The Cartel: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  “We must not only combat the cartels,” Vera said, “we must be seen to be combating the cartels. That’s the only way to restore the public’s confidence in their law enforcement agencies.”

  Keller watches on television at the embassy as Vera describes the daring raid, the intense firefight, and memorializes the brave men who gave their lives. He goes on to praise the diligent work of SEIDO, and introduces Luis Aguilar, “who, as you can see, shed his blood in the pursuit of this criminal.”

  Aguilar mumbles through a typed statement. “We regret our failure in this instance. However, we assure the public that the battle will go on and we must…”

  Vera throws his arm around his colleague’s shoulder.

  “We’re Batman and Robin.” He looks straight into the cameras. “And he’s right—the battle is just beginning. We won’t relent in our hunt for Barrera, but now I’m talking to the rest of you narcos out there. We’re coming after you. We’ll be in Tijuana next.”

  “What about the beauty queen?” a reporter asks. “What about Miss Culiacán?”

  Vera steps back in. “She wasn’t in the house. But don’t worry—we’ll find her and give her a new sash.”

  The reporters laugh.

  —

  The fight starts the next day.

  “You’re going home,” Aguilar tells Keller.

  “Absolutely,” Keller answers. “The moment Barrera is back behind bars or on a slab.”

  “Now,” Aguilar insists. “It’s too dangerous—not only for you but for other people. The booby-trapped door could have been meant for you. Other men paid with their lives.”

  “That’s what soldiers do,” Vera says.

  “They were policemen, not soldiers,” Aguilar says. “And this is a law enforcement action, not a war.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” Vera answers.

  “I object to the militarization of—”

  “Tell that to the narcos,” Vera says. “If Keller is willing to stay until the job is done, I’m willing to have him. If he’s willing to stay.”

  Keller’s willing.

  Adán Barrera is still out there, in his world.

  La Tuna, Sinaloa

  Adán walks out onto the little balcony off the master bedroom of his finca.

  The ranch was his aunt’s, abandoned back in the ’70s when the American DEA came in and devastated the poppy fields with fire and poison. Thousands of campesinos and gomeros—now refugees—fled their mountain homes.

  Tía Delores’s finca stood empty for years, a home for only ravens.

  Since his return to Mexico, Adán has poured millions into renovating the main house and the outbuildings, and more millions turning the ranch into a fortress with high walls, guard towers, sound and motion sensors, and casitas that serve as living spaces for the servants and barracks for the sicarios.

  For Adán it is a return to innocence, of sorts, to the idyllic day of his teenage years when he would come up here to escape the heat of the Tijuana summer and dive into the cold waters of the granite quarries. Of family dinners at large tables under the oak trees, listening to the campesino men play tamboras and guitars, and the old women, the abuelas, tell stories from a time beyond his memory.

  A good life, a rich life, a life that the North Americans destroyed.

  It is good to be home, Adán thinks.

  Despite Sondra’s stupidity.

  Stupid, vapid Sondra was a perfect pawn for both white and black. As it turned out, it wasn’t a problem. He and Magda went to the safe house in Atizapán, he let himself be seen and heard, and then he slipped out of the net that had been thrown around the house.

  The lookalike was already there, a happy idiot thrilled to have a nice house and a beautiful woman for a few days, an expensive whore who resembled Magda in all the most superficial ways.

  Adán will take care of the lookalike’s family.

  The only downside is that Keller didn’t die in the ambush. It would have been perfect—the North American killed in a botched raid that couldn’t have been blamed on me. But Keller is still out there, alive, and Magda is still urging that he be left out there. Too much at stake now, Magda says, too much happening to take another chance.

  Adán maintains the “stay of execution” but insists that it’s just that. Unlike the United States, Mexico has no death penalty, but Adán likes to think of Keller just inhabiting a mobile cell on death row.

  After the raid, Adán deemed it safe to move to the ranch in Sinaloa, outside La Tuna, high in the Sierra Madre. His convoy made its way up winding roads—dusty now but often impassable with mud in the rainy season—through tiny hamlets made of spare odds and ends of wood and corrugated tin.

  Despite its wealth in drug production, the Triangle is still one of the poorest parts of Mexico. The vast majority of the people are still campesinos—peasant farmers—as they had always been. The fact that they grow poppies and yerba instead of corn is only a detail.

  For most, life never changes.

  It was good to be home.

  “Is there where you grew up?” Magda asked, looking at the expanse of green field with the mountains in the background.

  “Summers,” Adán said. “Actually, I’m a city boy.”

  The car pulled through the gate then up the macadam road lined with junipers, tall and straight like soldiers on parade. It stopped in the crescent gravel driveway outside the main house.

  “No moat?” Magda asked.

  “Not yet.”

  Magda looked at the main house, a two-story stone building with a central structure flanked by two wings that came out at a forty-five-degree angle. A large portico with marble columns stood at the front of the central structure; balconies were cantilevered from the second floors of the wings.

  “It’s a mansion,” Magda said.

  “More than I need or want,” Adán answered, “but there are expectations.”

  A king must have a castle, whether he wants one or not. It’s expected, and if the king doesn’t build one, he can be certain that his dukes will.

  Designing the renovation became a hobby of sorts in prison—Adán met with architects and builders, approved plans, even drew a few sketches of his own. It gave him something to look forward to.

  So many of the narco-mansions are monuments to bad taste. Adán did his best to avoid gaudy, ostentatious displays, retaining the classic lines of old Sinaloa while still making sure that the house revealed the proper level of wealth and power.

  The Barreras, after all, came to the Sierras in the early seventeenth century as hidalgos—Spanish gentlemen of fortune—and conquered the local Indians over centuries of brutal, bloody warfare. They were aristocrats, not indios like so many of the new nouveau-riche narcos.

  So Adán felt an obligation toward restraint.

  It was in his nature anyway.

  He showed Magda around the house and then they went up to the master bedroom. The thick walls kept it cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and the maids had sprinkled the sheets with ice water.

  After she and Adán made love, she asked, “So what do I do now?”

  “Live?”

  “As the lady of the house?” Magda asked. “Supervise the staff, organize parties, go shopping in Culiacán with the wives, get my hair and nails done? I’ll die of boredom. I need something else. Something to make money.”

  Adán looked at her long, slender form stretched out like a cat and saw that she was fully awake and not going to let him sleep. “Money is not your problem in life.”

  “It will be one day,” Magda said. “I’ll lose my looks, or you’ll grow tired of me, or I’ll grow tired of you, or you’ll start looking for some young pura señorita to start a new family for you. What am I supposed to do then?”

  “I’ll always take care of you.”

  “I don’t want to be ‘taken care of,’ ” she answered, “like some worn-out segundera put out to pasture. I want into the trade.”

  “No.”
<
br />   “You can’t stop me.”

  “Of course I can,” Adán said. But he admired her for trying.

  “I could be useful to you.”

  “Oh? How?”

  “I could help you reestablish your Colombian cocaine connections,” Magda said.

  “Nacho and Diego’s connections are my connections,” he answered.

  “Please listen to yourself,” Magda said. “It only goes to show how much you need me.”

  She’s making sense, Adán thought. Magda would be an effective ambassador. The Colombians would find a beautiful, intelligent woman hard to resist, and her advice to him had always been clearheaded.

  “And what would you want for these services?” he asked.

  Magda smiled, knowing that she’d won. “A piece of the cocaine I bring in. And the protection to make it worth something.”

  “What else?” He could tell from the look in her eye that she wasn’t finished.

  “A seat at the table,” Magda said.

  “Which you already have.”

  “Not the dining table,” she said. “The men’s table.”

  “They won’t accept you.”

  “I’ll make them accept me,” Magda said.

  Now, as Adán looks out over the hills, he realizes both that he believes her and that it might not matter. Osiel Contreras wants him dead and has the men and the means to do it.

  I need more force.

  I need an alliance.

  —

  The table is set in the back room of an exclusive restaurant in Cuernavaca.

  Meeting in neutral territory was Nacho’s idea, to put Vicente Fuentes at ease. Nacho has guaranteed everyone’s safety—Fuentes, the Tapias, Adán, and the twenty other important associates from Sinaloa.

  Even so, everyone comes armed.

  Plainclothes Cuernavaca police guard the door from other police, the media, and from the important narcos who haven’t been invited—Teo Solorzano and Osiel Contreras.

  Adán makes a point by not even mentioning Magda’s presence, as if it’s a given and literally unremarkable. But she is remarkable—stunning in a gold lamé dress with a deep décolletage that if Vicente Fuentes doesn’t remark upon, he’s certainly thinking about as he leans over to kiss her hand.

  Vicente looks up at Adán and says, “It must be Easter.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You’ve risen from the dead.” The line gets a laugh from the guests who’ve already come into the room. Encouraged by his audience, Vicente goes on. “You look good, Adán, for a corpse.”

  The Fuenteses are originally from Sinaloa, and the family has ruled the Juárez plaza for years. Vicente doesn’t have the charisma or brains of his late uncle—he’s dissolute, flamboyant, too busy with coke and women to run his business well.

  And he’s lazy, Adán thinks. Too lazy to work out solutions to difficult problems, so his only reaction is the easiest one—killing. He orders up murders like takeout Chinese food, and a lot of his people are tired of it. Afraid that a casual word or a misunderstanding could make them next, a lot of them came over to Adán after his return to Mexico.

  Vicente resents it and sees Adán as a threat. Maintaining the relationship with Nacho, who moves vast weights of meth through Juárez, is the only reason he agreed to this meeting.

  “When Nacho told me you were alive,” Vicente says now, “I wept.”

  I’ll bet you did, Adán thinks.

  Vicente asks, “Is Elvis here, too?”

  The joke doesn’t sit well with Alberto Tapia. “You want to meet Elvis, Vicente? Because maybe we can work that out.”

  Vicente reaches for the gun at his hip.

  So does Alberto.

  Nacho steps in. “Don’t make a liar of me, gentlemen.”

  Vicente eases his hand away.

  He believes he’s too handsome to die, Adán thinks, that it would be too great a loss to a world in need of beauty. Alberto waits for Vicente to back down first, and then, grinning, takes his hand away from his gun.

  But it could have happened that fast, Adán thinks. Plans that I’ve spent years constructing could have fallen apart in a stupid exchange of insults. We run a billion-dollar business and act like nickel gangbangers. He makes a mental note to tell Diego to get his little brother under control.

  Martín Tapia steps into the awkward gap. “Gentlemen—and lady—dinner is served.”

  They take their seats.

  Adán hates making speeches.

  It was his uncle’s speech almost thirty years ago—at a dinner like this—that created the Federación, and Adán knows the men at the table are expecting an equal performance.

  He’s afraid that he’s not up to it.

  “We Sinaloans created the pista secreta,” Adán says. “The trade is in our blood, in our bones, in the water we drink and the air we breathe. We made it flourish. When the yanquis destroyed our homes and our fields and scattered us like dry leaves in the wind, we refused to die. We re-formed, we created La Federación, we divided the country into plazas and ran it.”

  The men around the table nod in agreement.

  “When Sinaloa ran the drug trade,” Adán continues, “it ran efficiently and everyone made money. It was a business.”

  He’s telling them what they already know, letting them remember his uncle and the reign of peace and plenty—brief but beautiful—he engendered.

  “Now we are going to take back what is ours,” Adán says. He lets it sink in for a moment, and then says, “All the plazas, all the so-called cartels—the big ones and the small ones—I intend to reunite under our leadership. They will be run by us—by Sinaloans and only Sinaloans. That is why you’re here tonight. We are blood. Therefore I want to propose an alliance. An alianza de sangre. An alliance of blood.”

  Adán waits for a few seconds to let the precisely chosen words sink in. An alliance of equals, not an empire with himself at its head. An alliance based on the old family and cultural relationships that go back centuries. He lets them also hear what he didn’t say. No mention of the Cartel del Golfo—they are not Sinaloans.

  He’s talking to all the men in the room, but his real target is Vicente.

  The Tapias are already on board, of course, so is Nacho, but if Adán is going to achieve what he wants, he needs Vicente, he needs the Juárez plaza through which to move his product.

  “How exactly would it work?” Vicente asks. “This ‘alliance of blood’?”

  Adán answers, “We will protect each other’s interests, defend each other in the case of an attack from outsiders, agree to allow each other to move product through our plazas, with a piso, of course.”

  “But Adán doesn’t have a plaza,” Vicente says to the others, pointedly ignoring Adán. “Barrera is offering something he doesn’t have. I hear he doesn’t even have Tijuana anymore.”

  You “hear”? Adán wonders. Or you’re behind Solorzano? But he doesn’t say it. Instead, he turns toward Vicente and says, “What we have is product and protection. We have police and politicians. We are willing to share. But only with blood.”

  Vicente won’t let it go. “Are you saying you’ll only move your product through Juárez? Not Laredo, not the Gulf?”

  Diego has had enough. “We’ll move our product where we want.”

  “Not through Juárez,” Vicente answers. “Not if I don’t allow it. Not when Adán is already poaching on my territory, stealing my people.”

  This is starting to go badly, Adán thinks. Not what he wanted at all.

  Then Magda says, “We are all friends here, we are all family. Families have little quarrels—they mean nothing. Let’s be honest—at the end of the day, we all need family. Family is all we can trust.”

  She touches her hand on Vicente’s.

  He hears what she’s saying. His territory is flanked on the east by the Gulf cartel, on the west by Tijuana, where Solorzano may have ambitions of his own. But it’s the Gulf that worries him—Contreras’s power is grow
ing every day, and it’s only a matter of time before he starts glancing at the rich plaza next door.

  Vicente needs protection, and if Adán is offering that…well, what are a few defectors, especially if Adán is guaranteeing that they will all pay the piso. If they pay Adán as well, it’s money out of their pockets, not his.

  An alliance of blood is an alliance against Contreras. Not a declaration of war—that would be foolish—but a statement of strength that might prevent an invasion. It might discourage Tijuana. And Adán’s woman, by framing it as a matter of family, has given him the chance to step down from this argument without losing face.

  Adán can virtually watch the man think. Finally—finally—Vicente speaks up. “Blood is blood. If Adán will agree that anyone moving product through our plaza will pay the piso—”

  “I will,” Adán says.

  “—and offer us the benefit of his connections, then we will join in this alianza de sangre.” Vicente stands, raises his wineglass, and proposes a toast. “To the alianza de sangre.”

  Adán clinks his glass.

  “To the alianza de sangre.”

  —

  Adán stretches out on the bed next to Magda.

  The meeting almost turned into a disaster, which Magda averted but at the end he got what he wanted—an alliance that will counterbalance Contreras and make him think twice about another assassination attempt.

  The susurro is that Contreras is making a move on Nuevo Laredo, right on Fuentes’s doorstep. Since the old Chinese opium days at the turn of the century, Nuevo Laredo has been controlled by two families, the Garcías and the Sotos, and the Barreras have happily done business with the Garcías for years, at a discounted piso. The CDG owning Laredo would be a catastrophe, costing us billions, Adán thinks. Worse, it would give Contreras yet more power.

  It can’t be allowed to happen.

  Magda runs her index finger along his temple. “That mind of yours—doesn’t it ever get tired?”

  “It can’t.”

  She leans over and unzips his fly.

  “Even when I do this?” Then she stops for a second and asks, “Are you still thinking?”

  “No.”

  “Liar.”

  “I need you to go to Colombia now,” Adán says.