The Cartel: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  “Right now?”

  “Not right now.”

  “Oh.”

  Later he asks, “Where did you learn that?”

  Magda gets out of bed. “I’ll pack tonight, leave in the morning. You’ll miss me.”

  “I will.”

  “You’ll find another woman,” Magda says, “some silly virgin. But no one who could do that to you.”

  He will miss her.

  But he’ll be busy.

  It’s almost time to move against Contreras in the Gulf. I have justification, Adán thinks—Contreras started the war when he tried to kill me in Puente Grande.

  First the Gulf.

  Then Tijuana.

  Then Juárez.

  The new alianza de sangre will become the old Federación.

  And I’ll become El Patrón.

  —

  Keller lies on the bed in his apartment.

  His loneliness is a faint ache, like the reminder of an old wound, a scar you no longer notice because it’s just a part of you now.

  Like your Barrera obsession? he asks himself. Is there a legitimate purpose, a reason, a cause, or is it just part of you now, a disease of the blood, an obstruction of the heart?

  It felt good, didn’t it, pulling the trigger on the man you thought was Barrera. Seeing the fear in his eyes. At the end of the day you have to account for the fact that it felt good.

  Aguilar’s right—the ambush at the house was probably meant for me. Kind of funny, when you think about it, that Barrera and I each thought we’d killed each other.

  And were both wrong.

  The Gulf War

  They bought up half of southern Texas,

  That’s why they act the way they do.

  —Charlie Robison

  “New Year’s Day”

  1

  The Devil Is Dead

  Some say the devil is dead,

  The devil is dead, the devil is dead

  Some say the devil is dead

  And buried in Killarney.

  I say he rose again,

  He rose again, he rose again…

  —Irish folk song

  Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas

  2006

  Keller watches the girl writhe on the pole in a pathetic parody of lust.

  He’s sitting by himself at a cantina in La Zona—the “Zone of Tolerance,” more commonly known as Boy’s Town—a walled-in section of bars, strip clubs, and brothels frequented mostly by teenagers and college kids coming over the bridges from Laredo, Texas, just across the Rio Grande.

  Los dos Laredos, Keller thinks.

  The Two Laredos.

  One in Mexico, the other just across the river in Texas.

  Collectively the two cities form the busiest inland port in the hemisphere. Something like 70 percent of all Mexican exports to the United States pass through Nuevo Laredo into its sister city across the border.

  That includes dope.

  Lots of dope.

  Keller sits and watches the girl tiredly do a routine that is almost prophylactic in itself. She’s young and thin, her eyes vacant even as they try to stare down men into slipping money under her ill-fitting yellow G-string, her motions more robotic than erotic.

  The girl is on autopilot and Keller bets that she’s high.

  The joint is almost impossibly depressing. Drunk American college kids, sad middle-aged men, sadder bargirls and whores, and, of course, narcos. Not top guys, but low- and midlevel traffickers and wannabes, most of them dressed in full norteño narco-cowboy gear.

  Keller takes another sip of beer. This bar, like most of them in La Zona, serves only beer and tequila, and he chose a bottle of Indio.

  These are bad and brooding days for Art Keller.

  Adán Barrera’s trail is colder than a bill collector’s heart.

  After the Atizapán shootout, Barrera went off the radar. No cell phone or Internet traffic, no discernible movement, no “Adán sightings” that used to light up the phone boards like Times Square at sunset. Keller can’t get a solid lead, just rumors, some of which say that Barrera has retired from the pista secreta and is content to live out his life in peace and seclusion.

  Keller doesn’t buy it.

  If Barrera is quiet, he has a reason, and the reason is always bad. Adán’s not playing bridge, going on Carnival cruises, or working on his golf swing. If he’s lying low, it’s because he’s about to make a move.

  The question is where.

  Barrera needs a piece of the border.

  A plaza.

  Keller thinks it’s going to be the Gulf.

  The CDG, the Cartel del Golfo, aren’t Sinaloans so don’t qualify for the “we are family” love-fest. The cartel’s boss, Osiel Contreras, is a Matamoros homeboy who lacks the Culiacán pedigree that is the usual prerequisite for narco-royalty. So he’s fair game. Especially when Adán figures that he put Contreras on the Gulf throne anyway, by dropping a dime on his predecessor.

  Barrera views Contreras as a placeholder.

  Contreras doesn’t.

  He sees himself as the next patrón.

  His power is growing—the CDG recently expanded from its Matamoros and Reynosa bases to threaten Nuevo Laredo, absorbing the Soto family that used to run the east side. And Contreras has his own private army—the Zetas—trained by us, Keller thinks with chagrin.

  At Fort Benning.

  To combat drug trafficking.

  So now Contreras’s CDG has the whole state of Tamaulipas, effectively making him the predominant narco in the country.

  But it’s the same old story, Keller thinks, as a new girl—this one older, even more tired, if that’s possible—takes her rotation on the pole. Sources say that Contreras has started to use his own product, is snorting piles of cocaine, and that it’s fueling his paranoia.

  And his rage.

  It recently caused him to seriously fuck up.

  Two DEA agents in Matamoros had an informant in their car. Contreras had some of his men surround their Ford Bronco, then he got out of his own vehicle and, gold-plated AK-47 in hand and golden-gripped Colt pistol tucked into his waistband, swaggered up to the trapped DEA men and demanded that they turn the informant over to him.

  When they refused, Contreras said he would kill them.

  DEA agents in Mexico aren’t allowed to carry weapons, so these guys were helpless.

  They toughed it out, though, and said that they wouldn’t surrender the man, seeing as how they were going to die anyway. The agent’s exact words to Contreras have already become agency lore. “Tomorrow and the next day and the rest of your life, you’ll regret anything stupid you do now. You’re fixing to make three hundred million enemies.”

  Everyone still remembered the massive manhunt launched after Ernie Hidalgo’s murder. They especially recalled that Keller’s obsessive quest for revenge brought down the Barreras.

  Contreras remembered that, too, and backed off.

  Washington overreacted, putting Contreras near the top of the Most Wanted list, just below bin Laden, and placing a $2 million reward on his head. Then they bought armored Suburbans for each of the eight DEA offices in Mexico. The vehicles were a gesture, the reward symbolic—no one in his right mind would try to collect on it.

  But Osiel Contreras has leapfrogged Adán Barrera as target número uno. Indictments on multiple counts of trafficking have been handed down on both sides of the border. All that remains is to arrest the man.

  But they simply can’t lay their hands on Contreras, even though he’s reported to be operating openly in Tamaulipas. His arrogance is galling, the reason for it humiliating, especially to Vera and Aguilar:

  Contreras owns the police.

  Municipal police in Matamoros, Reynosa, and Nuevo Laredo, police chiefs in a hundred smaller towns and villages, and state police in Tamaulipas are on the CDG payroll.

  The problem is intractable—you can’t just fire three-quarters of the police force. Traffic would come to a halt, public order
would be compromised, robberies, rapes, and murders would go uninvestigated.

  Vera and Aguilar tried to effect the necessary change from above, Vera appointing new AFI commanders from Mexico City, Aguilar sending in teams of trusted SEIDO agents.

  They met with a hostile reception from the local police, who considered them “outsiders,” ignorant of local conditions, men sent to disrupt their normal operations, including the cozy relationship with the CDG.

  And the Zetas’ military discipline and reputation for torture have made seizures difficult, informers impossible, and the CDG impenetrable.

  They’ve effectively stunted the campaign to bring down Osiel Contreras.

  But Gerardo Vera and Luis Aguilar—“Batman and Robin”—are shredding the Tijuana cartel.

  Every week brings a new seizure or a major arrest. A tunnel found under the border at Otay Mesa, three thousand pounds of marijuana seized, key players captured. Every seizure and prisoner is paraded in front of the media, and each arrest yields intelligence that so far have led to the arrests of over one thousand members of the Tijuana cartel.

  Whom the AFI can’t capture, they kill.

  They gun down one of Solorzano’s lieutenants in a firefight in Mazatlán. A firefight in Rosarito takes down his chief of security.

  Vera’s new AFI is a collective Dirty Harry—the narcos have to decide if they feel lucky—and Vera isn’t shy about voicing his philosophy to the public. “They surrender or they die. That’s their only choice. Los malosos—the bad guys—are not going to run Mexico.”

  The media love it. Every arrest and seizure makes headlines in the American newspapers, especially in California. One went as far as to chirp, BATMAN AND ROBIN CLEAN UP THE MEXICAN GOTHAM.

  Add to that the fact that Nacho Esparza has launched his own campaign against Solorzano. Adán’s former partner has reportedly sent his son, Ignacio Junior, to run the war to retake Adán’s old plaza.

  But Keller is convinced that Barrera is about to make a move on the Gulf; he said so at one of the increasingly infrequent meetings of the Barrera Coordinating Committee and saw both Aguilar and Vera roll their eyes.

  “This Barrera obsession of yours,” Aguilar said.

  “It doesn’t seem that long ago when it was a Barrera obsession of ours,” Keller answered.

  “And we’ll get him,” Vera said. “But the fact is that he’s a spent force, a hunted fugitive content just to be free for another day. We have to concentrate on the active narcos.”

  Vera referred him to a map of Mexico. “We have a strategy. We get control of Tijuana, west of Juárez. Then we beat down the CDG, east of Juárez. We’ll have Fuentes in a vise, and we crush him. When you really think about it, the capture of Barrera is more symbolic than strategic.”

  It isn’t symbolic to me, Keller thought.

  It’s personal.

  “If we’re not going after Barrera,” he asked, “what am I doing here?”

  “Excellent question,” Aguilar said.

  “We’re not giving up the hunt for Barrera,” Vera said. “I’m only saying that, absent any development, it has to…”

  “Go on the back burner?” Keller asked.

  Vera shrugged, an eloquent gesture.

  The weekly meetings of the Barrera Coordinating Committee had already been suspended, to be held only when “developments” warranted.

  But there were no developments.

  Barrera had gone to ground.

  Some rumors had him holed up in Sinaloa, others in Durango, still others—among them the Mexican president—hinted that Barrera was actually hiding in the United States.

  Keller did what he could to develop leads, but he couldn’t do much. Even DEA got on board with the “Barrera as spent force” theory, which soon gained the status of received wisdom.

  “Barrera’s old news,” Taylor said over the phone just this afternoon.

  Literally true, Keller thought. Barrera vanished from the media just as he disappeared off the radar—and Washington, in the peculiar ADD fashion of the American news cycle, seems content to let him slip out of the public consciousness.

  So does Mexico City.

  It has mostly to do with the elections.

  After over seventy years of PRI monopoly of Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, the PAN party finally won a national election and seized control of the federal government. Now PAN’s first term is coming to an end—Mexican presidents can only serve a single six-year term—and PAN’s new candidate, Felipe Calderón, is in a close election race to hold Los Pinos against PRI.

  So PAN is more than happy to sweep the Puente Grande prison escape scandal under the rug, and PRI’s history of narco-corruption prevents them from bringing it up as an issue.

  Nobody wants to talk about Adán Barrera.

  Batman and Robin are happier subjects, especially with Vera providing irresistible quotes like, “Contreras has his own army? So what? I have my own army—we’ll see who wins.”

  “I didn’t come here for Contreras,” Keller told Taylor.

  “We’re thinking the same thing,” Taylor said. “It might be time to pull you out. The bees probably miss you, right?”

  I’m on the endangered species list, Keller thought when he hung up the phone. The ax is looming over my head and Luis Aguilar can’t wait to swing.

  On the other hand, Gerardo Vera has become something of a friend.

  Well, not exactly a friend—Keller has no friends in Mexico, will allow himself no real friends among colleagues whom he doesn’t trust—but they do share an end-of-the-day beer from time to time, and Vera is as gregarious as Aguilar is closed.

  Almost everything Keller assumed about Vera turned out to be wrong. He’d thought that Vera was from your typical privileged Mexico City upper crust, when in fact he came up the hard way and had been a beat cop in one of the city’s most notorious slums.

  He’d fought his way up the ranks, gaining attention from his superiors for cleaning up tough neighborhoods, and when PAN took over and was looking for someone to clean up the scandal-ridden corrupt federales, they turned to Gerardo Vera.

  “Oh, I gained some sophistication along the way,” he joked to Keller one afternoon over beers at the Omni Hotel bar. “I learned which fork to pick up when, where to buy my suits…Mistresses mostly taught me things. I was sleeping with a higher class of women, and they cleaned me up so that I’d be more suitable material for scandalous gossip.”

  He never married or had children.

  “Never had the time or interest,” he said. “Besides, families make you vulnerable. I prefer married women and expensive whores. You have a nice meal, a few laughs, a good fuck, and then you each go back to your own lives. It’s better that way.”

  So he took Keller out for a drink and asked him to go to Nuevo Laredo on an errand. “Alejandro Sosa. Osiel Contreras’s personal pilot. We’ve had him under surveillance for months.”

  “I’m here for Barrera.”

  Vera was ahead of him. “We both know that the clock is running on you. If you help me get Contreras, you’d be untouchable. You could stay in Mexico.”

  True, Keller thought. But his brief was strictly the Barrera Coordinating Committee, the CDG was other agents’ turf, and he’d be trespassing, a poacher. “Why do you want me?”

  Vera was silent for a few seconds before he answered. “You and I, we’re very much the same. You and I know that you can’t punch the narcos with gloves on. It’s a bare-knuckle fight. I want you in the alley with me. These people are scum. Garbage to be hosed off the streets. By any means necessary.”

  “What’s your way into Sosa?” Keller asked, knowing that he was walking down an alley where he shouldn’t go. It was in violation of his working agreement, in violation of DEA practice, and in violation of his own better sense.

  But he wanted to stay in Mexico, and Vera was offering him the chance.

  Vera chuckled. “It’s a little complicated, almost baroque. One of those things that mig
ht just be crazy enough to work, but very embarrassing if it doesn’t. Like your CIA sending poisoned cigars to Castro.”

  Now Keller looks at the casually but well-dressed man who looks to be in his thirties. Sandy hair, light-complexioned, he sits at the bar, sips on a beer, and watches the strippers. Sosa looks soft to him. Thin, unmuscled, a man who can fly a plane but hasn’t seen a lot of life. Maybe it’s the green pastel polo shirt or the pressed white jeans. Maybe it’s the sandy hair, thinning already—Sosa is what, thirty-nine?—and it looks like he might be using Rogaine or something.

  A few minutes later—thank God—Sosa flips a few bills on the bar and walks out onto Cleopatra Street, where he window-shops along the cribs of younger attractive prostitutes that line the street.

  The older hookers are on the back streets.

  Keller doesn’t feel like waiting for the man to get laid, so he makes his approach. “Alejandro Sosa?”

  Sosa turns around and looks puzzled, not recognizing this man. “Yes? How can I help you?”

  “I don’t need your help,” Keller says. “You need mine.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your boss,” Keller says, “Osiel Contreras. You probably know that he goes to a gypsy, right? A fortune-teller?”

  “Yes…”

  Keller says, “She told him that someone very close to him—light-skinned, light-haired—was going to betray him. You know anyone close to him with light skin and light hair?”

  Sosa’s skin turns lighter. Like white. “Oh my God.”

  “You’re on the hit list, my friend.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Run,” Keller says. “I guess in your case fly.”

  “Who are you? Why are you telling me this?”

  “You don’t want me to flash my DEA badge here, do you?” Keller asks. “Let’s walk, talk, like two guys in La Zona looking to catch the clap.”

  It’s the critical moment.

  Keller has flipped scores of informants, and he knows that there’s a moment in which you literally have to make the man come along with you, get him into the habit of doing what you say. He starts to walk away, and is relieved a moment later when Sosa falls in with him.