The Cartel: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  “Look around you,” Keller says. “Do you see trees with ornaments on them? Bulbs? Candy canes?”

  Not hardly. What he sees are sleazy bars, hookers, their customers, young punks, drunk students, and narco lookouts.

  Keller continues on the classic bad-cop routine. “Do I look like a jolly fat man? Am I wearing a red suit? I guess what I’m getting at here, Alejandro—this isn’t Christmas. There are no presents under the tree. Do you know what the definition of a present is? Something for nothing. You want me to get you out of Mexico, get you a snitch visa on the other side, you’re going to have to give me something I want.”

  “I can give you a lot of information about Contreras.”

  Keller stops in front of a window and runs his eyes up and down the body of a young woman in a purple negligee. “I have a lot of information about Contreras. I have warehouses of information about Contreras. I bet I know more about him than you do. You’re going to have to do better than that.”

  “Like what?” Sosa asks. He’s scared.

  “Look at the woman, not at me,” Keller says. “His location.”

  “I never know,” Sosa answers. “He only tells me a few minutes ahead of time. To get the plane ready.”

  “Well,” Keller says, “when he does, you can tell me.”

  Sosa shakes his head. “I can’t go back there. He’s going to kill me.”

  “Then if I were you?” Keller says. “I’d call me at the first possible opportunity.”

  “I won’t do it.”

  And then there’s that moment with an informant where you pull the carrot away and just show him the stick. You have to let him know he’s trapped, and the only way out is you.

  I am the truth and the way.

  “Yeah you will,” Keller says, smiling at the woman behind the glass. “Or I’ll put it out that you were talking to DEA. Then Contreras won’t need any goddamn gypsy to tell him to kill you. He’ll turn you over to Ochoa to find out what you told me.”

  “You evil motherfucker.”

  “Hey, you could have chosen to fly for the friendly skies,” Keller says, walking down the street with Sosa at his side like a puppy. “Now, you have options: The federales arrest you right now and you go to a jail where Contreras’s guys kill you; you run until Ochoa finds you and tortures you to death; or you go back, you do your job like nothing happened, you call me when you know where your boss is going to be, and I put you in the ‘program.’ ”

  Sosa chooses door number three.

  Now they just have to wait for him to call.

  Keller flies back to Mexico City.

  —

  Luis Aguilar finally broke down to his wife’s imprecations and invited the North American to dinner, albeit not without some rearguard resistance. “It would be unkind.”

  “How so?” Lucinda asked.

  “The man lost his own family,” Luis assayed, “and it would be unkind to confront him with our happiness.”

  “Is that the best you can do?” Lucinda asked. “How do you win any cases?”

  “I’ll call him.”

  Keller got the call at his desk and was too surprised to think of an excuse. He showed up that night at Aguilar’s with a bottle of wine and flowers, both of which Lucinda graciously accepted.

  If Keller expected Luis Aguilar’s wife to be, well…dull…he’s disappointed. In a word, she’s striking. A head taller than her husband, with long chestnut hair and an aquiline nose, subtly but elegantly dressed.

  The daughters, luckily, favor their mother. Tall, thin, each resembling a ballerina (which, he learned over dinner, was accurate), Caterina and Isobel, sixteen and thirteen respectively, are lovely, perfect combinations of their father’s reserve and their mother’s graciousness.

  They politely answer Keller’s polite questions over a meal that starts with a delicious soup made of cactus tenders, followed by diced chicken in a creamy almond sauce over wild rice, and then a coconut flan.

  “You went to a lot of trouble,” Keller tells Lucinda.

  “Not at all. I love to cook.”

  At a subtle nod from their mother, the girls excuse themselves after dinner and Lucinda says she’s going to “finish up” in the kitchen.

  Keller starts to say, “Let me—”

  “We have help,” Aguilar says as he takes Keller into his study. “Do you play chess?”

  “Not very well.”

  “Oh.”

  “We can play.”

  “No,” Aguilar says, “not if you don’t play well. It wouldn’t be a challenge.”

  A maid—Keller learns that her name is Dolores—brings in coffee, which Aguilar laces with cognac. They sit down, and with nothing else to talk about, the conversation turns to Vera.

  “Gerardo runs roughshod on the law,” Aguilar complains. “It looks good in the media, I suppose it gets results, but sooner or later it comes back and bites you in the ankle.”

  Keller is a little skeptical about Aguilar’s by-the-book pretense. The lawyer hasn’t been exactly reluctant to use the information that Vera’s none-too-gentle interrogations produce. Half the time, the suspects actually confess, and Keller hasn’t noticed Aguilar asking too many questions as to how those confessions were induced.

  He doesn’t tell Aguilar about his trip to Nuevo Laredo for Vera.

  “And this ‘Batman and Robin’ business,” Aguilar says, “it’s silly and demeaning.”

  “But it gives the media a hook,” Keller says.

  “I’m not in the media business.”

  “Sure you are.”

  Lucinda comes in and rescues them from another debate, steering the conversation to film, sports, and Keller. He finds himself telling them about his background—the absentee Mexican businessman father, his days at UCLA, meeting Althea, Vietnam…Then he sees Aguilar glance at his watch. “And I should be going. Thank you for a wonderful evening.”

  After he leaves, Lucinda says, “See, he isn’t so bad. I like him.”

  “Hmmmm,” Aguilar says.

  Gerardo Vera spends the evening with his latest mistress. Good wine, good food, better sex.

  Drink, food, and women. What else is there in life?

  “God?” Aguilar asked him when he’d spouted this philosophy over lunch.

  “That’s the next life,” Vera said. “I’ll worry about that when I get there.”

  “Then it will be too late.”

  “Yes, Father Luis.”

  Luis believes in heaven and hell, Vera knows that there is neither. You die and that’s it, so you have to suck the marrow out of life. The American, Keller, he likes to pretend that he’s lost his faith, but it’s still there, tormenting him with guilt over his supposed sins.

  Vera has no such torments.

  He doesn’t believe in sin.

  Right and wrong, yes.

  Courage and cowardice, yes.

  Duty and dereliction, yes, but these are parts of being a man. A man does the right thing, does his duty and does it bravely.

  Then he drinks, eats, and fucks.

  The woman tonight is a charmer, her husband a government official too busy with his work to do his duty at home, and Vera is the grateful beneficiary of this neglect, cheerful to hang horns on a fool.

  It’s an epidemic in Mexico these days, what with these Ivy League technocrats bringing the absurd American “work ethic” back with them. They have volunteered to become cogs in a machine, and they forget why it is that they work.

  Vera doesn’t forget.

  He’s ordered a fine meal delivered to this Polanco love nest, has put fine champagne on ice, music on the stereo.

  Discreet, trusted sentries stand guard outside.

  Vera pours the woman a glass of champagne, just enough now to make her giddy but not sloppy, then savors the perfume of her elegant neck, then reaches down to feel her equally elegant ass.

  She freezes but doesn’t stop him, and he lifts the silk up and then reaches around to feel the essence of her, a
nd she doesn’t object but leans back and lays her head on his shoulder as he strokes her and whispers filth into her ear.

  The rich ones, their husbands are too tame, they like to hear words that come from the slums.

  Luis hopes for heaven.

  Keller fears hell.

  Vera fears only death, and that because he takes such pleasure in life.

  —

  Sosa calls that night.

  “I’m taking Contreras from Nuevo Laredo to his niece’s birthday party in Matamoros tomorrow,” he tells Keller. “After that, he’s going to have a party of his own at one of his safe houses.”

  “I need an address.”

  Sosa gives it to him—a three-story apartment building on Agustín Melgar in the Encantada district.

  “Anyone flying with him?”

  “Ochoa,” Sosa says. “And Forty. And another Zeta named Segura. Crazy guy who wears a grenade on a chain around his neck. Other Zetas are coming to the party. Look, I don’t want to stay on the phone too long.”

  “Okay,” Keller says. “Here’s what you do. You drop Contreras off. You go downtown. You walk across the Puente Nuevo into Brownsville. A DEA agent will be waiting for you on the other side.”

  “You promise?”

  “You have my word.”

  Keller gets on the horn to Vera. Thirty minutes later, he’s sitting in the SEIDO office with him and Aguilar.

  “What do you have to do with this?” Aguilar asks Keller.

  “He helped me with the informant,” Vera says.

  “That’s not—”

  “You want Contreras or not?” Vera snaps.

  “I should have been informed of this operation,” Aguilar says. “My God, gypsy fortune-tellers…what’s next?”

  “What’s next is that we take Contreras,” Vera says, “and three top Zetas.”

  Aguilar warns, “They won’t give up Contreras without a fight.”

  “Good,” Vera says.

  “I want him alive,” Aguilar says to Vera.

  Keller gets on the phone to Tim Taylor. “I’m going to need an agent to pick up an informant on the New Bridge in Brownsville. And I’m going to need an S-visa for him.”

  “What the hell, Keller? What are you doing in Matamoros?”

  “The op is out of Mexico City.”

  “What does it have to do with Barrera?”

  “Nothing,” Keller says. “It has to do with Contreras.”

  “Keller—”

  “You want him or not?” Keller asks, echoing Vera.

  “Of course we want him.”

  “Then get an agent there tomorrow afternoon,” Keller says. “He’s picking up an Alejandro Sosa and putting him into protective custody. Then get the extradition papers going for Contreras.”

  “Gee, is that all? Anything else?”

  “Not right now.” He hangs up and turns back to Aguilar and Vera. “We’d better get going.”

  “You’re not coming,” Aguilar says.

  “Do you know the address of the safe house?” Keller asks.

  “No.”

  “Then I guess I’m coming.”

  Vera laughs.

  —

  Matamoros makes cars.

  Perched on the south bank of the Río Bravo where it flows into the Gulf, the city is home to over a hundred maquiladoras, many of which build parts for GM, Chrysler, Ford, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz.

  Once the odd combination of a cow town and fishing village, Matamoros came of age during the American Civil War, when it became an alternate port from which to ship Confederate cotton after the North closed New Orleans. Now it has the feel of an industrial city, with factories, warehouses, pollution, and endless rows of trucks carrying its products across four bridges into Brownsville, Texas, just across the river.

  Matamoros is the home of the Gulf cartel, and Osiel Contreras is throwing a party.

  —

  Ten o’clock in the morning, Ochoa thinks, and the boss is sound asleep, naked, wedged between two similarly unconscious and unclad thousand-dollar whores in a bedroom on the second floor of the safe house.

  It was a hell of a fiesta.

  The women were exceptional.

  But he’s starting to worry more and more about Contreras. The boss is doing too much cocaine, his paranoia is becoming treacherous, and his ego has led to acts of terrible misjudgment.

  The assault on the American DEA agents had come one second from what would have been a catastrophe. Even what did happen put the CDG on the radar in ways that just aren’t good.

  Ochoa doesn’t like it—it’s bad for business, bad for his money. And Ochoa has come to like his money.

  “Patrón, patrón.” Contreras had ordered his plane to be ready by eleven. They have business in Nuevo Laredo. “Patrón.”

  Contreras opens one jaundiced eye. “Chíngate.”

  Okay, fuck me, Ochoa thinks, but—

  Miguel Morales, whom they call Forty, comes up the stairs. A thick, squat man with a thick mustache and curly black hair, he’s pulled on his jeans but nothing else and he looks both hungover and fucked out.

  And alarmed.

  Which in turn alarms Ochoa, because Forty isn’t one to panic. He’s risen quickly in the Zeta ranks despite not being one of the original special-ops veterans. In fact, he’s half American, a pocho from Laredo, with no military experience but a long history with the Los Tejos gang along the border. He took to the military training like he was born to it and didn’t blink at the rougher stuff.

  A story going around has it that Forty once tore the heart out of one of his living victims and ate it, saying that it gave him strength, and while Ochoa doesn’t really believe the story, he doesn’t really disbelieve it, either. So when Forty says, “There’s a problem”—there’s a problem.

  He follows Forty to the window and looks out.

  Police and soldiers are everywhere.

  —

  The Zetas fight.

  For six hours, fifteen of them, surrounded, hold out against over three hundred AFI, SEIDO, and army troopers trying to storm the house.

  Ochoa never goes into any building without working out fields of fire, and his disciplined men are laying it down. First they drive the federales from the door, then across the street, but that’s the best they can do.

  The soldiers have armored cars, and after an initial burst of overexcited, incontinent fire, they’ve settled down and are picking their targets. They’ve fired tear-gas grenades through the shattered windows, and the helicopters have swept Zeta snipers off the roof.

  If we could hold out until dark, Ochoa thinks, there’s a slim chance of getting Contreras out in the confusion, but we can’t hold until dark.

  He looks at his watch.

  It’s only 1:30 in the afternoon.

  They already have one KIA and two wounded, and they’re running out of ammunition.

  A bullhorn once again demands Contreras’s surrender.

  —

  Vera lowers the megaphone.

  “It’s time to storm the house,” he says.

  “Why?” Aguilar asks. “We have them surrounded. They’re not going anywhere.”

  “It makes us look weak,” Vera says. “The longer they hold out, the worse it makes us look. I can hear the corridos already.”

  “Let them sing,” Aguilar says. “We’ll have Contreras. Without him, these Zetas are nothing.”

  He’s missing the point, Keller thinks. Vera wants bodies, the more the better. Contreras and his troops in handcuffs sends one message—Contreras and his troops in pools of their own blood sends another:

  If you form an army, we don’t arrest you.

  We kill you.

  You want a war, you get a war.

  “Strap your vest on,” Vera says. “Five more minutes and we go.”

  “You should reconsider that,” Keller says.

  Vera looks at him, surprised.

  Same with Aguilar.

  But for once, Keller thinks,
the lawyer is right. Contreras is trapped, he can’t possibly escape. Those aren’t just narcos in that house, they’re highly trained elite soldiers.

  “Whatever message you want to send,” Keller tells Vera, “it’s not worth a bloodbath. Which there will be if we storm the house.”

  Vera stares at him.

  “Make them surrender,” Keller presses. “Make them come out with their hands in the air. That’s the footage you want. Dead, they’re martyrs; alive, they’re bitches. That’s the song you want sung. That’s what makes some kid look at you and not them as the hero.”

  “Quite a speech, Arturo,” Vera says. “But you still don’t understand Mexico. Five minutes.”

  —

  “They’re moving!” Forty yells.

  Ochoa crawls back to the window and peers out. Forty is right—there’s movement behind the armored cars.

  He recognizes the signs of an imminent assault.

  “They’re coming,” Ochoa says.

  Segura fingers the grenade around his neck. He’s a giant of a man, six-seven and built like a tree. He’s worn his “grenade necklace” ever since Ochoa can remember, since they served together in Chiapas. “If they get in, I let them get close and pull the pin. We go to the devil together.”

  “It will be a good time,” Forty says. “All the best women are in hell.”

  “Don’t be idiots,” Contreras says. “I’m going to surrender.”

  “Not me,” Segura grunts. That’s why he wears the grenade.

  “I didn’t say you, I said me,” Contreras snaps. Turning to Ochoa, he says, “Take your best men out the back. I’ll go to the front with my hands up, make a big show. You might have a chance in the excitement.”

  “They’ll gun you down,” Ochoa says.

  The AFI are murderers.

  “Maybe not in front of the cameras,” Contreras says. “Ochoa, listen to me, this is the right decision.”

  Ochoa knows that it is. Contreras can still run the organization from prison, but only if he still has an organization to run.

  Which means the Zetas surviving.

  Contreras says, “My brother will take over the day-to-day running of the organization.”

  Despite the grimness of the situation, Ochoa almost has to laugh. The “little” brother is little only in the sense of “younger.” Héctor Contreras is known as “Gordo,” who is only impressive in that he manages to be obese despite an addiction to cocaine. The man has no self-discipline whatsoever, and therefore Ochoa has no respect whatsoever for him.