The Cartel: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  “What?” Magda asks, seeing him look at her.

  “Nothing.”

  Other than her, Adán really has no friends.

  Nacho is an adviser, but also a father-in-law and a partner as well as a potential rival. Adán isn’t afraid that Nacho would try to kill his own son-in-law, but Nacho definitely has his own agenda.

  Adán can’t relax with him, ever really let his guard down.

  Only with Magda can he do that, and the truth is now that he’d rather talk to her than fuck her, not that he can’t do both. He used to scoff at the old cliché about “the loneliness of command.” He doesn’t scoff now—he feels its truth. No one who doesn’t have to make the decisions that he has to make can understand.

  To order the deaths of scores of people.

  The fight for Juárez has been far bloodier than he expected.

  Vicente Fuentes is just a figurehead—hiding in his lairs, maybe even in Texas—but La Línea has fought hard and so has La Azteca. The Juarenses are ferociously protective of their turf.

  Then there’s the war with Diego.

  A war that’s your own fault, a situation that you brutally mishandled, almost fumbling the entire protective machinery into Keller’s hands. But how could you have known that Martín Tapia taped his meetings with the Izta Mafia? How could you have known that Keller was working with the Tapias, maybe literally in bed with Yvette?

  Stop giving yourself excuses—you should have known. It’s your business to know.

  You woke up—hopefully—just in time.

  He looks at his watch again.

  So much killing on both sides, so unnecessary. And exactly what he didn’t need just as he was about to launch his campaign in Juárez. A needless distraction that saps resources away from the real battle. He has the resources to fight simultaneous wars against the Fuenteses, the Tapias, and the CDG with their Zeta mercenaries, but it stretches him thinner than he wants.

  And he has bigger plans for Juárez, plans that go far beyond the city itself.

  The Zetas are a problem.

  The Zetas are going to be the problem. Of all his enemies, Heriberto Ochoa is the best of the lot—the smartest, the most ruthless, the most disciplined. He did the smart thing, siding with the Tapias. It was the right move. And he’s doing the right thing staying out of the fighting in Juárez. Adán sees his strategy—let Fuentes and me bleed each other, then make his play.

  At the end of the day, Adán thinks, it’s going to come down to Ochoa and me.

  Magda pours herself a glass of Moët, which he knows to have on ice for all their meetings. “You’re thinking about Keller.”

  He shrugs. He’s thinking about a lot of things.

  “They’ll call,” Magda reassures him. She distracts him by going over business—prices per kilo, transportation issues, personnel decisions. Their relationship, while still sexual, has been more that of friends and colleagues recently. He’s come more and more to rely on her advice, and she has new ideas to grow the business.

  As for other men, Magda’s had a few lovers, but fewer than anyone, herself included, might have expected. While a few men find her wealth and power an aphrodisiac, a surprising number find it quite the opposite, and she doesn’t relish another night of coddling, as it were, another limp dick and assuring its owner that “it’s all right, it’s nice just to be close.”

  It isn’t.

  And she’s not ready to go in the other direction, to the pretty younger men—boys, really—who see her as a source of cash and gifts, holidays and expensive meals. They’re more than eager and able, and she has indulged once or twice, but she knows that her ego is far too healthy to accept the role of “cougar.”

  Nor, she thinks, am I a “MILF,” lacking the “M” for “mother,” and she’s surprised that this is a source of increasing sadness. She wouldn’t have expected that and supposes it’s just some sort of biological thing, but she finds herself thinking about it, knowing that she’s approaching the now-or-never moment, and she’s increasingly pessimistic about meeting the right man to father her child.

  For one thing, there’s so little time in her busy days.

  “Shouldn’t he be here by now?” Adán asks Magda.

  “He’ll come.” Magda smiles serenely. “I told him it was business, but he probably thinks it’s more.”

  Doubtless he does, Adán thinks, knowing his man.

  It’s good to know a man’s strengths.

  Better to know his weaknesses.

  The volume on the television picks up, the shrill tone of breaking news, and both Adán and Magda turn to the screen.

  A Learjet 25, on fire as it plummeted from the sky, crashed into the busy financial district of Las Lomas at the corner of Paseo de la Reforma and Anillo Periférico, barely a kilometer from Los Pinos. It smashed into an office building, killing six people as well as the pilot, copilot, and the sole passenger on board.

  Adán takes no joy in it.

  From all accounts, Luis Aguilar was a decent man.

  With a wife and children.

  He hears voices downstairs as the guards stop someone, then start to walk him up to the second-floor apartment.

  “I told you,” Magda says.

  The guard lets Gerardo Vera in.

  He smiles at Magda, then his look turns to fear as he sees Adán sitting in the wingback chair.

  “I didn’t expect—”

  “No,” Adán says pleasantly. “You expected to have an assignation with my woman without my presence.”

  “It was a business meeting.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Adán says, shaking his head. “It’s not why I wanted to see you. Palacios is dead, Aguilar is dead, Keller should be dead by now.”

  “Then we’re in the clear,” Vera says.

  “Not quite.”

  Vera looks puzzled at first, and then Adán sees the comprehension come across his face. “You let things get out of hand, Gerardo. You’re compromised now.”

  “I see.” Vera looks at the bottle of champagne. “May I?”

  He pours himself a glass and then takes a long swallow. “It’s good. Very good. I won’t beg for my life.”

  “I didn’t think you would.”

  “You know I have men just outside.”

  “Actually, they just left.”

  “We’ve come a long way, you and me,” Vera says. “You were a little shit selling blue jeans off the back of a truck in Tijuana, I was a cop walking a beat in a slum. We’ve done all right for ourselves.”

  “We have.”

  “So why stop now?”

  “You just had your oldest friend killed,” Adán says, “and colluded in the death of your closest colleague. To be perfectly honest with you, Gerardo, I just can’t trust you.”

  Magda stands up.

  “Indulge me in one thing?” Vera asks. He leans over and puts his face close to her neck. “That’s a lovely scent. Men debate about the prettiest part of a woman. I say it’s the neck. Where it curves into the shoulder. Right here. Thank you.”

  She nods and walks out the door.

  Vera reaches for the pistol in his shoulder holster.

  The guard blows the back of his head off.

  Adán gets up to leave.

  It’s all cleaned up now—there will be no “smoking gun,” as it were, to tarnish PAN in the last administration or this one.

  Only one thing troubles him.

  He still hasn’t received the phone call telling him that Keller is dead.

  —

  Keller comes to in the back of a black Suburban with tinted windows.

  A medic in civilian clothes, but clearly military from his haircut and bearing, works efficiently and silently to clean and bandage his wounds.

  “Who are you?” Keller asks.

  The medic doesn’t answer his question, just makes small talk as he tries to keep Keller awake. Desperate for sleep, Keller realizes that he must have a concussion, so they’re keeping him conscious. Thi
s goes on all the way into Mexico City, where the car turns onto Paseo de la Reforma. Keller thinks that they’re headed for the embassy but the car pulls off earlier, in a neighborhood of banks and corporate buildings, and at number 265 goes down a driveway to a steel door. The driver shows some identification to a guard, the door slides open, and the car goes into the parking structure.

  They load Keller onto a stretcher, take him to a room that looks like a small infirmary, where an American medic, just as military-looking, takes over, does a preliminary examination, and then takes X-rays.

  “Where am I?” Keller asks.

  “A concussion, broken nose, dislocated shoulder, two cracked ribs, and a few scattered shotgun pellets,” the medic says. “You’re a hard man to kill, sir.”

  “Where am I?”

  “Internal pain? Anything you haven’t told me about, sir?”

  “Where the hell am I?”

  “Someone will be in to see you soon.”

  It’s Tim Taylor.

  “Aguilar called us,” Taylor said, “when he couldn’t get hold of you. We sent people out looking for you. What the hell were you doing in Cuernavaca?”

  “Luis is okay, then,” Keller says. “In El Paso.”

  “He’s dead,” Taylor says. He tells Keller about the plane crash and then says, “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I’m not going to,” Keller says. “Vera had that plane brought down.”

  “Vera was found murdered,” Taylor says. “Same MO as the other cops. He was having an assignation. Like Aguilar, his demise is being attributed to the Tapias.”

  “They didn’t do either,” Keller says. “Barrera did.”

  “We know that.”

  So it’s over, Keller thinks.

  Aguilar is dead, the tapes destroyed in the crash.

  Palacios is dead.

  So is Vera.

  Barrera cleaned up his mess.

  “So you’re here to take me home?” Keller asks.

  “Can you walk?”

  “I think so.”

  Keller eases himself off the gurney, the effort setting his ribs on fire. His legs are wobbly from the shock and the meds, but he manages to follow Taylor down the hall and into an elevator that they take to the sixth floor. When they get out, Keller sees more military types, although in civilian clothes, and people who look like computer geeks and accountants.

  None of the offices are marked.

  All of the doors are closed.

  “What you see here doesn’t exist,” Taylor says, “except officially as an accounting office to make sure that the taxpayers’ Mérida money is being used properly. In reality, the hat racks in this building are pretty full—FBI, CIA, us, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Treasury, Homeland Security, the National Reconnaissance Office, NSA, Defense Intelligence Agency…you get the idea.”

  He opens the door to a room where a dozen technicians sit at desks in front of computers.

  “Everything here is state-of-the-art,” Taylor says. “Encryption equipment, counterencryption equipment, satellite surveillance, wiretapping, secure communications. Come on.”

  They go to a locked door at the end of the hall. Taylor looks into a retina scanner and the door slides open to what seems to be some kind of lounge, with comfortable furniture, a coffee machine, and a bar.

  A man who looks a little younger than Keller sits on one of the sofas and sips a beer. His hair is black and cut short. A little under six feet tall, broad-chested, ramrod posture. He gets up when they walk in and extends his hand to Keller. “Arturo Keller—Roberto Orduña.”

  “Admiral Orduña,” Taylor says, “is the commander of the Mexican marines’ FES—special forces—roughly analogous to our SEALs.”

  “Let me first say how sorry I am about Luis Aguilar,” Orduña says. “He was a good man. Would you like a drink? A coffee? This is your building but my country, so I feel that I should be a good host.”

  You made your point, Keller thinks. What do you want?

  They all sit down.

  “We’re losing the war,” Orduña says without preamble. “Drugs are more plentiful, more potent, and cheaper than ever. The cartels have more influence than at any time, have co-opted the major instruments of power, and threaten to become a shadow government. The war between them increases the violence to horrific levels. What we have been doing isn’t working.”

  Keller knows this.

  The strategy of drug interdiction is a broom sweeping back the ocean. The strategy of arresting traffickers at any level only creates a job opportunity that any number of candidates are eager to fill.

  “We have to do something different,” Orduña says. “The law enforcement model isn’t working. We have to switch to a military model.”

  “With all respect,” Keller says, “your president has already militarized antitrafficking. It’s only made things worse.”

  “Because he’s pursuing the wrong model,” Orduña answers. “Are you conversant with the debate between counterinsurgency and antiterrorism doctrines?”

  “Only vaguely.”

  Orduña nods. “Counterinsurgency—the model for fighting terrorism for the past thirty years—focused on defense, preventing attacks while politically building relationships with the local people so that they would not support the terrorists. That is roughly analogous to what we—and you—have been doing in regards to drug trafficking, if you can say that drug traffickers are analogous to terrorists.”

  “More and more they are terrorists,” Keller says.

  “Al Qaeda killed three thousand Americans,” Taylor says. “This is going to sound callous, but that’s a fraction of the harm that drugs cause every year. And we spend tens of billions on interdiction and incarceration.”

  “Exactly,” Orduña says. “Counterinsurgency is expensive, time-consuming, and ultimately unsuccessful, which is why your military has recently evolved toward antiterrorist doctrine, which emphasizes the offensive—narrow, specific attacks on prime targets.

  “As it exists now, we arrest a cartel leader—Contreras, for instance—another takes his place. There is great motivation to take the job, but little disincentive.”

  Taylor adds, “What we’re finding is that fewer jihadists are stepping up for the top positions, because we’ve made it a death sentence instead of a promotion. You take the big chair, we drop a drone missile on your head, or special forces take you out.”

  “I wonder,” Orduña says, “who would want to be the head of, say, the Sinaloa cartel, if his two predecessors were both killed. The message is, ‘Go ahead and make your billions, but you won’t live to spend them.’ That’s what we want to do, abandon counterinsurgency and adopt antiterrorism.”

  “You’re talking about a program of targeted assassinations,” Keller says.

  “Arrest them if we have to,” Orduña says, “kill them when we can.”

  Keller smirks.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Orduña says. “You’ve heard it before, and every piece of intelligence you gave Vera went straight to the Sinaloa cartel. The AFI was bought and paid for, but not my unit.”

  “That’s what Vera said.”

  “Not in my unit,” Orduña repeats. His men can’t apply for the unit, he explains, they have to be selected, talent-spotted, picked from the chorus.

  Then they’re trained.

  First at a secret camp in the mountains of Huasteca Veracruzana for a year and a half learning weapons, tactics—ambush and counterambush—evasive driving, surveillance, rappelling, explosives, survival.

  If they make it through that session, they’re sent to another secret camp in Colombia for specific anti–drug trafficking training. How to infiltrate the cartels’ private armies, identify a drug lab, find stash houses, jump from helicopters, fight in jungles and mountains.

  The men who pass that course then go on to a third school, on antiterrorism, in Arizona, on the “neutralization and destruction” of terrorist threats, where they’re taugh
t intelligence, counterintelligence, surviving capture and interrogation. They’re put under intense physical and psychological pressure, and if they survive that, they’re taught how to inflict it—“soft” and “hard” interrogation techniques.

  Then they come back to Mexico where their salary is 30,000 pesos a month, plus a 20,000 bonus for every risky operation, which makes them far less likely to take bribes from the narcos.

  Another incentive is, to be blunt, looting.

  The FES marines get to keep a portion of what they capture—watches, jewelry, cash. Cops have done it forever, of course; Orduña’s genius is to make it legal and actually encourage it.

  His men aren’t going to take bribes, they’re just going to take.

  “Any man of mine who takes a bribe,” Orduña says, “knows that he won’t be arrested, tried, and sent to jail. He’ll just disappear out in the desert.”

  Orduña has created a dirty unit designed to fight a dirty war, Keller thinks. Whether he realizes it or not, he’s formed his own version of the Zetas.

  “We have a list of thirty-seven targets,” Orduña says.

  “Is Barrera on it?”

  “Number two.”

  “Who’s number one?”

  “Diego Tapia. I’m sure you understand that the public, knowing nothing about the ‘Izta cartel’ scandal, expects it. Our honor demands it. But I swear to you, if you work with me, I will help you kill Adán Barrera.” Orduña smiles and adds, “Hopefully before he succeeds in killing you.”

  “The operation is a cut-out,” Taylor said. “No connection to normal DEA activities. Those will go on as usual, in cooperation, such as it is, with the Mexican government. This new unit will work out of here and only with the Mexican marines. The money has been siphoned off from Mérida, so there’s no budget line item, no oversight committee. No State, no Justice—only the White House, which will deny its existence.”

  “Where would I fit in?” Keller asks.

  “You’d run the American end of things,” Taylor says. “You’ll base yourself here and at EPIC. Only military flights back and forth. FES plainclothes security. Top-level clearance, top-level access.”