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“It was the Esparzas,” she said. “It was Iván.”
“I don’t think so, Mother,” Luis said. “The police say that Gallina was insane. Delusional. He thought Rudolfo had slept with his daughter or something.”
“And you believe that.”
“Why would Iván want to kill Rudolfo?” Luis asked.
Because I took Baja from him, Elena thought. Or thought I did. “They killed your brother and now they’re going to try to kill you. They’ll never let us out alive, so we have to stay in. And if we stay in, we have to win. I’m sorry, but that’s the cold truth.”
Luis turned pale. “I’ve never had anything to do with the business. I don’t want to have anything to do with the business.”
“I know,” Elena said. “And I wish it were possible to keep you out of it, my darling. But it’s not.”
“Mother—I don’t want it.”
“And I didn’t want it for you,” Elena said. “But I’m going to need you. To avenge your brother.”
She watches Luis looking at his brother’s ashes float on the surface of the water and then disappear into the foam of a gentle wave.
Just like that.
The poor boy, she thinks.
Not a boy, a young man, twenty-seven now. Born to this life from which he can’t escape. It was foolish of me to think otherwise.
And that foolishness cost my other son his life.
She watches the wave go out, taking her child with it, and thinks of the song she sang on his birthdays.
The day you were born,
All the flowers were born,
And in the baptismal fountain
The nightingales did sing,
The light of day is shining on us,
Get up in the morning,
See that it has already dawned.
A sharp, heavy blade presses down on her chest.
Pain that will never go away.
Keller sits down on the sofa across from Marisol.
“You look tired,” Marisol says.
“It’s been a day.”
“Barrera,” she says. “It’s been all over the shows. What a scene, huh?”
“Even dead, he’s still getting people killed,” Keller says.
They talk for a few more minutes and then she goes up to bed. He goes into the den and turns the television on. CNN is covering the Barrera story and doing a recap of his life—how he started as a teenager selling bootleg jeans, how he joined his uncle’s drug business, his bloody war with Güero Méndez to take over the Baja plaza, his succeeding his uncle as the head of the Mexican Federación. As the scant photos of Barrera appear on the screen, the reporter goes on to talk about “unconfirmed rumors”—that Barrera was involved in the torture-murder of DEA agent Ernie Hidalgo, that Barrera had thrown the two small children of his rival Méndez off a bridge, that he’d slaughtered nineteen innocent men, women and children in a small Baja village.
Keller pours himself a weak nightcap as the reporter provides “balance”—Barrera built schools, clinics and playgrounds in his home state of Sinaloa, he had forbidden his people to engage in kidnappings or extortion, he was “beloved” by the rural people in the mountains of the Sierra Madre.
The screen shows the signs reading ¡ADÁN VIVE! and the little homebuilt roadside shrines with photos of him, candles, bottles of beer, and cigarettes.
Barrera didn’t smoke, Keller thinks.
The profile relates Barrera’s 1999 arrest by “current DEA head Art Keller,” his transfer to a Mexican prison, his 2004 “daring escape” and subsequent rise back to the top of the drug world. His war with the “hyperviolent” Zetas, and his betrayal at the peace conference in Guatemala.
Then the scene at the funeral.
The bizarre murder.
The lonely lowering of the coffin into the ground, with only his widow, his twin sons and Ricardo Núñez present.
Keller turns off the television.
He thought that putting two bullets into Adán Barrera’s face would bring him peace.
It hasn’t.
(#ulink_e3a8f7d8-e28e-5433-a954-d4119bd10e68)
Heroin (#ulink_e3a8f7d8-e28e-5433-a954-d4119bd10e68)
They left at once and met the Lotus-eaters, who had no thought of killing my companions, but gave them lotus plants to eat, whose fruit, sweet as honey, made any man who tried it lose his desire ever to journey home …
—Homer
The Odyssey, book 9
1 (#ulink_777fbf85-4bcf-561b-9976-10627d62195c)
The Acela (#ulink_777fbf85-4bcf-561b-9976-10627d62195c)
This train don’t carry no liars, this train …
—Traditional American folk song
New York City
July 2014
Keller looks out the train window at abandoned factory buildings in Baltimore and wonders if some of them are now shooting galleries. The windows are shattered, gang graffiti is sprayed on the redbrick walls, fence posts lean like drunken sailors, and the chain links have been cut.
It’s the same story all the way up the Amtrak line, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Newark—the factories are shells, the jobs are gone and too many of the former workers are shooting smack.
A huge sign over a decrepit building outside Wilmington says it all. It originally read GOOD BUY WORKS, but someone spray-painted it to GOOD BYE WORK.
Keller’s glad he took the train instead of flying. From the air he would have missed seeing all this. It’s tempting to think that the root causes of the heroin epidemic are in Mexico, because he’s so focused on interdiction, but the real source is right here and in scores of smaller cities and towns.
Opiates are a response to pain.
Physical pain, emotional pain, economic pain.
He’s looking at all three.
The Heroin Trifecta.
Keller is riding the Acela, the three-hour train from Washington, DC, to New York City, from the governmental power center to the financial one, although sometimes it’s hard to know which rules which.
And hard to know what he can do about Mexico from Washington when the real source of the opiate problem might just be on Wall Street. You’re standing on the Rio Grande with a broom, he thinks, trying to sweep back the tide of heroin while billionaires are sending jobs overseas, closing factories and towns, killing hopes and dreams, inflicting pain.
And then they tell you, stop the heroin epidemic.
The difference between a hedge fund manager and a cartel boss?
Wharton Business School.
He looks over to see Hugo Hidalgo lurching down the aisle with a cardboard tray in his hand, bringing back coffee and sandwiches. The young agent plops down in the aisle seat beside him. “I got you a ham and cheese panini. I hope that’s all right.”
“It’s fine. What did you get?”
“A burger.”
“Brave man.”
A good man, actually.
In a few short months, Hidalgo has become a rock star. He’s the first one to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night, although Keller suspects that Hugo sometimes sleeps on a cot in the office if he’s monitoring something.
Hugo is immersed in cell phone traffic analysis, email tracking, satellite pickups, field reports, anything he can look at to assemble a picture of the changing, fluid nature of the Sinaloa cartel.
He’s become Keller’s personal briefer, his last report coming before they left this morning to catch the train: three Tijuana street dealers found hanging from a bridge.
“They were Esparza’s people,” Hugo said. “Elena’s answer to her son’s murder.”
“Is he still denying responsibility for Rudolfo’s murder?”
“He is,” Hugo said, “but the street says that he’s using Elena’s hostility as an excuse for not handing over Baja, so she hits his street dealers.”
The Mexican street sales are a relatively small profit center compared to the cross-border trade, but they’re essential to holding the border turf. To hold a plaza, a boss needs local gunmen, and the gunmen make most of their money from local street sales.
Without the street sales, no army.
No army, no plaza.
Hence, no local street sales, no international trade.
So unless Núñez can enforce peace, Elena and Iván will fight it out locally in Baja for control of the border crossings.
“Does Elena have the troops?” Keller asked.
Hugo shrugged. “Hard to say. Some old Barrera loyalists are going back to Elena now that she’s raised her flag. A lot of them were Rudolfo’s friends looking for revenge. Others are holding with the Esparzas, scared shitless Iván will bring Tito Ascensión and his Jalisco people in to keep them in line.”
It’s a reasonable fear, Keller thought. Nacho’s old guard dog El Mastín is as brutal as it gets. “Núñez?”
“Staying neutral,” Hugo said. “Trying to keep the peace.”
Keller’s suspicions about Núñez had proved to be true—Barrera had named the lawyer as his successor, as the “first among equals” to run the cartel. Núñez is in a tough position—if he lets Iván keep Baja, he looks weak, which in the narco world is the top of a slippery slope. But if he forces Iván to give it up, he’ll have to go to war against him. Either way he goes, his organization fractures. While most of the old Barrera wing is staying loyal to Núñez, some are reported to be looking hard at Elena or Iván as options.
Núñez will have to either force Iván and Elena to the peace table or choose a side.
In the aftermath of Adán Barrera’s death the Pax Sinaloa is dissolving.
Maybe it’s all deck chairs on the Titanic, Keller thinks. Maybe it doesn’t matter who’s sending the heroin, only that it’s coming in. The narcos can play musical chairs all they want; hell, we can empty the chairs with the so-called kingpin strategy—arresting or killing cartel bosses—but the top chair always gets filled and the drugs keep coming.
Keller had been one of the main executors of that strategy, having had a hand in taking out the jefes of the old Federación, the Gulf cartel, the Zetas and Sinaloa, and what’s been the result?
More Americans than ever are dying from overdoses.
If you asked the average citizen to name America’s longest war, he’d probably say Vietnam and then quickly amend it to Afghanistan, but the true answer is the war on drugs.
Fifty years old and counting.
It’s cost over a trillion dollars, and that’s only one part of the financial equation—the legitimate, “clean” money that goes for equipment, police, courts and prisons. But if we’re going to be really honest, Keller knows, we have to account for the dirty money, too.
Tens of billions of drug dollars—in cash—go down to Mexico alone every year, so much cash they don’t even count it, they weigh it. It has to go somewhere, the narcos can’t stick it under their pillows or dig holes in their backyards. A lot of it is invested in Mexico, the estimate being that drug money accounts for 7 to 12 percent of the Mexican economy.
But a lot of it comes back here—into real estate and other investments.
Into banking and then out to legitimate businesses.
It’s the dirty secret of the war on drugs—every time an addict sticks a needle into his arm, everyone makes money.
We’re all investors.
We’re all the cartel.
Now you’re the commanding general in this war, Keller thinks, and you have no idea how to win it. You have thousands of brave, dedicated troops and all they can do is hold the line. You only know how to do the same old thing you’ve been doing, which isn’t working, but what’s the alternative?
