The Border: The final gripping thriller in the bestselling Cartel trilogy. Don Winslow
have to starve him out, and the way to starve a bureaucrat is to deprive him of access and information.
Keller kept Blair after the meeting. “Does Howard have a hard-on for me?”
Blair smiled. “He expected to get your desk.”
The administrator and deputy administrator of the DEA are political appointees—all the rest are civil servants who come up through the system. Keller figured that Howard probably thought O’Brien and his cabal fucked him.
The organizational chart has all the department heads reporting directly to Howard, who then reports to Keller.
“Anything significant,” Keller told Blair, “you bypass Howard, bring directly to me.”
“You want me to keep a double set of books.”
“You have a problem with that?”
“No,” Blair said. “I don’t trust the son of a bitch, either.”
“It blows up, I’ll cover your ass.”
“Who’s going to cover yours?” Blair asked.
Same person who always has, Keller thought.
Me.
“Let’s look at the velorio again,” Keller says.
Blair puts up the photos from Barrera’s wake, taken by an incredibly brave SEIDO undercover working as a waiter for the catering company that serviced the event. Keller stares at the dozens of photos—Elena Sánchez sitting by the coffin; the Esparza brothers; Ricardo Núñez and his son, Mini-Ric; a host of other important players. He studies photos taken in the house, on the lawn, out by the pool.
“Can you order them by time sequence?” Keller asks.
The cliché is that every picture tells a story, but a sequence of pictures, Keller thinks, can be more like a movie and tell a different story. He’s a big believer in chronology, in causation, and now he studies the photos with that sensibility.
Blair is smart enough to shut up.
Twenty minutes later, Keller starts to select a series of photos and lay them out in line. “Look at this—Núñez goes up to Elena. They walk outside, let’s say it’s to talk in private.” He highlights a series of photos that show Elena and Núñez walking closely together, in what seems to be intense conversation. Then—
“Shit,” Keller says, “what’s this?”
He zooms in on Núñez’s hands, on a piece of paper that he gives Elena.
“What is it?” Blair asks.
“Can’t make it out, but she’s sure as hell reading it.” Keller zooms in on Elena’s face—reading, frowning. “It could be the catering bill, who knows, but she isn’t happy.”
They look at pictures of Elena and Núñez in conversation and then check the time log. The conversation lasted for five minutes and twenty-two seconds. Elena gave Núñez the paper and went back inside the house.
“What I wouldn’t give for some audio,” Keller says.
“They were jamming,” Blair says.
Keller goes back to his timeline series of photos and notes Iván and Mini-Ric in what looks to be a casual conversation by the pool. Then Núñez comes out and walks away with Iván, leaving Ric sitting there. Half an hour later, by the time log, Iván comes back out and talks to Ric.
And it doesn’t look casual.
“Am I imagining things,” Keller says, “or are they in an argument?”
“Iván sure looks angry.”
“Whatever got his panties in a wad,” Keller says, “it had to have been when he was with Núñez. I don’t know, maybe I’m reading too much into this.”
And maybe not, he thinks.
All the drumbeats said that Iván was next in line to take control of the cartel, merging the Barrera and Esparza wings of the organization. But now we seem to be seeing Ricardo Núñez summoning Elena Sánchez and Iván Esparza to personal talks, after which Iván appears to be angry.
Jesus Christ, could we have missed something here?
Keller had thought of Ricardo Núñez as a midlevel functionary, at most some kind of adviser to Barrera, but he’s been playing an outsize role in the velorio and the funeral and now he seems to be some kind of go-between from Elena to Iván.
Negotiating what, though?
Elena’s been out of the trade for years.
Keller tries a different theory—maybe Núñez isn’t simply providing “good offices,” but has become a power in and of his own.
Stay tuned, Keller thinks.
¡ADÁN VIVE!
Elena Sánchez Barrera looks at the graffiti spray-painted on the stone wall of the Jardines del Valle cemetery.
She saw the same thing on the ride into the city, painted on walls, the sides of buildings, on billboards. She’s been told that the same phenomenon has occurred in Badiraguato and that little shrines to “Santo Adán” have shown up on roadsides in smaller towns and villages all across Sinaloa and Durango—the deeply felt, passionate wishful thinking that Adán Barrera—the beloved El Señor, El Patrón, the “Godfather,” the “Lord of the Skies,” the man who built clinics, schools, churches, who gave money to the poor and fed the hungry—is immortal, that he lives in flesh or spirit.
Saint Adán, indeed, she thinks.
Adán was many things, but a saint wasn’t one of them.
Elena looks out the window and sees the entire power structure of the Sinaloa cartel, in fact of the whole Mexican trafficking world, gathered. If the government really intended to stop the drug trade, it could do so in one fell swoop.
A single raid would net them all.
It will never happen—not only are there hundreds of cartel sicarios posted around and inside the cemetery, but it’s been cordoned off by the Sinaloa state police and the Culiacán municipal police. A state police helicopter hovers overhead, and, in any case, the federal government is not serious about shutting down the drug trade, it’s serious about managing the drug trade, so it’s not going to disrupt this service.
Ricardo Núñez stands in his impeccably tailored black suit, rubbing his hands together like some kind of Latino Uriah Heep, Elena thinks. The man insisted on inserting himself into the planning of every element of the funeral, from the selection of the coffin to the seating arrangements to security, and Núñez sicarios in their trademark Armani caps and Hermès vests guard the gate and the walls.
Elena spots the notorious La Fósfora, somewhat subdued in a black suit jacket over black pants, supervising the sicarios, and she has to admit that the girl is quite striking. Ricardo’s son, “Mini-Ric,” stands beside him with his mousy wife, whose name Elena cannot recall.
The Esparza brothers stand in a row like crows on a telephone line. For once they aren’t dressed like extras in a cheap telenovela, but respectfully garbed in black suits and real shoes with actual laces. She nods to Iván, who curtly nods back and then moves a little closer to his sister as if asserting his ownership.
Poor Eva, Elena thinks, standing there with her two small boys, who are now pawns in a game they know nothing about. As is Eva, of course—Iván will take control of her as leverage against Núñez. She can hear it already—See, we are Adán Barrera’s real family, his true heirs, not some jumped-up assistant, some clerk. If Eva is too weak to go back to California, Iván will roll her and the twins around like stage props.
Speaking of props, he has his guard dog close at hand. El Mastín is sweating at the collar, looking distinctly uncomfortable in a jacket and tie, and Elena