The Border: The final gripping thriller in the bestselling Cartel trilogy. Don Winslow
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.
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
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,