The Cartel (12 page)

Keller lays the paper on top of the box and reads the story. Barrera extradited to a Mexican prison…Puente Grande…a Christmas party…

He can’t believe it.

Then again, he can.

Of course he can.

It’s Barrera and it’s Mexico.

The irony, Keller thinks, is as perfect as it is painful.

I’m a prisoner in the world’s largest solitary confinement.

And Barrera is free.

Keller tosses the paper into a trash can. He walks the streets for hours, past piles of dirty snow, closed factories, shivering crack whores, the detritus of a Rust Belt town where the jobs have gone south.

At some point, late in the afternoon with the sky turning a harsh, threatening gray, Keller walks into the bus station to go where he knows he’s always been headed.

—

The Drug Enforcement Administration headquarters are in Pentagon City. Which, Keller supposes, makes perfect sense. If you’re going to fight a war on drugs, base yourself in the Pentagon.

He’s in a suit and tie now, his only one of either, closely shaved and his hair freshly cut. He sits in the lobby and waits until they finally let him up to the fifth floor to see Tim Taylor, who successfully masks his enthusiasm at seeing Art Keller.

“What do you want, Art?” Taylor asks.

“You know what I want.”

“Forget it,” Taylor says. “The last thing we need right now is some old vendetta of yours.”

“Nobody knows Barrera like I do,” Art answers. “His family, his connections, the way his mind works. And nobody is as motivated as I am.”

“Why, because he’s hunting you?” Taylor asks. “I thought you had a different life now.”

“That was before you guys let Barrera out.”

“Go back to your bees, Art,” Taylor says now.

“I’ll go down the road.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you let me walk out of here,” Keller answers, “I’ll go to Langley. I’ll bet
they’d
send me.”

The rivalry between DEA and CIA is bitter, the tension between the two agencies horrific, the trust virtually nonexistent. CIA had at least helped to cover up Hidalgo’s murder, and DEA had never forgotten or forgiven it.

“You and Barrera,” Taylor says, “you’re the same guy.”

“My point.”

Taylor stares at him for a long time and then says, “This is going to be complicated. Not everyone is going to welcome you back. But I’ll see what I can do. Leave me a number where you can be reached.”

Keller finds a decent hotel up in Bethesda by the Naval Hospital and waits. He knows what’s happening—Taylor has to meet with higher-ups at DEA, who then have to go to their bosses at Justice. Justice has to talk to the State Department, and then it would have to be coordinated with CIA. There will be quiet lunches on K Street and quieter drinks in Georgetown.

He knows what the arguments will be: Art Keller is a loose cannon, not a team player; Keller has his own agenda, he’s too personally involved; the Mexicans resent him; it’s too dangerous.

The last argument is the toughest.

With a $2 million reward on Keller’s head, sending him down to Mexico is dangerous, to say the least, and DEA can’t afford the media storm that would ensue if another agent were killed in Mexico. Still, no one can reasonably question Keller’s potential value in the hunt for Adán Barrera.

“Give him a desk at EPIC,” a White House official determines, referring to DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center. “He can advise the Mexicans from there.”

Taylor relays the offer to Keller.

“I’m pretty sure,” Keller says, “that Barrera isn’t in El Paso.”

“Asshole.”

Keller hangs up.

The White House official who was listening in explodes. “Since when does some
agent
tell us where he will or will not go?!”

“This is not ‘some agent,’ ” Taylor responds. “This is Art fucking Keller, the former ‘Border Lord.’ He knows where the bodies are buried, and not just in Mexico.”

“What about the danger?”

Taylor shrugs. “It is what it is. If Keller gets Barrera, great. If Barrera gets him first…It puts other things to bed, doesn’t it?”

Keller knows what happened in 1985. He was there. He busted the flights of cocaine, saw the training camps, knew that NSC and CIA had used the Mexican cartels to fund the Nicaraguan Contras, with full approval of the White House. He perjured himself in his testimony before Congress in exchange for a free hand to go after the Barreras, and he destroyed them and put Adán Barrera away.

And now Barrera’s out, and Keller is back.

If he gets killed in Mexico, he takes some secrets with him.

Mexico is a cemetery for secrets.

—

After more phone calls, more classified memos, more lunches, and more drinks, the powers-that-be finally decide that Keller can go to Mexico City with DEA credentials, not as a special agent, but as an intelligence officer. And with a simple mission statement—“assist and advise in the capture of Adán Barrera or, alternatively, the verification of his death.”

Keller accepts.

But they still have to sell it to the Mexicans, who are skeptical about Keller being sent to “assist and advise.” It touches off a bureaucratic pissing match between the Mexican attorney general’s office, the Ministry of Public Security, and an alphabet soup of other agencies, all variously cooperating and/or competing within overlapping jurisdictions.

On the one hand, they want his knowledge; on the other hand is the notorious, if understandable, Mexican sensitivity about the perception that they’re “little brown brothers” in the relationship, as well as aggrievement over the constant—and one-sided—American insinuations of corruption.

Taylor lectures Keller about it. “Perhaps you missed it when you were off playing Friar Tuck, but it’s a new day down there. The PRI is out and PAN is in. The federal law enforcement agencies have been reorganized and cleaned up, and the received wisdom—which you
will
receive, Art—is that Los Pinos is reborn with a bright shiny new soul.”

Yeah, Keller thinks. Back in the ’80s, the received wisdom was that there was no cocaine in Mexico, and he was ordered to keep his mouth shut about the all too tangible evidence to the contrary, the countless tons of blow the Colombians were moving through Barrera’s Federación into the United States. And Los Pinos—the Mexican White House—was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Federación. Now the official word is that the Mexican government is squeaky clean?

“So Barrera’s escape was a Houdini magic act,” Keller says. “No one in the government was bought off.”

“Maybe a prison guard or two.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“I’m not bullshitting you,” Taylor says. “You are not going to go down there and make onions. You assist and you advise, and otherwise you keep your mouth shut.”

A battle of e-mails, meetings, and confidential cables between Washington and Mexico City ensues, the result of which is a compromise: Keller would be on loan to, and under the supervision of, a “coordinating committee” and would serve in a strictly advisory capacity.

“You accept the mission,” Taylor says, “you accept these conditions.”

Keller accepts. It’s all bullshit anyway—he’s fully aware that one of his roles in Mexico is that of “bait.” If anything would bring Adán Barrera out of the woodwork, it would be the chance to get Art Keller.

Keller knows this and doesn’t care.

If Adán wants to come after him—good.

Let him come.

The words of a psalm they used to chant at Vigils comes back to him.

Romans 13:11.

“And do this, knowing the hour,

That now it is high time for us to arise from sleep.”

3

The Hunting of Man

There is no hunting like the hunting of man.

—Ernest Hemingway

“On the Blue Water”

Los Elijos, Durango

March 2005

The sun, soft and diffuse in the haze, comes up over the mountains on this Holy Thursday.

Keller sits in the front of an unmarked SUV tucked into a stand of Morales pines on the edge of a ridge, fingers the trigger of the Sig Sauer he isn’t supposed to have, and looks down into the narrow valley where the little village of Los Elijos, wedged between mountain peaks, just starts to appear through the mist.

The thin mountain air is cold and Keller shivers from the chill but also from fatigue. The convoy has driven all night up the narrow twisting road, little more than a goat path, in the hope of arriving here unseen.

Looking through binoculars, Keller sees that the village is still asleep, so no one has raised an alarm.

Luis Aguilar shivers behind him.

The two men don’t like each other.

—

The first meeting of the “Barrera Coordinating Committee,” held the day after Keller arrived in Mexico City, was inauspicious.

“Let’s have things clear between us,” Aguilar said as soon as they sat down. “You are here to share your knowledge of the Barrera organization. You are not here to cultivate your own sources, take independent action, or do surveillance or any other intelligence gathering. I will not have another gringo wiping his boots on my turf. Do we understand each other?”

Everything about Luis Aguilar had an edge to it—from his aquiline nose, to the press of his trousers, to his words.

“We have resources of our own,” Keller answered. Satellite surveillance, cell phone intercepts, computer hacks, information developed in the States. “I’ll share them with you unless and until I see that intelligence leaked. Then it’s cut off and you and I don’t know each other.”

Aguilar’s sharp eyes got sharper. “What are you trying to say?”

“I’m just getting things clear between us.”

As sharp as Aguilar was, Gerardo Vera was that smooth. He laughed and said, “Gentlemen, please, let’s fight the narcos instead of each other.”

Luis Aguilar and Gerardo Vera head up the two new agencies charged with the task of cutting through the Gordian knot of corruption and bureaucracy to finally, seriously take on the cartels.

Aguilar’s SEIDO (Subprocuraduría Especializada en Investigación de Delincuencia Organizada)—the Assistant Attorney General’s Office for the Investigation of Organized Crime—was created to replace its predecessor, FEADS, which the new administration had disbanded, labeling it “a dung heap of corruption.”

Similarly, Vera disbanded the old PJF—the
federales
—and replaced it with the AFI, the Federal Investigative Agency.

The heads of the two new organizations were a study in contrast—Aguilar short, slim, dark, compact, and tidy; Vera tall, heavy, blond, broad-faced, and expansive. Aguilar was a lawyer with a reputation as a hard-charging prosecutor; Vera a career cop, trained by, among others, the FBI.

Vera was a regular guy you’d swap stories over a few beers with; Aguilar a quiet academic, devout Catholic, and family man who never told tales. Vera wore custom-made Italian suits; Aguilar was strictly Brooks Brothers off-the-rack.

What they had in common was a determination to clean things up.

They started with their own people, making each investigator pass a background check and a polygraph asserting that he never has been, nor is he now, in the employ of the narcos. Aguilar and Vera were the first ones to take the test, and they released the (clean) results to the media.

Not everyone passed. Aguilar and Vera fired hundreds of investigators who failed the test.

“Some of these bastards,” Vera told Keller, “were working with the cartels
before
they came to us. The cartels
sent
them to enlist, do you believe that? Fuck their mothers.”

Aguilar winced at the obscenity.

“Now we all take the test once a month,” Vera said. “Expensive, but if you’re going to keep the stable clean you have to keep shoveling out the shit.”

The shit tried to shovel back.

Vera and Aguilar had each received scores of death threats. Each had half a dozen heavily armed bodyguards who escorted them everywhere; sentries patrolled their houses twenty-four/seven.

DEA was encouraged.

“We’ve finally found people we can work with,” Taylor told Keller in his predeployment briefing. “These guys are honest, competent, and
driven.
”

Keller had to agree with that.

Still, Keller and Aguilar knocked heads.

“Your organizational chart,” Keller said one day after it took an exchange of thirty-seven memos to approve a simple wiretap, “is about as straightforward as a bowl of day-old spaghetti.”

“I don’t eat stale food,” Aguilar answered, “but perhaps you can enlighten me as to the exact delineations between DEA, ICE, FBI, Homeland Security, and the plethora of state and local jurisdictions on your side of the border, because, frankly, I haven’t noticed them.”

They argued about the Puente Grande escape.

The prison system now came under Vera’s bailiwick, but prosecutions of prison staff had to be done under Aguilar’s authority. So Vera had appointed his own man to investigate the escape, while Aguilar had ordered the arrests of seventy-two guards and staff, including the warden. Interrogations were conducted by a top AFI official named Edgar Delgado, but Aguilar and Keller were allowed to sit in. Aguilar was humiliated by what he heard—that Barrera basically ran the prison.

Keller took it as a given.

“Because all Mexicans are corrupt,” Aguilar huffed.

Keller shrugged.

—

Aguilar went home that night too late for dinner but in time to help his daughters with their homework. After the girls went to bed, Lucinda set a plate of lamb
birria,
one of his favorites, at the table.

“How is the North American?” she asked, sitting next to him.

“Like all North Americans,” Aguilar answered. “He thinks he knows everything.”

“I didn’t know you were a bigot, Luis.”

“I prefer to call myself parochial.”

“You should invite him over for dinner.”

“I spend enough time with him,” Aguilar answered. “Besides, I wouldn’t inflict him on you.”