The Cartel (16 page)

Keller listens as “Cuernevaca” says,
“It’s me.”

“What is it?”

“Is that Barrera?” Aguilar asks.

“Can’t tell,” Keller answers.

They listen as “Cuernavaca” describes the problem with Sondra Barrera. Then the recipient of the call says,
“The
pendejos,
why do they have to interfere with families?”

Keller nods. It’s him.

“What do you want to do?”
“Cuernavaca” asks.

“Just tell her you spoke with me and we’re fixing it. Send them on vacation or something.”

“Atizapán,” the technician says, naming a town on the outskirts of Mexico City, “5871 Calle Revolución.”

“Cuernavaca” says,
“Do you think…we should…”

“She’s my brother’s wife.”

The call goes off. Vera grins. “Did we just hear ‘Cuernavaca’ suggest killing Barrera’s sister-in-law?”

Keller is already on the horn to DEA to request a satellite run.

By early morning they have a hit.

“Look at this,” Keller said.

He shows them a grainy video image of Adán Barrera standing on the roof of the house, gazing out over the neighborhood, a cup of coffee in his hand. He only stayed a minute, and then went in.

“It’s him,” Keller says.

“Are you sure?” Aguilar asks.

Keller has come to learn that the head of SEIDO is a cautious man, constantly checking and rechecking the “facts” to make certain that they are indeed facts, and not rumors or deliberate misinformation. The image is grainy but Keller is reasonably sure it’s Adán—the short stature, the shock of black hair across the forehead…

“Put a percentage on it,” Aguilar presses.

“Eighty-five,” Keller says.

“Eighty-five is good,” Vera comments.

Keller wants to go in right away. He requests and receives another satellite flyover with mega-audio capability and sits listening to what he believes is Adán’s voice inside the house.

Talking to a woman.

“Do you want red or white?”

“Red tonight, I think.”

“Is that her?” Keller asks. “Magda Beltrán?”

The beauty queen.

Aguilar shrugs. “Narcos have a lot of women.”

“Not Adán,” Keller says. “He’s more of a serial monogamist.”

They run the audio against DEA recordings of Adán and come up with a close match.

“We know that he’s inside the house
now,
” Keller says. “Let’s
do
it now.”

“It’s too risky,” Aguilar says.

Vera—usually the more aggressive—agrees. “Too much chance of my men hitting each other in a crossfire.”

“Or a civilian,” Aguilar says.

It’s frustrating—the AFI troopers are good, more and more of them have received training at Quantico, but Keller yearns for American special forces, with their high level of training and equipment. He knows it will never happen—D.C. would never send, nor would Los Pinos ever accept, American troops on Mexican soil—but Keller would give a lot right then for special operators who
preferred
to fight at night.

But this is the Mexicans’ call to make, and they decide to wait until dawn. Aguilar puts his best surveillance team on the scene, and Vera sends an AFI plainclothes team in case Barrera tries to leave the house.

“We have him penned in,” Vera reassures Keller. “He’s not going anywhere. He’ll be there in the morning.”

Keller hopes so.

Adán hasn’t stayed free this long by being careless, and he doubtless has men watching from the house, as well as
halcones
—“falcons,” lookouts—on the street. Not to mention an average, misguided citizen who sees Barrera as some kind of Robin Hood and who could get very rich very quickly by warning the
patrón
about strangers in the neighborhood.

But now the “strangers” are in place—four armored vehicles filled with AFI troopers with black hoods and Kevlar vests—parked blocks away from the building. The troopers are armed with automatic rifles, flash-bang grenades, and tear-gas canisters. Two helicopters stand by to take off as soon as the raid starts, and they’ll drop more AFI troopers onto the roof.

Keller urges the sun to hurry the hell up.

The house will be full of
sicarios,
and, sleepy or not, they’ll fight to protect Barrera, and there will be gunfire. And when the shooting starts, Keller thinks, the distinction between justice and revenge tends to get blurred.

Then Vera’s voice comes over the radio.

“Two minutes.”

The plan is straightforward, perhaps too much so, Keller thinks. At the “go” command, the vehicles will charge up to the building and AFI troopers will get out, bludgeon open the door, and go in while others guard the back entrance and seal off the streets. The SEIDO agents will follow to make arrests and gather intelligence and evidence—cell phones, computers, cash, and weapons.

Aguilar checks the load on his service revolver, and tightens his Kevlar vest. Then he turns to Keller and says, “You will remain in the vehicle. We will bring Barrera out and you will identify him. Is that clear?”

“I heard you the fifteenth time.”

They sit in silence for an interminable ninety seconds, until they hear Vera say, “Go.”

Aguilar starts to follow his men out of the car.

Keller watches him go down the block, then pulls his gun and follows.

“Juras! Juras!”

Keller hears the
halcones
shout that the cops are coming, but the lookouts—most of them kids—run away as the AFI troopers pour out of the vehicles.

Gunfire blasts from the windows and the roof.

Vera seems oblivious to the bullets zipping around him. Pistol in hand, he urges the men with the battering ram to hit the door. More afraid of him than the bullets, the troopers pick up the ram and run it into the door.

The door comes off its hinges, pulling the trip wires on the grenades attached waist high to the sill.

Keller sees the red blast as two troopers fly back.

“Muévanse!”
Vera yells at the stunned survivors.

Move!

They balk as bullets zip out through the doorway and they look at their two comrades lying in the street, limp as puppets.

“
Rajados!
Cowards!” Vera yells. “
I’ll
go!”

He runs in.

His men follow him.

So does Keller, who trots toward the house, remembering Vietnam and his Quantico training—
don’t run to your death
—and saves his oxygen for the firefight.

And, like ’Nam, he hears the choppers coming in.

—

The house is a bedlam.

The power out, faint light comes through the few windows—screams of pain and bursts of automatic weapons fire cut through the darkness. The carnage is horrific, although it’s hard to make out the narcos from the AFI troopers. Keller hears Vera’s voice in front of him, toward the back of the house, shouting orders.

Stepping over the bodies of dead and wounded, Keller looks for the stairs. Adán wouldn’t be on the ground floor or on the top. He’d be on the second, in the back, with the possibility of getting out a window.

If he’s even here, Keller thinks. This was an ambush—a booby-trapped ambush—and they were ready for us.

But the voice track said he was here.
Was
here, anyway, Keller thinks as he finds the stairs and starts up, pistol pointed in front of him.

Then he trips over Aguilar’s legs.

The lawyer sits on the landing, his back against the wall, his legs stuck straight out, his left hand grasping his right arm, the glassy look of the wounded in his eyes.

He sees Keller.

“You’re supposed to be in the car,” Aguilar says softly.

Keller crouches beside him. The wound is jagged—shrapnel, not a bullet. Keller rips Aguilar’s sleeve and uses it as a tourniquet. “The medics are on the way. You won’t bleed out.”

“Go back to the car.”

Keller continues up the stairs.

A grenade clatters down the steps.

Before he can move, it goes off by his ankles. The smoke explodes up, choking him, blinding him. Staggering up the stairs, he hears gunfire above him, as the AFI troopers fight their way down from the roof. A
sicario
appears through the smoke in front of him. He looks confused when he sees Keller, then throws his AK up to his shoulder.

Keller fires twice into his chest and the man goes down.

Pushing past him, Keller makes it to the top of the stairs. He opens the first door he can find and sees—

Adán—

—standing by the bed—

—a pistol in his right hand.

“Don’t,” Keller says.

Hoping he does.

Barrera raises the gun.

Keller fires.

The first bullet takes off the bottom of Barrera’s jaw.

The second goes through his left eye.

Blood sprays against the wall.

The woman screams.

Keller lowers his gun.

—

Vera walks up behind him.

Together, they look down at the corpse.

The black hair, the slightly pug nose, the brown eyes.

Well,
one
brown eye.

“Congratulations,” Vera says.

“It’s not him,” Keller says.

“What?!”

“It’s not fucking him.”

Adán used lookalikes before, at least three of them during his war with Palma, and when Keller sees the body up close, remote from the chaos, adrenaline, darkness, and smoke, he realizes that it wasn’t Adán and that the whole raid has been a setup.

Keller, Vera, and the AFI troopers tear through the house, and in one of the bedrooms they find it.

The bathtub has been torn up and there it is—the entrance to a tunnel.

Keller jumps down.

Pistol in front of him, he moves down the tunnel, which is wired for electricity and has lights. He hopes that Barrera is in here, cowering somewhere, but the greater likelihood is that if Barrera’s down here, he has an army of
sicarios
protecting him.

Keller keeps pushing anyway.

Vera is right behind him, his gun also drawn.

They walk under the street and then come to the end of the tunnel and another metal ladder. Keller climbs up and pushes open the trapdoor into another house.

It’s empty.

Barrera is gone.

—

They do the press conference that afternoon. Aguilar questioned the wisdom of making a public show of what had been a desperate shootout near the nation’s capital, but Vera insisted.

“We must not only combat the cartels,” Vera said, “we must be
seen
to be combating the cartels. That’s the only way to restore the public’s confidence in their law enforcement agencies.”

Keller watches on television at the embassy as Vera describes the daring raid, the intense firefight, and memorializes the brave men who gave their lives. He goes on to praise the diligent work of SEIDO, and introduces Luis Aguilar, “who, as you can see, shed his blood in the pursuit of this criminal.”

Aguilar mumbles through a typed statement. “We regret our failure in this instance. However, we assure the public that the battle will go on and we must…”

Vera throws his arm around his colleague’s shoulder.

“We’re Batman and Robin.” He looks straight into the cameras. “And he’s right—the battle is just beginning. We won’t relent in our hunt for Barrera, but now I’m talking to the rest of you narcos out there. We’re coming after you. We’ll be in Tijuana next.”

“What about the beauty queen?” a reporter asks. “What about Miss Culiacán?”

Vera steps back in. “She wasn’t in the house. But don’t worry—we’ll find her and give her a new sash.”

The reporters laugh.

—

The fight starts the next day.

“You’re going home,” Aguilar tells Keller.

“Absolutely,” Keller answers. “The moment Barrera is back behind bars or on a slab.”

“Now,”
Aguilar insists. “It’s too dangerous—not only for you but for other people. The booby-trapped door could have been meant for you. Other men paid with their lives.”

“That’s what soldiers do,” Vera says.

“They were policemen, not soldiers,” Aguilar says. “And this is a law enforcement action, not a war.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” Vera answers.

“I object to the militarization of—”

“Tell that to the narcos,” Vera says. “If Keller is willing to stay until the job is done, I’m willing to have him. If he’s willing to stay.”

Keller’s willing.

Adán Barrera is still out there, in his world.

La Tuna, Sinaloa

Adán walks out onto the little balcony off the master bedroom of his
finca.

The ranch was his aunt’s, abandoned back in the ’70s when the American DEA came in and devastated the poppy fields with fire and poison. Thousands of campesinos and
gomeros
—now refugees—fled their mountain homes.

Tía Delores’s
finca
stood empty for years, a home for only ravens.

Since his return to Mexico, Adán has poured millions into renovating the main house and the outbuildings, and more millions turning the ranch into a fortress with high walls, guard towers, sound and motion sensors, and casitas that serve as living spaces for the servants and barracks for the
sicarios.

For Adán it is a return to innocence, of sorts, to the idyllic day of his teenage years when he would come up here to escape the heat of the Tijuana summer and dive into the cold waters of the granite quarries. Of family dinners at large tables under the oak trees, listening to the campesino men play tamboras and guitars, and the old women, the
abuelas,
tell stories from a time beyond his memory.

A good life, a rich life, a life that the North Americans destroyed.

It is good to be home, Adán thinks.

Despite Sondra’s stupidity.

Stupid, vapid Sondra was a perfect pawn for both white and black. As it turned out, it wasn’t a problem. He and Magda went to the safe house in Atizapán, he let himself be seen and heard, and then he slipped out of the net that had been thrown around the house.