by Don Winslow
“I’m asking for your help,” Eddie says. “But if I don’t get it, I have to help myself. You know what I’m saying here.”
Guatemala.
The raid that never happened.
When Keller stood there and did nothing while Eddie turned Heriberto Ochoa into a road flare.
Then Keller walked into the jungle to find Barrera.
And only Keller walked out.
“You talk about certain things,” Keller says, “maybe I have enough swag left to get you moved to Z-Wing, Eddie.”
Z-Wing.
Basically, under ADX Florence.
Z-Wing is where they toss you if you fuck up. They strip you, shackle you by the hands and feet, throw you in and leave you there.
A black hole.
“You think you can do three years in Z-Wing?” Keller asks. “You’ll come out a babbling idiot, yapping about all kinds of shit that never happened. No one will believe a word you say.”
“Then keep me where I’m at.”
“You’re not thinking this through,” Keller says. “If you stay in Florence, the same people you’re worried about are going to wonder why.”
“Then you think of something better,” Eddie says. “If I get fucked, it’s not going to be by myself. Just so you understand—my next call’s not to you, it’s about you.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Keller says.
“And you gotta do something else for me,” Eddie says.
“What?”
“I want a Big Mac,” Eddie says. “Large fries and a Coke.”
“That’s it?” Keller asks. “I thought you’d want to get laid.”
Eddie thinks for a second, then says, “No, I’ll go with the burger.”
Eddie hears the toilet bang and knows that Caro wants to speak to him. He goes through the whole rigmarole of flushing water out of the toilet and then puts his ear to the toilet paper roll.
“I hear they’re moving you,” Caro says.
That didn’t take long, Eddie thinks. And Caro’s more hooked up than I thought he was. “That’s right.”
“To Victorville.”
“Yeah.”
He’s not as scared about going there anymore since he got a call from Keller telling him that his paperwork was squeaky clean. Anyone looking at it could read through the lines and decide that Eddie got four years because his lawyer was a lot stronger than the government’s case.
“Don’t worry,” Caro says. “We have friends there. They’ll look after you.”
“Thank you.”
“La Mariposa,” Caro says.
Another name for La Eme.
Caro says, “I’ll miss our talks.”
“Me too.”
“You’re a good young man, Eddie. You show respect.” Caro is quiet for a few seconds, then he says, “M’ijo, I want you to do something for me in V-Ville.”
“Anything, Señor.”
Eddie doesn’t want to do whatever it is.
Just wants to do his time and get out.
Out of the joint, out of the trade.
He’s still toying with producing a movie about his life, what do they call it, a “biopic,” which would have to be, like, a huge hit if they got someone like DiCaprio to play him.
But he can’t say no to Rafael Caro. If he does, La Eme will give him another kind of welcome to V-Ville. Maybe shank him on the spot, or maybe just shun him. Either way, he won’t survive without being cliqued up with a gang.
“I knew that would be your answer,” Caro says. He lowers his voice so Eddie can barely hear him say—
“Find us a mayate.”
A black guy.
“From New York. With an early release date. Put him in your debt,” Caro says. “Do you understand?”
Jesus Christ, Eddie thinks. Caro is still a player.
He does the math—Caro has done twenty years on his twenty-five-year sentence. Federal time, they can make you do every day or they can knock it down to 85 percent, maybe even less.
Which makes Caro a short-timer, looking at the gate.
And he wants back in the game.
“I understand, Señor,” Eddie says. “You want to put the arm on a black guy who’s going to get out soon. But why?”
“Because Adán Barrera was right,” Caro says.
Heroin was our past.
And our past is our future.
He don’t need to tell Eddie that.
Keller gets on the horn to Ben O’Brien. “Call me back on a clean line.”
The first time Keller met O’Brien was in a hotel room in Georgetown a few weeks before the Guatemala raid. They didn’t exchange names, and Keller, who was never much of a political animal, didn’t recognize him as a senator from Texas. He just knew that the man represented certain oil interests willing to fund an operation to eliminate the Zeta leadership because the “Z Company” was taking over valuable oil and gas fields in northern Mexico.
The White House had just officially rejected the operation but sent O’Brien to authorize it off the record. The senator arranged a funding line through his oil connections and helped put together a team of mercenaries through a private firm based in Virginia. Keller had resigned from DEA and joined Tidewater Security as a consultant.
Now O’Brien calls him back. “What’s wrong?”
Keller tells him about Eddie’s threat. “You have any leverage at BOP? Get Ruiz’s PSI scrubbed?”
“In English?”
“I need you to reach out to someone in the Bureau of Prisons and get Ruiz’s records cleansed of any trace of his deal,” Keller says.
“We’re letting drug dealers blackmail us now?” O’Brien asks.
“Pretty much,” Keller says. “Unless you want to answer a lot of questions about what happened down in Guatemala.”
“I’ll get it done.”
“I don’t like it any more than you do.”
Goddamn Barrera, Keller thinks when he clicks off.
Adán vive.
Elena Sánchez Barrera is reluctant to admit, even to herself, that her brother is dead.
The family held out hope through the long silence that lasted days, then weeks, and now months, as they tried to glean information as to what had happened in Dos Erres.
But so far they’ve come up with no new information. Nor, apparently, have the authorities disseminated what they do know down the ranks—it seems as if half of law enforcement believe that the rumor of Adán’s death was put out as a smoke screen to help him evade arrest.
As if, Elena thinks. The federal police are virtually a wholly owned subsidiary of the Sinaloa cartel. The government favors us because we pay them well, we retain order and we’re not savages. So the idea that Adán staged his own death to avoid capture is as ludicrous as it is widespread.
If it wasn’t the police, it was the media.
Elena had heard the term media circus before, but she never fully realized what it meant until the rumors about Adán’s death began to swirl. Then she was besieged—reporters even had the nerve to set up post outside her house in Tijuana. She couldn’t go out the door without being harassed by questions about Adán.
“How many ways can I say ‘I don’t know’?” she had said to the reporters. “All I can tell you is that I love my brother and pray for his safety.”
“So you can confirm he’s missing?”
“I love my brother and pray for his safety.”
“Is it true your brother was the world’s biggest drug trafficker?”
“My brother is a businessman. I love him and pray for his safety.”
Every fresh rumor prompted a new assault. “We’ve heard Adán is in Costa Rica.” “Is it true he’s hiding in the United States?” “Adán has been seen in Brazil, Colombia, Paraguay, Paris . . .”
“All I can tell you is that I love my brother and pray for his safety.”
The pack of hyenas would have eaten little Eva alive, torn her to shreds. If they could have found her. It wasn’t for
lack of trying. The media flooded Culiacán, Badiraguato. An ambitious reporter in California even tracked down Eva’s condo in La Jolla. When they couldn’t find her, they pestered Elena.
“Where is Eva? Where are the boys? There are rumors they’ve been kidnapped. Are they alive?”
“Señora Barrera is in seclusion,” Elena said. “We ask you to respect her privacy in this difficult time.”
“You’re public figures.”
“We’re not,” Elena said. “We’re private businesspeople.”
It was true—she had retired from the pista secreta eight years ago, when she agreed to turn over the Baja plaza to Adán so he could give it to the Esparzas. She had done so willingly—she was tired of the killings, of the death, that went along with the trade and was happy to live off her many investments.
And Eva knows as much about the drug trade as she does about particle physics. Goodhearted, beautiful, and stupid. But fecund. She served her purpose. Gave Adán sons and heirs. The twin boys—Miguel and Raúl. And what will become of them? Elena wonders.
Eva is a young Mexican woman, a young Sinaloan woman. With her father and husband apparently dead, she probably feels that she has to obey her older brother, and Elena wonders what Iván has been telling her.
I know what I would tell her, Elena thinks. You’re an American citizen and so are the boys. You have enough money to live like a queen the rest of your life. Take your sons and run back to California. Raise your children away from this business, before you and they are trapped in it for another generation. It will take some time, but eventually the media circus will pack up and move to the next town.
Hopefully.
The bizarre social alchemy of this vulgar age has turned Adán into that most precious of public commodities—a celebrity. Images of him—old mug shots, random photos taken at social events—are plastered over television screens, computer monitors, front pages of newspapers. The details of his 2004 escape from prison are recited with titillated delight. “Experts” join panels of talking heads to assert Adán’s power, wealth and influence. Mexican “witnesses” are interviewed to testify about Adán’s philanthropy—the clinics he built, the schools, the playgrounds. (“To you he is a drug trafficker. To us he is a hero.”)
Celebrity culture, Elena thinks.
An oxymoron.
Even if you could control the traditional press, corralling social media is like grabbing mercury—it slips out of your hand and breaks into a thousand more pieces. The internet, Twitter, Facebook are electric with “news” about Adán Barrera—every rumor, whisper, innuendo and bit of misinformation went viral. Behind the screen of digital anonymity, people inside the organization who know they shouldn’t be talking are leaking what information they have, mixing little bits of truth into a stew of falsehood.
And the most pernicious rumor of all—
Adán is alive.
It wasn’t Adán at all in Guatemala, but a double. The Lord of the Skies outsmarted his enemies yet again.
Adán is in a coma, hidden away in a hospital in Dubai.
I saw Adán in Durango.
In Los Mochis, in Costa Rica, in Mazatlán.
I saw him in a dream. The spirit of Adán came to me and told me everything will be all right.
Like Jesus, Elena thinks, resurrection is always possible when there’s no body. And just like Jesus, Adán now has disciples.
Elena walks from the living room into the enormous kitchen. She’s thought of selling and downsizing now that her sons are grown and out. The maids busy preparing breakfast look away and seem even busier as they try to avoid her glance. The servants always know first, Elena thinks. Somehow they always hear of every death, every birth, every hurried engagement or secret affair before we do.
Elena pours herself a cup of herbal tea and walks out onto the deck. Her house is in the hills above the city and she looks down at the bowl of polluted smoke that is Tijuana and thinks of all the blood that her family shed—in both the active and passive sense—to control this place.
Her brother Adán and her brother Raúl—long dead—had done that, taken the Baja plaza and turned it into the base of a national empire that had risen and fallen and risen again, and now . . .
Now Iván Esparza has it.
Just as he will have Adán’s crown.
With Adán’s sons mere toddlers, Iván is next in the line of succession. The news of Guatemala had barely reached their ears before he was ready to declare his father and Adán dead and announce that he was taking over.
Elena and Núñez talked him down from that tree.
“It’s premature,” Núñez said. “We don’t yet know for a fact that they’re dead, and you really don’t want to step up to the top position anyway.”
“Why not?” Iván demanded.
“It’s too dangerous,” Núñez said. “Too exposed. In the absence of your father and Adán, we don’t know who will stay loyal.”
“Some ambiguity over their deaths has its uses,” Elena said. “The doubt about whether they might be alive keeps the wolves at bay for a while. But if you announce that the king is dead, everyone from the dukes to the barons to the knights to the peasants will see a weakness in the Sinaloa cartel as a chance to seize the throne.”
Iván reluctantly agreed to wait.
He’s a classic, almost stereotypical third-generation spoiled narco brat, Elena thinks. Hotheaded, violently inclined. Adán didn’t like or trust him and worried about his taking over when Nacho died or retired.
So do I, Elena thinks.
But the only alternatives are her own sons.
They’re Adán’s true nephews, the Barrera blood flows through them. Her oldest son, Rudolfo, has done his time, figuratively and literally. He went into the family business young, trafficking cocaine from Tijuana into California, and did well for years—bought nightclubs, owned top recording bands, and managed champion boxers. A beautiful wife and three beautiful children.
No one loved life more than Rudolfo.
Then he sold 250 grams of coke to a DEA undercover at a motel in San Diego.
Two hundred and fifty grams, Elena thinks. So stupid, so small. They’ve moved tons of cocaine in the States, and poor Rudolfo went down for less than half a pound. The American judge sentenced him to six years in a federal prison.
A “supermax.”
Florence, Colorado.
Because, Elena thinks, he bore the name “Barrera.”
It took everything the family had—money, power, influence, lawyers, blackmail and extortion, but they got him out—well, Adán got him out—after only eighteen months.
Only eighteen months, she reflects.
A year and a half in a seven-by-twelve cell, twenty-three hours a day, alone. An hour a day for a shower, or exercise in a cage with a glimpse of the sky.
When he returned, coming across the Paso del Norte Bridge into Juárez, Elena barely recognized him. Gaunt, pale, haunted—a ghost. Her life-loving son, at thirty-five, looked more like sixty.
That was a year ago.
Now Rudolfo focuses on his “legitimate” business, nightclubs in Culiacán and in Cabo San Lucas, and music—the various bands that he produces and promotes. Sometimes he talks about getting back into la pista secreta, but Elena knows he’s afraid of ever going back to prison. Rudolfo will say that he wants the chair at the head of the table, but he’s lying to himself.
Luis, her baby, she doesn’t worry about. He went to college to become an engineer, God bless him, and wants nothing to do with the family business.
Well, good, Elena thinks now.
It’s what we wanted, isn’t it? It’s what we always intended—for our generation to make the family fortune in the trade so that our children wouldn’t need to. Because the trade has brought us riches beyond imagining, but it has also brought us to the cemetery time and again.
Her husband, her uncle—the patriarch “Tío” Barrera—her brother Raúl, and now her brother Adán is dead. Her nephew
Salvador, and so many cousins and in-laws and friends.
And enemies.
Güero Méndez, the Tapia brothers, so many others that Adán defeated. They fought for “turf,” she thinks, and the only turf they eventually, inevitably, inherit and share is the cemetery.
Or the prisons.
Here in Mexico or El Norte.
In cells for decades or for the rest of their lives.
A living death.
So if Rudolfo wants to run a nightclub and play at making music, and Luis wants to build bridges, so much the better.
If the world will let them.
“We’re all going to die young anyway!” Ric Núñez announces. “Let’s make legends while we’re doing it!”
It’s been a night of Cristal and coke at Rudolfo Sánchez’s new club, the Blue Marlin. Well, that’s where they wound up; part of the group informally known as Los Hijos—Ric, the Esparza brothers, Rubén Ascensión—and a host of girls had been hitting all the trendy clubs in Cabo, going from VIP room to VIP room, usually comped but leaving hefty tips, and then they were in a private room at the Marlin when Ric got the idea to “take it to the next level.”
He takes out his .38 Colt and sets it on the table.
Can you imagine the songs they’ll write? Ric thinks. The corridos about young people, the scions of the drug cartels, decked out in Armani, Boss, Gucci; driving Rolls, Ferraris; snorting primo blow through hundred-dollar bills, throwing it all away on a game?
They’ve been together forever, Los Hijos. Went to school together in Culiacán, played together at their parents’ parties, went on vacations together to Cabo and Puerto Vallarta. Snuck off and drank beer together, smoked weed, picked up girls. A few of them did a couple of semesters of college, most went straight into the family business.
They knew who they were.
The next generation of the Sinaloa cartel.
The sons.
Los Hijos.
And the girls? They always get the best girls. Ever since middle school, even more so now. Of course they do—they have looks, clothes, money, drugs, guns. They have the swag—they go to the VIP rooms, get the best tables at the best restaurants, front-row seats and backstage passes to the hot concerts; shit, the bands sing songs to them, about them. Maître d’s open doors and women open up their legs.