by Don Winslow
“If you do,” Keller says, “I will resume it on the Capitol steps.”
“You are in contempt, Mr. Keller,” O’Brien says.
“You don’t know the half, Senator.”
“Continue,” Elmore says.
Keller says, “In my role as DEA administrator, I became aware that a new heroin-smuggling network, led by Eddie Ruiz and released trafficker Rafael Caro, was sending masses of heroin and lethal fentanyl into the United States through intermediaries in New York City. I also learned that Caro had ordered the murders of forty-nine students in Mexico—some of them burned to death—and the torture-murder of journalist Ana Villanueva, who was investigating this atrocity.
“I further became aware that the Terra Company—headed by special White House adviser Jason Lerner—with the help of the hedge fund managed by Chandler Claiborne, had arranged a multimillion-dollar loan through a Mexican bank, but that the actual money had come from a syndicate of Mexican drug organizations, including the Caro-Ruiz organization that perpetrated this mass murder.
“Court-authorized wiretaps revealed that Lerner initiated bank fraud and knowingly violated anti-money-laundering statutes. Further authorized recordings of a conversation between Lerner and Claiborne conclusively show that both had knowledge that the source of the loan was drug money coming from, inter alia, Rafael Caro.
“I was in negotiations with Special Counsel Scorti to turn over the incriminating tapes and documents. Frankly, I was concerned that, if I did turn over the tapes, they might be suppressed. Accordingly, I would now like to play the relevant moments for this committee.”
He lays a small tape player on the table.
“This is not going to happen!” O’Brien says.
“Are you trying to suppress this evidence?” Elmore asks.
“This isn’t ‘evidence,’” O’Brien says. “We don’t know the provenance of these tapes, we don’t know their origin, they might very well violate the legal rights of—”
“We don’t know until we hear them,” Elmore says. “Do you not want them heard, Senator O’Brien?”
“Then we should hear them in closed session,” O’Brien says.
“So it’s the American people you don’t want hearing these recordings,” Elmore says. “But I think the people have a right to hear—”
“I want those tapes seized,” O’Brien says. “I want them seized and handed over to the US attorney general’s office.”
“Meaning I’m telling you it’s drug money.”
“Jesus Christ, are you wearing a wire?”
“Don’t be an asshole.”
“Are you?!”
“No!”
“Because if you are—”
“You think I’d cross these people? You know who they are, you know what they do.”
“Yes, I do. Do you?”
“They’d kill me and my whole family.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I’m scared, Jason. I’m thinking of maybe going to the police.”
“Don’t do that. That’s the last thing you want to do.”
“If this goes south—”
“We’re covered. Don’t you get that? If it’s drug money, if it’s Russian money, whatever, we can have any investigation shut down. We’re golden now. We’re untouchable.”
“I don’t know . . .”
“Chandler, I needed this fucking loan. My father-in-law needed this fucking loan. Do you know what I’m getting at here?”
Uproar.
Reporters spill out of the room.
O’Brien gavels for order but doesn’t get it.
Crosby puts her hand over the microphone and says, “My God, Art.”
Keller looks across the room at Marisol, then leans back to the mike and says, “While still in my job, I was asked by both current DEA director Denton Howard and by Senator O’Brien to cease the investigation of Jason Lerner. Mr. Howard, strongly alluding that he was relaying a message from President Dennison, offered that I could retain my position, and also that the administration would support certain liberalizing policies that I have endorsed.
“I refused these offers. Fearing that evidence would be destroyed, I removed tapes and documents from DEA premises and secreted them in a safe location. I am fully aware that in doing so, I have violated certain federal statutes, and, again, I am prepared to take responsibility and accept the consequences. I will leave it to others to determine if O’Brien’s and Howard’s actions rise to the level of obstruction of justice.”
O’Brien gets up and walks out of the hearing room, followed by his staff.
Elmore nods at Keller to continue.
“As a result of this investigation,” Keller says, “and with the superb cooperation of the NYPD Narcotics Division, we have destroyed the Caro-Ruiz network and seized vast amounts of fentanyl-laced heroin. Justice for their money launderers, however, has yet to be realized.
“We often point a finger at Mexico for being corrupt,” Keller says. “It’s too easy because it’s too often true. I can personally testify to corruption at the highest level of Mexican government. However . . .
“We also have to look at corruption here in the United States. I just played you a recording that revealed corruption at the very highest levels of American finance and government, by the very people most active in pointing accusatory fingers at Mexico.
“If we do not thoroughly and honestly investigate and prosecute this corruption here at home, we are the worst kind of hypocrites, and we should immediately open the cell doors of every man, woman, and, yes, child currently serving time for possessing or selling drugs.
“But the corruption goes deeper than just money. We have to ask ourselves—what kind of corruption is there of our collective national soul that makes us the world’s greatest consumer of illicit drugs? We can say that the roots of the heroin epidemic are in Mexican soil, but opiates are always a response to pain. What is the pain in the heart of American society that sends us searching for a drug to lessen it, to dampen it?
“Is it poverty? Injustice? Isolation?
“I don’t have the answers, but we must ask the real question—
“Why?”
Cirello sits with a Kingston detective and a state prosecutor.
“It was self-defense,” Cirello says. “The guy was raping her and was going to kill her.”
“She was hooking,” the prosecutor says.
Cirello looks at the detective and knows the interview is going to go down the way it should. He’ll ask her the right questions in the right way and leave the DA with nothing to do but write it off as self-defense.
“Please do what you can for this kid?” Cirello says. “She’s an addict. She needs help, not prison.”
“She’s been to rehab already,” the prosecutor says. “How many times do you want us to send her to treatment?”
“Until it works,” Cirello says.
Jacqui sits at a table in the interview room.
The cop comes in.
“Hey,” Jacqui says.
“Hey.”
“I’m going to jail now, huh?” she asks.
“I don’t think so,” Cirello says. “Whatever the cop asks you, you answer yes, okay?”
“I owe you big time,” Jacqui says.
“I owe you big time.”
“Okay,” she says, “we owe each other.”
“Take care of yourself, huh?”
“You too.”
The cop leaves.
Jacqui starts to sing her song to herself.
“When Jacqui—”
Then she stops.
I’m not a little girl anymore, she thinks.
Ric sits in his cell.
There’s nothing else to do there until they move him. He’s pleaded out for a sentence of twelve years, half the sentence his father took. Ric knows that his dad is never getting out.
But I’ll be young, he thinks, in my early forties.
I can still have some kind of
a life.
Not like Belinda.
The prison telegraph has already tapped that she’s dead, that Iván Esparza executed her for the sin of not killing Ric.
He feels bad about it.
The same prison telegraph told him that Iván has put himself under Tito Ascensión.
So it’s over, Ric thinks.
The Sinaloa cartel is done.
You’re the godson to nothing.
It doesn’t matter, he thinks. The drug thing is over anyway. What you need to do now is to serve your time and get back to your family.
Valeria will be a teenager.
He hears a muffled voice. It sounds like it’s coming from the toilet. He bends down and hears, “Ric? Ric Núñez?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s up? What’s up, brother? It’s Eddie Ruiz.”
Crazy Eddie? Ric thinks.
What the fuck?
“Listen, Ric. We can do some things together . . .”
Cirello gets in his car and heads south on the 87, back toward the city.
Back to the job.
The UC is finally over, Mullen will get him a prime assignment, but he knows that the stink that’s on him will never really come off. There’ll always be that suspicion, that doubt, the whispers behind his back, the rumors that some of the drug money stuck to him like the crumpled bills you find in your jeans pocket when you take them out of the dryer.
He can stay on, do his thirty, get his pension, but it will never be the same as it was.
When he hits Newburgh, he turns west on the 84.
Doesn’t know where he’s going, only knows that he’s not going back to New York, not going back to NYPD, not going back to being a drug cop.
He’s done.
“I have spent my adult life fighting the war on drugs,” Keller says.
“I have had many colleagues—some of them fallen—in this war, and I am proud of their sacrifice, their dedication, and their fine efforts to combat what they see as an unmitigated evil.
“They are true believers and truly good people.
“But now I have, sadly, come to the conclusion that we have fought the wrong war, and that it must end.
“The war on drugs has been going on for fifty years—half a century. It is America’s longest war. In the process of waging it, we have spent over a trillion dollars, put millions of people, most of them black, brown and poor, behind bars—the largest prison population in the world. We have militarized our police forces. The war on drugs has become a self-sustaining economic machine. Towns that once competed for factories now vie to build prisons. In ‘prison privatization’—one of the ugliest combinations of words I can imagine—we have capitalized corrections; corporations now make profits keeping human beings behind bars. Courts, lawyers, police, prisons—we are more addicted to the war on drugs than to the drugs against which we wage the war.
“The war on drugs is a war in more than name. Countless people have been killed because drugs are illegal. You don’t see wine or beer or tobacco companies shooting it out to dominate a market, but that’s exactly what we see on the corners and in the tenements for control of the drug trade. And, of course, in Mexico. Because drugs are illegal, we send sixty billion dollars a year to the violent sociopaths of the cartels, money that bribes police and politicians and buys the guns that have killed hundreds of thousands of people with no end in sight.
“The ‘Mexican drug problem’ is not the Mexican drug problem. It is the American drug problem. We are the buyers, and without buyers, there can be no sellers.
“We have waged this war for fifty years, and after all those years, all that money, all that suffering, what is the result?
“Drugs are more plentiful, more powerful and more available than ever.
“Fatal drug overdoses are at a record high—we now lose more people to overdoses than to car accidents or gun violence.
“All this while drugs are illegal.
“If that’s what victory looks like, I would hate to see defeat.
“We need to end this war.
“We need to legalize all drugs and spend our time, money and effort on addressing the root causes of drug abuse.
“We need to ask and answer the question ‘Why?’
“Until we answer that question, we are doomed to repeat the same tragic, repetitive dance of death.
“Hobbes said, ‘Hell is truth seen too late,’” Keller says. “I pray that this truth hasn’t come too late. Thank you for your time.”
Keller gets up and leaves the room.
His arm around Marisol’s shoulder, Keller pushes his way through the crush of media outside the Capitol and then helps her into the waiting car.
“Where are we going?” Marisol asks. “Home will be under siege.”
True, Keller thinks.
He’s exhausted.
The adrenaline from his cathartic speech is draining, his brain is just tired and he doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. Will I be arrested? he wonders. Tossed in jail? If so, will I ever get out?
“I’d like to go for a walk,” he says. “Clear my head.”
Marisol looks at him quizzically. “Where do you want to go?”
“The Wall,” Keller says. He wants to say goodbye to some old friends, maybe say goodbye to his first war, while he has the chance. “Do you want to come with me?”
“People will see us.”
“It will take them a little while to catch up,” Keller says.
“Okay,” Marisol says. “Let’s do it.”
Keller tells the driver to drop them on Independence Avenue, between the Tidal Basin and the World War II memorial.
Rollins stays several cars behind them.
“Where is he going?” Mercado asks.
The shooter is nervous, Rollins thinks, watching his foot tap on the car floor. A few nerves are good, too many of them not so much.
They follow Keller’s car down Independence.
The car stops.
Rollins watches Keller help his wife out of the car.
“I know where he’s going,” Rollins says.
The Wall.
Mercado gets out of the car.
A beautiful spring day, the kind that brings thousands of tourists to see the cherry blossoms along the Tidal Basin, the kind of day that makes residents happy that they live in DC.
Keller and Marisol walk along the periphery of the World War II memorial, not wanting to get too close and intrude on the dozens of private moments, remembrances and mourning as groups of veterans escorted by local volunteer guides move along the stones inscribed with the names of battles and campaigns. He remembers they call this program “honor flights,” flying in veterans from all over the country to come to the memorial. They’re old and white-haired, stooped, some leaning on canes, not a few in wheelchairs, and Keller wonders what they must be thinking as they look at the names of their old battles.
A “good” war, Keller thinks, good against evil, black versus white.
They saved the world from fascist tyranny, and we . . . well, we were told, we were sold, the mythology that we were saving the world from communism.
They turn onto a walkway that edges Constitution Gardens Pond. The irony isn’t lost on him—one thing all the media seem to agree on is that he’s triggered a constitutional crisis.
Mari says, “I’m proud of you.”
“Yeah.”
“Te amo, Arturo.”
“Te amo también, Mari.”
They walk around the western edge of the pond, past a small gazebo and a walkway that leads to a restroom, then follow the path to the Vietnam Memorial.
“Target acquired,” Mercado says into a neck mike.
“Take position.”
One of the work cars is parked along Constitution Avenue. Rollins circles the area, now on Henry Bacon Drive, which runs northeast from the Lincoln Memorial. Mercado moves through the trees and sets up behind the restroom building that overlooks the Wall.
> The Wall sits low in the park, hidden like a guilty secret, a private shame.
Keller looks at the names inscribed in the stone. Vietnam was a long time ago, another lifetime, and he’s fought his own long war since then. Here and there, mourners have left flowers, or cigarettes, even small bottles of booze.
No battles are inscribed on the Vietnam Wall. No Khe Sanhs or Quẚng Trịs or Hamburger Hills. Maybe because we won every battle but lost the war, Keller thinks. All these deaths for a futile war. On previous trips, he’s seen men lean against the Wall and sob like children.
The sense of loss heartbreaking and overwhelming.
There are maybe forty people here today. Some of them look like they might be vets, others families; most are probably tourists. Two older men in VFW uniforms and caps are there to help people locate their loved ones’ names.
It’s a warm spring day, a little breezy, and cherry blossoms float in the air. Sensing his emotion, Marisol takes Keller’s hand.
He sees the little boy and the glint of the scope in the same moment.
The child, holding his mother’s hand, gazes at the names etched into the black stone, and Keller wonders if he’s looking for someone—a grandfather maybe, or an uncle—or if his mother just brought her son to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as the end of a walk down the National Mall.
Now Keller sees the boy and then—to the right, back toward the Washington Monument—the odd, random glint of light.
Mercado sights in on Keller, moving closer to him now. Puts the crosshairs on his head and says, “Joy.”
Hears the command, “Go.”
He squeezes the trigger.
Lunging for the mother and the child, Keller shoves them to the ground.
Then he turns to shield Mari.
The bullet spins Keller like a top.
Creases his skull and whips his neck around.
Blood pours into his eyes and he literally sees red as he reaches out and pulls Marisol down.
Her cane clatters on the walkway.
Keller covers her body with his.
More bullets smack into the Wall above him.
He hears shouts and screams. Someone yells, “Active shooter!”