by Don Winslow
The pilot breathes a sigh of relief as he sees a man trot over.
Then the man sticks a gun in his face.
“Surprise, asshole,” Russ Dantzler says. “You have the right to remain silent . . .”
Silent?
The guy is motherfucking speechless.
Shag isn’t. He’s in the car with Art, doing a cowboy Bundini Brown. “You are the greatest, boss! You have the arms of an orangutan! You are King Kong! You reach into the sky and pull down airplanes!”
Art laughs. Then he sees Dantzler walk over to the car. The San Diego narc is shaking his head, and even in the faint light looks pale.
Shaken.
“Art,” Dantzler begins. “The guy . . . the pilot . . . he says . . .”
“What?”
“That he’s working for us.”
Art opens the door to where they have the pilot sitting in the back.
Phil Hansen should be a very nervous guy, but he isn’t. He’s leaning back as if he’s waiting out a traffic ticket that’s going to get fixed anyway. Art would like to slap the smirk off his face.
“Long time no see, Keller,” he says casually, like this is all one big joke.
“What the hell is this about you working for us?”
Hansen looks at him serenely. “Cerberus.”
“What?”
“C'mon. Cerberus? Ilopongo? Hangar Four?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
The smile fades from Hansen’s face. Now he looks alarmed.
“You thought what, you got a pass?” Art asks. “You fly a couple hundred Ks of coke into the United States and you think you get a pass? What makes you think that, asshole?”
“They said you were—”
“They said I was what?”
“Nothing.”
Hansen turns his head and looks out the window.
Art says, “If you have a Get Out of Jail Free card, now is the time to lay it down. Give me a name, Phil. Who do I call?”
“You know who to call.”
“No, I don’t. Tell me.”
“I’m done here.”
He stares out the window.
“Someone fucked you, Phil,” Art says. “I don’t know who told you what, but if you think we’re playing for the same team you’re mistaken. We got you carrying thirty-to-life weight, Phil. You’re going to do fifteen, minimum. But it’s not too late to get on the right side of this. Cooperate with me and if it works out, I’ll see that you get a deal.”
When Hansen turns back to him there are tears in his eyes. He says, “I have a wife and kids in Honduras.”
Ramón Mette, Art thinks. The guy is scared shitless that Mette will retaliate against his family. Tough shit—you should have thought of that before you started flying coke around. “You want to see them before they have kids of their own? Talk to me.”
Art’s seen the look before—he calls it the Skell Scale, the guilty guy weighing his options, realizing to his horror that there is no good option, just a less bad one. He waits for Hansen to work it out.
Hansen shakes his head.
Art slams the car door and walks out into the desert for a minute. He could bust the plane now, but what good would it do? It would prove that SETCO is flying drugs, but he already knows that. And it wouldn’t tell him what’s going back as cargo on the return trip, and to whom.
No, it’s time to take another big chance.
He walks back over to Dantzler. “Let’s play this one different. Let the plane go through.”
“What?!”
“Then we can track it three ways,” Art says. “See where the coke goes, see where the money goes, see what’s on the plane going back.”
Dantzler gets on board with it. What the hell is he going to do? It’s Art fucking Keller asking.
Art nods and gets back into the car.
“Just testing,” he tells Hansen. “You passed. Get going.”
Art watches the plane take off again.
Then he gets on the radio to tell Ernie to expect the return SETCO flight, to photograph it and let it go.
But Ernie doesn’t answer.
Ernie Hidalgo has gone off the radar.
Chapter Five
Narcosantos
There are two things the American people don’t want: another Cuba on the mainland of Central America, and another Vietnam.
—Ronald Reagan
Mexico, January 1985
Six hours after Ernie goes off the screen, Art storms into Colonel Vega’s office.
“One of my men is missing,” he says. “I want this city turned upside down and inside out. I want you to arrest Miguel Ángel Barrera, and I don’t want to hear any of your shit—”
“Señor Keller—”
“—your shit about not knowing where he is, and anyways, he’s innocent. I want you to pick up all of them—Barrera, his nephews, Abrego, Méndez, every goddamn one of the drug-pushing cocksuckers—and I—”
“You don’t know that he’s been kidnapped,” Vega says. “He might be having an affair, he might be drunk somewhere. You certainly don’t know that Barrera has anything to do with—”
Art comes across the man’s desk, right in the colonel’s face.
“If I have to,” Art says, “I’ll start a fucking war.”
He means it. He’ll call in every favor, threaten to go to the press, go there, threaten to go to certain congressmen, go to them—he’ll bring a division of Marines down from Camp Pendleton and start a real goddamn shooting war if that’s what it takes to rescue Ernie Hidalgo.
If—please, God, please, Jesus and Mary, the mother of God—Ernie’s still alive.
A second later he adds, “Now, why are you still sitting there?”
They hit the streets.
All of a sudden, like magic, Vega knows where the gomeros are. It’s a miracle, Art thinks. Vega knows where every low- and middle-level narcotraficante in the city lives, hangs out or does business. They roust them all—Vega’s federales bust through the city like the Gestapo, only they don’t find Miguel Ángel, or Adán or Raúl, or Méndez, or Abrego. It’s the same old dye test, Art thinks, the same old search-and-avoid mission. They know where these guys were, they just can’t seem to find where they are.
Vega even leads a raid on Barrera’s condominium, the address of which he suddenly acknowledges, but when they get there they find that Miguel Ángel is gone. They also find something else that makes Art go absolutely berserk.
A photograph of Ernie Hidalgo.
An ID photo taken in the Guadalajara MJFP office.
Art grabs it and waves it in Vega’s face.
“Look at this!” he yells. “Did your guys give him this picture?! Did your fucking guys do that?!”
“Certainly not.”
“My ass,” Art says.
He goes back to the office and calls Tim Taylor in Mexico City.
“I heard,” Taylor says.
“So what are you doing?”
“I’ve been at the ambassador’s office,” Taylor says. “He’s going to see the president personally. Did you get Teresa and the kids out?”
“She didn’t want to go, but—”
“Shit, Arthur.”
“But I had Shag take her to the airport,” Art says. “They should be in San Diego now.”
“What about Shag?”
“He’s working the streets.”
“I’m pulling you guys out.”
“The hell you are,” Art says.
There’s a brief silence, then Taylor asks, “What do you need, Art?”
“An honest cop,” Art says. He tells Taylor about the photo he found in Barrera’s condo, then says, “I don’t want any more of these MJFP assholes. Send me someone clean, someone with some weight.”
Antonio Ramos arrives in Guadalajara that afternoon.
Adán listens to the man scream.
And to the quiet voice patiently asking the same question over and over again.
&n
bsp; Who is Chupar? Who is Chupar? Who is Chupar?
Ernie tells them again that he doesn’t know. His interrogator doesn’t believe him and pushes the ice pick in again, scraping it against Ernie’s shinbone.
The question starts again.
You do know. Tell us who he is. Who is Source Chupar?
Ernie gives them names. Any names he can think of. Minor dealers, major dealers, federales, Jalisco State Police—any gomero or dirty cop, he doesn’t care. Anything to make them stop.
They don’t. They don’t buy a single name he gives them. The Doctor—the others actually call the man “Doctor”—just keeps it up with the ice pick, slowly, patiently, meticulously, unshaken by Ernie’s shouts. Unhurried.
Who is Chupar? Who is Chupar? Who is Chupar?
“I don’t knoooooowwww . . .”
The ice pick finds a new angle to a fresh piece of bone, and scrapes.
Güero Méndez comes out of the room, shaken.
“I don’t think he knows,” Güero says.
“He knows,” Raúl says. “He’s macho—a tough son of a bitch.”
Let’s hope he’s not too tough, Adán thinks. If he’ll just give us the name of the soplón we can let him go before all this gets too far out of hand. I know the Americans, Adán had told his uncle, better than you do. They can bomb, burn and poison other peoples, but let one of their own be harmed and they’ll react with self-righteous savagery.
Hours after the agent was reported missing, an army of DEA agents busted Adán’s safe house in Rancho Santa Fe.
It was the biggest drug bust in history.
Two thousand pounds of cocaine worth $37.5 million, two tons of sinsemilla worth another $5 million, plus another $27 million in cash, plus money-counting machines, scales and other miscellaneous office equipment of the drug trade. Not to mention fifteen illegal Mexican workers who were employed in weighing and packaging the coke.
But it cost far more than that, Adán thinks as he tries to shut out the moans of pain coming from the other room. It cost far more than that. Drugs and money you can always replace, but a child . . .
“A lymphatic malformation,” the doctors had called it. “Cystic lymphangioma.” They said it had nothing to do with the stress of their sudden flight from their home in San Diego, steps ahead of the DEA, nothing to do with the jostling of the high-speed run across the border into Tijuana, nothing to do with the flight to Guadalajara. The doctors said the condition develops in the early months of pregnancy, not late, and they don’t really know what causes it, only that somehow Adán and Lucía’s daughter’s lymph channels failed to develop properly and because of that her face and neck are deformed, distorted, and there is no treatment or cure. And while the lifespan is usually normal, there are risks of infection or stroke, sometimes difficulty with breathing . . .
Lucía blames him.
Not him directly, but their lifestyle, the business, the pista secreta. If they had been able to stay in the States, with the excellent prenatal care, if perhaps the baby had been born at Scripps Clinic as planned, if perhaps in those first moments when they saw that something was terribly wrong, if they’d had access to the best doctors in the world . . . perhaps, just perhaps . . . even though the doctors in Guadalajara assured her it wouldn’t have made any difference.
Lucía wanted to go back to the States to have the baby, but she wouldn’t go without him, and he couldn’t go. There was a warrant out for him and Tío forbade it.
But if I had known, he thinks now, if I’d had the slightest thought that anything might have been wrong with the baby, I would have taken the chance. And with it, the consequences.
Goddamn the Americans.
And goddamn Art Keller.
Adán had called Father Juan in those first few terrible hours. Lucía was in agony, they all were, and Father Juan had hurried to the hospital right away. Came and held the baby, baptized her on the spot just in case, and then held Lucía’s hand and talked with her, prayed with her, told her that she would be a wonderful mother to a special, wonderful child who would need her. Then, when Lucía finally yielded to the tranquilizers and fell asleep, Father Juan and Adán went out to the parking lot so the bishop could smoke a cigarette.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Father Juan said.
“That God is punishing me.”
“God doesn’t punish innocent children for the sins of their fathers,” Parada answered. The Bible, he thought, notwithstanding.
“Then explain this to me,” Adán said. “Is this the way God loves children?”
“Do you love your child, despite her condition?”
“Of course.”
“Then God loves through you.”
“That’s not a good enough answer.”
“It’s the only one I have.”
And it’s not good enough, Adán thought, and thinks it now. And this Hidalgo kidnapping is going to destroy us all, if it hasn’t already.
Grabbing Hidalgo had been the easy part. Christ, the police had done it for them. Three cops picked Hidalgo up in La Plaza de Armas and delivered him to Raúl and Güero, who drugged him, blindfolded him and brought him here to this house.
Where the Doctor had revived him and started his ministrations.
Which, so far, have produced no results.
He hears the Doctor’s soft, patient voice from inside the room.
“Tell me the names,” the Doctor says, “of the government officials who are on Miguel Ángel Barrera’s payroll.”
“I don’t have any names.”
“Did Chupar give you those names? You said that he did. Tell them to me.”
“I was lying. Making it up. I don’t know.”
“Then tell me the name of Chupar,” the Doctor says. “So we can ask him instead of you. So we can do this to him instead of you.”
“I don’t know who he is.”
Is it possible, Adán wonders, that the man really doesn’t know? He hears echoes of his own scared voice eight years ago during Operation Condor, when the DEA and the federales beat and tortured him for information that he didn’t have. Told him that they had to be sure that he didn’t know, so kept up the torture after he told them, again and again, I don’t know.
“Christ,” he says. “What if he doesn’t know?”
“What if he doesn’t?” Raúl shrúgs. “The fucking Americans need to be taught a lesson anyway.”
Adán hears the lesson being conducted in the other room. Hidalgo’s moans as the metal of the ice pick grinds against his shinbone. And the Doctor’s gently insistent voice: “You want to see your wife again. Your children. Surely you owe them more than you owe this informant. Think: Why have we blindfolded you? If we intended to kill you we wouldn’t have bothered. But we intend to let you go. Back to your family. To Teresa and Ernesto and Hugo. Think of them. How worried they are. How scared your little sons must be. How they want their papá back. You don’t want them to have to grow up without a father, do you? Who is Chupar? What did he tell you? Whose names did he give you?”
And Hidalgo’s response, punctuated by sobs.
“I . . . don’t . . . know . . . who . . . he . . . is.”
“Pues . . .”
It starts again.
Antonio Ramos grew up on the garbage dumps of Tijuana.
Literally.
He lived in a shack outside the dump and picked through garbage for his meals, clothes, even his shelter. When they built a school nearby, Ramos went, every day, and if some other kid teased him for smelling like garbage, Ramos beat the kid up. Ramos was a big kid—skinny from lack of food, but tall and with quick hands.
After a while, he wasn’t teased.
He made it all the way through high school, and when the Tijuana police accepted him, it was like going to heaven. Good pay, good food, clean clothes. He lost that skinny look and filled out, and his superiors found out something new about him. They knew he was tough; they didn’t know he was smart.
The DFS, Mexic
o’s intelligence service, found it out, too, and recruited him.
Now if there’s an important assignment that requires smart and tough, Ramos usually gets the call.