by Don Winslow
Then she dresses and goes shopping in La Jolla Village. All the trendy shops are within walking distance, and she has a handful of bags before she hits her favorite boutique, where she selects three dresses and takes them into the changing room.
A few minutes later she comes out with two of the dresses, lays them on the counter and says, “I’ll take these. I’ve left the red one in the dressing room.”
“I’ll hang it up,” the owner says.
Nora thanks her, smiles and walks back out into the gorgeously sunny La Jolla afternoon. She decides on French cuisine for lunch and has no trouble getting a table at the Brasserie. She kills the rest of the afternoon with a movie and a long nap. She gets up, orders some consommé for dinner, then puts on one of her new black dresses and does her hair and makeup.
Art Keller parks three blocks away from the White House and walks the rest of the way.
He’s lonely. He has his work and little else.
Cassie is eighteen now, soon to graduate from Parkman; Michael is sixteen, a freshman at the Bishop’s School. Art goes to Cassie’s volleyball matches and Michael’s swim meets, and he takes the kids out afterward if they don’t already have plans with their friends. They have awkward once-a-month weekends at his downtown condo—he makes extravagant efforts to entertain them, but they mostly just hang around the complex pool with the other “visitation daddies” and their kids. And his own kids increasingly resent the mandated visits, which interfere with their own social lives.
Art understands and usually lets them cancel with a fake-cheery “Next time.”
He doesn’t date. He’s had a few short-term relationships with a couple of divorced women—convenience fucks scheduled between the demands of busy careers and the single parenthood of teenage kids—but they were more sad than satisfying, and pretty soon he quit trying.
So most nights he keeps company with the dead.
They’re never too busy and there’s no lack of them. Ernie Hidalgo, Pilar Talavera and her two kids. Juan Parada. All collateral casualties in Art’s private war with the Barreras. They visit him at night, they chat with him, they ask him if it was worth it.
At least for now, the answer is no.
Art’s losing the war.
The Barrera cartel now makes a profit of approximately $8 million a week. Fully one half of the cocaine and a third of the heroin that hits American streets comes through the Baja cartel. Virtually all the methamphetamine west of the Mississippi originates with Barrera.
Adán’s power is unchallenged in Mexico. He’s put his uncle’s Federación together again, and he is the undisputed patrón. None of the other cartels can touch his influence. Furthermore, Barrera has established his own cocaine supply in Colombia. He’s independent of Cali or Medellín. The Barrera drug operation is self-sustaining from the coca plant to the corner, from the poppy flower to the shooting gallery, from the sinsemilla seed to the brick that hits the streets, from the base ephedrine to the rock of crystal meth.
The Baja cartel is a vertically integrated polydrug operation.
And none of the above takes into account his “legitimate” businesses. Barrera money is heavily invested in the maquiladoras along the border, in real estate throughout Mexico—especially in the resort towns of Puerto Vallarta and Cabo San Lucas—and the southwest United States and in banking, including several banks and credit unions in the States. The cartel’s financial mechanisms are fully enmeshed with those of Mexico’s wealthiest and most powerful business concerns.
Now Art reaches the front door of the White House and rings the bell.
Haley Saxon comes into the foyer to meet him.
Smiles professionally and hands him the key to a room upstairs.
Nora’s sitting on the bed.
She looks stunning in her black dress.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
The red dress was her signal that she had to see him personally. For over two years now, she’s been leaving him messages in “dead drops” all over the city.
It was Nora who gave him the details of the Orejuela brothers’ meeting with Adán, the info that allowed the DEA to arrest them as they flew back to Colombia.
Nora who has given him a rundown on the new organization of the Federación.
Nora who has provided him with hundreds of pieces of intelligence, from which he’s been able to glean a thousand more. Thanks mostly to her, he has an organizational chart of the Barrera organization in Baja and in California. Delivery routes, safe houses, couriers. When drugs were coming in, money going out, who killed whom and why.
She’s risked her life to bring him this information on her “shopping trips” to San Diego and Los Angeles, on her visits to spas, on any trip that she takes outside of Mexico and without Adán.
The method they use is surprisingly simple. The fact is that the drug cartels have a bigger budget and therefore better technology than Art does, and they don’t have the constitutional restrictions. So the only way to beat the Barreras’ superiority in high-tech is to go low-tech: Nora simply sits in her hotel room, writes down her information and mails it to Art at a post office box that he established under a false name.
No cell phones.
No Internet.
Just the good ol’ U.S. Mail.
Unless there was an emergency; then she would leave the red dress in the changing room. The boutique owner was looking at a possession rap that could have sent her to prison for five years. Instead, she agreed to do this favor for The Border Lord.
“I’m fine,” Nora says.
But she’s angry.
No, angry doesn’t describe it, she thinks as she looks at Art Keller. You said that with my help you would take Adán down quickly, but it’s been two and a half years. Two and a half years of pretending to love Adán Barrera, of taking a man I loathe inside me, feeling him in my mouth, my pussy, my ass, and pretending to love it. Pretending to love this monster who killed the man I really loved, and then guiding him, molding him, helping him to get the power to commit more of his filth. You don’t know what it’s like—how could you?—to wake up in the morning with that beside you, to crawl between his legs, to open yours, to scream your phony orgasms, to smile and laugh and share talk and meals, all the time living a nightmare, waiting for you to act.
And so far, what have you done?
Besides the Orejuela arrest, nothing.
He’s been sitting on this information for two and a half years, waiting for the right moment to act.
Now Art says, “This is too risky.”
“I can trust Haley,” she says. “I want you to take some action. Now.”
“Adán’s still untouchable. I don’t want to—”
She tells him about Adán’s deal with FARC and the Chinese.
Art looks at her with awe. He knew she was smart—he’s been tracking her as she’s helped to steer Adán through the shoals—but he didn’t know that she was this perceptive. She’s thought it through.
Damn right I have, Nora thinks. She’s been reading men all her life. She sees the change come over his face, his eyes are lit with excitement. Every man has his own turn-on. She’s seen them all, and now she sees Keller's.
Revenge.
Same as mine.
Because Adán has made a serious mistake. He’s doing the one thing that could bring him down.
And we both know it.
“Who else knows about the arms shipment?” he asks.
“Adán, Raúl and Fabián Martínez,” she says. “And me. Now you.”
Art shakes his head. “If I act on this, they’ll know it was you. You can’t go back.”
“I’m going back,” Nora says. “We know San Pedro and GOSCO. But we don’t know which ship, which pier—”
And even if you can get that information, Art thinks, making the bust is the same as killing you.
When he’s about to leave she asks, “Do you want to fuck me, Art? For the sake of realism, of course.”
His lon
eliness is palpable, she thinks.
So easy to touch.
She opens her legs ever so slightly.
He hesitates.
It’s a small measure of revenge for leaving her “asleep” for so long, but it feels good and she says, “I was joking, Art.”
He gets it.
Payback.
He knows that leaving an undercover in place for as long as he has is unconscionable. Six months is a long time, a year is the max. They just can’t last that long—their nerves unravel, they get burned, the information they provide gets tracked back to them, the clock just runs out.
And Nora Hayden isn’t a professional. Strictly speaking, she isn’t even an undercover, but a confidential informant. It doesn’t matter—she’s been under deep cover, and she’s been under for too long.
But I couldn’t have used any of the information she gave me in Mexico, because Barrera is under Mexican protection. And I couldn’t have used any of her intelligence inside the States, because it might have compromised her before we could take Adán down once and for all.
The frustration has been awful. Nora has given him enough intelligence to virtually destroy the Barrera organization in one overnight coup, and he hasn’t been able to use it. All he could do was wait and hope that The Lord of the Skies flew too close to the sun.
And now he has.
It’s time to pull the trigger on him. And time to get Nora out.
I could just arrest her now, he thinks. God knows there are enough pretexts. Arrest her, compromise her and then she could never go back. Get her a new identity and a new life.
But he doesn’t.
Because he still needs her close to Adán, for just a little while longer. He knows he’s stretching her string to the breaking point, but he lets her walk out of the room.
“I need proof,” John Hobbs says.
Solid, tangible evidence to show the Mexican government before he can even think about prodding them to launch an offensive against Adán Barrera.
“I have a source,” Art says.
Hobbs nods—yes, go on.
Art answers, “I can’t reveal it.”
Hobbs smiles. “Aren’t you the same man who rather famously created a source that didn’t actually exist?”
And now Keller, with his well-known Barrera obsession, comes forward with a story about Adán Barrera making a deal with FARC to import Chinese arms in exchange for cocaine? Something that would get the CIA solidly on board in his war against the Barreras? It’s a bit too convenient.
Art gets that. I’m the Boy Who Cried Wolf.
“What kind of proof?” he asks.
“The arms shipment would do nicely, for example.”
But that’s the dilemma, Art thinks. Busting the arms shipment would expose exactly what I’m trying to protect. If I could get Hobbs to pressure Mexico City into launching a preemptive strike against Barrera now, there’d be no need to put Nora in jeopardy. But to get them to launch the strike, I have to produce the arms shipment, and the only person who can get me that is Nora.
But if she does it, she’s probably dead.
“Come on, John,” he says, “you could mask this from the Chinese side. Intercepts of maritime radio signals, Internet traffic, satellite intelligence—just say you have a source in Beijing.”
“You want me to compromise valuable sources in Asia to protect some drug dealer that you flipped? Please.”
But he is tempted.
The Zapatistas in Chiapas are more active than ever, their ranks reportedly swelled by recent refugees from neighboring Guatemala, so the potential exists there for a Communist insurgency that could spread regionally.
And a new left-wing insurgent group, the EPR, the Ejército Popular Revolucionario, the Popular Revolutionary Army, emerged back in June at a memorial service for peasants in Guerrero killed by right-wing militias. Then, just weeks ago, EPR launched simultaneous attacks against police posts in Guerrero, Tabasco, Puebla and Mexico itself, killing sixteen police officers and wounding another twenty-three. The Vietcong started smaller than that, Hobbs thinks. He offered his Mexican intelligence counterparts assistance against the EPR, but the Mexicans, ever sensitive about Yanqui neo-imperialist interference, declined.
Stupidly, Hobbs thinks, because it takes only a quick glimpse at the map to see that the Communist insurgency is spreading north from Chiapas, fueled by the economic devastation of the Peso Crisis and the dislocations caused by NAFTA implementation.
Mexico is teetering on the brink of revolution, and everyone but the ostriches in State know it. Even Defense acknowledges the possibility—Hobbs has just finished reading the top-secret contingency plans for a U.S. invasion of Mexico in the event of a total social and economic breakdown. God, one Castro in Cuba is enough—can you imagine a Comandante Zero ruling from Los Pinos? A Marxist government sharing a two-thousand-mile border with the United States? And every state along that border soon to have a Hispanic majority? But God, wouldn’t the Mexicans hemorrhage cats if they ever got wind of that report?
No, the Mexicans can accept American military aide only through the veil of the War on Drugs. Not unlike the American Congress, Hobbs thinks. The Vietnam Syndrome prevents Congress from authorizing a penny to wage covert wars against Communists, but they’ll always open the vault to fight the drug war. So you don’t go to Capitol Hill to tell them you’re helping your allies and neighbors defend themselves against Marxist guerrillas; no, you send your supporters in the DEA to ask for money to keep drugs out of the hands of America’s young people.
So Congress would never authorize, nor would the Mexicans openly accept, the offer of seventy-five Huey helicopters and a dozen C-26 airplanes to fight the Zapatistas and EPR, but Congress has funded the same package to help the Mexicans suppress the drug traffickers, and the equipment will be quietly transferred to the Mexican army for use in Chiapas and Guerrero.
And now you have the patrón of the Federación providing weapons to Communist insurgents in Colombia? That would get the Mexicans solidly on board.
Art plays his last card. “So you’re just going to let a shipment of arms go through to Communist insurgents in Colombia? Not to mention the increase of Chinese influence in Panama?”
“No,” Hobbs says calmly. “You are.”
“Screw you, John,” Art says. “If this goes down, the CIA gets nothing. I don’t share intel, assets, credit, nothing.”
“Give me the source, Arthur.”
Art stares at him.
“Then get me the guns,” Hobbs says.
But I can’t, Art thinks. Not until Nora tells me where they are.
Mexico
There’s a meeting going on at Rancho las Bardas, too.
Between Adán, Raúl and Fabián.
And Nora.
Adán insisted that she be included. The fact is that they wouldn’t have the deal in place without her.
It doesn’t sit well with Raúl.
“Since when do our baturras know our business?” he asks Fabián. “She should stay in the bedroom, where she belongs. Let her open her legs, not her mouth.”
Fabián chuckles. He’d like to open La Güera’s legs, and her mouth. She’s the most delectable piece of chocho he’s ever seen. You’re wasting yourself with a wimp like Adán, he thinks. Come to me, tragona, I’ll make you scream.
Nora sees the look on his face and thinks, Try it, asshole. Adán would have you skinned alive and roasted over a slow fire. And I’d bring the marshmallows.
The Chinese want cash on delivery, and will accept no other form of payment, not a wire transfer or a series of laundered payments through shell companies. They insist that the payment be absolutely untraceable, and the only way to do that is a hand-to-hand cash transferral.
And they want Nora to make it.
It’s a guarantee for them, Adán sending his beloved mistress.
“Absolutely not,” Adán and Raúl say simultaneously, albeit for completely different reasons.
> “You first,” Nora says to Raúl.
“You and Adán haven’t exactly kept your relationship under wraps,” Raúl says. “The DEA probably has more photographs of you than they do of me. If you are arrested, you have a lot of information inside that pretty head, and motivation to give it up.”
“What would they arrest me for, sleeping with your brother?” Nora asks. She turns to Adán. “Your turn.”