On a cloudless morning in mid-March, driving a Ford F-250 and costumed in a suede jacket and a black Stetson, he was buzzed through a barred steel gate with security cameras mounted on the posts. A short drive through scabrous mesquite flats brought him to another gate, an ornamental wooden one guarded on the outside by more security cameras and on the inside by men with assault rifles, two of whom hopped into the Ford and directed him to proceed. The road led uphill to a small, grassy mesa. After showing him where to park, the pistoleros escorted him on foot to the ranch house, white as a hospital, tucked into a spring-fed grove of oaks and cottonwoods and enclosed by a wall draped with bougainvillea. There, eating his breakfast on the patio, sat Rubén Levya. It was the first time the Professor had seen him in the flesh.
“Ah, Señor Carrington,” Levya said, rising to shake hands. “Welcome to Rancho Santo Niño.”
The two gunmen left. The Professor assumed there would be several more nearby, keeping him under observation and themselves out of sight.
“Please, have a seat,” Levya said. “Have you had breakfast?”
“I usually skip it.”
“Some coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
They had agreed to speak in English, in which Levya was fluent, to maintain the Professor’s cover.
“You will pardon me for eating in front of you?” Levya asked.
The Professor nodded. Nice manners.
Levya dug into a platter of sliced mango and banana and quartered oranges. His cholesterol was through the roof, he said, and a doctor had advised him to lay off chorizo and eggs and eat more fruit.
He was dressed narco-garishly—a gold chain vanishing into a bright blue shirt with dark blue stripes, yellow rings spiraling down their length; a beaded belt holding up dove-gray pants; green western boots, their toes as sharp as spear points. His underworld nickname, El Tigre Negro, had been conferred for his skills as a killer and for his dark walnut complexion. His hair, of a shade almost identical to his charcoal irises, made a straight line low across his forehead, giving him something of an Early Man appearance. He was anything but a primitive, however. According to his file in the Intelligence Division, he had a university degree and had taught high school French and English for a few years. The file did not explain how or why he’d gone from academia into his present line of work. There was the money, of course. On a teacher’s salary he could not have afforded one square meter of a ranch like this; but, the Professor guessed, there must have been more—the unexpected, and captivating, discovery of a secret self, a killer whose existence had been hidden until some event revealed it. That was what had happened to the Professor. Almost twenty years ago, when he was a young DEA agent, he had jumped the reservation to track down and eliminate three men who had tortured and murdered his partner. He was successful, and his economy and marksmanship had thrilled him: three men, three bullets.
“Let’s have a look at the horses I’m selling,” Levya said when he finished eating. His Mexican accent was barely noticeable.
They proceeded down a paved walkway bordered by flowers—the man had an aesthetic sense as developed as his ruthlessness—passed an exercise ring, in which a trainer was working a bay, and entered a cut-rock stable housing some twenty horses. The Professor drank in the good smells of horseflesh, manure, and hay, and had a fleeting thought about retiring to a life like this. He owned a couple of Arabians himself.
“Here they are,” Levya said, stopping at two stalls side by side at the far end, a sorrel in one, a roan in the other, their coats shiny as rubbed leather in the light slicing through the barred windows. A stable boy, mucking out a stall across from the two, greeted his boss—“Buen día, Don Rubén”—who told him to find something else to do.
“All right. Business,” said Levya after the boy was gone. He leaned a shoulder into a stall gate, crossed his ankles, and dug the sharp toe of a boot into the dirt.
“These are some fine-looking horses. What are you asking?”
“I’m asking what my dear Elvira told you.”
“That you’re getting … disenchanted with Salazar.”
“She said that? ‘Disenchanted’?”
“That’s my word.”
“What is the cause of this disenchantment?”
“First, Salazar gave you a warning because you’d moved some merca—heroin—on your own, without his okay. It pissed you off, getting scolded like a schoolboy. Second, and this is the big thing, you think he’s going off the deep end, and you don’t want to go with him.”
Levya said nothing, his dark face expressionless.
The Professor pressed on. Salazar had begun to think of himself as a messiah, divinely ordained to liberate Mexico from tyranny. According to Elvira, he was talking about transforming La Fraternidad into an insurgent army, financed by its drug profits. He wanted to start a revolution, in the name of the weird, gun-toting Christianity to which a Texas preacher named Showalter had converted him. Car bombs in front of government buildings, takeovers of TV and radio stations, kidnapping senators to exchange for Brotherhood prisoners …
Levya half-turned and stroked the sorrel’s cheeks. “She told you all that?”
“Except for the part about the Texas preacher. That comes from me.” The Professor tapped the gate with his finger to draw Levya’s attention away from the horse. “What she gave us fits in with Salazar’s latest video. He’s hinting that he’s going to go public with this revolution crap pretty soon. That’s why we tend to believe her.”
Levya snickered. “Know who shot that video? I did.”
That startled the Professor, but he made sure not to show it. “Are you saying you agree with that shit about a … what did he call it? A new crusade? Because your girlfriend says you don’t.”
“Yeah? What does she say?”
“That you told her Salazar was thinking some quote, unquote fucking crazy shit. And that you’re not the only one who thinks so. You’re not the only one in the organization who doesn’t want to be revolutionary. You want to make money. Don’t we all?”
“Love does a lot, money everything. Making it is like eating nachos. Once you start, you can’t stop until the bowl is empty. And then you order more.”
“Is Elvira a truth teller or what?” asked the Professor.
Levya’s eyebrows drew together, and he looked down at the thin trench he’d dug with the toe of his boot. He was pondering whether to open up, and how much.
“I told him to his face, ‘We’re narcos. We’re not the fucking Taliban,’” he said, raising his eyes to meet the Professor’s. “‘You start this revolution shit, we’ll have the U.S. Air Force and Navy SEALs down here like that.’” He snapped his fingers. “La Mariposa. Would you join a revolution led by a dude who calls himself ‘the Butterfly’? The fucking maricón.”
“Do you think he is, or has he just not found the right girl yet?”
“Ask me if I give two shits. An insurgency, a revolution. Oye, man, I’m a patriot and a businessman.”
“What about Enrique? Where does he stand on all this?”
“Mora kneels, kissing Salazar’s ass. If Salazar tells him to shit, he says, ‘In what color, jefe? For you I will shit a rainbow.’”
The Professor had heard enough to satisfy his curiosity: the too-good-to-be-true was true after all. “Don Rubén,” he said, flattering him with the honorific, “I think it’s time for you to do your patriotic duty and work with us to get rid of Salazar, and Mora into the bargain.”
“I’m more of a businessman than a patriot. What’s in it for me?”
“For starters, you get to avoid going to war with Ernesto. A war you could lose.”
Levya puckered his lips and narrowed his eyes into slits. “Elvira told you I’m going to go to war with him?”
“No. But if I owned this horse”—the Professor motioned at the sorrel, nibbling from a hay bale—“I would bet it that you’ve thought about it.”
“‘For starters,’ you said. Wh
at comes after the starters?”
The trainer came in, leading the bay horse to its stall.
“Before you put that one up, saddle this one, the sorrel,” Levya said to him. Then, to the Professor in English: “You are shopping for a horse. You want to see what he can do?”
When the gelding was saddled and bridled, they brought him out to the ring, about as big as a baseball infield and surrounded by steel rails. The Professor took off his jacket—the weather had grown warm—and perched on the top rail while Levya mounted up. He sat the horse well as they circled the enclosure at a walk, then an easy lope. Riding to the center, he slacked the reins and put the animal through its paces. Subtle leg cues were all the horse needed to veer sharply left or right, cutting an imaginary calf from its imaginary mother. A curtain of dust sparkled in the harsh sunlight. Far above, turkey vultures soared on the thermals. Levya halted the horse and glanced up at the dark-winged birds.
“They show up every spring, the black hawks with them,” he said, with seeming irrelevance. “See ’em, the hawks? Bet you can’t, because the hawks look just like the vultures from far away.”
The Professor squinted at the sky. “They’re called zone-tails. I didn’t know you were a naturalist, Don Rubén.”
Levya took another spin around the ring, then rode up to the rail, he and the Professor at eye level.
“A good one, this one,” he said, patting the sorrel’s neck. “He knows what you want him to do before you do. So … after the starters…?”
“We know you ordered the hit on two police officers on Christmas Eve. Nothing a cop hates more than a cop killer. After you’ve done some time in Mexico, the Americans will file an extradition request—you’ve been indicted there for murder. That guy you put on the floor in Phoenix a couple of years ago. Mexico grants the request to get you off its hands. You get life in a supermax. Solitary twenty-three hours a day. Join us and you get to avoid all that.”
Levya, leaning forward on the saddle horn, shrugged off the threat. “You’ve told me two things I won’t get. I need to hear what I will.”
This response did not come as a surprise; the Professor regretted hearing it nonetheless. He and Comandante Pérez had discussed what inducements they might offer. They’d agreed that one should be presented only as a last resort. The negotiations had reached that point.
“You cooperate with us, Salazar and Mora go to jail, and the plaza is yours. That doesn’t come from me. From high up on the food chain. From the top. You get the plaza.”
“That’s more like it,” Levya said, deadpan. “Except for one thing. Everybody knows that if the Brotherhood is taken down, the plaza is returned to Joaquín Carrasco.”
“He’s old, he’s the past, he’ll be taken care of,” the Professor stated with crisp finality. Yet it pained him to speak those words. In all his years of double-dealing and double-crossing, he had never double-crossed Joaquín. He might have snitched on a cocaine shipment once or twice to preserve his credentials with his former employers, the DEA, but a betrayal like this—never. “He’ll be persuaded that leaving the country is his best option.”
Levya had no visible reaction, beyond cocking his head to one side and half-closing an eye in a show of mild interest. “I don’t know much about you, Señor Whoever, but I do know one thing: if there was such a thing as a four-sided fence, you could stand on all four sides at once.”
Apt, thought the Professor. He laughed sardonically. “Right now I’m on one side, and that’s the side I want you on.”
At a gesture from Levya, he hopped down from the rail—noticing that the movement wasn’t as nimble or sure as it would have been just a few years ago—and unlatched the gate. Levya rode through and dismounted.
“So here I am. Do you want me to kill him for you?”
“We want him alive. We want to parade him in front of the cameras.”
“Then what do you want from me?”
“Intelligence we can act on.”
Levya looked into the middle distance. He was silent for a long time, seemingly absorbed in thought.
“Maybe I have some. You’ll decide if you can act on it.”
* * *
The necessities of his double life had trained the Professor never to betray his emotions; indeed, he’d kept them under restraint for so long that they had atrophied from lack of use. Which was why, as he sped from Levya’s ranch, the rapping in his chest and the tingling of his scalp were unfamiliar sensations. He covered the two hundred kilometers to Hermosillo in under ninety minutes. After checking in with Comandante Pérez, he sent an urgent e-mail to the Intelligence Division, requesting aerial photos of certain quadrants in the northeastern Sierra Madre. But the photos Intelligence had on file were years out of date, requiring them to ask their counterparts in the DEA for more recent satellite images. El Paso to Mexico City to Hermosillo—the photos’ journey to Pérez’s office, where the Professor downloaded them onto his computer, consumed more than forty-eight hours. The delay was not a total waste of time, however; inspired by Levya’s casual observation of hawks and turkey vultures, the Professor and Pérez used the time to rough out a plan of attack.
This was what the Professor had learned from El Tigre Negro and passed on to Valencia, when he returned to the military base at San Patricio: A fiesta in honor of Salazar’s—that is, Julián Menéndez’s—forty-fourth birthday was to be held at his Santa Bárbara ranch, which was also his comandacia. It was to be an exclusive affair, the guests limited to Levya, Enrique Mora, and the Brotherhood’s top lieutenants, together with their guests. Twenty-five to thirty people altogether. The Brotherhood’s entire leadership gathered in one place—it could be decapitated in a single operation. Thus had Levya made the too-good-to-be-true even better, without making it any less true. The Professor trusted he’d spoken truth. Experience had taught him to place his trust in a man motivated by greed.
Alberto Valencia’s incorruptibility, a virtue almost as extinct in Mexico as the imperial woodpecker, was cemented to his fault: inflexibility. Whether he was incorruptible because he was inflexible or the other way around, the Professor couldn’t say; but he was sure that the rigidity in the man’s nature produced his single-mindedness and blinkered vision.
That was the only way to explain the captain’s reaction to the Professor’s report. His first comment was: Why didn’t you interrogate Levya about the ambush and the video of the faked executions? The orders must have originated with him, the Brotherhood’s sicario in chief. Because, the Professor remarked, that incident no longer mattered. Valencia jerked his head, as if slipping a punch. No longer mattered? He stomped around his headquarters, the smoke from his cigarette drawing curlicues in the air as he waved a hand. No longer mattered? Well, what could he expect? The deaths of four soldiers would not matter to a cop who had recruited the man responsible for the deaths of his brother officers. Let him off in trade for nothing more than a promise to cooperate. A promise Levya probably would not keep!
Nada mejor que un ladrón para atrapar a otro ladrón, said the Professor. It takes a thief to catch a thief. Quien con perros se echa, con pulgas se levanta, countered the captain. If you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas. The Professor had lain down with so many dogs he’d become one, which brought another proverb to mind: No todas las verdades son para dichas. There are truths best kept to oneself. He’d omitted mention of the promise made to Levya; the arrangement was too far outside the flea-free chamber of Valencia’s incorruptibility. Much too far.
“You do see the chance we’ve got here?” he asked, genuinely curious. If the captain did not, then he suffered from more than poor vision; he was an idiot.
“Of course I do. I don’t like what it may cost—that bastard of a butcher walking around free.”
He’ll be doing more than that, the Professor thought. “A bargain, I’d say.”
“We’ll find out how great a bargain you struck.” Valencia dropped into a chair, facing a TV screen wired to the Pr
ofessor’s computer. “Let’s see what you’ve got,” he said.
To preserve security, the clerks and the company sergeant had been dismissed. The Professor pulled down a window shade, shutting out the hard March sunlight, and began his slide show, projecting from the computer to the TV a topographic map showing the Santa Bárbara location, on a high mesa in the Sierra Madre, near the Chihuahuan border. Ten satellite photos of the ranch followed: wide shots, tight shots of the ranch house, a couple of guesthouses, stables, and an airstrip, roughly half a kilometer from the buildings. It was a thousand meters long, the main delivery point for the cartel’s shipments of Colombian cocaine. Except for burro paths that even burros would find objectionable, the only way onto the ranch was by plane. Everything for the fiesta—the food, the beer, the musicians—was going to be flown in; likewise, the guests. Levya had already chartered a Cessna for himself and a few bodyguards.
“And, of course, Salazar has more than a few around this rancho,” said Valencia, looking fixedly at the screen.
“But not many more,” the Professor said, pleased to have focused the captain’s attention on the objective. “He relies on the geography. And on the locals to warn him if anyone’s coming.” A click brought up a photo of a cell-phone tower on a hilltop overlooking the landing field. “So they can stay in touch with him. Levya told me he had the thing flown in in pieces and reassembled. He piggybacks off a network.”
“So our problem is, how do we crash his birthday party.”
The Professor nodded. Because the military was in charge of Joint Operation Falcon, he said nothing about the plan he and Pérez had devised to solve this problem. He would nudge Valencia into thinking it was his own idea.
“Let me see that topographic map again,” the captain said. When it reappeared, he studied it for half a minute. “So, absolutely no way in there by land.”
“Except for the burro trails.”
“It would take at least a day to move our people in on foot. Salazar’s lookouts would know we were coming,” Valencia said. “And helicopters … too noisy…”
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