Prologue

The Petén District, Guatemala
November 1, 2012

KELLER THINKS HE hears a baby cry.

The sound is just audible over the muted rotors as the helicopter comes in low toward the jungle village.

The cry, if that is what he’s hearing, is shrill and sharp, a call of hunger, fear, or pain.

Perhaps loneliness—it is that loneliest time of the night, the predawn darkness when the worst dreams come, the sunrise seems far off, and the creatures that inhabit both the real world and the darker edges of the unconscious prowl with the impunity of predators who know that their prey is helpless and alone.

The cry lasts only moments. Maybe the mother came in, picked up the child, and cradled it in her arms. Maybe it was Keller’s imagination. But it’s a reminder that there are civilians down there—women and children mostly, a few old men and women—who will soon be in harm’s way.

The men in the chopper check the loads on their M-4 rifles to make sure the clips are solidly fixed and another one firmly duct-taped to the handle. Underneath the combat helmets and night-vision goggles and “bone-phones,” their faces are blackened. Below the ceramic-plate protective vests they wear camouflaged cargo pants with big pockets that hold tubes of energy gel, laminated satellite photos of the village, compression pads if things go bad and they have to stanch the bleeding.

An assassination mission on foreign soil—things could go bad.

The men are in another world, that pre-mission tunnel vision that natural fighters go into like a trance. The twenty-man team—split up in two MH-60 Black Hawks—are mostly former SEALs, Delta Force, Green Berets—the elite. They’ve done this before—in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia.

Technically, they’re all private contractors. But the shell company, a security firm out of Virginia, is a thin screen that the media will rip right through if this goes sick and wrong.

In a few moments the men will lower themselves down fast ropes into the village near their target. Even with the element of surprise, there’ll be a firefight. The narco gunmen are protecting their boss and for him they’ll give up their lives. And the sicarios are well armed with AK-47s, rocket launchers, and grenades, and know how to use them. These sicarios aren’t just thugs, but special forces veterans themselves—trained at Fort Benning and elsewhere. It’s possible that some of the men in the chopper trained some of the men on the ground.

People will be killed.

Appropriate, Keller thinks.

It’s the Day of the Dead.

Now the men hear another sound—the pop of small-arms fire. Looking down, they see muzzle flashes cut through the darkness. A firefight has broken out in the village prematurely—they hear shouted orders and small explosions.

It’s bad—this wasn’t supposed to happen. The mission is compromised, the element of surprise gone, the chance of completing the job without taking casualties probably gone with it.

Then a red streak comes up out of the night.

A loud bang, a flash of yellow light, and the helicopter jolts sideways like a toy that’s been hit by a bat.

Shrapnel sprays, exposed wires spark, the ship is on fire.

Red flame and thick black smoke fill the cabin.

The stench of scorched metal and burned flesh.

One man’s carotid artery spurts in rhythm with his racing heartbeat. Another keels over, shrapnel obscenely jutting from his crotch, just below his protective vest, and the team medic crawls across the deck to help.

Now the voices come from grown men—howls of pain, fear, and rage as tracers fly up and rounds smack the fuselage like a sudden rainstorm.

The chopper spins crazily as it falls toward the earth.

In memory of Sue Rubinsky,
who always wanted to learn the truth

 

Deliver my soul from the sword; my love from the power of the dog.

Psalms 22:20

Prologue

El Sauzal

State of Baja California

Mexico

1997

THE BABY IS dead in his mother’s arms.

Art Keller can tell from the way the bodies lie—her on top, the baby beneath her—that she tried to shield her child. She must have known, Art thinks, that her own soft body could not have stopped bullets—not from automatic rifles, not from that range—but the move must have been instinctive. A mother puts her own body between her child and harm. So she turned, twisted as the bullets hit her, then fell on top of her son.

Did she really think that she could save the child? Maybe she didn’t, Art thinks. Maybe she just didn’t want the baby to see death blaze out from the barrel of the gun. Maybe she wanted her child’s last sensation in this world to be that of her bosom. Enfolded in love.

Art is a Catholic. At forty-seven years of age, he’s seen a lot of madonnas. But nothing like this one.

“Cuernos de chivo,” he hears someone say.

Quietly, almost whispered, as if they were in church.

Cuernos de chivo.

Horns of the goat: AK-47s.

Art already knows that—hundreds of 7.62-mm shell casings lie on the patio’s concrete floor, along with some .12-gauge shotgun shells and some 5.56s, probably, Art thinks, from AR-15s. But most of the casings are from the cuernos de chivo, the favored weapon of the Mexican narcotraficantes.

Nineteen bodies.

Nineteen more casualties in the War on Drugs, Art thinks.

He’s used to looking at the bodies from his fourteen-year war with Adán Barrera—he’s looked at many. But not nineteen. Not women, children, babies. Not this.

Ten men, three women, six children.

Lined up against the patio wall and shot.

Blasted is more the word, Art thinks. Blasted to pieces in an incontinent rush of bullets. The amount of blood is unreal. A pool the size of a large car, an inch thick with black, dried blood. Blood splattered on the walls, blood splattered on the manicured lawn, where it glistens black-red on the tips of the grass. The blades of which look to him like tiny, bloody swords.

They must have put up a fight as they realized what was about to happen. Pulled from their beds in the middle of the night, dragged out to the patio, lined up against the wall—someone had finally offered a struggle, because furniture is tipped over. Heavy wrought-iron patio furniture. Glass shattered on the concrete.

Art looks down and sees … Christ, it’s a doll—its brown glass eyes staring up at him—lying in the blood. A doll, and a small cuddly animal, and a beautifully rendered pinto horse in plastic, all lying in blood by the execution wall.

Children, Art thinks, pulled out of sleep, grab their toys and hold on to them. Even as, especially as, the guns roar.

An irrational image comes to him: a stuffed elephant. A childhood toy he always slept with. It had one button eye. It was stained with vomit, with urine, with all the various childhood effluvia, and it smelled of all of them. His mother had sneaked it away in his sleep and replaced it with a new elephant with two eyes and a pristine aroma, and when Art woke up he thanked her for the new elephant and then found and retrieved the old one from the trash.

Arthur Keller hears his own heart break.

He switches his gaze to the adult victims.

Some are in pajamas—expensive silk pajamas and negligees—some in T-shirts. Two of them, a man and a woman, are naked—as if they had been grabbed from a postcoital sleeping embrace. What once had been love, Art thinks, is now naked obscenity.

One body lies alone along the opposite wall. An old man, the head of the family. Probably shot last, Art thinks. Forced to watch his family killed, and then dispatched himself. Mercifully? Art wonders. Was it some sort of sick mercy? But then he sees the old man’s hands. His fingernails have been ripped out, then the fingers chopped off. His mouth is still open in a frozen scream and Art can see the fingers sticking to his tongue.

Meaning that they thought someone in his family was a dedo, a finger—an informer.

Because I led them to believe that.

God forgive me.

He searches through the bodies until he finds the one he’s looking for.

When he does, his stomach lurches and he has to fight back the vomit in his throat because the young man’s face has been peeled like a banana; the strips of flesh hang obscenely from his neck. Art hopes that they did this after they shot him, but he knows better.

The bottom half of his skull has been blown off.

They shot him in the mouth.

Traitors get shot in the back of the head, informers in the mouth.

They thought it was him.

Which was exactly what you wanted them to think, Art tells himself. Face it—it worked just the way you planned.

But I never envisioned this, he thinks. I never thought they’d do this.

“There must have been servants,” Art says. “Workers.”

The police have already checked the workers’ quarters.

“Gone,” one of the cops says.

Disappeared. Vanished.

He forces himself to look at the bodies again.

It’s my fault, Art thinks.

I brought this on these people.

I’m sorry, Art thinks. I am so, so sorry. Bending over the mother and child, Art makes the sign of the cross and whispers, “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.”

“El poder del perro,” he hears one of the Mexican cops murmur.

The power of the dog.

Original Sins

Cerberus

NAFTA

The Road to Ensenada

The Crossing

1

The Men from Sinaloa

Seest thou yon dreary plain, forlorn and wild,

The seat of desolation, void of light,

Save what the glimmering of these livid flames

Casts pale and dreadful?

—John Milton, Paradise Lost

Badiraguato District

State of Sinaloa

Mexico

1975

THE POPPIES BURN.

Red blossoms, red flames.

Only in hell, Art Keller thinks, do flowers bloom fire.

Art sits on a ridge above the burning valley. Looking down is like peering into a steaming soup bowl—he can’t see clearly through the smoke, but what he can make out is a scene from hell.

Hieronymus Bosch does the War on Drugs.

Campesinos—Mexican peasant farmers—trot in front of the flames, clutching the few possessions they could grab before the soldiers put the torch to their village. Pushing their children in front of them, the campesinos carry sacks of food, family photographs bought at great price, some blankets, some clothes. Their white shirts and straw hats—stained yellow with sweat—make them ghost-like in the haze of smoke.

Except for the clothes, Art thinks, it could be Vietnam.

He’s half-surprised, glancing at the sleeve of his own shirt, to see blue denim instead of army green. Reminds himself that this isn’t Operation Phoenix but Operation Condor, and these aren’t the bamboo-thick mountains of I Corps, but the poppy-rich mountain valleys of Sinaloa.

And the crop isn’t rice, it’s opium.

Art hears the dull bass whop-whop-whop of helicopter rotors and looks up. Like a lot of guys who were in Vietnam, he finds the sound evocative. Yeah, but evocative of what? he asks himself, then decides that some memories are better left buried.

Choppers and fixed-wing planes circle overhead like vultures. The airplanes do the actual spraying; the choppers are there to help protect the planes from the sporadic AK-47 rounds fired by the remaining gomeros—opium growers—who still want to make a fight of it. Art knows too well that an accurate burst from an AK can bring down a chopper. Hit it in the tail rotor and it will spiral down like a broken toy at a kid’s birthday party. Hit the pilot, and, well … So far they’ve been lucky and no choppers have been hit. Either the gomeros are just bad shots, or they’re not used to firing on helicopters.

Technically, all the aircraft are Mexican—officially, Condor is a Mexican show, a joint operation between the Ninth Army Corps and the State of Sinaloa—but the planes were bought and paid for by the DEA and are flown by DEA contract pilots, most of them former CIA employees from the old Southeast Asia crew. Now there’s a tasty irony, Keller thinks—Air America boys who once flew heroin for Thai warlords now spray defoliants on Mexican opium.

The DEA wanted to use Agent Orange, but the Mexicans had balked at that. So instead they are using a new compound, 24-D, which the Mexicans feel comfortable with, mostly, Keller chuckles, because the gomeros were already using it to kill the weeds around the poppy fields.

So there was a ready supply.

Yeah, Art thinks, it’s a Mexican operation. We Americans are just down here as “advisers.”

Like Vietnam.

Just with different ball caps.

The American War on Drugs has opened a front in Mexico. Now ten thousand Mexican army troops are pushing through this valley near the town of Badiraguato, assisting squadrons of the Municipal Judicial Federal Police, better known as the federales, and a dozen or so DEA advisers like Art. Most of the soldiers are on foot; others are on horseback, like vaqueros driving cattle in front of them. Their orders are simple: Poison the poppy fields and burn the remnants, scatter the gomeros like dry leaves in a hurricane. Destroy the source of heroin here in the Sinaloan mountains of western Mexico.

The Sierra Occidental has the best combination of altitude, rainfall and soil acidity in the Western Hemisphere to grow Papaver somniferum, the poppy that produces the opium that is eventually converted to Mexican Mud, the cheap, brown, potent heroin that has been flooding the streets of American cities.

Operation Condor, Art thinks.

There hasn’t been an actual condor seen in Mexican skies in over sixty years, longer in the States. But every operation has to have a name or we don’t believe it’s real, so Condor it is.

Art’s done a little reading on the bird. It is (was) the largest bird of prey, although the term is a little misleading, as it preferred scavenging over hunting. A big condor, Art learned, could take out a small deer; but what it really liked was when something else killed the deer first so the bird could just swoop down and take it.

We prey on the dead.

Operation Condor.

Another Vietnam flashback.

Death from the Sky.

And here I am, crouched in the brush again, shivering in the damp mountain cold again, setting up ambushes.

Again.

Except the target now isn’t some VC cadre on his way back to his village, but old Don Pedro Áviles, the drug lord of Sinaloa, El Patrón himself. Don Pedro’s been running opium out of these mountains for half a century, even before Bugsy Siegel himself came here, with Virginia Hill in tow, to nail down a steady source of heroin for the West Coast Mafia.

Siegel made the deal with a young Don Pedro Áviles, who used that leverage to make himself patrón, the boss, a status he’s maintained to this day. But the old man’s power has been slipping a little lately as some young up-and-comers have started to challenge his authority. The law of nature, Art supposes—the young lions eventually take on the old. Art has been kept awake more than one night in his Culiacán hotel room by the sound of machine-gun fire in the streets, so common lately that the city has gained the nickname Little Chicago.

Well, after today, maybe they won’t have anything to fight about.

Arrest old Don Pedro and you put an end to it.

And make yourself a star, he thinks, feeling a little guilty.

Art is a true believer in the War on Drugs. Growing up in San Diego’s Barrio Logan, he saw firsthand what heroin does to a neighborhood, particularly a poor one. So this is supposed to be about getting drugs off the streets, he reminds himself, not advancing your career.

But the truth of it is that being the guy to bring down old Don Pedro Áviles would make your career.

Which, truth be told, could use a boost.

The DEA is a new organization, barely two years old. When Richard Nixon declared a War on Drugs, he needed soldiers to fight it. Most of the new recruits came from the old Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs; a lot of them came from various police departments around the country, but not a few of the early start-up draft into the DEA came from the Company.

Art was one of these Company Cowboys.

That’s what the police types call any of the guys who came in from the CIA. There’s a lot of resentment and mistrust of the covert types by the law enforcement types.

Shouldn’t be, Art thinks. It’s basically the same function—intelligence gathering. You find your assets, cultivate them, run them and act on the intelligence they give you. The big difference between his new work and his old work is that in the former you arrest your targets, and in the latter you just kill them.

Operation Phoenix, the programmed assassination of the Vietcong infrastructure.

Art hadn’t done too much of the actual “wet work.” His job back in Vietnam was to collect raw data and analyze it. Other guys, mostly Special Forces on loan to the Company, went out and acted on Art’s information.

They usually went out at night, Art recalls. Sometimes they’d be gone for days, then reappear back at the base in the small hours of the morning, cranked up on Dexedrine. Then they’d disappear into their hooches and sleep for days at a time, then go out and do it again.

Art had gone out with them only a few times, when his sources had produced info about a large group of cadres concentrated in the area. Then he’d accompany the Special Forces guys to set up a night ambush.

He hadn’t liked it much. Most of the time he was scared shitless, but he did his job, he pulled the trigger, he took his buddies’ backs, he got out alive with all his limbs attached and his mind intact. He saw a lot of shit he wishes he could forget.

I just have to live with the fact, Art thinks, that I wrote men’s names down on paper and, in the act of doing so, signed their death warrants. After that, it’s a matter of finding a way to live decently in an indecent world.

But that fucking war.

That goddamn motherfucking war.

Like a lot of people, he watched the last helicopters taking off from Saigon rooftops on television. Like a lot of vets, he went out and got good and stinking drunk that night, and when the offer came to move over to the new DEA, he jumped at it.

He talked it over with Althie first.

“Maybe this is a war worth fighting,” he told his wife. “Maybe this is a war we can actually win.”

And now, Art thinks as he sits and waits for Don Pedro to show up, we might be close to doing it.

His legs ache from sitting still but he doesn’t move. His stint in Vietnam taught him that. The Mexicans spaced in the brush around him are likewise disciplined—twenty special agents from the DFS, armed with Uzis, dressed in camouflage.

Tío Barrera is wearing a suit.

Even up here in the high brush, the governor’s special assistant is wearing his trademark black suit, white button-down shirt, skinny black tie. He looks comfortable and serene, the image of Latino male dignity.

He reminds you of one of those matinee idols from an old ’40s movie, Art thinks. Black hair slicked back, pencil mustache, thin, handsome face with cheekbones that look like they’re cut from granite.

Eyes as black as a moonless night.

Officially, Miguel Ángel Barrera is a cop, a Sinaloa state policeman, the bodyguard to the state governor, Manuel Sánchez Cerro. Unofficially, Barrera is a fixer, the governor’s point man. And seeing how Condor is technically a Sinaloa state operation, Barrera is the guy who’s really running the show.

And me, Art thinks. If I really want to be honest about it, Tío Barrera is running me.

The twelve weeks of DEA training weren’t that hard. The PT was a breeze—Art could easily run the three-mile course and play basketball, and the self-defense component was unsophisticated compared with Langley. The instructors just had them wrestle and box, and Art had finished third in the San Diego Golden Gloves as a kid.

He was a mediocre middleweight with good technique but slow hands. He found out the hard truth that you can’t learn speed. He was just good enough to get into the upper ranks, where he could really get beat up. But he showed he could take it, and that was his ticket as a mixed-race kid in the barrio. Mexican fight fans have more respect for what a fighter can take than for what he can dish out.

And Art could take it.

After he started boxing, the Mexican kids pretty much left him alone. Even the gangs backed off him.

In the DEA training sessions he made it a point to take it easy on his opponents in the ring, though. There was no point in beating someone up and making an enemy just to show off.

The law enforcement–procedure classes were tougher, but he got through them all right, and the drug training was pretty easy, questions like, Can you identify marijuana? Can you identify heroin? Art resisted the impulse to answer that he always could at home.

The other temptation he resisted was to finish first in his class. He could have, knew he could have, but decided to fly under the radar. The law enforcement guys already felt that the Company types were trespassing on their turf, so it was better to walk lightly.

So he took it a little easy in the physical training, kept quiet in class, punted a few questions on the tests. He did enough to do well, to pass, but not enough to shine. It was a little harder to be cool in the field training. Surveillance practice? Old hat. Hidden cameras, mikes, bugs? He could install them in his sleep. Clandestine meetings, dead drops, live drops, cultivating a source, interrogating a suspect, gathering intelligence, analyzing data? He could have taught the course.

He kept his mouth shut, graduated, and was declared a Special Agent of the DEA. They gave him a two-week vacation and sent him straight to Mexico.

Right to Culiacán.

The capital of the Western Hemisphere drug trade.

Opium’s market town.

The belly of the beast.

His new boss gave him a friendly greeting. Tim Taylor, the Culiacán RAC (Resident Agent in Charge) had already perused Art’s shield and seen through the transparent screen. He didn’t even look up from the file. Art was sitting across from his desk and the guy said, “Vietnam?”

“Yup.”

“‘Accelerated Pacification Program’ …”

“Yup.” Accelerated Pacification Program, aka Operation Phoenix. The old joke being that a lot of guys got peaceful in a hurry.

“CIA,” Taylor said, and it wasn’t a question, it was a statement.

Question or statement, Art didn’t answer it. He knew the book on Taylor—he was an old BNDD guy who’d lived through the low-budget bad days. Now that drugs were a fat priority, he didn’t intend to lose his hard-earned gains to a bunch of new kids on the block.

“You know what I don’t like about you Company Cowboys?” Taylor asked.

“No, what?”

“You aren’t cops,” Taylor said. “You’re killers.”

And fuck you, too, Art thought. But he kept his mouth shut. Kept it firmly clamped while Taylor launched into a lecture about how he didn’t want any cowboy shit from Art. How they’re a “team” here and Art better be a “team player” and “play by the rules.”

Art would have been happy to be a team player if they would have let him on the team. Not that Art cared one hell of a lot. You grow up in the barrio as the son of an Anglo father and a Mexican mother, you’re not on anybody’s team.

Art’s father was a San Diego businessman who seduced a Mexican girl while on vacation in Mazatlán. (Art often thought it was funny that he was conceived, albeit not born, in Sinaloa.) Art Senior decided to do the right thing and marry the girl—not too painful an option, as she was a raving beauty; Art gets his good looks from his mother’s side. His father brings her back to the States, only to decide that she’s like a lot of things you get in Mexico on vacation—she looked a lot better on a moonlit beach in Mazatlán than in the cold, Anglo light of the American day-to-day.

Art Senior dumped her when Art was about a year old. She didn’t want to throw away the one advantage her son had in life—U.S. citizenship—so she moved in with some distant relations in Barrio Logan. Art knew who his father was—sometimes he’d sit in the little park on Crosby Street and look at the tall glass buildings downtown and imagine going into one of them to see his father.

But he didn’t.

Art Senior sent checks—faithfully at first and then sporadically—and he’d get occasional bouts of paternal urges or guilt and show up to take Art to dinner or maybe a Padres game. But their father-son time was awkward and forced, and by the time Art was in junior high the visits had stopped altogether.

Ditto the money.

So it was no easy thing when the seventeen-year-old Art finally made the trip downtown, marched into one of those tall glass buildings, strode into his father’s office, laid his killer SAT scores and UCLA acceptance letter on his desk and said, “Don’t freak out. All I want from you is a check.”

He got it.

Once a year for four years.

He got the lesson, too: YOYO.

You’re On Your Own.

Which was a good lesson to learn because the DEA just chucked him into Culiacán, virtually on his own. “Just get the lay of the land” is what Taylor told him at the start of a cliché-fest that also included “Get your feet wet,” “Easy does it” and, honest to God, “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”

It should have included “And go fuck yourself,” because that was the thrust of it. Taylor and the cop types totally isolated him, kept info from him, wouldn’t introduce him to contacts, froze him out on meetings with the local Mexican cops, didn’t include him in the morning coffee-and-doughnut bullshit or the sundown beer sessions where the real information was passed.

He was fucked from jump street.

The local Mexicans weren’t going to talk to him because as a Yanqui in Culiacán he could only be one of two things—a drug dealer or a narc. He wasn’t a drug dealer because he wasn’t buying anything (Taylor wouldn’t free up any money; he didn’t want Art fucking up anything they already had going), so he had to be a narc.

The Culiacán police wouldn’t have anything to do with him because he was a Yanqui narc who should stay home and mind his own business, and besides, most of them were on Don Pedro Áviles’s payroll anyway. The Sinaloa state cops wouldn’t deal with him for the same reasons, with the additional rationale that if Keller’s own DEA wouldn’t work with him, why should they?

Not that the team was doing much better.

The DEA had been hammering on the Mexican government for two years, trying to get them to move against the gomeros. The agents brought evidence—photos, tapes, witnesses—only to have the federales promise to move right away and then not move, only to hear, “This is Mexico, señores. These things take time.”

While the evidence grew stale, the witnesses got scared and the federales rotated posts so that the Americans had to start all over again with a different federal cop, who told them to bring him solid evidence, bring him witnesses. Who, when they did, looked at them with perfect condescension and told them, “Señores, this is Mexico. These things take time.”

While the heroin flowed down from the hills into Culiacán like mud in a spring thaw, the young gomeros slugged it out with Don Pedro’s forces on a nightly basis until the city sounded to Art like Danang or Saigon, only with a lot more gunfire.

Night after night, Art would lie on the bed in his hotel room, drinking cheap scotch, maybe watching a soccer game or boxing match on TV, pissed off and feeling sorry for himself.

And missing Althie.

God, how he missed Althie.

He had met Althea Patterson on Bruin Walk in his senior year, introducing himself with a lame line: “Aren’t we in the same Poli Sci section?”

Tall, thin and blond, Althea was more angular than curvy; her nose was long and hooked, her mouth a little too wide, and her green eyes set a little too deep to be considered classically pretty, but Althea was beautiful.

And smart—they actually were in the same Poli Sci section, and he’d listened to her talk in class. She argued her viewpoint (a little to the left of Emma Goldman) ferociously, and that turned him on, too.

So they went out for pizza and then they went to her apartment in West-wood. She made espresso and they talked and he found out that she was a rich girl from Santa Barbara, her family Old California Money and her father a very big deal in the state Democratic Party.

To her, he was madly handsome, with that shock of black hair that fell over his forehead, that rugged broken nose that saved him from being a pretty boy, and the quiet intelligence that had brought a kid from the barrio to UCLA. There was something else, too—a loneliness, a vulnerability, a hurt, an edge of anger—that made him irresistible.

They ended up in bed, and in the postcoital darkness he asked, “So, can you cross that off your liberal checklist now?”

“What?”

“Sleeping with a spic.”

She thought about this for a few seconds, then answered, “See, I always thought that spic referred to a Puerto Rican. What I can cross off is sleeping with a beaner.”

“Actually,” he said, “I’m only half a beaner.”

“Well then, Jesus, Art,” she said. “What good are you?”

Althea was the exception to Art’s Doctrine of YOYO, an insidious infiltrator into the self-sufficiency that was already well ingrained in him by the time he met her. Secrecy was already a habit, a protective wall he had carefully constructed around himself as a kid. By the time he fell in love with Althie, he’d had the added advantage of professional instruction in the discipline of mental compartmentalization.

The Company’s talent-spotters had lamped him in his sophomore year, picked him like low-hanging fruit.

His International Relations professor, a Cuban expatriate, took him out for coffee, then started advising him on what classes to take, what languages to study. Professor Osuna brought him home to dinner, taught him which fork to use when, which wine to select with what, even which women to date. (Professor Osuna loved Althea. “She’s perfect for you,” he said. “She gives you sophistication.”)

It was more of a seduction than a recruitment.

Not that Art was hard to seduce.

They have a nose for guys like me, Art thought later. The lost, the lonely, the bicultural misfits with a foot in two worlds and a place in neither. And you were perfect for them—smart, street-tough, ambitious. You looked white but you fought brown. All you needed was the polish, and they gave you that.

Then came the small errands: “Arturo, there’s a Bolivian professor visiting. Could you escort him around the city?” A few more of those, then, “Arturo, what does Dr. Echeverría like to do in his leisure time? Does he drink? Does he like the girls? No? Perhaps the boys?” Then, “Arturo, if Professor Méndez wanted some marijuana, could you get it for him?” “Arturo, could you tell me who our distinguished poet friend is speaking to on the telephone?” “Arturo, this is a listening device. If you could perhaps insinuate it into his room …”

Art did it all without blinking, and did it all well.

They handed him his diploma and a ticket to Langley practically at the same time. Explaining this to Althie was an interesting exercise. “I can sort of tell you, but I can’t really,” was about the best he could manage. She wasn’t stupid; she got it.

“Boxing,” she told him, “is the perfect metaphor for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“The art of keeping things out,” she said. “You’re so skilled at it. Nothing touches you.”

That’s not true, Art thought. You touch me.

They got married a few weeks before he shipped out to Vietnam. He’d write her long, passionate letters that never included anything about what he actually did. He was changed when he got home, she thought; of course he was, why wouldn’t he be? But the insularity that had always been there was intensified. He could suddenly put oceans of emotional distance between them and deny that he was doing it. Then he would revert to being that sweet, intensely affectionate man with whom she had fallen in love.

She was relieved when he said he was thinking about changing jobs. He was enthused about the new DEA; he thought he could really do some good there. She encouraged him to take the job, even though it meant he was going to leave for another three months, even when he came home just long enough to get her pregnant and left again, this time for Mexico.

He wrote her long, passionate letters from Mexico that never included anything about what he actually did. Because I don’t do anything, he wrote her.

Not a goddamn thing except feel sorry for myself.

So get off your ass and do something, she wrote back. Or quit and come home to me. I know Daddy could get you a job on a senator’s staff in no time, just say the word.

Art didn’t say the word.

What he did was get off his ass and go see a saint.

Everyone in Sinaloa knows the legend of Santo Jesús Malverde. He was a bandito, a daring robber, a man of the poor who gave back to the poor, a Sinaloan Robin Hood. His luck ran out in 1909 and the federales hanged him on a gallows just across the street from where his shrine now stands.

The shrine was spontaneous. First some flowers, then a picture, then a small building of rough-hewn planks, put up by the poor at night. Even the police were afraid to tear it down because the legend grew that the soul of Malverde lived in the shrine. That if you came here and prayed, and lit a candle and made a manda—a devotional promise—Jesús Malverde could and would grant favors.

Bring you a good crop, protect you from your enemies, heal your illnesses.

Notes of gratitude detailing the favors that Malverde has bestowed are stuck into the walls: a sick child cured, rent money magically appeared, an arrest evaded, a conviction overturned, a mojado returned safely from El Norte, a murder avoided, a murder avenged.

Art went to the shrine. Figured it was a good place to start. He walked down from his hotel, waited patiently in line with the other pilgrims and finally got inside.

He was used to saints. His mother had faithfully dragged him to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Barrio Logan, where he took catechism classes, made his First Communion, was confirmed. He had prayed to saints, lit candles at the statues of saints, sat as a child and looked at paintings of saints.

Actually, Art was a pretty faithful Catholic even during college. He was a regular communicant in Vietnam at first, but his devotion waned and he stopped going to confession. It was like, Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned, Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned, Forgive me, Father, for I have—Oh, fuck it, what’s the point? Every day I mark men for death, every other week I kill them myself. I’m not going to come in here and tell you that I’m not going to do it again, when it’s on the schedule, regular as Mass.

Sal Scachi, one of the Special Forces guys, used to go to Mass every Sunday he wasn’t out killing people. Art used to marvel how the perceived hypocrisy didn’t faze him. They even talked about it one drunken night, Art and this very Italian guy from New York.

“It don’t bother me,” Scachi said. “Shouldn’t bother you. The VC don’t believe in God, anyway, so fuck ’em.”

They got into a ferocious debate, Art appalled that Scachi actually thought they were “doing God’s work” by assassinating Vietcong. Communists are atheists, Scachi repeated, who want to destroy the Church. So what we’re doing, he explained, is defending the Church, and that isn’t a sin, it’s a duty.

He reached under his shirt and showed Art the Saint Anthony’s medal he kept around his neck on a chain.

“The saint keeps me safe,” he explained. “You should get one.”

Art didn’t.

Now, in Culiacán, he stood and stared into the obsidian eyes of Santo Jesús Malverde. The saint’s plaster skin was stark white and his mustache a sable black, and a garish circle of red had been painted around his neck to remind the pilgrim that the saint had, like all the best saints, been martyred.

Santo Jesús died for our sins.

“Well,” Art said to the statue, “whatever you’re doing, it’s working, and whatever I’m doing, it’s not, so …”

Art made a manda. Knelt, lit a candle, and left a twenty-dollar bill. What the hell.

“Help me bring you down, Santo Jesús,” he whispered in Spanish, “and there’s more where that came from. I’ll give money to the poor.”

Walking back to the hotel from the shrine, Art met Adán Barrera.

Art had walked past this gym a dozen times. He had been tempted to check it out and never had, but on this particular evening a fairly large crowd was inside, so he walked in and stood at the edge.

Adán was barely twenty then. Short, almost diminutive, with a thin build. Long black hair combed straight back, designer jeans, Nike running shoes, and a purple polo shirt. Expensive clothes for this barrio. Smart clothes, smart kid—Art could see that right away. Adán Barrera just had a look like he always knew what was going on.

Art put him at about 5'5”, maybe 5'6”, but the kid standing beside him had to go 6'3” easy. And built. Big chest, sloping shoulders, lanky. You wouldn’t make them for brothers except for their faces. Same face on two different bodies—deep brown eyes, light coffee–colored skin, more Spanish-looking than Indian.

They were standing on the edge of the ring looking down at an unconscious boxer. Another fighter stood in the ring. A kid, really, certainly not out of his teens, but with a body that looked like it had been chiseled out of living stone. And he had those eyes—Art had seen them before in the ring—that had the look of a natural killer. Except now he seemed confused and a little guilty.

Art got it right away. The fighter had just knocked out a sparring partner and now had no one to work out with. The two brothers were his managers. It was a common enough scene in any Mexican barrio. For poor kids from the barrio, there were two routes up and out—drugs or boxing. The kid was an up-and-comer, hence the crowd, and the two middle-class Mutt-and-Jeff brothers were his managers.

Now the short one was looking around the crowd to find someone who could step into the ring and go a few rounds. A lot of guys in the crowd suddenly found something very interesting on the tops of their shoes.

Art didn’t.

He caught the short guy’s eye.

“Who are you?” the kid asked.

His brother took one look at Art and said, “Yanqui narc.” Then he looked over the crowd, straight at Art, and said, “¡Vete al demonio, picaflor!”

Basically, “Get the hell out of here, faggot.”

Art instantly answered, “Pela las nalgas, perra.”

Shove it up your ass, bitch.

Which was a surprise coming out of the mouth of a guy who looked very white. The lanky brother started to push his way through the crowd to get at Art, but the smaller brother grabbed him by the elbow and whispered something to him. Tall brother smiled, then the smaller one said to Art, in English, “You’re about the right size. You want to go a few rounds with him?”

“He’s a kid,” Art answered.

“He can take care of himself,” the short brother said. “In fact, he can take care of you.”

Art laughed.

“You box?” the kid pressed.

“Used to,” Art said. “A little bit.”

“Well, come on in, Yanqui,” the kid said. “We’ll find you some gloves.”

It wasn’t machismo that made Art accept the challenge. He could have laughed it off. But boxing is sacred in Mexico, and when people you’ve been trying to get close to for months invite you into their church, you go.

“So who am I fighting?” he asked one of the crowd as they were taping his hands and getting him into gloves.

“El Leoncito de Culiacán,” the man answered proudly. “The Little Lion of Culiacán. He’ll be champion of the world one day.”

Art walked into the center of the ring.

“Take it easy on me,” he said. “I’m an old man.”

They touched gloves.

Don’t try to win, Art told himself. Take it easy on the kid. You’re here to make friends.

Ten seconds later, Art was laughing at his own pretensions. Between taking punches, that is. You couldn’t be much less effective, he told himself, if you were wrapped in telephone wire. I don’t think you have to worry about winning.

Worry about surviving, maybe, he told himself ten seconds later. The kid’s hand speed was awesome. Art couldn’t even see the punches coming, never mind block them, never mind counterpunch.

But you have to try.

It’s about respect.

So he launched a straight right behind a left jab and collected a wicked three-punch combination in return. Boom-boom-boom. It’s like living inside a fucking timpani drum, Art thought, backing away.

Bad idea.

The kid came rushing in, threw two lightning jabs and then a straight shot to the face, and if Art’s nose wasn’t broken, it was doing a damn good imitation. He swiped the blood off his nose, covered up, and took most of the subsequent drubbing on his gloves until the kid switched tactics and went downstairs, digging rights and lefts into Art’s ribs.

It seemed like an hour later when the bell rang and Art went back to his stool.

Big Brother was right there. “You had enough, picaflor?”

Except this time the “faggot” wasn’t quite so hostile.

Art answered in a friendly tone, “I’m just getting my wind, bitch.”

He got the wind knocked out of him about five seconds into round two. A wicked left hook to the liver dropped Art right to one knee. He had his head down, and blood and sweat dripped off his nose. He was gasping for air, and out of the corners of his teary eyes he could see men in the crowd exchanging money, and he could just hear the smaller brother counting to ten with a tone of foregone conclusion.

Fuck you all, Art thought.

He got up.

Heard cursing from some in the crowd, cheers from a few.

Come on, Art, he told himself. Just getting the shit beat out of you isn’t going to get you anywhere. You have to put up some kind of a fight. Neutralize this kid’s hand speed, don’t let him get off punches so easy.

He charged forward.

Took three hard shots for his trouble but kept going forward and worked the kid into the ropes. Stayed toe to toe with him and started throwing short, chopping punches, not hard enough to really hurt, but enough to make the kid cover up. Then Art ducked down, hit him twice in the ribs, and then leaned forward and tied him up.

Take a few seconds off the round, Art thought, get a blow. Lean on the kid, maybe wear him out a little. But even before Little Brother could come in and break the clinch, the kid slipped under Art’s arms, spun out, and hit him with two punches in the side of the head.

Art kept coming forward.

Absorbing punches the whole time, but it was Art who was the aggressor, and that was the point. The kid was backing off, dancing, hitting him at will, but nevertheless going backwards. He dropped his hands and Art hit him with a hard left jab in the chest, driving him back. The kid looked surprised, so Art did it again.

Between rounds, the two brothers were too busy giving their boxer hell to give Art any shit. He was grateful for the rest. One more round, he thought. Just let me get through one more round.

The bell rang.

A lot of dinero changed hands when Art got off his stool.

He touched gloves with the kid for the last round, looked into his eyes and instantly saw that he’d wounded the kid’s pride. Shit, Art thought, I didn’t mean to do that. Rein in your ego, asshole, and don’t take a chance on winning this thing.

He needn’t have worried.

Whatever the brothers had told the kid between rounds, the kid made the adjustment, constantly moving to his left, in the direction of his own jab, keeping his hands high, pretty much hitting Art at will, then getting out of the way.

Art was moving forward, hitting at air.

He stopped.

Stood in the center of the ring, shook his head, laughed and waved the kid to come on in.

The crowd loved it.

The kid loved it.

He shuffled into the center of the ring and started raining punches down on Art, who blocked them the best he could and covered up. Art would shoot a jab or counterpunch back every few seconds, and the kid would fire over it and nail him again.

The kid wasn’t going for knockout punches now. There was no anger in him anymore. He was truly sparring, just getting in his workout and showing that he could hit Art anytime he wanted, playing to the crowd, giving them the show they’d come to see. By the end, Art was down on one knee with his gloves tight to his head and his elbows tucked into his ribs, so he was taking most of the shots on his gloves and arms.

The final bell rang.

The kid picked Art up and they embraced.

“You are going to be champ one day,” Art said to him.

“You did okay,” the kid said. “Thank you for the match.”

“You got yourself a good fighter,” Art said as Little Brother was taking his gloves off.

“We’re going all the way,” Little Brother said. He stuck out his hand, “My name is Adán. That’s my brother, Raúl.”

Raúl looked down at Art and nodded. “You didn’t quit, Yanqui. I thought you’d quit.”

No “faggot” this time, Art noted.

“If I had any brains, I’d have quit,” he said.

“You fight like a Mexican,” Raúl said.

Ultimate praise.

Actually, I fight like half a Mexican, Art thought, but he kept it to himself. But he knew what Raúl meant. It was the same in Barrio Logan—it isn’t so much what you can dish out as what you can take.

Well, I took plenty tonight, Art thought. All I want to do now is go back to the hotel, take a long, hot shower and spend the rest of the night with an ice pack.

Okay, several ice packs.

“We’re going out for some beers,” Adán said. “You want to come?”

Yeah, Art thought. Yeah, I do.

So he spent the night downing beers in a cafetín with Adán.

Years later, Art would have given anything in the world to have just killed Adán Barrera on the spot.

Tim Taylor called him into the office the next morning.

Art looked like shit, which was an accurate external reflection of his internal reality. His head was pounding from the beers and the yerba he’d ended up smoking in the after-hours club Adán had hauled him to. His eyes were black and there were still traces of dark, dried blood under his nose. He’d showered but hadn’t shaved because one, he hadn’t had time; and two, the thought of dragging anything across his swollen jaw was just unacceptable. And even though he lowered himself into the chair slowly, his bruised ribs screamed at him for the offense.

Taylor looked at him with undisguised disgust. “You had quite a night for yourself.”

Art smiled sheepishly. Even that hurt. “You know about that.”

“You know how I heard?” Taylor said. “I had a meeting this morning with Miguel Barrera. You know who that is, Keller? He’s a Sinaloan state cop, the special assistant to the governor, the man in this area. We’ve been trying to get him to work with us for two years. And I have to hear from him that one of my agents is brawling with the locals—”

“It was a sparring match.”

“Whatever,” Taylor said. “Look, these people are not our pals or our drinking buddies. They’re our targets, and—”

“Maybe that’s the problem,” Art heard himself say. Some disembodied voice that he couldn’t control. He’d meant to keep his mouth shut, but he was just too fucked-up to maintain the discipline.

“What’s the problem?”

Fuck it, Art thought. Too late now. So he answered, “That we look at ‘these people’ like ‘targets.’”

And anyway, it pissed him off. People as targets? Been there, done that. Besides that, I learned more about how things work down here last night than I did in the last three months.

“Look, you’re not in an undercover role here,” Taylor said. “Work with the local law enforcement people—”

“Can’t, Tim,” Art said. “You did a good job of queering me with them.”

“I’m going to get you out of here,” Tim said. “I want you off my team.”

“Start the paperwork,” Art said. He was sick of this shit.

“Don’t worry, I will,” Taylor said. “In the meantime, Keller, try to conduct yourself like a professional?”

Art nodded and got up out of the chair.

Slowly.

While the Damoclean sword of bureaucracy was dangling, Art thought he might as well keep working.

and