The Power of the Dog

1994

Adan has spent the whole day at cemeteries.

He had nine graves to visit, nine little shrines to build, nine elaborate meals to lay out. Nine family members killed by Guero Mendez on a single night barely one month ago. His men, dressed in the black uniforms of the federales, had taken them from their houses or kidnapped them off the streets, in Mexico City and Guadalajara, driven them to safe houses and tortured them, then dumped their bodies on busy corners for the morning street sweepers to find.

Two uncles, an aunt and six cousins-two of the latter women.

One of the female cousins was a lawyer working for the pasador, but the others were uninvolved with the drug end of the family business. Their only connection was being related to Miguel Angel and Adan and Raul, and that was enough. Well, it was enough for Pilar and Guerito and Claudia, wasn’t it? Adan thinks. Mendez didn’t start this thing of killing families.

We did.

So it was expected, Mendez’s “Bloody September,” by everyone in Mexico who knew anything about the drug trade. The local police barely investigated the murders. “What did they expect?” ran the general opinion. “They killed his wife and children.” And not only killed them, but sent Mendez his wife’s head and a videotape of his children plummeting off a bridge. It was too much, even for Mexico, even for the narcotraficantes-it put the Barrera pasador beyond the pale, as it were. And if Mendez retaliated by killing members of the Barrera family, well, it was expected.

So Adan had a busy day, starting early in the morning with the Mexico City graves, then flying to Guadalajara to attend to his duties there, then a quick flight here to Puerto Vallarta where his brother Raul was, characteristically, throwing a party.

“Cheer up,” Raul tells Adan when he arrives at the club. “It’s El Dia de los Muertos.”

Sure, they’ve taken some hits, but they’ve delivered some, too.

“Maybe we should bring food to their graves, too,” Adan says.

“Shit, we’d go broke,” Raul says to him, “feeding all the guys we’ve sent to the devil. Fuck them-let their families feed them.”

The Barreras v. the world.

Cali cocaine v. Medellin cocaine.

If Adan hadn’t made the deal with the Orejuela brothers, the Barreras would be the recipients of the candy and flowers today. But with the steady supply of product from Cali, they have the men and the money to fight the war. And the battle for La Plaza has been bloody but simple. Raul has presented the local dealers with a clean choice: Do you want to be a Coca-Cola distributor or a Pepsi distributor? You have to choose; you can’t be both. Coke or Pepsi, Ford or Chevy, Hertz or Avis-it’s either one or the other.

Alejandro Cazares, for instance, had chosen Coke. The San Diego real-estate investor, businessman and dope dealer had declared his loyalty to Guero Mendez, and his body was found in his car off a dusty dirt street in San Ysidro. And Billy Brennan, another San Diego dealer, was found with a bullet in his brain in a motel room in Pacific Beach.

The American cops were puzzled as to why each of these victims had a Pepsi can stuck in his mouth.

Guero Mendez struck back, of course. Eric Mendoza and Salvador Marechal went with Pepsi, and their charred bodies were found in their still-smoldering cars in a vacant lot in Chula Vista. The Barreras answered in kind, and for a few weeks Chula Vista became a virtual parking lot for burning cars with burned bodies inside.

But the Barreras were making their point: We’re here, pendejos. Guero is trying to run La Plaza from Culiacan, but we are here. We’re local. We can reach right out and touch somebody-in Baja or San Diego-and if Guero is so tough, why can’t he reach out for us in his own territory in Tijuana? Why hasn’t Guero had us killed? The answer is simple, my friends-because he can’t. He’s holed up in his mansion in Culiacan, and if you want to take his side go ahead, but brothers, he’s there and we’re here.

Guero’s lack of action is a show of weakness, not strength, because the truth is that he is running out of resources. He may have a firm grip on Sinaloa, but their beloved home state is landlocked. Without use of La Plaza, Guero has to pay El Verde to move drugs through Sonora, or pay Abrego to move them through the Gulf, and you can bet those two greedy old bastards charge him plenty for every ounce of his product that passes through their territories.

No, Guero is almost finished, and his slaughter of Barrera uncles, aunt and cousins was just the flopping of a fish on the deck.

It’s the Day of the Dead and Adan and Raul are still alive, and that is something to celebrate.

Which they do at their new disco in Puerto Vallarta.

Guero Mendez makes the pilgrimage to the Jardines del Valle cemetery in Culiacan, to an unmarked crypt with carved marble columns, bas-relief sculptures and a dome decorated with frescoes of two little angels. Inside are the tombs of his wife and children. Colored photographs locked in glass cases hang from the wall.

Claudia and Guerito.

His two angelitos.

Pilar.

His esposa and querida.

Seduced, but still beloved.

Guero has brought with him ofrenda a los muertos, offerings to the dead.

For his angelitos, he has papel picado, tissue paper cut in the shapes of skeletons and skulls and little animals. And cookies, and candies shaped like skulls and inscribed with their names in frosting. And toys-little dolls for her, little soldiers for him.

For Pilar he has brought flowers-the traditional chrysanthemums, marigolds and coxcomb-formed into crosses and wreaths. And a coffin made from spun sugar. And the little cookies made with amaranth seeds that she liked so much.

He kneels in front of the tombs and lays down his offerings, then pours fresh water into three bowls so that they can wash their hands before the feast. Outside, a small norteno band plays cheerful music under the watchful eye of a platoon of sicarios. Guero lays a clean hand towel beside each bowl, then sets up an altar, carefully arranging the votive candles and the dishes of rice and beans, pollo in mole sauce, candied pumpkins and yams. Then he lights a stick of campol incense and sits on the floor.

Shares memories with them.

Good memories of picnics, swims in mountain lakes, family games of futbol. He speaks out loud, hears their answers in his head. A sweeter music than they’re playing outside.

Soon I will join you, he tells his wife and children.

Not soon enough, but soon.

First there is much work to be done.

First I must set a table for the Barreras.

And load it with bitter fruit.

And candy skulls with each of their names: Miguel Angel, Raul, Adan.

And send their souls to hell.

After all, it’s the Day of the Dead.

The disco, Adan thinks, is a monument to vulgarity.

Raul has done La Sirena up in an underwater theme. A grotesque neon mermaid (La Sirena herself) presides over the front entrance, and when you come inside, the interior walls are sculpted like coral reefs and underwater caves.

The entire left wall is one huge reef tank holding five hundred gallons of salt water. The price of the glass wall made Adan shudder, not to mention the cost of the exotic tropical fish-yellow, blue and purple tangs at $200 each; a porcupine puffer fish at $300; a $500 clown trigger fish, with its admittedly beautiful yellow and black spots. Then there were the expensive corals, and of course Raul had to have several kinds: open brain coral, mushroom coral, flower coral and pumping venicia coral, shaped like fingers, reaching up from underwater like a drowned sailor. And “live rocks” with calcified algae glowing purple in the lights. Eels-black-and-white snowflake eels and black-striped brown morays-peek their heads out from holes in the rock and the coral, and crabs crawl across the tops of the rocks and shrimp float in the electrically created current.

The right side of the club is dominated by an actual waterfall. (“That doesn’t make any sense,” Adan objected to his brother when it was under construction. “How can you have an underwater waterfall?” “I just wanted one,” Raul answered. Well, that answers that, Adan thought-he just wanted one.) And underneath the waterfall is a grotto with flat rocks that serve as beds for couples to lounge on, and Adan is just glad that, for hygienic purposes, the grotto is regularly sprayed by the waterfall.

The club’s tables are all twisted, rusted metal, the surfaces done in mother-of-pearl with seashells encrusted on them. The dance floor is painted like an ocean bottom, and the expensive lighting creates a blue ripple effect, as if the dancers were swimming underwater.

The place cost a fortune.

“You can build it,” Adan had warned Raul, “but it had better make money.”

“Haven’t they all?” Raul answered.

In all fairness, this is true, Adan had to admit. Raul might have appalling taste, but he’s a genius at creating trendy nightclubs and restaurants, profit centers in themselves and invaluable for laundering the narco-dollars that now flow south from El Norte like a deep green river.

The place is packed.

Not only because it is El Dia de los Muertos but also because La Sirena is a smash, even in this highly competitive resort town. And during the annual drunken orgy known as spring break the American college kids will flock to the club, spending even more (clean) American dollars.

But tonight the crowd is mostly Mexican, mostly, in fact, friends and business associates of the Barrera brothers, here to celebrate with them. There are a few American tourists who have found their way in, and a handful of Europeans as well, but that’s all right. There will be no business conducted here tonight, or any night, for that matter-there is an unwritten rule that the legitimate businesses in the resort towns are strictly off limits for any narco activities. No drug deals, no meetings and above all, no violence. After narcotics, tourism is the country’s biggest source of foreign currency, so no one wants to scare away the Americans, British, Germans and Japanese who leave their dollars, pounds, marks and yen in Mazatlan, Puerto Vallarta, Cabo San Lucas and Cozumel.

All the cartels own nightclubs, restaurants, discos and hotels in these towns, so they have an interest to protect, an interest that would be ill served by a tourist catching a stray bullet. No one wants to pick up a newspaper and see headlines of a bloody shoot-out with photos of corpses lying in the street. So the pasadores and the government all have a healthy agreement of the “Take it somewhere else, boys” variety. There’s just too much money being made to mess with.

You can play in these towns, but you have to play nice.

And they are certainly playing tonight, Adan thinks as he watches Fabian Martinez dance with three or four blond German girls.

There is too much business to take care of, the unceasing cycle of product going north and money coming south. There are the constant business arrangements with the Orejuelas, then the actual movement of the cocaine from Colombia to Mexico, then the endless challenge of getting it safely into the States and converting it to crack, then selling it to the retailers, collecting the money, getting the cash back into Mexico and cleaning it.

Some of the money goes into fun, but a lot of the money goes into bribes.

Silver or lead.

Plata o plomo.

One of the Barrera lieutenants would simply go to the local police comandante or army commander with a bag full of cash and give him the choice in those exact words: “?Plata o plomo?”

That’s all that needed to be said. The meaning was clear-you can get rich or you can get dead. You choose.

If they chose rich, it was Adan’s business. If they chose dead, that was Raul’s business.

Most people chose rich.

Cono, Adan thinks, most of the cops planned on getting rich. In fact, they had to buy their positions from their superiors, or pay a monthly share of their mordida. It was like a franchise operation. Burger King, Taco Bell, McBribes. Easiest money in the world. Money for nothing. Just look the other way, be someplace else, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, and the monthly payment will be there in full and on time.

And the war, Adan reflects, watching the partiers dance in the shimmering blue light, has been a further boon for the cops and the army. Mendez pays his cops to bust our dope, we pay our guys to bust Mendez’s dope. It’s a good deal for everyone except the guy whose dope gets popped. Say the Baja State Police seize a million dollars of Guero’s cocaine. We pay them a $100,000 “finder’s fee,” they get to be heroes in the papers and look like good guys to the Yanquis, and then after a decent interval they sell us that million bucks’ worth of blow for $500,000.

It’s a win-win deal.

And that’s in Mexico alone.

There are also U.S. Customs agents to pay to look the other way when cars full of coke or grass or heroin come through their stations-$30,000 a carload, no matter what’s in it. And still, there’s no way to guarantee that your car is going to go through a “clean” checkpoint, even though you’ve bought condo buildings whose top floors overlook the crossing stations and you have lookouts up there who are in radio contact with your drivers and try to steer them toward the “right” lanes. But the Customs agents are switched often and arbitrarily, and other agents are monitoring radio bands, so if you send a dozen cars at a time through the border crossings at San Ysidro and Otay Mesa, you expect nine or ten of them to get through.

There are bribes to city cops in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, you name it. And to state police, and sheriff’s departments. And secretaries and typists in the DEA who can slip you info on what investigations are going on, with what technology. Or even to that rare, rare, DEA agent you could get on the arm, but they are few and far between, because between the DEA and the Mexican cartels there is a blood feud, still, from the killing of Ernie Hidalgo.

Art Keller sees to that.

And thank God for that, Adan thinks, because while Keller’s revenge obsession might cost me money in the short run, in the long run it makes me money. And that is what the Americans simply cannot seem to understand-that all they do is drive up the price and make us rich. Without them, any bobo with an old truck or a leaky boat with an outboard motor could run drugs into El Norte. And then the price would not be worth the effort. But as it is, it takes millions of dollars to move the drugs, and the prices are accordingly sky-high. The Americans take a product that literally grows on trees and turn it into a valuable commodity. Without them, cocaine and marijuana would be like oranges, and instead of making billions smuggling it, I’d be making pennies doing stoop labor in some California field, picking it.

And the truly funny irony is that Keller is himself another product because I make millions selling protection against him, charging the independent contractors who want to move their product through La Plaza thousands of dollars for the use of our cops, soldiers, Customs agents, Coast Guard, surveillance equipment, communications… This is what Mexican cops appreciate that American cops don’t. We are partners, mi hermano Arturo, in the same enterprise.

Comrades in the War on Drugs.

We could not exist without each other.

Adan watches as two Nordic-looking young women stand under the waterfall, letting the spray soak their thin T-shirts to display their breasts to any and all admirers, of which there are quite a few. The disco music is pounding, the dancing frenetic, the drinking hard, fast and constant. It’s El Dia de los Muertos, and most of the people in the crowd here tonight are old friends from Culiacan or Badiraguato, and if you’re a narco from Sinaloa you have a lot of dead to remember.

There are a lot of ghosts at this party.

It’s been a bloody war.

But, Adan thinks, hopefully it is almost over, and we will get back to pure business.

Because Adan Barrera has reinvented the drug business.

The traditional shape of any of the Mexican pasadores was the pyramid. Similar to the Sicilian Mafia families, there was a godfather, a boss, then captains, then soldiers, and every level “kicked up” to the next. The lower levels made very little money unless they could build levels beneath them, who would in turn kick up, but make very little. Anybody but a fool could figure out the problem with the pyramid-if you get in early, you’re gold; if you get in late, you’re fucked. All it did, in Adan’s analysis, was create motivation to go out and start a new pyramid.

The pyramid was also too vulnerable to aggressive law enforcement. All you had to do, Adan thought, was look at what had happened to the American Mafia to see that. All you needed was one dedo, one snitch, one dissatisfied soldier at the lower levels, and he could take the cops up and down the integrated pyramid structure. Every single one of the heads of New York’s Five Families was now in prison, with their families going into serious and inevitable decline.

So Adan tore down the pyramid and replaced it with a horizontal structure. Well, almost horizontal. His new organization had only two levels: the Barrera brothers on top, everyone else underneath them.

But on the same level.

“We want entrepreneurs, not employees,” Adan told Raul. “Employees cost money, entrepreneurs make money.”

The new structure created a growing pool of highly motivated, richly rewarded independent businessmen who paid 12 percent of their gross to the Barreras and were happy to do it. There was now only one level to kick up to, and you ran your own business, took your own risks, reaped your own rewards.

And Adan saw to it that the potential rewards were greater for the emerging entrepreneurs. He rebuilt his Baja cartel on that principal, allowing-no, encouraging-his people to go into business for themselves: lowering their “taxes” to 12 percent, giving low-interest loans for start-up capital, providing them with access to financial services-i.e., money-laundering-all in exchange for simple loyalty to the cartel.

“Twelve percent from many,” Adan had explained to Raul when first proposing the drastic tax reduction, “will be more than thirty percent from a few.” He had observed the lessons of the Reagan Revolution. They could make more money by lowering taxes than by raising them because the lower taxes allowed more entrepreneurs to come into the business and make more money and pay more taxes.

Raul is of the opinion that lead, not a new business model, is winning the war against Mendez, and in a narrow sense he’s right. But Adan is convinced that the more powerful factor was the pure force of economics-the Barreras simply undersold Guero Mendez. You can sell Coke with a 30 percent overhead, or Pepsi with a 20 percent overhead-you choose. An easy choice to make-you can sell Pepsi and make a lot of money, or Coke and make less money until Raul kills you. Suddenly, there were a lot of Pepsi distributorships. You would have to be a fool to choose the lead Coke over the silver Pepsi.

Silver or lead.

The yin and yang of the new Baja cartel.

Deal with Adan and get the silver, or deal with Raul and get the lead. A structure that tipped the scales in Baja against Guero Mendez. He was simply too slow catching up, and by the time he did, he couldn’t afford to lower his prices because he couldn’t get enough cocaine through La Plaza and had to pay out thirty points to move it through Sonora or the Gulf.

No, Raul later had to admit, the 12 percent deal had been an act of sheer genius.

It’s perfect for guys like Fabian Martinez and the rest of the Juniors.

The rules were simple.

You would tell the Barreras when you were bringing the product through, what it was (cocaine, marijuana or heroin), how much weight, and what your pre-arranged sale price was-usually somewhere between $14,000 and $16,000 per kilo-and what date you were planning on delivering it to the retailer in the States. You then had forty-eight hours after that date to pay the Barreras 12 percent of the pre-arranged sale price. (The pre-arranged price was simply a guarantee on a bottom-if you sold it for less, you still owed the percentage on the quoted price; if you sold it for more, you owed the percentage on the higher price.) If you couldn’t deliver the money within the two days, you had better sit down with Adan and arrange a payment plan, or sit down with Raul and…

Silver or lead.

The 12 percent was just for bringing the drugs through La Plaza. If you wanted to make your own arrangement with the local police, federales or army comandante to guarantee the safety of your shipment, fine, but if it got busted, you still owed the twelve points. If you wanted the Barreras to make those security arrangements, that was also fine, but it would cost you-the price of the mordida plus a handling fee. But in that case, the Barreras guaranteed the safety of your shipment on the Mexican side of the border. If it was seized, they would reimburse you for the wholesale cost of the shipment. That is, if it was cocaine, for instance, the Barreras would pay you the purchase price you had negotiated with the Orejuela cartel in Cali, not the retail price you expected to get in the States. If you bought the Barrera security package, the safety of your shipment was absolutely guaranteed from the time it reached Baja until the time it hit the border. No other dealer would try to rip it off, no bandits would try to hijack it. Raul and his sicarios saw to that-you would have to be seriously insane to try to steal a shipment the safety of which was spoken for by Raul Barrera.

The Barreras also offered financial services. Adan wanted to make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to get into the business, so the 12 percent never had to be fronted. You didn’t have to pay it until after you had sold it. It was always done on the come. But the Barreras went the extra step-they would help you launder the money once you had sold your shipment, and this was an increasingly profitable product for the Barreras. The going rate for money cleansing was 6.5 percent, but bribed bankers would give the Barreras a volume price of 5 percent, so Adan was making an additional 1.5 percent on every customer’s dollar. Again, you didn’t have to launder your cash through the Barreras-you were an independent businessman, you could do whatever you wanted. But if you went somewhere else and got ripped off or cheated, or if your money got seized at U.S. Customs on the way back through the border, it was your own tough luck, whereas the Barreras guaranteed your money. Whatever you put in dirty, you got back clean-within three working days-minus the 6.5 percent.

And this has been Adan’s “Baja Revolution”-catching the drug business up with times.

“Miguel Angel Barrera dragged the drug business into the twentieth century,” is how one narcotraficante put it. “Adan is leading it into the twenty-first.”

And beating Guero Mendez while we’re at it, Adan thinks. If he cannot move his cocaine, he cannot pay mordida. If he cannot pay mordida, he cannot move cocaine. In the meantime, we are building a network that is fast, efficient and entrepreneurial, using the newest and best technology and financial mechanisms.

Life is good, Adan thinks, on this Day of the Dead.

Day of the Dead, Callan thinks.

Big deal.

Like, ain’t they all days of the dead?

He’s knocking a few back at the bar of La Sirena. You want a challenge, try getting a straight-up whiskey at a Mexican beach bar. Tell the guy you want a drink without a goddamn umbrella in it, he looks at you like you ruined his fuckin’ day.

Callan does it anyway. “Yo, viejo, is it raining in here?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t need this, do I?”

And if I wanted fruit juice, amigo, I’d order fruit juice. Only juice I want is the juice of the barley.

Irish Vitamin C.

The old waters of life.

Which is kind of funny, Callan thinks, when you consider what I do for a living, what I’ve always done, basically.

Cancel people’s reservations.

Sorry, sir, you’re checking out early.

Yeah, but Yeah, but nothin'. Out of the pool.

It ain’t for the Cimino Family anymore, but Sal Scachi is still calling the shots, in a manner of speaking. Callan was chilling out down in Costa Rica, waiting for the shit storm in New York to blow itself out, when Scachi came to see him.

“How would you feel about going down to Colombia?” he’d asked Callan.

“To do what?”

To hook up with something called “MAS” was the answer.

Muerte a Secuestradores-Death to Kidnappers. Scachi explained that it started back in ’81 when the left-wing insurgent group M-19 kidnapped the sister of Colombian drug lord Fabian Ochoa and held her for ransom.

Yeah, that was a good business plan, Callan thought, kidnapping a boss’s sister.

Like Ochoa was going to pay, right?

What the cocaine magnate did instead, Scachi said, was he convened a meeting of 223 associates and made them each cough up $20,000 in cash and ten of their best gunmen. Do the math-that’s a war chest of four and a half million bucks and an army of over two thousand button men.

“Dig this,” Scachi said. “These guys actually flew over a soccer stadium in a helicopter and dropped leaflets announcing what they were going to do.”

Which was basically rip through Cali and Medellin like rabid dogs on crack. Busted into homes, dragged college kids right out of their classrooms, shot some of them on the spot and took others away to safe houses for “questioning.”

Ochoa’s sister was released unharmed.

“What’s all this to me?” Callan asked.

Scachi tells him. In ’85 the Colombian government struck a truce with the various leftist groups that formed an above-ground alliance called the Union Patriotica, which won fourteen seats in parliament in the ’86 elections.

“Okay,” Callan said.

“Not okay,” Scachi answered. “These people are Communists, Sean.”

Scachi launched into a fucking tirade, the gist of which was that we fought the Communists so the people could have democracy, then the ungrateful motherfuckers turn around and vote for Communists. So what Sal was saying, Callan guessed, is that the people should have democracy, just not that much democracy.

They got the absolute freedom to choose what we want them to.

“MAS is going to do something about it,” Scachi was saying. “They could use a man with your talents.”

Maybe they could, Callan thought, but they ain’t gettin’ a man with my talents. I don’t know what Sal’s connection is to this MAS, but it ain’t nothin’ to me.

“I think I’ll just go back to New York,” Callan said. After all, Johnny Boy was firmly in charge of the family, and Johnny Boy had no reason to give Callan anything but love and safe harbor.

“Yeah, you can do that,” Scachi said. “Except for there are about three thousand federal indictments waiting for you.”

“For what?!”

“For what?” Scachi said. “Cocaine dealing, extortion, racketeering. The word I get is they also like you for the Big Paulie thing.”

“They like you for the Big Paulie thing, Sal?” Callan asks.

“What are you saying?”

“I mean, you put me there.”

“Listen, kid, I can probably get this straightened out for you,” Scachi says, “but it wouldn’t hurt if you would, you know, help us out on this thing.”

Callan didn’t ask how Sal Scachi could straighten out a federal beef by getting him to go down to Colombia to hook up with a bunch of anti-Communist cocaine vigilantes, because there are some things you don’t want to know. He just took the plane ticket and the fresh passport, flew to Medellin and reported for work with MAS.

Death to Kidnappers turned out to be Death to Winning Union Patriotica Candidates. Six of them took bullets to the head instead of the oath of office. (Days of the Dead, Callan thinks now, working on his drink. Days of the Dead.)

After that, it was just on, he remembers. M-19 retaliated by seizing the Palace of Justice, and over a hundred people, including several Supreme Court judges, got killed in the fucked-up rescue attempt. Which is what you get, Callan thinks, for using the cops and the army instead of professionals.

They used professionals, though, to hit the leader of the Union Patriotica. Callan didn’t pull the trigger, but he rode shotgun when they whacked Jaime Pardo Leal. It was a good hit-clean, efficient, professional.

Turned out, though, that was just the warm-up.

The real killing started in ’88.

The money behind a lot of it came from the Man himself, Medellin cocaine lord Pablo Escobar.

At first Callan couldn’t figure why Escobar and the other coke lords gave a rat’s ass about the politics. But then he tripped to the fact that the cartel boys had put a lot of their coke money into real estate, large cattle ranches that they didn’t want to see broken up by some leftist land-distribution scheme.

Callan got to know one of these ranches real well.

In the spring of ’87, MAS moved him out to Las Tangas, a large finca owned by a couple of brothers, Carlos and Fidel Cardona. When they were still teenagers their father had been kidnapped and murdered by Communist guerrillas. So as much as you want to talk about politics and all that shit, Callan thought when he met them at their ranch, it’s personal. It’s always personal.

Las Tangas wasn’t as much a ranch as it was a fucking fort. Callan saw some cattle out there, but what he saw mostly were other killers like himself.

There were a lot of Colombians, cartel soldiers on loan, but there were also South Africans and Rhodesians who had lost their own war and were looking to win this one. Then there were Israelis, Lebanese, Russians, Irish and Cubans. It was a fucking Olympic Village for button men.

They trained hard, too.

Some guy rumored to be an Israeli colonel came in with a bunch of fucking Brits who were all ex-SAS, or claimed to be anyway. As a good mick, Callan hated the Brits and the SAS, but he had to admit that these limeys knew what they were doing.

Callan was always pretty slick with a. 22, but there was a lot more to this kind of work, and pretty soon Callan was getting instruction on the use and handling of the M-16, the AK-47, the M-60 machine gun and the Barrett-Model. 90 sniper rifle.

He also trained in hand-to-hand combat-how to kill with a knife, a garrote, his hands and feet. Some of the permanent instructors were former U.S. Special Forces guys-some of them Operation Phoenix vets from Vietnam. A lot of them were Colombian army officers who spoke English like they were from Mayberry, USA.

It used to crack Callan up, whenever one of these upper-crust Colombians would open his mouth and sound like some cracker. Then he found out that most of these guys had gotten their training at Fort Benning in Georgia.

Something called the School of the Americas.

Yeah, what the fuck kind of school is that? Callan thought. Reading, writing and whacking. Whatever, they taught some nasty skills, which the Colombians were happy to pass on to the group that had become known as Los Tangueros.

There was a lot of OJT, too. On-the-Job Training.

One day a squad of Tangueros went out to ambush a group of guerrillas that had been operating in the area. A local army officer had delivered photos of the six intended targets, who lived in villages like your average campesinos when they weren’t out doing guerrilla-type shit.

Fidel Cardona led the mission himself. Cardona had become kind of a kick, calling himself “Rambo” and pretty much dressing like the guy in the movie. Anyway, they went out and set up an ambush on a dirt road these guys were supposed to be using.

The Tangueros spread out in a perfect U-shaped formation, just the way they’d been taught. Callan didn’t like it, lying in the brush, wearing cammies, sweating in the heat. I’m a city guy, he thinks. When did I join the fucking army?

Truth is, he was edgy. Not scared, really, more apprehensive, not knowing what to expect. He’d never gone up against guerrillas before. He thought that they’d probably be pretty good, well trained, know the terrain better and how to use it.

The guerrillas strolled right into the open top of the U.

They weren’t what Callan was expecting, hardened fighters in camouflage gear with AKs. These guys looked like farmers, in old denim shirts and short campesino trousers. And they didn’t move like soldiers, either-spread out, alert. They were just walking up the road.

Callan laid the sights of his Galil rifle on the guy farthest to the left. Aimed a little low, at the guy’s stomach, in case the rifle kicked up. Also, he didn’t want to look at the guy’s face because the man had this baby face and he was talking to his friends and laughing, like a guy does with his buddies at the end of a day of work. So Callan kept his eyes on the blue of the man’s shirt because then it was like shooting this thing, just like target shooting.

He waited for Fidel to take the first shot, and when he heard it, he squeezed the trigger twice.

His man went down.

They all did.

The poor fuckers never saw it coming, never knew what hit them. There was just a volley of fire from the bushes beside the road and then there were six guerrillas down, bleeding into the dirt.

They never even had time to pull their weapons.

Callan forced himself to walk over to the man he had shot. The guy was dead, lying facedown in the road. Callan nudged the body over with his foot. They had strict orders to pick up any guns, except Callan didn’t find one. All the guy was carrying was a machete, the kind that the campesinos used to cut bananas off the trees.

Callan looked around and saw that none of the guerrillas had guns.

That didn’t bother Fidel. He walked around, putting insurance shots into the backs of their heads, then radioed back to Las Tangas. Pretty soon a truck rolled up with a pile of clothes like the Communist guerrillas usually wore, and Fidel ordered his men to dress the corpses in the new clothes.

“You gotta be fuckin’ kiddin’ me,” Callan said.

Rambo wasn’t kidding. He told Callan to get busy.

Callan got busy sitting on the side of the road. “I ain’t no fuckin’ undertaker,” is what he told Fidel. So Callan sat and watched as the other Tangueros changed the corpses’ clothes, then snapped photos of the dead “guerrillas.”

Fidel yapped at him all the way back. “I know what I’m doing,” Fidel said. “I went to school.”

Yeah, I went to school, too, Callan told him. They held the classes in Hell’s Kitchen. “But the guys I shot, Rambo?” Callan added. “They usually had guns in their hands.”

Rambo must have bitched to Scachi about him because Sal showed up a few weeks later at the ranch to have a “counseling session” with Callan.

“What’s your problem?” Scachi asked him.

“My problem is gunning down fuckin’ farmers,” Callan said. “Their hands were empty, Sal.”

“We ain’t making Westerns, here,” Sal answered. “There’s no 'code of honor.’ What, you want to hit them when they’re in the jungle with AKs in their hands? You feel better if you take casualties? This is a motherfuckin’ war, Sparky.”

“Yeah, I get it’s a war.”

Scachi said, “You’re getting paid, aren’t you?”

Yeah, Callan thought, I’m getting paid.

The eagle screams twice a month, in cash.

“And they’re treating you well?” Scachi asked.

Like fucking kings, Callan had to admit. Steaks every night, if you wanted them. Free beer, free whiskey, free coke if that was your thing. Callan blew a little coke now and then, but it didn’t do it for him like the booze did. A lot of the Tangueros would snort a pile of coke, then hit the whores that were brought in on weekends and fuck them all night.

Callan went with the whores a couple of times. A man has needs, but that’s about all it was, just meeting a need. These weren’t high-class call girls like at the White House, either-these were mostly Indian women brought in from the oil fields to the west. They weren’t even women, if you wanted to be honest about it. They were mostly just girls in cheap dresses and heavy makeup.

First time he used one, Callan felt more sad than relieved afterward. He went into a little cubicle in the back of their barracks. Bare plywood walls and a bed with a bare mattress. She tried to talk sexy to him, saying things she thought he’d like to hear, but he finally asked her to shut up and just fuck.

He lay there afterward thinking about the blond woman back in San Diego.

Nora was her name.

She was beautiful.

But that was a different life.

After Scachi’s pep talk Callan soldiered up and went on more missions. Los Tangueros bushwhacked another six unarmed “guerrillas” on the banks of a river, gunned down another half-dozen right in the town square of a local village.

Fidel had a word for their activities.

Limpieza, he called it.

Cleansing.

They were cleansing the area of guerrillas, Communists, labor leaders, agitators-all the fucking garbage. Callan heard talk they weren’t the only ones doing the cleansing. There were lots of other groups, other ranches, other training centers, all over the country. All the groups had nicknames-Muerte a Revolucionarios, ALFA 13, Los Tinados. Inside two years they killed over three thousand activists, organizers, candidates and guerrillas. Most of these killings took place in isolated rural villages, especially in the Medellin stronghold area in the Magdalena Valley, where the entire male populations of villages would be herded together and machine-gunned. Or chopped to pieces with machetes, if bullets were deemed too expensive.

And there were a lot of people other than Communists getting cleansed-street kids, homosexuals, drug addicts, winos.

One day the Tangueros went out to cleanse some guerrillas who were on the move from one base of operation to another. So Callan and the others waited for this rural bus to come down the road, stopped it and took everybody but the driver off. Fidel went through the passengers, comparing their faces with photos he had in his hand, then pulled five men from the group and had them taken into the ditch.

Callan watched as the men dropped to their knees and started praying.

They didn’t get much beyond “Nuestro Padre” before a bunch of Tangueros sprayed them with bullets. Callan turned away, only to see two of his other comrades chaining the bus driver to the steering wheel.

“What the fuck are you doing?!” Callan yelled.

They siphoned gasoline from the fuel tank of the bus into a plastic water jug and then poured it on the driver, and as he screamed for mercy Fidel turned to the passengers and announced, “This is what you get for transporting guerrillas!”

Two of the Tangueros held Callan back as Fidel tossed a match into the bus.

Callan saw the driver’s eyes, heard his screams and watched the man’s body twist and dance to the flames.

He never got the smell out of his nose.

(Sitting here now in this Puerto Vallarta bar, he can smell the burning flesh. Ain’t enough scotch in the world to cleanse that smell.)

That night Callan hit the bottle hard. Got good and fuckin’ drunk and thought about picking up the old. 22 and putting a deuce into Fidel’s face. Decided he wasn’t ready to commit suicide and started packing instead.

One of the Rhodesians stopped him.

“You don’t leave here on your feet,” the guy told him. “They’ll kill you before you walk a klik.”

The guy’s right, I wouldn’t make it a kilometer.

“There’s nothing you can do,” the Rhodesian said. “It’s Red Mist.”

“What’s Red Mist?” Callan asked.

The guy looked at him weird and then just shrugged.

Like, If you don’t know…

“What’s Red Mist?” Callan asked Scachi on Sal’s next visit to Las Tangas to adjust Callan’s ever-shittier attitude. The fucking mick was just sitting in the barracks having long conversations with Johnnie Walker.

“Where’d you hear of Red Mist?” Scachi asked.

“Don’t matter.”

“Yeah, well, forget you heard it.”

“Fuck that, Sal,” Callan said. “I’m a part of somethin', I want to know what it is.”

No, you don’t, Scachi thought.

And even if you did, I can’t tell you.

Red Mist was the code name for the coordination of scores of operations to “neutralize” left-wing movements across Latin America. Basically, the Phoenix program for South and Central America. Half the time, the individual operations didn’t even know they were being coordinated as part of Red Mist, but it was Scachi’s role as John Hobbs’s errand boy to make sure that intelligence was shared, assets were distributed, targets were hit and nobody stepped on anyone else’s dick in the doing of it.

It wasn’t an easy job, but Scachi was the perfect man for it. Green Beret, sometime CIA asset, made member of the Mafia, Sal would just disappear on “detached duty” from the army and work as Hobbs’s waterboy. And there was a lot of water to be carried: Red Mist encompassed literally hundreds of right-wing militias and their drug-lord sponsors, a thousand army officers and a few hundred thousand troops, dozens of separate intelligence agencies and police forces.

And the Church.

Sal Scachi was a Knight of Malta and a member of Opus Dei, the fervently right-wing, anti-Communist secret organization of bishops, priests and committed laypeople such as Sal. The Catholic Church was at war with itself, its conservative leadership in the Vatican fighting the “liberation theologists”-left-wing, often Marxist, priests and bishops on the ground in the Third World-for the soul of Mother Church herself. The Knights of Malta and Opus Dei worked hand-in-glove with the right-wing militias, the army officers, even the drug cartels when necessary.

And the blood flowed like wine at Communion.

Most of it paid for, directly or indirectly, with American dollars. Directly from American aid to the countries’ militaries, whose officers made up the bulk of the death squads; indirectly by Americans buying drugs, the dollars for which went to the cartels sponsoring the death squads.

Billions of dollars in economic aid, billions of dollars in dope money.

In El Salvador, right-wing death squads murdered left-wing politicians and labor organizers. In 1989, on the campus of Central American University in San Salvador, Salvadoran army officers gunned down six Jesuit priests, a maid and her little girl with sniper rifles. In that same year, the United States government sent half a billion dollars in aid to the Salvadoran government. By the end of the ’80s, approximately 75,000 people had been killed.

Guatemala doubled that figure.

In the long war against the Marxist rebels, over 150,000 people were killed and another 40,000 were never found. Homeless kids were gunned down in the streets. College students were murdered. An American hotelier was beheaded. A university professor was stabbed in the hall of her classroom building. An American nun was raped, killed and thrown onto the corpses of her companions. Through it all, American soldiers provided training, advice and equipment, including the helicopters that flew the killers to the killing grounds. By the end of the ’80s, U.S. president George Bush was so disgusted by the carnage that he finally cut off funds and armaments for the Guatemalan military.

Everywhere in Latin America it was the same-the long shadow war between the haves and the have-nots, between the right wing and the Marxists, with the liberals caught, deer-in-the-headlights, between them.

Always, Red Mist was there.

John Hobbs oversaw the operation.

Sal Scachi ran the day-by-day.

Liaising with army officers trained at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. Providing training, technical advice, equipment, intelligence. Lending assets to the Latin American armed forces and militias.

One of these assets was Sean Callan.

The man is a fucking mess, Scachi thought, looking at Callan-long, dirty hair, his skin yellow from days of hard drinking. Not exactly the specimen of a warrior, but looks are deceiving.

Whatever Callan isn’t, Scachi thought, he is talent.

And talent’s hard to come by, so…

“I’m taking you out of Las Tangas,” Scachi said.

“Good.”

“I got other work for you.”

No shit he did, Callan remembers.

Luis Carlos Galan, the Liberal Party presidential candidate who was miles ahead in the polls, was taken off the count in the summer of ’89. Bernardo Jaramillo Osa, the leader of the UP, was shot to death as he got off a plane in Bogota the following spring. Carlos Pizarro, M-19’s candidate for president, was gunned down just a few weeks later.

After that Colombia was too hot for Sean Callan.

But Guatemala wasn’t. Neither was Honduras, nor was El Salvador.

Scachi moved him around like a knight in a chess set. Jumping him here, jumping him there, using him to take pieces off the board. Guadalupe Salcedo, Hector Oqueli, Carlos Toledo-then a dozen others. Callan started to lose track of the names. He might not have known exactly what Red Mist really was, but he sure as hell knew what it was to him-blood, a red mist filling his head until that’s all he could see.

Then Scachi moved him to Mexico.

“What for?” Callan asked.

“Chill you out for a while,” Scachi answered. “Just help provide a little protection for some people. You remember the Barrera brothers?”

How couldn’t he? It was the cocaine-for-guns deal that had started all the shit back in ’85. Got Jimmy Peaches sideways with Big Paulie, which started his own strange trip.

Yeah, Callan remembered them.

What about them?

“They’re friends of ours,” Scachi said.

Friends of ours, Callan thought. Weird choice of words, a phrase that made guys use only to describe other made guys to each other. Well, I ain’t a made guy, Callan thought, and a couple of Mexican coke dealers sure aren’t, so what the fuck?

“They’re good people,” Scachi explained. “They contribute to the effort.”

Yeah, that makes them fucking angels, Callan thought.

But he went to Mexico.

Because where else was he going to go?

So now he’s here at this beach resort for a Day of the Dead party.

Decides to have a couple of pops because they’re in a safe place on a holy day, so there ain’t going to be no problems. Even if there are, he thinks, I’m better a little drunk these days than totally sober.

He throws back the last of his drink, then sees the big aquarium shatter and the water burst out and two people drop in that particular twisting way that people do only when they’ve been shot.

Callan drops behind the bar stool and pulls his. 22.

There must be forty black-uniformed federales busting through the front door, firing M-16s from the hip. Bullets strike the fake rock walls of the cave, and it’s a good thing they are fake, Callan thinks, because they’re absorbing the bullets instead of deflecting them back into the crowd.

Then one of the federales unhooks a grenade from his shoulder strap.

Callan yells, “Get down!” as if anyone could hear or understand him, then he pops two rounds into the federale’s head, and the man drops before he can pull the pin and the grenade falls harmlessly to the floor, but another federale flings another grenade and it hits near the dance floor and explodes in a disco-pyrotechnic flash, and now several partyers go down, screaming with pain as the shrapnel rips into their legs.

Now people are ankle-deep in bloody water and flopping fish and Callan feels something hit his foot, but it isn’t a bullet, it’s a blue tang fish, pretty and electric indigo in the nightclub lights, and he loses himself in a peaceful moment watching the fish, and it is pandemonium now inside La Sirena as the partiers scream and cry and try to push their way out, but there is no way out because the federales are blocking the doors.

And shooting.

Callan’s glad he’s a little buzzed. He’s on alcohol-Irish-hired-killer autopilot, his head is clear and cool, and he knows now that the shooters aren’t federales. This isn’t a bust, it’s a hit, and if these guys are cops, they’re off-duty and picking up a little extra money for the upcoming holidays. And he realizes quickly that no one is going to get out through the front door-not alive, anyway-and there must be a back exit, so he lowers himself into the water and starts to crawl toward the back of the club.

It’s the wall of water that saves Adan’s life.

It knocks him off his chair and sends him to the floor, so the first round of gunfire and shrapnel passes over his head. He starts to pick himself up, but then instinct takes over as he feels bullets zinging over him and he sits back down. Looks stupidly at the bullets chopping into the expensive coral, now dry and exposed behind the shattered aquarium, then jumps as an agitated moray eel twists beside him. He looks over to the other wall, where, behind the waterfall, Fabian Martinez is trying to twist himself back into his pants as one of the German girls sitting on the rock shelf does the same, and Raul stands there with his pants around his ankles and a pistol in his hand and shoots back through the waterfall.

The faux federales can’t see through the waterfall. That’s what saves Raul, who stands there blasting away with impunity until he runs out of ammo, drops the gun and reaches down and pulls up his pants. Then grabs Fabian by the shoulder and says, “Come on, we have to get out of here.”

Because the federales are pushing their way through the crowd now, searching for the Barrera brothers. Adan sees them coming and gets up to head for the back, slips and falls, gets back up again and, when he does, a federale points a rifle in his face and smiles, and Adan is dead, except the federale’s smile disappears in a whirl of blood and Adan feels someone grab his wrist and pull him down and then he’s in the water on the floor, face-to-face with a Yanqui who says, “Get down, asshole.”

Then Callan starts shooting at the advancing federales with short, efficient bursts-pop-pop, pop-pop-knocking them down like floating ducks in a carnival game. Adan glances down at the dead federale, and, to his horror, sees that the crabs have already scuttled over to feed at the gaping hole where the cop’s face used to be.

Callan crawls forward and takes two grenades from the guys he just shot, then quickly reloads, belly-crawls back, grabs Adan and, firing behind with the other hand, pushes him toward the back.

“My brother!” Adan yells. “I have to find my brother!”

“Down!” Callan yells as a fresh burst of fire explodes toward them. Adan does go down as bullets punch him in the back of his right calf and send him sprawling face-first into the water, where he stupidly lies watching his own blood flow past his nose.

He can’t seem to move now.

His brain is trying to tell him to get up, but he’s suddenly exhausted, much too tired to move.

Callan squats down, hefts Adan over his shoulder and staggers toward the door labeled BANOS. He’s almost there when Raul takes the weight off him.

“I got him,” Raul says.

Callan nods. Another Barrera shooter has their backs, firing behind him into the chaos of the club. Callan kicks the door open and finds himself in the relative quiet of a little hallway.

To the right is a door marked SIRENAS, with a little silhouette of a mermaid; the door to the left is marked POSEIDONES, with a silhouette of a man with long, curly hair and a beard. Directly in front is the SALIDA, and Raul makes straight for this exit.

Callan screams, “NO!” and pulls him away by the collar. Just in time, because slugs come ripping through the open door just like he expected they would. Anyone who has the time and manpower to stage this kind of hit is going to place some shooters outside the back door.

So he yanks Raul through the POSEIDONES door. The other shooter goes in behind him. Callan pulls the pin on one of the grenades and tosses it out the back door to discourage anyone from standing around there or coming in.

Then he jumps into the men’s room and closes the door behind him.

Hears the grenade go off with a dull bass thump.

Raul sits Adan down on the toilet and the other shooter guards the door while Callan examines Adan’s wounded leg. The bullets have passed clean through, but there’s no way of telling if they’ve broken any bones. Or hit the femoral artery, in which case Adan is going to bleed to death before they can get him help.

The truth is that none of them are going to make it, not if the shooters keep coming, because they’re trapped. Fuck, he thinks, somehow I always knew I’d die in a shithouse, then he looks around, and there are no windows like you’re supposed to have in American restrooms but there is, directly above him, a skylight.

A skylight in a men’s room?

It had been another one of Raul’s style points.

“I want the bathrooms to look like cruise-liner cabins turned sideways,” he’d explained to Adan when arguing for the skylights. “You know, as if the ship was sunk?”

So the skylight is in the shape of a porthole, and the bathrooms are ornate, and everything except the sink and the toilet is turned sideways. Which is just what you want, Callan thinks, if you’ve been pounding margaritas and go to take a piss-a seasick shitter. He wonders how many college kids have staggered in here in pretty good shape and then puked it all up once they got sideways, but he doesn’t think about it for long because that fucking stupid porthole above them is the way out, so he climbs up on the sink counter and opens the skylight. He jumps, gets a grip then pulls himself up and through and then he’s on the roof and the air is salty and warm and then he sticks his head back down through the porthole skylight and says, “Come on!”

Fabian jumps and pulls himself through the skylight, then Raul lifts Adan up and Callan and Fabian pull him up onto the roof. Raul has a hard time squeezing himself through the small porthole, but manages just in time as the federales kick open the door and spray the room with bullets.

Then they rush in, expecting to see dead bodies and screaming, twisting wounded. But they don’t see any of that and they’re puzzled until one of them looks up and sees the open skylight and then he gets it. But the next thing he sees is Callan’s hand dropping a grenade and then the skylight closes, and now there are dead and screaming, twisting bodies in the men’s room of La Sirena.

Callan leads the way across the roof to the back of the building. There’s only one federale guarding the alley in back now, and Callan dispatches him with two quick shots to the back of the head. Then he and Raul carefully lower Adan down to a waiting Fabian.

Then they take off trotting down the alley, Raul with Adan slung over his shoulder, toward the back street, where Callan shoots the window out of a Ford Explorer, opens the door and takes about thirty seconds to hot-wire the ignition.

Ten minutes later they’re in the emergency room of Our Lady of Guadalupe hospital, where the registration nurses hear the name Barrera and ask no questions.

Adan is lucky-the femur is chipped but not broken, and the femoral artery is untouched.

Raul is giving blood with one arm, on the phone with the other, and in minutes his sicarios are either rushing to the hospital or searching the neighborhood of La Sirena for any of Guero’s boys who might be lingering. They don’t come back with any, only the news that six of the partyers were killed, and ten of the “federales” are either dead or wounded.

But Mendez’s gunmen have failed to kill the Barrera brothers.

Thanks to Sean Callan.

“Whatever you want,” Adan tells him.

On this Day of the Dead.

You have only to ask.

Whatever you want in this world.

The teenage girl makes him his own pan de muerto.

Bread of the Dead.

The traditional sugary sweet roll with a surprise hidden inside, a treat which she knows Don Miguel Angel Barrera especially likes and looks forward to on this holiday. And as it’s good luck for the person who takes the bite that has the surprise in it, she makes one roll just for him, to make sure that Don Miguel is the one who receives the surprise.

She wants everything just right for him on this special night.

So she dresses with special care: a simple but elegant black dress, black stockings and heels. She applies her makeup slowly, paying particular attention to the exact thickness of the mascara, then brushes her long black hair until it shines. She checks the effect in the mirror and what she sees pleases her-her skin is smooth and pale, her dark eyes are highlighted, her hair falls softly on her shoulders.

She goes into the kitchen and places the special pan de muerto on a silver tray, flanks it with amber candles, lights them and goes into his dining-room cell.

He looks regal, she thinks, in a maroon smoking jacket over silk pajamas. Don Miguel’s nephews make sure that their uncle has all the luxuries that he requires to make his existence in prison bearable-good clothing, good food, good wines, and, well, her.

People whisper that Adan Barrera takes such good care of his uncle to assuage his own guilt because he prefers his uncle to linger in prison so the old man won’t interfere with his leadership of the Barrera pasador. Sharper tongues wag that Adan actually set up his own uncle so that he could take over.

The girl doesn’t know the truth behind any of this and doesn’t care. All she knows is that Adan Barrera rescued her from a future of misery in a Mexico City brothel and chose her instead as his uncle’s companion. The gossips would have it that she resembles a woman whom Don Miguel once loved.

Which is my good fortune, the girl thinks.

Don Miguel’s demands aren’t heavy. She cooks for him, launders his clothes, accommodates his needs as a man. True, he beats her, but not as often or as viciously as her own father, and his sexual demands are not as frequent. He beats her, then screws her, and if he cannot keep his floto hard he gets angry and beats her until he can do it.

There are worse lives, she thinks.

And the money that Adan Barrera sends her is generous.

But not as generous as…

She puts the thought out of her head and presents Don Miguel with the pan de muerto.

Her hands are shaking.

Tio notices.

Her small hands quiver as she lays the bread on the table in front of him, and when he looks into her eyes they’re moist, on the verge of tears. Is it sorrow? He asks himself. Or fear? And as he looks closely into her eyes she glances down at the pan de muerto and then back up at him and then he knows.

“It is beautiful,” he says, looking down at the sweet roll.

“Thank you.”

Is there a crack in her voice? he wonders. Just the slightest hesitation?

“Please sit down,” he says, standing and holding her chair out for her. She sits down, her hands gripping the edges of the chair.

“Please, you have the first bite,” he says, sitting back down.

“Oh, no, it is for you.”

“I insist.”

“I couldn’t.”

“I insist.”

It’s a command.

She can’t disobey.

So she tears off a piece of the pan and lifts it to her lips. Or tries to, anyway-her hand shakes so badly that it has a hard time finding her mouth. And try as she might to hold them back, tears fill her eyes and then spill over, and her mascara runs down her cheeks, leaving black streaks on her face.

She looks up at him and sniffles, “I can’t.”

“And yet you would have fed it to me.”

She sniffs, but little bubbles of snot run out of her nose.

He hands her a linen napkin.

“Wipe your nose,” he says.

She does.

Then he says, “Now you must eat the bread that you baked for me.”

She blurts out, “Please.”

Then she looks down.

Are my nephews already dead? Tio wonders. Guero wouldn’t dare attempt to assassinate me unless Adan and Raul, especially, were safely out of the picture. So either they are already dead or will be soon, or perhaps Guero has botched that as well. Let us hope so, he thinks, and makes a mental note to contact his nephews at the first opportunity, as soon as this triste business is concluded.

“Mendez offered you a fortune, didn’t he?” Miguel Angel asks the girl. “A new life for you, for your whole family?”

She nods.

“You have younger sisters, do you not?” Tio asks. “Your drunk of a father abuses them? With Mendez’s money you could get them out, make them a home?”

“Yes.”

“I understand,” Tio says.

She looks up at him hopefully.

“Eat,” he says. “It is a merciful death, isn’t it? I know you wouldn’t have wanted me to die slowly and in pain.”

She balks at putting the bread in her mouth. Her hand trembles, leaving little crumbs sticking to her bright red lipstick. And now fat, heavy tears plop onto the bread, ruining the sugary frosting that she had so carefully applied.

“Eat.”

She takes a bite of the bread but can’t seem to swallow it, so he pours a glass of red wine and puts it in her hand. She sips it, and that seems to help, and she washes the bread down with it, then takes another bite and another sip.

He leans across the table and strokes her hair with the back of his hand. And softly murmurs, “I know. I know,” as with his other hand he places another piece of the bread to her lips. She opens her mouth and takes it on her tongue, then a sip of wine, and then the strychnine hits and her head snaps back, her eyes open wide and her death rattle gurgles moistly between her parted lips.

He has her body thrown over the fence to the dogs.

Parada lights a cigarette.

Sucks on it as he bends over, putting on his shoes, and wonders why he’s being awakened in the small hours of the morning, and what is this “urgent personal business” that could not wait until the sun came up. He tells his housekeeper to make the minister of education at home in the study and that he’ll be right down.

Parada has known Cerro for years. He was bishop in Culiacan when Cerro was the Sinaloa governor, and even baptized two of the man’s legitimate children. And hadn’t Miguel Angel Barrera stood as godfather on both occasions? Parada asks himself. Certainly it was Barrera who had come to him to make arrangements, both spiritual and temporal, for Cerro’s illegitimate offspring, when the governor had taken advantage of some young girl from one of the villages. Oh, well, at least they came to me as opposed to an abortionist, and that is something in the man’s favor.

But, he thinks as he pulls an old wool sweater over his head, if this is another teenage girl in an interesting circumstance, I am prepared to be seriously annoyed. Cerro should know better at his age. Certainly, he might have learned from experience if nothing else, and in any case, why does it have to be at-he glances at the clock-four in the morning?

He rings for the housekeeper.

“Coffee, please,” Parada tells her. “For two. In the study.”

Recently his relationship with Cerro has been one of alternate arguing and cajoling, begging and threatening, as he has petitioned the minister of education for new schools, books, lunch programs and more teachers. It has been a constant negotiation in which Parada has tiptoed on the edge of blackmail, once protesting to Cerro that the rural villages were not going to be treated like “bastard children”-a remark that was apparently worth two primary schools and a dozen new teachers.

Perhaps this is Cerro’s revenge, Parada thinks as he goes downstairs. But when he opens the door to his study and sees Cerro’s face, he knows it’s far more serious.

Cerro gets right to it. “I’m dying of cancer.”

Parada is stunned. “I am terribly sorry to hear this. Is there nothing…”

“No. There is no hope.”

“Would you like for me to hear your confession?”

“I have a priest for that,” Cerro says.

He hands Parada the briefcase.

“I brought you this,” Cerro says. “I didn’t know who else to bring it to.”

Parada opens it, looks at the papers and the tapes and says, “I don’t understand.”

“I have been a conspirator,” Cerro says, “in a massive crime. I cannot die… I am afraid to die… with this on my soul. I need to at least try to make restitution.”

“Certainly if you confess you will receive absolution,” Parada answers. “But if this is all evidence of some sort, why bring it to me? Why not to the attorney general, or…”

“His voice is on those tapes.”

Well, that would be a reason, Parada thinks.

Cerro leans forward and whispers, “The attorney general, the secretary of the interior, the chairman of the PRI. The president. All of them. All of us.”

Good God, Parada thinks.

What is on these tapes?

He goes through a pack and a half listening to them.

Lighting one cigarette from another, he listens to the tapes and pores through the documents. Memos of meetings, Cerro’s notes. Names, dates and places. A fifteen-year record of corruption-no, not just corruption. That would be the sad norm, and this is extraordinary. More than extraordinary-language fails.

What they did, in the simplest possible terms: They sold the country to the narcotraficantes.

He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t heard it himself: Tapes from a dinner-$25 million per plate-to help elect this president. The murders of election officials and the theft of the election itself. The voices of the president’s brother and the attorney general planning these outrages. And soliciting the narcos to pay for it all. And to commit the murders. And to torture and murder the American agent Hidalgo.

And then there was Operation Cerberus, the conspiracy to fund, equip and train the Contras through the sale of cocaine.

And Operation Red Mist, the right-wing murders funded in part by the drug cartels in Colombia and Mexico and supported by the PRI.

Small wonder Cerro is afraid of hell-he’s helped to build it here.

And now I understand why he brought this evidence to me. The voices on the tapes, the names on the memos-the president, his brother, the secretary of state, Miguel Angel Barrera, Garcia Abrego, Guero Mendez, Adan Barrera, the literally scores of police, army and intelligence officers, PRI officials-there is no one in Mexico who can or will act on this.

So Cerro brings it to me. Wanting me to give it to…

Whom?

He goes to light another cigarette but finds to his surprise that he’s sick of smoking-his mouth tastes filthy. He goes upstairs and brushes his teeth, then takes an almost scalding shower and, as he lets the water pound the back of his neck, thinks that perhaps he should give this evidence to Arthur Keller.

He’s maintained frequent correspondence with the American, now unfortunately persona non grata in Mexico, and the man is still obsessed with bringing down the drug cartels. But think it through, he tells himself: If you give this to Arthur, what will happen to it, given the shocking revelation of Operation Cerberus and the CIA’s complicity with the Barreras in exchange for Contra funding? Does Arthur have the power to act on this, or will it be suppressed by the current administration? Or any American administration, as focused as they are on NAFTA?

NAFTA, Parada thinks with disgust. The cliff we are marching toward in lockstep with the Americans. But there is hope. Presidential elections are coming up, and the PRI’s candidate-who will, perforce, win-seems to be a good man. Luis Donaldo Colosio is a legitimate man of the left, who will listen to reason. Parada has sat down with him, and the man is sympathetic.

And if this stunning evidence that the dying Cerro brought me can discredit the dinosaurs in the PRI, that might give Colosio the leverage he needs to follow his true instincts. Should I give him the information?

No, Parada thinks, Colosio mustn’t be seen to be going against his party-that would only rob him of the nomination.

So who, Parada wonders as he lathers his face and begins to shave, has the autonomy, the power, the sheer moral force to bring to light the fact that the entire government of a country has auctioned itself to a cartel of drug merchants? Who?

The answer occurs to him suddenly.

It’s obvious.

He waits until a decent hour of the morning, and then phones Antonucci to tell him that he wants to relay important information to the Pope.

The order of Opus Dei was founded in 1928 by a wealthy Spanish lawyer-turned-priest named Josemaria Escriva, who was concerned that the University of Madrid had become a hotbed of left-wing radicalism. He was so concerned that his new organization of Catholic elite fought on the side of the fascists in the Spanish Civil War and spent the next thirty years helping to entrench General Franco in power. The idea was to recruit talented, elite young lay conservatives who were headed into government, the press and big business, imbue them with “traditional” Catholic values-especially anti-Communism-and send them out to do the Church’s work in their chosen spheres.

Salvatore Scachi-Special Forces colonel, CIA asset, Knight of Malta and made Mafia wise guy-is a tried-and-true member of Opus Dei. He met all the requirements-attended Mass daily, made his confessions only to an Opus Dei priest and made regular retreats at Opus Dei facilities.

And he’s been a good soldier. He’s fought the good fight against Communism in Vietnam, Cambodia and the Golden Triangle. He’s fought the war in Mexico, in Central America through Cerberus, in South America through Red Mist-all operations that the liberation theologist Parada is now threatening to expose to the world. Now he sits in Antonucci’s office considering what to do about the information that Cardinal Juan Parada wants to pass on to the Vatican.

“You say Cerro went to see him,” Scachi says to Antonucci.

“That’s what Parada told me.”

“Cerro knows enough to bring down the entire government,” Scachi says. And then some.

“We can’t burden the Holy Father with this information,” Antonucci says. This Pope has been a major supporter of Opus Dei, even to the point of recently beatifying Father Escriva, the first step toward canonization. To force him to confront evidence of the Order’s involvement in some of the harsher actions against the Communist world conspiracy would be, at the very least, embarrassing.

Worse yet would be the scandal that would erupt against the present government, just as negotiations are proceeding to return the Church to full legal status in Mexico. No, these revelations would scuttle the government, and with it the negotiations, and swing momentum toward the heretical liberation theologists-many of them well-meaning “useful idiots” who would help bring about Communist rule.

It’s been the same story everywhere, Antonucci thinks-stupid, misled, liberal priests help bring the Communists to power, then the reds slaughter the priests. It was certainly true in Spain, which is why the blessed Escriva founded the order in the first place.

As members of Opus Dei, both Antonucci and Scachi are well versed in the concept of the greater good, and for Sal Scachi the greater good of defeating Communism outweighs the evil of corruption. He also has something else on his mind-the NAFTA treaty, still under debate in Congress. If Parada’s revelations were ever made public they would scuttle NAFTA. And without NAFTA, there will be no hope for the development of a Mexican middle class, which is the only long-term antidote for the poisonous spread of Communism.

Now Antonucci says, “We have an opportunity here to do something great for the souls of the millions of faithful-to return the true Church to the Mexican people by earning the gratitude of the Mexican government.”

“If we suppress this information.”

“Just so.”

“But it’s not that simple,” Scachi says. “Parada apparently has certain knowledge, which he’ll come forward with if he doesn’t see-”

Antonucci gets up. “I must leave such worldly details to the lay brothers of the order. I don’t understand such things.”

But Scachi does.

Adan lies in bed at Rancho las Bardas, Raul’s large estancia-cum-fortress, off the road between Tijuana and Tecate.

The ranch’s main living compound, composed of separate houses for Adan and Raul, is surrounded by a ten-foot wall topped with razor wire and shards of broken glass bottles. There are two gates, each with massive, steel-reinforced doors. Spotlight towers are set in each corner, manned by guards with AK-47s, M-50 machine guns and Chinese rocket launchers.

And to even reach the place, you have to drive two long miles off the highway down a red-dirt road, but the chances are you’re not even going to get on that road, because the junction with the highway is guarded twenty-four-seven by plainclothes Baja state policemen.

So this is where the brothers came as soon as possible after the attack on the La Sirena disco, and now the place is on high alert. Guards patrol the walls night and day, squads in jeeps patrol the surrounding countryside, technicians electronically sweep the area for radio transmissions and cell-phone calls.

And Manuel Sanchez sits outside Adan’s bedroom window like a faithful dog. We’re twins now, Adan thinks, with our identical limps. But mine is temporary and his is permanent, and this is why I have kept the man employed all these years as a bodyguard since the bad old days of Operation Condor.

Sanchez will not leave his post-not to eat, not to sleep.

Just props himself against the wall with his shotgun in his lap, or occasionally gets up and limps back and forth along the wall.

“I should have been there, patron,” he told Adan, with tears streaming down his face. “I should have been with you.”

“Your job is to protect my home and my family,” Adan answered. “And you have never let me down.”

Nor is he likely to.

He won’t leave Adan’s window. The cooks bring him plates of warm flour tortillas with refritas and peppers, and bowls of hot albondigas, and he sits outside the window eating. But he will not leave: Don Adan saved his life and his leg, and Don Adan and his wife and daughter are inside that house, and if Guero’s sicarios somehow get inside the compound, they will have to come through Manuel Sanchez to get to them.

And no one is getting through Manuel.

Adan’s glad he’s there, if only to give Lucia and Gloria a feeling of security. They were already put through an upsetting ordeal, being woken in the middle of the night by the pasador’s sicarios and hustled off to the countryside without even a chance to pack. The upset had set off a major respiratory episode, and a doctor had to be flown in, blindfolded, then driven out to the ranch to see the sick girl. The expensive and delicate medical equipment-respirators, breathing tents, humidifiers-all had to be packed out of the house and moved in the middle of the night, and even now, weeks later, Gloria is still displaying symptoms.

And then when she had seen him limping, in pain, it was yet another shock and he had felt bad about lying to her, telling her that he had been in a motorcycle accident, and lying to her more, telling her they were staying out in the country for a while because the air is better for her.

But she’s not stupid, Adan knows. She sees the towers, the guns, the guards, and she will soon see through their explanation that the family is very wealthy and needs protection.

And then she will ask harder questions.

And get harder answers.

About what Papa does for a living.

And will she understand? Adan wonders. He’s restless, edgy, tired of being a convalescent. And be honest, he tells himself-you miss Nora. You miss her in your bed and at your table. It would be good to talk with her about this whole situation.

He’d managed to get a phone call off to her the day after the La Sirena attack. He knew that she’d have seen it on TV or read about it in the papers, and he wanted to tell her that he was all right. That it would be a few weeks before he could see her again, but more important, that she should stay out of Mexico until he tells her it’s safe.

She’d responded just the way he’d imagined she would, just the way he’d hoped. She answered the phone on the first ring, and he could feel her relief when she heard his voice. Then she’d quickly started to joke with him, telling him that if he let himself be lured by any siren other than her, he got what he deserved.

“Call me,” she’d said. “I’ll come running.”

I wish I could, he thinks as he painfully stretches his leg. You don’t know how much I wish I could.

He’s tired of being in bed and sits up, slowly swings his wounded leg out and gently eases himself to his feet. He takes his cane and hobbles over to the window. It’s a beautiful day. The sun is bright and warm and the birds are warbling and it’s good to be alive. And his leg is healing quickly and well-there has been no infection-and soon he will be up and around. Which is a good thing because there is much to do and not a lot of time to do it.

The truth is that he’s worried. The attack on La Sirena, the fact that they used federale uniforms and identification-it must have cost hundreds of thousands in mordida. And the fact that Guero felt strong enough to violate the prohibition on violence in a resort town must mean that Guero’s business is healthier than they had thought.

But how? Adan wonders. How is the man getting his product through La Plaza, which the Barrera pasador has all but shut down to him? And how has Guero won the support of Mexico City and its federales?

And has Abrego aligned himself with Guero? Would Guero ever have launched the La Sirena attack without the old man’s approval? And if that is the case, Abrego’s support would bring the president’s brother, El Bagman, and the full weight of the federal government.

Even in Baja itself, there’s a civil war going on between the local cops-the Barreras own the Baja State Police and Guero owns the federales. The Tijuana city cops are more or less neutral, but there’s a new player in town-the Special Tactical Group, an elite group sort of like the Untouchables, run by none other than the incorruptible Antonio Ramos. If he ever allies himself with the federales…

Thank God there’s an election coming up, Adan thinks. Adan’s people have made several discreet approaches to the PRI’s handpicked candidate, Colosio, only to be turned down flat. But Colosio at least gave assurances that he is anti-narco across the board-when elected he will be coming after the Barreras and Mendez with equal vigor.

But in the meantime it’s us against the world, Adan thinks.

And this time, the world wins.

Callan don’t like it one bit.

He’s in the backseat of a stolen fire-engine red Suburban-the vehicle of choice among the narcotraficante cowboys-sitting beside Raul Barrera, who’s cruising around Tijuana like he’s the fucking mayor. They’re rolling down Boulevard Diaz Ordaz, one of the busiest streets in the city. He has a Baja State Police officer driving and another one in the front seat. And he’s tricked out in full Sinaloa cowboy gear, from the boots to the black pearl-button shirt to the white cowboy hat.

This is no fucking way to fight a war, Callan thinks. What these guys should be doing is what the old Sicilians would do-go to the mattresses, lay low, pick your spots. But this apparently ain’t the Mexican way, Callan has learned. No, the Mexican way is macho-go out there and show the flag.

Like, Raul wants to be seen.

So it ain’t no surprise to Callan when two black Suburbans filled with black-uniformed federales start to follow them down the boulevard. Which ain’t good news, Callan thinks. “Uh, Raul…”

“I see them.”

He tells the driver to take a right down a side street, alongside a gigantic flea market.

Guero’s in the second black Suburban. He looks out and sees this yuppie fire engine take a right, and in the backseat he thinks he sees Raul Barrera.

Actually, the first thing he sees is a clown.

A stupid laughing clown’s face is painted on the wall of the enormous flea market, which runs the length of two city blocks. Clown’s got one of those big red noses and the white face and the wig and the whole clown nine yards and Guero sort of blinks at it and then focuses on the guy in the backseat of the red Suburban with California plates and it sure as hell looks like Raul.

“Pull him over,” he tells his driver.

The lead black Suburban pulls ahead and forces the red Suburban to the curb. Guero’s vehicle pulls up behind and wedges in the red SUV.

Oh, fuck, Callan thinks, as a comandante federale gets out of the lead car and comes toward them, pointing his M-16, two of his boys right behind him. This ain’t no traffic ticket. He slides a little lower in his seat, gently pulls his. 22 from his hip and lays it under his left forearm.

“We got it covered,” Raul says.

Callan’s not so sure because rifle barrels poke out of the windows of the two black Suburbans like muskets out of wagons in one of them old Westerns, and Callan figures if the cavalry don’t ride in soon there ain’t gonna be much to bury here out on the old prairie.

Fuckin’ Mexico.

Guero lowers the right back window, rests his AK on the sill, flicks the lever to “bush rake” and gets ready to hose Raul.

The Baja state cop driver rolls down his window and asks, “Is there a problem?”

Yeah, apparently there is because the comandante federale spots Raul from the corner of his eye and starts to pull the trigger on his M-16.

Callan shoots from his lap.

The two rounds smack the comandante in the forehead.

The M-16 hits the pavement a moment before he does.

The two Baja state cops in the front seat shoot right through their own windshield. Raul sits in the back, zinging bullets past the ears of his two boys in the front and he’s yelling and shooting because if this is the last Arriba, he’s going out in style. He’s going out in a way that the narcocorridos will be singing about for years.

Except he ain’t going out.

Guero had spotted the bright red Suburban, but he didn’t see the nondescript Ford Aerostar and the Volkswagen Jetta that were trailing it from a block behind, and now those two stolen vehicles roar in and trap the federales.

Fabian jumps out of the Aerostar and rakes a federale across the chest with an AK burst. The wounded federale tries to crawl for cover underneath the black Suburban, but one of his own boys sees how outgunned they are and makes a bid for survival by switching sides on the spot. He raises his own M-16 and as the man pleads for his life delivers the coup de grace through his partner’s upraised arms and into his face, then looks to Fabian for acceptance.

Fabian puts two rounds into his head.

Who needs a coward like that?

Callan pulls Raul down onto the seat and shouts, “We have to get you the fuck outta here!”

Callan opens the car door and rolls out onto the sidewalk. He shoots from underneath the car at anything that has black pants on as Raul climbs out over the top of them and then they start shooting their way out, backing down the street toward the main boulevard.

It’s a major goat fuck, Callan thinks.

Cops are roaring in from all compass points, in cars, on motorcycles and on foot. Federal cops, state cops, Tijuana city cops, and they’re not sure who’s who-it is just a fucking free-for-all.

Everyone’s trying to figure out who to shoot at the same time they’re trying to work out how not to get shot. Fabian’s shooters at least know who they’re shooting at, though, as they methodically gun down the federales who pulled them over. But those guys are tough, they’re shooting back, and there are bullets flying every which way and you have some moron across the street standing there with his Sony 8mm trying to videotape the whole goddamn mess, and through that grace given to idiots and drunks he lives through the whole ten-minute gun battle, but a lot of people don’t.

Three federales are dead and three others wounded. Two Barrera sicarios-including one Baja state policeman-have checked out and two others are pretty badly shot up, as are the seven bystanders who are down with gunshot wounds. And in one of those surreal moments that seem to occur only in Mexico, you have the bishop of Tijuana, who just happened to be in the neighborhood, going from body to body giving last rites to the dead and spiritual comfort to the living. You got ambulances coming in, and cop cars and television trucks. You got everything except twenty midgets tumbling out of a little car.

The clown ain’t laughing anymore.

The smile has literally been blasted off his face, his red nose is pockmarked with bullets and there are fresh holes drilled in the bottom inside corner of each pupil, so he’s looking down at the scene cross-eyed.

Guero’s done a walkaway-he spent most of the firefight lying on the floor of his Suburban and then he slid across to the opposite door and slunk away without anyone seeing him.

A lot of people see Raul, though. He and Callan are backing down the street, shoulder to shoulder, Raul just blasting away with his AK, Callan firing precise two-shot groupings with his. 22.

Callan sees Fabian jump in the Aerostar and back it down the street even though the tires have been shot out. He’s driving it on its rims-sparks are shooting out-and he pulls up alongside Callan and Raul and yells, “Get in!”

Okay with me, Callan thinks. He’s just in the fucking door when Fabian hits the gas again and they are flying backwards down the street and then crashing into another fucking Suburban that has blocked the intersection. The car is filled with plainclothes detectives, their M-16s leveled and ready.

Callan’s relieved when Raul drops his AK, puts his hands up and smiles.

Meanwhile, Ramos and his boys get there ready to kick ass, except most of the ass either is already bleeding on the pavement or is long gone. The whole street is buzzing like insects in Ramos’ ear as he hears the rumor that the police have arrested one of the Barreras.

It was Adan.

No, it was Raul.

Whichever the fuck Barrera, Ramos thinks, which cops arrested him, and where did they take him?! It matters, right, because if it was the federales they probably took him to the dump to shoot him, and if it was the Baja state boys they probably took him to a safe house and if it was the city police Ramos might still have a shot at bagging a Barrera brother.

Would be nice if it was Adan.

A close second if it’s Raul.

Ramos is grabbing one eyewitness after another until a uniformed city officer comes up to him and tells him that city homicide-squad detectives collared one of the Barreras and two other guys and drove off with them.

Ramos races back to the precinct house.

Cigar clamped in his mouth, Esposa at his hip, he storms into the homicide-squad room just in time to see the back of Raul’s head disappearing out the back door. Ramos raises his gun to put a bullet in the back of that head, but a homicide guy grabs the barrel.

“Take it easy,” the detective says.

“Who the fuck was that?” Ramos asks.

“Who the fuck was who?”

“That guy who just gunned down a bunch of cops,” Ramos says. “Or don’t you care about that?”

Apparently not, because the homicide guys sort of bunch up in the doorway to let Raul, Fabian and Callan get away clean, and if they’re ashamed of themselves, Ramos can’t see it in their faces.

Adan watches it on television.

The Sinaloa Swap Meet is all over the news.

He hears reporters breathlessly report that he’s been arrested. Or his brother has, depending on which station he has on. But all the channels are commenting that for a second time in a few weeks innocent citizens have been caught in the cross fire between rival drug gangs right in the heart of a major city. And that something must be done to put an end to the violence between the rival Baja cartels.

Well, something will soon, Adan thinks. We were lucky to have survived the last two attacks, but how long before our luck runs out?

The bottom line is, we’re finished.

And when I’m dead, Guero will hunt down Lucia and Gloria and slaughter them. Unless I can find-and stop-the source of Guero’s newfound power.

Where is it coming from?

Ramos and his troops are ripping up a warehouse near the border, just on the Mexican side. The tip that led them there was a good one, and they’re finding stacks of vacuum-wrapped cocaine. About a dozen of Guero Mendez’s workers are tied up, and Ramos notices that they’re all sneaking glances at a forklift parked in one corner.

“Where are the keys?” he asks the warehouse manager.

“Top desk drawer.”

Ramos gets the keys, hops onto the forklift and backs it up. He can hardly believe what he sees.

The mouth of a tunnel.

“Are you shitting me?” Ramos asks aloud.

He hops off the forklift, grabs the manager and lifts him off his feet.

“Are there men down there?” he asks. “Booby traps?”

“No.”

“If there are, I’ll come back and kill you.”

“I swear.”

“Are there lights down there?”

“Si.”

“Turn them on.”

Five minutes later Ramos has Esposa in one hand as he uses the other to climb down the ladder bolted to the side of the tunnel’s entrance.

Sixty-five feet deep.

The shaft is about six feet high and four feet wide, with reinforced concrete floors and walls. Fluorescent light fixtures are attached to the ceiling. An air-conditioning system pumps fresh air down the length of the tunnel. A narrow gauge track has been laid on the floor and carts have been set on the rails.

“Christ,” Ramos thinks, “at least there’s no locomotive. Yet.”

He starts walking along the shaft, north, toward the United States. Then it occurs to him that he should probably contact someone on the other side before he crosses the border, even underground. He goes back to the surface and makes a few phone calls. Two hours later he’s going down the ladder again, with Art Keller right behind him. And behind them, a troop of the Special Tactical Group and a flock of DEA agents.

On the American side, an army of DEA, INS, ATF, FBI and Customs agents are poised in the area across from the tunnel, waiting to rush the exact location as soon as the tunnel party radios in.

“Un-fucking-real,” Shag Wallace says when they get down to the bottom. “Someone dumped a lot of money into this.”

“Someone ran a lot of money through it,” Art answers. He turns to Ramos. “We know this was Mendez, not the Barreras?”

“It’s Guero's,” Ramos says.

“What, someone show him a video of The Great Escape?” Shag asks.

“Let me know when we cross the border,” Ramos says to Art.

“I’d just be guessing,” Art answers. “Christ, how far does this thing go?”

Fourteen hundred feet, give or take, is how they pace it out before they get to the next vertical shaft. An iron ladder bolted to the concrete walls leads up to a bolted hatch.

Art punches in on a GPS system.

The troops will be rolling.

He looks up at the hatch.

“So,” Art says, “who wants to be the first to go through that?”

“We’re in your jurisdiction,” Ramos answers.

Art goes up the ladder, with Shag at his feet, and they each balance with one hand on the rail as they twist open the hatch with the other.

It must take quite an operation, Art thinks, to hoist the dope up from the tunnel shaft. Probably a chain of men stationed on various rungs of the ladder. He wonders if they were planning to construct an elevator.

The hatch opens and light pours down the shaft.

Art firms his grip on his pistol and hauls himself up.

Chaos.

Men are running around like cockroaches when the lights come on, and the blue-jacketed task-force guys are sweeping them up, putting them on the floor and securing their wrists behind their backs with plastic telephone-cord ties.

It’s a cannery, Art notices.

There are three neat, organized conveyor belts, stacks of empty cans, sealing machines, labeling machines. Art reads one of the labels: CALIENTE CHILI PEPPERS. And indeed, there are huge piles of red chili peppers ready to be fed onto the conveyor belts.

But there are also bricks of cocaine.

And Art thinks the coke is meant to be hand-canned.

Russ Dantzler comes up to him. “Guero Mendez-the Willy Wonka of nose candy.”

“Who owns this building?” Art asks.

“You ready for this? The Fuentes brothers.”

“No kidding.”

“I shit you not.”

Three Brothers Foods, Art thinks. Well, well, well-the Fuentes family is a prominent fixture in the Mexican-American community. Important businesspeople in southern California, and major contributors to the Democratic Party. The Fuentes trucks go from the canneries and warehouses in San Diego and Los Angeles to cities all over the country.

A ready-made distribution system for Guero Mendez’s cocaine.

“Genius, isn’t it?” Dantzler says. “They bring the coke in through the tunnel, can it as Caliente Chili Peppers and ship it anywhere they want. I wonder if they ever screw up-I mean, I wonder if someone in Detroit ever goes to buy himself a can of peppers and ends up with twelve ounces of blow instead. In which case, give me a bowl of that chili, you know what I mean? So what do you want to do about the Fuentes brothers?”

“Bust them,” Art says.

Which is going to be interesting, he thinks. Not only are the Fuenteses major supporters of the Democratic Party, they’re also big contributors to the presidential campaign of Luis Donaldo Colosio.

It takes about thirty-seven seconds for the news to reach Adan.

Now we know how Mendez has been getting his cocaine through La Plaza, Adan thinks. He’s been going under it. And now we also know the source of his power in Mexico City. He’s bought the heir apparent, Colosio.

So that’s that.

Guero has bought himself Los Pinos, and we are finished.

Then the phone rings.

Sal Scachi wants to offer some help.

When he says what his offer entails, Adan instantly says no. Firmly, unalterably, absolutely, the answer is no.

It’s unthinkable.

Unless…

Adan tells him what he wants in return.

The quid pro quo.

It takes days of covert negotiations, but Scachi finally agrees.

But Adan has to act quickly.

That’s fine, Adan thinks.

But we’ll need people to do it.

Kids.

That’s what Callan is looking at-kids.

He’s sitting in the basement of a house in Guadalajara. The place is a freaking armory. There’s hardware all over the place, and not just the usual ARs and AKs, either.

This is the heavy stuff: machine guns, grenade launchers, Kevlar body armor. Callan sits on a metal folding chair looking at a bunch of teenage Chicano gangbangers from San Diego as they watch Raul Barrera pin a photograph to a bulletin board.

“Memorize this face,” Raul tells them. “It’s Guero Mendez.”

The teenagers are rapt. Especially as Raul slowly and dramatically takes bundles of cash out of a canvas bag and sets them on the table.

“Fifty thousand dollars American,” Raul says. “In cash. And it’s going to go to the first one of you who…”

He pauses dramatically.

“… puts the kill shot into Guero Mendez.”

They’re going on a “Guero hunt,” Raul announces. They’re going to form convoys of armored vehicles until they find Mendez and then use their combined firepower to blow him to hell, where he belongs.

“Any questions?” Raul asks.

Yeah, a few, Callan thinks. Starting with, How the hell you think you’re going to take on Guero’s professional hitters with the Kiddie Corps here. I mean, is this what we got left? This is the best that the Barrera pasador, with all its money and power, can come up with? A bunch of San Dog gangbangers?

They’re a goddamn joke, with tags like Flaco, Dreamer, Poptop and-honest to Christ-Scooby Doo. Fabian recruited them from the barrio, says they’re stone killers, claims they’ve all made their bones.

Yeah, maybe, Callan thinks. Maybe they have, but it’s a big jump from doing a drive-by on some other banger smoking boo on his front porch to taking on a crew of professional killers.

A bunch of kids on a big-time hit? They’ll be too busy pissing their pants and shooting each other-and hopefully not me-when they panic and start blasting anything that flashes by their peripheral vision. No, Callan still don’t get it-what the fuck Raul is thinking about with the Children’s Crusade here. All it’s going to be is one gigantic mess, and Callan is only hoping that (a) through the chaos he can find Mendez and take him off the count, and (b) he can do it before one of the kids guns him down by mistake.

Then he remembers that he was just seventeen when he took out Eddie Friel back in the Kitchen. Yeah, but that was different. You was different. These kids just don’t look like killers to me.

So that’s a question he wants to ask Raul: Are you drunk? Are you out of your fucking mind? He doesn’t ask that, though. He just settles for a more practical question.

“How do we know,” Callan asks, “that Mendez is even in Guadalajara?”

Because Parada asked him to come.

Because Adan asked Parada to ask him.

“I want to stop the violence,” he tells his old priest.

“That’s easy,” Parada answers. “Stop it.”

“It isn’t that easy,” Adan argues. “That’s why I’m asking for your help.”

“My help? To do what?”

“Make peace with Guero.”

Adan knows that he’s rung the bell-hit the chord that no priest can resist.

Certainly it presents Parada with a difficult choice. He’s no starry-eyed fool-he realizes that if, against the odds, he did succeed in brokering peace between the Barreras and Mendez, he would also be fostering a more efficient environment in which to operate the drug cartels. So in that sense, he would be helping to perpetuate an evil, which as a priest he has sworn not to do. On the other hand, he has also sworn to take every opportunity he can to mitigate evil, and peace between the two warring cartels would prevent God only knows how many killings. And if forced to choose between the evils of drug trafficking and murder, he has to judge murder the heavier evil, so he asks, “You want to sit down and talk with Guero?”

“Yes,” Adan says, “but where? Guero wouldn’t come to Tijuana, and I won’t go to Culiacan.”

“Would you come to Guadalajara?” Parada asks.

“If you guarantee my safety.”

“But would you guarantee Guero's?”

“Yes,” Adan says. “But he wouldn’t accept that guarantee any more than I would accept his.”

“That’s not what I’m asking,” Parada says impatiently. “I’m asking if you will promise not to attempt to harm Guero in any way.”

“I swear on my soul.”

“Your soul, Adan, is blacker than hell.”

“One thing at a time, Father.”

Parada hears this. If you can get a single shaft of light into the darkness, sometimes it is a wedge that will spread until it illuminates the entire void. If I didn’t believe this, he thinks as he contemplates the soul of this multiple murderer, I couldn’t get up in the morning. So if this man is asking for this one shaft of light, I can hardly refuse.

“I will try, Adan,” he says. It won’t be easy, he thinks as he hangs up. If even half of what I’ve heard about the war between these men is true, it will be virtually impossible to persuade Guero to come and talk to Adan Barrera about peace. Then again, perhaps he is also sick of killing and death.

It takes him three whole days just to get through to Mendez.

Parada contacts old friends in Culiacan and puts out the word that he wants to talk with Guero. Three days later, Guero calls.

Parada doesn’t waste time with preliminaries. “Adan Barrera wants to talk peace.”

“I’m not interested in peace.”

“You should be.”

“He killed my wife and children.”

“All the more reason.”

Guero doesn’t quite see the logic of this, but what he does see is an opportunity. As Parada presses on about a meeting in Guadalajara, in a public place, with himself as a mediator and “the entire moral weight of the Church” guaranteeing his safety, Mendez sees a chance to finally lure the Barreras out of their Baja fortress. After all, his best chance to kill them failed, and now he is getting his ass kicked in San Diego.

So he listens, and as he listens to the priest rattle on about how his wife and children would have wanted it this way, he works up a few crocodile tears and then, in a choking voice, agrees to come to the meeting.

“I will try, Father,” he says quietly. “I will take a chance for peace. Can we pray together, Father? Can we pray over the phone?”

And as Parada asks Jesus to help them find the light of peace, Guero is praying to Santo Jesus Malverde for something different.

Not to fuck it up this time.

They are going to royally fuck it up.

Is what Callan thinks.

Watching this Looney Toon spectacular that Raul is staging in the city of Guadalajara. It’s fucking ridiculous, making a big show of riding around town in this convoy, hoping to spot Guero so they can line up like battleships off an island and blast him.

Callan’s done big-time hits. This is a man who personally took out the heads of two of the Five Families, and he tries to tell Raul how it should be done. (“You find out where he’s going to be at a specific time, then you get there first and set it up.”) But Raul won’t listen-he’s bullheaded; it’s almost like he wants this to be a fiasco. He just smiles and tells Callan, “Chill out, man, and be ready when the shooting starts.”

For a whole week the Barrera forces cruise the city, night and day, searching for Guero Mendez. And while they’re looking, other men are listening. Raul has technicians stationed in another safe house, using the most current high-tech equipment to scan cellular calls, trying to intercept messages that might be going back and forth between Guero and his lieutenants.

Guero’s doing the same thing. He has his own techno-geeks in his own safe house monitoring the cellular traffic, trying to get a fix on the Barreras. Both sides are playing this game, switching cell phones constantly, moving safe houses, patrolling the streets and the airwaves, trying to find and kill each other with some kind of advantage before Parada sets up the peace meeting, which can only be a risky shoot-out.

And both sides are trying to get an edge on that, trying to glean any intelligence that could give them an advantage-what kind of car is the enemy driving, how many men do they have in town, who are they, what kind of weapons are they carrying, where are they staying and what route will they take? And they have their spies out working, trying to find out which cops are on which payroll, when they’re on duty, will there be federales around, and if so, where?

Both sides are listening in on Parada’s office phones, trying to get a fix on his schedule, his plans, anything that might provide a hint as to where he intends to hold the meeting and give them a head start on setting up an ambush. But the cardinal is holding his cards close to his chest, for that very reason, and neither Mendez nor the Barreras can find out when or where the meeting is going to be.

One of Raul’s techno-geeks does draw a bead on Guero.

“He’s using a green Buick,” the geek tells Raul.

“Guero drives a Buick?” Raul asks with some disdain. “How do you know?”

“One of his drivers phoned a garage,” the geek explained. “Wanted to know when the Buick was going to be ready. It’s a green Buick.”

“What garage?” Raul asks.

But by the time they get there, the Buick’s been picked up.

So the search goes on, night and day.

Adan gets the call from Parada.

“Tomorrow at two-thirty at the Hidalgo airport hotel,” Parada tells him. “Meet in the lobby.”

Adan already knew this, having intercepted a call from the cardinal’s driver to his wife discussing the next day’s schedule. And it just confirms what Adan also already knew-that Cardinal Antonucci is flying in from Mexico City at 1:30 and Parada is picking him up at the airport. Then they’ll go to a private conference room upstairs for a meeting, after which Parada’s driver will take Antonucci back to the airport for his 3:00 flight and Parada will stay at the hotel for his peace summit with Mendez and Adan.

Adan has known this all along, but there was no point sharing any of it with Raul until the last possible moment.

Adan is staying in a different safe house than the rest of them and now he goes down into the basement, where the real assassination squad is barracked. These sicarios were flown in on separate flights over the course of the last few days, quietly picked up at the airport and then sequestered in this basement. Meals have been brought in a few at a time from different restaurants, or cooked in the kitchen upstairs and then brought down. No one has gone cruising or nightclubbing. It’s strictly professional. A dozen Jalisco State Police uniforms are neatly folded on tables. Flak jackets and AR-15s are neatly racked.

“I’ve just confirmed everything,” Adan tells Fabian. “Are your men ready?”

“Yeah.”

“This has to go right.”

“It will.”

Adan nods and hands him a cell phone that he knows has been compromised. Fabian dials a number and then says, “It’s on. Be in place by one-forty-five.”

Then he hangs up.

Guero gets the word ten minutes later. He’s already gotten the call from Parada, and now he knows that Adan intends to ambush him as he drives into the airport.

“I think we’ll show up for the meeting a little early,” Guero tells his head sicario.

And ambush the ambush, he thinks.

Raul gets the call from Adan on a secure phone, then goes down into the dormitory and wakes up the sleeping gangbangers.

“It’s off,” he announces. “We’re going home tomorrow.”

The kids are pissed, disappointed, their dreams of a cool $50K having just gone down the shitter. They ask Raul what happened.

“I don’t know,” Raul says. “I guess he got word we were on his trail and ran back to Culiacan. Don’t worry-there’ll be other chances.”

Raul tries to make them feel better. “Tell you what, we’ll leave early for our flight-you can go to the mall.”

It’s a small consolation, but it’s something. The mall in downtown Guadalajara is one of the largest in the world. With the resilience of youth, the boys start to talk about what they’ll shop for at the mall.

Raul takes Fabian upstairs.

“You know what to do?” Raul asks him.

“Sure.”

“And you’re good to do it?”

“I’m good,” he says.

Raul finds Callan in an upstairs bedroom.

“We’re going back to TJ tomorrow,” Raul says.

Callan’s relieved. This whole thing has been so fucked-up. Raul gives him his airline ticket and the day’s schedule then tells him, “Guero’s going to try to hit us at the airport.”

“What do you mean?”

“He thinks we’re going there to make peace with him,” Raul says. “He thinks we’re just protected by a bunch of kids. He’s going to gun us down.”

“He thinks right.”

Raul smiles and shakes his head. “We got you, and we got a whole crew of sicarios who’ll be dressed as Jalisco State Police.”

Well, Callan thinks, at least that answers my question about why the Barreras were using a crew of kids. The kids are bait.

And so are you.

Raul tells Callan to keep his hand on his gun and his eyes open.

I always do, Callan thinks. Most of the dead guys he knows got that way because they didn’t have their eyes open. They got careless, or they trusted somebody.

Callan don’t get careless.

And he don’t trust nobody.

Parada puts his faith in God.

Gets up earlier than usual, goes into the cathedral and says Mass. Then he kneels at the altar and asks God to give him the strength and wisdom to do what he has to do this day. Prays that he’s doing the right thing, then ends with, “Thy will be done.”

He goes back to his residence and shaves again, then chooses his clothes with more than particular care. What he wears will send an instant message to Antonucci, and Parada wants to send the right message.

In a strange way, he harbors hope for reconciliation between himself and the Church. And why not? If Adan and Guero can come together, so can Antonucci and Parada. And he is, for the first time in a long time, truly hopeful. If this administration goes out and a better one comes in, in this new environment perhaps the conservatives and liberation theologists can find a common ground. Work together again to seek justice on earth and the bliss of heaven.

He goes to light a cigarette, then snuffs it out.

I should quit smoking, he thinks, if only to make Nora happy.

And this is a good day to start.

A day of new beginnings.

He chooses a black soutane and drapes a large cross around his neck. Just religious enough, he thinks, to mollify Antonucci, but not so ceremonial that the nuncio will think he’s gone completely conservative. Conciliatory but not obsequious, he thinks, pleased with his choice.

God, would I like a cigarette, he thinks. He’s nervous about his tasks today-delivering Cerro’s incriminating information to Antonucci, and then sitting down with Adan and Guero. What can I say, he thinks, to effect a peace between the two of them? How do you make peace between a man whose family has been killed and the man who-as rumor has it anyway-killed them?

Well, put your faith in God. He will give you the words.

But it would still be comforting to smoke.

But I’m not going to.

And I’m going to drop a few pounds.

He’s going to Santa Fe for a bishops’ conference in a month and plans to see Nora there. And it will be great fun, he thinks, to surprise her with a svelte, smoke-free me. All right, not svelte, maybe, but thinner.

He goes down to his office and occupies his mind with paperwork for a few hours, then calls his driver and asks him to get the car ready. Then he goes to his safe and takes out the briefcase filled with Cerro’s incriminating notes and tapes.

It’s time to go to the airport.

In Tijuana, Father Rivera prepares for a christening. He puts on his robes, blesses the holy water and carefully fills out the necessary paperwork. On the bottom of the form he lists as godparents Adan and Lucia Barrera.

When the new parents come with their blessed child, Rivera does something unusual.

He closes the doors of the church.

The Barrera crew arrives at the Guadalajara airport fresh from the mall.

They’re loaded down with shopping bags, having basically tried to buy the freaking place. Raul had tossed the kids some bonus money to soothe their disappointment over the cancellation of the Guero lottery, and they’d done what kids do in a mall with cash in their pockets.

They’d spent it.

Callan’s watching all this with disbelief.

Flaco bought a Chivas Rayadas del Guadalajara futbol jersey-which he’s wearing with the sales label still attached to the back collar-two pairs of Nikes, a new Nintendo GameBoy and half a dozen new games for it.

Dreamer went strictly the clothes route. Got himself three new lids, all of which he has jammed on his head at the same time, a suede jacket and a new suit-his first one ever-carefully folded in a wardrobe bag.

Scooby Doo is glassy-eyed from the video arcade. Hell, Callan thinks, the little glue-sniffer is usually glassy-eyed anyway, but now his pupils are glazed over from two solid hours of playing Tomb Raider and Mortal Kombat and Assassin 3 and now he’s sipping the same giant Slurpee he’s been hitting on the whole ride over from the mall.

Poptop is drunk.

While the others were shopping, Poptop went into a restaurant and hammered beers, and by the time they caught up with him it was too late, and it took Flaco and Dreamer and Scooby to wrestle him back in the van to go to the airport and they had to stop three times on the way so Poptop could throw up.

And now the little shit can’t find his airline ticket, so him and his buddies are digging through his backpack looking for it.

Great, Callan thinks. If we’re trying to convince Guero Mendez that we’re sitting ducks, we’re doing a damn fine job of it.

What you got out there is a bunch of kids with stacks of luggage and shopping bags on the sidewalk outside the terminal, and Raul is trying to establish some kind of order, and Adan has just pulled up with a few of his people and it looks like nothing more than a high school field trip headed home on that last chaotic day. And the boys are laughing and hollering at each other, and Raul is trying to figure out with the attendant at the outside counter whether they should check the bags at the curb or bring them inside, and Dreamer goes to find a couple of luggage carts and tells Flaco to come with him to help and Flaco’s yelling at Poptop, “How could you lose your fucking ticket, pendejo?” and Poptop looks like he’s going to puke again, but what comes out of his mouth isn’t puke, it’s blood, and then he crumples onto the curb.

Callan’s already flat on the sidewalk, tracking a green Buick with gun barrels sticking out the side windows. He pulls out his. 22 and fires two shots at the Buick. Then he rolls behind another parked car just as a burst from an AK blasts the sidewalk in front of where he just was, sending bullets bouncing off the concrete and into the terminal wall.

Stupid fucking Scooby Doo is standing there sucking on his Slurpee straw, watching like it’s some video game with really radical graphics. He’s trying to remember if they ever left the mall and exactly which game this is but it must have cost a ton of tokens because it’s so lifelike. Callan dashes out from behind the relative safety of the van, grabs Scooby and throws him to the concrete, and the Slurpee spills all over the pavement and it’s a raspberry Slurpee so it’s hard to tell it from Poptop’s blood, which is also spreading across the concrete.

Raul, Fabian and Adan drop black equipment bags to the ground and pull AKs out of them, then lift the rifles to their shoulders and start shooting at the Buick.

The bullets bounce off the car-even the windshield-so Callan figures that the car is armored, but he squeezes off two shots, then drops down and can just see the opposite doors of the Buick opening and Guero and two other guys with rifles getting out, and then they lean against the car and rest their AKs on top and let loose.

Callan goes into that zone where he can’t hear anything-it is just perfect silence in his head as he sees Guero, takes careful aim at his head and is about to squeeze him out of the world-when a white car pulls right into the line of fire. The driver seems oblivious to what’s going on, like he’s happened upon some on-location movie and is pissed off and determined to get to the airport anyway, so the car pulls past the Buick and over to the curb about twenty feet in front of it.

Which really seems to get Fabian going.

He spots the white Marquis and makes for it, running sideways past the Buick, blasting at it as he does, and Callan figures that Fabian has the white car lamped for a new carload of Guero’s sicarios, and Fabian is fighting his way toward it so Callan tries to lay down some cover fire but the white car is in the line of fire and he doesn’t want to shoot just in case these are civilians and not more of Guero’s boys.

But now there are bullets hitting the Buick from the other side, and out of the corner of his eye Callan can make out some of the fake Jalisco cops training fire onto the car, which forces Guero and his hitters to squat down behind it, so Fabian survives his charge toward the white Marquis.

Parada doesn’t even see him coming. He’s too focused on the scene of bloodshed playing out in front of him. Bodies are splayed all over the sidewalk, some lying motionless, others crawling on their stomachs, dragging their legs behind them, and Parada can’t tell if they’re wounded or dead or just trying to take cover from the bullets that are flying everywhere. Then he looks out the window and sees a young man lying on his back with bubbles of blood gurgling out of his mouth and his eyes open in pain and terror, and Parada knows this young man is dying, so he starts to get out of the car to give him the last rites.

Pablo, his driver, tries to grab him and hold him back, but he’s a small man and Parada easily shrugs him off and yells, “Get out of here!” But Pablo won’t leave him there, so he huddles as far as he can under the steering wheel and puts his hands over his ears as Parada opens the door and gets out, just as Fabian gets there and points his gun into the priest’s chest.

Callan sees him.

You dumb fuck, he thinks, that’s the wrong guy. He watches as Parada squeezes his large body out of the car, straightens up and starts toward Poptop, and he watches as Fabian steps in the way and raises his AK. Callan stands straight up and yells, “No!”

Leaps over the hood of the car and races toward Fabian, yelling, “Fabian, no! That's not him!”

Fabian glances over at Callan, and as he does Parada grabs the rifle and manages to turn the barrel down toward the ground, and now Fabian tries to lift it again and squeezes the trigger and the first shot hits Parada in the ankle and the next one in the knee but the adrenaline is coursing through Parada and he doesn’t even feel it, never mind let go of the gun.

Because he wants to live. Feels it now more strongly, more urgently than ever in his life. Feels that life is good, the air is sweet and there is so much he still has to do, wants to do. Wants to get to that dying young man and soothe his soul before he goes. Wants to listen to more jazz. Wants to see Nora smile. Wants another cigarette, another good meal. Wants to kneel in sweet, soft prayer to his Lord. But not walk with Him, not yet, too much to do, so he fights. Holds on to the gun barrel with his whole life.

Fabian lowers his head and lifts his foot and plants it right on the crucifix on Parada’s chest and kicks, sending the priest sprawling back against the car, and then Fabian lifts the gun’s barrel again and sends fifteen bullets smashing into Parada’s chest.

Parada feels his life draining out of him as his body slides down the side of the car.

Callan kneels down by the dying priest.

The man looks up at him and mumbles something Callan can’t make out.

“What?” Callan asks. “What did you say?”

“I forgive you,” Parada murmurs.

“What?”

“God forgives you.”

The priest starts to make the sign of the cross, then his hand drops and his body jerks and he’s gone.

Callan kneels there, looking down at the dead priest, as Fabian raises his rifle, aims and deliberately puts two more shots into the side of Parada’s head.

Blood sprays onto the white paint of the car.

And hunks of Parada’s white hair.

Callan turns around and says, “He was already dead.”

Fabian ignores him, reaches into the front seat of the car, pulls out a briefcase and walks away with it. Callan sits down and cradles Parada’s shattered head in his arms and, crying like a baby, asks over and over again, “What did you say? What did you say?”

He’s oblivious to the battle going on around him.

Doesn’t care.

Adan does.

He doesn’t see Parada get killed; he’s a little busy completing the execution of Guero Mendez, who’s ducked behind the Buick, just realizing that he has fucked up. Two of his guys are already down and the car, even though it’s armored, is vibrating with the number of bullets hitting it and isn’t going to hold up much longer. A lot of the glass has finally shattered and the tires are shot out and it’s only a matter of time before the gas tank explodes. He’s badly outnumbered by the Barrera hit squad disguised as Jalisco cops, and this whole kiddie brigade bullshit was just that-bullshit. And now they’ve got him on three sides and if they can make it around to the fourth-behind the Buick-it’s over. He’s dead. And while he’d be perfectly happy to go if he could take Adan and Raul with him, it’s pretty clear now that isn’t going to happen, so the thing is to boogie the fuck out of there and try again another time.

But getting out isn’t going to be easy. He decides he has about one chance, and he takes it. He reaches into the backseat of the car and pulls out a tear-gas grenade and lofts it over the Buick toward the Barreras, then yells to his surviving four men to make a break for it, and they do, running parallel to the terminal, shooting as they go.

Adan’s hit squad has a lot of hardware, but gas masks they don’t have, and they start retching and coughing and Adan feels like his eyes are on fire and struggles to stay on his feet then decides that because he can’t see and there are bullets zipping around, maybe that isn’t such a good idea, so he lets himself drop to his knees.

Raul doesn’t.

Eyes on fire, nose burning, he charges toward the fleeing Mendez group, shooting from the hip. One of bursts takes Mendez’s chief sicario in the spine and drops him, but Raul watches in frustration as Mendez makes it to a parked taxi, throws the driver out on the pavement and gets behind the wheel, waiting just long enough for his three surviving tiros to jump in before he peels out.

Raul fires at the car but can’t hit the wheels and Guero speeds out of the parking lot, ducking low, his head just high enough to see, as the Jalisco cops who weren’t hit by the tear gas fire away at the rapidly disappearing taxi.

“Son of a fucking bitch!” Raul yells.

He turns to his right and sees Callan sitting there, holding Parada’s body in his arms.

Raul thinks that Callan has been hit. The man is crying and there’s blood all over him and, whatever else Raul is, he’s not ungrateful, he remembers his debts, so he squats down to pick Callan up.

“Come on!” Raul yells. “ We have to get you out of here!”

Callan doesn’t answer.

Raul smacks him on the back of the head with his gun butt, hauls him to his feet and pulls him toward the terminal. Yelling as he does, “Come on, everyone! We have a plane to catch!”

Out on the tarmac, Aeromexico Flight 211 to Tijuana is already fifteen minutes late taking off.

But the flight waits.

The “Jalisco cops” peel off their uniforms to reveal civilian clothing underneath, toss their guns on the sidewalk and calmly walk toward the departure gate. Then the Barreras and the surviving gangbangers and the professional hit squad enter the terminal. They have to step over bodies to get there-not only Poptop’s and Mendez’s two shooters’, but also six bystanders hit in the cross fire. The terminal is bedlam, people crying and screaming, medical personnel trying to sort out the wounded and Cardinal Antonucci standing in the middle of all this shouting, “Calm down! Calm down! What’s happened? Will someone tell me what’s happened?!”

He’s afraid to go out and see for himself. He has a sick, sinking feeling in his stomach, and it isn’t fair that he is in this position. All Scachi had asked him to do was to meet with Parada, that was all, and now there is this scene, and he feels a shamed relief when a young man strolls by him and answers his question.

“We gassed Guero Mendez!” Dreamer tells him. “El Tiburon gassed Mendez!”

The Barrera group walks calmly down the passageway toward their flight and lines up to hand the gate attendant their tickets, just like they would for any normal old flight. The attendant takes the tickets and hands them back their boarding passes and then they walk up the gangway and get on the plane. Adan Barrera is still carrying his equipment bag with the AK in it, but it’s just like any carry-on, especially as he’s in first class.

The only problem is when Raul gets to the gate with the unconscious Callan draped over his shoulder.

The attendant’s voice shakes as she says, “He can’t get on like that.”

“He has a ticket,” Raul says.

“But-”

“First class,” Raul says. He hands her their tickets and walks right past her up the gangway. Finds Callan’s assigned seat and dumps him in it, then covers up his blood-soaked shirt with a blanket and says to the shocked flight attendant, “Too much partying.”

Adan sits down next to Fabian, who looks at the pilot and asks, “What are you waiting for?”

The pilot closes the cabin door behind him.

When the plane lands, they’re immediately met by airport police and escorted through a back entrance into waiting cars. And Raul issues one order:

Scatter.

Callan don’t need to be told that.

He gets dropped off at his house, where he stays long enough to shower, change out of his bloody clothes, pick up his money and go. Takes a taxi to the border crossing at San Ysidro and walks over the bridge, back into the United States. Just another drunk gringo coming back from a bender on Avenida Revolucion.

He’s been gone nine years.

Now he’s back in the country where, as Sean Callan, he’s wanted for conspiracy to distribute narcotics, racketeering, extortion and murder. He doesn’t care. He’d rather take his chances here than spend another minute in Mexico. So he walks over the border and gets on the bright red trolley and rides it all the way into downtown San Diego.

It takes him about an hour and a half to find a gun shop, on the corner of Fourth and J, and buy a. 22 in the back room without showing any papers. Then he finds a liquor store and buys a bottle of scotch, then walks over to an SRO hotel and takes a room for a week.

Locks himself in his room and starts drinking.

I forgive you, is what the priest had said.

God forgives you.

Nora’s in her bedroom when she hears the news.

She’s reading, with CNN on for background noise, when her ear catches the words, “When we come back, the tragic death of Mexico’s highest-ranking cleric…”

Her heart stops, and there’s a pounding in her head and she hits the speed dial for Juan’s number as she sits through the endless commercials-hoping, praying that he’ll answer the phone, that it’s not him, that he’ll pick up the phone-Please, God, don’t let it be him-but when the news comes back on there’s an old, posed photo of him on one half of the screen and the scene from the airport on the other and she sees him lying on the pavement and she doesn’t scream.

Her mouth opens, but no sound comes out.

On a normal day, the Cross of Squares in Guadalajara is filled with tourists, lovers and locals out for a midday stroll. On a normal day, the walls of the cathedral are lined with stands where hawkers sell crosses, rosary cards, plaster models of saints, and milagros, tiny clay sculptures of knees, elbows and other body parts that people who feel they’ve been cured by prayer leave in the cathedral as a memorial.

But this isn’t a normal day. Today is the funeral Mass for Cardinal Parada, and now the twin yellow-tiled steeples of the cathedral loom over a plaza crowded with thousands of mourners, lined up in a serpentine formation, standing for hours to walk past the coffin of the martyred cardinal to pay their respects.

They’ve come from all over Mexico. Many are the sophisticated Tapatios, in expensive suits and stylish, if subdued, dresses. Others have come from the countryside, campesinos in freshly cleaned white shirts and frocks. Others have made the trip from Culiacan and Badiraguato, and these men wear cowboy garb, and many of them were christened by Parada, received their First Communion from him, were married by him, watched their parents be buried by him when he was still just a rural priest. Then there are the government bureaucrats in gray and black suits, and priests and bishops in their clerical uniforms and hundreds of nuns in the varied habits of their particular orders.

On a normal day the plaza is alive with sound-the rapid-fire chatter of Mexican conversation, the shouts of hawkers, the music from busking mariachi groups-but today the plaza is strangely silent. All that can be heard are the murmurs of prayers, and darker mutterings about conspiracies.

Because few in the crowd believe what is now the government’s explanation of Parada’s death, that he was a victim of mistaken identity, that the Barreras’ sicarios mistook Parada for Guero Mendez.

But the talk of conspiracy is subdued. Today is a day of mourning, and the thousands who wait patiently in the serpentine line and then move into the cathedral do so mostly in silence or in quiet prayer.

Art Keller is one of them.

The more he learns about Father Juan’s death, the more troubled he is about it. Parada was riding in a white Marquis, Mendez in a green Buick; Parada was wearing a black sourtane with a prominent pectoral cross (now missing), Mendez was garbed in full Sinaloa cowboy chic.

How could anyone mistake a 6'4?, sixty-two-year-old, white-haired man wearing a soutane and a crucifix for a 5'10” blond guy wearing narco-cowboy gear? At point-blank range? How could an experienced killer like Fabian Martinez do that? Why was an airplane waiting? How could Adan and Raul and all their hitters get on board? How could they get off in Tijuana and get escorted right out of the airport?

And why, even though dozens of witnesses described a man identical to Adan Barrera at the airport and on the plane, did a Father Rivera in Tijuana-the Barreras’ family priest-come forward to announce that Adan Barrera was the godfather at a christening performed at the exact time that Parada was gunned down?

The priest even displayed the baptismal records, with Adan’s name and signature.

And who was the mysterious Yanqui a dozen witnesses saw cradling Parada’s body? Who was carried on the plane with the Barreras and has since dropped out of sight?

Art says a quick prayer-there are people in line behind him-and finds a seat in the crowded cathedral.

The funeral Mass is long and moving. Person after person stands up to speak about what Father Juan had done in their lives, and the sound of weeping fills the large space. The atmosphere is quiet, mournful, respectful, subdued.

Until the president gets up to speak.

He had to be there, of course, the president and the entire cabinet and a score of other government officials, and as he gets up and walks to the pulpit an expectant silence falls over the crowd. And El Presidente clears his throat and begins, “A criminal act has taken the life of a good, clean and generous man-”

And that’s as far as he gets because someone in the crowd shouts, “?Justicia!”

Justice.

And then someone else picks it up, and then another and within seconds thousands of people in the cathedral and then thousands more outside start to chant “Justicia, justicia, justicia-“

– and El Presidente steps back from the microphone with an understanding smile as he waits for the chant to stop, but it doesn’t stop “Justicia, justicia, justicia-” it just gets louder “JUSTICIA, JUSTICIA, JUSTICIA-“

– and the secret police start to get nervous, whispering to each other in their little microphones and earpieces, but it’s hard to hear over the chant of “JUSTICIA, JUSTICIA, JUSTICIA-“

– which builds and builds until two of the police nervously hustle El Presidente away from the microphone and out a side door of the cathedral and into his armored limousine, but the shouts follow him as his car pulls out of the plaza “JUSTICIA, JUSTICIA, JUSTICIA-“

Most of the government men are gone by the time Parada is interred in the cathedral.

Art hadn’t joined in the chanting, but sat there in amazement as the people in that church declared that they’d had enough of the corruption and faced the powerful leader of their country and demanded justice. And he thought, Well, you’ll get it if I have anything to do with it.

Now he gets up to stand in line to file past the casket. He carefully maneuvers his place in line.

Nora Hayden’s blond hair is covered with a black shawl, her body draped in a black dress. Even with all that she’s still beautiful. He kneels beside her, puts his hands up in prayer and whispers, “Pray for his soul and sleep with his killer?”

She doesn’t answer.

“How can you live with yourself?” Art says, then gets up.

He walks away from her soft crying.

By morning the national commander of the entire MJFP, General Rodolfo Leon, is flying to Tijuana with fifty specially selected elite agents, and by afternoon they’ve broken into heavily armed, combat-ready squads of six officers each, sweeping the streets of Colonia Chapultepec in armored Suburbans and Dodge Rams. By evening they’ve smashed into six Barrera safe houses, including Raul’s personal residence on Caco Sur, where they find a cache of AK-47s, pistols, fragmentation grenades and two thousand rounds of ammunition. In the enormous garage they find six armor-plated black Suburbans. By the end of the week they’ve arrested twenty-five Barrera associates, seized over eighty houses, warehouses and ranches belonging to either the Barreras or Guero Mendez and arrested ten of the airport security police who escorted the Barreras off Flight 211.

In Guadalajara, a squad of real Jalisco State Police stumbles on a pickup truck full of fake Jalisco police, and a chase through the city ends with two of the fake cops being trapped inside a house and shooting it out with over a hundred Jalisco cops all night and into the morning, when one is killed and the other surrenders, but not before they’ve killed two of the real police and wounded the commander of the state police force.

The following morning, El Presidente goes in front of the cameras to declare his determination to crush the drug cartels once and for all, and to announce that they’ve just exposed and fired and will criminally charge over seventy corrupt MJFP officers, and he offers a $5 million reward for information leading to the capture of Adan and Raul Barrera and Guero Mendez, all of whom are still on the loose, whereabouts unknown.

Because even with the army, the federales, and every state police force scouring the country, they can’t find Guero, Raul or Adan.

Because they aren’t there.

Guero’s across the border in Guatemala.

And the Barreras have also crossed the border.

Into the United States.

They’re living in La Jolla.

Fabian finds Flaco and Dreamer living under the Laurel Street Bridge in Balboa Park.

The cops couldn’t find them, but Fabian hit the barrio and people told him stuff they weren’t going to tell the cops. They tell him because they know if they stone the cops, the cops might harass them and shit, but if they stone Fabian, he’ll fucking kill their asses, and that is the cold truth.

So Flaco and Dreamer are dozing one night under the bridge when Flaco feels a shoe dig into his ribs and he jumps, thinking it’s a cop or a fag, but it’s Fabian.

So he looks up at Fabian with big eyes because he’s half-afraid the tiro is going to put a bullet into him, but Fabian smiles and says, “Hermanitos, it’s time to show you have heart.”

And he thumps his chest with the inside of his fist.

“What you want us to do?” Flaco asks.

“Adan is reaching out to you,” Fabian answers. “He wants you to go back to Mexico.”

He explains how the Barreras are taking all the heat from the death of that priest, how the federales are putting pressure on them, busting their safe houses, arresting people, and how it’s not going to settle down until they get someone who was involved in the shooting.

“You go down and get yourselves arrested,” Fabian says, “and you tell them the truth-we were going after Guero Mendez, he ambushed us instead, and Fabian mistook Parada for Guero and shot him by accident. Nobody ever meant for Parada to get hurt. One of those things.”

“I don’t know, man,” Dreamer says.

“Look,” Fabian answers, “you’re kids. And you didn’t do the shooting. You’ll only get a few years, and while you’re in, your families will be taken care of like royalty. And when you get out, you’ve had the appreciation and respect of Adan Barrera in the bank, earning interest for you. Flaco, your mother is a maid in a motel, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Not anymore she isn’t,” Fabian says, “if you show heart.”

“I don’t know,” Dreamer says. “Mexican cops…”

“Tell you what,” Fabian says. “That reward for Guero? That fifty thousand. You two split it, tell us who to bring it to and it’s done.”

Both boys say they want the money to go to their mothers.

As they get near the border, Flaco’s legs are shaking so hard he’s afraid that Fabian can see them. His knees are literally knocking together and he can’t seem to stop them, and his eyes are filled with tears and he can’t stop the tears from spilling over. He’s ashamed, even though he can hear Dreamer sniffling in the backseat.

When they get near the crossing, Fabian pulls over to let them out.

“You got heart,” he tells them. “You’re warriors.”

They make it through Immigration and Customs with no problem and start walking south into the city. They get about two blocks when searchlights hit them in the face, blinding them, and the federales are yelling and telling them to get their hands up and Flaco throws his hands up high. Then a cop grabs him, throws him to the ground and cuffs his hands tight behind his back.

So Flaco’s lying there in the dirt, his back arched painfully because his arms are pulled back so hard, but then that pain don’t seem like nothing because the federale spits on his face then kicks him hard, right in the ear, with the toe of his combat boot, and Flaco feels like his eardrum has just exploded.

Pain goes off like fireworks inside Flaco’s head.

Then, from a long way away, he hears a voice tell him It’s just the beginning, mi hijo.

We’re just getting started.

Nora’s phone rings and she picks it up.

It’s Adan.

“I want to see you.”

“Go to hell.”

“It was an accident,” he says. “A mistake. Give me a chance to explain it to you. Please.”

She wants to hang up, detests herself for not hanging up, but she doesn’t hang up. Instead, she agrees to meet him that night on the beach at La Jolla Shores, by Lifeguard Tower 38.

Under the dim light of the tower he sees her coming. She looks like she’s alone.

“You know I put my life in your hands,” he says. “If you called the police…”

“He was your priest,” she says. “Your friend. My friend. How could you-”

He shakes his head. “I wasn’t even there. I was at a christening in Tijuana. It was an accident, a cross fire-”

“That’s not what the police are saying.”

“Mendez owns the police.”

“I hate you, Adan.”

“Don’t say that, please.”

He looks so sad, she thinks. Lonely, desperate. She wants to believe him.

“Swear,” she says. “Swear to me you’re telling the truth.”

“I swear it.”

“On your daughter’s life.”

He can’t bear losing her.

He nods. “I swear.”

She reaches her arms out and he holds her. “God, Adan, I’m so miserable.”

“I know.”

“I loved him.”

“I know,” Adan says. “So did I.”

And the sad thing is, he thinks, that’s the truth.

They must be at a dump because Flaco smells garbage.

And it must be morning because he can feel faint sunlight on his face, even through the black hood. One of his eardrums is ruptured, but he can hear Dreamer pleading, “Please, please, no, no, please.. .”

A gunshot explodes and Flaco don’t hear Dreamer no more.

Then Flaco feels a gun barrel brush the side of his head, by his good ear. It makes little circles, like its holder wants to make sure Flaco knows what it is, then he hears the hammer click back.

Flaco screams.

A dry click.

Flaco loses it. His bladder lets go and he feels the hot urine run down his leg and his knees give out and he crumbles to the ground, squirming and twisting like a worm, trying to get away from the gun barrel at his head and then he hears the hammer go back and another dry click and then a voice says, “Maybe the next one, little pendejo, eh?”

Click.

Flaco messes his pants.

The federales whoop and holler. “God, what a stink! What you been eating, mierdita?”

Flaco hears the hammer click back again.

The gun roars.

The bullet plows into the dirt by his ear.

“Pick him up,” the voice says.

But the federales balk at touching the filthy kid. They finally hit on a solution-they take the hood off Dreamer and the gag out of his mouth and make him pull off Flaco’s soiled pants and underwear, and they give him a wet rag to wipe the shit off his friend.

Flaco murmurs to him, “I’m sorry. Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

Then they put both of them into the back of the van and take them back to their cell. Throw them on the bare concrete floor, slam the door shut and actually leave them alone for a while.

The boys lie on the floor and cry.

An hour later a federale comes back in and Flaco starts to tremble uncontrollably.

But the federale just tosses them each a pad of paper and a pencil and tells them to start writing.

Their stories hit the papers the next morning.

Confirmation of what the MJFP thought had happened in the Parada case-the cardinal was the victim of mistaken identity, killed because American gang members mistook him for Guero Mendez.

El Presidente gets back on television with General Leon at his side to announce that this news only strengthens his administration’s resolve to wage a merciless war against the drug cartels. They will not stop until these thugs are punished and the narcotraficantes are destroyed.

Flaco’s tongue lolls lazily from his mouth.

His face is dark blue.

He hangs by the neck from the steam pipe that runs across the ceiling in his cell.

Dreamer dangles next to him.

The coroner returns with a verdict of double suicide: The young men couldn’t live with the guilt of killing Cardinal Parada. The coroner never deals with the unexplained blunt-trauma blows on the backs of their heads.

San Diego

Art waits on the American side of the border.

The terrain looks strangely green through the night-vision scopes. It’s a strange piece of ground anyway, he thinks. No-man's-land, the desolate stretch of dusty hills and deep canyons that lies between Tijuana and San Diego.

Every night a weird game is played out here. Just before dusk, the would-be mojados gather above the dry drainage canal that runs along the border, waiting for darkness. As if on a signal, they all rush across at once. It’s a numbers game-the illegals know that the Border Patrol can stop only so many, so the rest will get through to find the sub-minimum wage jobs picking fruit, washing dishes, working on farms.

But this night’s mad scramble is already over, and Art has made sure that the Border Patrol has been cleared from this sector. A defector is coming over from the other side, and even though he’s going to be a guest of the United States government, he can’t come across at any of the regular stations. It would be too dangerous-the Barreras have spotters who watch the checkpoints 24/7, and Art can’t take the chance that his man might be spotted.

He checks his watch and doesn’t like what he sees. It’s 1:10 and his man is ten minutes late. It could just be the difficulty of negotiating the treacherous terrain at night. His guy could be lost in one of the numerous box canyons, or come up the wrong ridge, or…

Stop kidding yourself, he says. Ramos is with him, and Ramos knows this territory like it’s his backyard, which it pretty much is.

Maybe Ramos didn’t get to him, and the guy decided to keep his lot in with the Barreras. Maybe he just chickened out, changed his mind. Or maybe Ramos didn’t get to him first, and he’s lying in a ditch somewhere with a bullet in the back of his head. Or, more likely, shot in the mouth, as informers usually are.

Just then he sees a flashlight blink three times.

He blinks his own twice, flips the safety of his service revolver off and walks down into the canyon, the flashlight in one hand, the gun in the other. In a minute he can make out two figures, one tall and thick, the other shorter and much thinner.

The priest looks miserable. He’s not wearing a soutane or collar, but a hooded Nike sweatshirt, jeans and running shoes. Which are, Art thinks, appropriate.

He looks cold and scared.

“Father Rivera?” Art asks.

Rivera nods.

Ramos slaps him on the back. “Cheer up, Father. You made a good choice. The Barreras would have killed you sooner or later.”

Or at least that’s what they’d wanted him to believe. It was Ramos, at Art’s urging, who had made the approach. Found the priest out on his morning jog, trotted beside him and asked him if he liked the smell of fresh air and wanted to breathe more. Then showed him photos of some of the men Raul had tortured to death, and added cheerfully that they would probably just shoot him, being a priest and all.

But they can’t let you live, Padre, Ramos had told him. You know too much. You miserable, lying, ass-licking excuse for a holy man. I can save you, though, Ramos added when the man started to cry. But it has to be soon-tonight-and you’ll have to trust me.

“He’s right,” Art says now. He nods to Ramos, and if a man’s eyes can actually smirk, Ramos’ are smirking.

“Adios, viejo,” Ramos says to Art.

“Adios, my old friend.”

Art takes Rivera by the wrist and gently walks him back toward his vehicle. The priest allows himself to be led like a child.

Chalino Guzman, aka El Verde, patron of the Sonora cartel, arrives at his favorite restaurant in Ciudad Juarez for breakfast. He comes here every morning to have his huevos rancheros with flour tortillas, and if it weren’t for the distinctive green lizard-skin boots, you’d think he was just another dry-country farmer scraping out a living from the hard, sun-baked red soil.

But the waiters know better. They usher him to his regular table on the patio and bring him his coffee and morning newspaper. And they take thermoses of hot coffee out to his sicarios, who sit in parked cars in front of the restaurant.

Just across the border is the Texas town of El Paso, through which El Verde ships tons of cocaine, marijuana and even a little heroin. Now he sits down and looks at the newspaper. He can’t read, but he likes pretending that he can, and anyway, he enjoys looking at the pictures.

He glances over the top of the paper and watches one of his sicarios walk up to a Ford Bronco parked out in front to tell it to move along. El Verde is a trifle annoyed-most of the locals know the rules this time of the morning. This must be an out-of-towner, he thinks as the sicario taps on the window.

Then the bomb goes off and rips El Verde to pieces.

Don Francisco Uzueta-aka Garcia Abrego, head of the Gulf cartel and patron of the Federacion-rides a palomino stallion at the head of the parade in the annual festival of his small village of Coquimatlan. He has the stallion in full parade trot, its hooves clapping on the cobblestones of the narrow street, and he’s decked out in full vaquero costume, as befits the patron of the village. He sweeps his bejeweled sombrero in acknowledgment of the cheers.

And well they should cheer-Don Francisco built the village clinic, the school, the playground. He even paid to air-condition the new police station.

So now he smiles at the people and graciously accepts their gratitude and love. He recognizes individuals in the crowd and makes a special point to wave to children. He doesn’t see the barrel of the M-60 machine gun as it pokes out of a second-story window.

The first short burst of. 50-caliber bullets takes the smile along with the rest of his face. The second burst rips his chest open. The palomino whinnies in terror, rears up and starts to buck.

Abrego’s dead hand still clutches the reins.

Mario Aburto, a twenty-three-year-old mechanic, stands in the large crowd that day in the poor neighborhood of Lomas Taurinas, near the Tijuana airport.

Lomas Taurinas is a squatters’ colony of improvised shacks and huts hidden in a ravine of the bare, muddy mountains that flank the east side of Tijuana. In Lomas Taurinas, when you’re not choking on dust, you’re slipping in the mud that pours down from the eroded hills, sometimes taking the shacks with it. Until recently, running water meant that you built your shack over one of the thousands of rivulets-water runs literally through your house-but the colonia recently received piped water and electricty as a reward for its loyalty to the PRI. But still, much of the muddy ground is an open sewer and slow-flowing garbage dump.

Luis Donaldo Colosio is flanked by fifteen plainclothes soldiers from the elite Estado Mayor, the presidential bodyguards. A special squad of ex-Tijuana cops, hired to provide security for the local campaign stops, are interspersed in the crowd. The candidate speaks from the bed of a pickup truck parked in a sort of natural amphitheater at the bottom of the ravine.

Ramos watches from the slope, his STG stationed at various points around the bowl of the amphitheater. It’s a difficult task-the crowd is large and raucous and flowing like mud. The people had mobbed Colosio’s red Chevy Blazer as it made slow progress up the one street into the neighborhood, and now Ramos is worried that the same thing will happen when Colosio goes to leave.

“It will be a goat fuck,” he says to himself.

But Colosio doesn’t get back in his car when the speech ends.

Instead, he decides to walk.

To “swim among the people,” as he puts it.

“He’s going to do what?” Ramos yells into his radio at General Reyes, the commander of the army guard.

“He’s going to walk.”

“That’s crazy!”

“It’s what he wants.”

“If he does that,” Ramos says, “we can’t protect him!”

Reyes is a member of the Mexican general staff and second-in-command of the presidential bodyguard. He’s not going to take orders from some grimy Tijuana cop. “It’s not your job to protect him,” he sniffs. “It’s ours.”

Colosio overhears the exchange.

“Since when,” he asks, “do I need protection from the people?”

Ramos watches helplessly as Colosio dives into the sea of people.

“Heads up! Heads up!” he radios his men, but he knows there’s little any of them can do. Although his men are fine marksmen, they can barely even see Colosio as he bobs in and out of the crowd, never mind get a shot at a potential assassin. Not only can they not see, they can barely hear, as speakers mounted on a truck start to blare the local Baja cumbia music.

So Ramos doesn’t hear the shot.

He just barely sees Mario Aburto push his way through the bodyguards, grab Colosio’s right shoulder, press the. 38 pistol to the right side of his head and pull the trigger.

Ramos starts to fight his way down as chaos erupts.

Some people in the crowd grab Aburto and start to beat him.

General Reyes takes the fallen Colosio in his arms and starts to carry him to a car. One of his men, a plainclothes major, grabs Aburto by the shirt collar and pulls him through the crowd. Blood spatters on the major’s collar as someone hits Aburto in the head with a rock, but now the Estado Mayor squad forms around the major like football linemen around a runner, bulldozes through the mob and shoves the assassin into a black Suburban.

As Ramos makes his way toward the Suburban, he sees that an ambulance has managed to drive in, and he sees Reyes and the EMTs lift Colosio into the back. That’s when Ramos sees the second wound in Colosio’s left side-the man was shot not once, but twice.

The ambulance howls and takes off.

The black Suburban starts to do the same, but Ramos raises Esposa and points it right at the army major sitting in the front seat.

“Tijuana police!” Ramos yells. “Identify yourself!”

“Estado Mayor! Get out of our way!” the major yells back.

He pulls his pistol.

It’s a bad idea. Twelve STG rifles are aimed at his head.

Ramos approaches the car from the passenger side. Now he can see the alleged assassin on the floor of the backseat, between three plainclothes soldiers who are shoving him down and beating him.

Ramos looks at the major in the front seat. “Open the door, I’m getting in.”

“The hell you are.”

“I want that man to arrive at the police station alive!”

“It’s none of your goddamn business! Get out of our way!”

Ramos turns to his men.

“If the car moves, kill them!”

He lifts Esposa and with the butt smashes through the passenger window. As the major ducks, Ramos reaches in, unlocks the door, opens it and gets in. Now he has Esposa’s barrel pointed at the major’s stomach; the major has his pistol pointed at Ramos’ face.

“What?” the major asks. “Do you think I’m Jack Ruby?”

“I’m just making sure you’re not. I want this man to make it to the station alive.”

“We’re taking him to federal police headquarters,” the major says.

“As long as he gets there alive,” Ramos repeats.

The major lowers his pistol and tells his driver, “Let’s go.”

A crowd arrives at Tijuana General before Colosio’s ambulance does. The weeping, praying people have gathered on the front steps, shouting Colosio’s name and holding up his picture. The ambulance brings Colosio around the back and into a waiting operating room. A helicopter has landed on the street, its rotors spinning, ready to fly the wounded man to a special trauma center across the border in San Diego.

It never makes the trip.

Colosio is already dead.

Bobby.

It’s too much like Bobby, Art thinks.

The lone gunman-the alienated, isolated nut. The two wounds, one in the right side, the other on the left.

“How did this Aburto kid do that?” Art asks Shag. “He fires from point-blank range into the right side of Colosio’s head, then shoots him again in the left side of his stomach? How?”

“Just like RFK,” Shag answers. “The victim spins when the first bullet hits.”

Shag demonstrates, snapping his head back and rotating to the left as he falls to the floor.

“That would work,” Art says, “except the trajectory of the bullets have them coming from opposite directions.”

“Oh, here we go.”

“Okay,” Art says. “We bust Guero’s tunnel and it’s connected to the Fuentes brothers, who are big supporters of Colosio. Then Colosio comes to Tijuana, the Barreras’ turf, and gets killed. Call me crazy, Shag.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” Shag says. “But I think you have this Barrera obsession, ever since…”

He stops. Stares at the desk.

Art finishes the thought for him. “Ever since they killed Ernie.”

“Yeah.”

“And you don’t?”

“I do,” Shag says. “I want to get them all, the Barreras and Mendez. But, boss, at a certain level, I mean… at some point you have to let this go.”

He’s right, Art thinks.

Of course he’s right. And I’d like to let it go. But wanting to and doing are two very different things, and letting go of this “Barrera obsession,” as Shag puts it, is something I just can’t do.

“I’m telling you,” he says, “when all this shakes out, we’re going to find out that the Barreras were behind this.”

No doubt in my mind.

Guero Mendez lies on a gurney at a private hospital, where three of the best plastic surgeons in Mexico are getting ready to give him a new face. A new face, he thinks, dyed hair, a new name, and I can resume my war against the Barreras.

A war he will certainly win, with the new president on his side.

He settles back on his pillow as the nurse preps him.

“Are you ready to go to sleep?” she asks.

He nods. Ready to go to sleep, and wake up a new man.

She takes a syringe, removes the little rubber cap and places the needle against a vein in his arm, then pushes the plunger on the syringe. She strokes his face as the drug starts to take effect, then says softly, “Colosio is dead.”

“What did you say?”

“I have a message from Adan Barrera-your man Colosio is dead.”

Guero tries to get up but his body won’t obey his mind.

“This is called Dormicum,” the nurse says. “A massive dose-call it a 'lethal injection.’ When your eyes close this time, they’ll never open again.”

He tries to scream, but no sound comes out of his mouth. He fights to stay awake, but he can feel it slipping away from him-his consciousness, his life. He struggles against the restraints, tries to get a hand free to rip off the mask and scream for help, but his muscles won’t respond. Even his neck won’t turn, to shake his head no, no, no, as he feels his life draining out of him.

As if from a tremendous distance he hears the nurse say, “The Barreras say to rot in hell.”

Two guards roll a laundry cart, full of clean sheets and blankets, up to Miguel Angel Barrera’s suite of cells in Almoloya prison.

Tio climbs in and the guards throw a sheet over him and roll him out of the building, across the yards and out the gate.

That simple, that easy.

As promised.

Miguel Angel climbs out of the cart and walks to a waiting van.

Twelve hours later he’s living in retirement in Venezuela.

Three days before Christmas, Adan kneels before Cardinal Antonucci in his private study in Mexico City.

“The most wanted man in Mexico” listens to the papal nuncio chant, in Latin, absolution for him and Raul for their unintentional role in the accidental killing of Cardinal Juan Ocampo Parada.

Antonucci doesn’t give them absolution for the murders of El Verde, Abrego, Colosio and Mendez, Adan thinks, but the government has. In advance-it was all part of the quid pro quo for killing Parada.

If I kill your enemy, Adan had insisted, you must let me kill mine.

So it’s done, Adan thinks. Mendez is dead, the war is over, Tio has been whisked out of prison.

And I am the new patron.

The Mexican government has just restored the Holy Roman Catholic Church to full legal status. A briefcase full of incriminating information has passed from Adan Barrera to certain government ministers.

Adan leaves the room with an officially shiny-clean new soul.

Quid pro quo.

New Year’s Eve, Nora comes home from a dinner with Haley Saxon. She left even before they popped the corks on the champagne.

She’s just not in a party mood. The holidays have been depressing. It was her first Christmas in nine years that she didn’t spend with Juan.

She slips the key into her door and opens it, and as she steps inside, a hand clamps over her mouth. She digs into her purse and fumbles for the pepper spray but the bag is knocked out of her hand.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Art says. “Don’t scream.”

He slowly takes his hand off her mouth.

She turns and slaps him across the face, then says, “I’m calling the police.”

“I am the police.”

“I’m calling the real police.”

She walks to her phone and starts to dial.

He says, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a…”

She puts the phone down.

“That’s better.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to see something.”

“You have no idea how many times I’ve heard that.”

He takes a videocassette from his jacket pocket. “Do you have a VCR?”

She laughs. “Amateur videos? Swell. Are they of you, to impress me? Or are they of me? First threats, now blackmail. Let me tell you something, honey-I’ve seen a hundred of them, and I look pretty good on tape.”

She opens an armoire and shows him the TV and VCR. “Whatever turns you on.”

He pops in the tape and says, “Sit down.”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“I said sit down.”

“Oh, it’s the forceful thing.” She sits on the sofa. “Happy now? Turned on?”

“Watch.”

She’s smirking as the tape starts to run, but she stops as the image of a young priest comes on the screen. He’s sitting in a metal folding chair behind a metal table. A bar is displayed on the bottom of the screen, giving the date and time.

“Who’s this?” she asks.

“Father Esteban Rivera,” Keller answers. “Adan’s parish priest.”

She hears Art’s voice in the background, asking questions.

Feels her heart drop as she listens.

May 24, 1994, do you remember where you were?

Yes.

You were performing a christening, is that right?

Yes.

In your church in Tijuana.

Yes.

Take a look at this document.

Nora sees a hand slide a paper across the table at the priest. He picks it up, looks at it and puts it back on the table.

Do you recognize that?

Yes.

What is it?

Baptismal records.

Adan Barrera is listed as the godfather. Do you see that?

Yes.

That’s your handwriting, isn’t it?

Yes.

You entered Adan Barrera as the godfather and indicated that he was present at the christening, is that right?

I did that, yes.

But that’s not true, is it?

Nora can’t breathe during the long pause as Rivera contemplates his response.

No.

She feels sick to her stomach.

You lied about that.

Yes. I’m ashamed.

Who asked you to say that Adan was there?

He did.

Is that his signature, there?

Yes, it is.

When did he actually sign that?

It was a week before.

Nora leans over and puts her head between her knees.

Do you know where Adan was that day?

No, I don’t.

“But we do, don’t we?” Art says to Nora. He gets up, pops the tape out of the machine and puts it back in his pocket. “Happy New Year, Ms. Hayden.”

She doesn’t look up as he leaves.

New Year’s Day, Art wakes up to the sound of the television and a wicked hangover.

I must have left the damn thing on last night, he thinks. He shuts it off, goes into the bathroom, takes a couple of aspirin and chugs a large glass of water. Then he goes into the kitchen and puts on a pot of coffee.

He opens the door to the hallway while it brews and picks up his newspaper. Takes the paper and the coffee to the table in the living space of the sterile condo and sits down. It’s a clear winter day outside, and he can see San Diego Harbor just a few blocks away, and beyond that, Mexico.

Good riddance to 1994, he thinks. A bastard of a year.

May ’95 be better.

More guests at the gathering of the dead last night. The old regulars, and now Father Juan. Mowed down in the cross fire I created, trying to make peace in the war I started. He brought people with him, too. Kids. Two SD gangbangers, children of my own old barrio.

They all came to see the old year out.

Quite a party.

He looks at the front page of the paper and notes without much interest that NAFTA goes into effect today.

Well, congratulations, everybody, he thinks. Free trade shall bloom. Factories shall spring up like mushrooms just across the border, and underpaid Mexican labor shall make our tennis shoes, our designer clothes, our refrigerators and handy household appliances at prices we can afford.

We shall all be fat and happy, and what’s one dead priest compared to that?

Well, I’m glad you all have your treaty, he thinks.

But I sure as hell didn’t sign it.