The Border: The final gripping thriller in the bestselling Cartel trilogy

There’s no answer.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Keller says. “For the record, I wanted to kill Barrera, I wish I had killed him, but I didn’t.”

He gets up and walks out.

Taylor follows him. “Where are you going?”

“None of your business, Tim.”

“To Mexico?” Taylor asks.

“I’m not with DEA anymore,” Keller says. “I don’t work for you. You can’t tell me where to go or not to go.”

“They’ll kill you, Art,” Taylor says. “If the Zetas don’t, the Sinaloans will.”

Probably, Keller thinks.

But if I don’t go, they’ll kill me anyway.

He drives into El Paso, to the apartment he keeps near EPIC. Strips out of his filthy, sweaty clothes and takes a long, hot shower. Then he goes into the bedroom and lies down, suddenly aware that he hasn’t slept for coming on two days and that he’s exhausted, depleted.

But he’s too tired to sleep.

He gets up, throws on a white button-down shirt over jeans and takes the little Sig 380 compact out of the gun safe in the bedroom closet. Clips the holster onto his belt, puts on a navy-blue windbreaker as he’s headed out the door.

For Sinaloa.

Keller first came to Culiacán as a rookie DEA agent back in the ’70s, when the city was the epicenter of the Mexican heroin trade.

And now it is again, he thinks as he walks through the terminal toward the taxi stand. Everything has come full circle.

Adán Barrera was just a punk kid then, trying to make it as a boxing manager.

His uncle, though, a Sinaloa cop, was the second-biggest opium grower in Sinaloa, striving to become the biggest. That was back when we were burning and poisoning the poppy fields, Keller thinks, driving peasants from their homes, and Adán got caught up in one of those sweeps. The federales were going to throw him out of an airplane, but I intervened and saved his life.

The first, Keller thinks, of many mistakes.

The world would have been a much better place if I had let them go Rocky the Flying Squirrel on little Adán, instead of letting him live to become the world’s greatest drug lord.

But we were actually friends back then.

Friends and allies.

Hard to believe.

Harder to accept.

He gets into a cab and tells the driver to go into centro—downtown.

“Where exactly?” the driver asks, looking at his face in the rearview mirror.

“Doesn’t matter,” Keller says. “That will give you time to call your bosses and tell them a strange yanqui is in town.”

The cabdrivers in every Mexican city where there’s a strong narco presence are halcones—“falcons”—spies for the cartels. Their job is to watch the airports, train stations and streets and let the powers that be know who’s coming in and out of their town.

“I’ll save you some effort,” Keller says. “Tell whoever you’re going to call that you have Art Keller in your cab. They’ll tell you where to take me.”

The driver gets on his phone.

It takes several calls and the driver’s voice gets edgier with each one. Keller knows the drill—the driver will call his local cell leader, who will call his, who will kick it up the chain, and the name Art Keller will take it to the very top.

Keller looks out the window as the cab goes into town on Route 280 and sees the memorials left on the roadside to fallen narcos—mostly young men—killed in the drug wars. Some are simply bunches of flowers and a beer bottle set beside cheaply made wooden crosses, others are full-color banners with photographs of the deceased stretched between two poles, while others are elaborate marble stiles.

But there will be more memorials soon, he thinks, when news of the “Dos Erres Massacre” reaches the city. A hundred Sinaloan sicarios went down to Guatemala with Barrera; few, if any, are coming back.

And there will be memorials in the Zeta heartlands of Chihuahua and Tamaulipas in the country’s northeast, when their soldiers don’t return.

The Zetas are a spent force now, Keller knows. Once a genuine threat to take over the country, the paramilitary cartel made up of former special forces troops is now leaderless and hamstrung, its best people killed by Orduña or lying dead in Guatemala.

There is no one now to challenge Sinaloa.

“They say to take you to Rotarismo,” the driver says, sounding nervous.

Rotarismo is a neighborhood at the far northern edge of the city, hard by the empty hills and farmlands.

An easy place to dump a corpse.

“To an auto body shop,” the driver says.

All the better, Keller thinks.

The tools are already there.

To chop up a car or a body.

You can always spot a conclave of high-ranking narcos by the number of SUVs parked out front, and this has to be a major meeting, Keller thinks as they roll up, because a dozen Suburbans and Expeditions are lined up in front of the garage with guns poking out like porcupine quills.

The guns train on the cab and Keller thinks that the driver might piss himself.

“Tranquilo,” Keller says.

A few uniformed sicarios patrol on foot outside. It’s become a thing in every branch of all the cartels, Keller knows—they each have their own armed security forces with distinctive uniforms.

These wear Armani caps and Hermès vests.

Which Keller thinks is a little fey.

A man hustles out of the garage toward the cab, opens the rear passenger door and tells Keller to get the fuck out.

Keller knows the man. Terry Blanco is a high-ranking Sinaloa state cop. He’s been on the cartel’s payroll since he was a rookie and now there’s some silver in his black hair.

Blanco says, “You don’t know what’s going on around here.”

“It’s why I came,” Keller says.

“You know something?”

“Who’s inside?”

“Núñez,” Blanco says.

“Let’s go.”

“Keller, if you go in,” Blanco says, “you might not come back out.”

“Story of my life, Terry,” Keller says.

Blanco walks him through the garage, past the work bays and the lifts, to a large empty area of concrete floor that seems more like a warehouse.

It’s the same scene as the motel, Keller thinks.

Just different players.

Same action, though—people on phones, working laptops, trying to get information as to the whereabouts of Adán Barrera. The place is dark—no windows and thick walls—just what you want in a climate that is baking hot from the sun or chilled by the north wind. You don’t want the weather or prying eyes penetrating this place, and if anyone dies in here, goes out screaming or crying or pleading, the walls keep that inside.

Keller follows Blanco to a door in the back.

It opens to a small room.

Blanco ushers Keller in and shuts the door behind them.

A man Keller recognizes sits behind a desk, on the phone. Distinguished-looking with salt-and-pepper hair, a neatly trimmed goatee, wearing a houndstooth jacket and a knit tie, looking distinctly uncomfortable in the greasy atmosphere of a garage back room.

Ricardo Núñez.

El Abogado—“The Lawyer.”

A former state prosecutor, he had been the warden of Puente Grande prison, resigning his position just weeks before Barrera “escaped” back in 2004. Keller had questioned him and he pleaded total innocence, but he was disbarred and went on to become Barrera’s right-hand man, making, reportedly, hundreds of millions trafficking cocaine.

He clicks off the phone and looks up at Blanco. “Give us a moment, Terry?”

Blanco walks out.

“What are you doing here?” Núñez asks.

“Saving you the trouble of tracking me down,” Keller says. “You’re apparently aware of Guatemala.”

“Adán confided to me your arrangement,” Núñez says. “What happened down there?”

Keller repeats what he told the boys in Texas.

“You were supposed to have brought El Señor out,” Núñez says. “That was the arrangement.”

“The Zetas got to him first,” Keller says. “He was careless.”

“You have no information about Adán’s whereabouts,” Núñez says.

“Only what I just told you.”

“The family is sick with worry,” Núñez says. “There’s been no word at all. No … remains … found.”

Keller hears a commotion outside—Blanco tells someone they can’t go in—and then the door swings open and bangs against the wall.

Three men come in.

The first is young—late twenties or early thirties—in a black Saint Laurent leather jacket that has to go at least three grand, Rokker jeans, Air Jordans. His curly black hair has a five-hundred-dollar cut and his jawline sports fashionable stubble.

He’s worked up.

Angry, tense.

“Where’s my father?” he demands of Núñez. “What’s happened to my father?”

“We don’t know yet,” Núñez says.

“The fuck you mean, you don’t know?!”

“Easy, Iván,” one of the others says. Another young guy, expensively dressed but sloppy, shaggy black hair jammed under a ball cap, unshaven. He looks a little drunk or a little high, or both. Keller doesn’t recognize him, but the other kid must be Iván Esparza.

The Sinaloa cartel used to have three wings—Barrera’s, Diego Tapia’s, and Ignacio Esparza’s. Barrera was the boss, the first among equals, but “Nacho” Esparza was a respected partner and, not coincidentally, Barrera’s father-in-law. He’d married his young daughter Eva off to the drug lord to cement the alliance.

So this kid, Keller thinks, has to be Esparza’s son and Adán’s brother-in-law. The intelligence profiles say that Iván Esparza now runs the crucial Baja plaza for the cartel, with its vital border crossings in Tijuana and Tecate.

“Is he dead?!” Iván yells. “Is my father dead?!”

“We know he was in Guatemala with Adán,” Núñez says.

“Fuck!” Iván slams his hand on the desk in front of Núñez. He looks around for someone to be angry at and sees Keller. “Who the fuck are you?”

Keller doesn’t answer.

“I asked you a question,” Iván says.

“I heard you.”

“Pinche gringo fuck—”

He starts for Keller but the third man steps between them.

Keller knows him from intelligence photos. Tito Ascensión had been Nacho Esparza’s head of security, a man even the Zetas feared—for good reason; he had slaughtered scores of them. As a reward, he was given his own organization in Jalisco. His massive frame, big sloping head, guard-dog disposition and penchant for brutality had given him the nickname El Mastín—“The Mastiff.”

He grabs Iván by the upper arms and holds him in place.

Núñez looks at the other young man. “Where have you been, Ric? I’ve been calling everywhere.”

Ric shrugs.

Like, What difference does it make where I was?

Núñez frowns.

Father and son, Keller thinks.

“I asked who this guy is,” Iván says. He rips his arms out of Ascensión’s grip but doesn’t go for Keller again.

“Adán had certain … arrangements,” Núñez says. “This man was in Guatemala.”

“Did you see my father?” Iván asks.

I saw what looked like your old man, Keller thinks. What was left of the bottom half of him was lying in the ashes of a smoldering bonfire. “I think you’d better get your head around the probability that your father’s not coming back.”

The expression on Ascensión’s face is exactly that of a dog that’s just learned it has lost its beloved master.

Confusion.

Grief.

Rage.

“How do you know that?” Iván asks Keller.

Ric wraps his arms around Iván. “I’m sorry, ’mano.”

“Someone’s going to pay for this,” Iván says.

“I have Elena on the phone,” Núñez says. He puts it on speaker. “Elena, have you heard anything more?”

It has to be Elena Sánchez, Keller thinks. Adán’s sister, retired from the family trade since she handed Baja over to the Esparzas.

“Nothing, Ricardo. Have you?”

“We have confirmation that Ignacio is gone.”

“Has anyone told Eva? Has anyone been to see her?”

“Not yet,” Núñez says. “We’ve been waiting until we know something definitive.”

“Someone should be with her,” Elena says. “She’s lost her father and maybe her husband. The poor boys …”

Eva has twin sons by Adán.

“I’ll go,” Iván says. “I’ll take her to my mother’s.”

“She’ll be grieving, too,” Núñez says.

“I’m flying down.”

“Do you need transportation from the airport?” Núñez asks.

“We still have people there, Ricardo.”

They’ve forgotten I’m even here, Keller thinks.

Oddly enough, it’s the young stoned one—Ric?—who remembers. “Uhhh, what do we do with him?”

More commotion outside.

Shouts.

Punches and slaps.

Grunts of pain, screams.

The interrogations have started, Keller thinks. The cartel is rounding people up—suspected Zetas, possible traitors, Guatemalan associates, anyone—to try to get information.

By any means necessary.

Keller hears chains being pulled across the concrete floor.

The hiss of an acetylene torch being lit.

Núñez looks up at Keller and raises his eyebrows.

“I came to tell you that I’m done,” Keller says. “It’s over for me now. I’m going to stay in Mexico, but I’m out of all this. You won’t hear from me and I don’t expect to hear from you.”

“You walk away and my father doesn’t?” Iván asks. He pulls a Glock 9 from his jacket and points it at Keller’s face. “I don’t think so.”

It’s a young man’s mistake.

Putting the gun too close to the guy you want to kill.

Keller leans away from the barrel at the same time that his hand shoots out, grabs the gun barrel, twists, and wrenches it out of Iván’s hand. Then he smashes it three times into Iván’s face and hears the cheekbone shatter before Iván slides to the floor like a robe dropped at Keller’s feet.

Ascensión moves in but Keller has his forearm wrapped around Ric Núñez’s throat and puts the gun to the side of his head. “No.”

El Mastín freezes.

“The fuck did I do?” Ric asks.

“Here’s how it’s going to work,” Keller says. “I’m going to walk out of here. I’m going to live my life, you’re going to live yours. If anyone comes after me, I’ll kill all of you. ¿Entienden?”

“We understand,” Núñez says.

Holding Ric as a shield, Keller backs out of the room.

He sees men chained to the walls, pools of blood, smells sweat and urine. No one moves, they all watch him go outside.

There’s nothing he can do for them.

Not a damn thing.

Twenty rifles point at him but no one is going to take a chance on hitting their boss’s son.

Reaching behind him, Keller opens the passenger door of the cab, then pushes Ric to the ground.

Sticks the gun into the back of the driver’s seat. “Ándale.”

On the drive back to the airport, Keller sees the first memorial to Adán on the side of the highway.

A banner spray-painted—

ADÁN VIVE.

Adán lives.

Juárez is a city of ghosts.

What Art Keller thinks as he drives through the town.

More than ten thousand Juarenses were killed in Adán Barrera’s conquest of the city, which he ripped from the old Juárez cartel to give him another gateway into the United States. Four bridges—the Stanton Street Bridge, the Ysleta International Bridge, the Paso del Norte and the Bridge of the Americas, the so-called Bridge of Dreams.

Ten thousand lives so Barrera could have those bridges.

During the five years of the war between the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels, more than three hundred thousand Juarenses fled the city, leaving the population at about a million and a half.

A third of whom, Keller has read, suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

He’s surprised there aren’t more. At the height of the fighting, the citizens of Juárez got used to stepping over dead bodies on the sidewalk. The cartels would radio ambulance drivers to tell them which wounded they could pick up, and which they had to let die. Hospitals were attacked, as well as homeless shelters and drug treatment houses.

The city center was virtually abandoned. Once vibrant with its famous nightlife, half the city’s restaurants and a third of its bars shut their doors. Stores closed. The mayor, the town council and most of the city police moved across those bridges to El Paso.

But in the past couple of years the city had started to come back. Businesses were reopening, refugees were coming home, and the murder rate was down.

Keller knows that the violence receded for one reason.

Sinaloa won the war.

And established the Pax Sinaloa.

Well, fuck you, Adán, Keller thinks as he drives around the Plaza del Periodista, with its statue of a newsboy hawking papers.

To hell with your bridges.

And to hell with your peace.

Keller can never drive by the plaza without seeing the scattered remains of his friend Pablo.

Pablo Mora was a journalist who had defied the Zetas by persisting to write a blog that exposed narco crimes. They’d kidnapped him, tortured him to death, dismembered him and arranged the pieces of his body around the statue of the newsboy.

So many journalists murdered, Keller thinks, as the cartels realized that they needed to control not only the action, but the narrative as well.

Most of the media simply stopped covering narco news.

Which is why Pablo started his suicidal blog.

And then there was Jimena Abarca, the baker from a little town in the Juárez Valley, who had stood up against the narcos, the federales, the army, and the entire government. Went on a hunger strike and forced them to release innocent prisoners. One of Barrera’s thugs shot her nine times in the chest and face in the parking lot of her favorite Juárez restaurant.

Or Giorgio, the photojournalist beheaded for the sin of taking images of dead narcos.

Erika Valles, slaughtered and cut up like a chicken. A nineteen-year-old girl brave enough to be the only cop in a little town where narcos had killed her four predecessors.

And then, of course, Marisol.

Dr. Marisol Cisneros is the mayor of Valverde, Jimena Abarca’s town in the Juárez Valley.

She took the office after the three previous mayors had been murdered. Stayed in the job when the Zetas threatened to kill her, then again after they gunned her down in her car, putting bullets in her stomach, chest and legs, breaking her femur and two ribs, cracking a vertebra.

After weeks in the hospital and months of recuperation, Marisol came back and held a press conference. Beautifully dressed, impeccably coiffed and made up, she showed her scars—and her colostomy bag—to the media, looked straight into the camera and told the narcos, I’m going back to work and you will not stop me.

Keller has no way to account for that kind of courage.

So it makes him furious when American politicians paint all Mexicans with the broad brush of corruption. He thinks about people like Pablo Mora, Jimena Abarca, Erika Valles and Marisol Cisneros.

Not all ghosts are dead—some are shades of what might have been.

You’re a ghost yourself, he tells himself.

A ghost of yourself, existing in a half life.

You’ve come back to Mexico because you’re more at home with the dead than the living.

The highway, Carretera Federal 2, parallels the border east of Juárez. Keller can see Texas, just a few miles away, through the driver’s-side window.

It might as well be a world away.

The Mexican federal government sent the army here to restore the peace, and, if anything, the army was as brutal as the cartels. Killings actually rose during the military occupation. There used to be army checkpoints every few miles on this road, which the locals dreaded as the locations of shakedowns, extortion and arbitrary arrests that too often ended in beatings, torture and internment in a hastily built prison camp that used to exist farther up the road.

If you didn’t get killed in a cartel cross fire, you could be murdered by the soldiers.

Or just disappear.

It was on this same road that the Zetas gunned Marisol down, left her for dead at the side of the road, bleeding out. One of the reasons Keller had made his temporary alliance with Barrera was because the “Lord of the Skies” promised to keep her safe.

Keller glances into the rearview mirror just to make sure, but he knows there’s no need for them to follow him. They already know where he’s going and will know when he gets there. The cartel had halcones everywhere. Cops, taxi drivers, kids on the corners, old women in their windows, clerks behind their counters. Everyone has a cell phone these days, and everyone will pick it up to curry favor with Sinaloa.

If they want to kill me, they’ll kill me.

Or at least they’ll try.

He pulls into the little town of Valverde, twenty or so blocks arranged in a rectangle on the desert flat. The houses—the ones that survived, anyway—are mostly cinder block with a few adobes. Some of them, Keller notices, have been repainted in bright blues, reds and yellows.

But the signs of war are still there, he also notices as he drives down the broad central street. The Abarca bakery, once the social center of the town, is still an empty pile of char, the pockmarks of bullets still scar walls, and some of the buildings are still boarded up and abandoned. Thousands of people had fled the Juárez Valley during the war, some afraid, others forced by Barrera’s threats. People would wake up in the morning to find signs draped across the street from phone pole to phone pole, with lists of names, residents who were told to leave that day or be killed.

Barrera depopulated some of the towns to replace their people with his own loyalists from Sinaloa.

He literally colonized the valley.

But now the army checkpoints are gone.

The sandbagged bunker that was on the main street is gone, and a few old people sit in the gazebo in the town square enjoying the afternoon warmth, something they never would have dared to do just a couple of years ago.

And Keller notices the little tienda has reopened, so people have a place again to buy necessities.

Some people have come back to Valverde, many stay away, but the town looks like it’s making a modest recovery. Keller drives past the little clinic and pulls into the parking lot in front of town hall, a two-story cinder-block rectangle that houses what’s left of the town government.

He parks the car and walks up the exterior staircase to the mayor’s office.

Marisol sits behind her desk, her cane hooked over the arm of her chair. Poring over papers, she doesn’t notice Keller.

Her beauty stops his heart.

She’s wearing a simple blue dress and her black hair is pulled back into a severe chignon, setting off her high cheekbones and dark eyes.

He knows that he’ll never stop loving her.

Marisol looks up, sees him, and smiles. “Arturo.”

She grabs her cane and starts to get up. Getting in and out of chairs is still hard for her and Keller notices the slight wince as she pushes herself up. The cut of her dress hides the colostomy bag, an enduring gift from the round that clipped her small intestine.

It was the Zetas who did that to her.

Keller went to Guatemala to kill the men who ordered it, Ochoa and Forty. Even though she begged him not to seek revenge. Now she wraps her arms around him and holds him close. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come back.”