They drive back to Juárez and file a simple story stating that Miguel Abarca was released without charges, and that Jimena Abarca has ended her hunger strike. The story doesn’t mention Miguel’s injuries. The next day’s edition features a photo of Jimena sipping a protein shake, and La Médica Hermosa makes what she assures reporters is a final appearance on the evening news and describes her patient’s condition as stable.

The Abarca story disappears from the headlines because the Zetas throw grenades into an Independence Day celebration in Morelia, Michoacán, and kill eight people.

And in Juárez, the tired war of attrition goes on.

Pablo covers the killing of a police commander shot in a hotel parking lot, eleven gunned down in a bar, six killed at a family party, six more lined up outside a tienda and executed against the wall.

He writes the story about 334 Juárez city cops fired for failing polygraphs and drug tests.

All that is fine with the man who comes and slips him the sobre.

“I told you,” Pablo says, “I don’t want this.”

“And I told you,” the man says, “no one’s asking you. Give the money to charity if you don’t want it, but you’re taking it.”

Pablo’s next call is to a headless body hanging from its feet off the Bridge of Dreams with the narcomensaje reading I, LORENZO FLORES, SERVED MY BOSS, THE DOG-FUCKER BARRERA.

“ ‘Dog-fucker’?” Giorgio asks, trying to figure out his shot. “That’s a new one.”

“Zetas,” Pablo says.

“How do you know?”

“Decapitation. That’s their thing.”

The head turns up later at the Plaza del Periodista.

Mexico City

December 2009

Only Keller knows the identity of the informant code-named “María Fernanda.”

Through the miserable year of 2009, as violence and bloodshed spread through Mexico like an unstoppable virus, Keller stayed in the Mexico City bunker and, good as his word, focused on bringing down Diego Tapia.

Except you can’t kill what you can’t find.

It wasn’t from lack of trying.

No “search and avoid” missions with the FES. Orduña even has his own satellite surveillance system, purchased from the French and operated by the European Space Agency.

It couldn’t draw a bead on Tapia.

Neither could any of the American intelligence packages.

In regard to intelligence, Keller gets what he wants.

Taylor has seen to it.

“Let the word go forth from this time and place,” Taylor pronounced. “There is no secret unit operating in Mexico City, and it gets everything it needs from you. If Keller asks you for something, you don’t ask ‘why,’ you ask ‘when.’ If Keller wants a large pizza smothered with chocolate ice cream, French fries, and a cherry on top, you deliver it faster than Domino’s, no questions asked. You have any questions, come to me, but don’t have any questions. Are there any questions?”

There weren’t.

Keller knew that a lot of this came from the fact that the new administration in Washington has a distinctly “antiterrorist” bent. The rumor was that the White House has a “kill list” on top jihadists, and this strategy had carried over into the war on drugs.

It’s not so much that we’ve now defined the narcos as terrorists, Keller thought, but that there’s more of a psychological leak from the war on terror into the war on drugs. The battle against Al Qaeda has redefined what’s thinkable, permissible, and doable. Just as the war on terror has turned the functions of intelligence agencies into military action, the war on drugs has similarly militarized the police. CIA is running a drone and assassination program in South Asia; DEA is assisting the Mexican military in targeting top narcos for “arrests” that are often executions.

Mexico has formalized the militarization of the drug war; the U.S. is drifting in that direction.

Certainly, Keller thought, my war on drugs has changed over the years. It used to be all about busts and seizures, the perpetual cat-and-mouse game of getting the shit off the street, but now I barely think about the drugs themselves.

The actual trafficking is almost irrelevant.

I’m not a drug agent anymore, he reflected, I’m a hunter.

He came out of retirement to hunt Barrera—if he has to take down other narcos on the way to that, so be it. Mostly to stay on—however indirectly—Barrera’s trail. The other reason is that he likes and actually trusts Roberto Orduña. Still mourning Luis Aguilar’s death and enraged over Gerardo Vera’s betrayal, Keller didn’t want a close working relationship—never mind a friendship.

But that’s what he got—a friendship, of sorts, based on a common understanding.

Revenge.

It came over a late-night drinking session after a long day of unsuccessfully tracking Diego Tapia. Single-malt scotch, very expensive, lowered inhibitions and provoked revelations.

Keller learned that Orduña came from an immensely wealthy family (“The reason I’m impervious to bribery”), and that they have something in common.

A grudge.

Felipa Muñoz.

Nineteen, a model, and a cheerleader for the local Tijuana fútbol team, Felipa was apparently friendly with a young man who was somehow associated with the Tapias.

Her decapitated body was found dumped on the soccer field—the trunk in two black plastic bags, the head in another. Her feet had been smashed in and her fingers cut off—the usual torture for a dedo, a snitch—although the clumsy nature of the wounds indicated that it was done by amateurs, not professionals. The two men who did it—Felipa’s twenty-two-year-old “friend” and a forty-nine-year old associate—were arrested for speeding and the police found a video of the torture on their cell phone. They’d apparently heard that she was passing information along to a policeman and thought they’d kill her to garner favor with the bosses.

Felipa Muñoz was Orduña’s goddaughter.

He’d held her in his arms as an infant, committed her soul to God.

“I hate the narcos,” Orduña told Keller that night. “Tapia, Contreras, Ochoa, Barrera, all of them.”

They touched glasses.

It was personal, Keller got that.

Keller knew “personal,” so he started to trust Orduña.

Worked hard with him to bring down Diego Tapia.

At the end of the day, it came down to what it almost always comes down to.

A snitch.

—

The relationship, Keller thinks as he goes to meet María Fernanda at a movie theater in Mexico City, between an informant and “handler” is one of mutual seduction—if only in the basest of terms, because each is trying to fuck the other.

But it goes deeper than that.

You have to bring the informant in, convince him or her that your bed is warmer and safer than the one the informant is currently sleeping in. You have to be a friend, but not too friendly, you have to make promises, but none that you can’t deliver. You have to keep your informants safe, but not hesitate to put them in mortal danger. You have to show them that there’s a future beyond this, when you know that there probably isn’t.

At the same time, the informant is seducing you—showing you a little leg, a glimpse beneath an unbuttoned blouse, promising that there’s more. An informant is a great cock tease, knowing that her value is depleted as soon as she delivers all the goods. So she holds back, plays it coy, hard-to-get.

Keller makes his point very clear to María Fernanda as he sits behind the informant in the uncrowded matinee screening.

“Christmas is coming,” Keller says. “I want Diego on the table with my turkey.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Didn’t ask whether it was easy,” Keller says, “and I don’t care. You’ve been giving me appetizers—little snacks—and now I want to sit down and eat.”