Gordo didn’t turn over the killers.

As a result, Forty kidnapped sixteen CDG sicarios and tortured them to death in a basement.

Adán places a private bet with himself to see who will call him first. It would be a smart move for the Zetas to offer to withdraw from Juárez in exchange for his help against the CDG.

But Ochoa and the Zetas are doing stupid things lately.

They’ve changed.

Their original cadre of veteran special forces has been depleted by arrests and attrition and now they have to recruit men with little or no experience and train them. Some of the people running around calling themselves “Zetas” aren’t part of the organization at all, and “Zeta” has become something of a brand name, like “Al Qaeda.”

Adán wonders if Ochoa is deteriorating as well. The decision to kill that marine’s family after the funeral was so phenomenally stupid as to boggle the mind. The public reacted with predictable outrage, and the marine special forces, the FES, have launched the predictable vendetta and are pounding the Zetas.

With the help of North American intelligence.

Of course Keller would find his way into the elite unit of killers. It’s a natural evolution, water seeking its own level. And with the FES relentlessly pursuing the Zetas, Adán is not self-indulgent enough to attract their attention by killing Art Keller.

No, let him do my killing for me.

There will be time enough to deal with him later. Still, it’s frustrating. Patience is a virtue, but like most virtues, also a burden.

But if Ochoa thought he could win hearts and minds by slaughtering a hero’s grieving family in their beds, he was wrong. Maybe he can intimidate the general public, but he’s not going to intimidate Orduña and his men, who are more than willing to get into a fight to the death.

And the Zetas continue to do things that alienate the public—principally kidnapping and extortion. They now make as much money from these activities as they do from drug trafficking, but while the public doesn’t pay much attention to trafficking, it deeply resents being held for ransom.

It plays right into my hands, Adán thinks as he puts his dishes in the sink. The Zetas make us look good—or at least the lesser of evils. After the Córdova murders, no one objects to the government making the Zetas its priority.

So now Ochoa and his boys are fighting me in Juárez and Sinaloa, Eddie Ruiz in Monterrey, Veracruz, and Acapulco, La Familia in Michoacán, the marines everywhere, and now the CDG in Tamaulipas.

Nevertheless, the Zetas are expanding, and it’s worrisome.

The most worrying expansion isn’t in Mexico at all.

It’s in Guatemala.

The Zetas have been moving into Guatemala for the last three years, gaining favor with the Lorenzana family by killing their chief rival, Juancho León, and ten others in an ambush at a supposed peace meeting.

In recent months they’ve fought—successfully—pitched battles against Guatemalan special forces troops to defend airstrips used for bringing in cocaine, and now Adán has word that there are over four hundred Zeta operatives in the country focusing on Guatemala City and the Petén, the province on the border with Mexico, and have advertised for ex-soldiers on pirate radio stations.

It’s significant—70 percent of the cocaine that flows through Mexico comes in via Guatemala.

All the cartels have used Guatemala for years.

It goes back to the old “Mexican Trampoline” days of the ’80s, because flights from Colombia needed a place to refuel before flying into Guadalajara. With the current war on drugs, Guatemala has become even more important, as a market, but also as a transshipment point. Cocaine flown into the Petén can simply be carried into Mexico and moved up to the border from there. Now the Zetas are forcing peasants from their land so they can use it as a string of bases.

The Guatemalan government has sent a thousand troops, with armored vehicles, helicopters, and surveillance equipment, into the Petén. The Petén has always been neutral territory—safe and quiescent—and now Ochoa, in making a move to control it, has brought government attention, not to mention the DEA.

It can’t be allowed—Adán’s cocaine imports depend on El Salvador and Guatemala, and he can’t yield either to the Zetas.

Adán walks out of the kitchen onto the broad stretch of lawn and walks down toward a grove of fresno trees at the bottom of the slope. The morning is cool and quiet, with birdsong just starting as the sun comes up.

Barely aware of the sicarios that follow from a discreet distance, Adán walks into the grove. It’s peaceful here, it feels so far away from the conflicts and strife that inhabit the rest of his life.

Eva is well, but Eva is also not pregnant.

Which seems to be the central fact of her life.

If sex with a beautiful twenty-year-old woman can be deemed a chore, that’s what it’s become, a chore—Eva running around with a thermometer in her mouth, checking calendars and clocks, summoning him to perform when the moment is ripe, suggesting new positions not for enjoyment but for the efficiency of physics.

Eva is frustrated and fearful—despite his assurances to the contrary—that he’ll leave her.

And she’s restless.

He understands.

Life on a remote finca is not exactly ideal for a vivacious girl her age. Adán understands that she feels like a prisoner here, even with the swimming pool, the home gym, the horses, the satellite dish, and Netflix. She goes on shopping trips to Badiraguato and Culiacán, but he knows that she wants to hit the clubs in Mazatlán and Cabo. He tries to facilitate that, but it’s difficult, and she doesn’t appreciate the level of organization and planning even a quick trip off the finca requires.

She misses her friends, and he brings them in from time to time, but each visitor is a potential security risk, and with two wars going on and the FES rampaging through the narco ranks, he can’t afford unnecessary risks.

As a sop, he’s arranged for her to go to Mexico City every few weeks for a few days, and she’s leaving later this morning, but he knows that it’s a temporary respite at best.

The issue is that she’s bored, has nothing to do with her time, and refuses to grow up. Some women let the vicissitudes of life make them hard and bitter, but Eva has gone in the other direction—willfully naïve, consciously unaware, almost defiantly childlike. Always cheerful, perpetually, annoyingly “bubbly,” still the virgin bride in bed—enthusiastic, energetic, unskillful.

The brutal fact is that Eva has failed in the one job that she was required to do—produce an heir.

“She has given you a child,” Magda said during one of their assignations in Badiraguato. “Herself.”

“Very funny.”

“So, seriously, what are you going to do?”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Get a new wife.” She let that sit for a second and then continued, “Oh, come on, you don’t love her. You can’t tell me that you love her.”

“I’ve grown fond.”

“I’m fond of my golden retriever,” Magda said. “Eva’s a child, and she gets younger every day. It’s almost creepy. Seriously, I wonder about her mental health, don’t you?”

“It’s a hard life for a woman.”

“Thank you for telling me. I didn’t know,” Magda said.

How would Nacho react, Adán wonders, if I do divorce his daughter? Would he accept it, or use it as a pretext to break the alliance? No, that’s too direct for Nacho—he would pretend to accept it and then use the power base I gave him in Tijuana to move against me. He’d go back to his old allies in Juárez and start stirring up a rebellion, while denying it all the time.

Adán has the fleeting thought that he should kill him now. Easy enough to blame on the Zetas. Then after Nacho is in the ground and a suitable mourning period, send Eva packing, with enough money, of course, to live in the manner to which she’s become accustomed.