He walks back up to the house.

Eva isn’t up yet, and for some reason it annoys him. He’d like to wake her up on the pretext that she’s going to miss her flight, but as they own two Learjets with crews standing by it wouldn’t work.

He watches her sleep.

Magda’s right, Adán thinks.

She’s a child.

—

Like any civil war, the conflict between the CDG and the Zetas has been extraordinarily vicious.

And it can only be called a war.

Whereas gangs of sicarios used to move covertly, now trucks with hundreds of armed men openly roll on the roads of northern Tamaulipas as machine-gun and grenade attacks erupt in Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, and Matamoros, as well as the small border towns along La Frontera Chica between Matamoros and Laredo.

“The Little Border” is strategically important for three reasons.

One, it lies between the two strongholds of the CDG and the Zetas, Matamoros and Nuevo Laredo respectively.

Two, it lies along the lucrative drug-smuggling border into the U.S.

The third reason has nothing to do with drugs at all, but with that other precious commodity of the twenty-first century.

Energy.

La Frontera Chica contains the Burgo Basin, rich in natural gas. Mexico’s national energy company, Pemex, has been exploring and drilling there for years, and there are almost 130 natural gas stations pumping now, with another 1,000 as yet to be exploited. American oil companies are eager to invest and start drilling. The cartels have long wanted to get into the energy business, and La Frontera Chica is the perfect place to do it.

So the little towns like Ciudad Mier, Camargo, and Miguel Alemán become battlefields.

It started in Mier, when fifteen pickup trucks marked with the CDG logo roared into town. Sicarios spilled out of the trucks and opened fire with machine guns on the town police station. Then the sicarios went in and hauled out six policemen, who were never seen again.

The CDG set up roadblocks, sealed off the town, and started the executions of Zeta loyalists, lining them up against a wall in the town square. The dead were decapitated, their heads set in a corner of the plaza. One young man, accused of being a Zeta lookout, screamed as his arm was sawed off before he was hanged from a tree.

The fighting went on for six days.

The Zetas struck back, and it became a battle of sniper versus sniper in Mier, Camargo, and Miguel Alemán. For all practical purposes, northern Tamaulipas could be Iraq, Gaza, or Lebanon as the rival factions fought in the streets, burned shops and houses, and evicted people from their homes.

Barricades went up.

Towns became ghost towns.

—

Ochoa doesn’t call.

Gordo Contreras does.

Adán says to Magda, “You owe me a hundred dollars.”

“I would have sworn it would have been Ochoa.”

“He’s too arrogant.”

“You know the CDG is going to lose,” Magda says, “and you don’t care. You’ll give them just enough help to keep the war going until both sides bleed each other out. Then you’ll step in and take Tamaulipas. Matamoros, Reynosa, Laredo—all of it.”

Adán shrugs. As usual, she’s read both him and the situation exactly.

“Have you thought about your price?” Magda asks. “Gordo will think that you’ll settle for just having an ally against Ochoa, but I think we could get more. Free use of their ports. It would be an easier route to the European market.”

“You’re still on that?”

“You should be, too,” Magda says.

—

It only makes sense, Magda thinks. A kilo of cocaine sells for about $24,000 in the United States, in Europe, more than twice that. Even after cutting in European partners and paying the usual bribes, the profit margin is simply too good to ignore. If Adán doesn’t want in on it, she’s going to do it anyway, although his protective umbrella would be useful.

“You’re talking ’Ndrangheta,” Adán says, referring to the Italian Mafia that dominates the drug trade in most of Europe. “The CDG has them wrapped up.”

“Because we haven’t made the effort,” Magda answers. “If I went there, I’m sure I could persuade them to work with us.”

Not because of her undoubted sex appeal, but because it’s to ’Ndrangheta’s advantage to have more than one source of supply. And the European market, especially for cocaine, is rapidly expanding. Most of the heroin still comes in from Afghanistan and Pakistan via Turkey, the marijuana from North Africa via Morocco, but the CDG’s cocaine monopoly could be pried open. And if she can buy at $5,500 and sell at $55,000, well, do the math.

Besides, she’d like to see Europe again, through her own eyes instead of as a rapt naïf under Jorge’s tutelage. She could mix in some museums and galleries, and maybe a little shopping, with business. The fact is, she could use a vacation—only now does she understand Adán’s disciplined, busy days back at Puente Grande—the thousand and one details of running a multimillion-dollar enterprise.

La Reina Amante, indeed.

“But if you don’t want in, I’ll do it on my own. Just get the CDG out of my way. By the way, have you knocked up your queen yet?”

“Be nice.”

“I am being nice,” Magda says.

“Not yet.”

“They say that the doggie position—”

“For God’s sake, Magda.”

“I don’t remember this puritanical attitude in Puente Grande,” Magda says. “Let’s fuck—I’ll give you your hundred dollars in trade.”

“In her house?”

“There must be other beds, if you’re squeamish,” Magda says. “Oh, never mind, if you’re going to be such a little househusband about it.”

He grabs her.

That night, Gordo agrees that Adán will have free use of his ports in Matamoros and Reynosa, and introductions to his drug network in Europe.

Adán agrees to do what he was going to do anyway—continue to fight the Zetas.

—

Eva lets herself into the condo in Bosques de las Lomas and flops down on the bed.

Her bodyguard Miguel brings in her bag. “Where do you want this?”

“On the bed,” Eva says. “Where I want you.”

Miguel smiles. He sets the bag at the foot of the bed and then lies down on top of Eva.

She unzips the fly of his tight blue jeans. “This is what I want, right here. Hurry. I thought the flight would never end.”

Eva makes him hard with her hand, although it doesn’t take much. She uses her other hand to unzip her own jeans and then she wriggles out of them. She’s already wet and he slides into her easily.

“That’s good,” she says. “That’s so good.”

Miguel is twenty-five and strong and lithe and muscled and impatient for his own pleasure, but she likes that. She wants to be taken, and as she feels him near his climax and start to pull out, she grabs his shoulders and holds him inside her and says, “It’s all right, you can come in me.”

“You sure?”

“The pill.”

After, she lies beside him and starts to laugh.

“What?” Miguel asks.

“Do you know what my husband would do to you,” she says, “would do to that beautiful cock, if he knew where it had just been?”

“I don’t want to think.”

“But you’re the one who’s supposed to tell him these things,” Eva said. “You’re his spy, aren’t you? Are you going to tell him?”

“No.”

“Good,” Eva says, “because I like this beautiful cock right where it is.”

She rolls over and takes him in her mouth.

“Can you go again,” she asks, sitting up. “Can you?”

“If you keep doing that.”

Eva keeps doing that.

She needs a baby.

Ciudad Juárez

September 2010

Pablo shoves the rest of the torta into his mouth and wipes the smear of avocado off his lips with the back of his hand.

The torta—chicken, pineapple, and avocado in a bun—used to be one of his favorite things about living in Juárez, one of the small local joys that make a city a city. Now he can barely taste it—it’s just cheap food to keep the body going.