Maybe there are worse things than dying in Dos Erres.

They break up the camp in Sunshine Summit and go to the staging area in San Diego. Then it will be separate flights to Mexico City, on to Campeche, then into the chopper and across the border for “Operation XTZ.”

“Cross Out the Zetas.”

In his hotel room out by the airport, Keller sits on his bed with his phone in hand and thinks about calling Marisol. But what would he say? I miss you? Goodbye? Nothing he’s going to say will change anything, but he isn’t going to say that he’s changed his mind about going.

He doesn’t call.

Restless, he goes for a walk through the old neighborhood known as Little Italy. He used to come down here from his office in the old days, to get a sausage at Pete’s—now gone—or a good espresso at a place that he sees is now a Starbucks.

He turns up Columbia Street to Our Lady of the Rosary, built back in the ’20s to serve the Italian tuna fishermen who dominated the neighborhood. Keller used to come here often, for early morning Mass, to make confession, take communion, or just look at the frescoes in the back of the sanctuary.

The tuna fleet is long gone, the Italian fishermen with it.

The neighborhood is “hip” now—coffeehouses and nightclubs, new condo buildings. The Italian restaurants are expensive and cater mostly to tourists.

Keller stands outside the church and thinks about going in. It’s too late for Mass, but there might be a priest inside to hear confession.

But how much time could he have? Keller asks himself ruefully.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned and sinned and sinned and sinned…

And I’m about to go commit (another) murder.

At least one.

Keller keeps walking.

He has no need of God, he decides, and God has no need of him.

The Petén District, Guatemala

October 31, 2012

Chuy kicks a soccer ball against the remnant of a stone wall he doesn’t know is Mayan in origin.

The jungle is full of such ruins and he doesn’t care. Chuy wanders across the old stone terraces that were once altars without knowing what he’s walking on, or his own connection to them, that they were places where victims were decapitated in sacrifices to the Mayan death gods. He does like the caves that permeate the forest, cracks in the limestone floor of the jungle into which he can crawl and hide, take a nap, or just lie and think.

Forty brought Chuy and his estaca down to Guatemala and it was his first time on an airplane. He hated the crowded heat of Guatemala City but felt better when they drove north across the broad grasslands and then into the jungle. It still feels too close and too green, but he’s starting to get used to it, even though he’s a little scared at night because the men who’d been there longer told him that there are jaguars and pumas, and crocodiles in the swamps outside the village.

The village itself is pretty empty, except for some women and girls the men keep to do the cooking and the cleaning, and some men to do the grunt work. Otherwise, they had killed the villagers or chased them out, so it’s pretty much just Zetas living there in an armed camp.

The men had offered Chuy a girl for his bed, but he didn’t want her because he remembered Flor talking about her childhood in the Petén and how the Kaibiles forced her family off their land. So he doesn’t want a girl because it would remind him too much of her and also because he wakes up in the night crying and sometimes he pisses the cot, so he likes to sleep alone.

Some nights he doesn’t even sleep in the tent, but crawls into one of the caves and pulls a sweatshirt around him and sleeps there, even though he’s afraid of the jaguars and the pumas, but he has a rifle and a pistol and a knife so he’s not too afraid, and anyway, he only sleeps in fits and starts because in his sleep he sees faces—the faces of the boys who took him in the reformatory, the face of the first man he killed, the face of Forty, the face of Ochoa when he made him take the man’s head. He sees the faces of the people he’s killed, they’re like masks that float around the inside of his head when he closes his eyes.

Chuy sees the face of the woman police when he started to saw on her throat, and now he sees the face of the man they took away a few weeks ago, the drunk man who was so afraid and who cried and wept and begged and screamed until they shoved his shirt in his mouth to shut him up and he sees Forty’s face laughing, always laughing, telling him to do it, keep doing it, keep hurting him, you little bitch, you’re a little bitch, aren’t you.

And Chuy remembers his mission.

He kicks the ball into the wall hard and it bounces back to him and he juggles it on his foot twice before kicking it again. Maybe he should have been a fútbol player, maybe he should have done that instead of what he did, and it seems like a long time ago that he picked up that pistol and fired it into the air and they put him in jail.

Forty brought him down here to fight the Sinaloans, but now it turns out that they may not fight because Chuy has heard that Barrera himself is coming to sit down with Ochoa and make a deal and he wonders if that means he’ll stay in Guatemala or they’ll send him back to Mexico or even let him go home.

Maybe I’ll just stay here, Chuy thinks, and live in a cave. Hunt my food and live like they do on Survivor. Or go to Alaska like on one of those shows. Or maybe just walk into a shopping mall or a movie theater, open up with the erre and kill everybody.

See my face on television.

He kicks the ball against the wall again. It feels good, comforting, the simple repetitive action, and it keeps him absorbed until he hears the shout to “fall in.” He trots back to the center of the village where the men are forming up.

The word goes around quickly.

Adán Barrera is in Dos Erres.

—

Adán brings an army with him made up of a hundred of the best Gente Nueva, the ones who have been fighting the war in Juárez, Durango, and Sinaloa, and they’re well armed with assault rifles, grenade launchers, and enough ammunition to handle the situation if things go badly.

Nacho is there, of course.

He’d reached out across complicated layers of connections in the narco-world to get the message to Ochoa that they wanted to discuss peace. It seemed like a ludicrous proposition at the time, given the mutual carnage they were inflicting on each other across Mexico, but Nacho persisted with his trademark patience.

It helped that Ochoa was motivated—his recent European debacle was a major setback. The fighting on all fronts was at a stalemate, and no one could be sure what the new government was going to do.

The Zetas’ strongest card was their hold on the Petén, and Ochoa insisted that the meeting be there, not in Mexico, where Barrera’s tame federales, army, and FES could swoop in.

Nacho responded that the Petén was unacceptable, that they would have to find neutral territory in Colombia or even Europe, if it came to that, but Ochoa was adamant and Nacho finally gave in with the assurance that the Sinaloans were welcome to bring as much armed force as they wanted.

The sight of Dos Erres isn’t particularly reassuring, Adán thinks as they roll toward it in a convoy of jeeps and trucks. The place is the visual definition of a backwater—jungles and swamps and a virtually abandoned village.

The heat is oppressive, the humidity more so, the jungle tight and close, and the tension is bowstring taut. Fifty of his fighters are in front of him, fifty more behind as they drive along a dirt road guarded by Zetas dressed in paramilitary garb.

Every man in this parade is a blood enemy to the other side, with grudges, vendettas, and deep hatreds. A casual glance, an untoward word, a rumor. Anything could set if off before—