“And the North Americans?”

“Are the North Americans,” Adán answers. “They’ll do everything they can to force the government to come after us. The government will make a show of it but be ineffectual. That is, unless you continue to commit atrocity after atrocity, and continue to do frankly idiotic things such as challenging them with press releases boasting that you rule the country, in which case you force the government’s hand.”

“We do rule the country,” Forty says.

“Which is totally irrelevant to the point I’m making,” Adán says. He tries again. “We can have a business. We can have the most profitable business in the history of the world—outside of oil, which I believe you’re moving into—if we manage it in an orderly way. Or we can have chaos that will eventually ruin us.”

The talks continue, focusing on details of how to disengage on the various fronts, how to announce the cease-fire, how to enforce it and make sure that no small organizations go off on their own and break the truce.

Much of this is delegated to Forty and Nacho.

By the time the sun starts to go down, they have achieved the pax narcotica.

Adán and Ochoa shake hands.

“We’ve arranged some entertainment for this evening,” Ochoa says. “A small party to celebrate the peace and the Day of the Dead. Some refreshments, some women from Guatemala City.”

“No offense, but I’m a married man.”

“But not a dead one,” Ochoa says.

“But a faithful one,” Adán answers.

He goes back to the camp, takes a hot shower from a Lister Bag hung from the ceiling, and then lies down to sleep under the mosquito netting that the servant opened over his bed.

He knew there’d be a fiesta, but it worries him. More than one narco has been murdered while celebrating a peace with his enemies, so he only let half the men attend the party, withdrew the other half to the camp, and reminded Nacho that the men should stay relatively sober and completely alert.

Adán looks at his watch, the gaudy expensive affair that Eva gave him and which he wore only to impress Ochoa, a vulgar hick who would be impressed by that sort of thing.

In twelve hours, he thinks, if everything goes according to plan, my enemies will be dead.

Forty.

Ochoa.

And, with any luck, Art Keller.

If there is a God, Keller will die a hero’s death, gunned down in a firefight against the Zetas in the jungles of Guatemala. There will be a private—secret, in fact—ceremony in the back halls of the DEA building, maybe even the White House, and then he will be forgotten and unmourned.

But every year, on the Day of the Dead, I will arrange for poppies to be placed on his grave.

A private joke, just between the two of us.

—

Ochoa watches the party.

It’s quite a scene, lit by a bonfire in the middle of the Zeta camp, men and women in black-and-white skull masks dancing to the blaring music, women going down on the men right out in the open, or sneaking off to the edge of the light to fuck. His only disappointment is that Barrera chose not to attend.

That will complicate things.

Barrera is a slimy piece of shit, not nearly as clever as he thinks he is. Ochoa knew that “El Patrón’s” peace offering was disingenuous when Barrera didn’t as much as mention his dead mistress, even when practically invited to. If he’d demanded something—some sort or recompense, even an apology—Ochoa might have believed him. Now Barrera will do what he always does: pretend to make peace and then buy off the government to make war.

Except this time, he won’t have the chance. Ochoa watches the party—beer, whiskey, and champagne flow generously, and most of the partiers are snorting cocaine.

Well, the Sinaloan guests are snorting cocaine laced with heroin, and the women aren’t whores, they’re Panteras.

—

Nacho Esparza is having a hard time getting it up, and he doesn’t understand it. Coke usually makes him harder than a diamond, he took a Viagra, and the girl is beautiful—lustrous black hair, big tits, and, under the half mask, full lips that are made for giving blow jobs, which she’s doing now, on her knees the way he likes it.

She tilts her head back and just flicks at the head of his dick with her tongue, like a snake, and that does the trick. He feels himself getting hard, the pornographic scene of the orgy around him helps, and then she swallows him deep and he’s relieved when he feels the blood pump down into him, he gets hard and thick in her mouth, and he closes his eyes in pleasure.

The pain is horrific, unimaginable.

Nacho looks down to see his blood seeping around the knife blade embedded in his stomach, and then the girl with the lustrous hair and full lips smiles and pulls out the blade, and his blood squirts out into the dirt.

Staggering backward, Nacho looks around at a nightmare. In the red of the firelight, beautifully dressed, elegantly masked women slaughter their lovers with knives and guns, with garrotes or just their bare hands. Zetas pull pistols from their belts and gun down Sinaloans at close range. Other demons come out of the shadows and drag dead and wounded men into the bonfire. Nacho hears their screaming as he feels a deep dull ache in his belly and then he realizes through his disbelief that he’s going to die and then the beautiful woman with the lustrous hair behind the white skull takes him by the hand and walks him toward the fire.

—

Chuy watches the Sinaloan camp from the brush at its edge.

The Sinaloans have sentries out, two each in front of the quarters where their bosses are. There are probably more, peeking out from tents or, like him, lying in the brush outside the camp, but he can’t see them.

He doesn’t drink, do drugs, or fornicate with women, so other than the music—norteño mariachi that he doesn’t like anyway—the pagan Day of the Dead fiesta held nothing for him. And Forty had told him and the rest of his cell to refrain—there would be work for them later and he wanted their heads on straight.

Chuy was just as glad—the scene at the party was satanic, disgusting. Now he hears screams coming from the camp, sights in on the sentry outside Barrera’s cabin, and waits for the signal, one blink from a laser.

It comes just seconds later and he squeezes the trigger.

The sentry’s head snaps back, his rifle clatters on the cabin’s porch.

Chuy swings his erre onto the second sentry, who is looking to see where the shot came from. A dumb mistake—he should have hit the ground and then looked. Chuy’s shot takes him in the chest.

Five yards away from Chuy, the muzzle flash of a grenade launcher goes off and the armor-piercing missile spins its way toward Barrera’s quarters.

Now gunfire is coming back toward him and the fight is on.

Then, in the distance, Chuy hears helicopter rotors. Shit, do the Sinaloans have a chopper? Where did they hide it? He shifts position and looks up into the night sky. A helicopter gunship like the army and the federales had in Michoacán could wipe them out in seconds.

He sees the chopper.

The man with the grenade launcher panics, drops the weapon, and runs. Chuy picks up the launcher, hefts it onto his shoulder, and points it toward the sky until the chopper comes into the range finder.

—

A red streak comes up out of the predawn darkness.

A loud bang, a flash of yellow light, and the helicopter jolts sideways like a toy that’s been hit by a bat.

The blast tosses Keller to the deck.

Shrapnel sprays, exposed wires spark, the ship is on fire. Red flame and thick black smoke fill the cabin.

The stench of scorched metal and burned flesh.

Keller struggles back up and sees that Ruiz’s face is a bloody smear. Then Ruiz wipes the blood off and Keller sees that it came from one of the other men, whose carotid artery spurts in rhythm with his racing heartbeat. Another keels over, shrapnel obscenely jutting from his crotch, just below his protective vest, and the team medic is already crawling across the deck to help.