A battle of e-mails, meetings, and confidential cables between Washington and Mexico City ensues, the result of which is a compromise: Keller would be on loan to, and under the supervision of, a “coordinating committee” and would serve in a strictly advisory capacity.

“You accept the mission,” Taylor says, “you accept these conditions.”

Keller accepts. It’s all bullshit anyway—he’s fully aware that one of his roles in Mexico is that of “bait.” If anything would bring Adán Barrera out of the woodwork, it would be the chance to get Art Keller.

Keller knows this and doesn’t care.

If Adán wants to come after him—good.

Let him come.

The words of a psalm they used to chant at Vigils comes back to him.

Romans 13:11.

“And do this, knowing the hour,

That now it is high time for us to arise from sleep.”

3 The Hunting of Man

There is no hunting like the hunting of man.

—Ernest Hemingway

“On the Blue Water”

Los Elijos, Durango

March 2005

The sun, soft and diffuse in the haze, comes up over the mountains on this Holy Thursday.

Keller sits in the front of an unmarked SUV tucked into a stand of Morales pines on the edge of a ridge, fingers the trigger of the Sig Sauer he isn’t supposed to have, and looks down into the narrow valley where the little village of Los Elijos, wedged between mountain peaks, just starts to appear through the mist.

The thin mountain air is cold and Keller shivers from the chill but also from fatigue. The convoy has driven all night up the narrow twisting road, little more than a goat path, in the hope of arriving here unseen.

Looking through binoculars, Keller sees that the village is still asleep, so no one has raised an alarm.

Luis Aguilar shivers behind him.

The two men don’t like each other.

—

The first meeting of the “Barrera Coordinating Committee,” held the day after Keller arrived in Mexico City, was inauspicious.

“Let’s have things clear between us,” Aguilar said as soon as they sat down. “You are here to share your knowledge of the Barrera organization. You are not here to cultivate your own sources, take independent action, or do surveillance or any other intelligence gathering. I will not have another gringo wiping his boots on my turf. Do we understand each other?”

Everything about Luis Aguilar had an edge to it—from his aquiline nose, to the press of his trousers, to his words.

“We have resources of our own,” Keller answered. Satellite surveillance, cell phone intercepts, computer hacks, information developed in the States. “I’ll share them with you unless and until I see that intelligence leaked. Then it’s cut off and you and I don’t know each other.”

Aguilar’s sharp eyes got sharper. “What are you trying to say?”

“I’m just getting things clear between us.”

As sharp as Aguilar was, Gerardo Vera was that smooth. He laughed and said, “Gentlemen, please, let’s fight the narcos instead of each other.”

Luis Aguilar and Gerardo Vera head up the two new agencies charged with the task of cutting through the Gordian knot of corruption and bureaucracy to finally, seriously take on the cartels.

Aguilar’s SEIDO (Subprocuraduría Especializada en Investigación de Delincuencia Organizada)—the Assistant Attorney General’s Office for the Investigation of Organized Crime—was created to replace its predecessor, FEADS, which the new administration had disbanded, labeling it “a dung heap of corruption.”

Similarly, Vera disbanded the old PJF—the federales—and replaced it with the AFI, the Federal Investigative Agency.

The heads of the two new organizations were a study in contrast—Aguilar short, slim, dark, compact, and tidy; Vera tall, heavy, blond, broad-faced, and expansive. Aguilar was a lawyer with a reputation as a hard-charging prosecutor; Vera a career cop, trained by, among others, the FBI.

Vera was a regular guy you’d swap stories over a few beers with; Aguilar a quiet academic, devout Catholic, and family man who never told tales. Vera wore custom-made Italian suits; Aguilar was strictly Brooks Brothers off-the-rack.

What they had in common was a determination to clean things up.

They started with their own people, making each investigator pass a background check and a polygraph asserting that he never has been, nor is he now, in the employ of the narcos. Aguilar and Vera were the first ones to take the test, and they released the (clean) results to the media.

Not everyone passed. Aguilar and Vera fired hundreds of investigators who failed the test.

“Some of these bastards,” Vera told Keller, “were working with the cartels before they came to us. The cartels sent them to enlist, do you believe that? Fuck their mothers.”

Aguilar winced at the obscenity.

“Now we all take the test once a month,” Vera said. “Expensive, but if you’re going to keep the stable clean you have to keep shoveling out the shit.”

The shit tried to shovel back.

Vera and Aguilar had each received scores of death threats. Each had half a dozen heavily armed bodyguards who escorted them everywhere; sentries patrolled their houses twenty-four/seven.

DEA was encouraged.

“We’ve finally found people we can work with,” Taylor told Keller in his predeployment briefing. “These guys are honest, competent, and driven.”

Keller had to agree with that.

Still, Keller and Aguilar knocked heads.

“Your organizational chart,” Keller said one day after it took an exchange of thirty-seven memos to approve a simple wiretap, “is about as straightforward as a bowl of day-old spaghetti.”

“I don’t eat stale food,” Aguilar answered, “but perhaps you can enlighten me as to the exact delineations between DEA, ICE, FBI, Homeland Security, and the plethora of state and local jurisdictions on your side of the border, because, frankly, I haven’t noticed them.”

They argued about the Puente Grande escape.

The prison system now came under Vera’s bailiwick, but prosecutions of prison staff had to be done under Aguilar’s authority. So Vera had appointed his own man to investigate the escape, while Aguilar had ordered the arrests of seventy-two guards and staff, including the warden. Interrogations were conducted by a top AFI official named Edgar Delgado, but Aguilar and Keller were allowed to sit in. Aguilar was humiliated by what he heard—that Barrera basically ran the prison.

Keller took it as a given.

“Because all Mexicans are corrupt,” Aguilar huffed.

Keller shrugged.

—

Aguilar went home that night too late for dinner but in time to help his daughters with their homework. After the girls went to bed, Lucinda set a plate of lamb birria, one of his favorites, at the table.

“How is the North American?” she asked, sitting next to him.

“Like all North Americans,” Aguilar answered. “He thinks he knows everything.”

“I didn’t know you were a bigot, Luis.”

“I prefer to call myself parochial.”

“You should invite him over for dinner.”

“I spend enough time with him,” Aguilar answered. “Besides, I wouldn’t inflict him on you.”

His new job had been hard on his wife. A school principal, she wasn’t used to the bodyguard who now took her to work and back, or to the guards who patrolled the house. The girls were easier with it—their young minds less set in their ways, and, besides, they thought it was kind of “cool,” and any numbers of their fellow students at their private schools had bodyguards.