Some were the children of government officials. Others, Aguilar knew with chagrin, were doubtless buchones—the sons and daughters of narcos. Never mind, he thought now, you can’t blame the child for the sins of the father.

“How’s the lamb?” Lucinda asked.

“Excellent, thank you.”

“More wine?”

“Why are you buttering me up?”

“I’m sure,” Lucinda said, “that he’s not so horrible.”

“I didn’t say he was horrible,” Aguilar answered. “I just said that he was North American.”

He finished his dinner and his wine, played two moves in a chess match against himself, and then went upstairs to bed.

Lucinda was waiting up for him.

—

The next morning they started fresh.

“Let’s work,” Aguilar said, “on the assumption that the Tapias, acting in concert with Nacho Esparza, took Barrera out of Puente Grande.”

“Fair enough,” Keller agreed.

“What is the operational corollary of that assumption?” Aguilar asked.

“We hit them,” Vera said. “Make it too expensive for them to hide him.”

They went at it hard.

Using SEIDO intelligence and information that Keller provided from DEA intelligence packages, they raided properties that Tapia or Esparza owned in Sinaloa, Durango, and Nayarit. They tracked down and questioned dozens of the two men’s associates. They busted growers, dealers, shippers, and money launderers.

They turned up the heat, busting a shipment of Diego Tapia’s cocaine, then a freighter full of the precursor chemicals that Esparza needed to cook his meth.

They made their agenda clear. The AFI troopers would throw the arrested men to the ground and scream, “Where is Adán Barrera?!” Then they turned them over to the SEIDO agents, who asked, over and over again, “Where is Adán Barrera?”

No one told them anything.

The raids netted drugs, weapons, computers, cell phones, but no solid leads as to Barrera’s whereabouts.

Aguilar threw it right back on Keller.

“You’re the Barrera expert,” he said with no effort to disguise his sarcasm. “Perhaps you’d gift us with your expertise to find him.”

Keller picked up the glove.

When he first arrived in Mexico City he checked in to his official housing near the embassy, but then went out and found a furnished apartment on the second floor of an art deco building on Avenida Vicente Suárez in Colonia Condesa, within walking distance of the embassy but not close enough to be an American diplomatic ghetto. The bohemian neighborhood was all sidewalk cafés, bars, nightclubs, and bookstores.

A native Spanish speaker, Keller blended in easily. He moved his few things into the Condesa apartment and rarely went back to the official housing. The apartment was well stocked—his Sig Sauer, a 12-gauge Mossberg Tacstar 590 shotgun strapped under the bed, and a U.S. Navy Ka-Bar combat knife taped to the toilet water tank. I might be bait, he thought, but that doesn’t mean I have to be a sitting duck.

After weeks of the futile search for Barrera, Keller burrowed himself into the Condesa apartment and went to work. Barrera had escaped from Puente Grande, so Keller started there, poring over the thousands of pages of transcript from the guards who had been arrested and interrogated.

If he didn’t know better, the accounts were almost the stuff of fiction—Barrera’s well-stocked luxury cell, the “movie nights,” the imported prostitutes, Los Bateadores. Keller read about the former beauty queen Magda Beltrán, the family Christmas party, the riot the night of the escape. It was fascinating but shed no light as to where Barrera might be.

Keller started over, reading, rereading, and reading again the stories about Barrera’s time in Puente Grande.

Then it hit him—a passing mention to a rumored attempt on Barrera’s life that had happened, if it happened at all, on the volleyball court. The would-be assassin’s body was later found with a neat bullet hole in the back of the head.

Keller phoned Aguilar. “Can you pull the file of a former prisoner, now deceased, Juan Cabray?”

“Yes, but why?”

“I need it to employ my expertise.”

“Well then, by all means.”

Keller went to the SEIDO offices to pick up the file.

Cabray was a career criminal who had worked for the old Sonora cartel and was apparently good with a knife. Not good enough, though, Keller thought. He set aside the question of who had ordered a hit on Barrera to consider Cabray.

Assume the story is true, Keller thought. Cabray took a stab, as it were, at Barrera and missed. Barrera’s people executed him. Looking at the photo of Cabray’s corpse, the bullet wound was clear, but Keller was more impressed by what he didn’t see.

Signs of torture.

They would have worked on Cabray pretty good to find out who hired him, but the photo showed no bruises, no broken bones, no burn marks.

Cabray cooperated.

Keller dug deeper into his file and found out that Juan Cabray was from Los Elijos, in Durango state. He logged on to the computer and quickly got satellite images of the little village, tucked in a valley among remote mountains.

Durango was part of the so-called Golden Triangle, the mountainous intersection of Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua that made up the prime opium and marijuana areas in Mexico.

It was in the heart of the Sinaloa cartel stronghold.

Keller convened a meeting of the Barrera Coordinating Committee and requested permission to ask for a U.S. satellite run over Los Elijos. It was a delicate suggestion, the Mexicans reluctant to accept foreign satellite surveillance over their country.

“It’s absurd,” Aguilar said. “Why would Barrera think of hiding in the village of a man who tried to kill him, moreover a man whom he ordered killed?”

“Just humor me,” Keller said.

“Your expertise?” Aguilar asked.

“We’re not making progress anywhere else,” Vera said, shrugging. “Why not?”

“We can just send a plane over,” Aguilar said.

“It has to be high-altitude,” Keller said, “not a low flyover. I don’t want to spook him. Let me ask for a satellite run.”

Aguilar snorted but gave the necessary permission, Keller got on the horn to Taylor, and the satellite run was okayed.

Two days later, Keller was back at SEIDO with the photos laid out on the conference room table. He pointed to a small circle, a larger square, and a yet larger rectangle.

“This could be a new well,” he says. “This…I don’t know, maybe a school? The third shape, maybe a clinic. In any case, it’s all new construction.”

“What’s your point?” Aguilar asked.

“This is a poor village. Suddenly there’s all kinds of new construction on things that they need?”

“We have social development programs all over Mexico,” Aguilar said.

“Can we find out—quietly—if there have been any in Los Elijos?” Keller asked. “Because if there haven’t, I have an idea as to who’s funded these projects.”

“Let me guess—Adán Barrera,” Aguilar said. “Oh, please.”

“Where are you from?” Keller asked.

Aguilar looked surprised, but answered, “Mexico City.”

Keller turned to Vera. “You?”

“Same.”

“I spent years in the Triangle,” Keller said. “I know the people, I know how they think, I know the culture. I’ve known Adán Barrera since he was twenty years old.”

“So?”

“So the people of Los Elijos will think that Juan Cabray acted honorably,” Keller said. “They’ll further think that Adán Barrera responded nobly. Go from the supposition that, before he died, Cabray accepted Barrera as his patrón. Barrera has acted the role of patrón in the village—a well, a school, a clinic. They’d shelter him.”

“I think you’re reaching,” Aguilar said.

“Do you have a better idea?” Keller asked.

Aguilar made some discreet calls and found that neither the federal nor state governments had development projects in Los Elijos. Likewise, there were no church or NGO activities there that he could discern.