“We’re being robbed,” Marisol says as they make the slow walk through the crowd from the Zócalo. “Everyone knows that the people want the PRD. They’re going to cook the books.”

“You don’t know that,” Keller answers, although he’s worried. Worried for her, that she’ll be hurt and disappointed; worried for himself, that PAN will take the election—fairly or unfairly—and that it will be business as usual for the Tapia money network.

He’s in a quandary about what to do with the information he has about the money pipeline going to Los Pinos.

If he tells Aguilar or Vera, he could be instantly expelled from the country.

Worse, he doesn’t know if one or both are implicated.

He should take the information to Taylor, let DEA and the rest of the alphabet soup take over the investigation, then deal with its consequences on the highest level.

But who in DEA is going to take on Los Pinos? The issue would be kicked up to Justice, then over to State, and probably die a slow death in the hallways. Because Laura Amaro is right—the current conservative administration in the White House wants PAN to win this election. They’d do nothing to rock that boat and risk the Mexican election going to the left wing.

So the smartest thing to do for the time being is nothing.

Continue the investigation and keep it from his colleagues and superiors until after the election.

Everything depends on the election.

The official count starts three days later.

The election commission collects all the sealed ballot packages from the districts and examines them for signs of alterations. Representatives from the various parties are present and can make objections.

Marisol sits up all night by the television in her condo.

Keller waits with her. They drink coffee and make nervous conversation as the numbers start to come in and López Obrador jumps out to an early lead.

“I told you,” Marisol says. “The country wants PRD.”

Then the erosion begins. It’s like watching a riverbank collapse under a slow flood of water. The lead dwindles and then collapses as results from the northern districts are slow arriving.

“That’s me,” Marisol says. “That’s my home.”

When the northern votes finally come in, they’re strongly for Calderón.

“I don’t believe it,” Marisol says. “I know the people there, they’re poor and they’re not PAN.”

Early the next morning, the official result is announced.

Calderón has won by a mere 243,934 votes.

0.58 percent.

A hanging chad, Keller thinks.

Marisol cries.

Then she gets angry.

—

They take to the streets.

Two days after the official tally, almost three hundred thousand people demonstrate in the Zócalo and listen to PRD speakers talk about voter fraud. A week later, the crowd swells to half a million people who demand that the courts order a recount.

Marisol is one of them.

Keller another.

He goes to protect her, but he also goes because it’s just such a spectacle. When was the last time, if ever, that half a million Americans gathered to fight for democracy? He doesn’t know if the accusations of voter fraud are right or wrong, but he’s impressed—no, moved—that they care in those numbers, that it means something to them. He’d watched an American election stolen with barely a whimper.

The ambassador would shit bricks if he knew that Keller was there, Tim Taylor would probably hemorrhage through the nose, but Keller doesn’t care. It’s an historic moment and he’s not going to miss it, and of course he’s aware that there’s something else.

He might be falling in love.

It seems unlikely at his age and place in life. Marisol is twenty years younger (although she would be the first to say that she has an “old soul”) and a loyal citizen of a country he might get tossed out of any day.

They haven’t slept together yet—their physical contact has been confined to kisses—but the physical attraction is there. He certainly feels it, and thinks she does as well, from the nature of those kisses and her sighs when they say good night.

But she’s a Mexican woman of a certain class, and a Mexican woman of a certain class doesn’t go to bed on the first date or the third. He knows that if it happens it won’t be casual for her—she’s been through the demise of a marriage and now she’s going to take her time.

Art Keller is no lovestruck fool, no victim of a midlife crisis. He knows that there are problems, problems he hasn’t talked to her about. How do you tell a woman you’re reluctant to get involved because it puts her in danger? How do you deliver the melodramatic, surreal news that there’s a multimillion-dollar price on your head that someone might try to collect any moment, and that you don’t want her to be in range of an errant bullet?

It’s surreal, like so much of the narco-world—and yet, like so much of the narco-world, all too real.

So Keller knows he shouldn’t be seeing her at all.

Her, or anyone else.

But being with her feels too good, too natural, too “right,” to employ a cliché from pop music. He likes Marisol, he respects her, he admires her (okay, yes, he lusts after her), he might be falling in love.

And the odds of anyone trying to collect Barrera’s bounty are slim right now. In a strange way, the disputed election affords him a level of protection, because Adán is too cautious to rock the boat in the middle of a storm.

Still, Keller knows that his getting involved with anyone is a bad idea.

Two weeks later he joins her at the biggest demonstration yet—a march down Paseo de la Reforma to demand a recount. It’s impossible to judge the number of marchers from inside the march—some observers put it at two hundred thousand—but the Mexico City police estimate that almost two and a half million people march that day to demand a fair election.

Two and a half million people, Keller thinks as he walks beside Marisol, who chants along with the crowd. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington was about a quarter of a million strong; a protest against the Vietnam War in ’69 might have had six hundred thousand.

Despite himself, Keller finds it compelling. Anyone who says that Mexicans don’t care about democracy should be here today, he thinks, as the marchers file pass the statue to Los Niños Héroes and El Ángel de la Independencia, past the American embassy and the stock exchange.

It’s stirring.

“They’ll have to give us a recount now!” Marisol shouts happily to him over the chanting. “They’ll have to!”

The march ends in the Zócalo, but this time people don’t leave as thousands of them start a plantón, an encampment, refusing to vacate until a recount is announced. Keller is against Marisol staying. “It’s dangerous. What if the police try to clear you out? You could get hurt.”

“Go home if you don’t want to stay,” she says.

“It’s not that—”

“After all, it’s not your country.”

It isn’t but it is.

Keller has spent more of the past twenty years in Mexico than he has in the United States, and even his time at “home” was consumed with Mexico. He’s shed blood here, had friends die here.

He stays.

The first night he spends with Marisol Cisneros is on a sleeping bag in the Zócalo with a thousand other people around them.

Things start to turn ugly the next day as the protestors snarl traffic on Paseo de la Reforma and other major thoroughfares. Fights break out with commuters, police make arrests. Keller urges Marisol not to get involved—she has a practice to protect, patients to see, he urges caution—but she won’t quit. She reschedules her regular patients and only leaves the protest to make her clinic hours in Iztapalapa. That afternoon, the judges decide that there is enough doubt as to the legitimacy of the voting to justify a recount in 155 disputed districts. The recount will start in four days and take weeks, at least.