“We could use the jobs,” Keller says.

After dessert and coffee, Yvette says, “Let’s walk down to the pool.”

“Where’s Martín?”

“Did you notice that handsome young actor?” Yvette asks.

“Yes.”

“So did Martín.”

“Oh.”

“We have an arrangement,” Yvette says. “We’re not as provincial about these things as you are up in the barbarian north. Martín does what—or whom—he wishes, and I do the same.”

“Yvette—”

“Relax,” she says. “This is not that kind of seduction.”

They reach the pool, she sits down at the edge, takes off her shoes, and dangles her feet in the water. The pool shines blue and beautiful under the filtered lights. Sitting beside her, Keller asks, “What kind of seduction is it?”

“First of all,” Yvette says, “could we drop the pretense? We know who you are, you know who we are. The dance has been amusing, but at some point the masquerade ends and we reveal our faces.”

“All right.”

Good, Keller thinks. Let’s get on with it.

“We could be your friends,” Yvette says. “Influential friends who could provide you with important information. That is your currency, isn’t it? You’ll note, please, that I haven’t insulted you with an offer of money.”

“How do you know I’d be insulted?”

“You’re much too Catholic,” she answers. “You couldn’t live with the guilt. No, you’d have to be convinced it was for the greater good.”

“Would it be?”

“You know what’s out there,” Yvette says. “Perhaps we’re not the greater good, but we are the lesser of evils.”

If I were as much a Catholic as you say I am, Keller thinks, you’d know I believe that evil is an absolute, without gradations. But he asks, “What would you want in return?”

“Friendship,” she says. “We would never ask you to betray a colleague, reveal a source, anything like that. We would come to you only when our interests align. Perhaps just to be an ‘ear,’ someone to represent a point of view in Washington…”

“Whose point of view?” Keller asks. “Yours? Martín’s? Diego’s? Adán Barrera’s?”

It’s inconceivable to him that this is Barrera reaching out, probing for peace. There’s too much blood between them. But the Tapias are Adán’s creatures, his functionaries, his ambassadors to the outside world.

Or are they?

“Martín and I are truly partners,” Yvette says. “We share everything. Diego? Diego is a dear sweet man and I love him like a brother, but he’s a dinosaur. Diego still thinks that this is a culture, a way of life, he still thinks it’s about the drugs.”

“What is it about?”

“Money,” Yvette answers. “Finance. Power. Connections. I’m speaking for myself and Martín.”

“And Adán?”

“If we were representing Adán’s point of view,” Yvette says, “your head would be in a box of dry ice by now, on its way to Sinaloa, and we’d be two million dollars richer. But two million dollars is small change, no offense.”

Is this a rift between the Tapias and Barrera? Keller wonders. Big enough for me to walk through? To get the evidence I need about Vera or Aguilar? Or Los Pinos? Big enough to bring Barrera down?

Yeah, Keller thinks, this is a different kind of seduction.

“You understand,” he says, “that if we become ‘friends,’ that friendship cannot ever include Adán.”

“Actually, I’m counting on it.” She puts her hand out. “It’s a complicated world. In a complicated world, everyone needs friends.”

Keller takes her hand. “Friends.”

Yvette gets up. “We should wander back. My husband’s sodomies are passionate but short-lived.”

—

The next morning, Felipe Calderón takes office.

On the same day, he appoints Gerardo Vera as commander of all federal police forces in Mexico.

Benjamín Amaro is appointed as Vera’s liaison to Los Pinos.

Luis Aguilar is retained as head of SEIDO.

Twelve days later, the new president launches Operation Michoacán and sends four thousand army troops and a hundred AFI agents into the violence-torn state, his wife’s native country, to suppress La Familia.

Three weeks later Operation Baja California sends thirty-three hundred troops into Tijuana.

Three weeks after that, Osiel Contreras is extradited to the United States.

It’s the beginning of Mexico’s war on drugs.

Good Night, Juárez

This isn’t a city, it’s a cemetery.

—Peggy Cummins as Laurie Starr

in Gun Crazy

1 Gente Nueva—The New People

And he that sat upon the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.”

—Revelation 21:5

Mexico City

May 2007

The trajinera, named María, is brightly decorated, its high arch painted in blue, red, and yellow, its gondola-like bow strewn with fresh spring flowers.

Keller and Yvette sit in the prow, out of hearing from the oarsman who steers the boat through the canal flanked by ahuejote trees. The narrow canals are all that remain of the once large lake of Xochimilco, where the Aztecs grew crops in the chinampas, floating gardens.

For the past five months, Keller and Yvette Tapia have had secret assignations. They’d meet in the Zócalo, in the museum at Chapultepec Castle, in the Palacio de Bellas Artes by the Orozco murals. Each time he went, Keller wondered if this was the time that she was setting him up, and each time he came back safely he was a little surprised.

Twice she warned him of an impending attack—That Italian restaurant you like, don’t go there. Take a different route home tonight. It was risky. Adán was getting impatient, she told Keller, frustrated at the failed attempts, beginning to get suspicious.

Risky for Keller, too. Every meeting with Yvette increased the chance that Aguilar or Vera would find out what he was doing. At the very least, they’d expatriate him; at worst, if either or both were dirty, it would kill any chance of getting Barrera.

Then there was the sheer physical danger and the stress of being a hunted man again. He found his life becoming more and more constrained, limited, his world getting smaller as he went from his apartment to his office to the occasional rendezvous with Yvette or meetings in the SEIDO building or at AFI.

Before Marisol he was never lonely, in fact he reveled in his solitude. After she first left, they spoke over the phone every few days. She had set up her clinic—the only full-time doctor for twenty thousand people in the valley—and was happily busy. They talked about getting together—she coming to Mexico City for a weekend, he going to Valverde—but something always came up for her, and he didn’t feel right about exposing her to the risk of being with him.

The phone calls started to fade to once a week, then once every ten days, and then once a month or so.

And he was getting nowhere on Barrera.

Just hanging in, hovering, hoping for a break.

Yvette was giving him bits of information that he knew had been approved and sanitized by Martín. Mostly “soft” intel—Diego was getting more involved in the Monterrey area, Eddie Ruiz’s star was rising, Nacho had acquired yet another new mistress. The “hard” intel she gave him was mostly about Solorzano—safe houses, drug shipments, which cops he owned, which border—in the hope that he would pass it on to DEA.