And Keller can guess what it is.

I should have killed him, Keller thinks more out of fatigue than fear. Now the blood feud will just go on and on, like the war on drugs itself.

World without end, amen.

He knows it won’t end until one or both of them is dead.

The beekeeper is not at dinner that night, he doesn’t go to Compline afterward. When he doesn’t show up at Vigils in the morning, Brother Gregory goes to his room to see if he’s sick.

The room is empty.

The beekeeper is gone.

Metropolitan Correctional Center, San Diego

2004

The thing you have to admire about the North Americans, Adán thinks, is their consistency.

They never learn.

Adán has been as good as his word.

After the funeral, he sat down with Gibson and gave him gold. He sat across the table from DEA, with federal, state, and local prosecutors, answered every question they asked, and some they didn’t know to ask. The information he provided led to a score of huge drug seizures and high-level arrests in the United States and Mexico.

This scared the shit out of Tompkins.

“I know what I’m doing,” Adán assured him.

He saves the best for last. “Do you want Hugo Garza?”

“We’re on Viagra for Garza,” Gibson answers.

“Can you give them Garza?” Tompkins asks, rattled. His client is offering to give up the head of the Gulf cartel, the most powerful drug organization in Mexico now that Adán’s old Federación has been taken apart.

This is why Tompkins doesn’t like to let clients in on the haggling. It’s like bringing your wife in with you to buy a car—sooner or later she’s going to say something that costs you. Clients have a right to be present, but just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

But what Adán says next—it goes way over the top.

“I want to be extradited,” Adán says. “I’ll plead guilty here, but I want to serve my sentence in Mexico.”

Mexico and the United States have a reciprocal arrangement to allow prisoners to serve their time in their home countries for humanitarian purposes, to be near their families. But Tompkins is aghast and hauls his client out of the room. “You’re a snitch, Adán. You won’t last five minutes in a Mexican prison. They’ll be lining up to kill you.”

“They’ll be lining up in American prisons, too,” Adán observes. The prisons on this side of the border are filled with Mexican narcos and cholo gangbangers who would jump at the opportunity to move up in the hierarchy by killing the world’s biggest informer.

Security arrangements for Adán have played a major role in the plea agreement that Tompkins has been negotiating, but Adán has already balked at going onto the “protected prisoner” units with child molesters and other informers.

“Adán,” Tompkins pleads, “as your lawyer—as your friend—I’m asking you not to do this. I’m making progress. With judicial notice of your cooperation, I can possibly get your sentence down to fifteen years, then the witness protection program. Time served, you’re out in twelve. You can still have a life.”

“You are my lawyer,” Adán says, “and as your client, I’m instructing you to make this deal—Garza for extradition. If you won’t, I’ll fire you and get someone who will.”

Because this deal has to be made, and Adán can’t tell Tompkins why. Can’t tell him that delicate negotiations have been going on in Mexico for months, and that yes, it’s a risk, but it’s a risk he has to take.

If they kill him, they kill him, but he’s not going to spend his life in a prison cell.

So he waits while Tompkins goes back in. Adán knows it won’t be simple—Gibson will have to go to his bosses, who will go to theirs. Then the Justice Department will talk to the State Department, who will talk to the CIA, who will talk to the White House, and then the deal will get done.

Because a former occupant of that same White House authorized the arrangement back in the ’80s by which Tío trafficked cocaine and gave money to the anticommunist Contras, and no one wants Adán Barrera pulling that skeleton from the closet to the witness stand.

There will be no trial.

They’ll take the Garza bait instead.

Because the North Americans never learn.

—

Three weeks later, the Mexican federales, acting on information provided by the DEA, capture Hugo Garza, the boss of the Gulf cartel, at a remote ranch in Tamaulipas.

Two days later, U.S. marshals take Adán out of San Diego in the middle of the night and put him on a plane to Guadalajara, where federales in black uniforms and hoods whisk him off the plane and drive him to serve his sentence at the Puente Grande Correctional Facility—“the Big Bridge”—outside the city that his uncle had once ruled like a duchy.

A convoy of two armored cars and a personnel carrier rumble up the Zapotlanejo Freeway toward the guard towers of the prison, its searchlights glowing silver in an otherwise silk black night.

The lead armored car stops under one of the towers by a large sign that reads CEFERESO II. Coils of razor wire top the high fences and concrete walls. Machine gunners in the towers train their sights on the convoy.

A steel door slides open and the convoy pulls inside a large supply bay. The door slides shut behind it. They say that once you cross the Big Bridge, you never cross back.

Adán Barrera is looking at twenty-two years here.

It’s cold, and Adán huddles inside the blue down jacket they gave him as the guards take him by the elbows and help him out of the personnel carrier. His hands are cuffed in front of him, his ankles shackled.

He stands against a concrete wall as guards snap his picture, fingerprint, and “process” him. They take off his cuffs and shackles, then the jacket, and he shivers as he changes into the brown prison uniform with the number 817 stitched on the front and back.

The warden gives a speech. “Adán Barrera, you are now an inmate of CEFERESO II. Do not think that your former status gives you any standing here. You are just another criminal. Abide by the rules, and you will do fine. Disobey them, and you will suffer the consequences. I wish you a successful rehabilitation.”

Adán nods, and then they take him from the processing area into the COC, the Observation and Classification Center, to be evaluated for a permanent housing assignment.

Puente Grande is Mexico’s harshest and most secure prison, and CEFERESO II (Federal Social Rehabilitation Center) is its maximum-security block, reserved for the most dangerous criminals, kidnappers, narco kingpins, and convicts who killed in other prisons.

The COC is the worst section of CEFERESO II.

This is where the malditos—the damned—go. Usually their indoctrination consists of being beaten with hoses, shocked with electric wires, or drenched with water and left to shiver, naked, on the bare concrete floor. Perhaps even worse is the isolation—no books, no magazines, nothing to write on. If the physical torture doesn’t destroy them, the mental torment usually takes their minds. By the time the evaluation is completed, they are usually, and accurately, classified as insane.

The guard opens the door of a cell, Adán steps in, and the door closes behind him.

The man sitting on the metal bench is huge—six foot eight, heavily muscled, with a full black beard. He looks at Adán, grins, and says, “I’m your welcoming committee.”

Adán braces for what he knows is coming.

The man gets up and wraps him in a crushing bear hug. “It’s good to see you, primo.”

“You, too, cousin.”

Diego Tapia and Adán grew up together in the Sinaloan mountains, among the poppy fields, before the American war on drugs—a saner, quieter time. Diego was a young foot soldier—a sicario—when Adán’s uncle formed the original Federación.