The Cartel Read Online Free PDF Page A

at peace.
    “So here in your splendid isolation,” Taylor continues, “you haven’t heard about your boy Adán.”
    “What about him?” Keller asks, despite himself. He wanted to have the strength not to ask.
    “He’s gone Céline Dion,” Taylor says. “You can’t stop the guy from singing.”
    “You came here to tell me that?” Keller asks.
    “No,” Taylor says. “There’s a rumor that he’s put a two-million-dollar bounty on your head, and I’m legally obligated to inform you of a direct threat on your life. I’m also obligated to offer you protection.”
    “I don’t want it.”

    “See what I mean?” Taylor says to Jiménez. “Hardass. You know what they used to call him? ‘Killer Keller.’ ”
    Jiménez smiles.
    Taylor turns back to Keller. “It’s tempting—my share of two mil, I could buy a little place on Sanibel Island, get up every morning with nothing to do but fish. Take care of yourself, huh?”
    Keller watches them walk back up the hill and then disappear over the crest. Barrera a soplón ? There are a lot of things you can call Adán Barrera, all of them true, but a snitch isn’t one of them. If Barrera is talking, it’s for a reason.
    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