never go away.
Keller sits down on the sofa across from Marisol.
“You look tired,” Marisol says.
“It’s been a day.”
“Barrera,” she says. “It’s been all over the shows. What a scene, huh?”
“Even dead, he’s still getting people killed,” Keller says.
They talk for a few more minutes and then she goes up to bed. He goes into the den and turns the television on. CNN is covering the Barrera story and doing a recap of his life—how he started as a teenager selling bootleg jeans, how he joined his uncle’s drug business, his bloody war with Güero Méndez to take over the Baja plaza, his succeeding his uncle as the head of the Mexican Federación. As the scant photos of Barrera appear on the screen, the reporter goes on to talk about “unconfirmed rumors”—that Barrera was involved in the torture-murder of DEA agent Ernie Hidalgo, that Barrera had thrown the two small children of his rival Méndez off a bridge, that he’d slaughtered nineteen innocent men, women and children in a small Baja village.
Keller pours himself a weak nightcap as the reporter provides “balance”—Barrera built schools, clinics and playgrounds in his home state of Sinaloa, he had forbidden his people to engage in kidnappings or extortion, he was “beloved” by the rural people in the mountains of the Sierra Madre.
The screen shows the signs reading ¡adán vive! and the little homebuilt roadside shrines with photos of him, candles, bottles of beer, and cigarettes.
Barrera didn’t smoke, Keller thinks.
The profile relates Barrera’s 1999 arrest by “current DEA head Art Keller,” his transfer to a Mexican prison, his 2004 “daring escape” and subsequent rise back to the top of the drug world. His war with the “hyperviolent” Zetas, and his betrayal at the peace conference in Guatemala.
Then the scene at the funeral.
The bizarre murder.
The lonely lowering of the coffin into the ground, with only his widow, his twin sons and Ricardo Núñez present.
Keller turns off the television.
He thought that putting two bullets into Adán Barrera’s face would bring him peace.
It hasn’t.
Book Two
Heroin
They left at once and met the Lotus-eaters,
who had no thought of killing my companions,
but gave them lotus plants to eat, whose fruit,
sweet as honey, made any man who tried it
lose his desire ever to journey home . . .
—Homer
The Odyssey, book 9
1
The Acela
This train don’t carry no liars, this train . . .
—Traditional American folk song
New York City
July 2014
Keller looks out the train window at abandoned factory buildings in Baltimore and wonders if some of them are now shooting galleries. The windows are shattered, gang graffiti is sprayed on the redbrick walls, fence posts lean like drunken sailors, and the chain links have been cut.
It’s the same story all the way up the Amtrak line, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Newark—the factories are shells, the jobs are gone and too many of the former workers are shooting smack.
A huge sign over a decrepit building outside Wilmington says it all. It originally read good buy works, but someone spray-painted it to good bye work.
Keller’s glad he took the train instead of flying. From the air he would have missed seeing all this. It’s tempting to think that the root causes of the heroin epidemic are in Mexico, because he’s so focused on interdiction, but the real source is right here and in scores of smaller cities and towns.
Opiates are a response to pain.
Physical pain, emotional pain, economic pain.
He’s looking at all three.
The Heroin Trifecta.
Keller is riding the Acela, the three-hour train from Washington, DC, to New York City, from the governmental power center to the financial one, although sometimes it’s hard to know which rules which.
And hard to know what he can do about Mexico from Washington when the real source of the opiate problem might just be on Wall Street. You’re standing on the Rio Grande with a broom, he thinks, trying to sweep back the tide of heroin while billionaires are sending jobs overseas, closing factories and towns, killing hopes and dreams, inflicting pain.
And then they tell you, stop the heroin epidemic.
The difference between a hedge fund manager and a cartel boss?
Wharton Business School.
He looks over to see Hugo Hidalgo lurching down the aisle with a cardboard tray in his hand, bringing back coffee and sandwiches. The young agent plops down in the aisle seat beside him. “I got you a ham and cheese panini. I hope that’s all right.”
“It’s fine. What did you get?”
“A burger.”
“Brave man.”
A good man, actually.
In a few short months, Hidalgo has become a rock star. He’s