Читать книгу The Border - Don winslow - Страница 19

Jacqui wakes up sick.

Like she wakes up every morning.

That’s why they call it a “wake-up shot,” she thinks as she rolls out of bed. Well, it’s not exactly a bed, it’s an air mattress on the floor of a van, but I guess if you sleep in it … on it … it’s a bed.

Nouns, after all, are based on verbs. Which is sort of too bad, she thinks, because her nickname, Jacqui the Junkie (a noun), lends itself far too easily to alliteration based on what she does, shoot junk, a verb.

Now she fights off an urge to puke.

Jacqui hates puking. She needs a wake-up.

Elbowing Travis, she says, “Hey.”

“Hey.” He’s out of it.

“I’m going out to score.”

“’Kay.”

Lazy prick, she thinks, I’m going out to score for you, too. She pulls on an old UConn sweatshirt, slips into her jeans, then puts on a pair of purple Nikes she found at a yard sale.

Slides the door open and steps out into a Staten Island Sunday morning.

Specifically Tottenville, down on the south end of the island across the river from Perth Amboy. The van is parked in the lot at Tottenville Commons, out behind the Walgreens along Amboy Road, but she knows they’ll have to move this morning before the security guys throw them out.

She walks into the drugstore, ignores the cashier’s dirty look and goes to the back to the restroom because she really has to pee. Does her business, washes her hands, splashes water on her face and is pissed at herself because she forgot to bring her toothbrush and her mouth tastes like day-old shit.

Which is pretty much what you look like, Jacqui thinks.

She doesn’t have any makeup on, her long brown hair is dirty and stringy and she’s going to have to find a place to deal with that before she goes to work today but right now all she hears is her mother’s voice: You’re such a pretty girl, Jacqueline, when you take care of yourself.

What I’m trying to do, Mom, Jacqui thinks as she walks out of the store and gives the cashier a fuck you smile on her way out.

Fuck you, bitch, you try living in a van.

Which is what she and Travis have been doing since her mom threw them out, what, three months ago, when she came home from the bar early—miracle of miracles—and found them shooting up.

So they moved into Travis’s van and live basically as gypsies now. Not homeless, Jacqui insists, because the van is a home, but they’re … what’s the word … peripatetic. She’s always liked the word peripatetic. She wishes it rhymed with something so she could use it in a song, but it really doesn’t. It sort of rhymes with pathetic, but Jacqui doesn’t want to go there because it has the ring of truth.

We are, she thinks, kind of pathetic.

They want to get an apartment, plan to get an apartment, but so far the first—and last—and the damage deposit have been going up their arms.

Back out in the parking lot she starts working the phone and calls her dealer, Marco, but it goes right to voice mail. She leaves a quick message—It’s Jacqui. Looking for you. Call back.

She really wants to hook up by phone because she’s starting to feel seriously sick and doesn’t want to have to get in the van and go all the way over to Princes Bay or way the hell up to Richmond, where the street dealers work.

It’s too far and it’s too risky, because the cops are clamping down, chasing the slingers inside. Or worse, you buy from some narc and get busted and what Jacqui really, really doesn’t want is to get arrested and detox at Rikers.

She’s about to go back to the van and drive down to Waldbaum’s parking lot where you can usually score and then her phone buzzes and it’s Marco and he isn’t happy. “It’s Sunday morning.”

“I know, I need a wake-up.”

“You should have saved some from last night.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“What do you need?” Marco asks.

“Two bags.”

“You want me to come out for twenty bucks?”

Jesus, why is he hassling her? Her nose is starting to run and she thinks she’s going to puke. “I’m getting sick, Marco.”

“Okay, where are you?”

“The Walgreens on Amboy.”

“I’m at Micky D’s,” Marco says. “I’ll meet you behind the Laundromat. You know where that is?”

Yeah, she does her laundry there all the time. Well, not all the time, when she thinks about it. When it gets too disgusting. “Duh, yes.”

“Half an hour,” Marco says.

“To walk across the parking lot?”

“I just got my food.”

“Okay, I’ll come there.”

“Ten minutes,” Marco says. “Behind the Laundromat.”

“Bring me a coffee,” Jacqui says. “Milk, four sugars.”

“Yes, Lady Mary,” Marco says. “You want, like, a McMuffin or something?”

“Just the coffee.” She’s just going to be able to keep that down, never mind greasy food.

Jacqui crosses the parking lot and walks out to Page Avenue, then up to the next strip mall, which has a CVS, a McDonald’s, a grocery store, a liquor store, an Italian restaurant and the Laundromat.

She walks behind the CVS and waits out the back of the Laundromat.

Five minutes later, Marco pulls up in his Ford Taurus. He rolls down the window and hands her the coffee.

“You drove across the parking lot?” Jacqui asks. “Global warming, Marco? Ever heard of that?”

“You have the money?” Marco asks. “And don’t tell me you’ll get it, you’re totally out of credit right now.”

“I have it.” She looks around and then hands him a twenty.

He reaches into the console and then slips her two glassine envelopes. “And a buck for the coffee.”

“Really?” Marco’s gotten kind of salty since he started dealing. Sometimes he forgets he’s just another addict, slinging shit so he has the money to get himself well. A lot of people are doing that these days—every dealer Jacqui knows is a user. She digs into her jeans pocket, finds a dollar bill and gives it to him. “I thought you were being a gentleman.”

“No, I’m a feminist.”

“Where are you going to be later?”

Marco holds his little finger to his mouth and his thumb to his ear—“Call me”—and pulls away.

Jacqui puts the envelopes in her pocket and walks back to the van.

Travis is awake.

“I scored,” Jacqui says, pulling the envelopes out.

“Where?”

“From Marco.”

“He’s an asshole,” Travis says.

“Okay, you go the next time,” Jacqui says.

Fuck the lazy bastard, she thinks. She loves him, but, Jesus, he can be a pain in the ass sometimes. And speaking of Our Lord and Savior, Travis looks a little like Jesus—shoulder-length hair and a beard, all slightly tinged with red. And thin like Jesus, at least like he looks in all the pictures.

Jacqui finds the cut-out bottom of a soda can she uses instead of a spoon for a cooker and pours the heroin into it. She fills her syringe out of a water bottle, squirts it into the heroin, then flicks on her lighter and holds it under the cooker until the solution bubbles. Taking the filter out of a cigarette, she dips it in water and gently lays it into the solution. Then she puts the tip of the needle into the filter and sucks the liquid into the syringe.

She takes a skinny belt she keeps for the purpose, wraps it around her left arm, and pulls on it until a vein pops up. Then she places the needle into the vein and pulls the plunger back so there’s a little air bubble in it and moves the needle around until a little blood shows up in the needle.

Jacqui hits the plunger.

Unties before she pulls the needle out and then—

Bam.

It hits her.

So beautiful, so peaceful.

Jacqui leans back against the van wall and looks at Travis, who just finished shooting up himself. They smile at each other and then she drifts off into heroin world, so vastly superior to the real world.

Which isn’t that high a bar to clear.

When Jacqui was little, when she was little, when Jacqui was a little girl, she saw her daddy in every man on the sidewalk, on the bus, every man who came into the restaurant where her mommy worked.

Is that my daddy? Is that my daddy? Is that my daddy? she’d asked her mom until her mom got tired of hearing it and told her that her daddy was in heaven with Jesus and Jacqui wondered why Jesus got him and she didn’t so she didn’t like Jesus very much.

When Jacqui was little she stayed in her room and looked at picture books and made up stories and told herself stories, especially when Mommy thought she was asleep and brought home some of the men who came into the restaurant where Mommy worked. She’d lie in her bed and make up stories and sings songs about when Jacqui was little, when she was little, when Jacqui was a little girl.

She wasn’t so little, she was nine, when Mommy married one of the men who came into the restaurant where she worked and he told Jacqui he wasn’t her daddy, he was her stepdaddy, and she told him she knew that because her daddy was with Jesus and he laughed and said yeah maybe, if Jesus is holding down a barstool in Bay Ridge.

Jacqui was eleven the first time Barry asked her if she was going to grow up to be a whore like her mother and she remembers that he pronounced it “who-are,” like “Horton Hears a Who-Are,” and Jacqui would go around the house muttering I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. Barry’s an asshole, one hundred percent. And one time he heard her and smacked her in the face and said You may not love me but you’re sure as shit going to respect me and her mother sat there at the kitchen table and did nothing. But then again she did nothing when he hit her and called her a who-are and a fucking drunk and Jacqui would run and hide in her room ashamed she didn’t do anything to stop him. And when Barry stormed out to go to the bar, Jacqui came out and asked her mother why she would stay with a man who was mean to her and her mother answered that someday she’d understand that a woman has needs, she gets lonely.

Jacqui didn’t feel lonely, because she had books. She would shut herself up in her room and read books—she read all of Harry Potter and the idea that they had been written by a woman led her to go to the library and find Jane Austen, the Brontës, Mary Shelley and George Eliot and then Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch and poems by Sylvia Plath and Jacqui decided that someday she’d leave Tottenville and move to England and become a writer and live in a room of her own where she didn’t have to block out the sounds of shouting and crying and hitting outside the door.

She started listening to music—not the pop shit her few friends listened to but good shit like the Dead Weather, Broken Bells, Monsters of Folk, Dead by Sunrise, Skunk Anansie. She bought an old guitar at a pawn shop, sat in her room and taught herself (in both literature and music Jacqui is an autodidact) chords and started to write songs when Jacqui was little (C), when she was little (F), when Jacqui was a little girl (C).

Jacqui is playing her guitar one afternoon when her mother is at work and Barry comes in and takes the guitar from her hand and says This will be our secret, our little secret, I’ll make you feel so good and lays her back on the bed and lies on top of her and she doesn’t tell her mother and she doesn’t tell anyone This will be our secret (D), our little secret (G), I’ll make you feel so good (Em) even when her mother says I can tell you’ve been having sex you’re a little whore who’s the boy I’ll have his ass thrown in jail and Barry keeps coming into her room until one day one early morning she hears her mother screaming and runs and sees Barry hunched over on the toilet and her mother screams Call 911 and Jacqui walks slowly to her room to get her phone and sings This will be our secret (D), our little secret (G), I’ll make you feel so good (Em) before she punches in the number and by the time the EMTs get there Barry is dead.

By this time Jacqui is in middle school, smoking a little weed, drinking some beer, some wine with her friends but mostly she stays in and reads or plays guitar, discovers Patti Smith and Deborah Harry, even Janis Joplin, writes songs with sardonic lyrics This will be my secret / My little secret / I killed my stepfather / Passively aggressively / And it makes me feel good / So good and her mother says she needs to get a job to help out so she becomes a barista at Starbucks.

Jacqui gets good grades in high school, almost out of spite because she hates high school and everything about it except study hall. Her grades are good enough to get a scholarship, but not good enough for Columbia or NYU or Boston University and there’s no money to send her anywhere she wants to go and she’s never going to live in England and be a writer and have a room of her own and her mother wants her to go to cosmetology school so she can make a living but Jacqui holds on to a shred of dream and enrolls at CUNY Staten Island.

It starts with pills.

She’s a freshman at CUNY, living at home with her mother, and it’s Christmas break and someone offers her some Oxy and she’s a little drunk and a lot bored so she thinks what the fuck and downs it and she likes it and the next day she goes out and gets some more because if you can’t find pills in Tottenville your seeing-eye dog probably can. They’re selling it in schools, on corners, in bars, shit, they’re even selling it from ice cream trucks.

The pills are everywhere—Oxy, Vicodin, Percocet—everyone is selling or buying or both. For Jacqui, it takes the edge off, the edge off having no fucking idea what she wants to do with her life, the edge off knowing that she was born in Tottenville and is going to live in Tottenville and die in Tottenville, working minimum-wage jobs no matter what degree she gets from CUNY. The edge off keeping the secret that her stepfather had turned her into a matinee.

The pills make her feel good and she doesn’t have a drug problem; what Jacqui has is a money problem. Not at first, when she was doing a little Oxy on weekends, not even when it was a pill a day, but now it’s two or three at thirty dollars a pop.

Some of the money she gets from her job at Starbucks, then some from her mother’s purse, sometimes she doesn’t need money at all if she wants to fuck guys who have pills. Fucking is nothing, she’s used to lying there letting a man fuck her and it might as well be somebody who can get her high if he can’t get her off.

Jacqui is basically high her second semester of college, then all summer, and then she kind of stops going to class her sophomore year as she goes from a 3.8 GPA to Incompletes, and then she just gives up the sham and drops out.

She drifts into working and getting high and fucking dealers and then she meets Travis.

Who turns her on to heroin.

It would be easy to blame him—her mother certainly does—but it wasn’t really Travis’s fault. They met at a club, one of those grungy coffeehouses where the neo-Kerouac crowd hangs out and plays guitars, and Travis had just been laid off from his construction job—he was a roofer—because he’d hurt his back and couldn’t really work and his disability ran out.

That was Travis’s story—he started taking Vike for the back pain—prescribed by a doctor—and never really stopped. On the age-old theory that if one was good, fifteen is better, Travis started chucking pills like M&M’s.

They were both high when they met but it was like—

BAM.

Love.

They fucked in the back of his van and Jacqui got off like she’d never gotten off; he had a long skinny dick like his long skinny body and it touched her in a place she’d never been touched.

It was Travis for her after that, and she for him.

They liked the same art, the same music, the same poetry. They wrote music together, busked together up in St. George for people getting off the ferry. They were having a blast, but it was the money.

The money, the money.

Because they had a habit together, too, a habit that cost up to three hundred dollars a day, and that was just unsustainable.

Travis had the answer.

“H,” he said, “it takes less to get you high and it costs, like, six or seven bucks a hit.”

Instead of thirty.

But Jacqui was afraid of heroin.

“It’s the same shit,” Travis said. “They’re all opiates, whether it’s a pill or a powder, it’s all the fruit of the poppy.”

“I don’t want to get addicted,” Jacqui said.

Travis laughed. “Shit, you’re addicted now.”

Everything he said was true, but Jacqui argued she didn’t want to use a needle. Cool, Travis said, we can just snort.

He did it first.

It really got him off.

He looked beatific.

So Jacqui snorted and it was so good, so good, so good. Better than anything, until they discovered smoking the shit, which was so much better, better, better.

Then one day Travis said, “Fuck this shit. Why are we messing around? It’s so much more efficient to shoot it, I’m not letting trypanophobia get in the way.”

Trypanophobia, Jacqui thought—the fear of needles.

They both loved words.

But she didn’t think she had a phobia, she thought she had a reasonable fear—needles gave you hep C, HIV, God knows what.

“Not if you’re clean, not if you’re careful, not if you’re … meticulous,” Travis said.

At first he was, using only fresh needles he bought from nurses and guys who worked at drugstores. He always swabbed his arm with alcohol before he shot up, always boiled the heroin to get any bacteria out.

And he got high.

Higher than Oxy, higher than snorting or smoking, he got mainlining-in-your-blood, in-your-brain high. Jacqui was jealous, felt left behind, earthbound while he flew to the moon, and one night he offered to shoot her up and she let him do it. Stuck a needle instead of his dick in her and it got her off more than he ever did.

Once she did that she knew she was never going back.

So you can blame Travis all you want, but Jacqui knows it’s her, it’s in her, the heart and soul of an addict, because she loves it, loves the H, loves the high, it’s literally in her blood.

“You’re too smart to be doing this,” her mother would tell her.

No, I’m too smart not to, Jacqui would think. Who would want to stay in this world when there’s an alternative?

“You’re killing yourself,” her mother would wail.

No, Mom, I’m living.

“It’s that rotten bastard’s fault.”

I love him.

I love our life.

I love …

It’s two hours later when Jacqui looks at her watch and thinks, Shit, I’m going to be late.

She gets out of the van and walks to CVS this time because she likes to switch it up. Goes into the restroom, locks the door behind her, takes some shampoo from her purse and washes her hair in the sink. Dries off with paper towels, and then puts on eyeliner and a little mascara and changes into her work clothes, reasonably clean jeans and a long-sleeved plum polo shirt with a name tag on it.

Back in the van, she rouses Travis. “I have to go to work.”

“Okay.”

“Try to score for us, okay?”

“Okay.”

I mean, how hard can it be, Travis? It’s easier to find H on Staten Island than it is to find weed. It’s everywhere. Half the people she knows are users.

“And move the van,” Jacqui says.

“Where?” Travis asks.

“I dunno, just move it.”

She gets out and takes the bus to the Starbucks on Page Avenue. Hopes the manager doesn’t see her come in five minutes late because it would be her third time in the last two weeks and she really needs this job.

There’s the Verizon bill, gas money, food money and she’s up to fifty bucks a day now just to stay well, never mind get high.

It’s like a train that just keeps picking up speed.

There are no stops and you can’t get off.

Keller steps out of the Metro at Dupont Circle sweating.

The Washington summer is typically hot, humid, and sweltering. Shirts and flowers wilt, energies and ambitions flag, blazing afternoons yield to sticky nights that bring small relief. It reminds Keller that the nation’s capital was actually built on a drained swamp, revives the rumor that old George chose the location to rescue himself from an ill-advised real estate investment.

It’s been an ugly summer everywhere.

In June, a radical Islamic group called ISIS emerged in Syria and Iraq, its atrocities rivaling those of the Mexican drug cartels.

In Veracruz, Mexico, thirty-one bodies were exhumed from a mass grave on property owned by the former mayor.

The Mexican army fought a gun battle with Guerreros Unidos and killed twenty-two of them. Later, a story came out that the narcos had actually been taken into a barn and executed.

In the post-Barrera era, violence in Mexico has just gone on and on and on.

In July, a group of three hundred flag-waving, sign-wielding protesters chanting “USA, USA” and screaming “Go home!” surrounded three buses full of Central American immigrants—many of them children—in Murrieta, California, and forced them to turn around.

“Is this America?” Marisol asked when she and Keller watched the news on television.

Two weeks later, NYPD cops on Staten Island put a black man named Eric Garner in a lethal headlock, killing him. Garner had been selling illegal cigarettes.

In August, a cop in Ferguson, Missouri, fatally shot eighteen-year-old African American Michael Brown, triggering, as it were, days of violent rioting. It reminded Keller of the long hot summers of the ’60s.

Later that month, potential presidential candidate John Dennison—without a trace of evidence, never mind actual proof—accused the Obama administration of dealing guns to ISIS.

“Is he insane?” Marisol asked.

“He’s throwing mud at the wall and seeing what sticks,” Keller said.

He knows from experience—Dennison has thrown some mud at him, too. Keller’s advocacy of naloxone prompted the barrage.

“Isn’t it a shame,” Dennison said, “that the boss of the Drug Enforcement Administration is soft on drugs? Weak. Not good. And isn’t his wife from Mexico?”

“He’s right about that,” Marisol said. “I am from Mexico.”

The conservative media picked it up and ran with it.

Keller was furious that they’d brought Marisol into it, but he didn’t issue a response. Dennison can’t play tennis, he thought, if I don’t hit the ball back. But he brought another attack on himself when he said, in response to a question from the Huffington Post, that he basically agreed with the administration’s review of maximum sentences for drug offenses.

Pathetic, Dennison tweeted. DEA boss wants drug dealers back on the streets. Weak Obama should say, “You’re fired!”

Which apparently is a catchphrase Dennison uses on his reality TV show, which Keller has never seen.

“B-list celebrities go around running errands for him,” Mari explained, “and the one who does the worst job every week gets fired.”

Keller doesn’t even know what a “B-list celebrity” is, but Mari does, having become shamelessly addicted to Real Housewives shows. She informed him that there are “real housewives” of Orange County, New Jersey, New York, Beverly Hills, and that what they do is go out to dinner, get drunk, and call each other names.

He was tempted to suggest Real Housewives of Sinaloa—a few of whom he’d actually known—in which they go out to dinner, get into arguments and machine-gun each other, but wisely decided to leave that one alone—Marisol can get very protective of her American pop culture.

On a serious level, his efforts to move DEA toward more progressive policy positions is running into resistance inside the agency.

Keller gets it.

He was one of the original true believers, a real hard-liner. He’s a hard-liner now on the cartels that bring heroin, coke and meth into the country. But he’s also a realist. What we’re doing now isn’t working, he thinks; it’s time to try something different, but it’s hard to sell that to other people who’ve also spent their lives fighting this war.

Denton Howard picks up Keller’s statements like rocks and throws them at him. Like Keller, he’s a political appointee, and he’s lobbying inside and outside DEA, making sure that potential supporters on the Hill and in the media know that he disagrees with his boss.

It gets out there.

Two days later, Politico comes out with a story about “factionalism” inside DEA. According to the story, the agency is splitting between a “Keller faction”’ and a “Howard faction.”

It’s no secret that the two men don’t like each other, the story reads, but the issue is more philosophical than personal. Art Keller is more liberal, wants to see a relaxation of drug prohibition laws, reduction of mandatory sentences and more focus placed on treatment than prohibition. Howard is a hard-liner on prohibition, a “lock ’em up and throw away the key” conservative.

Factions are forming around the two positions, the story goes on to say:

But it’s more complicated than a bipolar political struggle. What makes it really interesting is what might be called an “experiential divide.” A lot of the veteran, old-school personnel, who might otherwise support Howard’s more hard-core stance, don’t respect him because he’s a bureaucrat, a politician who never worked the field, while Keller is a veteran field agent, a former undercover, who knows the job from the street up. On the other hand, some of the younger personnel, who might otherwise be sympathetic to Keller’s more liberal positions, tend to see him as something of a dinosaur, a street cop with a “shoot first, ask questions later” history who lacks administrative skills and tends to spend too much time on operations to the detriment of policy.

It might all be a moot point, anyway, decided not in the halls of the DEA but in the voting booth. If the Democrats win the next presidential election, Keller is almost certain to keep his job and will in all likelihood move to dump Howard and purge his faction. If a Republican candidate takes the White House, Keller is almost as certainly out the door, with Howard taking his desk.

Stay tuned.

Keller gets the writer on the phone. “Who did you talk to for this story?”

“I can’t reveal sources.”

“I know the feeling,” Keller says. Marisol has schooled him that the media is not the enemy and that he needs to play nice. “But I know you didn’t talk to me.”

“I tried. You wouldn’t take my call.”

“Well, that was a mistake,” Keller says. Or sabotage, he thinks. “Look, here’s my cell number. Next time you want to do a story about my operation, call me directly.”

“Is there anything in the story you want to correct or comment on?”

“Well, I don’t shoot first and ask questions later,” he says. That was Howard, he thinks, building a narrative. “And I’m not going to conduct any ‘purges.’”

“But you would dump Howard.”

“Denton Howard is a political appointee,” Keller says. “I couldn’t fire him if I wanted to.”

“But you do want to.”

“No.”

“Can I quote you?”

“Sure.”

Let Howard look like the asshole.

Keller clicks off and walks out to the reception area. “Elise, did I get an incoming call from Politico?”

He is an old undercover guy, so the slight trace of hesitation in her eyes tells him what he needs to know.

“Never mind,” Keller says. “I’m reassigning you.”

“Why?”

“Because I need someone I can trust,” Keller says. “Have your desk cleaned out by the end of day.”

He can’t afford to have a Howard loyalist screening his phone calls.

Not with Agitator going on.

Keller has kept knowledge of, and access to, Agitator on a highly select need-to-know basis, the intelligence on which is restricted to Blair, Hidalgo, and himself.

On the NYPD side, Mullen has laid his neck on the chopping block by running the op from his own desk, not informing his superiors or anyone else in the Narcotics Division except for one detective—Bobby Cirello, the cop who drove them around on the New York City heroin tour.

This was part of the “top-down/bottom-up” strategy that Keller and Mullen developed over their intense discussions. Cirello would be sent out to penetrate the New York heroin connection from the lowest level and work his way up. At the same time, they’d try to find an opening at the top of the financial world and work their way toward a connection between the two.

Agitator is a slow burn, it’s going to take months, if not years. Keller and Mullen have promised each other that they will make no premature arrests or seizures, no matter how tempting.

“We won’t pull the string on the net,” Mullen said, “until we have all the fish.”

Cirello is already on the street.

Finding a target in the financial world has taken longer.

They can’t put an undercover cop into the financial world, because the learning curve at the level they want would be too steep and it would take too long.

That means finding a snitch.

It’s ugly, but what they’re looking for is a victim. Like any predators, they’re scanning the herd to find the vulnerable, the injured, the weak.

It’s no different from finding an informer in the drug world, Keller thinks; you’re looking for someone who has succumbed to weaknesses or is in trouble.

The vulnerabilities always come in the same categories.

Money, anger, fear, drugs, or sex.

Money is the easiest. In the drug world, someone has received some dope on credit, then got it busted or ripped. He owes a lot of money he can’t pay. He flips in exchange for cash or refuge.

Anger. Someone doesn’t get the bump he wanted, the deal he wanted, the respect he thinks he deserves. Or someone screws someone’s wife or girlfriend. Or, worse, someone kills someone’s brother or friend. The aggrieved doesn’t have the power to extract his own revenge, so he goes to law enforcement to do it for him.

Fear. Someone gets word he’s on the list, his head is on the block. He has nowhere to run but to the cops. But he can’t come empty-handed, the law doesn’t give protection from the goodness of its heart. He has to come with information, he has to be willing to go back and wear a wire. Then there’s the fear of going to prison for a long stretch—one of the biggest motivations for ratting out. The feds used that particular fear to rip the guts out of the Mafia—most guys can’t deal with the fear of dying in the joint. There are the few who could—Johnny Boy Cozzo, Rafael Caro—but they’re few and far between.

Drugs. It used to be axiomatic in organized crime that if you do dope, you die. It makes guys too unpredictable, too talkative, too vulnerable. People do crazy, fucked-up things when they’re high or drunk. They gamble stupidly, they get into fights, they crash cars. And an addict? All you have to do to get information from an addict is to withhold the drug. The addict will talk.

And then there’s sex. Carnal misdeeds are not such a big deal in the drug world—unless you screw someone’s wife, girlfriend, daughter, or sister, or unless you’re gay—but out in the civilian world, sex is the undefeated champion of vulnerabilities.

Men who will confess to their wives that they cheated on their taxes, embezzled millions, hell, killed somebody, won’t cop to something on the side. Guys who make sure their buddies know that they’re players—that they have girlfriends, mistresses, hookers, high-priced call girls—would practically die before letting those same buddies find out that they don the girlfriends’ lingerie, the mistresses’ makeup; that the hookers and the call girls get a bonus for spanking them or pissing on them.

The weirder the sex, the more vulnerable the target is.

Money, anger, fear, drugs and sex.

What you’re really looking for is a combo plate. Mix any of the five and you have a guy who is on the fast track to being your victim.

Hugo Hidalgo takes a cab from Penn Station to the Four Seasons Hotel.

He spends most of his time in New York now, because that’s the new heroin hub and because, in the words often attributed to bank robber Willie Sutton, “That’s where the money is.”

Mullen is waiting for Hugo in the sitting room of a penthouse suite.

A guy in his early thirties, Hidalgo guesses, sits on one of the upholstered chairs. His sandy hair is slicked straight back, although a little disheveled as if he’s run his hands through it. He’s wearing an expensive white shirt and black suit pants, but he’s barefoot.

His elbows are on his knees, his face in his hands.

Hidalgo is familiar with the posture.

It’s someone who’s been caught.

He looks at Mullen.

“Chandler Claiborne,” Mullen says. “Meet Agent Hidalgo from DEA.”

Claiborne doesn’t look up, but mumbles, “Hello.”

“How are you?” Hidalgo says.

“He’s had better days,” Mullen says. “Mr. Claiborne rented a suite here, brought up a thousand-dollar escort, an ounce of coke, got shall we say ‘overexcited,’ and beat the hell out of the woman. She, in turn, called a detective she knows, who came up to the room, saw the coke and had the good career sense to call me.”

Claiborne finally looks up. Sees Hidalgo and says, “Do you know who I am? I’m a syndication broker with the Berkeley Group.”

“Okay …”

Claiborne sighs, like a twenty-year-old trying to teach his parents how to use an iPhone app. “A hedge fund. We have controlling interest in some of the largest office and residential building projects in the world, over twenty million square feet of prime property.”

He goes on to name buildings that Hidalgo knows, and a bunch he doesn’t.

“What I think Mr. Claiborne is trying to indicate,” Mullen says, “is that he’s an important person who has powerful business connections. Am I representing that correctly, Mr. Claiborne?”

“I mean, if I didn’t,” Claiborne says, “I’d be in jail right now, wouldn’t I?”

He’s a cocky prick, Hidalgo thinks, used to getting away with shit. “What’s a ‘syndication broker’ do?”

Claiborne is getting comfortable now. “As you can imagine, these properties cost hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars to finance. No single bank or lending institution is going to take that entire risk. It takes sometimes as many as fifty lenders to put together a project. That’s called a syndicate. I put syndicates together.”

“How do you get paid?” Hidalgo asks.

“I have a salary,” Claiborne says, “mid–seven figures, but the real money comes from bonuses. Last year it was north of twenty-eight mil.”

“Mil would be millions?”

Hidalgo’s DEA salary is $57,000.

“Yeah,” Claiborne says. “Look, I’m sorry, I did get carried away. I’ll pay her whatever she wants, within reason. And if I can make some sort of contribution to a policemen’s fund, or …”

“I think he’s offering us a bribe,” Mullen says.

“I think he is,” says Hidalgo.

Mullen says, “See, Chandler … may I call you Chandler?”

“Sure.”

“See, Chandler,” Mullen says, “money isn’t going to do it this time. Cash isn’t the coin of my realm.”

“What is the ‘coin of your realm’?” Claiborne says. Because he’s confident that there’s some kind of coin—there always is.

“This idiot’s getting snarky with us,” Mullen says. “I don’t think he’s used to taking crap from a mick or a Mexican. That isn’t the way you want to go here, Chandler.”

Claiborne says, “If I call certain people … I can get John Dennison on his private cell right now.”

Mullen looks at Hidalgo. “He can get John Dennison on his private cell.”

“Right now,” Hidalgo says.

Mullen offers him his phone. “Call him. And then here’s what’s going to happen: We take you right down to Central Booking, charge you with felony possession of a Class One drug, soliciting, aggravated assault, and attempted bribery. Your lawyer will probably bail you before we can get you to Rikers, but you never know. In any case, you can read all about it in the Post and the Daily News. The Times will take another day but they’ll get to it. So call.”

Claiborne doesn’t take the phone. “What are my other options?”

Because Claiborne is basically right, Hidalgo thinks. If he was your basic Johnny Jerkoff, he’d be downtown already. He knows he has options—rich people always have options, that’s how it works.

“Agent Hidalgo is up from Washington,” Mullen explains. “He’s very interested in how drug money makes its way through the banking system. So am I. If you could help us with that, we might be willing to forestall arrest and prosecution.”

Hidalgo thinks that Claiborne is already about as white as white gets, but now he turns whiter.

Like ghost white.

Pay dirt.

“I think I’ll take my chances,” Claiborne says.

Hidalgo hears what Claiborne didn’t say. He didn’t say, I don’t know anything about drug money. He didn’t say, We don’t do that. What he did say was that he would take his chances, meaning that he does know people who deal in dope money, and he’s more scared of them than he is of the cops.

“Really?” Mullen asks. “Okay. Maybe your money people get to the hooker and she drops the assault charges. Then you hire a seven-figure lawyer and maybe, maybe he keeps you out of jail on the coke charge. But by then it’s too late, because by that time your career is fucked, your marriage is fucked and you are fucked.”

“I’ll sue you for malicious prosecution,” Claiborne says. “I’ll destroy your career.”

“Here’s the bad news for you,” Mullen says. “I don’t care about my career. I’ve got kids dying on my watch. I only care about stopping the drugs. So sue me. I have a house in Long Island City, you can have it—the roof leaks, by the way, full disclosure.

“Now, here’s what’s going to happen—I’m going to have a DA up here in about thirty minutes. She can take your statement, which will be composed of a full and forthright confession, and write a memorandum of agreement for your cooperation, the details of which you will work out with Agent Hidalgo here. Or she can charge you with the full monty and we’ll all go to the precinct together and get this war started. But, son? I’m telling you this right now, and I beg you to believe me, I am not the guy you want to go to war with. Because I will fly the last kamikaze mission right into your ship. So you have a half hour to think about it.”

Hidalgo and Mullen step out into the hallway.

“I’m impressed,” Hidalgo says.

“Ahhhh,” Mullen says. “It’s an old routine. I have it down.”

“Do you know what we’re taking on here?”

Because Claiborne’s not entirely wrong. You start fucking with people who control billions of dollars, they fuck back. And a John Dennison could do a lot of fucking back.

“Your boss said he was willing to go the whole way,” Mullen says. “If that was bullshit, I need to know now, so I can kick this asshole.”

“I’ll call him.”

Mullen goes back in to babysit.

Hidalgo gets on the phone to Keller and fills him in. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Oh, yeah.

Keller is sure.

It’s time to start agitating.

Keller testifies in front of Ben O’Brien’s committee to brief them on his strategy for combatting the heroin epidemic. He started by dismissing the so-called kingpin strategy.

“As you know,” Keller says, “I was one of the chief supporters of the kingpin strategy—the focus on arresting or otherwise disposing of the cartel leaders. It roughly parallels our strategy in the war on terror. In coordination with the Mexican marines, we did an extraordinary job of it, lopping off the heads of the Gulf, Zeta, and Sinaloa cartels along with dozens of other plaza bosses and other high-ranking members. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked.”

He tells them that marijuana exports from Mexico are down by almost 40 percent, but satellite photos and other intelligence show that the Sinaloans are converting thousands of acres from marijuana to poppy cultivation.

“You just said that you decapitated the major cartels,” one of the senators says.

“Exactly,” Keller says. “And what was the result? An increase in drug exports into the United States. In modeling the war against terrorists, we’ve been following the wrong model. Terrorists are reluctant to take over the top spots of their dead comrades—but the profits from drug trafficking are so great that there is always someone willing to step up. So all we’ve really done is to create job vacancies worth killing for.”

The other major strategy of interdiction—the effort to prevent drugs from coming across the border—also hasn’t worked, he explains to them. The agency estimates that, at best, they seize about 15 percent of the illicit drugs coming across the border, even though, in their business plans, the cartels plan for a 30 percent loss.

“Why can’t we do better than that?” a senator asks.

“Because your predecessors passed NAFTA,” Keller says. “Three-quarters of the drugs come in on tractor-trailer trucks through legal crossings—San Diego, Laredo, El Paso—the busiest commercial crossings in the world. Thousands of trucks every day, and if we thoroughly searched every truck and car, we’d shut down commerce.”

“You’ve told us what doesn’t work,” O’Brien says. “So what will work?”

“For fifty years our primary effort has been stopping the flow of drugs from south to north,” Keller says. “My idea is to reverse that priority and focus on shutting down the flow of money from north to south. If money stops flowing south, the motivation to send drugs north will diminish. We can’t destroy the cartels in Mexico, but maybe we can starve them from the United States.”

“It sounds to me like you’re surrendering,” one says.

“No one is surrendering,” Keller says.

It’s a closed hearing but he wants to keep this on the broadest possible terms. He sure as hell doesn’t tell them about Agitator, because if you sneeze in DC someone on Wall Street says gesundheit. It’s not that he doesn’t trust the senators, but he doesn’t trust the senators. A campaign year is coming up, two of the guys sitting in front of him have set up “exploratory committees” and PACs, and they’re going to be looking for campaign contributions. And like me, Keller thinks, they’re going to go where the money is.

New York.

Blair has already tipped him that Denton Howard is crawling into bed with John Dennison.

“They had dinner together at one of Dennison’s golf clubs down in Florida,” Blair said.

Keller guesses he was on the menu.

Dennison, still flirting with running, tweeted, DEA boss wants to let drug dealers out of prison! A disgrace!

Well, Keller thinks, I do want to let some drug dealers out of prison. But he doesn’t need Howard talking out of school. After the hearing, he collars O’Brien in the hallway and tells him he wants Howard out.

“You can’t fire him,” O’Brien says.

“You can.”

“No, I can’t,” O’Brien says. “He’s a Tea Party favorite and I’m facing a revolt from the right in the next election. I can’t win the general if I lose in the primary. You’re stuck with him.”

“He’s stabbing me in the back.”

“No shit,” O’Brien says. “That’s what we do in this town. The best way for you to deal with it is to get results.”

The man is right, Keller thinks.

He goes back to the office and calls Hidalgo in.

“How are we doing with Claiborne?”

“He’s given us shit,” Hidalgo says. “‘This broker does coke, this hedge fund manager is heavy into tree …’”

“Not good enough,” Keller says. “Lean on him.”

“Will do.”

The “bottom-up” half of Agitator is going well—Cirello is climbing the ladder. But the “top-down” half is stalled—this cute piece of shit Claiborne thinks he can play them by giving them bits and pieces.

They need to bring him up short, make him produce.

No more free ride.

He pays the fare or he’s off the bus.

They meet on the Acela.

“What do you think we are, Chandler, assholes?” Hidalgo asks. “You think you can just blow us off and go on with your life?”

“I’m trying.”

“Not hard enough.”

“What do you want me to do?” Chandler asks.

“Bring us something we can use,” Hidalgo says. “New York’s fed up with your act. They’re going to prosecute.”

“They can’t do that,” Claiborne says. “We have a deal.”

“Which you haven’t lived up to.”

“I’ve been doing my best.”

“Bullshit, you have,” Hidalgo says. “You’ve been playing us. You think you’re so much smarter than a bunch of dumb cops who buy their suits off the rack, and you probably are. You’re so smart you’re going to smart your way right into a cell. You’re going to love the room service in Attica, motherfucker.”

“No, give me a chance.”

“You had your chance. We’re done.”

“Please.”

Hidalgo pretends to think about it. Then he says, “All right, let me get on the phone, see what I can do. But no promises.”

He gets up, walks out of the car and stands in the next one for a couple of minutes. Then he walks back in and says, “I bought you a little more time. But not, like, infinity. You give us something we can use, or I let New York hump you.”

Keller takes a call from Admiral Orduña.

“That kid you’re looking for,” Orduña says, “we might have a sighting.”

“Where?”

“Guerrero,” Orduña says. “Does that make any sense?”

“No,” Keller says. But when has anything to do with Chuy Barajos made any sense?

They’re not sure it’s him, Orduña says, but one of his people in Guerrero was surveilling a group of student radicals at a local college and spotted a young man hanging around the fringes who meets the description, and he heard one of the students call him Jesús.

Could be anybody, Keller thinks. “What college?”

Chuy never finished high school.

“Hold on,” Orduña says, checking his notes. “Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College.”

“Never heard of it.”

“That makes two of us.”

“I don’t suppose your guy—”

“It’s on its way, cuate.”

Keller stares at his computer screen.

Christ, the odds are …

The photo comes across.

Keller sees a short, scrawny kid in torn jeans, sneakers and a black ball cap. His hair is long and unkempt.

The photo is a little blurry, but there’s no question.

It’s Chuy.