Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

“Adan, I’m scared.”

“It’s okay,” he says. “Go to the city place. Wait there. I’ll be in touch.”

She knows what he means. It’s a code they worked out a long time ago, for just such an emergency as this. The city place is a condo they keep in Colonia Hipodromo in Tijuana.

“I love you,” she says.

“I love you, too.”

She gets on the next southbound train to San Diego.

Plans have a way of going wrong.

In this case, the mechanics back in Costa Mesa are working on the tricked-out little Toyota Camry to get it ready for another run and they find something interesting jammed between the seat and the headrest on the passenger side.

Some sort of electronic device.

The crew chief makes a phone call.

Nora gets off the train in San Diego and grabs the trolley down to San Ysidro, gets off, climbs the steps to the pedestrian bridge and walks across the border.

Tijuana, 1997

Nora Hayden’s in the wind.

That’s the simple, brutal truth that Art’s trying to deal with.

Ernie Hidalgo all over again.

Source Chupar redux.

These are the scariest times in the life of any person who handles undercovers. The missed check-in, the non-signal, the silence.

It’s the silence that will make your stomach churn, your teeth grind, your jaws clench, the silence that will slowly extinguish the low flame of false hope. The dead silence as you launch one radar ping after another into the dark, into the depth and then wait for that returning ping. And wait and wait and get only silence.

She was supposed to have gone to the condo in Colonia Hipodromo to meet Adan. But she never showed up, and neither did The Lord of the Skies. Antonio Ramos did, in force-two platoons of his special troopers in armored cars sealed off the entire block and hit the condo like it wasNormandyBeach.

Only it was empty.

No Adan Barrera, no Nora.

Now Ramos is tearing Baja to pieces looking for the Barrera brothers.

He’s been waiting for this call for years. Convinced by John Hobbs that Adan Barrera is dealing arms to left-wing insurgents inChiapas and elsewhere, Mexico City has taken the leash off Ramos, and he goes at it like a pit bull on steroids. A week into the operation, he’s hit seven safe houses already, all in the exclusive neighborhoods of Colonia Chapultepec, Colonia Hipodromo and Colonia Cacho.

For an entire week Ramos’ troopers storm through Tijuana’s wealthy neighborhoods in armored trucks and Humvees, and they’re none too gentle about it, blowing off expensive doors with explosive charges, ransacking homes, blocking traffic and disrupting businesses for hours. It’s almost as if Ramos wants to alienate the city’s elite, who, indeed, are torn between blaming Ramos or the Barreras for all the trouble.

Which, of course, has been a centerpiece of Adan Barrera’s long-term strategy for years-to become so enmeshed with the Baja upper crust that an attack on him is an attack on them. And they do scream toMexico City that Ramos is out of control, over the top, that he’s trampling on their civil rights.

Ramos doesn’t care ifTijuana ’s upper crust hates his guts. He hates them, too, thinks that they sold whatever souls they had to the Barrera brothers-taking them into society, into their homes, allowing their sons and nephews to dabble in the drug trade-in exchange for cheap thrills by association and quick, easy money. They acted, Ramos thinks, like a gaggle of narco-groupies, treating the Barrera scum like celebrities, rock musicians, movie stars.

And he tells them so, when they come to complain.

Look, Ramos tells the city fathers, the narcotraficantes murdered a Catholic cardinal and you welcomed them home. They gunned down federales on the streets in rush hour and you protected them. They murdered your own chief of police and you did nothing about it. So don’t come to me and complain-you brought this on yourselves.

Ramos gets on television and calls the city out.

He looks straight into the camera and announces that within fourteen days he’s going to have Adan and Raul Barrera behind bars and their organization on the old ash heap of history. He stands beside stacks of captured weapons and piles of seized drugs and names names-Adan, Raul and Fabian-and goes on to name the scions of several prominentTijuana families as Juniors and promises to put them in jail as well.

Then he announces that he’s fired five dozen Baja federales for lacking the “moral qualifications” to be policemen, saying, “It is a shame on the nation that in Baja, many of the police officers are not the enemies of the Barrera cartel, but their servants.”

I’m not going away, he says. I’m taking on the Barreras-who will stand with me?

Well, not too many people.

One young prosecutor, a state investigator and Ramos’ own men-and that’s about it.

Art understands why the people ofTijuana aren’t flocking to Ramos’ banner.

They’re scared.

And why shouldn’t they be?

Two months ago, a Baja cop who exposed the names of crooked cops in the state police was found by the side of the road in a canvas bag. Every bone in his body had been broken-one of Raul Barrera’s trademark executions. Just three weeks ago, another prosecutor who had been investigating the Barreras was shot to death as he took his morning jog on the track of the city university. The gunmen had yet to be apprehended. And the warden ofTijuana ’s prison was killed in a drive-by shooting as he went out onto his porch to get his morning newspaper. The word on the street is that he had offended a Barrera associate who is incarcerated in his facility.

No, the Barreras might be on the run right now, but that doesn’t mean their reign of terror is over, and people aren’t going to stick their necks out until they see the two Barrera brothers on slabs.

The fact is, Art thinks a week into the operation, that we haven’t produced. The people of Baja know that we took a swing at the Barreras’ heads and missed.

Raul is still at large.

Adan is still at large.

And Nora?

Well, the fact that Adan didn’t walk into the trap in Colonia Hipodromo probably means that her cover was blown. Art still holds on to hope, but as the days go by in silence, he has to acknowledge the probability that he will have to search for her decomposed body.

So Art’s not in a good mood when he goes into the interview room in the federal lockup in downtownSan Diego to have a chat with Fabian Martinez, aka El Tiburon.

The little punk doesn’t look so stylish now in his federal orange jumpsuit, handcuffed and in ankle bracelets. But he retains his smirk as he’s led in and plopped into a folding chair across the metal table from Art.

“You went to Catholic school, didn’t you?” Art begins.

“Augustine,” Fabian answers. “Right here in San Dog.”

“So you know the difference between purgatory and hell,” Art says.

“Refresh my memory.”

“Sure,” Art says. “Basically, they’re both painful. But your time in purgatory eventually ends, whereas hell lasts forever. I’m here to offer you the choice between hell and purgatory.”

“I’m listening.”

Art lays it out for him. How the weapons charge alone gets him thirty-to-life in federal prison, not to mention the drug trafficking charges, each of which carries fifteen-to-life. So that’s hell. On the other hand, if Fabian becomes a government witness, he spends a few years painfully testifying against his old friends, followed by a short stretch in prison, then a new name and a new life. And that’s purgatory.