Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

Just another businessman coming home after a late night’s work.

So, Art thinks, in the morning I’ll go through another charade, entering the car dealership and the home address into the system to come up with the identity of our alleged M-1.

Miguel Angel Barrera.

Tio Angel.

Art goes into the dining room, opens the liquor cabinet and pours himself a Johnnie Walker Black. He takes his drink and walks down the hallway and looks in on his kids. Cassie is five and looks, thank God, like her mother. Michael is three and also favors Althea, although he has Art’s thicker build. Althea is thrilled that, due to a Mexican housekeeper and a Mexican nanny, both kids are on their way to being bilingual. Michael doesn’t ask for bread anymore, he asks for pan; water has become agua.

Art sneaks into each of their rooms, kisses them softly on the cheeks and then goes back down the long hallway, through the master bedroom and into the attached bathroom, where he takes a long shower.

If Althie was a crack in Art’s Doctrine of YOYO, the kids were a hydrogen bomb. The moment he saw his daughter born, and then lying in Althie’s arms, he knew his shell of “himself alone” had been blown to bits. When his son came along, it wasn’t better, it was just different, looking down at that little version of himself. And an epiphany-the only redemption for having a bad father is being a good one.

And he’s been a good one. A warm, loving father to his kids; a faithful, warm husband to his wife. So much of the anger and bitterness of his youth has faded away, leaving only this-this thing with Tio Barrera.

Because Tio used me, back in the Condor days. Used me to take out his rivals so he could set up his Federacion. Played me for a sucker, let me think I was destroying the drug network, when all I was doing was helping him set up a bigger and better one.

Face it, he thinks as he lets the hot spray hit his tired shoulders, it’s why you came here.

It had seemed an odd assignment request, a backwater like Guadalajara, especially for the hero of Operation Condor. Bringing down Don Pedro put his career on a bullet. He went from Sinaloa to Washington, then to Miami, then to San Diego. Art Keller, the Boy Wonder, was about to be, at thirty-three, the youngest RAC-Resident Agent in Charge-in the agency. He could pick his spot.

Everyone was stunned when he picked Guadalajara.

Took his career off the fast track and derailed it.

Colleagues, friends, ambitious rivals asked why.

Art wouldn’t say.

Even to himself, really.

That he had unfinished business.

And maybe I should leave it that way, he thinks as he gets out of the shower, grabs a towel from the rack and dries off.

It would be so easy to back off and toe the company line. Just take the small-time marijuana dealers the Mexicans want to give you, dutifully file reports that the Mexican anti-drug effort is going swimmingly (which would be a good joke, given that the U.S.-funded Mexican defoliation planes are dropping mostly water-they’re actually watering the marijuana and poppy crops) and sit back and enjoy your tour here.

No investigation of M-1, no revelations about Miguel Angel Barrera.

It’s in the past, he thinks. Leave it there.

You don’t have to kiss the cobra.

Yes, you do.

It’s been eating away at you for nine years. All the destruction, all the suffering, all the death brought by Operation Condor, all so Tio could set up his Federacion with himself as its head. The Law of Unintended Consequences, bullshit. It was exactly what Tio intended, what he planned, what he set up.

He used you, set you like a dog on his enemies, and you did it.

Then you kept your mouth shut about it.

While they lauded you as a hero, slapped you on the back, finally let you on the team. You pathetic son of a bitch, that’s what it’s been about, hasn’t it? Your desperation to finally belong.

You sold your soul for it.

Now you think you can buy it back.

Let it go-you have a family to take care of.

He slips into bed, trying not to wake Althea, but it doesn’t work.

“Time is it?” she asks.

“Almost four.”

“In the morning?”

“Go back to sleep.”

“What time’re you getting up?” she asks.

“Seven.”

“Wake me,” she says. “I have to go to the library.”

She has a reader’s ticket at the University of Guadalajara, where she’s working on a post-doc thesis: “The Agricultural Labor Force in Pre-Revolutionary Mexico-A Statistical Model.”

Then she says, “You want to mess around?”

“It’s four in the morning.”

“I didn’t ask for time and temperature,” she says. “I asked you to do me. C'mon.”

She reaches for him. Her hand feels warm and in a few seconds he’s inside her. It always feels like coming home to him. When she climaxes she grabs his ass and pushes him in tight. “That was beautiful, baby,” she says. “Now let me sleep.”

He lies awake.

In the morning, Art looks at the pictures of the airplane, of the federales off-loading the coke, then opening the car door for Tio, then Tio sitting at the desk in the office.

Then he listens to Ernie brief him on what he already knows.

“I got on EPIC,” Ernie says, referring to the El Paso Intelligence Center, a computer databank that coordinates DEA, Customs and Immigration information. “Miguel Angel Barrera was a former Sinaloa state policeman, in fact, the bodyguard to the governor himself. Heavy connections with the Mexican DFS. Now get this: He played on our team-he was one of the state cops who ran Operation Condor back in ’77. Some EPIC reports credit Barrera with single-handedly dismantling the old Sinaloan heroin operation. He left the force and disappeared off the EPIC radar after that.”

“No hits post-'75?” Art asks.

“Nada,” Ernie answers. “You pick up his story here in Guadalajara. He’s a very successful businessman. He owns the car dealership, four restaurants, two apartment buildings and considerable real-estate holdings. He sits on the boards of two banks and has powerful connections in the Jalisco state government and in Mexico City.”

“Not exactly the profile of a drug lord,” Shag says.

Shag is a good old boy out of Tucson, a Vietnam vet who found his way from military intelligence into the DEA, and is in his own quiet way as much of a hard-ass as Ernie is. He uses his “aw-shucks” cowboy persona to disguise his smarts, and a number of drug dealers are now in prison because they underestimated Shag Wallace.

“Until you see him supervising a shipment of coke,” Ernie says, pointing at the photographs.

“Could he be M-1?”

Art says, “Only one way to find out.”

Taking, he thinks, one more step toward the edge of the cliff.

“There will be no investigation of the Barrera cocaine connection,” he says. “Is that clear?”

Ernie and Shag look a little stunned, but they both nod.

“I want to see nothing on your logs, no paperwork of any kind,” he says. “We’re just chasing marijuana. In that connection: Ernie, work your Mexican sources, see if the Barrera name rings any alarms. Shag, work the airplane.”

“What about surveillance on Barrera?” Ernie asks.

Art shakes his head. “I don’t want to stir him up before we’re ready. We’ll bracket him. Work on the street, work on the plane, work in toward him. If that’s where it leads.”

But shit, Art thinks. You know it does.

The DC-4’s serial number is N-3423VX.

Shag works through the tangled paper chase of holding corporations, shell companies and DBAs. The trail ends at an airfreight company called Servicios Turisticos-SETCO-operating out of Aguacate Airport in Tegu-cigalpa, Honduras.