Don winslow Don winslow - The Border

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 ?”