Don winslow Don winslow - The Border

“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.