The Cartel (66 page)

It makes sense, Keller thinks. The Zetas are fighting on five fronts and need troops.

Keller’s own “Zeta front” is bogged down. They know that Rodríguez, Z-20, is somewhere in the Veracruz area, because he surfaced as the leader of a Zeta team that lobbed incendiary grenades into the house of a Veracruz police operations director.

The wooden structure went up in flames. Just to be on the safe side, Rodríguez and his men waited outside to gun down anyone who made it out.

No one did.

The police commander, his wife, and his four young children died in the fire.

—

Keller and Marisol do go to Mass that night, if only because the people of Valverde expect their mayor to be present at Holy Saturday services. The church is only half full anyway, so many people have left town. By tradition, the statue of the Virgin Mary is draped in black for mourning, and the obvious symbolism of the current situation escapes no one.

The whole valley, Keller thinks, is on the cross.

Marisol doesn’t take communion and neither does Keller. As they’re sitting in the pew, he feels his cell phone vibrate in his pocket and steps outside. It’s a computer tech at EPIC.

They’ve picked up cell phone traffic between Rodríguez’s cousin and him in Veracruz and they have an address.

Keller gets on the horn to Orduña. If they move fast, they can get Z-20.

The plan was for Keller to spend the night and then go to Juárez with Marisol for Easter—a dinner with Ana and the crew. Then he was going to fly back to Mexico City and she was going back to Valverde for a meeting with the mayors and city councils from the Valley. When she comes out of the church, Keller tells her that he has to leave. They go back to her house so he can get his things.

“Go to El Paso,” he asks.

“I can’t. I have things to do,” she says. “I’ll be fine. I’m going into the city for an Easter party with the crew.”

“Te quiero, Mari.”

“Te quiero también, Arturo.”

—

Marisol and Ana leave the Easter party in separate cars to go back to Valverde for the meeting tomorrow morning. The plan is for Ana to stay at Marisol’s that night and come back after the meeting. She follows Marisol down Carretera 2.

Ana is going to write a story on the meeting as a way of explicating the “Woman’s Rebellion” in Chihuahua. In the valley, in Juárez, in little towns all across the state, women are standing up, filling positions in the government and police, demanding accountability, transparency, answers.

Marisol is tired and would have preferred to stay in Juárez, but the meeting is at eight in the morning, and besides, she doesn’t like to leave Erika on her own for too long. The young woman has done a good job but she’s still nineteen years old.

The party had been fun—good food, good company—although Marisol missed Arturo being there. She’s glad that he likes her friends and that they like him; otherwise, it would make the relationship horribly awkward.

It’s a crisp Juarense night and she wears a heavy sweater and a scarf. The pistol that Arturo gave her is in her purse, within easy reach on the passenger seat. She wonders about her relationship with Keller. She loves him, she knows that, more than she ever loved her husband, probably more than she’s ever loved anyone. He’s a wonderful man—intelligent, funny, kind, a good lover—but the challenges to their relationship are formidable.

He needs to understand—well, he does understand, he needs to
accept,
Marisol thinks—that I’m as committed to my work as he is to his. And if I’m under threat, so is he. Arturo’s old-school in that regard—being in danger is a man’s role, not a woman’s.

And Arturo is far more North American than he thinks he is—he has that North American belief that every problem has a solution, whereas a Mexican knows that this isn’t necessarily true.

She punches the radio to an El Paso station that plays country-western music, her secret guilty pleasure.

She chuckles. Me and Miranda Lambert.

—

Despite four bullet wounds, Rodríguez is still breathing with the help of an oxygen mask, his chest heaving as he lies on a gurney in the back of the ambulance now racing across Veracruz toward the hospital.

Keller thinks the man is going to make it. They’d hit Rodríguez’s safe house in Veracruz just before dawn and took it by surprise. The raid netted Rodríguez, five armored cars, radio equipment, and Rodríguez’s famous gold-plated M-1911 pistol, with his
aportos
encrusted in diamonds.

Now one of the Matazetas, his face disguised under a black balaclava, looks at Keller and asks, “This is one of the
pendejos
who killed Lieutenant Córdova’s family?”

Keller nods.

The Matazeta turns to the EMT monitoring the oxygen tank. “Turn around, my friend.”

“What?”

“Turn around, my friend,” the Matazeta repeats.

The EMT hesitates but then turns around. The Matazeta looks at Keller, who merely looks back, then leans across and takes the oxygen mask off Rodríguez’s face. Z-20’s chest heaves faster. He starts to panic and gasps, “I want a priest.”

“Go to hell,” the Matazeta says.

He lays a jack of spades over Rodríguez’s heart.

—

Marisol sees the lights come up in her rearview mirror and wonders why Ana is passing her on this two-lane road at night.

She looks over to see the window roll down and the gun barrel come out.

Then the red muzzle flashes blind her, she feels like something is punching her in the chest, and then her car flies off the road.

—

An unmarked car picks Keller up outside the hospital where Rodríguez is delivered DOA, and takes him to La Boticaria airfield. His presence in Veracruz is a secret, as is his participation in this, or any, raid. He boards a Learjet 25, provided by Mérida, for the flight back to Mexico City.

Orduña is on the plane. “I hear Rodríguez didn’t make it.”

“He died of complications on the way to the hospital,” Keller says.

Which is true enough, he supposes. It’s an unspoken understanding.
Nobody
who participated in the killings of Córdova’s family is going to make it into a police station or a hospital. Rodríguez knew that, which is why he pulled his gold-plated pistol and tried to slug it out.

So now they’ve killed every Zeta who took part.

Mission accomplished.

Yeah, not quite.

Now they have to get the men who ordered it.

Keller takes a seat and pours himself a scotch. As the plane takes off, Orduña hands him
Forbes
magazine and says, “You’re going to like this.”

Keller gives Orduña a questioning look.

“Page eight,” Orduña says.

Keller turns to the page and sees it. Adán Barrera is listed as number sixty-seven on the
Forbes
annual list of the world’s most powerful people.

“Forbes,”
Keller says, tossing the magazine down.

“Don’t worry,” Orduña says. “We’ll get him.”

Keller wonders.

He pours two fingers of scotch on the ice and relaxes during the flight. When he lands, his phone rings.

“Keller, this is Pablo Mora.”

The man sounds shaken. He might even be crying.

“It’s Marisol.”

—

Marisol is not going to make it.

This is what the doctors tell Keller.

She took bullets to the stomach, chest, and leg, in addition to a broken femur, two broken ribs, and a cracked vertebra suffered when the car crashed after the gun attack. They almost lost her three times on the drive to the hospital—twice more on the operating table, where they had to remove a section of her small intestine. Now the issue is sepsis. Dr. Cisneros is running a high fever, is very weak, and is, frankly,
señor,
unlikely ever to emerge from the coma.

Even if she does, there is the possibility of brain damage.

Keller flew directly to Juárez on a military flight. When he got to Juárez General, Pablo Mora was in the waiting room with Erika.

Erika was crying. “I didn’t protect her. I didn’t protect her.”

Mora told Keller what he knew.

They had just left an army checkpoint a mile behind when a car came racing up, pulled around Ana’s car, and came up alongside Marisol’s. Ana remembers seeing gun flashes out of the passenger window. Marisol’s car swerved off the road into a ditch. The attacking car stopped and went into reverse.

Ana hit the brakes and threw herself flat onto the seat.

The attacking car sped off.

Ana had lacerations on her arm where it struck the steering wheel. She managed to get Marisol into her car and start driving back toward Juárez. A Red Cross ambulance met them on the highway, where the EMTs took over.

But Marisol lost so much blood.

A priest is brought in to give her last rites.

Keller goes in after the priest leaves. Marisol’s skin is white, tinged with a greenish hue. Her face is sweaty. A tube in her mouth helps her breathe, myriad other tubes going into her arms pump in pain medication and antibiotics. The stomach wound—a gaping, obscene red hole—is left open to prevent further infection.

The mark of holy oil is on her forehead.

—

Marisol lives through the day and the following night.

Her heart stops again that night but the doctors manage to start it again and wheel her back into surgery to repair the internal bleeding. The doctors are surprised when the sun comes up and she’s still alive. She hangs on all that day, that night, and the following day.

A watch is set up in the little foyer outside her room. Keller is there, and Ana, and Pablo Mora comes in and out. Óscar Herrera spends hours there, and women from all over Juárez and the valley maintain the vigil.

Gunmen have been known to come into Juárez hospitals to finish off the wounded, and they aren’t going to let that happen.

Orduña sure as hell isn’t.

Two plainclothes FES operatives show up the first night, and then more in shifts, twenty-four/seven.

No one is going to get to Marisol Cisneros.

Nevertheless, Erika refuses to leave.

The third morning, the news comes in that Cristina Antonia, one of the Valverde city councilwomen, was shot dead in her shop in front of her eleven-year-old daughter. Marisol lives through the day and the next, but the other councilwoman, Patricia Ávila, is gunned down outside her home.

Keller has a talk with Erika. “You have to resign. I’ll get you a visa on the other side.”

“I’m not quitting.”

“Erika—”

“What would Marisol think?”

Marisol is in a coma, Keller wants to say. “She would want you to live. She’d tell you to go.”

Erika is stubborn. “I’m not running away.”

Colonel Alvarado comes to pay his respects. The commander of the army district in the valley brings flowers.

Keller stops him from going into Marisol’s room.

“She was a mile from an army checkpoint when she was attacked,” Keller says.

“What are you implying?”

“I’m not implying anything,” Keller says. “I’m
stating
that your troops let a carload of armed men through their checkpoint and back out again. And your people let two more women get killed in Valverde.”

Alvarado turns white with anger. “I know your reputation, Señor Keller.”

“Good.”

“This isn’t over.”

“You can count on that,” Keller says. “Now get out.”

On the third day, Ana persuades Keller to go home and take a shower, change his clothes, and get a little sleep. He notices that two FES follow him the whole way and take positions outside his condo in El Paso.

He’s just out of the shower when his phone rings.

“Don’t hang up,” Minimum Ben Tompkins says.

“What do you want?”

“Someone wants you to know that it wasn’t his people who attacked your friend,” Ben says.

“Tell that someone I’m going to kill him.”

“Think about it,” Tompkins says. “He already has everything he wants there. Why would he risk that by killing a bunch of women?”

He makes a point, Keller thinks. Barrera has already won in Juárez and basically taken the valley. But he says, “Marisol Cisneros challenged him on television.”

“She challenged the Zetas, too,” Tompkins says. “Our friend says to tell you that nothing has changed between the two of you, but that he didn’t go after your woman.”

Tompkins clicks off.

Barrera doesn’t give a damn what I think happened, Keller considers. But he’s always been very conscious of his public image. The killing of the women and the attack on a celebrity like La Médica Hermosa would be bad public relations.

On the other hand, the Zetas came into the valley to teach a lesson when they killed the Córdova family. Their idea of public relations is intimidation and terror. Much as he’d like to add the attack on Marisol to Barrera’s account, the Zeta explanation does make sense.

He’s back in Marisol’s hospital room when she opens her eyes.

“Arturo?” she asks weakly. “Am I dead?”

“No,” he says. “You’re alive.”

Thank God, thank God, thank God, you’re alive.

—

Marisol’s recuperation is long, painful, and uncertain.

She has another surgery to close up the stomach wound, yet another to fit the colostomy bag.

It’s weeks before Keller wheels her out of the hospital, and even then he puts her in a private ambulance for the short drive across the bridge to El Paso.

“I’m not going to El Paso,” Marisol says. “I can’t.”

“The paperwork is already in.”

He’s obtained a visa for her. There was resistance at first, until Keller told Tim Taylor and the powers-that-be that either Cisneros got the visa or the FES assassination program would be on CNN by morning.

“You’re not making any friends with this,” Taylor warned.

“I don’t want any friends.”

Marisol was issued a visa.

“That’s all very well,” she says now, “but no one asked you to file
any
paperwork. I’m going back to Valverde.”

“Marisol…”

“I want to go home, Arturo,” she says. “Please, I want to be home.”