The Border: The final gripping thriller in the bestselling Cartel trilogy. Don Winslow

for your help,” Eddie says. “But if I don’t get it, I have to help myself. You know what I’m saying here.”

      Guatemala.

      The raid that never happened.

      When Keller stood there and did nothing while Eddie turned Heriberto Ochoa into a road flare.

      Then Keller walked into the jungle to find Barrera.

      And only Keller walked out.

      “You talk about certain things,” Keller says, “maybe I have enough swag left to get you moved to Z-Wing, Eddie.”

      Z-Wing.

      Basically, under ADX Florence.

      Z-Wing is where they toss you if you fuck up. They strip you, shackle you by the hands and feet, throw you in and leave you there.

      A black hole.

      “You think you can do three years in Z-Wing?” Keller asks. “You’ll come out a babbling idiot, yapping about all kinds of shit that never happened. No one will believe a word you say.”

      “Then keep me where I’m at.”

      “You’re not thinking this through,” Keller says. “If you stay in Florence, the same people you’re worried about are going to wonder why.”

      “Then you think of something better,” Eddie says. “If I get fucked, it’s not going to be by myself. Just so you understand—my next call’s not to you, it’s about you.”

      “I’ll see what I can do,” Keller says.

      “And you gotta do something else for me,” Eddie says.

      “What?”

      “I want a Big Mac,” Eddie says. “Large fries and a Coke.”

      “That’s it?” Keller asks. “I thought you’d want to get laid.”

      Eddie thinks for a second, then says, “No, I’ll go with the burger.”

      Eddie hears the toilet bang and knows that Caro wants to speak to him. He goes through the whole rigmarole of flushing water out of the toilet and then puts his ear to the toilet paper roll.

      “I hear they’re moving you,” Caro says.

      That didn’t take long, Eddie thinks. And Caro’s more hooked up than I thought he was. “That’s right.”

      “To Victorville.”

      “Yeah.”

      He’s not as scared about going there anymore since he got a call from Keller telling him that his paperwork was squeaky clean. Anyone looking at it could read through the lines and decide that Eddie got four years because his lawyer was a lot stronger than the government’s case.

      “Don’t worry,” Caro says. “We have friends there. They’ll look after you.”

      “Thank you.”

      “La Mariposa,” Caro says.

      Another name for La Eme.

      Caro says, “I’ll miss our talks.”

      “Me too.”

      “You’re a good young man, Eddie. You show respect.” Caro is quiet for a few seconds, then he says, “M’ijo, I want you to do something for me in V-Ville.”

      “Anything, Señor.”

      Eddie doesn’t want to do whatever it is.

      Just wants to do his time and get out.

      Out of the joint, out of the trade.

      He’s still toying with producing a movie about his life, what do they call it, a “biopic,” which would have to be, like, a huge hit if they got someone like DiCaprio to play him.

      But he can’t say no to Rafael Caro. If he does, La Eme will give him another kind of welcome to V-Ville. Maybe shank him on the spot, or maybe just shun him. Either way, he won’t survive without being cliqued up with a gang.

      “I knew that would be your answer,” Caro says. He lowers his voice so Eddie can barely hear him say—

      “Find us a mayate.”

      A black guy.

      “From New York. With an early release date. Put him in your debt,” Caro says. “Do you understand?”

      Jesus Christ, Eddie thinks. Caro is still a player.

      He does the math—Caro has done twenty years on his twenty-five-year sentence. Federal time, they can make you do every day or they can knock it down to 85 percent, maybe even less.

      Which makes Caro a short-timer, looking at the gate.

      And he wants back in the game.

      “I understand, Señor,” Eddie says. “You want to put the arm on a black guy who’s going to get out soon. But why?”

      “Because Adán Barrera was right,” Caro says.

      Heroin was our past.

      And our past is our future.

      He don’t need to tell Eddie that.

      Keller gets on the horn to Ben O’Brien. “Call me back on a clean line.”

      The first time Keller met O’Brien was in a hotel room in Georgetown a few weeks before the Guatemala raid. They didn’t exchange names, and Keller, who was never much of a political animal, didn’t recognize him as a senator from Texas. He just knew that the man represented certain oil interests willing to fund an operation to eliminate the Zeta leadership because the “Z Company” was taking over valuable oil and gas fields in northern Mexico.

      The White House had just officially rejected the operation but sent O’Brien to authorize it off the record. The senator arranged a funding line through his oil connections and helped put together a team of mercenaries through a private firm based in Virginia. Keller had resigned from DEA and joined Tidewater Security as a consultant.

      Now O’Brien calls him back. “What’s wrong?”

      Keller tells him about Eddie’s threat. “You have any leverage at BOP? Get Ruiz’s PSI scrubbed?”

      “In English?”

      “I need you to reach out to someone in the Bureau of Prisons and get Ruiz’s records cleansed of any trace of his deal,” Keller says.

      “We’re letting drug dealers blackmail us now?” O’Brien asks.

      “Pretty much,” Keller says. “Unless you want to answer a lot of questions about what happened down in Guatemala.”

      “I’ll get it done.”

      “I don’t like it any more than you do.”

      Goddamn Barrera, Keller thinks when he clicks off.

      Adán vive.

      Elena Sánchez Barrera is reluctant to admit, even to herself, that her brother is dead.

      The family held out hope through the long silence that lasted days, then weeks, and now months, as they tried to glean information as to what had happened in Dos Erres.

      But so far they’ve come up with no new information. Nor, apparently, have the authorities disseminated what they do know down the ranks—it seems as if half of law enforcement believe that the rumor of Adán’s death was put out as a smoke screen to help him evade arrest.

      As if, Elena thinks. The federal police are virtually a wholly owned subsidiary of the Sinaloa cartel. The government favors us because we pay them well, we retain order and we’re not savages. So the idea that Adán staged