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

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?”

      He is an old undercover guy, so the slight trace of hesitation in her eyes tells him what he needs to know.

      “Never mind,” Keller says. “I’m reassigning you.”

      “Why?”

      “Because I need someone I can trust,” Keller says. “Have your desk cleaned out by the end of day.”

      He can’t afford to have a Howard loyalist screening his phone calls.

      Not with Agitator going on.

      Keller has kept knowledge of, and access to, Agitator on a highly select need-to-know basis, the intelligence on which is restricted to Blair, Hidalgo, and himself.

      On the NYPD side, Mullen has laid his neck on the chopping block by running the op from his own desk, not informing his superiors or anyone else in the Narcotics Division except for one detective—Bobby Cirello, the cop who drove them around on the New York City heroin tour.

      This was part of the “top-down/bottom-up” strategy that Keller and Mullen developed over their intense discussions. Cirello would be sent out to penetrate the New York heroin connection from the lowest level and work his way up. At the same time, they’d try to find an opening at the top of the financial world and work their way toward a connection between the two.

      Agitator is a slow burn, it’s going to take months, if not years. Keller and Mullen have promised each other that they will make no premature arrests or seizures, no matter how tempting.

      “We won’t pull the string on the net,” Mullen said, “until we have all the fish.”

      Cirello is already on the street.

      Finding a target in the financial world has taken longer.

      They can’t put an undercover cop into the financial world, because the learning curve at the level they want would be too steep and it would take too long.

      That means finding a snitch.

      It’s ugly, but what they’re looking for is a victim. Like any predators, they’re scanning the herd to find the vulnerable, the injured, the weak.

      It’s no different from finding an informer in the drug world, Keller thinks; you’re looking for someone who has succumbed to weaknesses or is in trouble.

      The vulnerabilities always come in the same categories.

      Money, anger, fear, drugs, or sex.

      Money is the easiest. In the drug world, someone has received some dope on credit, then got it busted or ripped. He owes a lot of money he can’t pay. He flips in exchange for cash or refuge.

      Anger. Someone doesn’t