He shouldn’t allow himself to get so upset. After all, life was good. He was twenty-four years old, a top lieutenant in a major drug cartel, and he’d already made 14 million pesos — more than a million U.S. dollars — himself. That was impressive for a boy who’d grown up poor in Juárez and had been raised by a housekeeper and maintenance man who had both worked at a cheap motel.
The burned-out station and the lingering stench of all that soot made Corrales want to leave soon. The place was beginning to smell like another night, the worst night of his life.
He’d been seventeen, an only child, and had joined a gang who called themselves the Juárez 8. Their group of high school kids was standing up to the sicarios of the Juárez Cartel, fighting back against their threats and forced recruitment of their friends. Too many of Corrales’s friends had wound up dead because of their involvement with the cartel, and he and his buddies had decided that enough was enough.
One afternoon, two boys had cornered Corrales behind a Dumpster and had warned him that if he didn’t quit that gang and join Los Caballeros that his parents would be killed. They’d said it very clearly.
Corrales could still remember the punk’s eyes, glowing like coals in a fire pit, from the shadows of the alley. And he could still hear the punk’s voice echoing through time: We will kill your parents.
Unsurprisingly, Corrales had told them to fuck off. And two nights later, after coming home from a night of drinking, he’d found the motel engulfed in flames. The bodies of his parents were recovered in the rubble. Both had been bound with tape and left to burn.
He’d gone crazy that night, stolen a gun from a friend, and driven at high speeds throughout the city, looking for the scumbags who’d ruined his life. He’d crashed his car into a fence, abandoned it there, and just gone running back to a small bar, where he’d passed out in the bathroom. The police took him away and delivered him to relatives.
After going to live with his godmother, and after working as a janitor himself while trying to finish high school, he decided that he could no longer toil away like his parents had. He just couldn’t do it.
There was no other choice. He would join the very group that had murdered his parents. That decision had not come easily or quickly, but working for Los Caballeros was his only ticket out of the slums. And because he was much smarter than the average thug, and perhaps more vengeful, he’d risen quickly through the ranks and had learned far more about the business than his bosses were aware of. He’d discovered early on that knowledge is power; thus he studied everything he could about the cartel’s business and its enemies.
As fate would have it, the two boys that had killed his parents had been murdered themselves, only a few weeks before Corrales had joined their ranks. They’d been killed by a rival cartel because of their bold and foolish acts. The other Caballeros were glad to see them go.
Corrales shuddered now and glanced over at his team of runners dressed in dark hoodies and jeans and weighed down by their bulging backpacks. He led them over to a rear corner of the convenience mart. He lifted a large piece of plywood from the floor, and the tunnel entrance lay below, a narrow shaft accessible via an aluminum ladder. Cold, musty air wafted up from the hole.
“When you get inside the other house,” Corrales began, “do not go outside until you see the cars, and only then you go out three at a time. No more. The rest of you stay in the bedroom. If there is trouble, you come back through the tunnel. Okay?”
They murmured their assent.
And down they went, one by one, a few carrying flashlights. This was one of the cartel’s smaller but longer tunnels, nearly one hundred meters long, a meter wide, and just under two meters high, with its ceiling reinforced by thick crossbeams. Because there were so many out-of-work masons and construction engineers in Mexico, finding crews to construct such tunnels was ridiculously easy; in fact, many crews were just standing by, ready to jump on the next project.
Corrales’s men would keep close and hunched over as they hurried down the shaft. The tunnel passed directly under one of the checkpoints in Nogales, Arizona, and there was always a concern that a larger vehicle like a bus might cause a cave-in. It had happened before. In fact, Corrales had learned that various cartels had been digging tunnels in Nogales for more than twenty years and that literally hundreds had been discovered by authorities — yet the digging of new passages continued, making Nogales the drug tunnel capital of the world. In recent years, though, the Juárez Cartel had begun to expand its tunnel operations and now controlled nearly all of the most significant tunnels passing into the United States. Men were paid handsomely to protect the tunnels and to stop rival cartels from using them. Moreover, the shafts themselves had been dug deeper so ground-penetrating radar would miss them and/or agents would mistake them for one of the many drainage pipes that ran between Nogales, Mexico, and Nogales, Arizona.
Some shouting from the doorway behind sent him reaching for his mata policía tucked into his shoulder holster. He produced the pistol and walked toward the door, where two of his men, Pablo and Raúl, were dragging in another guy with blood pouring from his nose and mouth. The bleeder struggled against the men holding him, then spat blood, the glob missing Corrales’s Berluti loafers by only inches. Corrales was certain that the fool had no idea how much the shoes cost.
Corrales frowned. “Who the fuck is this?”
Raúl, the taller of the two, piped up: “I think we found a spy. I think he’s one of Zúñiga’s boys.”
Corrales sighed deeply, raked fingers through his long, dark hair, then suddenly shoved his pistol into the man’s forehead. “Were you following us? Do you work for Zúñiga?”
The man licked his bloody lips. Corrales shoved the pistol harder into the man’s forehead and screamed for him to answer.
“Fuck you,” the guy spat.
Corrales dropped his voice to funereal depths and got in closer to the man. “Do you work for the Sinaloas? If you tell me the truth, you’ll live.”
The man’s eyes went vague; then he lifted his head a little higher and said, “Yes, I work for Zúñiga.”
“Are you alone?”
“No. My friend is back at the hotel.”
“On the corner?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
With that, Corrales abruptly — and without a second’s hesitation — put a bullet in the man’s head. He did this so quickly, so effortlessly, that his own men gasped and flinched. The spy fell forward, and Corrales’s men let him drop to the dirt.
Corrales grunted. “Bag up this motherfucker. We’ll leave this garbage on our old friend’s doorstep. Get two guys to the hotel and take that other scumbag alive.”
Pablo was staring at the dead man and shaking his head. “I thought you’d let him live.”
Corrales snorted, then looked down and noticed a bloodstain on one of his shoes. He cursed and started back for the tunnel, reaching for his cell phone to call his man inside the house on the other side of the border.
A U-Haul truck had pulled up outside the big tent, and FBI Special Agent Michael Ansara watched as two men climbed out of the cab and were joined by two more who’d come out of the tent. One guy, the tallest, unlocked the back of the truck and rolled up the door, and the men began passing boxes to one another, forming a line toward the tent’s entrance. This area was a hub for supply distribution to the groups farther north. That the Mexican drug cartels were smuggling cocaine across the border into the United States was hardly as audacious as the operation that Ansara had been reconnoitering for the past week.