"Why?"

"Seriously?" Salvador asks. "I'm going to be an architect?"

It's so Ral, Adn almost laughs. "Your father had a medical degree."

"And he did a lot with it."

Adn gestures to the cell. "Do you want to end up here?"

"It's better than where my father ended up, isn't it?"

It's true, Adn thinks, and they both know it. "What do you want, Salvador?"

"Let me work with To Diego," he says, looking Adn in the eyes for the first time in this conversation. "Or To Nacho. Or send me to Tijuana. I can help Ta Elena."

He's so eager, so sincere all of a sudden, it's almost sad. The boy wants so badly to redeem his father, Adn hurts for him.

"Your father didn't want this for you," Adn says. "He made me promise. His last words to me."

It's a lie. Ral's last words were his begging to be put out of his gut-shot misery. He said nothing about Salvador, or Sondra. What he said was Thank you, brother when Adn pointed the pistol at his head.

"It was good enough for him," Salvador says.

"But he didn't think it was good enough for you," Adn insists. "You're smart, Salvador. You've been to the funerals, the prisons...you know what this is. You have money, an education if you want it, connections...You can have a life."

"I want this life," Salvador says.

As pigheaded as his father.

"You can't have it," Adn says. "Don't try. And don't think of freelancing-if I catch anyone selling to you, I'll have their heads. Don't make me do that."

"Thanks."

"And straighten up," Adn says, the stern uncle now, and, anyway, he's bored with this. "Start going to class, and keep a civil tongue in your head with your mother. Are you doing drugs? Don't even bother to lie to me. If you're not-good. If you are-stop."

"Are we done?" Salvador asks.

"Yes."

The young man gets up and starts to walk away.

"Salvador."

"Yeah?"

"Get your degree," Adn says. "Show me you have the discipline to finish your education, stop being a pain in the ass, and then come back to me and we'll see."

Salvador is going to get into the pista secreta one way or the other, Adn thinks. He might as well do it through me, where I can at least keep an eye on him.

But not yet.

This will kick the can down the street for a couple of years, anyway. By that time he might find a nice girl, an interest, a career, and not want what he thinks he wants now.

Adn goes back into the party room and looks at his guests-his extended family, or what's left of it.

His sister, Elena.

His sister-in-law, Sondra, and his nephew Salvador.

His cousins, the Tapia brothers-Diego, Martn, and Alberto-and their wives, Chele, Yvette, and Lupe, respectively. Diego's children...This is his family, his blood, all that he has left.

Without me, he thinks, they go where a deposed king's family go in this merciless realm-to the slaughterhouse. Your enemies will kill them just after they've killed you. And unless you take back your rightful place, all the death, all the killing, all the terrible acts for which you're going to hell, were all for nothing.

He's heard it said that life is a river, that the past flows downstream. It isn't true-if it flows, it flows through the blood in your veins. You can no more cut yourself away from the past than you can cut out your own heart.

I was the king once, I will have to be the king again.

Life, he muses, always gives you an excuse to take what you want anyway.

- Adn's relieved when they're gone.

When the mandatory oohs and ahhs over presents have been exchanged, the equally obligatory confessions over having eaten too much, the hugs and busses on the cheeks, the insincere promises that we need to do this again sooner, Diego finally manages to herd them all back into the truck and they leave him to the peace of his prison.

He flops face first down on the bed beside Magda.

"Families are exhausting," he says. "It's easier to manage a hundred traffickers than one family."

"I thought they were nice."

"You don't have to meet their needs," Adn says.

"No, only yours."

"Are they a burden on you?"

"No, I like your needs," she says, reaching for him. "Feliz Navidad. Do you want your last present?"

"Not now," he says. "Pack a few things."

She looks at him oddly. "What do you mean?"

"Just a few," he says. "Not your whole wardrobe. We can buy more clothes later. Go on-we don't have a lot of time."

Diego walks into the cell. "You ready, primo?"

"For years."

Diego points to his ear-listen.

Adn hears a shout, then another, then a chorus of shouts. Then the banging of wooden bats on steel bars, feet pounding on the metal catwalks, alarms.

Then shots.

A motn.

A prison riot.

Los Bateadores are rampaging through Block 2, Level 1-A, attacking other inmates, attacking each other, creating chaos. The guards are running back and forth, trying to contain it, radioing for reinforcements, but it's already too late-inmates are busting out of cells, running down the cell block, spilling out into the yard.

"We have to go!" Diego says. "Now!"

"Did you hear that?!" Adn yells to Magda.

"I heard!" She comes out with a small shoulder bag while trying to put on a different pair of shoes, flats. "You might have given a lady some notice."

Adn takes her arm and follows Diego onto the block.

It's as if they're invisible. No one looks at them as they move through the swirling fights, the noise, the guards, and Diego leads them to a steel door that has been left unlocked. He ushers them into a stairwell and they climb to another door that opens onto the roof.

The guards aren't watching them, they have their guns and lights aimed down at the yard and don't even seem to notice when the helicopter comes in and lands on the roof.

The rotors blow Magda's hair into a mess, and Adn puts his hand on her back and pushes her down a little as they step into the open door.

Diego climbs in behind them and gives a thumbs-up to the pilot.

The helicopter lifts off.

Adn looks down at Puente Grande.

It's been five years of negotiations, diplomacy, payoffs, establishing relationships, waiting for the other bosses to accept his presence, for some of them to die, for others to be killed, for the North Americans to move on and become obsessed with another public enemy number one.

Five years of patience and persistence and now he's free.

To resume his rightful place.

Erie, Pennsylvania Outside a diner the next morning, going in for the breakfast special of two eggs, toast, and coffee, Keller sees it.

A headline behind the cracked glass of a newspaper box.

DRUG KINGPIN ESCAPES.

Almost dizzy, Keller puts two quarters in the slot, takes out the paper, and scans the story for the name.

It can't be.

It can't be.

The letters spring out at him like shards of metal from a tripwire, booby-trap grenade.

"Adn Barrera."

Keller lays the paper on top of the box and reads the story. Barrera extradited to a Mexican prison...Puente Grande...a Christmas party...

He can't believe it.

Then again, he can.

Of course he can.

It's Barrera and it's Mexico.

The irony, Keller thinks, is as perfect as it is painful.

I'm a prisoner in the world's largest solitary confinement.

And Barrera is free.

Keller tosses the paper into a trash can. He walks the streets for hours, past piles of dirty snow, closed factories, shivering crack whores, the detritus of a Rust Belt town where the jobs have gone south.

At some point, late in the afternoon with the sky turning a harsh, threatening gray, Keller walks into the bus station to go where he knows he's always been headed.

- The Drug Enforcement Administration headquarters are in Pentagon City. Which, Keller supposes, makes perfect sense. If you're going to fight a war on drugs, base yourself in the Pentagon.

He's in a suit and tie now, his only one of either, closely shaved and his hair freshly cut. He sits in the lobby and waits until they finally let him up to the fifth floor to see Tim Taylor, who successfully masks his enthusiasm at seeing Art Keller.

"What do you want, Art?" Taylor asks.

"You know what I want."

"Forget it," Taylor says. "The last thing we need right now is some old vendetta of yours."

"Nobody knows Barrera like I do," Art answers. "His family, his connections, the way his mind works. And nobody is as motivated as I am."

"Why, because he's hunting you?" Taylor asks. "I thought you had a different life now."

"That was before you guys let Barrera out."

"Go back to your bees, Art," Taylor says now.

"I'll go down the road."

"What do you mean?"

"If you let me walk out of here," Keller answers, "I'll go to Langley. I'll bet they'd send me."

The rivalry between DEA and CIA is bitter, the tension between the two agencies horrific, the trust virtually nonexistent. CIA had at least helped to cover up Hidalgo's murder, and DEA had never forgotten or forgiven it.

"You and Barrera," Taylor says, "you're the same guy."