They walk under the street and then come to the end of the tunnel and another metal ladder. Keller climbs up and pushes open the trapdoor into another house.

It's empty.

Barrera is gone.

- They do the press conference that afternoon. Aguilar questioned the wisdom of making a public show of what had been a desperate shootout near the nation's capital, but Vera insisted.

"We must not only combat the cartels," Vera said, "we must be seen to be combating the cartels. That's the only way to restore the public's confidence in their law enforcement agencies."

Keller watches on television at the embassy as Vera describes the daring raid, the intense firefight, and memorializes the brave men who gave their lives. He goes on to praise the diligent work of SEIDO, and introduces Luis Aguilar, "who, as you can see, shed his blood in the pursuit of this criminal."

Aguilar mumbles through a typed statement. "We regret our failure in this instance. However, we assure the public that the battle will go on and we must..."

Vera throws his arm around his colleague's shoulder.

"We're Batman and Robin." He looks straight into the cameras. "And he's right-the battle is just beginning. We won't relent in our hunt for Barrera, but now I'm talking to the rest of you narcos out there. We're coming after you. We'll be in Tijuana next."

"What about the beauty queen?" a reporter asks. "What about Miss Culiacn?"

Vera steps back in. "She wasn't in the house. But don't worry-we'll find her and give her a new sash."

The reporters laugh.

- The fight starts the next day.

"You're going home," Aguilar tells Keller.

"Absolutely," Keller answers. "The moment Barrera is back behind bars or on a slab."

"Now," Aguilar insists. "It's too dangerous-not only for you but for other people. The booby-trapped door could have been meant for you. Other men paid with their lives."

"That's what soldiers do," Vera says.

"They were policemen, not soldiers," Aguilar says. "And this is a law enforcement action, not a war."

"Don't kid yourself," Vera answers.

"I object to the militarization of-"

"Tell that to the narcos," Vera says. "If Keller is willing to stay until the job is done, I'm willing to have him. If he's willing to stay."

Keller's willing.

Adn Barrera is still out there, in his world.

La Tuna, Sinaloa Adn walks out onto the little balcony off the master bedroom of his finca.

The ranch was his aunt's, abandoned back in the '70s when the American DEA came in and devastated the poppy fields with fire and poison. Thousands of campesinos and gomeros-now refugees-fled their mountain homes.

Ta Delores's finca stood empty for years, a home for only ravens.

Since his return to Mexico, Adn has poured millions into renovating the main house and the outbuildings, and more millions turning the ranch into a fortress with high walls, guard towers, sound and motion sensors, and casitas that serve as living spaces for the servants and barracks for the sicarios.

For Adn it is a return to innocence, of sorts, to the idyllic day of his teenage years when he would come up here to escape the heat of the Tijuana summer and dive into the cold waters of the granite quarries. Of family dinners at large tables under the oak trees, listening to the campesino men play tamboras and guitars, and the old women, the abuelas, tell stories from a time beyond his memory.

A good life, a rich life, a life that the North Americans destroyed.

It is good to be home, Adn thinks.

Despite Sondra's stupidity.

Stupid, vapid Sondra was a perfect pawn for both white and black. As it turned out, it wasn't a problem. He and Magda went to the safe house in Atizapn, he let himself be seen and heard, and then he slipped out of the net that had been thrown around the house.

The lookalike was already there, a happy idiot thrilled to have a nice house and a beautiful woman for a few days, an expensive whore who resembled Magda in all the most superficial ways.

Adn will take care of the lookalike's family.

The only downside is that Keller didn't die in the ambush. It would have been perfect-the North American killed in a botched raid that couldn't have been blamed on me. But Keller is still out there, alive, and Magda is still urging that he be left out there. Too much at stake now, Magda says, too much happening to take another chance.

Adn maintains the "stay of execution" but insists that it's just that. Unlike the United States, Mexico has no death penalty, but Adn likes to think of Keller just inhabiting a mobile cell on death row.

After the raid, Adn deemed it safe to move to the ranch in Sinaloa, outside La Tuna, high in the Sierra Madre. His convoy made its way up winding roads-dusty now but often impassable with mud in the rainy season-through tiny hamlets made of spare odds and ends of wood and corrugated tin.

Despite its wealth in drug production, the Triangle is still one of the poorest parts of Mexico. The vast majority of the people are still campesinos-peasant farmers-as they had always been. The fact that they grow poppies and yerba instead of corn is only a detail.

For most, life never changes.

It was good to be home.

"Is there where you grew up?" Magda asked, looking at the expanse of green field with the mountains in the background.

"Summers," Adn said. "Actually, I'm a city boy."

The car pulled through the gate then up the macadam road lined with junipers, tall and straight like soldiers on parade. It stopped in the crescent gravel driveway outside the main house.

"No moat?" Magda asked.

"Not yet."

Magda looked at the main house, a two-story stone building with a central structure flanked by two wings that came out at a forty-five-degree angle. A large portico with marble columns stood at the front of the central structure; balconies were cantilevered from the second floors of the wings.

"It's a mansion," Magda said.

"More than I need or want," Adn answered, "but there are expectations."

A king must have a castle, whether he wants one or not. It's expected, and if the king doesn't build one, he can be certain that his dukes will.

Designing the renovation became a hobby of sorts in prison-Adn met with architects and builders, approved plans, even drew a few sketches of his own. It gave him something to look forward to.

So many of the narco-mansions are monuments to bad taste. Adn did his best to avoid gaudy, ostentatious displays, retaining the classic lines of old Sinaloa while still making sure that the house revealed the proper level of wealth and power.

The Barreras, after all, came to the Sierras in the early seventeenth century as hidalgos-Spanish gentlemen of fortune-and conquered the local Indians over centuries of brutal, bloody warfare. They were aristocrats, not indios like so many of the new nouveau-riche narcos.

So Adn felt an obligation toward restraint.

It was in his nature anyway.

He showed Magda around the house and then they went up to the master bedroom. The thick walls kept it cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and the maids had sprinkled the sheets with ice water.

After she and Adn made love, she asked, "So what do I do now?"

"Live?"

"As the lady of the house?" Magda asked. "Supervise the staff, organize parties, go shopping in Culiacn with the wives, get my hair and nails done? I'll die of boredom. I need something else. Something to make money."

Adn looked at her long, slender form stretched out like a cat and saw that she was fully awake and not going to let him sleep. "Money is not your problem in life."

"It will be one day," Magda said. "I'll lose my looks, or you'll grow tired of me, or I'll grow tired of you, or you'll start looking for some young pura seorita to start a new family for you. What am I supposed to do then?"

"I'll always take care of you."

"I don't want to be 'taken care of,'" she answered, "like some worn-out segundera put out to pasture. I want into the trade."

"No."

"You can't stop me."

"Of course I can," Adn said. But he admired her for trying.

"I could be useful to you."

"Oh? How?"

"I could help you reestablish your Colombian cocaine connections," Magda said.

"Nacho and Diego's connections are my connections," he answered.

"Please listen to yourself," Magda said. "It only goes to show how much you need me."

She's making sense, Adn thought. Magda would be an effective ambassador. The Colombians would find a beautiful, intelligent woman hard to resist, and her advice to him had always been clearheaded.

"And what would you want for these services?" he asked.

Magda smiled, knowing that she'd won. "A piece of the cocaine I bring in. And the protection to make it worth something."

"What else?" He could tell from the look in her eye that she wasn't finished.

"A seat at the table," Magda said.

"Which you already have."

"Not the dining table," she said. "The men's table."

"They won't accept you."

"I'll make them accept me," Magda said.

Now, as Adn looks out over the hills, he realizes both that he believes her and that it might not matter. Osiel Contreras wants him dead and has the men and the means to do it.

I need more force.

I need an alliance.

- The table is set in the back room of an exclusive restaurant in Cuernavaca.

Meeting in neutral territory was Nacho's idea, to put Vicente Fuentes at ease. Nacho has guaranteed everyone's safety-Fuentes, the Tapias, Adn, and the twenty other important associates from Sinaloa.

Even so, everyone comes armed.

Plainclothes Cuernavaca police guard the door from other police, the media, and from the important narcos who haven't been invited-Teo Solorzano and Osiel Contreras.

Adn makes a point by not even mentioning Magda's presence, as if it's a given and literally unremarkable. But she is remarkable-stunning in a gold lame dress with a deep decolletage that if Vicente Fuentes doesn't remark upon, he's certainly thinking about as he leans over to kiss her hand.

Vicente looks up at Adn and says, "It must be Easter."

"Why is that?"

"You've risen from the dead." The line gets a laugh from the guests who've already come into the room. Encouraged by his audience, Vicente goes on. "You look good, Adn, for a corpse."

The Fuenteses are originally from Sinaloa, and the family has ruled the Jurez plaza for years. Vicente doesn't have the charisma or brains of his late uncle-he's dissolute, flamboyant, too busy with coke and women to run his business well.

And he's lazy, Adn thinks. Too lazy to work out solutions to difficult problems, so his only reaction is the easiest one-killing. He orders up murders like takeout Chinese food, and a lot of his people are tired of it. Afraid that a casual word or a misunderstanding could make them next, a lot of them came over to Adn after his return to Mexico.

Vicente resents it and sees Adn as a threat. Maintaining the relationship with Nacho, who moves vast weights of meth through Jurez, is the only reason he agreed to this meeting.

"When Nacho told me you were alive," Vicente says now, "I wept."

I'll bet you did, Adn thinks.

Vicente asks, "Is Elvis here, too?"

The joke doesn't sit well with Alberto Tapia. "You want to meet Elvis, Vicente? Because maybe we can work that out."

Vicente reaches for the gun at his hip.

So does Alberto.

Nacho steps in. "Don't make a liar of me, gentlemen."