To the man who kills Art Keller.

Abiqui, New Mexico 2004.

The beekeeper watches the two men come down the gravel path toward the apiary.

One is a gero with silver hair and a slightly stiff gait that comes with age. But he moves well, a professional, experienced. The other is Latino, brown-skinned and younger-graceful, confident. They walk a few feet apart, and even from a hundred yards, the beekeeper can discern the bulges under their jackets. Stepping back to the hives, he takes the Sig Sauer from its hiding place, jacks a round into the chamber, and, using the arroyo as cover, starts moving down toward the river.

He doesn't want to kill anyone unless he has to, and if he has to, he wants to do it as far from the monastery as possible.

Kill them at the river's edge.

The Chama is swollen, and he can pull the bodies into the water and let the current take them away. Sliding down the muddy bank, he turns over on his stomach, peers over the edge, and watches the two men cautiously make their way toward the beehives.

He hopes that they stop there, and that they don't damage the hives out of carelessness or spite. But if they keep coming, he'll let them into pistol range. More out of habit than thought, his hand swings back and forth, rehearsing the first two-shot burst, and then the second.

He'll take the younger man first.

The older one won't have the reflexes to react in time.

But now the two men spread out, widening the angle as they approach the hives, making his four-shot pattern harder. So they're professionals, as he would have expected, and now they pull their weapons and approach the hives with their guns pointed out in front of them, in the two-handed grip that they're all taught.

The younger one juts his chin at the ground and the older one nods. They've seen his footprints that lead down to the river. But fifty yards of flat ground with only ankle-high brush for cover leading to a sheltered riverbank where a shooter could hit them at will?

They don't want it.

Then the silver-haired man yells, "Keller! Art Keller! It's Tim Taylor!"

Taylor was Keller's boss back in the day in Sinaloa. "Operation Condor" in 1975, when they burned and poisoned the Sinaloan poppy fields. After that he was in charge of Mexico when Keller was shredding it up in Guadalajara, becoming a superstar. He watched as Keller's trajectory shot right over him.

Keller thought he'd be retired from DEA by now.

He keeps the Sig trained on Taylor's chest and tells him to holster his weapon and put his hands up.

Taylor does it and the younger man follows suit.

Keller gets up and, pistol pointed, moves toward them.

The younger man has jet-black hair, fierce black eyes, the cocky look of a street kid. The kind of agent they recruit from the barrio for undercover work. Just like they recruited me, Keller thinks.

"You went off the radar," Taylor says to Keller. "Hard man to find."

"What do you want?" Keller asks.

"You think you could put the gun down?" Taylor asks.

"No."

Keller doesn't know why Taylor is here or who sent him. Could be DEA, could be CIA, could be anybody.

Could be Barrera.

"Okay, we'll just stand out here with our hands in the air like jerk-offs." Taylor looks around. "What are you, some kind of monk now?"

"No."

"These are what, beehives?"

"If your boy there moves to the side again I'll shoot you first."

The younger man stops moving. "It's an honor to meet you. I'm Agent Jimenez. Richard."

"Art Keller."

"I know," Jimenez says. "I mean, everyone knows who you are. You're the man who took down Adn Barrera."

"All the Barreras," Taylor corrects. "Isn't that right, Art?"

Accurate enough, Keller thinks. He killed Ral Barrera in a shootout on a Baja beach. He shot To Barrera on a San Diego bridge. He put Adn-goddamned Adn-in a prison cell but sometimes regrets that he didn't kill him too, when he had the chance.

"What brings you here, Tim?" Keller asks.

"I was going to ask you the same thing."

"I don't answer to you anymore."

"Just making conversation."

"Maybe you didn't notice," Keller says, "but we're not big on conversation around here."

"Vow of silence sort of thing?"

"No vows." Keller's disappointed with himself in how quickly he fell into verbal fencing with Taylor. He doesn't like it, doesn't want it or need it.

"Can we go someplace and talk?" Taylor asks. "Out of the sun?"

"No."

Taylor turns to Jimenez and says, "Art's always been a hard case. A real asshole-the Lone Ranger. Does not play well with others."

That was always Taylor's beef with him, from the moment Keller-freshly transferred from CIA to the new DEA-arrived on Taylor's turf in Sinaloa thirty-two years ago. He thought Keller was a cowboy, and wouldn't work with him or let other agents work with him, thereby forcing Keller to be exactly what he accused him of-a loner.

Taylor, Keller thinks now, virtually drove me into To Barrera's waiting arms. There was nowhere else to go. He and To made a lot of busts together. They even "took down"-a euphemism for "killed"-Don Pedro viles, gomero nmero uno. Then DEA and the Mexican army sprayed the poppy fields with napalm and Agent Orange and destroyed the old Sinaloan opium trade.

Only, Keller thinks, to watch To create a new and vastly more powerful organization out of the ashes.

El Federacin.

The Federation.

You start, Keller thinks, by trying to cut out a cancer, and instead you help it to metastasize, spread from Sinaloa throughout the whole country.

It was just the beginning of Keller's long war with the Barreras, a thirty-year conflict that would cost him everything he had-his family, his job, his beliefs, his honor, his soul.

"I told the committees everything I knew," Keller says now. "I have nothing left to say."

There'd been hearings-internal DEA hearings, CIA hearings, congressional hearings. Art had taken down the Barreras in direct defiance of orders from CIA, and it had been like rolling a grenade down an airplane aisle. It blew up on everybody, and the damage had been tough to contain, with The New York Times and The Washington Post sniffing around like bloodhounds. Official Washington couldn't decide if Art Keller was a villain or a hero. Some people wanted to pin a medal on him, others wanted to put him in an orange jumpsuit.

Still others wanted him to just disappear.

Most people were relieved when, after all the testimony and the debriefings were concluded, the man once known as "the Border Lord" did it on his own. And maybe Taylor is here, Keller thinks, to make sure I stay disappeared.

"What do you want?" Keller asks. "I have work to do."

"Do you read the papers, Art? Watch the news?"

"Neither."

He has no interest in the world.

"Then you don't know what's going on in Mexico," Taylor says.

"Not my problem."

"It's not his problem," Taylor says to Jimenez. "Tons of coke pouring across the border. Heroin. Meth. People getting killed, but it's not Art Keller's problem. He has bees to take care of."

Keller doesn't answer.

The so-called war on drugs is a revolving door-you take one guy out, someone else grabs the empty chair at the head of the table. It will never change, as long as the insatiable appetite for drugs is there. And it's there, in the behemoth on this side of the border.

What the suits will never understand or even acknowledge- The so-called Mexican drug problem isn't the Mexican drug problem. It's the American drug problem.

There's no seller without a buyer.

The solution isn't in Mexico and never will be.

So once it was Adn and now it's someone else. After that it will be somebody else.

Keller doesn't care.

Taylor says, "The Gulf cartel stopped two of our agents in Matamoros the other day, drew weapons, and threatened to kill them. Sound familiar?"

It does.

The Barreras had done the same thing with him back in Guadalajara. Threatened him and his family if he didn't back off. Keller responded by sending his family back to San Diego and pushing harder.

Then the Barreras killed Art's partner, Ernie Hidalgo. Tortured him for weeks for information he didn't have and then dumped his body in a ditch. Left a widow and two little kids.

And Keller's undying hatred.

Their feud became a blood feud.

And it wasn't the worst thing that Adn Barrera did.

Not by a long shot.

That was what, Keller thinks, twenty years ago?

Twenty years?

"But you don't give a damn, right?" Taylor asks. "You live in this ethereal world now. 'In it but not of it.'"

When I was in it I was too in it, Keller thinks. I got Ernie killed and then I got nineteen innocent people killed. He'd made up an informant to protect his real source and Adn Barrera slaughtered nineteen men, women, and children along with the phony sopln to teach a lesson. Lined them all up against a wall and shot them.

Keller will never forget walking into that compound and seeing children dead in their mothers' arms. Knowing that it was his fault, his responsibility. He doesn't want to forget, not that his conscience will let him. Some mornings the bell wakes him from the memory.

After the El Sauzal massacre he wasn't in it to stop drug trafficking, he was in it to get Adn Barrera. To this day he doesn't know why he didn't pull the trigger when he had the gun to Adn's head. Maybe he thought that death was too merciful, that thirty or forty years in the hell of a supermax prison before he goes to the real hell was a better fate for Adn.

"I have a different life now," he says.

A Cold Warrior, then a Drug Warrior, Keller thinks.

Now I'm at peace.

"So here in your splendid isolation," Taylor continues, "you haven't heard about your boy Adn."

"What about him?" Keller asks, despite himself. He wanted to have the strength not to ask.

"He's gone Celine Dion," Taylor says. "You can't stop the guy from singing."

"You came here to tell me that?" Keller asks.

"No," Taylor says. "There's a rumor that he's put a two-million-dollar bounty on your head, and I'm legally obligated to inform you of a direct threat on your life. I'm also obligated to offer you protection."

"I don't want it."

"See what I mean?" Taylor says to Jimenez. "Hardass. You know what they used to call him? 'Killer Keller.'"

Jimenez smiles.

Taylor turns back to Keller. "It's tempting-my share of two mil, I could buy a little place on Sanibel Island, get up every morning with nothing to do but fish. Take care of yourself, huh?"

Keller watches them walk back up the hill and then disappear over the crest. Barrera a sopln? There are a lot of things you can call Adn Barrera, all of them true, but a snitch isn't one of them. If Barrera is talking, it's for a reason.

And Keller can guess what it is.

I should have killed him, Keller thinks more out of fatigue than fear. Now the blood feud will just go on and on, like the war on drugs itself.

World without end, amen.