A year.

You can be a multimillionaire, even a billionaire, moving your own product and paying the piso. A lot of men do, it's not a bad life. You can get even richer controlling a plaza, charging other traffickers to use it and never touching or even going near the actual drugs. What most people don't understand is that the top narcos can go years or even their entire business lives without ever touching the drugs.

Their business is to control turf.

Adn used to control it all.

He was the Lord of the Skies.

- Adn's days in Puente Grande are full.

A thousand details require supervision.

Supply routes into Mexico from Colombia have to be constantly refreshed, then there's transportation to the border, smuggling into the United States.

Then there's money management-tens of millions of dollars flooding back from the United States, in cash, that need to be laundered, accounted for, invested in overseas accounts and businesses. Salaries, bribes, and commissions that need to be paid. Equipment to be purchased. Adn's operation employs scores of accountants to count the money and keep an eye on each other, dozens of lawyers. Hundreds of operatives, traffickers, security lookouts, police, army, politicians.

Adn hired a convicted embezzler to digitize all his records so he can track accounts on computer, laptops that are swapped out once a month and freshly encoded. He uses scores of cell phones, changed every other day or so, the replacements smuggled in by guards or other of Diego's employees.

Los Bateadores are in charge of managing Block 2. The rest of Puente Grande is a bedlam of gangs, robberies, assaults, and rapes, but Block 2 is quiet and orderly. Everyone knows that the Sinaloa cartel runs that part of the prison on behalf of Adn Barrera, and it is a sanctuary of calm and quiet.

Adn rises early, has a quick breakfast, and then goes to his desk. He works until 1:00 p.m., when he has a leisurely lunch, then goes back to his desk until 5:00. Most evenings are quiet. His chef comes in every day to cook his dinner and select the appropriate wine. It seems to matter a great deal to the chef-it matters less to Adn.

He's not a wine snob.

Some evenings Los Bateadores convert the dining hall into a cinema, complete with a popcorn machine, and Adn invites friends in to watch a movie, munch popcorn or eat ice cream. The guests call these sessions "Family Nights" because Adn prefers PG films-lots of Disney-because he doesn't like the sex and violence that come with most Hollywood films these days.

Other nights are less wholesome.

A prison guard cruises the Guadalajara bars and comes back with women, and then the dining hall is converted into a brothel, replete with liquor, drugs, and Viagra. Adn pays all the "fees" but doesn't take part in these evenings, retreating to his cell instead.

He's not interested in women.

Until he sees Magda.

- Sinaloans like to brag that their mountain state produces two beautiful things in abundance-poppies and women.

Magda Beltrn is certainly one of the latter.

Twenty-nine years old, with a tall frame, long legs, blue eyes-Magda is a mixture of the native Mexican people and the Swiss, German, and French who migrated to Sinaloa in the nineteenth century.

Seven Sinaloanas have been crowned Miss Mexico.

Magda wasn't one of them, but she was Miss Culiacn.

She competed in beauty pageants since she was six years old and won most of them. In doing so, she attracted the attention of agents, film producers, and, of course, narcos.

Magda was no stranger to that world.

Her uncle was a trafficker in the old Federacin, and two cousins had been sicarios for Miguel ngel Barrera. Growing up in Culiacn, she simply knew traffickers; most people did.

She was nineteen when she started dating them.

Narcos flock around local beauty queens like circling vultures. Some of them even sponsor their own pageants, narcoconcursos de misses, to bring out the talent. When some other pageant officials expressed concern about the girls associating with drug traffickers, one local wag asked, "Why would you not want these women representing the state's biggest product?"

It's a natural combination-the girls have looks, and the narcos have money to treat them to gourmet dinners, clothes, jewelry, expensive vacations, spas, beauty treatments...

Magda took them all.

Why not?

She was young and beautiful and wanted to have a good time, and if you wanted good times in Culiacn, if you wanted to hang with the cachorros-the jet-set kids of the drug barons-you had to go where the money was.

Besides, the narcos were fun.

They liked parties, music, dances, concerts, and clubs.

If you were on the arm of a narco, you didn't stand in line behind the rope; they opened the rope for you and showed you into the VIP room with the Cristal and the Dom, and the owners-if the narco himself didn't own the club-would come over to greet you personally.

Some of the girls found themselves enmeshed with the older narcos who became obsessed with them, but Magda avoided that trap. She watched what happened to girls a few years ahead of her. A fifty-year-old chaca, a boss, would become enamored, make the girl his mistress, and make sure no other man-especially a young, handsome one-came near her. Sometimes he would "marry" her in a faux ceremony, fake because he was already married (at least once). The poor girl would waste her youth imprisoned in a luxury condo somewhere until the narco went to prison, was killed, or simply grew tired of her.

Then she would have money, yes, but also regrets.

Magda had none.

She was nineteen when Emilio, an up-and-coming twenty-three-year-old cocaine trafficker, came to one of her pageants, swept her off her feet and into his bed. He was handsome, funny, generous, and a good lover. She could see herself with him, marrying him and having his babies when she was done with the pageant world.

Magda was heartbroken when Emilio went to prison, but by that time she was competing for Miss Culiacn and gained the attentions of Hector Salazar, a younger associate of her uncle's. Hector sent a dozen roses with a diamond in each one to her dressing room, stood politely in the shadows as she was crowned, and then took her to Cabo.

Emilio was a boy, but Hector was a man. Emilio was playful, Hector was serious, about business and about her. Emilio had been puppy love-her first and therefore beautiful in that way-but with Hector it was different, two adults building a life together in an adult world.

Hector was very traditional-after Cabo he went to Magda's father to ask permission to marry his daughter. They were planning the wedding when another narco who was also very serious about business put four bullets into Hector's chest.

Technically Magda wasn't a widow, but in a way she was, and expected to play the part. She was heartbroken, she knew that, but she also knew that somewhere, in a secret part of her mind, she was at least a little relieved at not having to take the role of wife and presumably mother so early in her life.

She also learned that black became her.

Jorge Estrada, a Colombian who had been one of Hector's cocaine suppliers, was at his funeral and noticed her. A respectful man, he waited what he considered a decent interval before approaching her.

Jorge took her off to Cartagena, to the Sofitel Santa Clara resort, and while, at thirty-seven, he was older than Emilio or Hector, he was just as good-looking, and in a manly rather than a boyish way. And where Hector had money, Jorge had money-generational wealth, as they say-and he took her to his finca in the countryside and his beach house in Costa Rica. He took her to Paris and Rome and Geneva, introduced her to directors, artists, important people.

Magda wasn't a gold-digger.

The fact that Jorge was rich was just a bonus. Her mother-as generations of mothers have-said, "It is just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one." Jorge did give her things-trips, clothes, jewelry (a lot of jewelry)-but what he didn't give her was a ring.

She didn't ask, didn't demand or nag or even hint, but after three years with the man she had to wonder why. What was she not doing? What was she doing wrong? Was she not pretty enough? Sophisticated enough? Not good enough in bed?

Finally she asked him that question. In bed one night in a suite on the beach in Panama, she asked him where this was headed. She wanted marriage, she wanted children, and if he didn't, she would have to get on with her life. No hard feelings, this has been wonderful, but she would have to move on.

Jorge smiled. "Move on where, cario?"

"I'll go back to Culiacn, find myself a nice Mexican man."

"Are there such creatures?"

"I can have any man I want," she answered. "The trouble is, I want you."

He wanted her, too, he said. Wanted to give her a ring, a wedding, babies. It was just...business had been bad lately...a couple of shipments seized...debts unpaid...but after these small reversals were ironed out...he was hoping to pop the question.

There was just one small thing.

He needed a little help.

There was some money, cash, in Mexico City. He'd go himself, but things were...difficult...there at the moment. But if she would go, perhaps visit her family, see friends, and then pick up the money and fly it back...

Magda did it.

She knew what she was doing. Knew that she was crossing the line from "association" to "participation," from dating a drug trafficker to money laundering. She did it anyway. Part of her knew, deep down, that he was using her, but another part wanted to believe him, and there was yet another part that...

...wanted in.

Why not?

Magda grew up around la pista secreta, learned about the trade from Emilio, learned much more about it, and on a much higher level, just being with Jorge. She had the experience, the brains-why did she always have to just be eye candy on the arm of some male narco?

Why couldn't she be a narca?

A chingona, a powerful woman on her own?

Other women-admittedly few-had done it.

Why not her?

So when Magda packed two suitcases with $5 million in American cash and headed for Mexico City International Airport, she couldn't really say, then or later, if she was going to deliver the money to Jorge or steal it from him to start her own business. She had a ticket to Cartagena and a ticket to Culiacn, and she didn't know which she was going to use. Go to Colombia and see if Jorge was really going to marry her, or go back to Sinaloa and fade into the protective cradle of the mountains, where Jorge would never dare come to demand his money back. (Really, what was he going to do? She would simply say that the police seized the money, and what was he going to do?) She never had the chance to decide.

The federales arrested her as she was walking into the terminal.

So she could truthfully tell Jorge that the police seized his money. They made a big show in front of the news cameras over the seizure of $1.5 million and the arrest of a "major money launderer for the Colombian cartels."

The media loved it.

They plastered Magda's mug shots all over the front pages and television with split-screen images of her under arrest and her standing on the stage in her tiara. News announcers shook their heads and tcch'd cautionary, let-this-be-a-lesson tales for other young women tempted by the narco-world of "glitz and glamour."

Even some American papers picked it up, with headlines reading BEAUTY AND THE BUST. Or, in the tabloid version, THE BUST AND THE BUST.

Magda was less amused, although her police interrogations were ridiculous. The focus of the federales' questions was not so much on what she was doing taking $5 million in cash through Benito Jurez Airport, but what she was doing taking $5 million in cash through Benito Jurez Airport without paying them first.

She admitted that it was a nave mistake, that she should have known better, and if she had it to do over again-that is, if they gave her the chance to do it over again-she would certainly do so.

That led directly to the next round of questions-did she, in fact, have any more money?

She didn't.

Magda had a few thousand in the bank, some jewelry on her fingers and around her neck and a little more in a safe-deposit box in Culiacn, but that was about it. But hadn't they made enough from her already, stealing three and a half million dollars?

As it turned out-no.

They did let her try to call Jorge to see if something could be arranged, but he didn't answer his phone and appeared to have gone on an extended trip to Southeast Asia.

That was bad luck, the federales commiserated.

Bad luck for them, worse luck for her, and she ended up getting charged, and convicted, of multiple counts of money laundering, advising and abetting a drug kingpin, and narcotics trafficking.

The magistrate sentenced her to fifteen years in maximum security.

As an example to other young women.

Her processing into CEFERESO II was brutal.

Of the five hundred inmates of the prison block, three of them are women, so Magda was a novelty to begin with, never mind being a (former) beauty queen. She was stripped, "internally searched" numerous times for contraband, scrubbed with disinfectant, and then hosed down. She was poked, prodded, felt up, patted down, hit on, and told over and over again about the multiple gang rapes that awaited her inside, both from guards and from inmates. By the time they carted her to COC, clad in male sweat clothes, she was almost catatonic with shock and terror.

The other convicts hooted "compliments" and threats as the guards walked her to COC.

This is when Adn sees her.

- "Who is she?" Adn asks Francisco, the head of Los Bateadores and his personal bodyguard.

"The dedo was Miss Culiacn," Francisco says. "A few years back."

She certainly doesn't look like a beauty queen at the moment. No makeup, her hair dirty and stringy, her body disguised in the oversized sweatsuit, shuffling along the corridor with her ankles bound.

But Adn sees her eyes.

Blue as a Sinaloan mountain lake.

And the classic bones of her face.

"What's her name?" Adn asks.

"Magda something," Francisco answers. "I don't remember her last name."

"Find out," Adn says. "Find out everything about her and get back to me tonight. In the meantime, make sure they give her a blanket. And have a doctor attend her. And not one of the prison butchers-a real doctor."

"S, patrn."

"And no one touches her," Adn says.

The word-greatly disappointing as there have already been knives out over who gets to rape her first-goes out: Any part of you that touches her gets the chop. You touch her with your hand, you lose the hand. You violate her with your dick...