SPECIAL AGENT SCOTT LAWSON PULLED INTO THE EMPTY PARKING LOT AND killed the engine. He could hear the muffled cadence of automatic rifle fire—pop, pop, pop, pop—echoing from across the river in Mexico. He rolled down his driver’s side window, shielding his eyes from the South Texas sun with his left hand.
Lawson was new to Laredo, Texas, and he’d come to the park by the river because it was as close to Nuevo Laredo as he could get without entering Mexican territory, which was out of his jurisdiction. The Mexican city was less than a quarter mile from where he sat in his beat-up Chevy Impala, but it felt a world away. He surveyed the wide expanse of the Rio Grande as it flowed languidly underneath the international bridge toward the Gulf of Mexico.
He’d heard that the river’s calm could be misleading, that there were hidden undercurrents. The Mexicans called it the Rio Bravo—the fierce river. Lawson got out of his car and walked to the edge. From the riverbank, he could see a chaotic jumble of telephone lines and electric wires, Spanish billboards, and crumbling white colonial-style buildings similar to the ones in downtown Laredo. The two cities could have been as one if it weren’t for the river.
He winced instinctively as the staccato of rapid gunfire rang out again across the river. A pillar of black smoke rose in the sky. Something was burning. He couldn’t tell what. A Mexican flag—the largest flag he’d ever seen—billowed in the warm afternoon breeze near the customs office on the other side of the bridge. He realized he couldn’t have been farther from home in Tennessee. But as a rookie he’d had no choice where the FBI sent him. And after six weeks on the border, he was still trying to make sense of where he’d landed.
Every day at his desk he read about the carnage and saw the grisly photos on websites like Borderland Beat, which obsessively reported every twist and turn in the drug war in Mexico. But it still felt abstract to him. That’s why he’d left his office and driven to the edge of the river when he’d heard that another gun battle had broken out in Nuevo Laredo. But as he stood on the riverbank, a tall and blond gringo in cowboy boots so obviously out of place—like some fool target, he thought—he could see nothing of the Zetas or the Gulf Cartel, who had declared war against one another only a few days ago. He could only hear the percussive echo of automatic gunfire and see traces of smoke as the two factions fought for territory, the violence spilling out across Nuevo Laredo.
All around him, life carried on as usual on the American side of the river. The region was already seven years into the drug war, and it had all taken on a surreal normality. A block away from where he’d parked his squad car, people went about their shopping in the downtown stores, while Mexicans—some of them innocent bystanders—died in the city across the river. The FBI’s sources in Mexico had already predicted that this war would be even more vicious than the last, when the two former allies had battled the Sinaloa Cartel for the city five years earlier. Back then, in 2005, Nuevo Laredo’s police force had been wiped out, their bodies quartered and decapitated and left in plastic trash bags by cartel gunmen. The Mexican army had patrolled the streets in armored personnel carriers, and people had called the city “Little Baghdad.”
Lawson had been told his first week in Laredo that it would be his job to make sure the violence didn’t spill across the river. But so far he’d spent most of his time sitting in a gray-carpeted cubicle, studying an FBI policy manual the size of a phone book and writing up reports, which they called 1023s, for the FBI’s intelligence analysts on any information he could gather about the escalating violence south of the Rio Grande.
He missed working the streets as a deputy outside Nashville. As he stood at the edge of the river, thirty years old and with the new gold FBI badge clipped to his belt beneath his shirt, he wondered whether he’d made a mistake. Growing up, he’d idolized small-town cops like his dad. But his dad had insisted on something more for him than a cop’s meager salary. He had drilled into him from an early age the idea of joining the FBI. But what was the point of being part of an elite federal agency if he was stuck behind a desk? Nuevo Laredo is on fire, he thought darkly, and I’m writing reports about it.
AT THE TRAINING ACADEMY, no one had bothered to tell Lawson that Laredo was considered a hardship post. Very few agents volunteered because it was too close to the drug war in Mexico for agents with families, and many felt isolated there if they didn’t speak Spanish. As a rookie, he was the perfect candidate, because he had to go where the bureau sent him. Even better, he had no wife or kids to consider in the equation. Since it was a hardship post, he had to commit to staying for five years. But there was a payoff. If he stuck it out, he could choose his next city, and most agents didn’t get that privilege until they’d been in the FBI for more than a decade. He was still young, he thought, and in five years he could be back home in Tennessee.
He’d arrived a week before Christmas in 2009, with a few duffel bags filled with clothes and a cowboy hat he’d bought in San Antonio. From San Antonio, he’d driven south through mostly empty ranchland. As he started to worry he’d gone too far, with signs on the interstate pointing toward Mexico, he’d arrived at the outskirts of Laredo. With a population of fewer than 240,000, it wasn’t a big city. Laredo splayed out along a bend in the Rio Grande. On the other side of the river was Mexico and a sprawling Nuevo Laredo that was twice as large as its American sister city. Maybe that’s why Laredo felt so rootless. Four vehicular bridges and a railroad bridge linked the two cities. The traffic pulsed back and forth across the bridges at all hours of the day, most of it tractor-trailers carrying cargo south into Mexico or north toward other parts of the United States or Canada. When he’d researched Laredo, he’d learned it was called “America’s truck stop” because it was the largest inland port in the country. Every day, more than twelve thousand semi trucks traveled through the border city. Their diesel fumes left a blue haze that gave the air a metallic taste.
He wondered why the FBI had chosen to send him to the border. Maybe it was the five weeks of Spanish in Mexico, which he was now struggling to remember. Maybe it was because he’d worked narcotics. On the Rutherford County drug interdiction task force, he’d arrested his share of dealers and helped seize kilos of meth, marijuana, and black tar heroin on the interstate. He’d interviewed smugglers after seizing their drug loads and seen real fear in their eyes when they told him about their relatives back in Mexico who would die because they’d lost the load. He’d thought he understood.
But before he’d left the FBI’s training academy in Quantico, Virginia, he’d been pulled aside for a special briefing after the others had gone home. He remembered the gory images, one after another, of beheadings, dismembered torsos with the letter Z carved into them, flickering across the instructor’s computer screen. The Zetas were a new kind of cartel, hyperviolent and military-trained, the instructor told him. Formed in 1999 by deserters from Mexico’s elite Special Forces, the Grupo Aeromovil de Fuerzas Especiales, or GAFE, they’d started off as bodyguards and enforcers for the Gulf Cartel but had turned into a cartel in their own right, spurring unprecedented violence and brutality in the drug war. The Zetas were fighting for control of the U.S.-Mexico border, his instructor said, and they were killing people in Laredo too. “You have no idea what you’re getting into,” he’d warned. “Every day your life will be on the line.”
But much to his surprise, he’d found that Nashville had a higher homicide rate than Laredo, though no one believed him back home. Yet from the riverbank he could hear grenades exploding and automatic gunfire less than a quarter mile away. How could two cities, so much alike, have six murders a year in one, and three hundred in the other?
His first week in Laredo, the special supervisory agent, David Villarreal, had given him the rundown and what was expected of him: “The Zetas are what we focus on in this squad. That’s what we do. And you need to learn as much as you can about them.” So Lawson had accompanied other agents while they met with their sources, typing up the 1023s for them afterward, just so he could learn whatever he could about the Zetas. What he’d found out so far was that Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, known as Z-3, was the cartel’s leader, and Miguel Ángel Treviño Morales, or Z-40, his second in command. And that Treviño ruled over Nuevo Laredo like a feudal lord along with his younger brother Omar, known as Z-42, who at thirty-four was three years younger than Miguel and served as his right-hand man. Lawson was told that the Z stood for their radio call sign, and the number denoted when they’d joined the cartel. The Treviños had been some of the cartel’s first recruits from Nuevo Laredo.
Miguel had come up fast in the Zetas on his reputation as a sadistic, cold-blooded killer whose appetite for violence verged on the psychopathic. In one story he’d heard, Miguel had killed the baby of a rival in a microwave; in another telling it was a vat of boiling oil. Lawson didn’t know whether the story was true, but it seemed anyone who worked in law enforcement along the border had heard a variation of it, and no one seemed to doubt Miguel was capable of it.
Between his research on the Zetas and studying the FBI policy manual he was going out on patrol with the Laredo cops who’d been assigned to his squad, just to get out of the office and feel like a street cop again. At least the bureau had put him on violent crimes, which was what he had requested. The FBI’s Laredo Resident Agency, where he’d been assigned, was a small satellite office with its headquarters 160 miles away in San Antonio.
The Laredo RA was divided between two squads—white-collar and violent crimes. Each squad had eight agents assigned to it, and four Laredo police officers to help ease the friction that was always there between the feds and the locals.
Violent crimes was staffed mostly by Puerto Rican and Cuban agents transferred from Miami who complained that they’d been demoted to backwater Laredo because they spoke Spanish. They called the blond and six-foot-five Lawson güero, because of his pale complexion, and would laugh when he tried to speak Spanish in his thick Tennessee drawl. Lawson took it good-naturedly. He was the son of a cop. And he knew they were testing him, to see how and where he would fit in.
To ease his transition into the Laredo office, the FBI had assigned a more senior agent, Jason Hodge, to be his training agent. In his late thirties, Hodge still dressed like the accountant he’d once been, and was full of nervous energy, his button-down shirts often stained with coffee. They sat back-to-back in their cubicles. Lawson noticed that Hodge had the habit of fidgeting with the rubber sole that had partially separated from one of his leather shoes. Thwap, thwap, thwap, he’d hear whenever Hodge was puzzling over something in one of his cases.
Hodge was dismayed that he’d been put on violent crimes. He preferred writing intelligence briefs or working on white-collar investigations. A stack of documents and an Excel spreadsheet would put a smile on his face. But the thought of going undercover or doing surveillance made him uneasy. His favorite topic of conversation was his impending transfer out of Laredo, which he hoped would come at the end of the year. He already had his remaining days figured down to the last hour.
They couldn’t have been more different. But Hodge had also been one of the first to make him feel welcome in Laredo, inviting him over for his wife’s home-cooked meals. Lawson appreciated the food and the company. The last thing he wanted was to return to his empty room at the extended-stay hotel, which backed up to a seedy trucker bar. He was supposed to be buying a house and settling in—the FBI would buy the house back if he couldn’t sell it, since he was in a hardship post—but he hadn’t even started to look. He was still struggling with the idea that for the next five years he would be calling Laredo, Texas, his home.