ACCORDING TO AGENT Scott, he met the Sureños at a house in Doraville, northeast of the city just outside the Perimeter. The neighborhood is a wedge of homes sandwiched between two busy commercial roads, Buford Highway and Peachtree Industrial. The house is at the end of a cul-de-sac—one way in, one way out.

The cops have taken advantage of that.

From the roof of a Home Depot not quite a hundred yards away, I look through my binoculars and see the split-level brick house, some couple’s dream home back in the 1960s. There are three cars parked in the driveway and a light on in an upstairs window, although I don’t see any movement in or around the house. A short pan to the left with my binoculars and I see, outside the entrance to the cul-de-sac, a pair of Doraville police cars parked with their lights off. Beyond them is a large black van, behind which I can see a group of what looks like SWAT officers gearing up. I count at least a dozen, but the van may be blocking more. Normally for a bust on an armed gang like the Sureños, there would be over a hundred cops from a wide swath of local, state, and federal agencies. Whoever Frankie talked to must have kept this on the down-low, relatively speaking.

The sun is gone, leaving in its wake an angry red welt that even now is fading on the horizon. There’s a single streetlight at the cul-de-sac entrance, but it’s dead. I wonder if the cops cut it off, because it leaves the street draped in the kind of darkness that’s perfect for people who don’t want to be seen. As if cued by my thought, two four-man teams of SWAT officers start down either side of the short street, crouched and running in a standard two-by-two cover formation—two cops hold their positions and keep their weapons trained on the split-level house while the other two run forward until they reach cover and pause to allow the first pair to advance. Behind them, two more four-man teams form up. With my NV binoculars I can see more SWAT officers moving in the woods behind the houses. They’re going to surround the split-level.

I lower the binoculars, and just then something to my right moves in my peripheral vision. If I had kept looking through the binoculars or lowered them a few seconds later, I wouldn’t have noticed. I glance to my right, where I can see the entrance to the subdivision. A gray sedan has just pulled up to the curb there under a streetlight, maybe a hundred yards away from where I am on the Home Depot roof. The car is parked but the engine is still on—I see faint gray smoke from its exhaust pipe. Car must be burning oil.