Although Martino Abrego Cabrera had been called Tiburón since he was fifteen years old, he’d never actually seen a man hurt in such a way in person, and he had never participated in such an act himself.

It wasn’t that he was particularly troubled by the sight of blood (he wasn’t), or sympathetic to the begging and screaming (it was distasteful, but unmoving), it was that he appreciated keeping a clinical—safe—distance from the unpleasant work itself. It was one of many differences between Martino and his father, Fox Uno, and even Gualterio, Oso Ocho . . . both of whom stubbornly held on to the past. The old ways . . . las viejas formas. Whereas Fox Uno didn’t mind getting his hands bloody, figuratively or literally, and in fact relished it—believing it the true source of his strength—Martino knew that only exposed you to unnecessary risks and unforeseen consequences. He had done a year of an MBA program at San Diego State University and thought about everything in terms of risk assessment and minimization. In so many ways, he’d studied hard for this moment, preparing himself to lead his father’s business into the future.

That did not mean, however, that some of the old ways were still not useful.

—

HE CONTINUED WATCHING THE VIDEO that had been sent to him through a secure, end-to-end encrypted e-mail, via Protonmail, whose servers were in Switzerland, a country he had visited when he was nineteen. That was another difference between Martino and his father: the older man had long refused to leave the country of his birth, the mountains and forests and dirt-poor farms and towns in Chihuahua and Durango and Coahuila de Zargoza. He’d always considered them his strongholds, places where he was safe, untouchable. Fox Uno had bought the loyalty of the people in those places and believed they would protect him, and to some extent, he’d been right for a long, long time.

Too long.

Martino, however, had learned that the real world was much, much larger than Chihuahua, and that what could be bought once often had to be paid for again and again, or had to be taken by force. That brought him back to the young man in the video—Abrahán Sierra—who’d survived the attack in Manuel Benavides. Abrahán had been offered more than ten thousand dollars U.S. to drive Martino’s father into that ambush, but had balked at the last moment. Perhaps it had been an instinct for self-preservation, or some measure of that loyalty Fox Uno had always relied on, but in the end the driver had helped the old man escape, and although Martino’s men and those of the Serrano Brothers had been turning that shithole upside down for days—using both money and threats to flush him out—his father, and Gualterio, too, had all but disappeared.