Reports like the daily write-up the intel unit was still giving him about Fox Uno and Nemesio, the ongoing hunt for the cartel leader. Garrison had submitted the brief Chesney had requested, and Chesney hadn’t asked him any more about it, so the issue was apparently dead as far as the SAC was concerned. But Garrison insisted on getting fresh intel reports anyway, making a point of looking through them. He told himself he was being thorough, but he was really just pretending that he could still do worthwhile agent work.

And this morning, while pretending, one of those reports had jumped out at him.

Or at least one word had . . .

Tejas.

—

IT WASN’T MUCH.

A single word picked out of the air: a thirty-second radio transmission between two members of the Serrano Brothers cartel. Not Nemesio, but intriguing all the same. Mexican traffickers sometimes used the word to talk about the border generally—the old northern Mexican state of Tejas—but it had more specific roots in the Native American history of the state itself. In this case, it could have been a direct reference to Diego Serrano, the older of the two brothers, who was often called El Indio due to his ruddier skin and features. It was a title he wore proudly, allegedly bragging about his supposed ancestral ties to the original Aztecs or Mayans or whatever the hell it was. But neither Diego nor Axel Serrano, the younger brother, had finished eighth grade, so although they claimed they were indios, Garrison guessed they had no more knowledge about their ancient ancestry or the more recent history of Coahuila y Tejas than he had about fixing a broken helicopter.

It was possible, though, that the radio intercept crew had overheard two Serrano plaza bosses talking about Chuy and Johnnie Machado’s Tejas unit, and that would make unfortunate sense. The Serrano Brothers had been moving across Texas for at least five years now, murdering or bribing their way along the border. Diego had started in the Rio Grande Valley, working west, while Axel—in Nogales, Arizona—had expanded eastward, with the siblings planning to meet in the middle. It was a giant hangman’s noose, an awful snake eating its tail. They’d successfully seized the most important smuggling and plaza routes along the way, carving out huge chunks of territory by buying off or killing Nemesio loyalists, and fatally choking out the rival cartel in the process. For the last eighteen months, the Ojinaga corridor, including the Big Bend, had been Nemesio’s last, best stronghold, and that wasn’t saying much.

Ojinaga was the knot in the noose, the middle of the snake.