It's 2004. El Federación, the most powerful drug organization in the world, has been exploded, and the Mexican drug trade has settled out into several cartels that exist in a state of tenuous accord. The patron of El Federación, Adán Barrera, is in solitary in a San Diego prison. Art Keller, the DEA agent who put him there, is living at a New Mexican monastery--the solitude and simple truths of the place a powerful antidote to his former life. But when Barrera negotiates a deal that lets him serve out his time in a Mexican prison, the tenuous accord between the cartels is broken, and a war of unprecedented scale erupts.