Martin Suarez opens his dramatic account of his life as an undercover FBI special agent assigned to infiltrate Colombian drug cartels from 1988 to 1994, Inside the Cartel: How An Undercover FBI Agent Smuggled Cocaine, Laundered Cash and Dismantled a Colombian Narco Empire, with the August 1994 attempt on his life. “The assassin pointed his gun at the back of my head,” Suarez writes in a gripping passage recounting how, after a morning run through his neighborhood by the Caribbean Sea near San Juan, Puerto Rico, he returned home, opened his front gate, and sat on a chair on his patio. He closed his eyes, and the hitman, called a sicario, came out of the bushes. Suarez did not see him, but he heard the sicario hiss, “Tsst, tsst, tsst.”