The Last Line

by Anthony Shaffer

  “Sounds like you need to switch hats.”

  “Maybe. Why? What do you have?”

  “Maybe nothing, but I had a call from JJ this afternoon. Something’s popped, something damned big and scary. The Klingons are scared shitless.”

  “JJ” was John J. Wentworth, an analyst working the Latin American desk in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence. He was a Klingon, but still one of the good guys, a former marine who hated the interagency rivalries and bickering politics as much as did Teller.

  “Do tell. Any ideas what’s up?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  The waitress returned with their drinks. Teller pulled cash from his wallet and handed it to her, including a generous tip. “Keep it, babe. Is Sandy on tonight?”

  “She sure is. Can I give her a message?”

  “Nah. I’ll just heckle her when she comes on.”

  The Scotch burned. Cheap stuff, despite the price. It didn’t matter. It would get him good and drunk, and right now that was pretty much all he cared about. On the runway, the brunette had been replaced by a blonde wearing a conservative business suit, padded shoulders and all. She seemed a bit livelier than the first woman, more connected with the crowd. Voices in the smoky semidarkness urged her along as she started removing her jacket.

  The laws encircling “exotic dancers” in this town were so twistedly labyrinthine they were funny. Across the river in Virginia, the guardians of public morality were stricter than here in D.C.; dancers had to wear G-strings and pasties, though some communities actually went so far as to permit transparent pasties. D.C. was more liberal. Bare-breasted was the rule rather than the exception, and sometimes the girls would strip down to their skin, though they weren’t supposed to. The local authorities occasionally cracked down on places that called too much attention to themselves. Low-key and low-profile seemed to be the secret.

  Just like in intelligence work.

  “So what did JJ have to say?” Teller asked after a few moments.

  “Just that they’re having a brainstorming session at his office tomorrow. He wondered if we might come by.”

  “He just has the hots for you.”

  “Maybe. He thinks you’re cute, too.”

  “You think he’s recruiting?”

  “It’s possible. But the way he was talking, I think they’re seriously running scared. There’s a rumor…”

  “What rumor?”

  “One of their people stepped in front of the Metro yesterday.”

  “Shit. Stepped? Or was pushed?”

  “Stepped. They’re pretty sure he stepped, anyway. There were lots of witnesses.”

  Teller started to raise his glass to his lips. “Who was it?”

  “Galen Fletcher.”

  That stopped him. Carefully, he set the drink down again, untouched, a cold prickle working its way up his spine. He’d known Galen and respected him. “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “They’re working to keep it off the six o’clocks.”

  “Damn.” Galen Fletcher had been the CIA’s chief of station in Mexico, working out of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. Eight years ago, he’d been one of Teller’s instructors at the Farm. Teller, fresh out of his twelve weeks of OCS, had gone through the CIA’s training course there for intelligence case officers as a part of his initiation into the Defense Intelligence Agency. Teller remembered Fletcher well—a quiet, cultured man, polite, refined, definitely old school, a gentleman.

  Very, very good at what he did.

  The dancer on the stage was down to skin and little else now, her business suit and underwear scattered along the runway. She finished her dance, working the pole in the center of the stage, then bowed to an appreciatively noisy audience, gathered up her clothing, and sauntered off.

  It turned out Sandy was up next.

  Her stage name was Bitsie Bright, but Sandra Doherty was an old friend. Teller had been seeing her on and off the stage for a year now; she was fun, perky, and great in the sack. She spotted Teller as she went into her routine and gave him a broad wink.

  Teller scarcely noticed.

  “Who’s his number two?” he asked.

  “Dick Nicholas. Deputy chief of station.”

  Teller grunted. “Don’t know him.”

  “Me neither. I knew Fletcher, though.”

  “From when you were at the Farm?”

  Procario nodded. “We were instructors down there at the same time. Six, maybe seven years ago.”

  The circles within American intelligence sometimes were remarkably small. The same people kept running into one another, being stationed together, or bumping into one another in the damnedest places at the damnedest times.

  “So why would Galen off himself?”

  “Maybe we’ll find out tomorrow.”

  “How’s that?”

  “We have a date with JJ and some of his people at Langley. Ten o’clock.”

  “Was that what you meant by putting on another hat?”

  Procario nodded. “Getting kicked out of INSCOM might be damned convenient right now.”

  “Maybe.”

  U.S. intelligence was a maze of overlapping and competing departments—the CIA, NSA, DIA, FBI, and God alone knew what else, all theoretically tied together since 2005 under the director of national intelligence. In fact, since the Office of the DNI had taken over, things had been even more confused and contentious. Everyone was out first and foremost to protect his own little patch of turf.

  Teller and Procario often joked about wearing different hats. Though he was currently working—at least in theory—for MacDonald at INSCOM, his real work address was the Defense Intelligence Agency, the DoD’s highest-level intelligence service. Technically, Procario was marine intelligence, but more often than not he was working for the DIA as well. Both men had worked for the CIA, though no one on either side of the duty roster admitted to that, and often their assignments were so unofficial they slipped completely beneath the bureaucratic radar of all of the government agencies, offices, and departments.

  Which was the way Teller liked it. You could get a lot done when all of your bosses thought you were working for someone else.

  So tomorrow they would be discussing things with the Central Intelligence Agency—though at an under-the-radar level to avoid the red tape and the turf wars.

  Teller finished his drinks, watching Sandy writhe and twist on the stage above him. He already knew that he wouldn’t be going home with her tonight.

  Damn and double damn.

  He wanted to find out what had happened to an old friend.

  Chapter Three

  CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  1140 HOURS, EDT

  15 APRIL

  Located in Langley, Virginia—a subdivision of the nearby town of McLean—the George Bush Center for Intelligence rises from 258 wooded acres on the south side of the Potomac River, a few miles west of downtown Washington, D.C. Teller’s and Procario’s appointment was in the OHB—the Old Headquarters Building, directly across from the NHB.

  They were expected. They checked in at the front security desk, then entered the lobby, striding across the sixteen-foot seal of the Agency set into the marble floor. Off to the left, between the American and the Agency flags, was the Memorial Wall, 103 stars cut into solid marble representing the lives of CIA officers.

  He glanced ahead, looking up at the words from John 8:32 carved into the lobby’s south wall: AND YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE.

  Yeah, Teller thought, with just a little bitterness. Right …

  Truth, Teller knew, was a highly flexible commodity in this town.

  Three men in conservative business suits emerged from the passageway beneath the legend. Jack Wentworth advanced with his hand out. “Frank! Chris! It’s good to see you.”

  “How’s it going, JJ?” Teller asked, shaking the man’s hand.

  “To hell,” Wentworth replied. “In the prov
erbial gold-plated handbasket. Chris Teller? Frank Procario? This is Ed Chavez and David Larson. Ed, Dave, these are the DoD people I was telling you about.”

  Hands were shaken. “Pleased to meet you,” Chavez said. He had Latino features and a friendly smile. Larson seemed more reserved, possibly suspicious. That was fine, so far as Teller was concerned. He didn’t trust them either. The Klingons always worked to remind the DoD clan that they weren’t Company, and that the Company was just a bit better than everyone else in the game.

  “I’ve reserved a conference room down the hall,” Chavez told them. “I really want you guys to take a look at this and tell us what you think.”

  The conference room was dominated by an interactive touch-table. “You’ve heard about Galen Fletcher?” Chavez asked.

  “Yesterday,” Procario said, “but JJ didn’t say what the problem was.”

  “The problem,” Wentworth told them, “is that we’re blind in Mexico—and at the very worst possible moment.”

  Why am I not surprised? Teller thought, but he said nothing.

  Wentworth tapped on the tabletop, bringing up a series of images. Pictures glowed on the table’s surface, repeated large on the screen built into the wall behind him. “Both of you gentlemen,” Wentworth went on, stressing the words to give them special weight, “now have Blue Star clearance.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Teller quipped.

  He didn’t add that his DIA security clearance was two levels above Blue Star. Even in this age of computers and databases, the various agencies and departments in both the government and the military often didn’t talk to one another.

  Make that especially in this age of computers. An individual’s electronic personnel records could be written on more than one level, and how deeply you were able to read them depended on the reader’s security classification—and on how open the targeted records might be to the accessing agency in the first place.

  Wentworth gave Teller a sharp look but continued. “What you see and hear in this room does not leave it. Understood?”

  Procario crossed his arms, his face deadpan. “Of course.”

  “We’ll be good, Mommy,” Teller added.

  Wentworth flashed Teller an annoyed glare. A photograph of Galen Fletcher appeared on the wall, much larger than life. He was smiling, a pipe in his right hand. Teller felt a fresh pang at the image; Fletcher had been more than a friend, more than a sponsor. In many ways he’d been Teller’s mentor, the man responsible for Teller being who and what he now was.

  “We’re putting it out that Fletcher had personal problems, problems that caused him to take his own life. In a sense that’s true.”

  “In a sense?”

  A second face appeared on the wall next to Fletcher’s, a much younger man, in his forties perhaps, lean, sharp edged, a bit grim.

  “Richard Nicholas,” Chavez said. “Our deputy chief of station in Mexico—and a traitor.”

  “Fletcher brought word to Langley personally four days ago,” Larson said. “Nicholas sold us out, possibly starting a year ago.”

  “He sold our Mexican network to Los Zetas, and probably to the Sinaloans as well. To date we’ve lost three case officers and twenty-five agents. DEA is losing theirs, too. And we now have reason to believe that our pictures of the cartel hierarchies are false fronts.” As he spoke, Chavez tapped commands into the table, bringing up a wall-sized map of Mexico, the southwestern rim of the United States, and the northern half of Central America, all of it divided into a scattered rainbow of colors—but predominantly in yellow and blue.

  “This is how the Mexican cartels have carved things up so far, at least as far as we’ve been able to dope it out. Blue is Los Zetas. Yellow is Sinaloa.”

  The blue area stretched from the Texas border south along the Gulf Coast all the way to include the Yucatán, spreading inland as far as the Sierra Madre Oriental. The yellow region reached from the borders of New Mexico and Arizona south through central Mexico to Guadalajara, with a small, disconnected pocket down on the border with Guatemala. Other cartel-controlled areas were smaller and more isolated—the Tijuana Cartel in red, tucked in between the northern end of Baja California and San Diego; the Beltrán Leyva Cartel in orange, on the Pacific coast between Hermosillo and Mazatlán; La Familia Michoacana in green from Acapulco to Mexico City itself; the scattered remnants of the once-mighty Gulf Cartel, light blue patches around Matamoros and Tampico. Numerous other colors formed a scattered patchwork around individual cities: Los Negros, formerly part of Sinaloa; the tiny but powerful Juárez Cartel and its armed wing, La Línea; the Oaxaca Cartel; the South Pacific Cartel and the Knights Templar, both fragments of the disintegrating Beltrán Leyva Cartel. A number of photographs illustrated the map—cartel leaders and drug lords.

  “The picture is always changing,” Larson said. “Shifting alliances, blood feuds, betrayals. Gangs go extinct. New gangs arise from the ashes. The Beltrán Leyva brothers used to be allies of Sinaloa, but since 2010 they’ve been cozy with Los Zetas. La Familia used to be part of the Gulf Cartel and allied with Los Zetas, but then they switched sides. We think they’re pretty much out of the picture, now, but an offshoot gang, Los Caballeros Templarios, the Knights Templar, is picking up the pieces now. They have an armed subgroup that calls itself La Resistencia, claims they’re ready to fight and die for social justice.”

  “So they’re revolutionaries?” Procario asked. “Political?”

  “When you can buy and sell politicians, judges, police, and military personnel like candy,” Chavez pointed out, “they’re all fucking political.

  “The two most powerful cartels are still Sinaloa and Los Zetas. Los Zetas started off as a gang of Mexican elite Special Forces, el Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzos Especiales. GAFE.” He pronounced the acronym to rhyme with “café.” “Superbly trained by U.S. Special Forces. Thirty of them deserted in ’99 to form a private mercenary army for the Gulf Cartel, but in 2010 they went freelance. Today they include GAFE deserters, corrupt federal, state, and local police officers, and Guatemalan Kaibiles.”

  Teller whistled softly. The Kaibiles were another elite Special Forces branch, trained in jungle warfare and counterinsurgency operations.

  “The Zetas have pretty much taken over all of the old Gulf Cartel territory,” Larson said. “Their big nemesis has always been the Sinaloa Cartel.”

  “Sinaloa is the really big, bad boy down there,” Chavez told them. “At least we think that’s the case. It got started all the way back in 1989, when the old Colombian cartels started falling apart. For a while, it was known as ‘the Federation,’ until the Beltrán Leyva Cartel broke away and set up shop for themselves. We estimate that Sinaloa alone has brought two hundred fifty tons of cocaine across into the United States between 1990 and 2012. God knows how much heroin and marijuana.”

  “What you’re saying,” Teller said, “is that all of these alliances and feuds down there keep changing the picture, and now you can’t even see what the picture is.”

  “Exactly. The drug gangs started picking off our agents a couple of months ago. Right now, we have no active agents on the ground in Mexico, and we’ve recalled our last four case officers because we think Nicholas compromised them.”

  “He fucking blew their covers,” Wentworth said, “and now we’re deaf, blind, and stupid down there.”

  Within the Central Intelligence Agency, an agent was a local person recruited to spy for the CIA. A case officer, on the other hand, was an American employed by the Agency to recruit and “run” agents from the local population.

  “So you’re looking to rebuild your Mexican network,” Procario said.

  “Yes,” Larson said, “but there is a … complication.” He looked at Wentworth, who nodded.

  “We were tracking a possible Trapdoor package to the Yucatán,” he said.

  “Jesus!” Teller said. “Confirmed?”

  “No,” Larson admitted. “Not confirmed. But we’re ninety percent on it.”

&nbs
p; “Dave is with WINPAC,” Wentworth explained.

  WINPAC was the CIA’s Weapons, Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center, a department under the Directorate of Intelligence concerned with monitoring nuclear weapons and the threat they posed to the United States. “Trapdoor,” Teller knew, was a code name for loose nukes—atomic weapons or nuclear materials that had gone missing, particularly during the break-up of the Soviet Union and in the chaotic aftermath of civil war, breakaway republics, and Muslim unrest during the nineties.

  “We believe,” Larson continued, “that two of Lebed’s missing suitcases were purchased in 2011 for twelve million dollars—a real bargain. Informants placed them in Karachi this past February. We were attempting to organize a strike force to go in and neutralize them. Unfortunately, they disappeared.”

  Teller felt a cold chill sweep up the back of his neck. This was nightmare stuff. Lebed was Russian general Alexander Lebed, who’d announced to the world in 1997 that 132 so-called suitcase nukes produced for the KGB were unaccounted for and might be headed for the open market. There were plenty of groups and governments in the world who would like to acquire one or more of the devices and become an overnight nuclear power.

  “Disappeared? How?”

  Larson shrugged. “We’re talking about two devices about yea big.” He held up his hands three feet apart, indicating something the size of a large briefcase. “Fifty, maybe sixty pounds each. Karachi is a very busy port, the Pakistanis don’t particularly like us right now, and not all of the ships there are well documented. We thought the weapons were on board a Syrian freighter, the Qahir. Navy SEALs deploying out of Diego Garcia intercepted the Qahir in the western Indian Ocean and performed a VBSS. They came up empty-handed.”

  VBSS was the military acronym for “visit, board, search, and seizure.” Teller wondered how that one had been covered up, since he hadn’t heard anything about it either on the news or through official channels. Possibly the State Department had been working overtime smoothing things over back-channel, convincing the Syrians that it was in their best interests to help find two missing nuclear weapons. Or possibly the Qahir had simply been reported as lost at sea. Those waters were well known to be the hunting grounds for pirates, and dangerous.