The Last Line

by Anthony Shaffer

  “So we went back to the drawing board,” Larson continued. He tapped on the tabletop, bringing up fifteen photographs of different ships. “All of these vessels were reported as departing from Karachi during the last week in March, the time period when we thought the weapons left Pakistan. We were also following up rumors that the ISI had stepped in and secured the devices for themselves.” Inter-Services Intelligence, the ISI, was Pakistan’s equivalent of the CIA. “The destinations of those ships were scattered all over the world—Jakarta, Sidney, Los Angeles, Southampton, New York. Most of them had multiple ports of call, which complicated things. We focused on the ones heading for U.S. ports, of course. Nothing.”

  “So we’re back to square one,” Chavez said. One of the ship photographs enlarged as the others disappeared from the screen. She was an ancient freighter, rust streaked and decrepit. “One of the vessels on our list was a small tramp, the Zapoteca. Liberian flagged, but owned by Manzanillo Internacional, a Mexican import-export company. We got curious because Karachi is a long way outside her usual range.”

  A box of stats opened alongside the photograph, and Teller skimmed down through the information quickly. The Zapoteca displaced 1,800 tons, was 252 feet long at the waterline, and had a beam of just over 40 feet. She was single screw; her power plant was a Burmeister & Wain Alpha 10-cycle diesel delivering 1,200 horsepower. She had a range of 3,000 nautical miles at 12 knots and usually carried a complement of ten men. She’d been launched in 1951 by Frederikshavn Vaerft & Terdok; originally she’d been Danish. She’d been sold to Colombia in 1985, then sold again to Manzanillo Internacional in 1996.

  Interesting.

  “Colombia, then Mexico,” Teller said. He exchanged a glance with Procario. “The cartels?”

  Procario nodded.

  “We checked that,” Wentworth said. “The corporations owning the Zapoteca, both in Colombia and in Mexico, are legit.”

  “But mostly she stuck to a coastal run between Barranquilla and either Veracruz or Tampico,” Chavez pointed out. “That’s just fifteen hundred nautical miles—say, five or six days at twelve knots. But from Karachi? She’d have to take it in two- and three-thousand-mile legs, refueling along the way. That’s over thirteen thousand nautical miles and forty-five days, not counting the time spent in each port.”

  “Maybe they were on a horse run,” Procario suggested. “Might be worth it. A hell of a lot of heroin comes out of Afghanistan by way of Karachi.”

  “That was a possibility,” Larson said, “but unlikely. The Mexican cartels produce their own heroin in northern Mexico. Why send one ship halfway around the world for a few more tons of the stuff? So we began wondering what the Zapoteca might be carrying besides drugs, especially when she didn’t show up at Veracruz like she was supposed to. We began a rather intense and thorough search with our NRO assets.” Part of the DoD, the NRO—the National Reconnaissance Office—was one of the sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies. Headquartered in Chantilly, Virginia, it designed, built, and operated America’s spy satellites. Larson moved his fingers over the interactive tabletop and brought up a new photograph. It had been shot obliquely from overhead, from high up and off the vessel’s port stern. Enlarged, the level of resolution and crisp detail was astonishing. You could see coils of rope on the deck, streaks of rust down her side, and crewmen going about their work. One man in blue jeans and a T-shirt appeared to be leaning against the railing along the fantail, balanced somewhat precariously. The resolution was good enough to show his head and what might have been a beard, but not quite sharp enough to show facial features.

  “What’s that one doing?” Teller asked, pointing.

  Chavez grinned. “Taking a piss.”

  Sure enough, Teller could just make out the man’s hands, folded together below where his belt buckle might be.

  The gesture was so completely human that Teller smiled. The CIA, in his opinion, relied entirely too much on what it referred to as its technological assets—looking at satellite imagery and listening in on cell phone intercepts. Satellites were good if you were tracking tanks or army movements or even individual ships, but they rarely helped you track individual people or figure out exactly what they were doing. You couldn’t get inside a person’s head with a satellite.

  Lines of type at the lower right of the image gave the date and time: 09 April, 1827 hours GMT, just six days ago. Below that were the vessel’s coordinates: 16°45'30.80" N; 82°54'34.69" W.

  “The ship’s position when this was taken was about three hundred forty miles east of Belize City,” Chavez said. “The Zapoteca appeared to be on course for Belize at the time, not Veracruz.”

  “Veracruz is on the other side of the Yucatán Peninsula.” Larson said.

  “I know how to read a map,” Teller said. “Why Belize?”

  “That’s what we wondered,” Wentworth said. “We told Fletcher to send a couple of agents down there and check it out.”

  “And then they disappeared,” Procario said.

  Wentworth closed his eyes, then opened them again. “In a manner of speaking. On the eleventh, this arrived at our Mexican embassy.”

  The satellite image of the Zapoteca was replaced by another photograph. For a moment, Teller’s mind refused to register exactly what it was he was looking at. The photo was a bit blurry—probably shot with a cell phone camera—but it showed a desktop, an open cardboard box, and a lot of partially crumpled newspaper.

  Inside the box was the grim reality that Teller, as he stared at it in increasing horror, only reluctantly began to accept.

  It was a man’s head, but horribly mutilated. The ears, the nose, the eyes, all were missing, and the skin, sliced randomly here and there as if by a scalpel, was caked with blood. Black, blood-matted hair was visible, and a black mustache. Below this last was an x-x-x pattern of what looked like leather cord sealing shut a bulging, bloody mouth.

  “His mouth.” Procario began. “What—”

  “His penis was stuffed inside, and the lips sewn shut,” Wentworth said, his voice utterly drained of any emotion.

  “Henrico Javier Ferrari Garcia de Alba,” Chavez said, grim. “There was a right forefinger inside the box along with the head, so we were able to get a positive ID from the print. The bastards wanted us to know. Recruited by Fletcher himself last year. A member of the Mexican federales, the federal police, and something of a campaigner for government reform. He told us he was sick to death of government and police corruption and let himself be recruited so he could fight back. We got a lot of good information from him about high-ranking politicians and military personnel who were owned by the cartels. Forty-one years old. College educated, Universidad de México. Accomplished violinist; wanted to be a professional musician but ended up with the police instead. He … he had a wife and three kids. Fletcher wasn’t able to find any of them after this—their house in San Mateo showed signs of a struggle—and we think they may have been abducted as well.”

  “The other agent was Agustín Morales Galvan,” Wentworth added. “No sign of him at all … at least, not yet. Their last report was from Corozal on the tenth. That’s a town on the Yucatán east coast, about eighty miles north of Belize City.”

  “So,” Teller said, “Galen sent those two to Belize to check on the arrival of the Zapoteca, and both of them disappeared.”

  “We have to assume the cartel enforcers got them,” Chavez said.

  “Which cartel?” Teller asked. He looked at the map of drug cartel territories, still partially visible as a kind of wallpaper behind the photo of the severed head. The Yucatán was highlighted in blue. “Los Zetas?”

  “Actually, we’re not sure,” Chavez said. He touched the tabletop, and the nightmarish photograph mercifully disappeared. “That’s Los Zetas territory, yeah—but there’s a chance, a fairly good one, we think, that Los Zetas and Sinaloa have buried the hatchet and are now working together.”

  A black-and-white surveillance photo came up on the screen, next to Mexico Ci
ty on the map. Four men stood on a city sidewalk, apparently getting into a car. “This was taken a month ago. The one on the right, behind the open door—that’s Carlos Guevara Alvarez, one of the top lieutenants in Los Zetas. The one next to him, holding the door open, is Ernesto Mendoza Flores, a high-ranking member of Sinaloa who specializes in smuggling both drugs and people into Arizona and New Mexico. The one in the back, he’s Hector Gallardo, and he’s important—the chief lieutenant, aide, whatever you want to call him of one of the real big fish. Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán. Head of Sinaloa Cartel, and by conservative estimates now with a personal worth of around one billion dollars. Forbes magazine listed him as the nine hundred thirty-seventh richest man in the world—and the sixtieth most powerful.”

  “So if a senior Guzmán aide is hanging out with Alvarez,” Wentworth said, “then there’s got to be a truce on, and a pretty solid one.”

  “And the fourth man?” Teller asked. “He doesn’t look Mexican. More Middle Eastern, I’d say.”

  “That is the one who really worries us,” Chavez said. “You’re right. He’s not Hispanic. He’s Persian. His name is Saeed Reyshahri. He’s Republican Guard and probably VEVAK. Until recently he was an Iranian adviser with Hezbollah in Syria.”

  “What the fuck are the Iranians doing in Mexico?” Procario demanded.

  “That’s what we would like to know,” Larson said, “very, very badly. We’ve known for several years that Hezbollah has people in Mexico working with the cartels—and Hezbollah, of course, has ties to Iran. We have the Mexican state in virtual anarchy, the possibility that a couple of small nukes have arrived in Belize on board a Mexican freighter with cartel ties, and now a VEVAK agent turns up in Mexico City with high-ranking members of Mexico’s two largest and most vicious drug cartels. That’s not good.”

  “And right at that moment,” Chavez added, “someone pulls the plug and our Mexican network goes down. It’s not exactly a good time to be in the dark.”

  “Can you explain to me,” Teller said, “what Hezbollah’s interest in Mexico might be?” He spoke quietly, his voice and manner wooden. His emotions were still churning after the sight of the severed head, and he was having trouble controlling them.

  Wentworth shrugged. “We’ve known they’ve been there for several years,” he said. “Mostly, they seem to be using the cartel smuggling networks—especially Sinaloa—to bring their own drugs across the border into the U.S. in order to finance their operations in the Middle East. But they’re moving people across as well.”

  “The cartels,” Chavez added, “don’t just bring drugs into the country. Over the last decade, they’ve been more and more involved in smuggling illegals across the border as well. The operators are called coyotes, and it’s pretty lucrative for them. They bring in between eighteen hundred and twenty-five hundred dollars per person, and lots of times they manage to extort more from the families. Sometimes a lot more, usually by locking up the illegals once they’re in the States and threatening to torture or kill them. Since they have well-established conduits—a network of underground railways—Hezbollah has been using them to move its own drugs and undocumented people across as well.”

  “So we need to find out what a known VEVAK agent is doing here, too,” Procario said.

  “Our first order of business,” Larson said, “is to get our Mexican intelligence network up and running again. Then we need to find out if someone—possibly one of the cartels—has just smuggled a couple of small nuclear weapons into Mexico.”

  “Los Zetas with nuclear weapons,” Wentworth said. “It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “Maybe it’s not the cartels bringing in the nukes,” Teller said. “Maybe it’s the Iranians.”

  “I don’t buy it,” Larson said, shaking his head. “If Iran got caught playing those kinds of games, some major Armageddon would come down on their turbans, and they know it. They’re not going to risk all-out retaliation over a couple of pocket nukes.”

  “Just how big a nuclear device are we talking about?” Teller asked. “I thought suitcase nukes were pretty small. What, five or six kilotons?”

  “If they’re based on Russian RA-115s, yeah. Sixty-five pounds for the device, three- to five-kiloton yield, or thereabouts. That’s less than a third the yield of the device that flattened Hiroshima, but it’s more than enough to wreck the downtown area of a major American city. They might also be built from old Soviet nuclear artillery shells. Those have smaller yields—half a kiloton up to about two kilotons. Still nasty.”

  “So what does a Mexican drug cartel want with a pocket nuke?” Procario asked.

  “Extortion, most likely,” Chavez replied. “All of the cartels have been under a lot of pressure lately, both from the Mexican government and from the U.S., the FBI and DEA. All of the cartels have a history of killing people they perceive as enemies in spectacularly bloody and public ways in order to send a message. ‘Back off, or this’ll happen to you.’ They might well threaten to nuke downtown Mexico City if the government and the army there didn’t do what they said.”

  “Are we sure Mexico City is the target?” Teller asked.

  “No.”

  “Because we also have a Shiite terror group and their Iranian sponsors getting cozy with the drug cartels. Maybe they’re the ones bringing them in. Maybe they’re planning on smuggling those bombs across the Mexican border.”

  “We’ve thought of that,” Larson said. “For the past week we’ve thought of little else. But, like I said, the Iranians aren’t stupid. They’re not going to let Hezbollah screw things for them, either. We know Hezbollah is in Tehran’s pocket. Most of us think it’s not Hezbollah behind it, but al Qaeda.”

  “Either way,” Wentworth said, “it’s not pretty. JJ said you people might have some ideas. If you do, we’d love to hear them.”

  Teller exchanged a look with Procario. “Of course we do,” he said. “We’ve got exactly what you need.”

  21ST CENTURY CITY

  SANTA MONICA BOULEVARD

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  1002 HOURS, PDT

  “Hey, you should lay off that stuff, man,” the driver said, watching the two in the backseat in his rearview mirror.

  “Yeah,” the other passenger said. “Cojones químico. That’s no good, Mannie. We need to be at our best, y’know?”

  “I can handle it, man.” He’d sprinkled some white powder from a small plastic bag onto a square of paper. “Solamente una pizca de blanquito, no más.” He inhaled the powder through his right nostril, then jerked his head back, crumpling the paper. “¡Ay! ¡Qué bueno!”

  The driver scowled. “¡Qué malparido!¡Eres un angurri!”

  “C’mon, c’mon,” the other passenger told the driver. “He’ll be okay. You got our packages?”

  “Aquí.” He handed back two large canvas tote bags, the kind with retail logos on them used by green-conscious shoppers in the United States. Both bags were quite heavy and bulged a bit.

  “Wait for us,” the passenger said, taking the bags and handing one to Manuel. “Diez minutos, Ignacio,” the driver said. “No más.”

  Ignacio Carballo glanced at his watch, then nodded. “Keep the motor running.”

  The two slipped out of the backseat onto the sidewalk and sauntered toward the looming, ultramodern façade of the shopping center, through two sets of glass doors, and into the main interior boulevard of the mall. The air-conditioning was cool and pleasant.

  This was an upscale part of the city, between Santa Monica and Beverly Hills. The shoppers, Carballo noticed, tended to be young, bored looking, and well dressed; even the cutoff jeans and T-shirts looked like they’d come with designer labels. He didn’t see a single black or Hispanic face, and for just a moment he felt afraid. He and Mannie stood out in the crowd.

  They had to get this started now, before a guard or a cop challenged them.

  Halfway up the lane of shops and boutiques, Carballo pointed to a Starbucks on the other side. �
�Allá,” he said. “Start there.”

  “¡Sí! ¡Vámonos a soltarse el pelo, ’mano!”

  Carballo shook his head. “Just go! Let’s do it!” Manuel Herrera was a good guy, but right now he was flying on that hit of mosca. Turning to face back the way he’d come, he reached into his canvas bag with his right hand, removing a baseball-sized steel sphere, a U.S. Army–issue Mk 1 hand grenade. His left hand holding the bag by its carry strap, he hooked his left forefinger through the cotter-pin ring and yanked it free. With his right hand, he flipped the grenade backhand and to the right, sending it clattering into the front of a Frederick’s of Hollywood.

  Continuing to walk briskly, he pulled another grenade from the bag, yanked the pin, and tossed it into the next shop along, a gift store featuring lots of cut glass ornaments and bric-a-brac. Then to the next shop, counting under his breath. “… y tres … y quatro … y cinco…”

  He heard a shrill scream from somewhere behind him, and in the next instant an explosion thundered from the lingerie shop. Glass windows and splinters from the wooden door frame erupted into the central aisle like a shotgun blast. Opposite, the grenade Manuel had tossed into the Starbucks detonated behind the counter. Glass display cases turned into blast-driven shards, razor sharp and deadly, scything through the cluster of customers waiting for their expensive morning coffee.

  More screams, shrill and terrified … and then the next blast went off … and the next … and the next. The shopping mall had become a storm of chaos, blood, and death. People were running in every direction, none of them knowing which way to go, just that they had to run. Others lay on the polished tiles of the floor, many of them splattered with blood, their own, or the blood of others. When Carballo glanced back over his shoulder, he saw horror. A young man propelled from a shop, colliding with an elderly woman. An overturned stroller, an infant in pink pajamas squirming on the ground nearby. A woman—the child’s mother, perhaps,—lying on her back, eyes staring at the skylights overhead, her face a mask of blood …