The Last Line

by Anthony Shaffer

  TWENTIETH STREET AND CONSTITUTION AVENUE NW

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  1335 HOURS, EDT

  “You’ve seen the news, James?”

  James Walker looked up from his meal. “You mean California? Yes.”

  “And so it begins.”

  The man placed his tray on the table and took a seat across from Walker. His name was Randolph Edgar Preston, and he was the assistant to the president for national security affairs, more commonly known as the national security adviser, or simply as ANSA. As a man with direct access to the president of the United States, he was undeniably one of the most powerful men in the world.

  “It begins,” Walker echoed. Glum, he turned and looked out the large expanse of glass windows along the cafeteria’s south wall, a view that took in the Constitution Gardens and the Reflecting Pool just beyond, the abrupt, skyward stab of the Washington Monument off to the left, the Lincoln Memorial to the right. “It begins, but I still wonder if the time is right.”

  “Why, James! Having second thoughts?”

  Walker looked back at Preston, met his eyes … then dropped his gaze.

  People thought of James Fitzhugh Walker as a small, gray man, as a banker, as an accountant, as a lawyer, terms that defined his world of numbers, accounts, banking laws, and the soulless transfer of funds. For twenty-five years he’d worked at the Fed, slowly working his way up the internal hierarchy. For twenty-five years he’d nurtured his career, built his life. If that life was less than exciting, well, James Walker didn’t like excitement. He liked things … predictable. Sane. Ordered. Rational.

  “I’ve had second thoughts, as you put it, all along, Mr. Preston. You know that.”

  “But you did agree to work with us. To work with the Program.”

  “People have died, Mr. Preston. If our … our involvement comes under public scrutiny—”

  “Ah, but it will not, Mr. Walker,” Preston said. “There is no reason for any of this to go public, is there?”

  Preston had a way of looking at him, cold, unemotional, superior. Walker felt exactly as he imagined a mouse might feel when confronted by a hungry snake.

  “No. No, of course not.”

  “Good.”

  It took Walker a moment to work up the courage to ask the question. “So … what are you doing over here?”

  “Finding you, of course. We’re having a special meeting tonight. The Program’s Central Committee. At the club. You’ll be there?”

  Walker wondered for a moment what would happen if he told the man no, if he said he had other plans, even just a quiet night home with his wife and son.

  Then he realized that it would make no difference at all. The Program, as it was informally known within the group, lately had come to dominate his life, to own it.

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Excellent. We’ll be discussing the next steps we must take to further the Program. We expect that things will be happening very quickly now.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Walker said. “Why the ungodly hurry?”

  “For the simple reason, Mr. Walker, that a secret of this size, of this magnitude, cannot be long kept. We are rewriting history, our little group, and the consequences will affect millions, no, hundreds of millions of people. The longer we wait, the more likely it is that … well … a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, isn’t that right?”

  Walker wondered if Preston had just threatened him. He knew he was the weak link. The others—Logan, Gonzales, Delaney, Fuentes—they’d been in on this from the beginning. They knew the risks, but they’d been willing to push ahead nonetheless. They never seemed to have second thoughts.

  “We are, all of us,” Preston continued, “under a great deal of pressure. But now that things are moving forward for us, the pressure will be less. I promise you that the rewards shall be infinitely worth the current stress and … difficulty.”

  “Directo a México is coming under fire, you know,” Walker said. “If Congress gets too interested, it could be bad. I know it’s only marginally concerned with the Program, but if it comes under intense public scrutiny, everything could unravel. Everything.”

  “Directo a México, as you well know, James, is completely legal. You need have no fears on that account. As for Congress … well, you leave them to me. They are not your concern.”

  Numb, Walker could only nod.

  “Good,” Preston said, standing. “I’ll see you at the club tonight. Be there, James.”

  Walker watched as Preston—arguably one of the most powerful men in the United States government—walked away. He took a last bite of his barely touched lunch, then pushed the tray aside. The cherry blossoms were at their height—clouds of pink beyond the Reflecting Pool and around the Jefferson Memorial and the Tidal Basin farther south.

  Right … completely legal. It was legal, of course, because the insanely serpentine laws had been written that way to make it legal, all while avoiding too much oversight from Congress or unpleasant attention from the media.

  Generally, the public thought little about the Federal Reserve and knew even less. Hell, people’s eyes glassed over when Walker told them what he did for a living—and that was okay. He didn’t want attention, not directed toward the Federal Reserve, and especially not directed toward him.

  As for the public, well, these things always were best kept out of the public eye. Someone once had noted that people should never watch how sausage or laws are made, and the same, Walker was convinced, was true of the federal banking system.

  Deliberately designed to be independent within the government, Fed did not need to have its decisions ratified by either the president or by Congress. The seven members of the Board of Governors were chosen by the president and ratified by Congress, which also maintained oversight, but most decisions were made by a handful of wealthy and powerful men who did not answer to politicians, to political parties, or to ideologies. The federal banking system was, in essence, responsible only to itself, and that included its need to show a profit.

  The public at large, Walker thought, would be distressed indeed to see how the government used the Fed to manage both the nation’s economy and its own profitability—too often to dismal effect.

  It had taken Directo a México to prove to Walker once and for all just how thoroughly corrupt the system had become.

  Four years ago, he’d been given the task of overseeing the remittance program, which was growing increasingly controversial. More and more members of the general public had become aware of it as journalists and editorialists wrote about it, criticized it—and right now the Federal Banking System didn’t need to be in the glare of that kind of harsh spotlight.

  Directo a México had been launched in 2003 under the U.S.-Mexico Partnership for Prosperity, a joint operation by the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Banco de México. Under the program’s provisions, people of Mexican descent could wire money to their families south of the border, using U.S. commercial banks and credit unions to transfer the money directly. The controversial part was that they could make those transfers using only a matrícula consular, an ID easily obtained at any Mexican consulate. Since they weren’t even required to provide a Social Security number, any immigrant, citizen or noncitizen, with or without documentation, could use the service.

  The banking fees attached to each transaction were generously low. Supporters of the program pointed out that more money sent to Mexican citizens still living in Mexico might help cut the tide of illegal immigration north.

  Which, of course, Walker knew, was complete and utter bullshit. The Mexican government had long been actively encouraging its more impoverished citizens to emigrate to el norte, so that more and more immigrants would send yet more and more money to Mexico. The so-called remittance program was now completely out of hand. Last year, almost twenty-five billion dollars had been sent south across the border. Mexico was addicted to that river of cash; money from el norte was the country’s second-la
rgest source of income after oil. Critics of the program pointed out that U.S. tax dollars were being used to support illegal immigration, and as the recent recession had deepened, people had begun questioning whether the United States could afford to support Mexico’s poor.

  Of course, when Walker had taken charge of the project, things hadn’t seemed all that bad. Banking, after all, was just business. A business was required to make money, to show a profit, and, as Preston had just pointed out, Directo a México was completely legal.

  Lately, however, James Walker had become aware of the Program’s other aspects.

  Anyone could get a matrícula consular. No one checked up on the applicant’s identity. Legal or illegal, it didn’t matter. The drug gangs and cartels that were destroying the Republic of Mexico now were using Directo a México to send money extorted from illegals in the United States south to Mexican banks that were owned and controlled by the cartels, and to launder drug money from the north. The Federal Reserve Bank didn’t care. Business, after all, was business, and lately business had been very good.

  Where, Walker wondered, did you draw the moral line? When did you accept responsibility for evil writ that large?

  He thought of Carol.

  Carol Marie Sullivan once had been his lover, an indiscretion wildly uncharacteristic of Walker at the time, but which he still treasured now, five years later. In 2011, she’d had the opportunity to take a vice president’s position at the Federal Reserve Bank of Phoenix, Arizona. While there, she’d uncovered … irregularities. Nothing illegal, but she’d strongly suspected that criminal elements were using her bank and the remittance program to ship money back to Mexico.

  Always a crusader, Carol had tried to alert the local news media to the problem.

  Of course, the media had not been interested. Certain elements within the banking system were always on guard against unfortunate leaks being made to the press. Carol had written a long e-mail to Walker, expressing her anger and her frustration, and her determination to keep digging.

  Two days later, she’d committed suicide—a combination of pills and alcohol. The coroner’s report had noted a blood alcohol level of over 0.35.

  Carol, Walker knew, never drank. Never. She’d claimed to hate the taste of the stuff. Besides, her e-mail, while angry, hadn’t sounded like one written by someone about to kill herself. It had been written by a person determined to get to the bottom of a very ugly situation, hinting at wholesale corruption both in the banks and in politics.

  Walker was dead certain that Carol had been murdered—but by whom? Cartel enforcers? Or, worse, by someone within the federal banking system? He assumed, had to assume, that the murderers had been vicious criminal elements, not bankers and businessmen and lawyers.

  Not people like him.

  Phone calls to local law enforcement had been unhelpful. Carol’s death was ruled a suicide, case closed.

  Which was to be expected. The local cops certainly weren’t going to want to open the political snake pit of bank corruption, illegal immigration, and Mexican mafias.

  Poor Carol.

  Walker, riding the tiger now, didn’t know how he was going to be able to let go.

  If he did, he now was convinced that the same would happen to him.

  SOUTH STEPS

  ECCLES FEDERAL RESERVE BOARD BUILDING

  TWENTIETH STREET AND CONSTITUTION AVENUE NW

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  1412 HOURS, EDT

  Preston paused between the massive, squared-off pillars at the top of the marble steps of the Federal Reserve. His meeting with Walker had confirmed something he’d been considering for some time. He was going to need to eliminate Walker, sooner, probably, rather than later.

  The man was weak. Spineless and weak. Worse, he had a conscience.

  The Program couldn’t afford too much of that kind of thing.

  Preston had recruited Walker at the Bohemian Grove two years before. That intimately private gathering of millionaires, bankers, politicians, business executives, and artsy types every July in Monte Rio, California, had turned out to be the perfect recruiting campus for the Program, a way for Preston to bring together the money and the power necessary to pull this thing off. They’d needed Walker for his banking connections with the Hispanic community; control the money and you controlled the people. The Fed’s monetary policies even gave the Program a certain amount of control over the Mexican cartels—not much, but some—and that would be vital in the final stages of the plan.

  Walker, Preston knew, was still pining over that woman. What was her name? Some VP of a Fed bank in Phoenix. A reformer. A crusader. Now a dead crusader, after Mendoza’s people had finished with her, managing to make it look like suicide. If Walker suspected that Preston had given the order to off the bitch, he would be turning state’s evidence at the Hoover Building in ten minutes flat.

  Even if he didn’t suspect the connection, Walker was just not reliable. Somehow, Preston knew, he would have to find someone else to handle the Mexican connections. Gonzales, maybe. A congressman in one of L.A.’s Hispanic communities, Gonzales was more figurehead than anything else—but he was visible.

  He was bought and paid for, too.

  Maybe the Program could dispense with Walker once and for all.

  Preston reached the bottom of the street and turned left. The Ellipse was just three blocks east, toward the Capitol Dome.

  LOS ANGELES CITY HALL

  NORTH SPRING STREET

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  1520 HOURS, PDT

  The crowd had come southwest across the overpass above the Hollywood Freeway just two blocks from city hall and surged down North Spring Street, chanting loudly. “Libertad, libertad, give us back our land! Libertad, libertad, give us back our land!” Many carried signs and placards, hastily scrawled on pieces torn from brown cardboard boxes. ¡VIVA AZTLÁN! read one. JUSTICE! DIGNITY! FREEDOM! read another.

  The crowd was met by a determined line of police officers in front of city hall, across North Spring Street behind plastic riot shields.

  “This is the Los Angeles Police Department,” a voice, hugely amplified, boomed across the mob. “This is an illegal assembly. You are ordered to disperse now or face arrest. I repeat, this is the Los Angeles Police Department…”

  Across the street, on the roof of an office building at North Spring and West Temple, two men armed with M-16 rifles and wearing police body armor took aim at the crowd.

  Chapter Five

  HOTEL HILTON

  CIUDAD DE MÉXICO

  REPÚBLICA DE MÉXICO

  0912 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

  16 APRIL

  “Señor de la Cruz?”

  “Miguel, por favor. And you are Señor … Callahan?”

  “Mucho gusto.”

  “’Chogusto.”

  “This is the guy I phoned you about,” Eduardo Chavez added. “Es buena gente.”

  Teller shook hands with de la Cruz, a small, wiry man in jeans and a yellow polo shirt. His grip was strong, and he had a direct, intense gaze.

  The CISEN officer glanced around, as if checking the futuristic architecture and profusion of tropical plants for possible eavesdroppers. “It’s good to meet you, sir. Your presence here is … most welcome.”

  They’d decided to meet de la Cruz in the hotel lobby the morning after their arrival rather than at the airport as originally planned. The change of venue gave them more tactical possibilities—and the palatial lobby of a five-star luxury hotel was less likely than the airport to have cartel spotters.

  Security here, Teller was pleased to see, was pretty good, although the plainclothes personnel scattered about the area were a little obvious in their casual nonchalance. A police officer in dark blue and wearing tactical armor patrolled the sidewalk outside the front door, armed with an M-16, and there were security cameras at various points on the ceiling. The Mexican government depended on tourism for revenue almost as much as it did on remittances from Mexican imm
igrants in el norte, and so they went to expensive lengths to make sure those tourists felt safe.

  “I have a car outside,” de la Cruz told them. “It’s been scanned for bugs. We can talk freely there, on our way to CISEN headquarters.”

  “Vámanos,” Chavez said.

  Teller wondered, though, if CISEN HQ would be a safe place to talk. He would assume that it was not.

  The three of them left the hotel, crossing the street to a white Ford Escort parked in the hotel’s front lot. Teller glanced around, trying to spot Frank Procario, but he didn’t see the marine. Not that he’d expected to; Procario, as Teller knew from dozens of exercises at the Farm, was one of the best. Their rental car was in the parking lot; it would be up to Procario to get on their tail and follow them. The wire Teller was wearing would provide a signal that would help Procario stay with them, as well as let him listen in on the conversation.

  “So … you’re here undercover, posing as a journalist?” de la Cruz asked as Teller slid into the backseat.

  Teller’s papers identified him as John Callahan, a reporter for the Washington Post. De la Cruz knew him only as Callahan, not as Teller. It was safer that way.

  “That’s the idea,” Teller replied. “Did they fill you in on the mission?”

  “You need to find a member of one of the cartels, ideally mid- to high level, and plant some sort of a bug on him.”

  Teller nodded. De la Cruz didn’t need to know the details. “Right.”

  “And I assume that this is connected with the arrival of two, ah … packages from Karachi?”

  Teller looked at Chavez in the front passenger seat for confirmation. The Mexicans shouldn’t have had access to Trapdoor intelligence.

  Chavez returned the glance over his shoulder, then nodded. “Some of us have been sharing information with CISEN back-channel, very informally,” he said. “We figured if those packages were wandering around in Mexico, it made sense to have CISEN in the loop, helping to find them.”

  “I see.” The news was faintly disturbing. If Mexican police, intelligence, and security services could not be trusted, there was a serious danger here. They still didn’t know who was behind the smuggling of the two nuclear weapons, if, indeed, they were on board the Zapoteca at all. Who in Mexico would want a couple of suitcase nukes?