The Last Line

by Anthony Shaffer

  The Latino independence movement had remained fairly low-key for decades, but lately, the Hispanic populations of those states had become more vocal. The Chicanos were in the majority in large areas of southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, and they were beginning to flex their political muscles. Many were talking about the inevitability of a new nation, el Republica del Norte, that would secede from the United States within the next half century or so.

  There were many also saying that it would not be that long, that the new country was being born now.

  The past twenty-four hours had seen an explosion of rage and determination within the local Chicano population. Not all of it, of course, not even a majority … but enough to focus the world’s attention on East Los Angeles. Paying those two members of an L.A. drug gang to fire into the crowd outside of City Hall yesterday had blown the lid off, as Reyshahri had known would be the case. The story was flashing through the Hispanic communities of L.A. like lightning: The LAPD had fired into a peaceful crowd of demonstrators! The IDs and badges carried by those two—plus the intervention of a police official on the cartel payroll—had freed both men.

  Both men had disappeared a few hours later; there would be no way to question them further.

  Was this the beginning of a new nation? Reyshahri doubted, frankly, that the hodge-podge of activist groups and would-be revolutionaries would be able to pull it off. They certainly wouldn’t do it on their own. The United States federal government had settled the question of whether individual states could choose to leave the parent country long ago, had done so by winning a bloody civil war. Those people out in the street could shout and chant until they were blue in the face. Once they became too violent, too big of a problem, Washington would declare martial law and send in the National Guard.

  That would be the last anyone would hear of Aztlán Libre for a long, long time to come.

  Still, his superiors back in Tehran had come up with Operation Shah Mat, which they thought had a good chance of success. Reyshahri’s first part in this operation was to encourage the independence movements in the southwestern U.S., to help them forge alliances with one another if they hadn’t already, and to see to it that the weapons and ammunition smuggled up out of Mexico reached their organizers. Whether or not the Aztlanistas managed to vote themselves free of the States, frankly, was unimportant. What was important was that they be loud, visible, and dangerous for a period of perhaps one more week.

  After that, after Reyshahri carried out the second part of Shah Mat, none of it would matter in the least.

  Chapter Six

  OBSERVATION POST

  DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

  CIUDAD DE MÉXICO

  0950 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

  17 APRIL

  Teller was bored.

  Stakeouts were, of course, an integral part of intelligence work, and even more so for counterintelligence, when you needed to keep tabs on the opposition. As a newbie, he’d polished just-learned skills dozens of times in training, practicing with senior intelligence officers as his targets. He’d been on plenty of the real thing since, throughout his career, in the streets of Kabul and Karachi, in Berlin once, and even in Washington, D.C., where he’d been keeping an eye on that SVR officer who’d wanted to defect. Of course, on that case he’d needed not only to watch the target but to watch for his real opposition from the Company, his nominal allies at the CIA.

  In eight years of intelligence work, he’d never been able to get past the mind-numbing boredom of a routine stakeout.

  Chavez and Teller had spent the night in the small bedroom on the third floor of Antonio Vicente’s house, taking turns sleeping and watching; de la Cruz had gone home for the night. Frank Procario had joined them for a time, then gone to a hotel back at the airport. Teller had phoned in a request for some special equipment, and it would be arriving sometime on the seventeenth.

  The two men spent much of the evening discussing the mission and how they could best carry it out, along with all the variants and sequels they could think of, all the possible ways it could go down. If they could catch Escalante in the street—perhaps by pretending to hold him up, or presenting themselves as members of a rival cartel threatening him—they might be able to grab his phone for a crucial few moments while Teller infected it with the virus, then return it to him. Chavez wasn’t sure they could pull that off, however, without making him suspicious, and Teller had to admit that it was a long shot. Physical confrontations with the target always went the way of Murphy; things never unfolded as planned, and there were always unexpected complications.

  Teller also put forward the possibility of the two of them breaking into the safe house—again posing as thieves or rival cartel members—with Chavez holding Escalante and his lady friend at gunpoint while Teller found Escalante’s cell phone and inserted the Cellmap virus.

  “The trouble is,” Chavez pointed out, “Escalante would know something was screwy. If he suspected that we were CIA or CISEN, he might assume we’d bugged his phone and get rid of it.”

  “The big problem,” Teller replied, “is that we still don’t know the bastard’s over there. We’ve been watching the place for twenty hours now, and we haven’t seen him.”

  “His car’s parked out front.”

  “Yeah, and now it’s Thursday and he hasn’t come out to drive it home. Maybe he loaned it to his lady friend for the week. You ever think of that? Until we put Mark One eyeballs on the target, get a positive ID, we don’t know he’s there.”

  “We could check.”

  “How?”

  “Miguel could go up posing as a census taker or a meter reader or whatever. He could get the appropriate camouflage at CISEN headquarters.”

  “Possibly,” Teller said. “I don’t want to spook the quarry, though. The opposition may assume that anyone asking to read the meter is an undercover cop.”

  “They can be paranoid like that, yeah.”

  “I think I’m going to vote for breaking and entering. At least if we have them at gunpoint, we would be in control of the situation.”

  “Until Murphy showed up,” Chavez said. “But … yeah.”

  “We need the package from Langley,” Teller said. “That will give us an edge.”

  “I hope so,” Chavez replied. “I don’t like operating in the dark, y’know?”

  CENTRAL BUREAU COMMUNITY POLICE STATION

  EAST SIXTH STREET

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  1112 HOURS, PDT

  Located just six-tenths of a mile south of city hall, the LAPD’s Central Bureau controls operations across sixty-five square miles of Los Angeles, including the downtown business district, Newton to the south, and Hollenbeck to the east. The most ethnically diverse of the LAPD’s operational areas, it has a population of over 900,000 people.

  Ignacio Carballo walked toward the bureau’s front doors, then hesitated, momentarily cowed by the sheer looming size of the edifice. He glanced at his partner, Hernán Jimenez Montoya, shook himself, then forced himself to go on. Despite the warm and sunny Southern California weather, both men were wearing knee-length raincoats, black leather with zippers up the front. Jimenez was wearing a backpack.

  A couple of SWAT officers were patrolling outside the front doors of the public entrance, and Carballo braced for trouble. Every police officer in the city, he thought, must be on a hair trigger. The riot in East L.A. was still under way; at last report, a dozen buildings were on fire over there, and last night the mob had turned over a couple of police cruisers. There were rumors that the governor had already declared martial law, though Carballo hadn’t been able to confirm that. It didn’t matter. They told him what to do … and he did it. For that much money, he would have stormed the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.

  So, into the lion’s den. Avoiding eye contact, the two men walked side by side up to the glass doors leading into the building’s vestibule.

  “Hey, you two!” one of the officers called. “Whe
re do you think you’re going?”

  “To see the chief of police,” Jimenez said.

  “Right. What’s in the backpack?”

  “We are reporters,” Carballo said, pulling out the ID he had ready in his raincoat pocket. “The backpack has camera equipment.”

  The second officer snorted. “You two look ready for the monsoon season.”

  Carballo gave a careless shrug. “The weather service said rain later today.”

  One of the cops examined the fake ID, then shrugged and handed it back. “You’ll need to check all that gear through inside, you know.”

  “I know.”

  One of the cops actually held the door open for them.

  Ignacio Carballo had trained with GAFE, the Special Forces, both in Mexico and at Fort Benning, Georgia, with the American Green Berets. He’d fought cartel mercenaries in Juárez, in Nogales, and in Tijuana, as well as revolutionaries in Campeche until a friend had recruited him for Los Zetas. He was tough, well trained, and experienced. Even so, his heart was pounding as he stepped through into the front lobby of the city’s central police station, and his hands and face were slick with sweat. There were a dozen police and security people inside, and several dozen civilians.

  Two of the security guards waved him forward toward the frame of one of the metal detectors. Casually, Carballo unzipped his coat and stepped forward. Behind him, Jimenez slipped his backpack off his shoulder and advanced toward the conveyor belt for the X-ray scanner.

  As Carballo passed through the frame, an alarm sounded, and a red light flashed. One of the guards picked up a wand to give him a scan. “Please remove your coat,” he said.

  Carballo shot him.

  The 9 mm Beretta had been in a shoulder holster underneath the raincoat. As quickly as he could pull the trigger, Carballo squeezed off rounds, pivoting as he fired into the police and security personnel around him. The slide locked open when the magazine was empty; he dropped the weapon. Strapped to his side, muzzle down and also hidden by the long coat, he was carrying an ArmaLite AR-15, its action modified to permit full-automatic fire. In one smooth motion, he unclipped the weapon and brought it up, triggering a long, stuttering burst into the crowd of civilians.

  Jimenez was in on the action now, yanking a pull-ring at the top of the backpack and hurling it underhand beneath the line of tables marking the security perimeter. Under his coat he was wearing an M-16 assault rifle, and within a couple of seconds he was adding its shrill thunder to that of Carballo’s weapon.

  Civilians screamed and scattered. Police officers drew their weapons. One, quicker than the rest, brought his Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol up in a two-handed grip and squeezed off three shots. Carballo felt one of the rounds slap him in the chest, hard, staggering him back a step, but the Kevlar vest he was wearing underneath the raincoat absorbed the force of the impact, and he felt nothing more than a thump, like a hard punch in the chest. Turning, his AR-15 at his shoulder, he returned fire and sent the officer stumbling backward and down, the front of his white shirt suddenly blossoming bright red.

  For a small eternity of seconds, the two men poured full-auto rounds into the crowd, into the scattering police officers, into anything that moved.

  Another round slapped Carballo in the back, much harder this time, and he felt the steel plate inside his Kevlar vest bruise his torso. The two cops with body armor were coming in through the front door, weapons set to semiauto, squeezing off rounds as they came. He didn’t know if their armor was hard, like his, or soft, but he took no chances, aiming instead for their unprotected faces. Blood splattered across the glass doors, and then the safety glass crazed as missed rounds smashed through it.

  Jimenez thumbed his magazine release, dropping an empty, and snapped a full mag home. “¡Vámanos, ’mano!”

  Stepping across the two bodies, Carballo and Jimenez jogged out onto the sidewalk, where a gray van had just swung off the street, bypassing the diagonal parking area out front, and was waiting for them beyond the ornamental shrubbery, its sliding side door open. The two men dived headfirst into the back of the vehicle, as Raimondo Velez fired his M-16 above their heads and into the building’s front windows.

  “¡Ándale!” Carballo yelled, but the van was already moving, tires squealing as it sideswiped a parked car and banged back onto the street. Behind them, the explosives in the backpack detonated with a booming roar, blowing out the front doors of the police station with a blast large enough to shake the building and set off car alarms for dozens of yards around.

  Around the corner and one block down Wall Street, they abandoned the van for a less conspicuous vehicle left parked and waiting for them, and ten minutes later they were on the Santa Monica Freeway, heading east.

  Behind them, the LAPD’s Central Bureau Station was burning.

  OBSERVATION POST

  DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

  CIUDAD DE MÉXICO

  1434 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

  “Jesus, it took you long enough,” Teller said. “What kept you?”

  Frank Procario dropped the aluminum-sided case he was carrying on the bed and gave Teller a sour look. “Traffic,” he said.

  Teller looked at his watch. “You picked up the package six hours ago! How long does it take you to drive five miles?”

  “Six hours,” Procario said, “when I have to get around a full-blown riot in downtown Mexico City.”

  “What riot?”

  “A big one. A big demonstration, anyway. Yankees go home.”

  Chavez came in, carrying another equipment case. “Yeah, it’s on all the local news stations,” he said, putting the case on the floor. “They’ve declared martial law in California.”

  “Christ,” Teller said. “Leave the country for a couple of days and the place goes to hell. What’s going on?”

  “Riots in Los Angeles,” Procario said. The marine sounded exhausted. “Police officers beating up Latinos in the streets have been filmed with cell phone cameras and iPads, and the footage has been getting a lot of airtime. L.A.’s Hispanic population is up in arms, claiming police officers were seen firing into a peaceful demonstration outside city hall. Lots of big demonstrations have broken out in other cities, in support of L.A.’s Latino communities. Phoenix. San Antonio. Chicago. New York. And Mexico City as well, apparently. Showing solidarity with their oppressed brothers in el norte.” He patted the top of the equipment case on the bed next to him. “But at least we got the shipment in from Langley.”

  Teller had called Langley yesterday, requesting the expedited shipment—several bulky metal cases flown into Benito Juárez International by a chartered plane early that morning. “That’s great,” Teller said. “Let’s open ’em up.”

  The various cases were opened, the equipment inside carefully unpacked. Procario got off the bed and began setting up the scope on its tripod, aiming it out the bedroom window at the cartel safe house. Teller unpacked the AN/PRC-117F and unfolded the antenna. Chavez began setting up the KY-99.

  The AN/PRC-117F satellite communications unit weighed just sixteen pounds and was connected to its cruciform antenna by a plug-in cable. The KY-99 was a crypto device employed for greater security.

  “The prick’s ready,” Teller said, grinning. “Let’s have the K-Y.”

  All military PRC radio units, ever since the Vietnam War, were called “pricks.” The inside joke within the DIA was that the CIA always broke out the K-Y for use with the prick whenever a surveillance target was going to get screwed.

  The television monitor went onto a desk next to the window, alongside a laptop computer. Procario finished adjusting the triple-M scope. “I’m getting an image,” Teller told him. “Left a little … and up. Good. Hold it right there! Perfect!”

  The three gathered around the monitor, studying the latest in through-the-wall surveillance technology.

  Electromagnetic radiation fills the air, an ocean of electromagnetic waves from the very, very long and low-energy—the longest radio wavelengt
hs—to the unimaginably short and extremely energetic, gamma radiation. Visible light is parked somewhere in the middle between infrared and ultraviolet.

  The wavelengths between microwaves and long infrared are known as the millimeter band, with wavelengths from ten millimeters to one, and frequencies of between thirty and three hundred gigahertz. Also known as MMMR, for millimeter microwave radiation, the waves can pass through most materials with ease.

  They cannot penetrate metal, and they cannot penetrate water or objects that were mostly made of water, but bricks, mortar, drywall, glass, cloth—all are as transparent to triple-M wavelengths as air is to visible light.

  On the monitor on the desktop, the walls of the Perez house across the street were invisible. An open network of pipes, the house’s plumbing, was clearly visible, as were wires, nails, metal studs, and other bits of the building’s architecture. Hanging apparently unsupported in the middle of the space was a naked, glowing male figure.

  He glowed because the human body gives off millimeter radiation, but he was also being imaged by the background microwave radiation. Humans can accurately be described as bags of warm water; electromagnetic radiation, both background wavelengths and that emitted by the body, rendered his clothing invisible but reflected off his skin. The resulting image was a bit blurry but revealed as much detail as the backscatter X-ray scanners that were causing such a furor at airports and other security checkpoints back in the States. Teller could see that the target was male, that he was leaning back on an invisible chair on the building’s ground floor, and that an assault rifle—made visible by the metal components of its receiver and trigger group, barrel, neatly stacked bullets, and other furniture—was leaning against a transparent wall beside him. His hands were propped up in front of him, as though he were reading a magazine.