The Last Line

by Anthony Shaffer

  Teller had thought about having one of those units sent down from Langley with the MMMR but decided against it. For the device to work, you either needed to be directly opposite the target window, so that the reflected beam bounced straight back at you, or you needed to plant a receiver somewhere else, off to the side at the one point where it would pick up the reflection, then transmit the data by radio back to the listening post. The angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection, as the physics boys said; dicking around in front of a house several numbers up the street would have been a great way to attract unwanted attention for the team.

  There were also high-tech bugs available that could be placed up against the glass of a target window, sensing the vibrations directly. Or they could plant some more traditional listening devices inside if they broke into the place later.

  A break-in, though, simply was not an option. With five people in the target house now, it was far too dangerous to try an armed confrontation.

  The woman got out of the car and started walking south toward the Perez house. “Uh-oh,” Chavez said. “Another one coming to the party?”

  Procario whistled appreciatively at the MMMR screen. “Nice,” he said.

  “She’s carrying,” Teller observed. It was possible to make out the shape of a semiauto handgun riding at her waist, probably in a holster worn in front, over her belly. He pointed at the screen. “Is that a suppressor?”

  “Either that,” Procario joked, “or it’s one hell of a hard-on.”

  “Standard field issue,” Chavez said.

  “Yeah, I’m thinking it’s the Klingons, definitely.” Teller looked away from the screen and out the window, studying the woman down on the street in ordinary light instead of millimeter waves. The curves and intimate details exposed on the MMMR monitor were wrapped in a dark gray raincoat. There was enough of a glow from a nearby streetlight for him to make out her features clearly.

  “Hey,” Teller said. “I know her!”

  Chavez joined him at the window. “Jesus.”

  “Definitely one of yours.”

  “You’re right. She’s DO.” That was the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. “I don’t know her name—”

  “Yeah, but I do! Hang on. I’ll be back in a moment.”

  “Wait a second, Chris!” Procario called, but Teller was already through the door.

  Yeah, Teller knew her, all right—Jacqueline Dominique, Jackie for short. At least, he thought that was her real name. She’d been his lover for a brief but intense fling last fall, before she’d been transferred to Venezuela.

  She was tough, experienced, dedicated, and smart, and she’d been that close to convincing him to leave DIA and come over to the Dark Side. It was possible she’d not told him her real name. “Dominique” had always seemed so … theatrical. The name of paparazzi bait, a model or a singer, maybe, not a real person.

  “Watch yourself, Chris,” Procario’s voice said in his ear as he hurried down the steps from the upstairs apartment. “She’s going up to the house.”

  Which might mean she was undercover. Or … the unthinkable. She was a double agent, working for them.

  No, he didn’t, he couldn’t, believe that of Jackie. She was too direct, too much the stereotypical straight arrow. You needed a mind like a hyperdimensional corkscrew to play on both sides of the street simultaneously.

  Teller stepped out onto the front porch of Antonio Vicente’s house. Dominique had reached the front door of the Perez house and was leaning over to the side, pressing something against the corner of the front window. It was too small and too far away for Teller to see what it was, but he assumed it was a listening device—probably one of the dime-sized stick-ons that could pick up vibrations through the glass like the more sophisticated long-range laser mikes. It would include a tiny transmitter to beam what it picked up back to Dominique and her partner in the car parked up the street.

  Gutsy—but damned risky. If the bad guys also had the Perez house under surveillance, Jackie was screwed. He watched her straighten up, look around, then turn and walk back down the steps to the sidewalk. She didn’t head straight back to the car but continued walking south. Going directly to her car, with possible watchers in the neighborhood, would have been bad technique.

  Teller decided to follow her.

  MATAZETAS HOUSE

  LA CALLE SUR 145

  DISTRICTO IZTACALCO,

  2245 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

  Enrico Barrón leaned into the eyepieces of his heavy army binoculars and gave a wolfish grin. “Quiero clavar ese culo apretado.”

  The Spanish was blunt and vulgar, a desire to “nail that tight ass.”

  The two were in a second-floor bedroom overlooking Sur 145, across the street and just to the north of the Maria Perez house, where they could keep an eye on it. The two watchers were members of a unit called the New Generation Cartel, but better known as Los Matazetas—“the Zeta Killers.” Though their public presentation was of a civilian vigilante group dedicated to wiping out the Zetas Cartel, they in fact were closely allied with the Sinaloa Cartel. The order—a very strongly worded order—that had come down last week from Guzmán himself had directed them to cease all hostilities against the Zetas, and Barrón didn’t like it one bit.

  However, Guzmán had a habit of turning people who disobeyed his orders over to his special inquisitors, with instructions to keep them alive for as long a time as possible. Barrón had seen some Zetas and others who’d received that special attention from the Sinaloan interrogators, seen them while they were still clinging to the last bloody, shrieking shreds of their lives, and he had no intention of sharing their fate.

  “Who is she?” his partner asked, watching now from behind his shoulder. The woman had just stepped off the Perez porch and was walking south down the sidewalk, her ass twitching provocatively beneath a long, lightweight raincoat.

  “I don’t know, but I’m betting the bitch just put a bug on Escalante’s window.”

  “Huh. Gringo, you think?”

  “Of course. She’s not one of ours.”

  “With that chassis? No, unfortunately.”

  “Not a problem. We’ll make her one of ours.”

  “You want to pick her up?”

  “I think we should find out who she is, who she works for, no?”

  His partner shrugged. “I think you just want to toss some powder.” In Spanish, the phrase echar un polvo meant much the same as the English “get your rocks off.”

  “Hey, I don’t see a problem mixing a little pleasure with our business.”

  “Who’s she with?”

  “She got out of that green car across the street.” Barrón panned the binoculars down and to the right, searching. “Yeah, the driver’s still there.”

  “Okay. You and Carlos take out the driver, then grab the girl. Take Arturo along.”

  Barrón thought for a moment. “Should we pick the guy up for questioning, too?”

  “Nah. Kill him. But quietly.”

  “It’s done. Hey … there’s someone else on the street now.” He pointed south. A tall man in a tan jacket was walking down the east side of the street. “What do you think? One of our new Zetas friends? Or another gringo?”

  Barrón drew his Beretta pistol, chambered a round, and tucked it into his waistband. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll handle him.”

  A moment later, he, a nineteen-year-old killer named Carlos Gutierrez, and a seventeen-year-old named Arturo Gomez were letting themselves out into the drizzling night.

  LA CALLE SUR 145

  DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

  2256 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

  Teller stayed on the opposite side of the street from Dominique, and a good thirty yards behind her. He didn’t want to spook her, and he certainly didn’t want to engage those superb reflexes of hers before she could realize it was him.

  This was, he reflected, a lot like one of the exercises they’d put him through at the Farm eight years ago—giving him a photo of
someone and having him find the person and tail him through mobs of tourists. He’d actually been pretty good at it. The trick was to blend in with the crowd and not be obvious about stopping when the target stopped, or following him into alleys or shops.

  The trouble here was that it was late and the street was pretty much deserted. There was no crowd to blend with, and no easy way to become invisible on the pavement.

  In this sort of situation, you had to focus on staying outside of the target’s field of view, muffling the click of your footsteps, and, so far as was possible, not thinking about your quarry. Science didn’t recognize the effect yet, but anyone who stalked human beings for a living—snipers in combat, detectives tailing a suspect, or intelligence officers following an enemy agent—knew that humans had a remarkable ability to feel when someone was following them. Call it telepathy, ESP, or magic, there was something to it, like when he’d felt the Klingon in the midnight darkness at the Farm. From what he’d seen of Jacqueline Dominique, she had that sixth-sense thing down to hard science. Sneaking up on her would not be easy.

  She passed the mouth of a narrow alley but then turned right at the next intersection, vanishing behind the corner of a building. Teller had already decided that she was simply walking around the block in order to return to the car and her partner. That way, if someone had challenged her at the Perez house, she could have claimed to be lost and asking directions. Avoiding the alley was good basic tradecraft; alleys were great places in which you could be trapped, and too often they proved to be one-way cul-de-sacs.

  If Jackie was boxing the block, the alley would give him a shortcut, assuming it cut all the way through. If it didn’t, he could double back and meet her when she approached her car.

  “Hey, Frank?” he murmured.

  “Go.” Procario and Chavez were monitoring his wire.

  “I think she’s boxing the block. I’m cutting through an alley to head her off.”

  “Just watch yourself, buddy,” Procario replied in his earpiece.

  “Don’t worry about that. It looks to me like I’m in the clear.”

  Glancing up and down the street and seeing no one, he started across, heading for the narrow and uninviting black slit of the alley.

  LA CALLE SUR 145

  DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

  2257 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

  Barrón eased the Chevy van out of the narrow driveway, pulling into the street and turning left. In the passenger seat, Carlos Gutierrez chambered a round in his Browning Hi Power, which had been threaded to accept the long, heavy tube of a sound suppressor. The passenger-side window was already rolled down.

  “It’s the dark green car,” the voice of his partner said in his ear. “Two back from Escalante’s white Chevy.”

  “I see it,” Barrón replied. “Wait one.”

  He pulled the van up alongside the green Escort and braked to a halt. Gutierrez extended his arm through the window, talking aim with the Hi Power. The driver only had time to turn his head to his left, eyes widening, and then the 9 mm pistol gave a harsh chirp, bucking in the gunman’s hand.

  Glass crazed and shattered. Gutierrez fired again, then again and again and again, snapping off round after round into the face and neck of the man seated at the Escort’s wheel. Blood splattered across the inside of the Escort’s windshield as the driver slumped over. Calmly, Gutierrez got out of the van, stepped up to the Escort’s driver’s side, and reached in with the Hi Power, placing the sound suppressor up against the driver’s head just below and behind the ear. He triggered two more shots, then climbed back into the van.

  “Amateurs,” Barrón said, and he accelerated the van slowly south down the street.

  LA CALLE SUR 143

  DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

  2301 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

  The next street to the west of Sur 145 was, illogically enough, Sur 143. Teller didn’t know where Sur 144 might be; the alleys here were far too narrow to have their own names or numbers. At the far end of this one was a wooden fence twelve feet high. He pushed off from an overflowing trash can, caught the top, and chinned himself up and over. This was beginning to look more and more like a damned exercise at the Farm, complete with obstacle course.

  “Chris! This is Frank!” He sounded worried.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Trouble. A van just pulled alongside the green car. Guy in the passenger seat just killed the woman’s partner.”

  “Shit. How?”

  “Professional-style hit—handgun with a sound suppressor. The van took off south, but it turned right at the next intersection.”

  Down the street Jacqueline Dominique had taken. “Okay. I’m on it.”

  “Be careful, Chris. Someone made them.”

  “Right.”

  Obviously, someone had been watching the Perez house and noticed Jackie going up on the porch. She and her partner had been burned, as tradecraft slang so succinctly put it.

  Ahead, the narrow alley opened onto Sur 143, the next street to the west. Teller reached the sidewalk and saw Dominique off to his left, just rounding the corner. She was still a good thirty yards away.

  He was about to step out and flag her down when a pale gray van came around the corner behind her, lights glaring in the night. The sliding cargo door on the vehicle’s right side was open, a man crouching inside. As the van screeched to a halt, Dominique turned, but the man in the back had already leaped onto the sidewalk just a few feet behind her. The passenger-side front door swung open, and a second man jumped out, lunging for her, a heavy gold-chain necklace flashing incongruously in the glow from a streetlight.

  At least they hadn’t simply gunned her down in the street. They intended to abduct her, and that gave Teller a slim chance.

  He pulled out his personal weapon, a ten-round Glock .45 semiautomatic riding in a belt holster high enough to stay hidden beneath his jacket. Stepping into the open, Teller braced the pistol in a Weaver stance, two-handed, right arm straight, left arm bent with the hand supporting the right. Thirty yards is a long range for any handgun; he ignored the man behind Jackie—too risky—and drew down on the man coming out of the front of the vehicle, squeezing off four quick shots.

  Thunderous gunfire echoed off the buildings across the street, and the passenger-side window on the van crazed from the impact of at least one round. The target spun, aiming a pistol and returning fire, the harsh chuff of a suppressor mingling with the whine of a round passing Teller’s head, the sharp ping of a ricochet from bricks to his left. Teller fired twice more, and the other stumbled, going down on all fours, though whether he’d been hit or was simply diving for cover Teller couldn’t tell at that distance.

  Dominique couldn’t get at the pistol she was carrying under her raincoat, not quickly enough, at any rate. Instead, she slammed the heel of her hand into her attacker’s face, sending him sprawling back through the open cargo door. The man on the ground started to get up, but she pivoted sharply and planted the toe of her boot beneath his chin, kicking hard.

  Teller was already running toward the fight as fast as he could, his .45 still gripped in two hands out in front of him. He wanted to stop the van, and momentarily considered shooting at the right front tire, but rubber tires don’t puncture as easily when hit by gunfire as they seem to do in the movies, and the van could still get well clear of the area running on a flat. Instead, he aimed for the windshield, trying to hit the driver.

  Again, there were no guarantees. The angle of a vehicle’s front windshield can deflect bullets even as they punch through, but at least he could wreck the driver’s vision. He put three more rounds through the windshield, turning glass to a crazed white web.

  One round left. He saw a clear shot at the guy with the gold chain, who’d just been slammed back into the van’s side by Jackie’s kick. As he staggered forward, Teller fired again. The man spun sharply to his right, then collapsed on the pavement.

  Teller thumbed the magazine release, dropping the empty to the sidewalk, reac
hing into his jeans pocket to pull out a loaded magazine and slap it home into the pistol’s grip. The man Dominique had hit in the face had grabbed the sliding door and was tugging it shut, and the van was already accelerating wildly down the street, sideswiping a parked car as it moved. Teller came to a halt, let the locked-open slide snap a round into the firing chamber, and began shooting, pivoting to his right as the van screeched north up the street. He put five rounds into the vehicle, then held his fire as it careened behind some parked cars.

  It was gone.

  Dogs barked in the distance, and Teller heard the slam of shutters banging closed across the street. Neighborhoods like this one tended to stick their collective head in the sand when they heard gunfire on the street nowadays.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  He turned, breathing hard. Dominique stood fifteen feet away, her pistol with its awkward sound suppressor now gripped tightly in both hands, aiming directly at him.

  Carefully, Teller raised his hands and stepped farther into the illumination of the streetlight, letting her see his face.

  “Chris?”

  “Hello, Jackie. It’s been ages. You never write … you never call…”

  Then she was in his arms.

  Chapter Eight

  LA CALLE SUR 143

  DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

  2304 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

  17 APRIL

  “Who is he?” Jackie Dominique asked.

  Teller grimaced as he squatted by the body of the man he’d shot, studying his wallet. Over twenty thousand pesos in bills, a Mexican driver’s license and some other ID, a color photo of a pretty girl, several credit cards. Flashy rings and a heavy necklace that looked like gold. According to the license, the man’s name was Carlos Gutierrez Sandoval. His address was in Nogales, up on the Mexico-Arizona border. He was nineteen years old.

  For answer, he handed the wallet to Dominique.