The Last Line

by Anthony Shaffer

  Teller pocketed the pistol, a Browning Hi Power, and three magazines of 9 mm ammo, but searched every pocket in vain for a cell phone. Damn.

  Reaching into his own pocket, he pulled out his cell phone, flipped it open, and took several pictures of the dead narcoterrorist’s face. He also photographed the driver’s license.

  “Frank?”

  “Go.”

  “They tried to abduct Jackie Dominique. I shot up the van, took down one Tango, but two others got away.”

  “Ed wants to know if Ms. Dominique is okay.”

  He glanced at her. Her face was flushed, she was breathing hard, but she didn’t look more than lightly shaken. “Yeah, she’s fine. Listen … you guys might be exposed.”

  “We’re already breaking down the OP. We won’t learn anything else here tonight. That meeting at the Perez place is starting to look permanent.”

  As he listened, he lifted the left arm of the body on the street, examining the elaborate tattoo. There were hearts and flowers, the red, white, and green of the Mexican flag, and the word MATAZETAS running from elbow to wrist encircled by twining roses. He took a photo of that as well, then keyed in a transmission code.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m uploading some photos of the Tango for you to shoot back to Langley. But I don’t want to go back there with Jackie, in case they’re watching the place. We’ll meet you back at the hotel, probably tomorrow.”

  “Roger that. Good luck.”

  He dropped the limp arm, thoughtful, and pocketed his phone. “Yeah … You too.”

  The Matazetas, he knew from his briefing back in Langley, was an arm of the Sinaloa Cartel, and that fit if this kid was from Nogales. Zeta Killers.

  He checked through Gutierrez’s clothing again, still looking for a phone, then abandoned the search. He took the money from the wallet instead. The current exchange rate was around thirteen or fourteen pesos to the dollar; twenty thousand pesos was around fifteen hundred dollars, and if he and Jackie were going to go to ground overnight, they would need cash. He had a thousand pesos and a few hundred dollars on him, plus a cash card, but the card might allow him to be tracked, and right now he wanted to disappear for a while.

  Both Sinaloa and Los Zetas maintained what amounted to small armies, for their wars with each other and with the Mexican government. Teller was unwilling to make any guesses as to how sophisticated their surveillance techniques or technology might be.

  He also pocketed the dead man’s credit cards. A check on those and what he’d purchased recently might be of some use.

  “We need to go back and pick up James,” Dominique told him. “James Grant, my partner. He’s waiting in the car—”

  “No, we don’t. He’s dead.”

  “My God! How?”

  “My people have an OP overlooking the Perez house. They saw the bad guys drive up and take him out before they came after you.”

  “Oh, Christ.” Her shoulders slumped, and she seemed to fold up a bit inside.

  “My people will take care of the body,” he said. Rising, he gently took her arm. “C’mon. We need to get out of here. There may be more of those people around, or the guys in that van may come back for us. And the police will show up sooner or later. We don’t want to have to answer their questions.”

  “You told your people you weren’t going back to your OP?”

  “That’s right. They’re getting ready to hightail it. You and me are going someplace else, just to be on the safe side.”

  “Like where?”

  “Someplace,” Teller told her solemnly, “where I can get a drink.”

  Los Gatos was a bar and restaurant a few blocks away, on the fringes of a commercial neighborhood better populated than the barrio streets where they’d just met. Inside it was smoky and noisy, a nearly full house. Teller scanned the crowd as he stepped in past the vestibule, trying to get a feel for the place. Lots of blue-collar types, a few students, but no obvious tourists. Tourists would have offered a bit more camouflage for the two of them, but the place was public enough that no one was going to try to get at them here.

  Probably.

  “We need some insurance,” Teller said, looking around. An enormous man was hunkered over one end of the bar, tattooed, bald, with a ragged goatee and muscles bulging with steroids. Teller suspected that the man might be the Los Gatos bouncer. “Wait here.”

  He walked over to the end of the bar and spoke with the giant for a few moments. Money passed from Teller’s hand to the other’s and quietly disappeared. “Gracias, amigo,” Teller told the man, and he rejoined Dominique.

  One advantage to Los Gatos was the knowledge that they could have a conversation without being easily overheard. They found an empty booth toward the back of the place.

  “Dos cervezas,” Teller told the waitress when she showed up a moment later.

  “¿Que tipo, señor?”

  “Me gustaría una Corona, por favor,” Dominique told her.

  “Y Negra Modelo por mí. Gracias.” As the waitress walked off, Teller said, “I think your accent’s better than mine.”

  “It should be. I’ve been working the Latino beat for three years now, and living in Venezuela for six months.”

  “So how’s Venezuela?”

  “Anti-American in public. Quietly taking all the help from Big Oil and U.S. technology they can manage.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Well, what brings you to Mexico City, Chris? Other than your charming penchant for rescuing damsels in distress?”

  “I could ask you the same thing,” he told her.

  “Is it business?”

  “Of course. You?”

  “Of course. Your cover?”

  “Journalist.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Not exactly the safest of choices right now,” Teller told her. He shrugged. “I considered circus clown, but I knew your friends in the station here have the corner on that market, and I’m trying to keep it low-profile. The role of journalista works for the paper-shufflers, but I wouldn’t care to have the opposition think I was with the press.”

  “And that’s assuming the government isn’t the opposition … or in bed with them.”

  “Either way, it’s not a real healthy environment here for reporters at the moment.”

  “You’re thinking of those two women in Iztapalapa?”

  Teller nodded. “The bastards have been targeting reporters, media people, even people on the Internet for a while, now.”

  The recent spate of cartel attacks against the media had been so shocking, so violently bloody, that they seemed deliberately designed to frighten off anyone reporting on the spiraling violence in Mexico. In early September of 2011, two female Mexican journalists had been abducted off the street. Their bodies, stripped naked, bound hand and foot, beaten, and strangled, had turned up in a park in the neighboring district of Iztapalapa the next morning. That was less than three miles from the spot where Teller and Dominique were sitting now.

  There was more, and much worse. A few days after the Iztapalapa murders, two young people, a man and a woman both in their twenties were found dead, hanging from a pedestrian bridge in Nuevo Laredo just across the river from Laredo, Texas. The male was hanging from his wrists, savagely mutilated, his right shoulder gashed so deeply the bones were exposed. The woman was tied by both hands and feet, topless, her entrails dangling from three deep slashes in her belly. Both showed evidence of torture, their fingers and ears mutilated. Notes left on the bridge promised the same for anyone who posted about the cartels on the Internet or through a Twitter account.

  Late in the same month, Maria Elizabeth Macias Castro, the newsroom manager for a Nuevo Laredo newspaper, had been found, partially undressed, decapitated, her severed head displayed on a nearby ornamental piling. A sign on the piling indicated she’d been killed because of her posts on a local electronic social network.

  Since 2000, over seventy journalists had been killed or had disappeared in Mexi
co, and there’d been other overt threats against people simply posting about the cartels on the Internet. The sheer blood-drenched viciousness of so many torture-murders clearly was intended to send a back-off message to anyone and everyone writing about the violence in Mexico.

  Yet the CIA seemed stuck on “journalist” as a cover for officers going into Mexico. There were reasons for that; legal restrictions in the United States made most other mobile professions—medical personnel, say, or Peace Corps volunteers or church officials—illegal, and reporters were among the few people who could travel around asking questions without attracting unwanted notice. Still, Teller felt a bit exposed in a country where people who asked questions about the drug cartels tended to disappear—or else be found disemboweled or headless and left on public display.

  What worried Teller most about the torture of those two kids in Nuevo Laredo, however, as well as Castro’s death, was what they said about the cartels’ technological abilities. People on social networks used nicknames; on the placard left beneath her head, Castro had been identified only as “Laredo Girl,” her network pseudonym. It suggested that the cartels had intelligence units capable of tracking people through their Twitter accounts, of finding them despite the supposed anonymity of social networks online. Teller remembered reading about the note left with the bodies hanging from the bridge: This is going to happen to all of those posting funny things on the Internet. You better fucking pay attention. I’m about to get you.

  Empty threat, mindless machismo and bravado? Or did the cartels—probably Los Zetas in those two particular cases, since one note had been signed “Z” and the other “ZZZZ”—actually have the expertise and technology to track down anonymous individuals on the Internet?

  The cartel killers seemed to possess the sophistication of many legitimate intelligence agencies, a disquieting thought for someone in Teller’s line of work. If they could hack e-mail accounts or track people by their Twitter posts, they likely had the equipment and the trained manpower to plant sophisticated listening devices or to track someone remotely, by means of RFIDs, for instance. Los Zetas had gotten their start as Mexican Army Special Forces; some of them must be people with intelligence training as well.

  It was just possible that some of the Zetas had gone through one or more spy courses at the Farm. That was a nasty thought.

  Their beers arrived, and they sat in silence for several minutes, quietly drinking. Teller gulped his, hard and fast, and ordered another. Dominique nursed hers, absently playing with the wedge of lime perched on the rim of the glass. “Thank you, by the way,” she said after a while. “You probably saved my life tonight.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Teller replied.

  “Well … maybe I can make it up to you. Later.”

  “Maybe you can.” He was already turning over possible hides. Los Gatos would close in another couple of hours. He’d checked the times on a plaque by the door. They would have to find a hotel; it was not a good idea to go back to their own rooms downtown, the Hotel Hilton at Azueta for him, the Holiday Inn Zócalo for her.

  He thought for a moment, then added, “You know, Jackie, we could work together. Pool our resources.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Dominique told him. “I’ve been made, somehow. But they don’t know about you yet.”

  “Maybe. But they saw me on the street just now—and it’s possible they spotted our OP at the Perez house, too. We can’t take anything for granted right now.”

  “So what do we do? Pack up and go home?”

  “No, I don’t think so. There’s a lot we can do yet.”

  “They must have spotted me in front of the Perez house.”

  Teller nodded. “Right. We saw you plant a listening device on the window. The opposition likely was watching, too, from another building.”

  “Damn. James and I talked about that possibility before I got out of the car, but we didn’t see any sign of a lookout, and we had to know what was going on.” She shrugged. “Calculated risk.”

  “The opposition is pretty slick.” He grinned at her. “We were watching you through a triple-M scope from across the street. Maybe they were doing the same.”

  She made a face. “So I should have sold tickets. See anything you like?”

  “Very much so.”

  “Pervert.”

  “Exhibitionist.”

  “You’re the one with the high-tech peep-show gear. What did you see in the Perez house?”

  “Does that mean you’re willing to pool information?”

  “Maybe. Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On what you decide to share with me.”

  “Well … besides a full-body massage that I’m willing to throw into the deal, what do you want to know?”

  “For a start, what’s your mission here? What are you doing in an unhealthy neighborhood at ten in the evening, besides rescuing me?”

  “Re-creating the CIA’s network in Mexico.” That wasn’t the whole story, of course, and it was general enough to sidestep the really sensitive topics, like two missing nuclear warheads, but it would do for a start.

  “Yeah? For who?”

  “JJ Wentworth.” He decided not to mention Larson. The WINPAC man’s involvement would bring up issues about nuclear weapons, issues he wasn’t ready to mention just yet.

  Teller felt a deep and genuine reluctance against sharing anything with the CIA. The Klingons always played their own game, by their rules, and they did not play well with others. Information they shared usually had strings attached, and they always had their own agenda. Right now, he didn’t want to get sucked into that any more than was necessary. Not only that, there was no way to tell, at this point, where Jackie’s loyalties really lay.

  Jackie Dominique was a friend, and she’d been his lover. That didn’t mean he trusted her.

  “Wentworth.” She shook her head. “Don’t know him.”

  “It’s a big company.”

  “Does that mean you’re working with us now?”

  “No,” he said with a sharp emphasis that surprised him. He caught the surprise in her eyes and lowered his voice. “No, not at all. I’m just … helping out.”

  “Hm.” The hint of a sparkle in her eye suggested that she might have her own ideas about that. Dominique had wanted him to go to work for the Agency ever since they’d met early last year. “We’ll have to see what we can do about that.”

  MATAZETAS HOUSE

  LA CALLE SUR 145

  DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

  2335 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

  Barrón’s partner, Agustín Morales Galvan, ran his finger down the list in the telephone directory, paused, then thumbed another number into his cell phone, his eleventh call so far. Unless they were hiding in someone’s house, they must be in a public place at this hour—a bar, a hotel, a late-night restaurant. There were only so many places they could be, and Morales had connections with most of them.

  “Los Gatos,” a voice said on the other end of the line. Morales could hear the clink of glasses and the rumble of conversation behind the barkeeper’s voice.

  “Hola, Luis,” he said. “Este es Calavera.”

  He could almost feel the man on the other end of the phone go cold. “Sí, señor.” Yes, sir. The nickname “Calavera” had a double meaning in Mexican Spanish. Una calavera could be a swinger, the life of the party, a libertine.

  It also meant “skull.”

  “I am looking for a person,” Morales said, continuing in Spanish. “A woman … tall, very beautiful, black or very dark brown hair, wearing a dark gray raincoat. She may be with a tall man, good-looking, light hair, in a black turtleneck, tan jacket, and jeans. Have you seen them, friend?”

  “I … I have, sir. Yes! Those very people came in together maybe ten minutes ago.”

  “Excellent! Some of my people will be there shortly.”

  “Is there … will there be trouble, sir?”

  “Only if they start it, Lu
is.” Morales snapped the cell phone shut. He looked up at Barrón and Gomez, standing in front of him. Barrón had blood on his face and was trying to stop the bleeding with a handful of toilet paper.

  “Los Gatos,” he told them. “No screwups this time, understand?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Bring both of them in. I suspect that they are … former associates of mine.”

  Agustín Morales had worked for the Sinaloa Cartel for ten years now. He had military experience—four years with the Mexican armored corps, in intelligence, and he’d had special training in the United States. The far-flung Sinaloan intelligence network was almost entirely due to his efforts and his skill. Largely, those efforts had been directed against the Mexican government and against the American DEA, but for the last couple of years more and more of his attention had been focused on Los Zetas and their attempts to seize control of all narcotics trafficking and networks in Mexico. He didn’t like the Zetas, and he didn’t trust them—wild, bloodthirsty animals, animals who killed for fun, or to drive home messages with horrific shock. He’d helped create La Nueva Generación—nicknamed “the Zeta Killers”—to counter their rampage, and perhaps turn down a notch the murderous violence engulfing the country.

  Which was why he was as angry at his orders tonight as was Barrón. They were here, in a Sinaloan safe house, in order to provide security for another meeting between a couple of Zeta and Sinaloan big shots: Escalante and Ortega. It was so damned tempting to just send in a team of Matazetas and kill the Zeta bastard—but Morales knew the value of following orders, and he knew discipline.

  Two years ago, he’d actually allowed himself to be recruited by the CIA case officer working out of the U.S. Embassy … what was his name? Fletcher, that was it. Morales had been in a position to learn a lot about the CIA’s attempt to infiltrate both the Sinaloa and Zetas organizations. He personally had helped interrogate that policía bastard working for the CIA, Garcia. It had been his idea to send Garcia’s head to CIA headquarters as a warning.

  “We’ll get the son of a whore for you, Calavera,” Barrón promised him. “And the bitch.”