“Going somewhere, sailor?” Teller asked, speaking Spanish.
The man gave a start and clutched the briefcase against his chest. “Who are you?”
“Juan Escalante,” Teller told him. He was fishing, curious as to whether the sailor knew the real Escalante.
“You don’t look Latino.” The man was suspicious, but not because of the name. He was also scared. Good. “You look like a gringo tourist.”
“My mother was from Seattle.” Teller pulled out his wallet and flipped it open to his driver’s license, snapping it shut immediately before the other had time to read it. “El Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional. You may have heard of us?”
The man’s grip on the briefcase tightened, and he gave a sharp negative shake of his head. “What does CISEN want with me? I’ve done nothing wrong!”
“Relax, señor.” Teller gave him his friendliest smile. “We’re not interested in you. We’re interested in the man who was just here with you.”
“I know nothing about him.”
“Of course, of course you don’t. What is your name?”
“Federico Castro.”
“And what were the two of you talking about, Federico?”
“He … he wanted to sell me something.”
“What?”
“A watch. He had a watch with the strap cut. I think he must have been a thief. I told him to go away.”
“I see. And what’s in the briefcase?”
“Nothing. Papers. Listen, you have no right—”
“Cálmate, Federico. I know you are lying. I watched him bring that briefcase in here and leave it with you. I notice you haven’t bothered checking what’s in it. Do you trust him that much?”
The man’s eyes widened slightly, then narrowed. “Listen, I’ve done nothing, nothing! Leave me alone!”
“Or what? You’ll call for the police?” Teller considered the man for a moment. He was terrified and retreating deeper and deeper into his denials. Teller needed to turn up the heat a notch or two. “I have news for you, friend. CISEN has … connections down here. A working arrangement with some of the major business concerns in the area. You understand?” As he spoke, Teller absently touched his forefinger to a puddle of moisture on the tabletop beside the man’s beer, then dragged it swiftly across the surface, forming the letter Z. Leaning forward, he said again, “You understand?”
Castro gave a small gasp, a short, sharp intake of breath. Drops of sweat were standing out on his forehead now. Yes, he understood.
“What is the name of the man who just left you?”
“Señor … I … no.” He shook his head. “You do not understand. It would mean my life to tell you anything!”
“It will mean your death if you do not.” Teller tapped his fingertip beside the Z on the tabletop for emphasis. Los Zetas had a certain reputation.
“You … your people are supposed to be in on this! Working with him, a part of the program!”
“Not all of us agree with the program,” Teller told him. He nodded at the briefcase. “And the man who gave you that is not … trustworthy. It seems that he stole from the wrong people.”
“Look … I did what was asked of me. I deserve to be paid!”
Until that moment, Teller had not been absolutely certain that the briefcase contained payment. Castro had just confirmed that.
“I agree. Don’t worry. You may keep your payment. As I said, it is the delivery boy we are interested in.”
“Julio. He calls himself Julio.”
“I see,” Teller said dryly. “And what is his real name?” Teller was fishing here, and taking a small chance with the attempt. Julio might well be the courier’s real name, but in this kind of dealing he was almost certainly using an alias.
“You know the answer to that.”
“Of course,” Teller lied. “But we need to know if you know.”
“I was told his name was … Hamadi. Mohamed Abdullah Hamadi.”
Teller was careful not to betray his surprise. “Correct. And where is the … shipment?”
Castro blinked. “At the warehouse, of course.”
“Which warehouse?”
Castro’s eyes narrowed. “There is only one. I don’t think you know. You’re playing a game, you’re trying to trick me!”
It was time, Teller decided, to play his last card.
“My friend, did you think I came in here alone?”
“What?”
He nodded toward the bar at the far end of the restaurant, where Coleman and Winters were sitting with their drinks. “See the big man? The one with the tie?”
“Yes.”
“One of my associates.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Hm. Believe or not, as you wish.” At that moment, Winters looked up, and Teller caught his eye. The big man grinned.
Teller grinned back. “You wouldn’t know it to look at him,” he said through the smile, “but he happens to be one of our best assassins. If I give the sign, he will follow you out of this place, hunt you down, and strangle you with his tie.”
As he spoke, Teller touched just below his throat, moving the fingers up and down to indicate a tie. Winters’s grin broadened, and he reached up and took hold of the neon tie, jigging it up and down.
The blood drained from the frightened man’s face, and he sagged back in his chair. “Dios mío.”
“You will answer my questions. What warehouse?”
“The usual one, the one on Santa Elena, by the airport.”
“And when did you make the delivery?”
“Two days ago. Wednesday.”
“Hamadi was there? He took delivery?”
“Yes. There were four or five others there with him.”
“Uh-huh. Other Arabs?”
“One of them was. I’m not sure about the others. I didn’t hear their names. But I heard him talking to one of the others in what sounded like Arabic.”
“Were there two … packages?”
Castro nodded.
“How big? How were they packaged?”
“In wooden crates.” He indicated a size with his hands. “About a meter and a half by a meter by a meter, more or less.”
“They were heavy?”
Again a nod. “A friend off the ship helped me. We had to use a handcart.”
“How heavy?”
“I don’t know. Thirty, maybe thirty-five kilos.”
“And why didn’t they pay you then?”
“I don’t know. I wanted them to. Hamadi … he said they needed to check the merchandise, that he would meet me here tonight.”
“So the packages met with their approval, I suppose. Have you checked?”
The man shook his head.
“Let’s have a look.”
The man was reluctant, but Teller told him, “It would be a shame to choke out your life with such a garishly hideous tie around your throat.”
“Here.”
“You open it.”
Teller had considered the possibility that the briefcase contained not money but a bomb, a cheap means of getting rid of a witness. The odds were against that, however; between their reputations and having more money than God, the cartels would be more likely to let him live so that he could make other deliveries in the future. The briefcase clicked open without incident, and the man turned it so Teller could see.
“Well, well.” Not money—but four brick-sized bundles of white powder wrapped in clear plastic. Perhaps two kilos. If it was already cut, at a hundred dollars a gram it would have a street value of $200,000.
Teller was glad he’d been careful and simply accused Hamadi of stealing from the wrong people instead of openly assuming that the briefcase contained money. There’d always been the chance that the payoff had been in barter.
The revelation raised an uncomfortable ethical dilemma for him, though. Two kilos of cocaine represented a staggering toll in human addiction, suffering, and crime. He wasn’t working for the
DEA, it wasn’t his job, but he hated to see that much of the white powder making its way north to the streets of some U.S. city. Even knowing that two kilos was a drop in the ocean compared to the hundreds of tons that made it north across the border every year, he didn’t want to let it go. Several options occurred to him. He could revert to his role of CISEN officer and confiscate the stuff, or pretend to put the seaman under arrest. That would call too much attention to him, however, when he needed to stay out of the light. If the sailor put up a struggle, he might have trouble talking his way out of it when the police showed up.
He could not put the mission at risk, even for two kilos of cocaine.
There might be a way to stop it, though.
“I’d like a sample,” he said. As he spoke, with his left hand he slipped open a zippered compartment on his camera case, reaching in with a finger and emerging with a slender black sliver of plastic perhaps a third the length of a toothpick. He kept his hand below the table, out of sight.
Castro hesitated, then nodded—perhaps while thinking of garish ties. Careful not to alert other patrons in the bar to what was happening, Teller reached into the briefcase with his free hand, worked one end of a sealed plastic bag open, then touched the finger of his other hand to the cocaine inside. As he did so, the action blocked from the sailor by the partially open briefcase itself, he pressed the RFID chip into the bag, burying it within the powder. He made a show then of pulling out his finger and rubbing a taste of the powder stuck to it across his upper gums … and felt the characteristic cold, tingling numbness of the drug’s touch.
His estimate of the drug’s street value went up to half a million. “Well, that tells me what I need to know,” Teller said, resealing the opened bag and closing the briefcase. “Thank you.”
Castro snapped the briefcase shut and took it back. “You … you’re letting me go?”
Teller gave a careless shrug. “Of course. It’s Hamadi we want, not you.”
The RFID tracking chip, Teller reflected, wasn’t a perfect answer to his ethical dilemma. It would respond to a radio signal from a tracking device, locating the shipment, but only across a fairly short range—a few hundred feet at most. Once this shipment vanished into the multiple pipelines funneling hundreds of tons of cocaine north across the border, it would be almost impossible to find it again, save by the most extraordinary chance.
But the drug would be cut again at least once before it was sold on the streets, and when it was there was a good chance that the chip would be found. Whoever found it would have to consider the possibility that someone was tracking that particular shipment of drugs. The distribution network might be disrupted; the source of that batch of coke would be suspect. Federico Castro might find himself in considerable trouble with whoever he was planning to sell the stuff to.
Teller read the relief in Castro’s face and decided to push just a little harder. “One more question,” he said.
“Yes?”
“The two packages. Where are they going?”
“How should I know? To the north.”
“Do you know by which route?”
“No.” He hesitated. There was fear in Castro’s eyes again.
“I think you do know. Shall we go have a word with my friend over there?”
“Look … I just heard Hamadi talking with one of the others. They were speaking Spanish, so I understood. Hamadi mentioned taking them to the ruins.”
Las ruinas. The way Castro said the words, it sounded like a specific place, a place name, rather than a general description of a place.
“And what happens to them there?”
A shrug. “Who knows? The submarine, I suppose.”
“They’re taking the crates away on a submarine?”
“Look, Hamadi simply had me bring the … the two crates here from Karachi! I don’t know anything else! I swear!”
“Do you know what those devices are?”
“I was told … I was told that they held special chemicals for processing drugs. That’s all I know! Please!”
Teller let a very relieved Castro leave after that, waited for a few moments, then strolled out of El Cocodrilo, exchanging another friendly wave with Winters and his friend as he passed. He rejoined Procario on the bench across from the Zapoteca.
“I think,” he told the other, “that we have a lead.”
“Really? The guy saw the nukes?”
“Better than that … and he knows where they are now. C’mon. We have to put a call in to Langley.”
It promised to be a long night.
HOLIDAY INN ZÓCALO
MEXICO CITY
2315 HOURS, LOCAL TIME
Jacqueline Dominique hit ENTER, then leaned forward to watch as data flooded down from the satellite and across the screen of her laptop. This, she thought, was going to be a game changer.
She and Chavez had returned to her room at the Holiday Inn, and she’d spent the past several hours trying to get clearance from Langley to go deep black—operating inside of Mexico without the knowledge or approval of the local government. She was still awaiting word on that; such requests involving mere administrative details would likely not be reviewed until regular working hours tomorrow. In the meantime, Chavez had gotten her a seat on a flight back to Washington leaving Benito Juárez International at three thirty the following afternoon, just in case.
In the meantime, Teller had uploaded the results of his investigation in Chetumal to Langley, but he’d included her in a blind cc. His report mentioned two crates that likely were the missing nuclear weapons hidden in a warehouse, and an informant’s statement that a submarine was hidden somewhere close by, at a place identified as “las ruinas.”
“Ruins” could mean any of a thousand locations across the Yucatán. Fifteen hundred years ago, the Mayan Empire had been at its height, with immense stone cities scattered across the jungles of what one day would be southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. Those cities, with names like Chichén Itzá, Tikal, and Copán, fascinated the modern world and continued to draw visitors from all across the globe to marvel and wonder at the stark, forest-choked relics of a vanished civilization.
Which ruins the informant was referring to was as yet unknown. However, Teller’s report had discussed the probability that the submarine must be somewhere close by Chetumal. It made sense. The Zapoteca had brought the weapons from Pakistan to Chetumal; from there, they were being transferred to a submarine that would take them to their final destination. That implied that the submarine and the ruins were relatively close by.
Dominique called up a mapping program and began studying satellite images pulled in from the servers at Langley. The NRO had photographed the entire region extensively while searching for the Zapoteca over the past few days. She concentrated on satellite images of the coastline within a few miles of Chetumal. Each image had three versions, one in visible light, one in infrared, and one at radar wavelengths. She spent a lot of time going back and forth between the three, looking for anomalies.
Her bosses back at Langley, she thought, would not have approved. Image analysis was properly carried out at the National Reconnaissance Office in Chantilly, Virginia, or at CIA Headquarters itself. Field officers might be given the final, highly polished results of a satellite pass, but they certainly weren’t encouraged to look at the raw data and make their own assessments.
A friend in the Office of Imagery Analysis—a department of the Agency’s Intelligence Directorate—had broken the rules and given her access to these pictures. The original set, ordered to find the hiding place of the Zapoteca, covered so many thousands of square miles of water and jungle that weeks would pass before a full analysis would be available.
Chris Teller’s discoveries in Chetumal had sharply narrowed the search field, and Dominique knew what she was looking for.
Thirty minutes later, she found it and reached for her phone.
Chapter Twelve
CHETUMAL HOLIDAY INN
; YUCATÁN, MEXICO
0215 HOURS, LOCAL TIME
19 APRIL
“I think,” Teller said, studying the screen, “that Jackie’s onto something. Look at this!”
Teller and Procario had returned to the hotel at around midnight and spent the next couple of hours composing a report to zap back to Langley. They’d found an e-mail attachment waiting for them, a collection of very large image files sent by Dominique to Teller’s computer.
On the screen, a photo taken from space looked straight down on water and jungle.
Within the sheltered, inland waters of Chetumal Bay, a smaller, deeply cut bay named for the fishing town of Corozal extended westward into the jungles of northern Belize. The southern coast of Corozal Bay was actually a slender peninsula, like a fang extending three miles east into the blue waters of the Bahía de Chetumal.
On the northern coast of the peninsula, ten miles southeast of Chetumal, was a point of land and a cluster of white stone ruins called Cerros.
Teller zoomed in on the point, an equilateral triangle cloaked in forest extending north into the azure waters. A dirt road connected the site with the village of San Fernando two and a half miles to the southeast and, in roundabout fashion, with Corozal across the bay on the northern coast.
“Okay,” Procario said, looking over Teller’s shoulder at the screen, “she’s found some Mayan ruins ten miles from Chetumal. There are other ruins closer.”
He was referring to the ruins at Oxtankah just seven miles north up the coast from Chetumal. Both Teller and Procario had spent some time earlier that morning going over the local maps, looking for las ruinas.
“Yeah,” Teller said. “But take a look at the same thing in IR.”
He shifted the satellite imagery to infrared. The waters of the bay turned black and cold, the land areas warmer, a deep blue green. Several brighter and hotter spots appeared scattered near the coast.
One object hot enough to show as a brilliant yellow glowed right at the line between jungle and bay.
“Huh,” Procario said. “What is that? Too big and hot to be a truck.”
The Last Line Page 17
