The Last Line

by Anthony Shaffer

  “I am afraid, señorita, that things are not so simple,” de la Cruz told her.

  “I’m not hurt,” she told him. “Not badly enough to be put in the hospital. There’s no need for me to remain here.”

  “Of course not. My … associates and I are here to take you to another location. A secure location.”

  Dominique was instantly suspicious. “And who are they?”

  “CISEN officers, like myself. This is Señor Martinez, and that is Señor Cobos. They have some questions to ask of you.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “As I said, a secure location.”

  “Not the airport?”

  “No. Things have … changed. Ah … here is the orderly with your clothing. We’ll step outside while you dress.”

  When she was alone in the room, Dominique got out of bed and went to the window. The streets of Mexico City crawled and clotted and honked far below—about five stories down. The window was sealed; there was no escape that way.

  Her cell phone, ominously, was missing from her pocketbook. Possibly it had fallen out and gotten lost in the street or in the car during the explosion, but its absence worried her. If someone had taken it deliberately, taken it to cut her off from Langley or Teller …

  Reluctantly, she began dressing. Her first order of business, however, was to pull a cheap ballpoint pen from the pocketbook and clip it to the front of her bra, between the cups. Unscrewing the pen, she made an adjustment to the credit-card-thin sliver of circuit-covered plastic hidden inside. Then she put on the bra so that the pen would ride unnoticed when she put on her shirt.

  As insurance it wasn’t a hell of a lot—but it was all that she had right now.

  CERROS RUINS

  YUCATÁN, MEXICO

  1603 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

  The submarine, as Teller had feared, was gone. There was plenty of evidence that it had been there, however. A thin rainbow sheen of oil coated the water along the crude wooden pier that ran parallel to the shoreline; two pickup trucks farther back in the jungle still had several dozen 55-gallon drums that once had held marine diesel fuel, and a large dump of empty drums farther back in the jungle showed where they’d been depositing their empties.

  ISA commandos moved through the jungle encampment with silent precision, picking up and bagging everything that might be useful for intelligence analysis—not only laptop computers and thumb drives but briefcases, trash, and the contents of dead men’s pockets. A photographer moved everywhere taking high-resolution pictures of everything, including the faces of seven dead narcoterrorists laid out in a line in front of the wood and concrete-block shack that had been their headquarters.

  In fact, a small village had been built here in the light-dappled shadows beneath the forest canopy: tents and small buildings, a fuel storage tank, a small machine shop powered by an electrical generator, storage sheds for food, equipment, weapons, and plastic bags filled with cocaine—everything necessary, in fact, for a secret drug-smuggling submarine base hidden in the jungle. The ISA troops had captured twelve men, including the one Teller had nabbed. Arrangements had already been made to bring in a big CH-47 Chinook helicopter transport from Ladyville to fly the prisoners out.

  Teller and Procario had been going through the stash of recovered digital intelligence: two laptop computers, several external hard drives and thumb drives, and briefcases full of papers. The computers all appeared to be password protected, but that, Teller knew, wouldn’t be a problem once they got them back to Langley. The Agency’s technical experts could crack all but the toughest computer security safeguards, and anything they couldn’t read would be passed on to the premier code breakers at the National Security Agency.

  At the moment, Teller was more interested in the paper records, which included a large nautical chart of the Florida coast, from the Keys all the way up to Nassau Sound north of Jacksonville. Along that 450-mile stretch of coastline, seven beaches had been marked by red circles—all of them relatively secluded, well clear of the major tourist centers and resorts.

  He showed the chart to Procario. “Looks like they’ve been doing this for a while. They wouldn’t need seven landing points for a single trip.”

  “You think they took the weapons to one of these spots and dropped them off?”

  Teller shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think these are drop points for drug consignments.”

  “I agree. Have a look at this.” Procario handed him the contents of a captured briefcase. It was a thick document—over fifty pages—and appeared to be a contract, with parallel texts in Spanish and in Russian. The front page was decorated with heavily embossed gold seals.

  “The Russkies do love their official crap, don’t they?”

  “Don’t leave home without it.” The Russian love of fancy seals and stamps on official documents was well known within the intelligence community, to the point of being an insider’s joke.

  Teller scanned through the Spanish portion of the document. “Here’s the pricing,” he said. “Three hundred million rubles … or a hundred thirty-two and some million pesos … that’s what, in dollars?”

  “Not sure. Something like ten million dollars, I think. Rubles are around thirty or so to the dollar right now, maybe a bit less.”

  Teller slapped absently at a mosquito on his neck, continuing to look through the document. “The price has gone up. They offered to rent the Colombians a Kilo class sub and a trained crew for a year for only one million.”

  “Well, that was back in the nineties,” Procario observed. “Gotta keep up with inflation, y’know.”

  “It’s still a drop in the bucket, compared with a cartel’s income in just one year. I’m interested, though, in why they took the Russians up on their offer. They’ve been manufacturing their own home-grown narco-subs since the nineties, right? Those only cost a few million apiece.”

  “Range,” Procario said. “The homemade subs have a range of only a couple of thousand miles max, where a Kilo can travel seven thousand miles on one fueling.”

  “Which means it could reach anywhere on the eastern U.S. seaboard,” Teller said. “We need to flag this for the navy.”

  “Yeah. If those nukes are on board the Kilo now…”

  “It could mean a very bad day for a couple of our cities. C’mon. Let’s pack this stuff up and get the hell out of here.”

  One of the Kevlar-shrouded commandos appeared in the doorway—Captain Marcetti, the young Army Special Forces captain in charge of the ground team. “Mr. Callahan?” he said, using Teller’s current “cover for status” alias. “There’s something back here you should see.”

  “Not a couple of nuclear weapons, is it?” Procario asked.

  “No, sir. It’s … you’d better just come and see.”

  It was another shed built a little farther back in the jungle. Teller could smell it as they approached—a sharp and coppery tang of blood. That, and Captain Marcetti’s subdued demeanor, warned Teller before he reached the door.

  Even with the warning, it was a shock.

  “God in heaven…”

  It was hard to tell how many bodies there were—six or seven, at least, of both sexes—but they were in pieces, a savage and bloody tangle of naked torsos, of arms and legs, of severed heads. Several large steel drums half filled with dark liquid stood in the center of the single room. A bloody chain saw rested on a table. There was so very much blood …

  “We found these,” Marcetti said, indicating several boxes stacked in a nearby corner containing neatly folded clothing, cameras and personal effects, passports, and wallets. “According to the passports, they were archaeologists. University of the Americas. Ah … don’t touch those barrels, sir. They’re filled with acid.”

  Teller snatched his hand back. Procario nodded. “The cartels often use acid to get rid of inconvenient bodies,” he said. “They only hang them from bridges or dump them in the street when they want to send a message.”

  “We’ll
need to check with the University of the Americas and see when their expedition went missing,” Teller said. “These people must have shown up, disregarded the keep-out sign, and blundered into the operation.”

  “Apparently the bastards didn’t want to leave any witnesses,” Procario agreed.

  The casual butchery was appalling, and Teller—who’d seen more than his fair share of blood and death and battlefield horror—had to work to force back a rising gorge. People who could do this, he thought, would feel no compunction about mass murder on the scale of a major city. He needed to get out, into the open air.

  Damn it, he needed a drink.

  “We’ve got to stop these animals, Frank,” Teller said slowly. “We’ve got to stop them.”

  Teller just wished he knew how they were going to pull that off.

  Chapter Thirteen

  CENTRO DE CISEN

  MEXICO CITY

  0905 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

  20 APRIL

  Teller was still hurting from his drunk of the night before.

  He rarely suffered from hangovers—the secret was to drink lots of water both during and after the binge—but he was still feeling slow and muzzy. De la Cruz had summoned him and Procario to his office at a few minutes past eight that morning, and Teller wasn’t sure he was entirely functional yet.

  The two of them had flown back to Mexico City the previous afternoon, and, after uploading their after-actions from the raid at Cerros, he’d settled down to do some serious drinking, hitting a bar on Independencia. He’d checked first at Jackie’s hotel but been told only that she’d checked out that morning. Calls to both Dominique’s and Chavez’s cell phones had gone unanswered, and Langley had heard nothing from either officer in the past eight hours; he was becoming worried about them.

  He’d struggled out of bed this morning to de la Cruz’s phone call. He had news, the CISEN officer had said, and it was not good.

  “I regret to say,” de la Cruz said when they entered his office forty minutes later, “that Señor Chavez is dead.”

  “Dead!” Procario exclaimed.

  “I am afraid so. And your other colleague, Miss Dominique, has disappeared. We … fear the worst.”

  Teller went cold, adrenaline shredding the remaining fog of the hangover. “What the hell happened?”

  De la Cruz gave a small shrug. “They were on their way to the airport yesterday morning. Apparently there was an ambush. Eyewitnesses say a man on a motorcycle placed a small package against the driver’s-side door of their vehicle, which exploded seconds later. Probably a remote-controlled device. Señor Chavez appears to have been killed instantly. The woman, we were told, was injured and taken to a local hospital with minor injuries, but she was discharged later in the afternoon. We do not know where she is at this time—but the hospital records tell us that she was released into the custody of two CISEN officers. She did not show up at the airport to catch her flight, she did not return to her hotel, and she did not return here. She has simply … disappeared.”

  “You have names for the people who picked her up at the hospital?” Procario asked.

  “Of course. Cobos and Martinez. However, we have no one named Cobos in CISEN, and everyone named Martinez has been otherwise accounted for. We fear that she has been abducted.”

  “It’s possible that she’s gone to ground,” Teller said. “In hiding.”

  “That, too, is possible, of course. We have been checking at hotels throughout the city. So far, we have found nothing.”

  “God,” Procario said. “If one of the cartels has her…”

  “That is what CISEN is assuming at the moment,” de la Cruz said. “I am very sorry.”

  “Yeah,” Teller said, his voice dark. He was thinking of that stack of bloody body parts in that shack in Belize, the stink, the horror. “So am I. And if anything happens to her, someone else is going to be damned sorry, too.”

  MARIA PEREZ HOUSE

  LA CALLE SUR 145

  DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

  0934 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

  “Damn it, Barrón, this is stupid. You should not have brought her here.” Maria Perez was furious. “We know they have this house under surveillance. You killed one of their operators on the street outside just three nights ago!”

  Barrón gave a careless shrug. “It was necessary, Miss Perez. A temporary measure only. And because of your uncle … well, the police are not about to bother you.”

  “Barrón, the woman is an American! Una espía yanqui.”

  “It means nothing. With the police and the government in our pocket, we can do what we like. Our friends with the police are watching. They will not permit the North Americans to operate here.”

  “So you hope.”

  “Con calma, puta. The woman herself is our insurance. The CIA will negotiate for her release before they attempt a rescue. They know what will happen to her if they fail.”

  “Juan would never have agreed to this!”

  “Your boyfriend is not running this operation, woman. And you will do what you are told. Understand?”

  Perez glared at Barrón. The man was Sinaloan and a Zeta Killer, and not to be trusted whatever Juan Escalante might have to say about it. The Sinaloans were perfectly capable of setting her and Juan up for an assault by the army, using the yanqui woman as bait.

  “Whore! I said, do you understand?”

  “Yes. Yes, I understand.”

  She’d argued with Juan about this insane idea of uniting the Sinaloan and Zeta cartels. The Sinaloans were pigs, brutal and vicious and utterly without honor. If the Zetas were brutal at times, it was because sometimes brutality was necessary—but the Sinaloans reveled in torture and rape and blood. She’d heard so many stories, horrible stories …

  She looked through the open doorway at the prisoner. The woman lying on the bed seemed to be young and attractive, though the gag and blindfold made it hard to see her face. She was tightly tied at wrists, knees, and ankles, with her feet drawn up close by a short length of rope connected to her hands. The two Sinaloan thugs who’d brought her in last night had been taking turns guarding her, one always sitting there beside the bed. Earlier that morning, both men had been there. She’d listened to them discussing their captive as she served them breakfast, talking about what they planned to do, and some of what they’d been saying had made her blood run cold. She knew the prisoner had heard them; worse, that she’d understood what they were saying.

  The poor woman …

  There was nothing Maria could do for the prisoner, however. To help the woman would mean her own death, probably a slow and agonizing death. Not even the niece of Jaime Perez Durán could interfere with el negocio del cártel, with cartel business, not without suffering the consequences … and with the emphasis decidedly on suffer.

  At least they hadn’t started the rough stuff. Yet.

  CENTRO DE CISEN

  MEXICO CITY

  0940 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

  Teller looked up at the huge face on the flat-screen wall display, disbelieving. “Excuse me, but I think there’s a glitch in the signal,” he said. “I didn’t catch that last.”

  In fact, the signal was fine. De la Cruz had set up the video conference call in one of CISEN HQ’s briefing rooms, using a secure satellite feed.

  “I said,” the face of Jack Wentworth said, looming above him, “that we’re pulling you out. You’ve completed your mission. It’s time to extract.”

  “Not without Jackie, it isn’t.”

  “Captain Teller, there is nothing we can do about Dominique. She’s an operative. She knew the risks. Her loss is … regrettable, but we have what we went into Mexico to get. Now we need to cut our losses and focus on priorities.”

  “Priorities!”

  “Our priority right now is that Kilo sub—and what it may be carrying.”

  “Hey, check my MOS,” Teller said, referring to the military occupational specialty, the nine-character code describing the job of every person in t
he U.S. military. “Not a word in there about me finding subs at sea. Maybe you got confused, JJ. The navy is tasked with tracking hostile submarines. Not me.”

  “Until the situation is resolved, it is your job. I want you both back here in Washington this afternoon for a full debriefing.”

  “You already have everything we found in Belize,” Procario said. “You don’t need us.”

  “Too many people have died on this op,” Teller said. “I’m not compounding it by running out on a fellow intelligence officer.”

  “Leave no man behind,” Procario added. “Or woman.”

  Teller glanced at Procario with a silent “thank you.”

  On the big wall display, Wentworth shook his head slowly. “Look, I know what you men must be feeling right now. Grant … Dominique … Chavez … Good people, all of them. It’s just too bad that—”

  “Jackie isn’t dead yet, damn it!” Teller shouted. It was all he could do not to lunge across the conference table at the big display screen. “Not until her body turns up down here—or her head shows up in a box on your fucking desk! We need to find her!”

  “I beg your pardon, Captain,” Wentworth said in frosty tones. “What we need is to find those nuclear weapons before they are deployed. If Ms. Dominique is still alive, she could be anywhere—Mexico City, Hermosillo, Veracruz, Guadalajara, Monterrey … We do not have the assets in place to conduct a search of every possibility.”

  “You’ve got me,” Teller said, taking his seat once more. Reaching into his jacket, he extracted a pen, held it up, and clicked it twice. “And we have options.”

  “I’m with Captain Teller on this,” Procario added.

  “If you are referring to ghost technologies—” Wentworth began, but Teller cut him off.

  “There is a lot we can do here,” he said, interrupting, “but we don’t have the time to discuss it with you now. We’re not coming home. Not without Jackie.”