The Last Line

by Anthony Shaffer

  “If you want to come with us, Señor Vicente,” Teller said, “I’m sure we can find room for one more.”

  “No. No … I will stay here. Mexico is my country.”

  “How about it, March?” Teller asked. “We’re not going to be needing our walking-around cash, are we?”

  “That’s a thought. Jackie? The case is over there, by the table. Give it to Señor Vicente, please.”

  Inside the briefcase were almost one million pesos—over $75,000—in bills of various denominations. The money had been issued to Teller and Procario by the Agency, money to survive in the streets, if necessary, to bribe officials, or to tracelessly hire vehicles. They’d spent some of it to rent cars and hotel rooms while they were in Mexico, but most of it was still there.

  Vicente stared at the money, uncomprehending, at first. “Ese … ese es por mí?”

  “You’ve been a good friend, Señor Vicente,” Marcetti said. “And you’ve been of incredible help, both to us and to your country.”

  “Just one thing,” Teller said. “I urge you to move, and quickly. If you won’t come with us, then sell the house and move someplace else. The man who first told us about you—”

  “Señor de la Cruz?”

  “Yes. He … is not to be trusted.”

  “But … he is National Security. Like your CIA, no?”

  “Like our CIA, yes,” Procario told him. “But he arranged to have our friend Jackie here kidnapped. And he probably arranged to have that army here tonight, to ambush us. The whole thing tonight was a trap.”

  “Dios mio…”

  “Chances are, he won’t bother you,” Marcetti said. “But it’s better to be safe.”

  “Gracias,” Vicente said, closing the briefcase. “Mil gracias, por los todos.”

  After Vicente had left, Dominique looked at Teller. “Just how dirty do you think de la Cruz is, anyway?” she asked. “I couldn’t tell if he was behind killing Ed and having me picked up, or if maybe cartel thugs forced him.”

  “I think he’s dirty dirty,” Teller said. “He was trying to plant misinformation from the beginning—al Qaeda smuggling nukes to attack Mexico, remember? Then it was his suggestion to put Escalante under surveillance, and him who introduced us to Vicente.”

  “He ordered me and Ed out of the country,” Dominique said.

  “Yeah—and you were picked up by a motorcycle almost at once, weren’t you? The bomb was meant to kill you, but when he found out you were alive, he showed up with a couple of cartel bully-boys to make you disappear.”

  “I checked at the hospital,” Procario said. “There was no visitor’s log, but the charge nurse told me there were three CISEN officers in to see you, including de la Cruz. She identified his file photo and said he’d been the one to order you held after you were treated, and then he ordered you released so you could go with him. And later he told us he didn’t know where you were.”

  “Shit,” Marcetti said. “De la Cruz told you about Vicente? That means the cartels know about him, too. He’s dead. I’m surprised they didn’t attack the house tonight.”

  “They probably didn’t attack because we were the prime targets,” Teller said. “And if he gets out of town fast, he should be okay. That’s why I lit a fire under him.”

  “We might talk to someone at the U.S. Embassy,” Procario said. “They might be able to help him. Maybe grant him asylum.”

  “Good thought,” Marcetti said. “Neither the Zetas nor the Sinaloans are particularly forgiving in nature.”

  “So how about us?” Dominique asked. “How are we getting out of here?”

  “Already taken care of,” Procario said with a grin. “Our plane is waiting for us at BJ International. All we need to do is get there.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  OVER THE GULF OF MEXICO

  0815 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

  21 APRIL

  As promised, the Beechcraft Model 400 Beechjet was waiting for them at Benito Juárez International, a small twin-turbofan passenger jet that could seat up to nine passengers. Procario had pulled some strings with INSCOM to have the jet chartered and readied for them, knowing that they’d likely have to make a fast exit.

  The toughest part had been waiting out the police and fire officials in the street. Long after the fire was out, they’d been probing about within both Hotel One and Hotel Two, collecting shell casings and other evidence, bagging bodies, and talking to civilians. It wasn’t until after six that the Americans had finally gone down to the street, gotten into their rented cars, and driven to the airport. If the police had noticed the rentals from their license plates and made inquiries, there was no sign. Most likely, the authorities were assuming that the gunfight was another shoot-out between rival drug factions—something that had been increasingly common over the past decade—and hadn’t gotten around to thinking about the possible involvement of U.S. intelligence. De la Cruz would know the truth, but he seemed to have vanished. Teller had tried phoning him, intending to transmit the Cellmap virus, but got no answer.

  No matter. Once the number was entered into Teller’s infected phone, the virus would jump to the new number whether the connection was active or not.

  De la Cruz would know that he was burned. He’d probably gone into hiding, though the team took extra precautions getting to the airport. A last-ditch attempt to kill them was not impossible, and Teller was concerned that the rental cars were now hot.

  Their weapons and special gear—all save their personal sidearms—had gone into airport storage for collection by the Agency later. Teller had waved a diplomatic immunity pass at security, and they’d been airborne shortly after 0730.

  They were flying northeast, en route for Eglin Air Force Base on the Florida panhandle some 930 nautical miles from Mexico City, with a total expected flight time of a bit over two hours. Eighteen minutes after takeoff, they crossed over the beach south of the refinery at Tampamachoco and were out over the Gulf of Mexico, free and clear.

  Teller at last began to relax somewhat.

  “You okay?” he asked Dominique. “How’re your ears?”

  “Fine, Chris, better. They were ringing last night—I couldn’t hear much of anything coming out of that house. But I’m okay.”

  “We … took an awful chance.”

  She laid a slim hand on his wrist. “Chris, it’s okay. You did what you had to do. If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here now.”

  Teller nodded, but he wasn’t happy. If that cartel gunman had tensed when the flashbang had gone off, if he’d shot her …

  He was angry, too, that he’d missed an obvious warning flag: Enrico Barrón, lying on the floor of the Perez house with no blood on him—an impossibility if he’d been hit by Procario’s through-the-wall cannon. Close-quarters assaults stressed putting a round through a downed Tango’s head if there was any doubt, but he’d been so anxious about reaching Jackie that he’d looked at Barrón on the floor and not really seen, not until it was too late.

  Still, they wouldn’t have a prisoner now if Barrón had been dead—and Jackie had come through the ordeal temporarily deaf, but in one piece. All in all, not a bad evening’s work.

  Teller’s normal good spirits were reasserting themselves now that they were out of the combat zone. He rose from his seat and walked forward, joining Procario, who was sitting opposite the prisoner.

  Enrico Barrón looked at Teller incuriously, then shrugged, looking away. “You have no right to do this, gringo,” he said. His English was excellent. “I have not been properly extradited to the United States. When I engage a lawyer, he will have me free so quickly that your fucking heads will spin.”

  “Really, Señor Barrón?” Teller asked. “And what makes you think we’re going to allow you to talk to a lawyer?”

  He looked startled. He shifted uncomfortably in the seat; his hands were still zip-stripped behind him. “You have to! It’s my constitutional right, both in Mexico and in the United States!”

  Procario picked
up on Teller’s game and laughed. “Let me tell you something, Enrico,” he said. “So far as we’re concerned, you are a shithead narcoterrorist, and right now you have no rights whatsoever. If we give the word, the pilot of this aircraft will take us down to twelve thousand feet, we pop open that cabin door up there, and you get to swan-dive headfirst into the Gulf without a parachute. And you know what? No one, no one would ever know what happened to you.”

  “I vote for ADX Florence,” Teller said. “You know about that, Enrico? That’s the federal supermax prison in Colorado. Lots of Muslim terrorists there … but I think there are a few drug dealers, too. Juan García Ábrego? He used to head up the Gulf Cartel. I think someone from the old Medillín Cartel is still rotting in there, too. You could sit down and have a chat with your buddies, maybe … except, no, that wouldn’t be an option, would it? Supermax facilities are kind of strict. Solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day. No contact with other inmates. Kind of like sensory deprivation, and it goes on and on and—”

  “You can’t do that without a trial!” Barrón cried. “And you can’t try me without a lawyer!”

  “Don’t tell us what we can or can’t do, Enrico,” Procario said, his voice low and dangerous. “You tried to kill us back there, an ambush for the yanqui intelligence officers. The woman was bait, wasn’t she?”

  “I’m saying nothing!”

  “You don’t really need to say a thing,” Teller said, giving his best innocent-boy grin. He leaned closer, looking closely into Barrón’s face. “We know you worked with de la Cruz to set up the kidnapping and the ambush. And … we know all about ‘Skull.’”

  In truth, they knew only that someone called Calavera had been on his way out to the Perez house, but Teller was guessing that Skull was a nickname for a cartel big shot.

  Barrón confirmed that guess, as his pupils enlarged and his nostrils flared. He was afraid. “I am telling you nothing.”

  He didn’t sound quite so sure of himself now, though.

  “Well, it sounds like the Supermax for you, then, amigo,” Procario said easily. “Actually, it’ll be easier all the way around if you just disappear. We turn you over to the CIA, they interrogate you for a year or two, and then … poof! No one ever finds out what happened to you.”

  “You’re bluffing. Your own laws make it illegal to torture me … even to threaten me with … what is it called? Waterboarding. Making me think I am drowning.”

  “You think we’re bluffing?” Teller asked, grinning. “If we don’t tell anyone that we have you in the first place, Enrico … if we turn you over to people who won’t even mention to their bosses that we have you in custody…” Teller shrugged. “Who’s to know?”

  “Anything could happen to you, Enrico.”

  “But you can’t do that!”

  “Try us,” Procario said.

  Teller chuckled. “Ever hear of NDAA 2012?” he asked. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, quietly signed into law by President Obama on New Year’s Eve of 2011, had created a raging firestorm of controversy by effectively repealing the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments of the Constitution—not, in Teller’s opinion, one of Congress’s better moves. “Among other things,” he said, “it gives the U.S. military and certain other agencies the power to arrest anyone, anywhere, including American citizens, and to hold them indefinitely without access to an attorney or to trial by jury. Now if Congress is willing to treat American citizens that way … how interested do you think they’ll be in protecting your rights?”

  “Look,” Barrón said, licking his lips. “I am rich. I could make both of you rich! Rich beyond your wildest dreams!”

  That caught Teller’s full attention. Until this moment, he’d assumed that Barrón was a relatively low-level soldier in the ranks of the Zeta Killers. There’d been nothing on his rap sheet suggesting more, though his military training might have given him special status. Now, his attempt at bribery suggested either that he had access to a lot more money than did the typical street-level cartel soldier, or that he had some very high-ranking connections indeed—Joaquín Guzmán, perhaps.

  And if he was in tight with Guzmán, he might know about the Iranian agent photographed with Guzmán’s lieutenant, Hector Gallardo. Or about nuclear weapons smuggled into Mexico from Pakistan.

  In fact, he might know a lot.

  “Not interested,” Teller said. “We know how much blood there is on that money.”

  “Yeah, too many strings,” Procario added. “Besides, right now, I hate to tell you, friend, but you don’t have shit. You can’t go to the bank. You don’t have your flunkies with you. You don’t have wireless service. We went through your wallet a while ago and found a few thousand pesos—but we already have that. You have nothing, except our good will.”

  Teller shrugged. “You know, Enrico, I don’t think you can afford us.”

  “Every man has a price,” Barrón said. He sounded desperate now.

  “Maybe.”

  Teller leaned back in his seat, thinking. He remembered reading about one Mexican government official—López Parra, a commander in the Mexican federal attorney general’s office in charge of northern Mexico—who’d been found to be receiving 1.5 million U.S. dollars per month from the Gulf Cartel. One estimate had suggested that 95 percent of the Mexican AGO was in the cartel’s pocket.

  One of the most serious aspects of the war against narcoterrorism was the scope of corruption extending across both sides of the line between Mexico and the United States. When profits of billions of dollars were involved, large-scale corruption was inevitable. Teller knew of one late-1980s scandal involving tons of cocaine going north on board Immigration and Naturalization Service buses, which didn’t have to stop for checks at the border, and of another involving the Texas National Guard.

  No one, it seemed, was beyond the reach of the cartel billions.

  For as long as he’d been an intelligence officer … no, longer … ever since he’d been a kid growing up in the rugged country outside of Juneau, Alaska, when he’d found himself in a tight spot, he’d tried to honestly answer just one question: What’s the next right thing to do?

  “You know what, Enrico?” Teller asked after a moment’s thought. “You’re right. I do have a price.”

  “Anything! You have but to name it! A million dollars? Ten million? That’s fucking pocket change!”

  “No. My price is what you know about Iranians and Hezbollah operatives in Mexico, nuclear weapons, and a Russian submarine.”

  Barrón seemed to consider this for a moment. “If … if I tell you about what I know … you will let me go?”

  “No,” Teller said. “Absolutely not. But we can see to it that you’re handed over to civilian law enforcement authorities in the States, and that you get to hire a lawyer.”

  Teller could see the calculating light come on behind Barrón’s eyes. “What guarantee do I have that you would keep your word?”

  “That’s a great question coming from a narcotrafficker, isn’t it?” Teller asked Procario. “The bastard wants to know if we’re going to keep our word.”

  “Yeah.” Procario chuckled. “Tell you what, Enrico. I promise, on my honor as a U.S. Marine Corps officer, that if you answer our questions and tell us everything we want to know, I will not personally shove you out of the cabin door of this aircraft.”

  “No guarantees,” Teller added. “You’re the one answering the questions, not asking them.”

  “I should warn you that we do have ways of checking up on your story,” Procario said. “You lie to us, and the deal is off. You go to Supermax … or you disappear.”

  “You want the truth? I can tell you all about the submarines!”

  “We’re not talking about the little toy submarines you guys are building in your basements,” Teller said. “We want to know about the Kilo class Russian sub rented from a group of Russian mafia for three hundred million rubles. It was docked beside some Mayan ruins in the jungl
e at Cerros, in northern Belize, and it sailed north on or shortly after April 17.”

  That was the date the satellite surveillance photos that seemed to show the sub at Cerros had been taken. When the ISA strike force had launched its assault on the nineteenth, the sub had been gone.

  “The eighteenth,” Barrón said. “The submarine left on Friday the eighteenth.”

  “What time?” Teller asked.

  “I don’t know. Early, well before sunrise. I heard they had to get out of the shallows of Chetumal Bay, out past Ambergris Cay and into deep water, before they could be spotted from the air.”

  “How do you know all this?” Procario asked. “Were you there?”

  Barrón shook his head. “I was at the Iztacalco safe house, providing security. I heard about it from my boss.”

  “Who is that?”

  “Agustín Morales.”

  “Yes?” Teller prompted. “And who is he?”

  The shutters seemed to come down behind Barrón’s eyes. “You said you knew him.”

  A misstep … but not a serious one. Barrón had not mentioned the name Morales. He had reacted at Teller’s mention of “the Skull,” however. Were the two names the same man?

  “We know about Calavera, of course,” Teller told him. “What I meant was, who exactly is he in the organization?”

  A shrug. “One of El Chapo’s lieutenants.”

  “Is he as high ranking as, say, Hector Gallardo?”

  “No. I don’t think so. It’s … hard to tell, sometimes. People move up in favor … people move down. Calavera’s star, it is in the ascendency right now.”

  “Oh? And why is that?”

  “Because he was the one who was approached by Pasha. And it was his idea to rent the Russian submarine.”

  “Pasha?”

  “The Iranian. That was his code name. I forget his real name.”

  “So what are the Iranians doing in Mexico, Enrico?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ah! Wrong answer,” Procario said. “Sounds like you’re going for a swim.”