The Last Line

by Anthony Shaffer

  “Oh … right. I wasn’t convinced. That was just me grasping at straws.”

  “But it makes sense. The Iranians want us out of the Mideast, and a second American civil war would give them the diversion they need.”

  “For some very ambitious empire building,” Teller added, nodding. “A damned dangerous game—but they did set things up to blame al Qaeda, whom they hate anyway. Larson’s ‘reliable informant’ in Pakistan. De la Paz, who tried to convince us it was all an al Qaeda plot against Mexico. Yeah…”

  “It’s probably not an official Iranian plan,” Dominique pointed out. “The ones behind it might just be a few loose cannons in their intelligence service.”

  “Or at least that’s what they would claim if we caught them,” Teller said. “Sure. They’ll make certain that even if we can trace the nukes back to them, we won’t have a solid enough case to justify full-scale retaliation. Now … who are the players?”

  “Pasha,” Dominique said. “The Iranian organizing and running the op in Mexico and the U.S. That’s probably Reyshahri.”

  “And Hamadi. Hezbollah, and therefore working for the Iranians. For the Mexicans, we have Juan Escalante. Brokering a deal between Los Zetas and Sinaloa.” He paused, frowning.

  “What is it?”

  “I just realized something. Agustín Morales. Calavera. A high-ranking member of the Sinaloa Cartel. He lets Galen Fletcher recruit him as a CIA agent, along with Henrico Garcia. And there’s someone else—the CIA deputy chief of station in Mexico City, Richard Nicholas.”

  Teller began typing rapidly on his laptop’s keyboard, entering a password and bringing up a classified personnel file on an encrypted satellite channel. A photograph showing Nicholas’s face—young, blond, ambitious—gazed back out of the screen at him.

  “‘Current whereabouts unknown,’” Teller said, reading. “‘Wanted for questioning…’ Yeah, I’ll just bet he is.”

  “Nicholas was the traitor at the Mexican station.”

  “Right. Poor Galen found out that Nicholas had sold out the Agency’s network down there. He must have found out that Morales had been recruited as well—and that he was still working for Sinaloa.” He kept typing as he spoke.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “This,” Teller said, pointing at a block of text on the screen. “Okay, thanks to Fletcher, we know Nicholas was a traitor. He sold our entire Mexican network to the cartels. That’s why Frank and I were sent down there in the first place.”

  “Okay…”

  “Nicholas would have recruited Garcia and Morales. It’s certainly hard to imagine that Morales could be brought in—under his real name—without some pretty high-level intervention.”

  “Right, that doesn’t make any sense at all,” Dominique said. “Why would he use his real name? If he was even suspected of cartel involvement…”

  “So that our people could access his Mexican military records when he applied for training in the U.S.,” Teller said. He typed in another password, bringing up another face, heavy and swarthy, with a thin mustache. “Here he is. Agustín Morales. Mexican military intelligence. Armored Corps. Special training in the U.S., including the Farm. Nothing at all here about him working with the cartels, but I’d be willing to bet that the information is there somewhere. Or it was.”

  “Someone tampered with the records?”

  “Someone high up in the Agency—or higher. Look, Galen Fletcher recruited him—but Galen was old school, and very thorough. He would have checked Morales out six ways from Sunday. Ah … here.” He pointed.

  “What is it?”

  Three columns of text came up on Teller’s screen, side by side. “The connection I was looking for. Look … Agustín Morales was recruited by Galen Fletcher, but it was Richard Nicholas who first contacted Morales, and who brought him to Fletcher’s attention. If Nicholas was dirty, he probably knew Morales was dirty as well. And Nicholas was appointed by—”

  “Randolph Edgar Preston,” Dominique said, reading over Teller’s shoulder. “The president’s national security adviser.”

  “I’m beginning to get the feeling,” Teller said slowly, “that this thing goes a lot higher than we thought.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  NEST 2/2

  OVER GREENBELT, MARYLAND

  0621 HOURS, EDT

  22 APRIL

  The NEST Super Stallion was making yet another pass, flying low beside the line of traffic, checking vehicle after vehicle with its Z-backscatter scanner. As the morning light grew stronger, the traffic jam was becoming more monstrous, an impossible gridlock. Up ahead, the police had established a roadblock and were letting cars through one at a time after a close check. Teller had also seen a gamma detector truck moving up the highway’s shoulder. A long arm, like that of a cherry picker, was extended out from the trailer, dangling a box on the far side of the traffic lane. The device, he knew, allowed the truck to fire X-rays through a target vehicle and capture them on the other side, and also to pick up gamma radiation. An ancestor of the ZBVs, they’d been in use for well over a decade at major U.S. ports, checking incoming cargo containers for radiological or nuclear devices.

  “Fletcher must have killed himself when he saw how far the rot had spread,” Dominique said.

  “He reported the fact that Nicholas had turned,” Teller said, “but I suspect he was told to be quiet about it.”

  “Preston?”

  “Preston. The national security adviser is, among other things, the funnel for intel from INSCOM and the CIA and the NSA to the president’s desk. I can’t imagine what else would have made Galen snap. When he realized that Preston was dirty…”

  Teller let the thought hang. Poor Galen. Old school, yeah, and as straight and as honorable as they came. Honor, however, didn’t seem to have much of a place any longer in intelligence work—or in D.C.

  “So why didn’t Preston warn us off of Escalante? Why weren’t we pulled out of Mexico? I mean … Preston would have known.”

  “Not necessarily,” Teller told her. “Our friends Wentworth and Larson had their own ideas about what was going on in Mexico, remember?”

  “‘There are no nukes in Mexico,’” she said, eyes widening. “Jesus! They never told him!”

  Teller grinned. “This may be the first time in history that bureaucratic CYA actually worked to someone’s advantage!”

  “So … did Fletcher know about the nukes?” Dominique asked.

  “No. He would have told someone. All he knew was that the Mexican station was compromised by someone he’d recruited, and that ANSA was telling him to back off.”

  “So where do the nukes come into it?”

  “I think Preston learned that the Iranians had purchased two Russian suitcase nukes,” Teller said. “As ANSA, he would have been privy to Trapdoor. And he would have had access to the Iranian secret service, through Nicholas and the Iranian Embassy in Mexico City. He may have … encouraged them. Maybe even worked out the plan to use the nukes to destabilize the United States and give Aztlan a chance to take over.”

  “Why? What would Preston gain from having the American Southwest break off and start an independent country?”

  “I don’t know,” Teller admitted. “The Iranians would see it as a chance to get us out of the Mideast. By blaming al Qaeda or the drug cartels, they keep their hands clean. Plausible deniability. But someone else is pulling the strings—Preston. And I don’t know why.”

  “So how does any of that help you figure out the bad guys’ menu?” Walthers asked.

  “It doesn’t. But if it’s the Iranians, that tells us that Shah Mat was meticulously planned as a surgical attack,” Teller told him. “Surgical. That’s the key.”

  “If they only have warheads measuring a few kilotons,” Dominique pointed out, “it would have to be, wouldn’t it?”

  “Right. With a blast yield of less than five kilotons, they can be sure of complete destruction across only a few hundred yards, with severe da
mage going out to a couple of miles or so from ground zero. We know that originally they had one target in D.C., another in New York City. They might still have a warhead going to Manhattan in a second vehicle, but right now I’m thinking both weapons are on the way to D.C. If so, they’ve probably selected two targets in Washington.”

  “Maybe they plan to detonate both together,” Walthers pointed out. “Double the boom.”

  “No,” Teller said, shaking his head. “Doesn’t work that way. If they could guarantee both warheads would go off at precisely the same instant, maybe—but the two blasts would interfere with one another to some extent. And if one went off even a fraction of a second before the other, it would destroy the second warhead—vaporize it, not detonate it. So their best bet would be to select two widely separated targets, at least a mile or two apart. The targets must be determined by military logic. They would probably have a list—number one, two, three, and so on, with the idea that if target one is blocked, they go to the next one down on the list. With two warheads, they’ll just select the top two.”

  “But how do we figure out what that list is?” Walthers said. “Or the target order?”

  “We take a very hard look at what they’re trying to do. Maria Perez told us the attack would kick off Aztlán independence. That means their targets must have been chosen to create the maximum amount of chaos throughout the U.S., and probably hamper our ability to respond militarily.”

  “The White House,” Walthers suggested.

  “Possible. Not, I think, likely, but it’s certainly on the list, for morale purposes if nothing else.”

  “Why not likely?” Walthers wanted to know. “The president is the commander in chief of the armed forces. Kill him and you cut off the military’s head.”

  “Because when it’s all said and done, the president is a figurehead more than anything else. He issues big-picture strategic military orders, sure, but he has military officers to advise him, the Joint Chiefs. They’re the ones who decide where to send the troops, who to attack, what to defend. They’re at the center of the military’s C3—command, control, and communications. And they’re at—”

  “The Pentagon!” Dominique exclaimed.

  “The Pentagon,” Teller agreed. He had a satellite map up now on his laptop, centered on the Washington, D.C. metro area, and he put a red marker over the huge gray pentagonal building located on the west bank of the Potomac River. “I’ve been thinking about that for a while. Destroy the Pentagon, and local military commands will have to make their own decisions. At the very least, command and control for our military would be completely disrupted for hours—more likely days.” He drew some lines on the map, checking distances. “Two miles from the White House, and with a clear line of sight. So that warhead might very well get the White House, too. For the second warhead … how about the Capitol Building?” He zoomed in for a closer look, then placed a second marker. “Maybe here. A whole row of buildings with the offices of congressional representatives—the Rayburn Building, the Longworth Building, the Cannon Office Building … Put a warhead somewhere along Independence Avenue, smack between these offices and the Capitol Building, and it takes out most of the members of the House of Representatives, all of the ones that are in town at the moment, at any rate.”

  “Most of them are,” Dominique pointed out. “In town, I mean. There’s a House debate going on this week about the use of troops in the Southwest.”

  “You’re right. They might also try for the Senate office buildings northeast of the Capitol.”

  “Even a small nuke anywhere on Capitol Hill is going to take them all out,” Dominique said. “That whole complex is only about half a mile across.”

  Walthers had pulled out a small plastic disk, a circular slide rule, and was peering at it closely as he manipulated it. “Say three-tenths of a mile … one-kiloton yield … yeah. One hundred percent deaths from radiation within two to fourteen days.” He looked up. “And that’s just from the initial radiation exposure. Fallout will kill a lot more in a footprint stretching downwind.”

  “It’ll be bad,” Teller said. “And not just for congress-critters.” He measured again on the map. “The dome is a little less than three miles from the Pentagon, so the two blasts can be sequential, not simultaneous. About a mile and a half from the Capitol Building to the White House. Not a clear line of sight—but with two weapons going off, and most of official Washington caught between two blasts, even very small ones…”

  “They decapitate the whole government,” Walthers observed. “Militarily and politically. Man, that would be one world-class diversion.”

  “Wait a minute,” Dominique said. “Their first choice was to hit New York City with one of the bombs. How did that figure into their plan?”

  “My vote would be for Wall Street, and an attempt to cripple us economically as well. If our banking system collapses, we won’t be interested in what’s happening overseas—or even in California. But this would be almost as good. Look … almost directly on a line between the White House and the Pentagon…”

  “The Federal Reserve,” Dominique said.

  “Wall Street would have been more effective, probably,” Teller said, placing a third marker. “But nuking D.C. would do a job on the U.S. economy as well.”

  “So we’re starting to get a menu,” Dominique said. “Pentagon and Wall Street, and when New York was closed to them the list became the Pentagon and the Capitol Building. The White House has to be on the list as well, but after those two. What else?”

  “CIA headquarters?” Walthers suggested. “Fort Meade? Fort Belvoir?”

  “I don’t think so,” Teller said. “Those would be pretty unlikely as Shah Mat targets. The Iranians are also going for global impact, I would imagine. They get to point and say, ‘See? The Americans had it coming! Allah akbar!’ But that sort of thing works best with high-profile targets like the Pentagon or the Capitol Dome. Besides … destroying the CIA or the NSA just doesn’t advance the Mexican agenda. Langley’s not worth a damn—no offense, Jackie.”

  “None taken. I’m beginning to agree with you.”

  “Oh?”

  She sighed. “Last night you told me that U.S. intelligence is our last line of defense for this country, before we have to take overt action or get into a war. But from where I sit the Agency is a lot more worried about its bureaucratic turf than it is about an enemy attack. It’s … discouraging.”

  “Yeah, it is that,” Teller agreed. “All we can do is keep soldiering, and try to figure out the next best thing we should do. At this point we are the line.”

  “So what is the next thing we do?” Walthers asked.

  “We get in touch with INSCOM and NEST HQ,” Teller decided. “Let them know what we’ve come up with. Suggest NEST concentrate most of its search effort around the Pentagon, the Capitol Building and the nearby offices, the White House … maybe the Federal Reserve, too. That’ll cut the search area down by a hell of a lot.”

  “And us?”

  Teller looked at the big screen, which showed yet another gray-tone image of a ghostly car and its naked passengers. No suitcase nukes. No weapons. Nothing …

  “Let’s head downtown,” Teller said. “Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  REYSHAHRI

  MARYLAND AVENUE NE

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  0815 HOURS, EDT

  “Okay, I admit it,” Moslehi said from behind the wheel. He was grinning. “You were right. Look!”

  The stately white dome of the Capitol Building had just emerged from behind the trees and varicolored row houses lining the sidewalk. Reyshahri estimated that it was now less than a kilometer away. He glanced at his watch. It had been a long and exhausting drive—almost three hours to work through the traffic from outside the Beltway. On the car’s radio, a morning news broadcast was talking about the ongoing riots in California, about declarations of martial law and the use of federal troops.

  After passing the NSA, he’
d ordered Moslehi to take an exit onto something called Powder Mill Road, winding tree lined across the Maryland countryside. Traffic here was still heavy—many other drivers, apparently, had had the same idea—but at least it was moving. Eventually, they’d reached Beltsville, Maryland, where they’d picked up an old friend—U.S. Route 1—and turned south.

  They’d made a right onto Rhode Island Avenue shortly after that, to avoid the gridlock building up around the Washington Beltway. When they passed under the Beltway a short time later, they’d been able to see the mass of vehicles frozen motionless on the overpass. For the next hour and a half they’d zigzagged through the narrow streets of suburban communities like College Park, Mount Rainier, and Arboretum, still in bumper-to-bumper traffic, edging along from stop sign to stop sign, but at least moving.

  After working their way through a suburb called Trinidad, they’d turned right onto Maryland Avenue NE, just two and a half kilometers from their destination.

  With Moslehi at the wheel, Reyshahri could study the people they passed on the sidewalks. It had occurred to him some distance back that all of the faces he was seeing were black … and that bothered him.

  Although he’d been in the United States before, this mission was his first time in the country’s capital. His training back in Iran had presented the United States as sharply divided between the rich whites, who controlled all business, all government, all banks and all religious institutions, and the vast ocean of black and Latino people at the bottom of the social and economic ladder. He’d seen the poverty, the stark desperation, of the Chicano population in California. In Tehran they’d taught him that the plight of American blacks was even worse, that not only were they were desperately poor but that the Muslims among them were prevented from following their faith.

  Somehow, what he was seeing on the streets of northeastern Washington didn’t match the image he’d carried in his head. The streets were clean and lined with trees, the houses neat, the people well dressed. Automobiles were parked end to end on the streets—few of them brand-new, but few rusted and worn, either. Compared to the poorest classes in his own country, these people were fabulously wealthy.