The Last Line (11 page)

“Officials so far have refused to make any statement about the two, as to whether they were active-duty police officers, as has been claimed, or even whether they are still in custody.”

The scene shifted once again to a close-up of an angry crowd, close-packed behind a yellow police-barrier tape. One Hispanic man was waving a crudely scrawled cardboard sign reading
POLICE BRUTALITY!

“While the crowd outside of city hall yesterday dispersed as soon as the shots were fired, other crowds have been gathering at points across East Los Angeles since then to protest what they call police brutality, or excessive use of force against peaceful demonstrators. Congressman Harvey Gonzales, of the East L.A. Congressional District, has personally issued a plea for calm while the incident is investigated.”

DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

CIUDAD DE MÉXICO

REPUBLICA DE MÉXICO

1535 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

They'd parked the Escort on Sur 145, a narrow street in the
barrio
of crowded tenements, houses, and shacks. De la Cruz had pointed out the suspected safe house used by Escalante and other members of the Los Zetas cartel, a two-story house with a cracked plaster façade and a decaying front stoop.

“I'd have thought a drug lord could afford something more upscale—something with a Chihuahua at least…” Teller observed.

De la Cruz shrugged. “In this part of town, it's best to be inconspicuous. Besides, it's not his home.”

“So, how do we know if he's here?” Chavez asked.

“Oh, he's here alright,” de la Cruz said. “That's his car parked in front of us. See the sticker on the plate?
Hoy no circula
.”

“‘No drive today'?” Teller translated. “I don't get it.”

“Mexico City has two major problems,” Chavez told him, “traffic congestion and pollution caused by traffic. The
hoy no circula
program takes some of those cars, the older ones, off the streets.”

“Newer cars are exempt,” de la Cruz explained. “But cars older than eight years can't go out on the streets one day a week plus one Saturday a month.”

“
Exacto
. His '02 Chevy has a red sticker, and his license plate number ends in ‘4.' That means he can't take it out on the streets on Wednesdays, or on the third Saturday of the month.”

“And today is Wednesday,” Teller said. “That must be hell on people who have to commute.”

“It forces people to find other ways to get to work,” de la Cruz replied. “But Mexico City proper has nine million people living in it … and almost twenty-five million people in the metro area. It's the largest city in the Western Hemisphere. Twenty years ago, they were issuing hazardous air warnings for this city 355 days out of the year. Today … well, things are a lot better.”

“Yeah, the air doesn't seem that bad,” Teller admitted. “A little thin, but not bad. I can't see people in the United States giving up driving, though, even one day a week. I think we're addicted to it.”

De la Cruz chuckled. “Don't get smug, gringo. I've seen Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., in rush hour. Mark me, you
yanquis
will be doing something just like it soon!”

“Sure,” Chavez said. “Remember gas rationing, back in the seventies? It could get that bad again.”

“Before my time,” Teller said. The steady erosion of basic American freedoms over the past couple of decades was a sore point with him. He decided to change the uncomfortable subject. “So … tell us about this Escalante character.”

“Here…” De la Cruz reached into a jacket pocket and produced a smart phone. “You have net access?”

“Sure.” Teller pulled out his mobile phone. With de la Cruz's phone acting as a mobile wireless hotspot, he could exchange contact information with the CISEN agent, then download a file from de la Cruz's phone. He opened it, and began scanning through the information. The attached file photos included several surveillance shots of Escalante, plus one prison photograph, showing front and side views. He was a young man with dark hair, a heavy mustache, and cold, cold eyes.

“He started off working for Sinaloa,” de la Cruz said. “Strictly mid-level management. He oversaw the shipment of cocaine, mostly, up from Colombia, and passed it on to the smuggling networks in Tijuana and Nogales. When the Tijuana Cartel went independent, they put a price on his head, but he went to work for El Chapo and the Sinaloan Federation. Arrested in '99 for bribing police officials, but they let him go—a federal judge in Sinaloa's pocket. He's loyal to Sinaloa, but the word is that he has personal ties to Los Zetas, so he's a floater.”

“‘Floater'?”

“Sinaloa and Los Zetas are in an all-out war … have been since 2010. But he's able to cross the lines, kind of like having diplomatic immunity, y'know? Floats from one camp to the other, and neither side is able to touch him. We think he's been brokering a truce between the two cartels.”

Teller scanned through the information appearing on his phone's screen. “A half-million dollar penthouse in a high-rise condo in downtown Mexico City,” he said, reading. “So what's he doing driving a beat-up white Chevy that he can't take out on Wednesdays?”

“Oh, he's got a Mercedes, too,” de la Cruz said, laughing. “
And
a Peugeot. And a couple of other hot cars. But … remember what I said about being inconspicuous? A Mercedes would be kind of out of place in this neighborhood. When he stays here, he drives his low-profile junker.”

“And why does he stay here at all?” Teller wanted to know.

“A girl, of course,” de la Cruz said. “Isn't that the way it always is?”

“Maria Perez,” Chavez added. “She keeps the place as a safe house, for members of Los Zetas when they're in town. Word is she's a niece of
El Hummer
, Jaime Perez Durán. He's one of the original bigshots of the Los Zetas, so maybe that's how he ended up in both camps, playing diplomat.”

“Exactly.” De la Cruz nodded. “Escalante has a wife living in his high-rise, so he can't take Maria there. So he visits her here at this place two, maybe three times a week. Probably tells his wife he's staying late at the office. And if it happens to be a Wednesday, well, he
has
to stay that extra day, right? Or the police'll pick him up for violating
hoy no circula
.”

“Well, things are just tough all over,” Teller said. “Even for drug lords.” He stretched and shifted. His long legs had been folded into the back of the Escort for hours now, and he was getting stiff. “Hey, you said we might be able to find a place for an OP.”

“Sure.” De la Cruz pointed to a pastel-blue painted house across the street and several numbers north from the cartel safe house. “That house … there. The guy who owns it, Antonio Vicente Lozano, is a police informant. Strictly unofficial, since if his address showed up on an official record or pay voucher, he'd be dead the very next day. But some of us in CISEN pay him a bit every month out of our own pockets to just kind of keep an eye on the Perez house. He lets us know the make and license numbers of cars that show up out front, how long they stay, that sort of thing. That's how we picked up on Escalante.”

“Sweet.”

“See the window on the third story, the one with the little balcony and all the potted plants in front of it? A couple of times, now, Vicente's let us rent that room for surveillance.” He grinned. “We've picked up some pretty hot action from Maria's bedroom, let me tell you.”

“Anything useful?” Chavez asked.

A shrug. “
No mucho
. Escalante's pretty careful about what he says, even around his
tragona
.”

“Let's set it up,” Teller said. “And I think we're going to need some special equipment from back home.”

SAFE HOUSE, EAST OLYMPIC BOULEVARD

EAST LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

1630 HOURS, PDT

Automatic gunfire sounded outside, and Reyshahri cautiously went to the window. The mob outside filled the street as far as he could see in each direction, and was on the move now, headed toward downtown. The shots had come from a man brandishing an M-16, firing wildly into the air. “Idiots,” Reyshahri said in Farsi. “Those bullets have to come down somewhere.”

Beside him, Fereidun Moslehi chuckled. “It will attract their police all the sooner,” he said in the same language. “And that is what we want, a confrontation, yes?”

“Oh, there will be a confrontation. I have no doubt of that.”

There must have been thousands in the crowd, which was made up mostly of young, angry men, but Reyshahri could see women and even children in the mob as well, marching, shouting, punching the air with clenched fists as they chanted.

“¡Dignidad! ¡Igualdad! ¡Libertad!”

Dignity. Equality. Liberty. The sincere and honest aspirations of any people. The signs they carried sported the same sentiments.
“¡Justicia!”
Read one.
“¡Fuerza a las Gentes!”
read another.
“¡Aztlán Libre!”
a third.

Free Aztlán.
That
didn't have a chance, of course. At least … not yet.

Aztlán was the mythical ancestral home for the Nahua native peoples; the name Aztec literally meant “People from Aztlán.” Beginning in the 1960s, however, the name had been taken up by the Chicano movement and various independence activists to refer to the lands of northern Mexico annexed—some said “stolen”—by the United States after the Mexican-American War in 1847. The idea was a frankly political ploy to give the Chicano independence movement what they felt was a legal right to what was now California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas … the entire U.S. Southwest, in fact, as far north as Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. A number of Latino political action groups in the United States had united under the Aztlán banner—the
Plan Espiritual de Aztlán
, the
Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán
, and NOA, the Nation of Aztlán.

The Latino independence movement had remained fairly low-key for decades, but lately, the Hispanic populations of those states had become more vocal. The Chicanos were in the majority in large areas of southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, and they were beginning to flex their political muscles. Many were talking about the
inevitability
of a new nation,
el Republica del Norte
, that would secede from the United States within the next half century or so.

There were many also saying that it would not be that long, that the new country was being born
now
.

The past twenty-four hours had seen an explosion of rage and determination within the local Chicano population. Not all of it, of course, not even a majority … but enough to focus the world's attention on East Los Angeles. Paying those two members of an L.A. drug gang to fire into the crowd outside of City Hall yesterday had blown the lid off, as Reyshahri had known would be the case. The story was flashing through the Hispanic communities of L.A. like lightning: The LAPD had fired into a peaceful crowd of demonstrators! The IDs and badges carried by those two—plus the intervention of a police official on the cartel payroll—had freed both men.

Both men had disappeared a few hours later; there would be no way to question them further.

Was this the beginning of a new nation? Reyshahri doubted, frankly, that the hodge-podge of activist groups and would-be revolutionaries would be able to pull it off. They certainly wouldn't do it on their own. The United States federal government had settled the question of whether individual states could choose to leave the parent country long ago, had done so by winning a bloody civil war. Those people out in the street could shout and chant until they were blue in the face. Once they became too violent, too big of a problem, Washington would declare martial law and send in the National Guard.

That would be the last anyone would hear of
Aztlán Libre
for a long, long time to come.

Still, his superiors back in Tehran had come up with Operation Shah Mat, which they thought had a good chance of success. Reyshahri's first part in this operation was to encourage the independence movements in the southwestern U.S., to help them forge alliances with one another if they hadn't already, and to see to it that the weapons and ammunition smuggled up out of Mexico reached their organizers. Whether or not the Aztlanistas managed to vote themselves free of the States, frankly, was unimportant. What was important was that they be loud, visible, and dangerous for a period of perhaps one more week.

After that, after Reyshahri carried out the
second
part of Shah Mat, none of it would matter in the least.

 

Chapter Six

OBSERVATION POST

DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

CIUDAD DE MÉXICO

0950 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

17 APRIL

Teller was bored.

Stakeouts were, of course, an integral part of intelligence work, and even more so for counterintelligence, when you needed to keep tabs on the opposition. As a newbie, he'd polished just-learned skills dozens of times in training, practicing with senior intelligence officers as his targets. He'd been on plenty of the real thing since, throughout his career, in the streets of Kabul and Karachi, in Berlin once, and even in Washington, D.C., where he'd been keeping an eye on that SVR officer who'd wanted to defect. Of course, on that case he'd needed not only to watch the target but to watch for his
real
opposition from the Company, his nominal allies at the CIA.

In eight years of intelligence work, he'd never been able to get past the mind-numbing boredom of a routine stakeout.

Chavez and Teller had spent the night in the small bedroom on the third floor of Antonio Vicente's house, taking turns sleeping and watching; de la Cruz had gone home for the night. Frank Procario had joined them for a time, then gone to a hotel back at the airport. Teller had phoned in a request for some special equipment, and it would be arriving sometime on the seventeenth.