The Last Line (17 page)

Teller had been distracted and wasn't paying complete attention to the conversation. There were two men at a nearby table, and for the past several moments he'd been warily noting their behavior. One was quiet enough and wasn't calling attention to himself. His friend, however, was loud, more than half drunk, and getting rowdy. He'd just reached up under a waitress's skirt, and when she shrieked and slapped him, he grinned and pulled out a thick sheaf of pesos, waving it under her nose.

“I'm sorry,” Teller said. “You were saying?”

“I asked you who was the backup for who, you for me or me for you.”

“Doesn't matter,” he told her. “Just so we don't get in each other's way.”

“What's so interesting behind me?”

“I think we have some drug-gang people over there,” he said quietly. “One, anyway. He's flashing bills and acting like a dick.”

“That doesn't make him a drug lord.”

“Not by itself. But he's wearing patent leather shoes that must've cost a couple of hundred dollars, and a jacket and silk shirt that set him back a lot more than that. He's pushy, won't take no for an answer. Acting like a big shot. And when he moved just now, I think I caught a glimpse of leather under the jacket. He's carrying.”

“Are they watching us?”

“No … don't turn around. I don't think so. But I think we'd better get out of here.” He tossed a generous tip on the table, and together they stood up and began threading their way toward the front door. As they passed the table, the noisy one leered at Dominique. “Hey,
chichuda
!” he called. The word was a mildly offensive endearment in Mexican Spanish, a reference to the size of her breasts. He reached for her.

“Frénalo a poco, macho,”
she told him, fending off the hand. The slang phrase called him a tough guy and suggested that he should put on his brakes.

The guy's eyes darkened, and he came to his feet.
“No seas una chuchafría, puta,”
he said in what he must have imagined to be a dangerous tone.

“Tómala con calma, amigo,”
Teller told him, placing a hand on his chest. “Simmer down.”

“¡Te voy a reventar!”

“Take me apart, you little insect?” Teller said pleasantly, still speaking Spanish. “I don't think so.” Smiling in his most disarming fashion, Teller put his arm around the enraged but baffled man's shoulders and pointed toward the end of the bar, where the big man with the football-player physique was drinking. “See that guy? In our organization we call him ‘Manuel el Loco,' and he's my hired gun. Only … he doesn't usually need a gun, you know? Because he can take people apart with his bare hands.”

“Manuel el Loco” glanced up from his drink just then, saw Teller looking at him, and gave a big smile. Teller tossed him a two-finger salute, and Crazy Manny gave a little wave in reply. The wind spilled from the tough guy's sails.

“I suggest you leave me and
mi comay,
my girlfriend, alone,
comprende
?” Teller said, still friendly.

“S-sí. Comprendo … señor.”

“Bueno. Hasta luego.”

He followed Dominique out of the restaurant.

MATAZETAS HOUSE

LA CALLE SUR 145

DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

2359 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

“Hey, Calavera?” It was Barrón's voice.

“Dígame,”
Morales replied. “Tell me.”

“The targets aren't here. We talked to Luis, the bartender. He said they just left, five, maybe ten minutes ago.”

“Okay.”

“You want us to drive around the streets, looking for them?”

Morales thought for a moment. “Go ahead—but they've probably gone to ground at a hotel in the area. I'll get back to you.”

“Yes, Calavera.” Barrón sounded relieved that Morales hadn't responded with anger. In fact, he'd half expected this. A few calls to hotels and taxi services in the area, some threats, a bribe or two, and he would find them, no problem.

He reached again for the telephone directory.

 

Chapter Nine

HOTEL ESTRELLA

DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

0225 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

18 APRIL

“Again?” she whispered, her ears close by his ear.

They lay together in an uncomfortably soft hotel bed, nude and slick with sweat and deliciously entangled. A neon sign outside the window leading to a second-floor fire escape flashed yellow and green light across the ceiling in regular patterns, and an ambulance siren wailed in the distance.

Teller groaned, and stretched. “I don't think I can,” he admitted. “Oh, but that was
good
.”

“Better than your exotic dancer friend?” Dominique asked. “What was her name … Titsie Tight?”

“Bitsie Bright. Let's not start
that
again, okay?”

They'd had a major blow-up over Teller's relationship with Sandy Doherty just before Dominique had left for Venezuela. Damn it, he'd never pretended that his relationship with Jackie was an exclusive one.

“Sorry,” she said, relaxing against him, her head pressed up under his chin. “That wasn't fair.”

“No, it wasn't.” He gave her a squeeze. “But it was justified.”

“So … what did you tell that creep in the bar, anyway? You never said.”

“The big guy I talked to when we first went in?”

“Yeah.”

“I told him I was the producer for a movie, and that some of the stars were going to be in Los Gatos tonight.”

“And he believed you?”

“Well, slipping him a thousand pesos helped. Told him it was to take out an option on his services, that he was exactly the type we wanted for the big fight scene, and we'd have him sign a contract tomorrow.”

“I repeat,” she said, sounding dubious, “he
believed
you?”

“Hey, pay people enough money and they'll believe any damned thing you tell them. When lover boy looked like he was going to be a problem, I pointed to the big guy and told the cockroach he was my bodyguard.”

“Pretty slick.”

“I thought it would help if those guys in the van came in. If they didn't come in shooting, that is.”

“What if they had?”

“Then you and I probably wouldn't be screwing one another's brains out in a cheap hotel right now. You can't cover
every
eventuality, but you do your best to cover what you can.”

“Do you really think those guys in the van are still looking for us?”

“I don't know. You asked me earlier what the targets were doing in the Perez house. The answer is, some kind of meeting, maybe a low-profile summit between cartel leaders. And Juan Escalante is believed to be brokering a truce or deal between Sinaloa and Los Zetas, a cease-fire. My guess is that you got spotted by a Zetas security detail, and they want to know who you are and who you work for.”

“Maybe they think we're from a rival cartel.”

“That's probably their big concern. There are a lot of small fry, besides the big two. None of them will want an alliance between Los Zetas and Sinaloa, and they could do a lot of damage by hitting that meeting, maybe making it look like the cease-fire had collapsed.”

“Makes sense. And that means they want to capture us for questioning, not just shoot us down in the street.”

“They'll also want to know if maybe we're working for the U.S.,” Teller added. “You could pass for
una Latina hermosa
easily enough with that hair—but me, I look like a gringo. They probably think I'm alphabet soup. CIA, DEA…”

“The TLA.”

Teller didn't recognize the acronym. “What agency is that?”

“Three-Letter Acronym,” she replied, laughing. Her hand, resting on his chest, began to wander, teasing.

“So what is Escalante's connection with nuclear weapons?” Teller asked. “Mmm. That's nice…”

“We're not sure. WINPAC thinks one of the cartels might be smuggling them in to destabilize the country.”

“That's what I was told. Doesn't make sense, though.”

“Why not?”

“In case you hadn't noticed, love, Mexico is
already
destabilized. Worse than Colombia ever was back in the eighties. It's on the point of becoming a failed state now, and I'm not sure there's any power on earth that can stop that.”

“Well, a pocket nuke or two would certainly hasten the process.” Her hand continued its teasing, becoming more aggressive.

“Sure, but what would be the point? The cartels have already infiltrated the government, the police, the army, and the judicial system, either with people or with bribes or through terror. Before long, Mexico is going to be as bad as Somalia, with warlords and gangs running everything.”

He let his own hand begin wandering, and she gave a small gasp. “Oh! But we
really
should get some sleep…”

“Eventually.”

“Mmm. It
does
appear that you're ready for another go.”

“More like another come. You haven't answered my question.”

“Which one?”

“Any ideas how Escalante's connected with the nukes? You said you were sent here to investigate Trapdoor. You were surveilling Escalante. You didn't just pick him at random.”

“No. He was of interest because WINPAC tagged him with the Kilo.”

“Kilo?” He shook his head, confused. “I don't understand. As in kilos of cocaine?”

“No. As in a Russian Kilo class submarine.”

Teller's hand stopped moving. “You're kidding me.”

“You weren't briefed? The Zetas have purchased a Russian diesel sub. Maybe ‘rented' is the better word. It's been on the market for quite a while.”

Yes, it had—and the game quite suddenly had just escalated to a whole new level.

During the Cold War, NATO had assigned code names to Soviet submarines based on international alphabet flags—Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, and so on—and the Kilo class had been one of the most successful of the lot. Diesel powered, intended as an attack sub rather than an ICBM boomer, the boat was so quiet that U.S. sonar operators referred to it as “the black hole,” and it had given naval strategic planners fits. Displacing 2,900 tons submerged, 241 feet long, and with a crew of fifty-two, Kilos had a range of well over 7,000 miles on the surface or, as was more likely, if they used a snorkel underwater. Their endurance was estimated at around forty-five days.

First launched in the early 1980s, Kilos had become an important export item for the Soviet Union, then for the Russian Federation that followed it. Algeria, China, India, Poland, Iran, Romania, and Vietnam had all purchased Kilo submarines, and Egypt and Venezuela were expected to make purchases soon.

Back in the 1990s, a new wrinkle had surfaced, as it were, with rumors that the Russians were attempting to rent a Kilo class submarine to one of the Colombian drug cartels, complete with a trained crew—one year for a reported one million dollars, plus operating expenses. The thought of an ultraquiet modern submarine hauling multiton lots of cocaine north and off-loading them on deserted American beaches had been a nightmare scenario for the Drug Enforcement Agency and others. According to information developed by the CIA, however, the cartel in question had gotten spooked and backed off. Evidently, the idea was too crazy even for the Colombian drug cartels; a million dollars was pocket change for them, but they'd elected to stick with more traditional methods of smuggling—like having human mules swallow condoms filled with cocaine to get them through customs.

“The Mexican cartels have been using subs lately,” Teller observed, “but those are homemade jobs, custom-made.”

The earliest, back in the 1990s, had been semisubmersible only, designed to be almost invisible to radar. More recent designs were fully submersible. They were called narco-subs, drug subs, or, amusingly, Bigfoot submarines, because authorities had heard rumors about the things for years but never seen one. Since the mid-2000s, though, a number had been seized, both by local police or military authorities and by the U.S. Coast Guard. A typical narco-sub was between 40 and 80 feet long, could travel up to 2,000 miles, could submerge to 300 feet, and had a crew of three or four—though some had been captured and found to be under remote control. The largest could carry around twelve tons of cocaine.

One report Teller had seen mentioned forty-two individual submarine sightings by the U.S. Navy in the first six months of 2008. The DEA estimated that about a third of all the cocaine moving from South America to Mexico was coming in by submarine; the Colombians, especially, were pioneering the use of submersibles in narco-trafficking. U.S. Intelligence believed that FARC—the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, Marxist-Leninist guerrillas—had been cooperating with the Mexican cartels to build the subs in order to pay for their revolution.

There were so many of the do-it-yourself subs out there that hiring a Russian Kilo now seemed like overkill. Still … since they were built on the cheap, they weren't particularly quiet. How much cocaine could a Kilo boat smuggle in—and how hard would it be to pick it up and track it?

“When did all of this go down?” Teller asked.

“A couple of months ago. I found out about the sub being transferred to Venezuela first, but then it was transferred to Los Zetas. We think it's in the Yucatán someplace, but we haven't been able to find it yet.”

“The Yucatán. Where we think the
Zapoteca
was headed.”

“Exactly. And you can see why WINPAC is … concerned.”

“Yeah.” Suppose the final destination of those two suitcase nukes wasn't Mexico after all. Suppose there was another target, one located somewhere on the U.S. eastern seaboard, for instance. Narco-submarines didn't have the range to reach, say, New York City, but a Kilo did. Easily.