The Last Line (4 page)

None of that was of much help now.

“You insufferable, arrogant, insubordinate
idiot
!” Colonel MacDonald leaned back in her office chair and glared at Teller, who stood before her at rigid attention. She was a lean, hard-edged, and no-nonsense woman, a by-the-book officer with an accountant's outlook on life and zero sense of humor. “An Agency contract employee is in the hospital! You could have killed him!”

“But I didn't, ma'am,” Teller said. “The situation—”

“You are at attention, Captain, and will not speak unless I ask you a question!” She picked up the report on her desk and shook it across the desk at Teller. “Our … colleagues at Langley have filed a formal complaint against you. It makes us look bad. It makes
me
look bad. The
situation,
mister, is that you have crossed the line.”

“Permission to speak, Colonel.”

She held the glare a moment longer, as if trying to decide whether to hear him out or not. She dropped the damning report back on her desk. “Granted,” she said at last.

“This whole thing is bullshit, Colonel, and you and I both know it. The Farm's just pissed because I crossed their barnyard without breaking a sweat.”

“You deliberately attacked one of their CEs. The man is in DeWitt with a concussion.” She cocked her head. “That doesn't bother you?”

“No, ma'am. Those boys play rough. I wasn't going to mess around.”

“You of all people, Captain, ought to know that things
never
go as planned in combat, real or simulated! If you'd misjudged, if you'd hit him too hard, you could have broken his neck, or smashed the side of his skull.”

“But I didn't, Colonel. That's the point. To complete the exercise, I needed to change the rules of the game. So I did.”

She tapped the report. “You
broke
the rules of the game. Not only did you injure a member of the opposition, you stole his night-vision device
and
you left the established boundaries of the course. You stole a vehicle—a truck, I might add, belonging to the Agency's assistant deputy director of operations. You also strayed outside the assigned operational area, which could have put civilians and nonoperational personnel at risk.”

Teller sighed. “Colonel, the before-action clearly stated that I was to move from Point Alpha to Point Bravo without being detected or captured. The exercise was designed to check out a new E&E class designed by Colonel Procario and did not involve live-fire activity. No civilians were put at risk—not unless the CEs decided to use live rounds instead of blanks.
I
was not armed. As for leaving the assigned area…” Teller managed a shrug while remaining more or less at attention. “I didn't have a GPS—and every piece of gear I borrowed was returned in working order, period.”

“Damn it, Teller, you knew you were supposed to stay southwest of the swamp.”

“Did I, Colonel?” He gave her his best look of open, boyish innocence. “I thought that was a suggestion. It sounded like a suggestion to
me.
”

“Don't give me your bullshit, Captain Teller,” MacDonald told him.

“Colonel MacDonald, you sent me down there to test out their E&E exercise and write a report on its potential usefulness for trainees. The exercise was flawed. It was play-acting. In combat, there
are
no rules, no boundaries, no restrictions.”

“Indeed?” MacDonald's tone dripped acid. “So … civilians, women and children, they're all fair game? Rules of engagement are to be ignored?”

“Damn it, Colonel, that's not what I meant and you know it.” Teller was angry now. “When you face an enemy in combat, you don't pull punches, you don't give him the first shot, and you don't decide if attacking him is politically correct. You take him down, and you take him down hard. And you sure as hell don't play by the bad guys' rules!”

“The exercise at the Farm was a game, Captain. Games have rules.”

“How do we learn from a game where we have to follow rules? I don't get it.”

“No,” MacDonald said. “No, you don't. That's why I'm relieving you of duty pending a formal investigation.”

“You can't do that, Colonel!”

“The hell I can't. Just watch me. You are dismissed.”

“Colonel—”

“Dismissed!”

Teller stared at her for a long couple of seconds, then turned on his heel and strode out of her office.

It wasn't even 1000 hours yet, and he needed a drink.

SAFE HOUSE, EAST OLYMPIC BOULEVARD

EAST LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

1230 HOURS, PDT

They'd driven through the night, arriving in the Angelino suburbs well before dawn. Reyshahri and Kawrd—the other VEVAK agent introduced himself during the drive as Fereidun Rahim Moslehi—had stopped in the desert outside of Palm Springs for Fajr, the morning prayer.

It had felt … good. God, Reyshahri knew, would forgive him for missing the appointed prayers during his journey north out of Mexico. Here, away from Mendoza and his filthy Sinaloan coyotes, it was possible once again to think about the mission.

The mission began … here.

This part of East Los Angeles was a teeming barrio of tenements, housing projects, and houses crammed together in festering, noisy mayhem less than ten kilometers from downtown L.A. The population here was almost exclusively Hispanic, most of them from Mexico. The safe house was a single-family home attached to a mechanic's garage on East Olympic Boulevard, just off the Santa Ana Freeway. Reyshahri noticed a Mexican flag hanging from the eaves of a house across the street, and a brick wall nearby had been daubed with white paint, in letters two meters high:
“¡VIVA AZTLÁN!”

Excellent. He didn't speak Spanish, but he knew what the words meant.

“Our contact here is Manuel Alvarado,” Moslehi told him as they got out of the car and walked up the rotting steps and onto the front porch. Inside, a dog barked.

“Another cartel member?” Reyshahri asked. He glanced surreptitiously left and right. There were guards out, though not obviously so. A group of young men on the street corner. Other men sitting on porches, or lounging casually on front stoops.

“No. But he is a dedicated Aztlanista.”

Alvarado answered the doorbell—an old man, white-haired and missing his front teeth. He carried a Smith & Wesson .38 in a shoulder holster over his filthy sleeveless tee.
“¿Quien es?”
he asked, looking at Reyshahri with suspicion.

“This is the colonel I told you about,” Moslehi replied in English. “He is with us.”

“Okawb,” Reyshahri added.

Alvarado gave a curt nod and admitted them. “You'll want to see the … stuff?”

“Please,” Reyshahri said. “It all arrived safely?”

Alvarado grunted and led them to a locked door off the kitchen. A couple of men with shotguns stood aside for them. “One truck hasn't arrived yet,” Alvarado said. “There may have been a problem in Tucson.”

“What problem?”

A shrug. “
Los federales.
Maybe a problem. Maybe not. We'll see.”

Not good. If the Border Patrol or the FBI had intercepted one of the shipments, it could tip them off to Shah Mat. More likely, though, the Americans would parade the captured materials as evidence that they were winning their vaunted war on drugs, and not think about what that seizure represented.

The door opened into the back of the garage, a huge open space that served now as a warehouse. On every side, crates and cartons were stacked on pallets almost from floor to ceiling. There were drugs, yes, but most of the boxes were filled with something just as dangerous—weapons and ammunition.

Reyshahri pulled up the lid on one crate already opened. Inside were military assault rifles—twelve of them, wrapped in translucent plastic. He picked one up and stripped off the protective covering. It was an M-16A4, factory fresh. Prominently stamped on the crate was the FNH USA logo. Another crate nearby, longer but narrower, carried the Saco Defense Systems logo. Inside, also carefully wrapped, was an M-60E3 light machine gun.

Other crates held ammunition of various calibers, hand grenades, and plastic explosives. Most was American manufactured, though there were a few foreign imports. The RPG-7s were Iranian, manufactured by the Defense Industries Organization, or DIO. They'd reached Los Angeles by way of Syria and Hezbollah.

There were weapons and ammunition enough here to equip a small army—which was precisely why they'd been smuggled across the border from Mexico, a few crates at a time, and at great cost.

Alvarado saw Reyshahri admiring the M-60. “We have our friends within the United States government to thank for most of these,” he said, grinning.
“Rapido y Furioso.”

“Fast and Furious.” Reyshahri nodded. He didn't need to be fluent in Spanish to translate that. Carefully, lovingly, he replaced the machine gun in its crate. The scandal last year, when the American public learned that large numbers of American weapons had been shipped to Mexico's drug cartels by the U.S. Department of Justice, had been explosive. Operation Fast and Furious, supposedly, had been an attempt to track arms shipments to the cartels, but somehow the government agencies responsible for tracking them had failed to do so. What the American news media did not know,
could
not know, was that the visible scandal represented only a tiny piece of the whole story. The weapons had vanished into Mexico without telling the FBI or DEA a thing about where they had gone.

Now many of them were
here,
smuggled back into the United States and awaiting shipment to their final destinations. Some had been routed here directly, thanks to the efforts of the operation's allies in Washington.

Operation Fast and Furious was the tip of a vast weapons-smuggling iceberg.

“Your distribution network is in place?” Reyshahri asked Alvarado.

“
Sí, señor.
My people need only the order.”

“Then do it. You have the order.”

Alvarado's eyes widened. “Immediately?”

Reyshahri nodded. “The longer we delay, the more likely it is that the enemy will discover us.”

That, of course, had been the chief danger all along. Operation Shah Mat was so big, involved so many people, and had such terrifyingly far-reaching implications that the secret would not be secure for very much longer. They had to strike
now,
before the enemy was aware of the danger.

“And your part in this game,
señor capitán?
”

“It will happen. Eight, maybe ten days. No more.”

The man hissed, a sharp intake of breath.
“Jesús y María.”

“God willing,” Reyshahri added.

EXECUTIVE SWEETS

WASHINGTON, D.C.

1745 HOURS, EDT

Chris Teller paused at the door, then held it open for Procario. “After you, Colonel.”

“I hate these joints,” Procario said, grimacing. “Why can't you get yourself plastered in a decent dive?”

Both of them were in civvies, Procario in a sports coat, Teller in his usual stone-washed jeans and a gray T-shirt.

“I'll have you know I've done some of my best undercover work here,” Teller said.

“Undercover? Or under the covers?”

“Cute.”

“Damn it, Chris, this is embarrassing!

Once, Fourteenth Street had been D.C.'s infamous red-light district, a seedy, noisome patch of inner-city lights and shabbiness where strip clubs, massage parlors, triple-X-rated theaters, tittie bars, and by-the-hour motels had shouldered one another in salacious intimacy with somewhat more respectable businesses such as liquor stores, tobacco shops, pawnbrokers, and quick-loan joints. That had been back in the wild and woolly seventies, when an intoxicated Wilbur Daigh Mills, honorable congressman from Arkansas, had been stopped at 2:00
A.M.
one night by Park Police for driving without his lights—and a stripper with the stage name Fanne Foxe had bolted from the car and gone for an impromptu swim in the Tidal Basin.

The 1974 scandal had led to Mills's resigning as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. It had also led to an attempt by the city to clean up the Fourteenth Street strip once and for all.

Nowadays, new sex-industry businesses were kept out, and the old ones, the ones grandfathered in, were strictly regulated and ruthlessly taxed. The old Pussycat Revue was now Executive Sweets, a high-toned gentleman's club with a tastefully elegant sign out front and a twenty-dollar cover just to get in. It was, Teller thought, the perfect illustration of a truism. Washington might be dynamic, constantly moving, always changing, and yet the place never, ever changed.

Teller and Procario walked through near-darkness to the front desk, giving a smiling hostess their money under the watchful eye of a bouncer who could have doubled as a linebacker for the Washington Redskins. Beyond the hostess station, the club opened into a crowded pub with dark wooden paneling, subdued lighting, and a haze of cigarette smoke suspended beneath the ceiling's cedar beams, while sultry R&B droned from the sound system. Teller led the way to a table close by the runway, where a bored-looking brunette was taking off her clothes more or less to the music's beat. Other women moved among the tables wearing sequined G-strings, high heels, and smiles, serving drinks or cruising for tips.

Teller liked the place. He'd spent a lot of pleasant evenings here, though sometimes it was tough to remember everything that had happened the next morning. He glanced over at the bar and took in the framed and autographed poster-sized blow-up of a topless Annabelle Battistella, better known to her fans as Fanne Foxe. Evidently, her notorious late-night swim in the Tidal Basin had given her career a real boost, and she'd commanded top dollar for her dancing at a number of area clubs, including the old Pussycat. A brass plate beneath the portrait read
THE TIDAL BASIN BOMBSHELL
, the
nom d'art
she'd adopted after the Mills incident. Before that, she'd been known as the Argentine Firecracker.