The Last Line (6 page)

“The picture is always changing,” Larson said. “Shifting alliances, blood feuds, betrayals. Gangs go extinct. New gangs arise from the ashes. The Beltrán Leyva brothers used to be allies of Sinaloa, but since 2010 they've been cozy with Los Zetas. La Familia used to be part of the Gulf Cartel and allied with Los Zetas, but then they switched sides. We think they're pretty much out of the picture, now, but an offshoot gang, Los Caballeros Templarios, the Knights Templar, is picking up the pieces now. They have an armed subgroup that calls itself La Resistencia, claims they're ready to fight and die for social justice.”

“So they're revolutionaries?” Procario asked. “Political?”

“When you can buy and sell politicians, judges, police, and military personnel like candy,” Chavez pointed out, “they're
all
fucking political.

“The two most powerful cartels are still Sinaloa and Los Zetas. Los Zetas started off as a gang of Mexican elite Special Forces, el Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzos Especiales. GAFE.” He pronounced the acronym to rhyme with “café.” “Superbly trained by U.S. Special Forces. Thirty of them deserted in '99 to form a private mercenary army for the Gulf Cartel, but in 2010 they went freelance. Today they include GAFE deserters, corrupt federal, state, and local police officers, and Guatemalan Kaibiles.”

Teller whistled softly. The Kaibiles were another elite Special Forces branch, trained in jungle warfare and counterinsurgency operations.

“The Zetas have pretty much taken over all of the old Gulf Cartel territory,” Larson said. “Their big nemesis has always been the Sinaloa Cartel.”

“Sinaloa is the really big, bad boy down there,” Chavez told them. “At least we think that's the case. It got started all the way back in 1989, when the old Colombian cartels started falling apart. For a while, it was known as ‘the Federation,' until the Beltrán Leyva Cartel broke away and set up shop for themselves. We estimate that Sinaloa alone has brought two hundred fifty tons of cocaine across into the United States between 1990 and 2012. God knows how much heroin and marijuana.”

“What you're saying,” Teller said, “is that all of these alliances and feuds down there keep changing the picture, and now you can't even see what the picture is.”

“Exactly. The drug gangs started picking off our agents a couple of months ago. Right now, we have
no
active agents on the ground in Mexico, and we've recalled our last four case officers because we think Nicholas compromised them.”

“He fucking blew their covers,” Wentworth said, “and now we're deaf, blind, and stupid down there.”

Within the Central Intelligence Agency, an agent was a local person recruited to spy for the CIA. A case officer, on the other hand, was an American employed by the Agency to recruit and “run” agents from the local population.

“So you're looking to rebuild your Mexican network,” Procario said.

“Yes,” Larson said, “but there is a … complication.” He looked at Wentworth, who nodded.

“We were tracking a possible Trapdoor package to the Yucatán,” he said.

“Jesus!” Teller said. “Confirmed?”

“No,” Larson admitted. “Not confirmed. But we're ninety percent on it.”

“Dave is with WINPAC,” Wentworth explained.

WINPAC was the CIA's Weapons, Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center, a department under the Directorate of Intelligence concerned with monitoring nuclear weapons and the threat they posed to the United States. “Trapdoor,” Teller knew, was a code name for loose nukes—atomic weapons or nuclear materials that had gone missing, particularly during the break-up of the Soviet Union and in the chaotic aftermath of civil war, breakaway republics, and Muslim unrest during the nineties.

“We believe,” Larson continued, “that two of Lebed's missing suitcases were purchased in 2011 for twelve million dollars—a real bargain. Informants placed them in Karachi this past February. We were attempting to organize a strike force to go in and neutralize them. Unfortunately, they disappeared.”

Teller felt a cold chill sweep up the back of his neck. This was nightmare stuff. Lebed was Russian general Alexander Lebed, who'd announced to the world in 1997 that 132 so-called suitcase nukes produced for the KGB were unaccounted for and might be headed for the open market. There were plenty of groups and governments in the world who would like to acquire one or more of the devices and become an overnight nuclear power.

“Disappeared? How?”

Larson shrugged. “We're talking about two devices about yea big.” He held up his hands three feet apart, indicating something the size of a large briefcase. “Fifty, maybe sixty pounds each. Karachi is a very busy port, the Pakistanis don't particularly like us right now, and not all of the ships there are well documented. We thought the weapons were on board a Syrian freighter, the
Qahir.
Navy SEALs deploying out of Diego Garcia intercepted the
Qahir
in the western Indian Ocean and performed a VBSS. They came up empty-handed.”

VBSS was the military acronym for “visit, board, search, and seizure.” Teller wondered how that one had been covered up, since he hadn't heard anything about it either on the news or through official channels. Possibly the State Department had been working overtime smoothing things over back-channel, convincing the Syrians that it was in their best interests to help find two missing nuclear weapons. Or possibly the
Qahir
had simply been reported as lost at sea. Those waters were well known to be the hunting grounds for pirates, and dangerous.

“So we went back to the drawing board,” Larson continued. He tapped on the tabletop, bringing up fifteen photographs of different ships. “All of these vessels were reported as departing from Karachi during the last week in March, the time period when we thought the weapons left Pakistan. We were also following up rumors that the ISI had stepped in and secured the devices for themselves.” Inter-Services Intelligence, the ISI, was Pakistan's equivalent of the CIA. “The destinations of those ships were scattered all over the world—Jakarta, Sidney, Los Angeles, Southampton, New York. Most of them had multiple ports of call, which complicated things. We focused on the ones heading for U.S. ports, of course. Nothing.”

“So we're back to square one,” Chavez said. One of the ship photographs enlarged as the others disappeared from the screen. She was an ancient freighter, rust streaked and decrepit. “One of the vessels on our list was a small tramp, the
Zapoteca.
Liberian flagged, but owned by Manzanillo Internacional, a Mexican import-export company. We got curious because Karachi is a long way outside her usual range.”

A box of stats opened alongside the photograph, and Teller skimmed down through the information quickly. The
Zapoteca
displaced 1,800 tons, was 252 feet long at the waterline, and had a beam of just over 40 feet. She was single screw; her power plant was a Burmeister & Wain Alpha 10-cycle diesel delivering 1,200 horsepower. She had a range of 3,000 nautical miles at 12 knots and usually carried a complement of ten men. She'd been launched in 1951 by Frederikshavn Vaerft & Terdok; originally she'd been Danish. She'd been sold to Colombia in 1985, then sold again to Manzanillo Internacional in 1996.

Interesting.

“Colombia, then Mexico,” Teller said. He exchanged a glance with Procario. “The cartels?”

Procario nodded.

“We checked that,” Wentworth said. “The corporations owning the
Zapoteca,
both in Colombia and in Mexico, are legit.”

“But mostly she stuck to a coastal run between Barranquilla and either Veracruz or Tampico,” Chavez pointed out. “That's just fifteen hundred nautical miles—say, five or six days at twelve knots. But from Karachi? She'd have to take it in two- and three-thousand-mile legs, refueling along the way. That's over thirteen thousand nautical miles and forty-five days, not counting the time spent in each port.”

“Maybe they were on a horse run,” Procario suggested. “Might be worth it. A hell of a lot of heroin comes out of Afghanistan by way of Karachi.”

“That was a possibility,” Larson said, “but unlikely. The Mexican cartels produce their own heroin in northern Mexico. Why send one ship halfway around the world for a few more tons of the stuff? So we began wondering what the
Zapoteca
might be carrying besides drugs, especially when she didn't show up at Veracruz like she was supposed to. We began a rather intense and thorough search with our NRO assets.” Part of the DoD, the NRO—the National Reconnaissance Office—was one of the sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies. Headquartered in Chantilly, Virginia, it designed, built, and operated America's spy satellites. Larson moved his fingers over the interactive tabletop and brought up a new photograph. It had been shot obliquely from overhead, from high up and off the vessel's port stern. Enlarged, the level of resolution and crisp detail was astonishing. You could see coils of rope on the deck, streaks of rust down her side, and crewmen going about their work. One man in blue jeans and a T-shirt appeared to be leaning against the railing along the fantail, balanced somewhat precariously. The resolution was good enough to show his head and what might have been a beard, but not quite sharp enough to show facial features.

“What's that one doing?” Teller asked, pointing.

Chavez grinned. “Taking a piss.”

Sure enough, Teller could just make out the man's hands, folded together below where his belt buckle might be.

The gesture was so completely human that Teller smiled. The CIA, in his opinion, relied entirely too much on what it referred to as its technological assets—looking at satellite imagery and listening in on cell phone intercepts. Satellites were good if you were tracking tanks or army movements or even individual ships, but they rarely helped you track individual people or figure out exactly what they were doing. You couldn't get inside a person's head with a satellite.

Lines of type at the lower right of the image gave the date and time: 09 April, 1827 hours GMT, just six days ago. Below that were the vessel's coordinates: 16°45'30.80" N; 82°54'34.69" W.

“The ship's position when this was taken was about three hundred forty miles east of Belize City,” Chavez said. “The
Zapoteca
appeared to be on course for Belize at the time, not Veracruz.”

“Veracruz is on the other side of the Yucatán Peninsula.” Larson said.

“I know how to read a map,” Teller said. “Why Belize?”

“That's what we wondered,” Wentworth said. “We told Fletcher to send a couple of agents down there and check it out.”

“And then they disappeared,” Procario said.

Wentworth closed his eyes, then opened them again. “In a manner of speaking. On the eleventh,
this
arrived at our Mexican embassy.”

The satellite image of the
Zapoteca
was replaced by another photograph. For a moment, Teller's mind refused to register exactly what it was he was looking at. The photo was a bit blurry—probably shot with a cell phone camera—but it showed a desktop, an open cardboard box, and a lot of partially crumpled newspaper.

Inside the box was the grim reality that Teller, as he stared at it in increasing horror, only reluctantly began to accept.

It was a man's head, but horribly mutilated. The ears, the nose, the eyes, all were missing, and the skin, sliced randomly here and there as if by a scalpel, was caked with blood. Black, blood-matted hair was visible, and a black mustache. Below this last was an
x-x-x
pattern of what looked like leather cord sealing shut a bulging, bloody mouth.

“His mouth.” Procario began. “What—”

“His penis was stuffed inside, and the lips sewn shut,” Wentworth said, his voice utterly drained of any emotion.

“Henrico Javier Ferrari Garcia de Alba,” Chavez said, grim. “There was a right forefinger inside the box along with the head, so we were able to get a positive ID from the print. The bastards
wanted
us to know. Recruited by Fletcher himself last year. A member of the Mexican
federales,
the federal police, and something of a campaigner for government reform. He told us he was sick to death of government and police corruption and let himself be recruited so he could fight back. We got a lot of good information from him about high-ranking politicians and military personnel who were owned by the cartels. Forty-one years old. College educated, Universidad de México. Accomplished violinist; wanted to be a professional musician but ended up with the police instead. He … he had a wife and three kids. Fletcher wasn't able to find any of them after this—their house in San Mateo showed signs of a struggle—and we think they may have been abducted as well.”

“The other agent was Agustín Morales Galvan,” Wentworth added. “No sign of him at all … at least, not yet. Their last report was from Corozal on the tenth. That's a town on the Yucatán east coast, about eighty miles north of Belize City.”

“So,” Teller said, “Galen sent those two to Belize to check on the arrival of the
Zapoteca,
and both of them disappeared.”

“We have to assume the cartel enforcers got them,” Chavez said.

“Which cartel?” Teller asked. He looked at the map of drug cartel territories, still partially visible as a kind of wallpaper behind the photo of the severed head. The Yucatán was highlighted in blue. “Los Zetas?”

“Actually, we're not sure,” Chavez said. He touched the tabletop, and the nightmarish photograph mercifully disappeared. “That's Los Zetas territory, yeah—but there's a chance, a fairly good one, we think, that Los Zetas and Sinaloa have buried the hatchet and are now working together.”

A black-and-white surveillance photo came up on the screen, next to Mexico City on the map. Four men stood on a city sidewalk, apparently getting into a car. “This was taken a month ago. The one on the right, behind the open door—that's Carlos Guevara Alvarez, one of the top lieutenants in Los Zetas. The one next to him, holding the door open, is Ernesto Mendoza Flores, a high-ranking member of Sinaloa who specializes in smuggling both drugs and people into Arizona and New Mexico. The one in the back, he's Hector Gallardo, and he's important—the chief lieutenant, aide, whatever you want to call him of one of the
real
big fish. Joaquín ‘El Chapo' Guzmán. Head of Sinaloa Cartel, and by conservative estimates now with a personal worth of around one billion dollars.
Forbes
magazine listed him as the nine hundred thirty-seventh richest man in the world—and the sixtieth most powerful.”