The Last Line (7 page)

“So if a senior Guzmán aide is hanging out with Alvarez,” Wentworth said, “then there's got to be a truce on, and a pretty solid one.”

“And the fourth man?” Teller asked. “He doesn't look Mexican. More Middle Eastern, I'd say.”

“
That
is the one who really worries us,” Chavez said. “You're right. He's not Hispanic. He's Persian. His name is Saeed Reyshahri. He's Republican Guard and probably VEVAK. Until recently he was an Iranian adviser with Hezbollah in Syria.”

“What the fuck are the Iranians doing in Mexico?” Procario demanded.

“That's what we would like to know,” Larson said, “very, very badly. We've known for several years that Hezbollah has people in Mexico working with the cartels—and Hezbollah, of course, has ties to Iran. We have the Mexican state in virtual anarchy, the possibility that a couple of small nukes have arrived in Belize on board a Mexican freighter with cartel ties, and now a VEVAK agent turns up in Mexico City with high-ranking members of Mexico's two largest and most vicious drug cartels. That's not good.”

“And right at that moment,” Chavez added, “someone pulls the plug and our Mexican network goes down. It's not exactly a good time to be in the dark.”

“Can you explain to me,” Teller said, “what Hezbollah's interest in Mexico might be?” He spoke quietly, his voice and manner wooden. His emotions were still churning after the sight of the severed head, and he was having trouble controlling them.

Wentworth shrugged. “We've known they've been there for several years,” he said. “Mostly, they seem to be using the cartel smuggling networks—especially Sinaloa—to bring their own drugs across the border into the U.S. in order to finance their operations in the Middle East. But they're moving people across as well.”

“The cartels,” Chavez added, “don't just bring drugs into the country. Over the last decade, they've been more and more involved in smuggling illegals across the border as well. The operators are called coyotes, and it's pretty lucrative for them. They bring in between eighteen hundred and twenty-five hundred dollars per person, and lots of times they manage to extort more from the families. Sometimes a
lot
more, usually by locking up the illegals once they're in the States and threatening to torture or kill them. Since they have well-established conduits—a network of underground railways—Hezbollah has been using them to move its own drugs and undocumented people across as well.”

“So we need to find out what a known VEVAK agent is doing here, too,” Procario said.

“Our
first
order of business,” Larson said, “is to get our Mexican intelligence network up and running again. Then we need to find out if someone—possibly one of the cartels—has just smuggled a couple of small nuclear weapons into Mexico.”

“Los Zetas with nuclear weapons,” Wentworth said. “It doesn't bear thinking about.”

“Maybe it's not the cartels bringing in the nukes,” Teller said. “Maybe it's the Iranians.”

“I don't buy it,” Larson said, shaking his head. “If Iran got caught playing those kinds of games, some major Armageddon would come down on their turbans, and they know it. They're not going to risk all-out retaliation over a couple of pocket nukes.”

“Just how big a nuclear device are we talking about?” Teller asked. “I thought suitcase nukes were pretty small. What, five or six kilotons?”

“If they're based on Russian RA-115s, yeah. Sixty-five pounds for the device, three- to five-kiloton yield, or thereabouts. That's less than a third the yield of the device that flattened Hiroshima, but it's more than enough to wreck the downtown area of a major American city. They might also be built from old Soviet nuclear artillery shells. Those have smaller yields—half a kiloton up to about two kilotons. Still nasty.”

“So what does a Mexican drug cartel want with a pocket nuke?” Procario asked.

“Extortion, most likely,” Chavez replied. “All of the cartels have been under a lot of pressure lately, both from the Mexican government and from the U.S., the FBI and DEA. All of the cartels have a history of killing people they perceive as enemies in spectacularly bloody and public ways in order to send a message. ‘Back off, or this'll happen to you.' They might well threaten to nuke downtown Mexico City if the government and the army there didn't do what they said.”

“Are we sure Mexico City is the target?” Teller asked.

“No.”

“Because we also have a Shiite terror group and their Iranian sponsors getting cozy with the drug cartels. Maybe
they're
the ones bringing them in. Maybe they're planning on smuggling those bombs across the Mexican border.”

“We've thought of that,” Larson said. “For the past week we've thought of little else. But, like I said, the Iranians aren't stupid. They're not going to let Hezbollah screw things for them, either. We know Hezbollah is in Tehran's pocket. Most of us think it's not Hezbollah behind it, but al Qaeda.”

“Either way,” Wentworth said, “it's not pretty. JJ said you people might have some ideas. If you do, we'd love to hear them.”

Teller exchanged a look with Procario. “Of course we do,” he said. “We've got exactly what you need.”

21ST CENTURY CITY

SANTA MONICA BOULEVARD

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

1002 HOURS, PDT

“Hey, you should lay off that stuff, man,” the driver said, watching the two in the backseat in his rearview mirror.

“Yeah,” the other passenger said. “
Cojones químico.
That's no good, Mannie. We need to be at our best, y'know?”

“I can handle it, man.” He'd sprinkled some white powder from a small plastic bag onto a square of paper.
“Solamente una pizca de blanquito, no más.”
He inhaled the powder through his right nostril, then jerked his head back, crumpling the paper.
“¡Ay! ¡Qué bueno!”

The driver scowled.
“¡Qué malparido!¡Eres un angurri!”

“C'mon, c'mon,” the other passenger told the driver. “He'll be okay. You got our packages?”

“Aquí.”
He handed back two large canvas tote bags, the kind with retail logos on them used by green-conscious shoppers in the United States. Both bags were quite heavy and bulged a bit.

“Wait for us,” the passenger said, taking the bags and handing one to Manuel.
“Diez minutos, Ignacio,”
the driver said.
“No más.”

Ignacio Carballo glanced at his watch, then nodded. “Keep the motor running.”

The two slipped out of the backseat onto the sidewalk and sauntered toward the looming, ultramodern façade of the shopping center, through two sets of glass doors, and into the main interior boulevard of the mall. The air-conditioning was cool and pleasant.

This was an upscale part of the city, between Santa Monica and Beverly Hills. The shoppers, Carballo noticed, tended to be young, bored looking, and well dressed; even the cutoff jeans and T-shirts looked like they'd come with designer labels. He didn't see a single black or Hispanic face, and for just a moment he felt afraid. He and Mannie stood out in the crowd.

They had to get this started
now,
before a guard or a cop challenged them.

Halfway up the lane of shops and boutiques, Carballo pointed to a Starbucks on the other side.
“Allá,”
he said. “Start there.”

“¡Sí! ¡Vámonos a soltarse el pelo, 'mano!”

Carballo shook his head. “Just go! Let's do it!” Manuel Herrera was a good guy, but right now he was flying on that hit of
mosca.
Turning to face back the way he'd come, he reached into his canvas bag with his right hand, removing a baseball-sized steel sphere, a U.S. Army–issue Mk 1 hand grenade. His left hand holding the bag by its carry strap, he hooked his left forefinger through the cotter-pin ring and yanked it free. With his right hand, he flipped the grenade backhand and to the right, sending it clattering into the front of a Frederick's of Hollywood.

Continuing to walk briskly, he pulled another grenade from the bag, yanked the pin, and tossed it into the next shop along, a gift store featuring lots of cut glass ornaments and bric-a-brac. Then to the next shop, counting under his breath.
“… y tres … y quatro … y cinco…”

He heard a shrill scream from somewhere behind him, and in the next instant an explosion thundered from the lingerie shop. Glass windows and splinters from the wooden door frame erupted into the central aisle like a shotgun blast. Opposite, the grenade Manuel had tossed into the Starbucks detonated behind the counter. Glass display cases turned into blast-driven shards, razor sharp and deadly, scything through the cluster of customers waiting for their expensive morning coffee.

More screams, shrill and terrified … and then the next blast went off … and the next … and the next. The shopping mall had become a storm of chaos, blood, and death. People were running in every direction, none of them knowing which way to go, just that they had to
run.
Others lay on the polished tiles of the floor, many of them splattered with blood, their own, or the blood of others. When Carballo glanced back over his shoulder, he saw horror. A young man propelled from a shop, colliding with an elderly woman. An overturned stroller, an infant in pink pajamas squirming on the ground nearby. A woman—the child's mother, perhaps,—lying on her back, eyes staring at the skylights overhead, her face a mask of blood …

Carballo didn't think about it, didn't
let
himself think about it. There was a job to be done. He and Herrera continued to walk down either side of the aisle, tossing grenade after grenade into each shop front as they passed it. Each of them had started with twelve grenades in his bag. Carballo was down to his last three when he saw a mall security cop ahead, running toward him.

Mall cops weren't armed, but they could still be trouble. Without slowing his walk, Carballo reached into his bag, extracted a Mini-Uzi, released the charging handle, and sent a burst of 9 mm rounds slamming into and through the security guard. The Mini-Uzi, a smaller version of its more famous big brother, was less than fifteen inches long with its folding stock removed and weighed less than eight pounds with a full magazine. With a cyclic rate of fire of better than fifteen rounds per second, it sounded like a miniature buzz saw. The security guard flopped backward, arms pinwheeling, and came to rest sprawled across an ornamental tree planter. Carballo turned and loosed the rest of his magazine randomly into a crowd of shrieking people, dropped the empty magazine, and snicked home a new one.

Three more shops, three more grenades. He dropped the now empty canvas bag and strode toward the front entrance. He hoped Mannie was behind him, but he didn't stop to look. Mannie was a big boy and could take care of himself.

As he emerged onto the sidewalk once more, he nearly collided with a a traffic cop in shorts, helmet, and a windbreaker riding a bike. That one wasn't armed either, but Carballo cut him down with a burst from the Mini-Uzi, slamming bike and rider sideways into a brick wall. Other people on the sidewalk shrieked and scattered. Carballo snapped off the rest of his magazine in a quick succession of bursts until the weapon was empty.

More gunfire sounded from inside the mall. It sounded like Mannie was having fun. Kicking up his heels, just like he'd said.

Fuck him.

He reached the idling automobile and yanked open the passenger-side front door.
“Vámanos,”
he said, sliding in.

“What about Mannie?”

Carballo looked at his watch. Nine minutes had passed.
“Un tecado gilún,”
he said. “Leave him!”

As more explosions sounded from the mall, blasting out the glass doors at the entrance, the getaway car sped off down the street.

In the distance, sirens wailed.

 

Chapter Four

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

1318 HOURS, EDT

15 APRIL

“I've never heard of this,” Larson said. “Damn it, why weren't we informed?”

The five men had gone down to one of the OHB's employee cafeterias for lunch. As they ate, they continued to discuss the technological twist Teller and Procario had been describing to them.

“Hey, new stuff is coming out all the time,” Teller told him. “This thing is still in beta, but it would be easy enough to get you guys a copy, let you try it out.”

“So it's like a virus—” Chavez began.

“A very, very smart virus,” Teller said.

“—and it just leaps from phone to phone?”

“Right,” Procario said. “It's called peer-to-peer transmission.”

“And it creates a map of phone use,” Chavez said. “That's … amazing.”

“Hey, welcome to the twenty-first century,” Teller told him. “All the thrills of sci-fi, and outmoded Dark Ages concepts like privacy magically become a thing of the past.”

The system they'd been describing had recently come from a high-technology think tank in Washington, one of dozens of corporate entities in the town feeding information, analyses, tools, and, occasionally, informed guesswork to the policy makers. Teller knew that something similar had already been field tested by the NSA, but the deep-black National Security Agency didn't like to share with anyone.

The software was called Cellmap.

“So how do we deploy it?” Chavez wanted to know.

“We find a cell phone that's part of the net we want to map,” Teller told him. “It would have phone numbers of other contacts. It uses those to locate other phones on the network.”

“Kind of like a computer virus making copies of your e-mail list,” Wentworth suggested.