The Last Line (35 page)

“And you really believe these people?” JJ Wentworth said, making a face. “This drug trafficker, Barrón, especially. You claim he just told you all of this … what, out of the goodness of his heart?”

Teller exchanged a glance with Procario. The two of them were in one of Langley's palatial electronic briefing rooms, together with Wentworth, Larson, and an assistant Ops director named Charles Vanderkamp. Dominique had mentioned that he was her department head—and the guy who'd sided with de la Cruz about pulling her out of Mexico.

Dominique was elsewhere in the building—Teller wasn't sure where—and he wondered why Vanderkamp was
here
rather than talking to her. Enrico Barrón, Maria Perez, and Captain Marcetti and his people all had gotten off the plane at Eglin. Barrón, as promised, had been turned over to the federal marshals, along with Perez, who'd been put in protective custody. Both of them would be wanted for more questioning before this thing played out.

Also put off the plane at Eglin had been the body bag containing Randolph Patterson.

“It wasn't out of the goodness of his heart,” Teller replied evenly. “The guy was scared shitless.”

“You used emotional torture on him,” Vanderkamp said. “In doing so, you two broke a number of regulations, though, since you're not with the Agency, we're not certain yet of where you stand legally in all of this.”

“Barrón was willing to tell you anything to keep from being sent back to Mexico City,” Wentworth said. “His testimony cannot be independently verified.”

“Since you two deployed to Mexico,” Larson told them, “we've developed new information. A reliable informant in Pakistan has told us that those stolen nukes are, in fact, in the hands of al Qaeda—just as we suspected all along.”

“You guys are fixated on al Qaeda,” Procario said. “There
are
other threats in the world, you know.”

“As I told you once before,” Larson said with an almost sorrowful shake of the head, “al Qaeda has been our chief suspect all along. They have been too weak and divided since the Abbottabad assault to manage normal operations—but we believe that if they do have nuclear weapons they will attempt to deploy them against us, for reasons of revenge if nothing else.”

“Have you given any thought at all,” Teller asked, “to the possibility that someone is employing disinformation here? Trying to make you look for al Qaeda when in fact it's the Iranians.”

Wentworth laughed. “Why would Iran be trying to smuggle nukes into the country? They hate al Qaeda, and they know what would happen to them if they attacked us.”

“Maybe that's why they're trying to put the blame on al Qaeda, a little thing called ‘false flag'—we've done it a time or two ourselves,” Teller said, exasperated. “Look, did you guys get anything out of the Cellmap data? Some of those contacts must be talking about smuggled nukes, or Iranian agents … or something called Operation Shah Mat.”

“Mm, yes,” Wentworth said. “The new system has been sending back a great deal of data … a very great deal. Look at this.”

He tapped out an entry on the glass tabletop in front of him, and both the table and the wall-sized display screen behind him brought up a map of the United States. Blue dots were everywhere, clustered in major cities and especially thick in the American Southwest. There were also dense concentrations in D.C. and New York and in most of the other Eastern seaboard cities, stretching from Tampa, Florida, to Portland, Maine.

Larson placed his thumb and forefinger on the tabletop and moved them together, zooming out from the map until it included Mexico as well—also awash in blue splotches.

“Every one of those is a cell phone on your Cellmap network,” Larson said. “Over fifty thousand in the United States, at last count. At least that many more in Mexico, and more and more coming onto the network all the time. We simply do not have the manpower or the computer power to trace every one of those targets, identify them all, and we certainly can't eavesdrop on their conversations.”

“That shouldn't be that hard,” Teller said. “They can run keyword intercepts easily enough.”

“We would need to enlist the Puzzle Palace computer center to process the data on that scale,” Wentworth said, “and that, I fear, is going to take time. More time than we have.”

“The Puzzle Palace” was an insider's nickname for the National Security Agency. The NSA, America's electronic and signals-intercept intelligence agency, possessed over a dozen acres of supercomputer hardware beneath its headquarters building and at its Tordella Supercomputer Facility, both at Fort Meade, Maryland.

“Time? They have enough computer hardware to crack just about anything,” Procario said. “And a keyword intercept would be easy to set up for this. ‘Nuclear weapon,' ‘Shah Mat,' ‘bomb,' ‘destroy Washington,' that sort of thing.”

Keyword intercepts had been in use since the 1980s, when intelligence agencies had discovered that you could turn an ordinary telephone into a covert listening device without even having to plant a bug or have the telephone connection open. A sufficiently powerful computer with word-recognition software could quietly sit at Fort Meade, mindlessly listening to tens of thousands of telephone conversations at a time, and only yell for human help if it caught certain words.

“The NSA gets something like six hundred and fifty million electronic intercepts per
day,
” Larson said. “And the NSA does not play well with others.
Their
priorities will be taken care of first.”

“I should also remind you that it's illegal for the NSA to eavesdrop on American citizens,” Wentworth said. “Technically, it's illegal for any of us—but there
are
ways around the roadblocks, of course. Even so, the NSA is simply not going to get involved in something that will take so much computer time and not have some sort of a payoff for them in return.”

“That's crazy,” Teller said. “We're talking about someone detonating a couple of nukes, one in Washington and one in New York!”

“That has not been independently confirmed,” Vanderkamp said. “Our information now is that those suitcase nukes are still in Pakistan. They were never put on board the
Zapoteca.
”

“What about the seaman I talked to in Chetumal?” Teller asked. “He told me there were two crates, each seventy-five or eighty pounds … about right for Lebed's missing nukes.”

“I saw your report,” Wentworth said. “As before, we have no confirmation. Those could easily have been precursor chemicals for the manufacture of methamphetamines or heroin.”

“If you hadn't fucking pulled the plug on the ISA team down there,” Procario said, furious, “you could have gotten rad counters on board the
Zapoteca
! Maybe
that
would have given you your damned confirmation!”

“We pulled the ISA team because we had reason to believe the nukes were not on board, in fact had never been on board … and because the assaults at Chetumal and at Cerros together caused a major international incident. If they'd stormed a Mexican ship in a Mexican port it would have been
much
worse.”

“Which brings us to the main reason we asked you to come in to see us today,” Wentworth said. “You've managed to piss off quite a few people here—not to mention your boss at INSCOM.”

“MacDonald?”

“Colonel MacDonald, yes. It seems you didn't request formal permission to leave the country.”

“I thought you people took care of that! We were working for you.”

“And we thought
you
had taken care of it.” Wentworth smiled. “Our various agencies try to work together, but we must observe the rules, you know. Otherwise it all collapses into chaos.”

“But we're getting a hell of a lot of flack now,” Vanderkamp said, “from the president's office on down. Gunfights in the streets. Explosions. Fires. Pitched battles. You two managed to turn Mexico City and a couple of other places down there into war zones.”

“I should point out, gentlemen,” Procario said, “that right now Mexico
is
a war zone. Gunfights in the streets? Nothing new there. Last I heard something like forty thousand people had been killed in Mexico's drug war just since 2006, including a lot of innocent bystanders. We carried out our mission, killed a few narcoterrorists, captured a prisoner, and brought home some important intel. We
survived
the war zone. We didn't create it.”

“Speaking of that prisoner,” Wentworth said, “you did not properly extradite him. That was kidnapping. And the Perez woman did not have a passport and must be considered to be an illegal immigrant. There are going to be serious charges in this—”

“Serious charges!” Teller flew up out of his seat. “What
should
we have done, turned Barrón over to CISEN? Killed him ourselves?”

“Sit
down
, Captain Teller,” Wentworth said, cold.

“I will
not
! We did what you people wanted us to do—bailed your asses out by giving you new eyes on the ground and a tool to patch things along until you could reestablish your Mexican network. Now you tell us you can't use the tool, and you're going to charge us with human trafficking!
What the fuck is going on here?
”

“Let's just sit down and take it easy,” Larson said, moving his hands in gentle “calm down” motions. “We're not charging you with human trafficking … or anything else,
if
you cooperate with us.”

Reluctantly, Teller took his seat once more. He was angry. “We are not going to quietly let you hang us out to dry,” he said. He muttered something else under his breath.

“What was that?” Larson asked.

“Fucking Klingons,” Teller replied. He made a brushing motion with his hand. “Never mind. Inside joke.”

Procario put his hand on Teller's arm, restraining him.

“What is it you want from us?” Procario asked.

“Your final after-actions,” Wentworth said, “will not mention the interview with that seaman off the
Zapoteca
or the interrogation of Enrico Barrón. You two went beyond your authority there. Well, mistakes were made, as they say. You may have misinterpreted our instructions.”

“There is no evidence that stolen nuclear weapons are being smuggled into the United States,” Larson added, “or that the drug cartels are somehow aiding and abetting such a plot.”

“You also mentioned several other names,” Wentworth said. “Reyshahri, an Iranian VEVAK agent. A Hezbollah operative named Hamadi. Iranian and Hezbollah involvement in Mexico is … debatable. Your report will not mention them.”

“What about Yussef Nadir Suwayd?” Teller asked.

“I beg your pardon … who?”

“Jackie Dominique learned about him from de la Cruz. He was going by the name Pablo Tomás, but the CISEN files identified him as a Hezbollah agent. He was one of the guys who attacked us in the Estrella Hotel. You could ID him from the cell phone pics I sent you.”

Wentworth smiled. “I thought you said de la Cruz's information could not be trusted?”

“It can't, but I believe him on that one.”

“Why?”

“Because it contradicted his party line—that al Qaeda is trying to smuggle nukes into Mexico, maybe as some sort of extortion attempt against the Mexican government. That story is totally nuts, but he clearly didn't know that al Qaeda and Hezbollah hate each other
almost
as much as they hate Israel—or us.”

“If he'd made it up,” Procario said, “you would expect him to have done his research, to get it right. We think he was misinterpreting data they really did have in their files, not making it up.”

“I don't buy it,” Vanderkamp said with a shrug. “The information could have been mistaken either way.”

“No, but it sets a strong probability,” Teller said. “Intelligence work always deals with probabilities, not certainties.”

“That may be,” Wentworth said. “But I have
this
certainty for you. You two will submit your after-action reports to us for editing, and show them to no one else.
No
one. We're classifying all of this material, and you will not reveal it to anyone else, and that specifically includes INSCOM. There are political ramifications here that you are not aware of.”

Teller looked at Procario. “Thought so. It's a hatchet job.”

“I beg your pardon?” Vanderkamp asked.

“Somehow, the intelligence we developed in Mexico has become … inconvenient. You're trying to bury it.”

“We are trying,” Wentworth said, “to prevent a … call it a public relations disaster of unprecedented proportions. The president is trying to calm public fears, public backlash against Latinos in the United States. These … these wild tales of Mexican drug lords working with Iranians to smuggle nuclear weapons—they're tossing gasoline on the fire.”

“Five men of Latino descent,” Vanderkamp said, “were lynched in Chicago last night. A private militia in Idaho has threatened to shoot any Latino they see on sight. Mobs have started fighting each other in Los Angeles—black, white, Latino, Asian. They're at each other's throats right now over this Aztlán thing.”

“We're not trying to bury your intel,” Larson said. “We've analyzed it and concluded that the scenario it suggests is so extremely unlikely, it must be mistaken. And if any part of it were to become public … well, that could have extraordinarily serious ramifications.”

“You know,” Teller said, “there's an easy solution here. Those weapons are on board a Kilo class submarine currently somewhere off the eastern seaboard.”

Reaching out, he moved his finger and thumb on the tabletop map, zooming in with sharp clarity to a stretch of beach along Virginia's east coast. Created from aerial reconnaissance photos, the map showed exquisite detail—houses, swimming pools, cars on the roads, and the white turbulence of waves breaking along the shore.