The Last Line (45 page)

“Four hundred kilos?” Teller did a fast calculation. “What is that,” he asked the prisoner, “maybe fifty, fifty-five million dollars on the street?”

“Look, you don't want to mess with this, man! You don't want to mess with
us
!”

“Walthers, you have something to take care of that cargo?”

“Right here, sir.”

“Do it.” Teller leaned over and roughly secured the prisoner's hands with a zip-strip. “Okay. I suggest you stay right there. This won't take a minute.”

Walthers tossed the AK and the handgun into the back of the vehicle, then pulled a gray cylindrical object from his tactical vest. He pulled a circular cotter pin from the top and tossed it in after the weapons.

“Don't look at it,” Teller warned his prisoner.

The AN-M14 incendiary grenade went off with a dazzling flash of TH3—thermite—burning at some 4,000 degrees. Flames licked up inside the back of the van. A few moments later, droplets of molten iron began dripping through the back floor and melting into the SUV's gas tank.

Orange fire blossomed into the night, the fireball roiling above the blazing vehicle.

The prisoner screamed, “No! You've
killed
us, man! You've
killed
us!”

“So what's the deal? You owe that money to someone else? Ah, I see. You owe your supplier something like eight million, but you need to distribute the stuff to pay him back, right? And all of your operating capital just went up in flames. Too bad.”

The man on the ground was sobbing now. “Man, you don't know what they'll
do
to me!”

“Oh, I have a pretty good idea,” Teller said, though he wondered if the sheer bloody viciousness common within the Mexican cartels had worked its way north into the United States yet. “Tell you what. The police will be along in a few minutes. I suggest you tell them everything and have them put you into protective custody.” He looked up. “How's the other one?”

“Dead,” Walthers said.

“Too bad. Well … take it easy, fella.”

“Please don't leave me!”

“Oh, I hardly think your distributors will come looking for you out here. You just wait for the police, okay? They'll help you out.”

“Who are you guys?”
The question was a shriek.

“Actually,” Teller told him with an exaggerated sense of drama, “we're no one at all … and we were never here.”

Moments later, they were airborne once more, leaving the towering pillar of orange flame behind them in the night. Traffic was light, but there were a few vehicles on Route 1, and several were stopping. Just to be sure, though, Dominique put in another call to the county police, and another to the state highway patrol.

“It's not every day you get to burn fifty million bucks,” Walthers said.

“No,” Teller said. He was studying his laptop's screen again. “But we couldn't do much else. Couldn't admit how we found it. And I sure as hell didn't want to let that carload of shit go!”

“Think the police will figure out what happened?” Dominique asked, switching off her phone.

“They'll find cocaine residue in the wreckage,” Teller said. “Probably even intact bricks, the ones in the front wheel wells. They'll probably release an official story saying a rival drug gang did it. In any case, I don't think they'll ask too many questions. When that guy tells them he got pulled over by a black unmarked helicopter … well, that might warn them off.”

“But we didn't find the bomb,” Walthers said. “Where next?”

Teller pecked out some more characters on the keyboard. He shook his head, then turned the display for the others to see. “I think we're too late to catch them,” he said. “Too many choices.”

Something like three and a half hours had elapsed since the weapon had come ashore. The data, fed into Highway Tracker, showed a vast bright red octopus spreading tentacles across northern Maryland, some of them already pushing through the city of Baltimore, others stretching around to the west.

“We can't assume that the bad guys stayed on the main highways, like 1 or 95. Back on the Eastern Shore, there weren't that many different routes. On this side of Chesapeake Bay, and south of the Susquehanna … well, take a look.
Lots
of choices.”

“And not enough of us,” Walthers said, looking at the screen.

“We can't just give up!” Dominique said.

“No. No, we can't. But I think we need to move in closer to the target and give some thought to just exactly what it is they're after.”

Banking sharply, the Super Stallion turned south, heading for the vast yellow glow of Baltimore's lights spreading across the horizon.

REYSHAHRI

BUSINESS ROUTE 1

BEL AIR, MARYLAND

0525 HOURS, EDT

“Where the hell are we?” Gallardo demanded in English.

“Just outside the National Security Agency,” Reyshahri replied. “The NSA. It's back there on the other side of those trees.”

“Maybe we should detonate here,” Moslehi said, driving. “It would end our traffic problems, at least.” He suddenly tromped on the brake as a red car cut sharply in front of them. “Abortion!” he shouted in Farsi, shaking his fist.

“Gently, my friend,” Reyshahri said. “We do not want an … altercation. Or a traffic accident.”

Traffic had been very bad for the past half hour, as more and more cars crowded onto the early-morning expressways. After they worked their way slowly across the Maryland countryside north of Baltimore, Reyshahri had agreed at last to merge with the Baltimore Beltway; all roads, it seemed, led to Baltimore—at least in northern Maryland.

Reyshahri's concerns about traveling on major freeways appeared to have been unfounded. The smaller, one-lane country roads were treacherous in and of themselves, not because American military or law enforcement personnel were patrolling them, but because it was so easy to take a wrong turn and end up lost. Fortunately, the major highways north and west of Baltimore weren't as bad as he'd feared they would be.

Swinging around to the south of the city, then, they'd taken the exit for 295, the Baltimore–Washington Parkway. Now they were passing the cloverleaf with Route 32, Fort Meade, and the site of the supersecret NSA—though they'd just passed a brown and white exit sign saying
NSA, EMPLOYEES ONLY.

“The NSA,” Hamadi said, grinning from the backseat. “
That
would be a worthy target!”

“And how would that help our cause?” Gallardo asked. “Destroying a spy's nest will not destroy the United States.”

“Always
your
cause,” Hamadi said, sneering. “It would be enough to strike at the Great Satan and singe his beard!”

“Señor Gallardo is right,” Reyshahri said. “Our target is the American capital.”

“I still question whether attacking Washington will help our … allies in Mexico,” Moslehi said. “Destroying a few hundred buildings, killing a few million people—how will it help your Aztlán?”

“We're an hour away from the downtown,” Reyshahri told them. “Wait, be patient, and we will see.”

“An hour
if
we get through this damnable traffic!” Gallardo said. “Where is it all coming from?”

“It is something,” Reyshahri told him, “called ‘the morning rush hour.' We'll get through it. You'll see.”

Moslehi had to step on the brakes more and more often, though, and soon their pace had been slowed to a crawl, as red taillights flared and flashed in front of them.

INSCOM HQ

FORT BELVOIR, VIRGINIA

0540 HOURS, EDT

“A fresh report from Arclight,” MacDonald said. Arclight was the name of the naval operation to secure the Kilo submarine off the Delaware coast and to find the nuclear weapon on board intended for New York City. “After a careful search, they have not found the nuclear weapon.”

“What, you're sure?” Larson demanded.

For answer, MacDonald held up her phone, on which a text message showed. “You want to argue with them?”

“No … no. But it makes no sense.”

“I think it does,” Procario said. “Think of it like this. The Kilo—which is under contract to a drug cartel, but crewed and skippered by Russians—is approaching the beach to drop off the first weapon, okay? But then they find out the
Pittsburgh
is hot on their trail. What do they do?”

“Drop off
both
weapons,” Granger said. “That way they're not caught red-handed.”

“Right. Besides, those Russian sailors aren't being paid enough to go up in a nuclear fireball—and probably don't want anything except for the job to be over so they can all go home.” He grinned. “It's
so
hard to get good help these days.”

“So the question becomes whether the two weapons are together, or if one got put on a separate car and is heading for New York.”

“The defense of New York City,” Granger said, “is the responsibility of the local NEST headquarters. Because Manhattan is an island, it'll be a little easier to protect. NEST and police are already screening all traffic at all of the bridges and tunnels.” He gave a wry smile. “I gather rush hour is turning out to be a bitch up there.”

MacDonald typed at a keyboard, and the wall display behind her lit up with a satellite photo-map of Washington, D.C., the hub of a vast wheel with dozens of spokes converging on it. Green icons clustered around the city about where the D.C. Beltway was, an attempt at putting up a barrier against incoming traffic.

The barrier was woefully inadequate, showing far too many gaps and spaces.

“Our problem in D.C. is a bit tougher,” she said. “They may be approaching the Beltway on one of the main highways—95, 270, 197—but we don't know. There are lots of smaller streets and roads, unlike the approaches to New York City. And once they reach the Beltway they have literally hundreds of streets to choose from. We can't possibly cover them all.”

“Then we pray we get real lucky,” Granger said. “Because we don't have many fucking options here.”

NEST 2/2

OVER GREENBELT, MARYLAND

0610 HOURS, EDT

“My God,” Teller said, looking out one of the Super Stallion's windows. “What a nightmare.”

Dawn would break over the D.C. area in another twelve minutes, but from fifteen hundred feet up the sun was already beginning to nudge above the horizon, filling the eastern sky with light while the land below was still in gray shadow. Teller was watching the endless river of red taillights below as cars nosed ahead bumper to bumper on the Baltimore–Washington Parkway, filling every lane, barely making any progress at all.

“The good news,” Dominique observed, “is that the bad guys might not be able to reach their target.”

“Targets,” Walthers reminded them. Teller had received a call from Procario moments before, alerting them to the fact that a search of the Russian Kilo had turned up nothing, and that the presumption now was that both nuclear weapons were somewhere in that gridlocked mass of traffic below.

Teller grunted. “Targets. What I'm afraid of is that the bastards will decide to trigger the warheads because they know they're stuck.
Worst
case of road rage ever.”

“You think they might do that, Chris?” Dominique asked.

Teller frowned. “No, actually. A hell of a lot of thought went into this operation, y'know? They will have particular targets in mind—probably a menu—and they won't change the plan unless they're absolutely forced to do so.”

“Okay, people,” Walthers said. “We're making another pass.”

For hours, the Super Stallion had been swooping over the lines of traffic below, using Z-backscatter to scan vehicle after vehicle. They'd checked hundreds of vehicles already and turned up nothing. Eventually, they'd gone back up to 12,000 feet and refueled from an airborne tanker out of Edwards, then returned to the search, checking hundreds more.

There still were thousands,
tens
of thousands, left to go.

“So how do we figure out what's on their menu?” Dominique asked. “I'm not very good at reading minds.”

“Let's look at everything we know about the enemy's plan,” Teller said. “It's called Operation Shah Mat, which means ‘the king is thwarted' in Farsi. Checkmate. It may have originated with Iran—brought to Mexico by their agent Pasha—but the Mexican cartels are providing a lot of the muscle. The whole thing is linked to the Aztlán independence movement—people who want to create a new country carved out of the U.S. Southwest. We can assume the drug cartels want to bring that about to provide themselves with a safe haven—no laws against drugs. The Iranian motives are less clear, especially since they stand to lose so much by attacking us with nukes.”

“That actually seems pretty clear to me,” Dominique told him. “You figured it out on our drive out to Ocean City yesterday, remember?”

Teller thought for a moment. “No.” He was, he realized, exhausted. How long had it been since he'd last slept?

“If the United States is badly destabilized first by the attack itself, then by what amounts to a civil war in the West, they have a free hand in places like Syria and Iraq.”

“Oh … right. I wasn't convinced. That was just me grasping at straws.”

“But it makes sense. The Iranians want us out of the Mideast, and a second American civil war would give them the diversion they need.”

“For some very ambitious empire building,” Teller added, nodding. “A damned dangerous game—but they did set things up to blame al Qaeda, whom they hate anyway. Larson's ‘reliable informant' in Pakistan. De la Paz, who tried to convince us it was all an al Qaeda plot against Mexico. Yeah…”