The Last Line (15 page)

If Jackie was boxing the block, the alley would give him a shortcut, assuming it cut all the way through. If it didn't, he could double back and meet her when she approached her car.

“Hey, Frank?” he murmured.

“Go.” Procario and Chavez were monitoring his wire.

“I think she's boxing the block. I'm cutting through an alley to head her off.”

“Just watch yourself, buddy,” Procario replied in his earpiece.

“Don't worry about that. It looks to me like I'm in the clear.”

Glancing up and down the street and seeing no one, he started across, heading for the narrow and uninviting black slit of the alley.

LA CALLE SUR 145

DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

2257 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

Barrón eased the Chevy van out of the narrow driveway, pulling into the street and turning left. In the passenger seat, Carlos Gutierrez chambered a round in his Browning Hi Power, which had been threaded to accept the long, heavy tube of a sound suppressor. The passenger-side window was already rolled down.

“It's the dark green car,” the voice of his partner said in his ear. “Two back from Escalante's white Chevy.”

“I see it,” Barrón replied. “Wait one.”

He pulled the van up alongside the green Escort and braked to a halt. Gutierrez extended his arm through the window, talking aim with the Hi Power. The driver only had time to turn his head to his left, eyes widening, and then the 9 mm pistol gave a harsh chirp, bucking in the gunman's hand.

Glass crazed and shattered. Gutierrez fired again, then again and again and again, snapping off round after round into the face and neck of the man seated at the Escort's wheel. Blood splattered across the inside of the Escort's windshield as the driver slumped over. Calmly, Gutierrez got out of the van, stepped up to the Escort's driver's side, and reached in with the Hi Power, placing the sound suppressor up against the driver's head just below and behind the ear. He triggered two more shots, then climbed back into the van.

“Amateurs,” Barrón said, and he accelerated the van slowly south down the street.

LA CALLE SUR 143

DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

2301 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

The next street to the west of Sur 145 was, illogically enough, Sur 143. Teller didn't know where Sur 144 might be; the alleys here were far too narrow to have their own names or numbers. At the far end of this one was a wooden fence twelve feet high. He pushed off from an overflowing trash can, caught the top, and chinned himself up and over. This was beginning to look more and more like a damned exercise at the Farm, complete with obstacle course.

“Chris! This is Frank!” He sounded worried.

“Go ahead.”

“Trouble. A van just pulled alongside the green car. Guy in the passenger seat just killed the woman's partner.”

“Shit. How?”

“Professional-style hit—handgun with a sound suppressor. The van took off south, but it turned right at the next intersection.”

Down the street Jacqueline Dominique had taken. “Okay. I'm on it.”

“Be careful, Chris. Someone made them.”

“Right.”

Obviously, someone had been watching the Perez house and noticed Jackie going up on the porch. She and her partner had been burned, as tradecraft slang so succinctly put it.

Ahead, the narrow alley opened onto Sur 143, the next street to the west. Teller reached the sidewalk and saw Dominique off to his left, just rounding the corner. She was still a good thirty yards away.

He was about to step out and flag her down when a pale gray van came around the corner behind her, lights glaring in the night. The sliding cargo door on the vehicle's right side was open, a man crouching inside. As the van screeched to a halt, Dominique turned, but the man in the back had already leaped onto the sidewalk just a few feet behind her. The passenger-side front door swung open, and a second man jumped out, lunging for her, a heavy gold-chain necklace flashing incongruously in the glow from a streetlight.

At least they hadn't simply gunned her down in the street. They intended to abduct her, and that gave Teller a slim chance.

He pulled out his personal weapon, a ten-round Glock .45 semiautomatic riding in a belt holster high enough to stay hidden beneath his jacket. Stepping into the open, Teller braced the pistol in a Weaver stance, two-handed, right arm straight, left arm bent with the hand supporting the right. Thirty yards is a
long
range for any handgun; he ignored the man behind Jackie—too risky—and drew down on the man coming out of the front of the vehicle, squeezing off four quick shots.

Thunderous gunfire echoed off the buildings across the street, and the passenger-side window on the van crazed from the impact of at least one round. The target spun, aiming a pistol and returning fire, the harsh chuff of a suppressor mingling with the whine of a round passing Teller's head, the sharp ping of a ricochet from bricks to his left. Teller fired twice more, and the other stumbled, going down on all fours, though whether he'd been hit or was simply diving for cover Teller couldn't tell at that distance.

Dominique couldn't get at the pistol she was carrying under her raincoat, not quickly enough, at any rate. Instead, she slammed the heel of her hand into her attacker's face, sending him sprawling back through the open cargo door. The man on the ground started to get up, but she pivoted sharply and planted the toe of her boot beneath his chin, kicking
hard.

Teller was already running toward the fight as fast as he could, his .45 still gripped in two hands out in front of him. He wanted to stop the van, and momentarily considered shooting at the right front tire, but rubber tires don't puncture as easily when hit by gunfire as they seem to do in the movies, and the van could still get well clear of the area running on a flat. Instead, he aimed for the windshield, trying to hit the driver.

Again, there were no guarantees. The angle of a vehicle's front windshield can deflect bullets even as they punch through, but at least he could wreck the driver's vision. He put three more rounds through the windshield, turning glass to a crazed white web.

One round left. He saw a clear shot at the guy with the gold chain, who'd just been slammed back into the van's side by Jackie's kick. As he staggered forward, Teller fired again. The man spun sharply to his right, then collapsed on the pavement.

Teller thumbed the magazine release, dropping the empty to the sidewalk, reaching into his jeans pocket to pull out a loaded magazine and slap it home into the pistol's grip. The man Dominique had hit in the face had grabbed the sliding door and was tugging it shut, and the van was already accelerating wildly down the street, sideswiping a parked car as it moved. Teller came to a halt, let the locked-open slide snap a round into the firing chamber, and began shooting, pivoting to his right as the van screeched north up the street. He put five rounds into the vehicle, then held his fire as it careened behind some parked cars.

It was gone.

Dogs barked in the distance, and Teller heard the slam of shutters banging closed across the street. Neighborhoods like this one tended to stick their collective head in the sand when they heard gunfire on the street nowadays.

“Who the fuck are you?”

He turned, breathing hard. Dominique stood fifteen feet away, her pistol with its awkward sound suppressor now gripped tightly in both hands, aiming directly at him.

Carefully, Teller raised his hands and stepped farther into the illumination of the streetlight, letting her see his face.

“Chris?”

“Hello, Jackie. It's been ages. You never write … you never call…”

Then she was in his arms.

 

Chapter Eight

LA CALLE SUR 143

DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

2304 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

17 APRIL

“Who is he?” Jackie Dominique asked.

Teller grimaced as he squatted by the body of the man he'd shot, studying his wallet. Over twenty thousand pesos in bills, a Mexican driver's license and some other ID, a color photo of a pretty girl, several credit cards. Flashy rings and a heavy necklace that looked like gold. According to the license, the man's name was Carlos Gutierrez Sandoval. His address was in Nogales, up on the Mexico-Arizona border. He was nineteen years old.

For answer, he handed the wallet to Dominique.

Teller pocketed the pistol, a Browning Hi Power, and three magazines of 9 mm ammo, but searched every pocket in vain for a cell phone.
Damn.

Reaching into his own pocket, he pulled out his cell phone, flipped it open, and took several pictures of the dead narcoterrorist's face. He also photographed the driver's license.

“Frank?”

“Go.”

“They tried to abduct Jackie Dominique. I shot up the van, took down one Tango, but two others got away.”

“Ed wants to know if Ms. Dominique is okay.”

He glanced at her. Her face was flushed, she was breathing hard, but she didn't look more than lightly shaken. “Yeah, she's fine. Listen … you guys might be exposed.”

“We're already breaking down the OP. We won't learn anything else here tonight. That meeting at the Perez place is starting to look permanent.”

As he listened, he lifted the left arm of the body on the street, examining the elaborate tattoo. There were hearts and flowers, the red, white, and green of the Mexican flag, and the word
MATAZETAS
running from elbow to wrist encircled by twining roses. He took a photo of that as well, then keyed in a transmission code.

“Okay,” he said. “I'm uploading some photos of the Tango for you to shoot back to Langley. But I don't want to go back there with Jackie, in case they're watching the place. We'll meet you back at the hotel, probably tomorrow.”

“Roger that. Good luck.”

He dropped the limp arm, thoughtful, and pocketed his phone. “Yeah … You too.”

The Matazetas, he knew from his briefing back in Langley, was an arm of the Sinaloa Cartel, and that fit if this kid was from Nogales.
Zeta Killers.

He checked through Gutierrez's clothing again, still looking for a phone, then abandoned the search. He took the money from the wallet instead. The current exchange rate was around thirteen or fourteen pesos to the dollar; twenty thousand pesos was around fifteen hundred dollars, and if he and Jackie were going to go to ground overnight, they would need cash. He had a thousand pesos and a few hundred dollars on him, plus a cash card, but the card might allow him to be tracked, and right now he wanted to disappear for a while.

Both Sinaloa and Los Zetas maintained what amounted to small armies, for their wars with each other and with the Mexican government. Teller was unwilling to make any guesses as to how sophisticated their surveillance techniques or technology might be.

He also pocketed the dead man's credit cards. A check on those and what he'd purchased recently might be of some use.

“We need to go back and pick up James,” Dominique told him. “James Grant, my partner. He's waiting in the car—”

“No, we don't. He's dead.”

“My God! How?”

“My people have an OP overlooking the Perez house. They saw the bad guys drive up and take him out before they came after you.”

“Oh, Christ.” Her shoulders slumped, and she seemed to fold up a bit inside.

“My people will take care of the body,” he said. Rising, he gently took her arm. “C'mon. We need to get out of here. There may be more of those people around, or the guys in that van may come back for us. And the police will show up sooner or later. We don't want to have to answer their questions.”

“You told your people you weren't going back to your OP?”

“That's right. They're getting ready to hightail it. You and me are going someplace else, just to be on the safe side.”

“Like where?”

“Someplace,” Teller told her solemnly, “where I can get a drink.”

Los Gatos was a bar and restaurant a few blocks away, on the fringes of a commercial neighborhood better populated than the barrio streets where they'd just met. Inside it was smoky and noisy, a nearly full house. Teller scanned the crowd as he stepped in past the vestibule, trying to get a feel for the place. Lots of blue-collar types, a few students, but no obvious tourists. Tourists would have offered a bit more camouflage for the two of them, but the place was public enough that no one was going to try to get at them here.

Probably.

“We need some insurance,” Teller said, looking around. An enormous man was hunkered over one end of the bar, tattooed, bald, with a ragged goatee and muscles bulging with steroids. Teller suspected that the man might be the Los Gatos bouncer. “Wait here.”

He walked over to the end of the bar and spoke with the giant for a few moments. Money passed from Teller's hand to the other's and quietly disappeared.
“Gracias, amigo,”
Teller told the man, and he rejoined Dominique.

One advantage to Los Gatos was the knowledge that they could have a conversation without being easily overheard. They found an empty booth toward the back of the place.

“Dos cervezas,”
Teller told the waitress when she showed up a moment later.

“¿Que tipo, señor?”

“Me gustaría una Corona, por favor,”
Dominique told her.

“Y Negra Modelo por mí. Gracias.”
As the waitress walked off, Teller said, “I think your accent's better than mine.”

“It should be. I've been working the Latino beat for three years now, and living in Venezuela for six months.”

“So how's Venezuela?”

“Anti-American in public. Quietly taking all the help from Big Oil and U.S. technology they can manage.”

“So I've heard.”

“Well, what brings you to Mexico City, Chris? Other than your charming penchant for rescuing damsels in distress?”