The Last Line (18 page)

A couple of five-kiloton nukes detonating between Battery Park and Governors Island would wreck lower Manhattan and might force the evacuation of all five of the city's boroughs and much of northern New Jersey as well. Compared to that, the destruction of the World Trade Center towers would seem like minor vandalism.

“It still doesn't make sense, though,” Teller objected. “Why would the Mexican cartels want to nuke a target in the United States? They want live, paying customers, not radioactive ruins.”

“I don't know,” Dominique admitted. “Extortion, maybe?”

“Yeah, well, if the Zetas leadership has been watching too many James Bond films, maybe. Damn.”

“What?”

“I really need to plant my bug.”

“What bug?”

He told her about the Cellmap virus, about how it would map out the drug-smuggling networks and also let Langley listen in through cartel cell phones. “If they
are
smuggling those nukes north,” he concluded, “they're having to coordinate a lot of different factors. Getting the weapons transferred off the cargo ship and onto the sub, for a start. If we could listen in, we might have a better idea of what's going on.”

“We need to find the
Zapoteca
,” she suggested.

“Yeah. I—” He stopped, listening.

“What is it?”

He touched his finger to his lips and sat up, staring at the crack of light under the door to the room. He'd thought he heard something in the hallway outside … a creak of old floorboards, perhaps. Now he saw a shadow flicker past the light.

The Estrella was something less than a four-star luxury hotel. The ceiling tiles were water stained and drooping in places, the floors and bed were sagging, and paint was peeling in places on walls and doorjambs. Teller would have preferred to find a higher-class hotel, if only because he and Dominique would have been better able to blend in and disappear at a place like the Hilton or the Holiday Inn, places where gringo
turistas
didn't stand out like a couple of big hairy spiders on a dinner plate.

Taxis were too easy to trace, though, and they'd needed to find a place within a short walk of Los Gatos. The Hotel Estrella was one of four or five places within half a mile of the bar, so he'd decided to risk it.

Now he was wondering if he'd made a mistake. He heard urgently whispering voices.

Quietly, he reached underneath the mattress, his fingers closing around the grip of his locked and loaded .45. Beside him, Dominique rolled over to her side of the bed and picked up her Beretta Px4 Storm, a 9 mm subcompact, custom fitted with a sound suppressor.

A metallic click sounded in the lock. The security chain was on as well, of course, but that wouldn't hinder a determined attacker for long. This hotel didn't have anything as sophisticated as dead bolts—another point in favor of the Hilton.

The door snapped open, banging against the chain. Dominique rolled off the mattress, dropping to the floor with the bed between her and the door, as Teller leaped for the room's tiny desk, scooping up the rickety chair beside it. The door banged inward again, and again, and on the fourth attempt wood splintered as the security chain pulled free. As the door flew all the way open, Teller hurled the chair with a sidearm swing, aiming for the silhouettes backlit by the lighting in the hallway.

The chair going out collided with gunmen coming in. Wood splintered, and one of the attackers went down in a flailing tangle of arms and pieces of disintegrating chair. Teller brought his pistol up in a two-handed stance and fired, the boom of the powerful semiautomatic handgun ringing off the hotel walls.

From behind the bed, Dominique cut loose with three fast shots, the noise muffled somewhat by the suppressor but loud enough to wake the neighbors if the .45 hadn't done that already. At least three figures were down now in the doorway, two of them still moving. Teller fired again into the tangle—and then the fire escape window at his back exploded inward, and something struck him, hard, in the ribs. The blow knocked him forward and down, but he managed to hold on to his pistol as he fell, turning, firing at a half-glimpsed shadow on the fire escape outside. Dominique turned as well, firing through shattering glass until the shadow outside folded and dropped.

“Chris! Are you okay?”

Rising to his feet, Teller reached around to his back, high up, just beneath his right shoulder blade. His hand came away slick with blood, and it hurt to breathe.

“I'm fine,” he said. “Just nicked.”

Dominique picked her way through the shattered glass, pistol ready.

“Watch out, don't cut yourself,” he said. He picked up her shoes and handed them to her, then found his own. There was glass everywhere, and he shook a couple of shards from his left shoe before slipping it on.

“I think this one's dead,” she said, coming back from the window. “Looks like a 12-gauge. Here, let me see your back.”

“No time. Get your coat. We're out of here.” He could hear shouts and loud voices from elsewhere in the building. Even in this part of town, a gunfight inside a hotel was going to bring the police, and quickly. A moment later, a fire alarm went off with a harsh, angry bray, sounding over and over again. Someone had pulled an emergency alarm to evacuate the hotel.

Teller took time to find his pants, pull them on, then fish the cell phone from his pocket. He made his way across to the room's inside door, stooping to examine the three bodies there.

Correction—one KIA and two wounded. One of the wounded was unconscious and wouldn't last much longer; one round had gone through his left lung, the wound bubbling and whistling. The other was whimpering, curled into a fetal position with his hands laced over his belly, blood pooling beneath him. Neither of the wounded men was paying attention to Teller. Quickly, Teller pulled the wallets from all three.

He found cell phones in their pockets. Jackpot!

Teller also found an unopened pack of cigarettes in the dead man's shirt pocket. Quickly, he stripped off the cellophane and used it to cover the sucking chest wound on the first wounded gunman. He retrieved a pillowcase from the bed and used that to pack the other's belly wound. That ought to hold them until an ambulance arrived.

He then jacked a connection cable from his cell phone to one of the others and punched in a four-digit code. The question was how long it would take the virus to load into the target phone.

It took less than five minutes for Dominique and Teller both to get dressed and collect their things. Teller went to the fire escape and looked down into the hotel parking lot.

“No one down there,” he told Dominique. “If these four have backup, they'll be waiting for us either in the lobby or right outside the front entrance. We'll go down this way.”

Teller went back to the door and checked the progress of his download. It was still going. Damn. They couldn't wait much longer. If the police didn't show up, curious hotel guests or management might—though chances were they would be cautious after hearing gunfire.

Dominique took a sheet from the bed and wrapped it around her hand, using it to smash broken glass from the window frame, clearing the way for their escape.

“We're good to go,” she said. She nodded at the tangle of bodies on the floor. “You think those two will make it?”

“Maybe.”

“Why'd you help them? They're bloodthirsty murderers.”

He shrugged, still watching the phone download in process. “They're also human beings. Drowning in your own blood is a horrible way to die.”

Ten minutes. Come on come on
come on
 …

A light winked green on the display of his cell phone. Swiftly, he unjacked the cable, pocketed it and his phone, and slipped the other phone back into the pocket of the gut-shot gunman.

“Let's go,” he told her. “I'll go first and check it out.”

He wanted to make sure that someone wasn't down there in the parking lot, hidden out of sight, watching that window. He took a moment to check the body on the fire escape platform—dead with a round through his forehead—then clattered down the extended fire escape ladder without attracting any attention that he could see, though the wound in his back shrieked at him as he moved. Dominique was right behind him. “Where now?” she asked, coming up against him.

“Downtown,” he decided. “My hotel. It's only a few miles.”

“Well, I must say you certainly know how to show a girl a good time.”

“Hey, that's me,” he said, grinning.
“Una calavera real.”

The rain had stopped, though the streets and sidewalks were still wet. Two police cars, sirens ululating, pulled in at the front of the hotel, followed closely by an ambulance.

A crowd had already gathered out front, mostly hotel guests, to judge by the range of undress and dishabille—underwear, negligees, and even blankets pulled over shoulders.

Teller took Dominique's arm, and they began strolling north toward the city center.

OVAL OFFICE

THE WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON, D.C.

0905 HOURS, EDT

“Good morning, Mr. President.”

“Randy.”

“I have the report you wanted.”

“Thank you.” The president looked up from what he was reading, then leaned back in his office chair. He looked exhausted, gray,
old.

Well, it had been that kind of week.

“In two hours,” the president said, “I have a meeting with the UN ambassador. He's going to tell me all about a resolution proposed by Mexico, UN Security Council Resolution 2855. What the hell am I going to tell him?”

Randy Preston glanced around the office. The two men were alone for the moment. A large flat-screen television monitor was on against one of the walls, the sound low but still audible. It was tuned to CNN and was running coverage of the continuing riots in Los Angeles as well as, since yesterday, in Phoenix, San Antonio, El Paso, and Chicago.

“I'm afraid, Mr. President, that there may be nothing you can say. Nothing we can do.”

“The hell there isn't. If the Security Council tries to pass such a resolution, I shall order our ambassador to veto it.”

“That might buy us some time, sir,” Preston said, “but we may well be up against the inevitability of history.”

“
Fuck
history. I will not be known as the president who gave away half of California and Texas!”

“Of course not, sir.”

“UN resolutions are not binding!”

“No, sir.”

“You're my national security adviser. Give me some advice I can use!”

Preston shrugged. “I would suggest that you agree to study the situation, to give the resolution due consideration, and promise to respect the rights and aspirations of citizens in those states. You might also give thought to pulling back the National Guard. That battle in East Los Angeles last night—that was bad. Made us
look
bad.”

“Those troops are in there to restore order. They're not coming out until order has been restored.”

“Yes, sir. But keep in mind how much this looks like the Arab Spring.”

“This has nothing to do with the goddamn Arabs!”

“Maybe not, sir. But to the world at large, it looks exactly the same.”

In December of 2010, popular demonstrations led swiftly to the overthrow of the government in Tunisia. Protests in Algeria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other nations in the region resulted in various government concessions. By early February of 2011, full-scale revolt had broken out in Egypt, leading eventually to the ousting, arrest, and prosecution of Hosni Mubarak and two prime ministers, and a general takeover of the country by the military that was still being protested. Yemen and Bahrain faced serious public disorder, and Gaddafi's forty-two-year dictatorship in Libya had at last come to an end in all-out civil war.

“Egypt, Libya, and Syria,” Preston said. “Those were the worst—revolution or civil war. In each case, there were instances of soldiers firing into crowds of civilians. Thousands died, and there was a world outcry, with demands for intervention by the UN or by NATO.”

The president stared hard at Preston. “Surely you're not suggesting that we're going to be attacked by NATO.”

“I'm saying, Mr. President, that American police and army personnel have fired on demonstrating civilians in Los Angeles and other American cities. Right now, our allies in Europe see that as the exact moral equivalent with Gaddafi's African mercenary snipers killing civilians in Tripoli, or al-Assad's butchers machine-gunning protestors in Damascus and Daraa. They see us as having supported a NATO offensive against the Libyan government to ostensibly protect endangered civilians.

“They'll likely ask what can be done to protect American civilians in an identical situation.”

“The situations are not identical, damn it. This … this Aztlanista movement is threatening to cut up our southwestern states to create a whole new goddamn country, by force if necessary! This
will
not stand!”

Although the text had not yet been released, Resolution 2855 was expected to call for a popular referendum within the southern portions of several states in the U.S. Southwest, under UN oversight, with an eye toward creating a new and independent country. The newborn nation, popularly known as Aztlán, would be carved out of the southern halves of California, New Mexico, Arizona—the new border roughly running along the 35th parallel—and the southern quarter of Texas, more or less along the 30th parallel. Such a division, if it actually came to pass, would abruptly change the nationality of roughly thirty million citizens of the United States.

“I will
not
be known as the president who presided over the dismemberment of this country.”

Preston looked at him with something strangely akin to affection. In fact, he hated the man, but the president was so arrogant, self-serving, politically motivated, narcissistic, and so damned
predictable
that manipulating him scarcely offered any challenge at all. Just wind him up and point him in the right direction.