The Last Line (49 page)

He was searching for the
CALL SEND
button on the unfamiliar phone when something hit him in the side. It didn't hurt, exactly, but the impact was like a hammer blow against his ribs.

Twisting, he saw a man running toward him from the trees, firing a pistol, just thirty meters away. Another round struck him, this time in the hip.

Still clutching the phone, he dropped to his knees, then fell.

TELLER

WASHINGTON MALL

WASHINGTON, D.C.

0858 HOURS, EDT

Teller saw his target drop, but the Iranian agent was still holding the cell phone. How many numbers had the man entered? The other man, the gunman behind the car, fired again, and Teller felt the impact against his left shoulder, a dull thud that staggered him and nearly knocked him down. He turned, shifting his aim—and realized that his Glock's slide was locked open, the magazine again empty.

He watched as the gunman reacquired the target, taking careful aim—

—and blinked, startled, as the man's head exploded in a spray of blood and bone.

The gunman sagged and dropped out of sight behind the sedan. Behind him, Dominique was running from the lowered rear ramp of the Sea Stallion, her pistol raised.

Somehow, Teller stayed on his feet, covering the last few yards to Reyshahri. The VEVAK agent was on his back, next to the woman whose phone he'd stolen. The cell phone was in his right hand, his thumb hovering above the keypad.

“Don't,” Teller said. He started to raise the empty pistol, then tossed it away. “Just
don't.
”

“My mission…” The words were faint, weak, little more than a whisper. At least he spoke English.

“Saeed Reyshahri,” Teller said.

Reyshahri looked startled. “How … do you know my name?”

“We also know you're VEVAK,” Teller told him. “And if you push that button, I promise you that the whole world will know that your people are mass murderers.”

“They will know that no matter what.”

“Not necessarily. You see … I don't think that Iran is really behind this. Shah Mat, you call it? Your country has way too much to lose. I think your superiors saw a way to tie us down so that we couldn't interfere with your plans in the Mideast. But someone else came to you with the idea, didn't they?”

“You appear to know a great deal about us … mister … mister…”

“Chris Teller. We know the Mexican cartels are agitating to start a new country in the American southwest, Aztlán. We know Iran and Hezbollah are helping that along, and we know that the nuclear weapons were supposed to so wreck the American economy and command-control infrastructures that it could happen.”

“Yes…”

“But Shah Mat still wouldn't have a prayer—not without some major help inside the United States itself. That new country would need money, lots of it. Maybe investment from some major banks? Or a faction within our own government committed to steering things their way?”

“How do you know all of this?”

“It was fairly obvious. The cartels are powerful in Mexico, but they haven't managed to buy Washington just yet. But they might have bought a few individuals.”

“Duke,” Reyshahri said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I know my American contact as Duke. He is a member of your government, fairly highly placed. I do not know his name.” Reyshahri reached out with a trembling hand, giving the cell phone to Teller. “But I do know it's not worth sacrificing my country's honor for a traitor's dream.”

“The weapons. Are they on timers? Any other means of setting them off?”

“A phone call.” Reyshahri managed a smile. “Duke has the number. He could still set them off. I don't think anyone else knows the number.”

Teller looked up. A second helicopter was landing nearby, and men in protective suits were piling out. NEST had arrived to take charge of the second weapon. Dominique was talking on her phone as sirens wailed in the distance.

“Thank you, Captain Reyshahri.”

“If you can…”

“Yes?”

“A message. To my Hasti.”

“Absolutely. But you'll be able to tell her yourself. We're going to get you to a hospital.”

“I have not … lately … been able to pray…”

THE OWL'S NEST

BOHEMIAN GROVE

MONTE RIO, CALIFORNIA

0615 HOURS, PDT

Preston had arrived at Oakland International on the red-eye during the wee hours of the morning and caught a commuter flight up to the Sonoma County Airport. From there, it was a twenty-five-mile drive by rented car through the spectacular mountains of Northern California to a small town on the Russian River called Monte Rio. He'd checked in at the Club château and was still in the process of unpacking his things. A large-screen plasma TV was hung from one red-oak wall. Picking up a remote, he clicked it on and turned the channel setting to CNN.

“… minutes ago from a traffic news helicopter above the Mall in the heart of Washington, D.C.! We go now to traffic reporter Larry Delancey on the scene.”

The image on the screen showed a tangle of movement and confusion on the broad, open swath of ground between Washington's Air and Space Museum and the National Gallery. Two helicopters were on the ground, their rotors still turning, as a swarm of people clustered around a white car on the grass. Police cars were there … and an ambulance.

The trunk of the white vehicle was open, and several men in protective silver suits were leaning inside.

“Thanks, Vicki. It's possible that we've now determined the cause of the massive gridlock outside the nation's capital this morning, as police converge on the Washington Mall in an apparent response to gunfire. We're not sure yet what's going on down there, but I can see men in hazmat suits working on something in the trunk of a car, and it's possible that we are witnessing the outcome of some sort of biological or chemical terror attack. According to our sources, witnesses reported gunfire on the Mall approximately fifteen minutes ago. No word yet on whether anyone was hurt—though from our vantage point five hundred feet above the Mall it
does
look as though someone is being loaded on board an ambulance.”

Preston knew immediately what was happening … and what needed to be done.

Grimly, with a cold determination, he reached for his cell phone and punched in a memorized number.

He waited for the view of central Washington to dissolve into white noise.

Nothing happened.

Nothing at all.

INSCOM HQ

FORT BELVOIR, VIRGINIA

1545 HOURS, EDT

“Preston knows we secured and safed the nukes,” Teller said. “One of the NEST guys said the telephone circuit closed about five seconds after he'd disconnected the power from the detonator.”

George Haupt looked uncomfortable. “I don't see how you can accuse Mr. Preston of this … this treason. Do you have any idea who he
is
?”

“The president's national security adviser,” Procario said. “Or are we talking about some
other
traitor?”

“You people are going to need some very serious proof of these allegations.”

“No one,” Granger said, “is making any allegations. Not
yet.
”

They'd met at Fort Belvoir's underground Ops Center, the B2 level—Teller and Procario, Colonel MacDonald, George Haupt, General Granger, and a half-dozen others. Granger had called the meeting, informing the rest of them that he would be briefing the president later that afternoon.

Teller was exhausted, barely standing. He'd caught a couple of hours of sleep earlier that morning at the DeWitt Army Hospital here at Fort Belvoir, where they'd brought him after the takedown at the Mall, but his sleep meter was still running way on the minus side of the dial. His shoulder, bandaged now, was aching, and between that and the lack of sleep he found he had exactly zero patience with Haupt's obstructionist attitude.

“We have all the proof we need,” Teller said. “Colonel MacDonald here pulled some strings and got us some time on the Tordella Supercomputer network earlier this afternoon.” He handed Haupt a printout. “Here's what they came up with.”

The Tordella Supercomputer Facility at Fort Meade was the heart and muscle of the NSA's code-breaking infrastructure, an array of ultrafast latest-model Cray computers used to decrypt and analyze signals intelligence from all over the globe.

Those machines could also chew through mountains of raw data to identify patterns, and that was what they'd done earlier that afternoon with information sent to them from MacDonald's office.

For five days now, the Cellmap program Teller had planted in a cartel assassin's phone had been silently multiplying and spreading, unseen and relentless, from phone to phone to phone across the entire world. Anyone and any organization that had had electronic contact with the Mexican cartels had been infected; current estimates suggested that the number of Cellmap-tagged phones numbered over a billion.

Making any sense at all of that vast mountain of data was beyond any analyst or department, even beyond any organization including the NSA, but the Tordella computers could still extract particular pebbles of information from the mountain,
if
the analysts knew what to ask.

“What the hell is this?” Haupt asked, looking at the list of names, dates, and locations on the sheet.

“That is a list,” Procario replied, “of people tagged by Cellmap who were in Washington, D.C., up until April nineteenth, who then caught flights out of the city. The computers then looked for correlations in destinations. That list there includes twenty-seven people who flew to one of four destinations in Northern California over the past few days: San Francisco International, Metro Oakland International, San Jose, and Sacramento. We then looked for correlations among those twenty-seven. Eleven, you'll notice, caught commuter flights to Sonoma County Airport, in Windsor. That's about fifty miles north of San Francisco. We also tapped into rental car and limo records. Seems like there's been quite a bit of traffic between Windsor and a little town west of there called Monte Rio.”

“Mean anything to you?” Teller asked.

“Should it?”

“It's the location of the Bohemian Grove.”

Teller hadn't known much about the Bohemians until he'd looked it up on his laptop a little earlier. It was a private men's club started in San Francisco in the 1870s, originally for journalists but now with an exclusive and
very
private membership that included government leaders and cabinet officials, the CEOs of oil companies, banks, and other large corporations, military leaders, and high-ranking members of the media. Once each year, in July, the Bohemian Club hosted a two-week-long camp-out at Bohemian Grove, located within a secluded old-growth redwood forest just outside of Monte Rio. Nearly three thousand had attended in years past—presidents and future presidents, defense contractors, oil magnates, banking CEOs, Joint Chiefs, corporate executives, senators and representatives … it was a long and imposing list.

The festivities had in recent years become somewhat controversial. Membership in the Bohemian Club was strictly males only. The club had lost a State Supreme Court ruling over a discrimination suit in 1986, requiring them to hire female workers during the summer, but even those were required to leave the Grove at sundown. Perhaps more alarming was the public's fear that letting that many power brokers and elitists get together for two unsupervised weeks would inevitably lead to backroom deals, secret agreements between government and big business, and national conspiracies. A couple of years before, a popular History Channel program had run a rather shallow and slanted episode about the Grove, and several of the actors had been arrested for trespass.

“Of those eleven people going to Monte Rio,” Procario pointed out, “nine are members of the Bohemian Club, including, you'll notice, Randolph Edgar Preston, the assistant to the president for national security affairs. Also on the list, Mr. James Fitzhugh Walker, of the Federal Reserve; Charles Richard Logan, CEO of North American Oil; Congressman Harvey Gonzales, of East Los Angeles; Robert Avery Delaney, of the First New York Bank of Commerce; Joseph Howard Belsanno, of the President's Commission on—”

“Damn you!” Haupt said, dropping the list as though it had just burned his hand. “I shouldn't even see this! I
can't
see this!”

“Why not, George?” Granger asked.

“Because this stuff is illegal as hell! This … this is wiretapping, plain and simple! Without a warrant … and on
government officials
!”

“These men,” Granger said carefully, “have just conspired to set off two nuclear weapons inside one, possibly two, of our cities in what appears to be a conspiracy to break several of our states away to create a new country. There are times when going outside the normal legal niceties is necessary.”

“I can't see this,” Haupt said again. Turning abruptly, he left the Ops Center.

“Sandy,” MacDonald said to one of her assistants, “have Security detain Mr. Haupt. And make certain they relieve him of his cell phone.”

“We're adding false arrest to the list, Colonel?” Teller asked.

“Watch your mouth, Captain,” MacDonald replied.

Teller felt secure in the knowledge that the colonel still hated him.

“We're only holding him until this California situation is resolved,” Granger added. “We want to make sure that Preston and his friends don't get any help from outside.”

Personally, Teller doubted that Haupt was a part of the conspiracy. He'd been left behind in the D.C. area, after all—though Fort Belvoir would have been well outside the probable zone of radioactive contamination if the bombs had actually gone off. It was possible, but most likely the man was nothing more than a chronic bureaucratic ass-coverer. He could see the legal ramifications of INSCOM's activities and didn't care to risk twenty years in Leavenworth for even marginal association with the Cellmap program.