The Last Line (14 page)

“Can't tell from her face,” Teller said, still studying the image, “but I think that one's a keeper. That's a
really
nice set she has.”

“So what if those two are friendlies?” Procario asked.

“CISEN, maybe,” Chavez suggested.

“I don't think so,” Teller said. “Miguel would have told us, I think.”

“We didn't tell him about me being here as your backup,” Procario pointed out. “Or about the nudie-show surveillance gear.”

“Point. But I was thinking of the Company. Or DEA. Or FBI. Or some other alphabet-soup acronym.”

“NSA?” Chavez volunteered.

“Probably not,” Procario said. “They're strictly SIGINT, signals intelligence. Electronic eavesdropping, phone taps, that sort of thing. They don't have agents in the field.”

“That we know of,” Teller pointed out. “Remember, NSA means ‘Never Say Anything.'”

Chavez chuckled. “I thought it was ‘No Such Agency.'”

“That, too,” Procario said.

“No, if it was anyone of ours, I'd have to assume either DEA or CIA,” Teller said, thinking out loud. The Drug Enforcement Agency had a history of sending agents and teams into Latin American countries, trying to shut down the tangle of drug pipelines that wound their way up to the United States from and through Mexico, and from Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. As for the CIA, well, the Empire had a history of not letting one hand know what the other was doing.

“How about it, Ed?” Procario asked. “Your buddies back at Langley have another op going down here? Something they didn't tell us about?”

“It's certainly possible,” Chavez said. “The Latin America desk was running scared after losing our network down here. And Larson and WINPAC are scrambling to cover their asses after losing those tactical nukes. They might have several teams on the ground, trying to pick up the pieces, and they wouldn't necessarily tell any of them about the others.”

“Hey, heads up,” Teller said, glancing out the window. “More people joining the party.” Sur 145 was a quiet back street, normally. It seemed to be a lot busier than normal tonight.

Procario readjusted the MMMR receiver, aiming it back at the house. Two men had just gone up onto the porch and were now standing at the door. On the monitor, it was clear that both were armed. One had a revolver tucked in next to his left armpit; the other carried a semiautomatic pistol at the small of his back, riding down into the waistband of his pants.

“Fucking Grand Central Station,” Chavez observed.

“It's not a hit,” Teller decided, studying the two closely. “They're not armed for an assault. And hit men don't ring the doorbell.”

The door opened, and the two men stepped into the hallway inside. “It looks more like a convention,” Chavez said.

The two newcomers were met by one of the men inside the house and led into what was probably a living room. Another man, probably Escalante, and Maria Perez were seated on invisible furniture there. They stood up as the newcomers entered.

“I do wish we had a bug in there,” Procario said. “It would be nice to listen in on what's going down.”

“Once we have Cellmap in place,” Teller said, “no problem. Until then, though, we're out of luck. Do we have the sat feed going?”

“Uploading perfectly,” Chavez said. The Prick 117F was transmitting everything they picked up through the MMMR scope back to Langley for analysis.

“Fucking technology,” Procario said. “We can pick up those guys'
heartbeats,
fer chrissakes, but we can't listen in on their conversation!”

“Yeah, we need a laser mike,” Teller said, “but the angle is wrong.”

Sending out a tight beam of millimeter radiation, at the rate of some hundreds of pulses per second, the system could analyze the waves bounced back and actually record the heartbeats and respiration of each target. The laser mike sent a beam of coherent light and bounced it off the glass of a convenient window. By measuring the reflected beam very precisely, the system in effect turned the window into an enormous microphone diaphragm, allowing a surveillance team over a hundred yards away to listen in on conversations inside the room.

Teller had thought about having one of those units sent down from Langley with the MMMR but decided against it. For the device to work, you either needed to be directly opposite the target window, so that the reflected beam bounced straight back at you, or you needed to plant a receiver somewhere else, off to the side at the one point where it would pick up the reflection, then transmit the data by radio back to the listening post. The angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection, as the physics boys said; dicking around in front of a house several numbers up the street would have been a great way to attract unwanted attention for the team.

There were also high-tech bugs available that could be placed up against the glass of a target window, sensing the vibrations directly. Or they could plant some more traditional listening devices inside if they broke into the place later.

A break-in, though, simply was not an option. With five people in the target house now, it was far too dangerous to try an armed confrontation.

The woman got out of the car and started walking south toward the Perez house. “Uh-oh,” Chavez said. “Another one coming to the party?”

Procario whistled appreciatively at the MMMR screen. “Nice,” he said.

“She's carrying,” Teller observed. It was possible to make out the shape of a semiauto handgun riding at her waist, probably in a holster worn in front, over her belly. He pointed at the screen. “Is that a
suppressor
?”

“Either that,” Procario joked, “or it's one hell of a hard-on.”

“Standard field issue,” Chavez said.

“Yeah, I'm thinking it's the Klingons, definitely.” Teller looked away from the screen and out the window, studying the woman down on the street in ordinary light instead of millimeter waves. The curves and intimate details exposed on the MMMR monitor were wrapped in a dark gray raincoat. There was enough of a glow from a nearby streetlight for him to make out her features clearly.

“Hey,” Teller said. “I
know
her!”

Chavez joined him at the window. “Jesus.”

“Definitely one of yours.”

“You're right. She's DO.” That was the CIA's Directorate of Operations. “I don't know her name—”

“Yeah, but I do! Hang on. I'll be back in a moment.”

“Wait a second, Chris!” Procario called, but Teller was already through the door.

Yeah, Teller knew her, all right—Jacqueline Dominique, Jackie for short. At least, he
thought
that was her real name. She'd been his lover for a brief but intense fling last fall, before she'd been transferred to Venezuela.

She was tough, experienced, dedicated, and smart, and she'd been
that
close to convincing him to leave DIA and come over to the Dark Side. It was possible she'd not told him her real name. “Dominique” had always seemed so … theatrical. The name of paparazzi bait, a model or a singer, maybe, not a
real
person.

“Watch yourself, Chris,” Procario's voice said in his ear as he hurried down the steps from the upstairs apartment. “She's going up to the house.”

Which might mean she was undercover. Or … the unthinkable. She was a double agent, working for them.

No, he didn't, he
couldn't
, believe that of Jackie. She was too direct, too much the stereotypical straight arrow. You needed a mind like a hyperdimensional corkscrew to play on both sides of the street simultaneously.

Teller stepped out onto the front porch of Antonio Vicente's house. Dominique had reached the front door of the Perez house and was leaning over to the side, pressing something against the corner of the front window. It was too small and too far away for Teller to see what it was, but he assumed it was a listening device—probably one of the dime-sized stick-ons that could pick up vibrations through the glass like the more sophisticated long-range laser mikes. It would include a tiny transmitter to beam what it picked up back to Dominique and her partner in the car parked up the street.

Gutsy—but damned risky. If the bad guys also had the Perez house under surveillance, Jackie was screwed. He watched her straighten up, look around, then turn and walk back down the steps to the sidewalk. She didn't head straight back to the car but continued walking south. Going directly to her car, with possible watchers in the neighborhood, would have been bad technique.

Teller decided to follow her.

MATAZETAS HOUSE

LA CALLE SUR 145

DISTRICTO IZTACALCO,

2245 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

Enrico Barrón leaned into the eyepieces of his heavy army binoculars and gave a wolfish grin.
“Quiero clavar ese culo apretado.”

The Spanish was blunt and vulgar, a desire to “nail that tight ass.”

The two were in a second-floor bedroom overlooking Sur 145, across the street and just to the north of the Maria Perez house, where they could keep an eye on it. The two watchers were members of a unit called the New Generation Cartel, but better known as Los Matazetas—“the Zeta Killers.” Though their public presentation was of a civilian vigilante group dedicated to wiping out the Zetas Cartel, they in fact were closely allied with the Sinaloa Cartel. The order—a very strongly worded order—that had come down last week from Guzmán himself had directed them to cease all hostilities against the Zetas, and Barrón didn't like it one bit.

However, Guzmán had a habit of turning people who disobeyed his orders over to his special inquisitors, with instructions to keep them alive for as long a time as possible. Barrón had seen some Zetas and others who'd received that special attention from the Sinaloan interrogators, seen them while they were still clinging to the last bloody, shrieking shreds of their lives, and he had no intention of sharing their fate.

“Who is she?” his partner asked, watching now from behind his shoulder. The woman had just stepped off the Perez porch and was walking south down the sidewalk, her ass twitching provocatively beneath a long, lightweight raincoat.

“I don't know, but I'm betting the bitch just put a bug on Escalante's window.”

“Huh. Gringo, you think?”

“Of course. She's not one of ours.”

“With that chassis? No, unfortunately.”

“Not a problem. We'll make her one of ours.”

“You want to pick her up?”

“I think we should find out who she is, who she works for, no?”

His partner shrugged. “I think you just want to toss some powder.” In Spanish, the phrase
echar un polvo
meant much the same as the English “get your rocks off.”

“Hey, I don't see a problem mixing a little pleasure with our business.”

“Who's she with?”

“She got out of that green car across the street.” Barrón panned the binoculars down and to the right, searching. “Yeah, the driver's still there.”

“Okay. You and Carlos take out the driver, then grab the girl. Take Arturo along.”

Barrón thought for a moment. “Should we pick the guy up for questioning, too?”

“Nah. Kill him. But
quietly.
”

“It's done. Hey … there's someone else on the street now.” He pointed south. A tall man in a tan jacket was walking down the east side of the street. “What do you think? One of our new Zetas friends? Or another gringo?”

Barrón drew his Beretta pistol, chambered a round, and tucked it into his waistband. “Doesn't matter. I'll handle him.”

A moment later, he, a nineteen-year-old killer named Carlos Gutierrez, and a seventeen-year-old named Arturo Gomez were letting themselves out into the drizzling night.

LA CALLE SUR 145

DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

2256 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

Teller stayed on the opposite side of the street from Dominique, and a good thirty yards behind her. He didn't want to spook her, and he certainly didn't want to engage those superb reflexes of hers before she could realize it was him.

This was, he reflected, a lot like one of the exercises they'd put him through at the Farm eight years ago—giving him a photo of someone and having him find the person and tail him through mobs of tourists. He'd actually been pretty good at it. The trick was to blend in with the crowd and not be obvious about stopping when the target stopped, or following him into alleys or shops.

The trouble here was that it was late and the street was pretty much deserted. There was no crowd to blend with, and no easy way to become invisible on the pavement.

In this sort of situation, you had to focus on staying outside of the target's field of view, muffling the click of your footsteps, and, so far as was possible, not thinking about your quarry. Science didn't recognize the effect yet, but anyone who stalked human beings for a living—snipers in combat, detectives tailing a suspect, or intelligence officers following an enemy agent—knew that humans had a remarkable ability to
feel
when someone was following them. Call it telepathy, ESP, or magic, there was something to it, like when he'd felt the Klingon in the midnight darkness at the Farm. From what he'd seen of Jacqueline Dominique, she had that sixth-sense thing down to hard science. Sneaking up on her would
not
be easy.

She passed the mouth of a narrow alley but then turned right at the next intersection, vanishing behind the corner of a building. Teller had already decided that she was simply walking around the block in order to return to the car and her partner. That way, if someone had challenged her at the Perez house, she could have claimed to be lost and asking directions. Avoiding the alley was good basic tradecraft; alleys were great places in which you could be trapped, and too often they proved to be one-way cul-de-sacs.