The Last Line (19 page)

To be fair, the political system in the United States had been teetering on the brink for a long time.
Money
ran the country, not the people, not democracy. The president had inherited a hell of a mess from his predecessors—as all presidents do—and no man was good enough, strong enough, or smart enough to keep the whole chaotic, jury-rigged structure from crumbling. Few people knew it yet, but the United States of America was in very serious trouble. The final collapse had already begun, and it was accelerating.

Exactly what Preston and the other members of the Project had been aware of for some time.

“Mr. President,” Preston said, picking his words carefully, “the Aztlanistas don't stand a chance. We all know that. Hispanics are, what? Thirty-eight percent of the populations of California and Texas? Less than that in Arizona and New Mexico. They are in the strong majority in the southern portions of those states, of course, but there is no constitutional provision for letting only part of a state vote on an issue like this. If there was a vote tomorrow, the referendum would easily be defeated, with or without the UN getting involved.”

“Damned straight.” The president seemed to relax somewhat. “And most Hispanics know they've got it
good
in this country. Even the illegals are better off than they'd be if the states they're living in broke away and became a fucking third-world country!”

“Exactly, sir.” Preston knew that one of the biggest problems the Aztlanistas faced was the fact that only a small percentage of all Hispanics in the United States actually supported them. Lopez and his bunch were noisy, but they didn't speak for all Mexican immigrants.
Yet.

“But it's the
idea
of the thing, of the UN meddling in our internal affairs!”

“Yes, sir.” Preston didn't need to add that the cold fact of the matter was that ever since the United States had become the world's sole remaining superpower, the country's relationship with the United Nations had gone from bad to abysmal.

“There was that call for the UN to intervene in the 2012 elections,” the president said. “Remember that? They do not have that
right
!”

“Of course not, sir. However, Resolution 2855 is going to make us look bad,
very
bad, just by coming up for a Security Council vote. It's going to be a public relations disaster for us, and we're going to need to dig to put a good spin on it.”

The UN Security Council was a fifteen-member group charged, under the UN Charter, with “responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.” Five members were permanent: the United States, the Russian Federation, the People's Republic of China, France, and the United Kingdom, each of which had veto power. Resolutions were nonbinding, but could become binding if they were made under Chapter VII of the UN Charter—“Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression.” A vote by nine of the fifteen members was needed to affirm a given resolution.

“And how do we put a ‘good spin' on something like this?”

“We've weathered worse, Mr. President. Careful handling of the news media. A lot of political maneuvering behind the scenes, backroom deals, that sort of thing. Some judicious arm-twisting, if necessary. If we threaten to pull out of the UN—or even just threaten not to pay our arrears up there—they'd cave pretty quickly.”

The United States had withheld payments to the UN before in order to shape its foreign policies. Currently, the back-owed bill amounted to well over a billion dollars.

The president picked up a pen and scribbled on a notepad in front of him. “I like that.”

“But I recommend that you not threaten to do that yet, not at your meeting with the ambassador. Just have him suggest that we're looking at ways to contain the violence, including pulling out the troops. See if he can delay a vote.”

“I will
not
pull out the troops, Randy. Not when the only alternative is complete anarchy.”

Preston nodded. “No, sir. You asked for my advice, and I've given it. I should remind you, though, both the Russians and the Chinese have already publicly compared us to Syria.”

“Damn it, Randy,” the president said, “this is outrageous! The United States of America is not going to quietly go along with this! I will
not
give in to these … these rabble-rousers!”

“I agree, sir,
if
we can do so without murdering our own people.”

Something that, Preston knew, was already a foregone conclusion.

 

Chapter Ten

HOTEL HILTON

CIUDAD DE MÉXICO

REPÚBLICA DE MÉXICO

0950 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

18 APRIL

“We've got some data back on those credit card numbers you picked up,” Chavez told Teller. “I think you'll both be interested in this.”

At 3:00
A.M.
, Teller had woken Procario up with a phone call and had him come pick them up. His back was hurting, the streets of Mexico City were dangerous at night, and he didn't want to get dragged into any more firefights. By a little past three thirty, the two of them had been back in the two-room suite at the Azueta Hilton, filling in Chavez and Procario on the evening's events. Chavez had uploaded the credit card numbers over the satellite link back to Langley and checked with Operations to see if the Cellmap intel was coming through yet.

Teller and Dominique had hit the sack before an answer had come back. They'd slept—
just
slept—until well past eight.

It had been a long night.

Awake again, they'd joined Procario and Chavez in the other room. “Let's see it,” Teller said.

Procario had set up a laptop computer on the desk and had just finished downloading pages of text from Langley. The information showed recent purchases for all of the men.

“This is Carlos Gutierrez Sandoval,” he said, pointing, “late of Nogales.”

“The guy from the van who had all the money in his wallet,” Teller said.

“That's him. Seems he was a big spender. He ran up over thirty thousand pesos' worth on that card in the last week alone. Clothes … jewelry … and until two days ago, he was spending it all in Chetumal and in Corozal.”

“Chetumal? Where the hell's that?”

“Corozal is in Belize, isn't it?” Dominique asked.

“Have a look,” Chavez said, calling up Google Earth on the screen and zooming in toward the eastern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula.

Yucatán thrusts almost four hundred miles due north into the Gulf of Mexico, tropical and low-lying enough that most of it is cloaked in jungle. The western and northern portions of the peninsula belong to Mexico. South is Guatemala, while a narrow, rectangular strip of the southeastern coast is occupied by the tiny nation of Belize.

“Chetumal is right here,” Chavez said, pointing at the screen to a spot on the eastern Yucatán coast halfway down the peninsula. “It's in Mexico, on the mouth of the Rio Hondo and smack on the border with Belize.” His finger tracked south. “Corozal is nine miles south, in Belize, right here.”

The coastal region there, Teller noted, was actually a sheltered inland waterway, the Bahía de Chetumal, an arm of pale blue sea around ten to fifteen miles wide and zigzagging from north to south. Those two towns actually lay on the western shore of the bay, cut off from the darker ocean almost forty miles to the east by a south-jutting peninsula—Costa Maya, the Maya Coast—and by Ambergris Caye, a slender island more than twenty miles long reaching toward the south. Beyond that, farther south still, a broken barrier of small cays stretched from Ambergris Caye almost all the way to Belize City. Chetumal Bay, isolated from the ocean, was cloaked in jungle and possessed numerous inlets, lagoons, and coves, plenty of places where a ship might disappear.

“Okay, so what was our big spender doing way the hell down there?” Teller asked.

“Possibly he was helping with this,” Procario said, and he called up a photograph, an aerial view of a dock with a freighter tied up alongside.

“The
Zapoteca
!” Teller exclaimed. “You found her!”

“We found her,” Chavez agreed.

“How come it took so long?” Dominique asked.

“That four-hundred-mile stretch of coastline,” Procario said, “from Honduras all the way up to Cozumel and Cancún, has dozens of bays, small towns, inlets … lots of places where you can easily park a small freighter, and this area in here”—Procario swept his fingers up the light blue waters of Chetumal Bay—“this isn't usually navigated by large ships. It's shallow, and the sea approaches are protected by the second-largest barrier reef in the world. All of the main ports in the eastern Yucatán are directly on the ocean, like Cancún, or in places with easy access to the ocean—Belize City or Ladyville. We had our satellites looking for the
Zapoteca
in places like Belize City, not way off the beaten track in Chetumal.”

“Exactly,” Chavez said. “Not only that, but there was a good chance the
Zapoteca
had gone on to Veracruz and we'd missed her. That was its original destination, remember. Or she could have put in at Campeche or some other port along the way.”

“Like Coatzacoalcos,” Chavez said. “Big oil-refining and -shipping port over four hundred miles west of Belize, beyond the other side of the Yucatán. Or Ciudad de Carmen. Most of our satellite time was spent watching Carmen and Coatzacoalcos.”

“Satellites are wonderful,” Teller observed, studying the photo on the screen, “but even something as big as a cargo ship can easily get lost in all that ocean.”

“So how did you find the ship?” Dominique asked.

“We got to wondering,” Chavez said, “what your friend Gutierrez was doing down there besides buying gold jewelry.”

“And we had an interesting confirmation, something that focused our attention on that area,” Procario added. He began typing on the keyboard, bringing up a new display.

Teller watched a map of all of Mexico come up, from the U.S. border down to Guatemala. An instant later, blue dots began to appear, one at a time at first, but then faster and faster and still faster, beginning as a tight, solid blue cluster around Mexico City but spreading rapidly outward, creating clusters and constellations that blanketed the country, with heavy concentrations at the major cities—Mexico City, Veracruz, Tijuana, Nogales, Nuevo Laredo, a dozen other urban centers. Lots of blue icons scattered across into the United States, Teller noticed, and throughout Guatemala and Belize as well.

“Is that—” Teller began.

“Yup,” Procario said, grinning. “First phone-home from Cellmap. It's working.”

“My God, there're a lot of them.”

“They're still running the analyses at Fort Belvoir,” Procario said. He glanced at Chavez. “
And
at Langley. Eventually, we'll be able to zoom in on any one of those dots and turn that phone into a covert listening device.”

“How are they picking up the geographical data?” Dominique asked.

“Those are just the phones that have GPS trackers built in,” Teller said. “Devices like iPhones. Tracking older phones is tougher.”

“Yeah,” Procario agreed. “It can be done by triangulating off cell towers and Wi-Fi servers, but that'll take more time to process. This gives us a damned good start, though.”

Teller pointed at the east central coast of the Yucatán, where a mass of blue dots had congregated at the bend in Chetumal Bay. “So what's going on here?”

“That,” Procario said, “was our confirmation.”

“It could be a local smuggling operation,” Teller suggested.

“A lot of drugs come up into Mexico from South America by sea,” Chavez said. “The old Colombian cartel pipelines. And lots of it comes into Mexico at Chetumal. It's a major port of entry for the stuff. But this made us take a closer look—”

“And the
Zapoteca
was there,” Teller said, completing the thought. “We'll need to go check it out.”

“While you two were napping,” Procario said with a grin, “we were making reservations. You and me are booked on a three-o'clock puddle jumper to Chetumal.”

“What about me?” Dominique asked.

“You're with me,” Chavez told her. “We'll do some Company business here in Mexico City, while these two army types check out the ship.”

“Just keep in touch this time,” Teller told Dominique, “okay?”

SAFE HOUSE, EAST OLYMPIC BOULEVARD

EAST LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

1340 HOURS, PDT

Saeed Reyshahri moved back grimy curtains and stared out the back window. From here, you could see smoke rising from behind the buildings to the north, great, boiling clouds of it.

East Los Angeles was burning.

This was the fourth straight day of rioting. The poorer sections of the city, it turned out, had been powder kegs on short fuses, waiting to explode. Local television stations now showed nothing but news reports and scenes of the riots—young men emerging from smashed storefronts carrying flat-screen TVs and pushing shopping carts full of clothing and electronics, overturned cars and burning buildings, the angry faces of chanting and banner-waving mobs, lines of police in riot gear, National Guardsmen patrolling trash-littered streets with M-16s.

What was amazing, at least to Reyshahri's way of thinking, was the fact that most Latinos in Los Angeles weren't even taking part, save as occasional targets of mob violence. The mobs had started by looting Asian- and black-owned businesses, but the violence had rapidly spread to Hispanic shops as well—and now to housing projects, apartments, and even suburban communities as far east as West Covina. An aggressive barrio minority was now burning everything its members could reach.