The Last Line by Anthony Shaffer Read Free Book Online

you.”
    â€œHow’s it going, JJ?” Teller asked, shaking the man’s hand.
    â€œTo hell,” Wentworth replied. “In the proverbial gold-plated handbasket. Chris Teller? Frank Procario? This is Ed Chavez and David Larson. Ed, Dave, these are the DoD people I was telling you about.”
    Hands were shaken. “Pleased to meet you,” Chavez said. He had Latino features and a friendly smile. Larson seemed more reserved, possibly suspicious. That was fine, so far as Teller was concerned. He didn’t trust them either. The Klingons always worked to remind the DoD clan that they weren’t Company, and that the Company was just a bit better than everyone else in the game.
    â€œI’ve reserved a conference room down the hall,” Chavez told them. “I really want you guys to take a look at this and tell us what you think.”
    The conference room was dominated by an interactive touch-table. “You’ve heard about Galen Fletcher?” Chavez asked.
    â€œYesterday,” Procario said, “but JJ didn’t say what the problem was.”
    â€œThe problem,” Wentworth told them, “is that we’re blind in Mexico—and at the very worst possible moment.”
    Why am I not surprised? Teller thought, but he said nothing.
    Wentworth tapped on the tabletop, bringing up a series of images. Pictures glowed on the table’s surface, repeated large on the screen built into the wall behind him. “Both of you gentlemen,” Wentworth went on, stressing the words to give them special weight, “now have Blue Star clearance.”
    â€œGee, thanks,” Teller quipped.
    He didn’t add that his DIA security clearance was two levels above Blue Star. Even in this age of computers and databases, the various agencies and departments in both the government and the military often didn’t talk to one another.
    Make that especially in this age of computers. An individual’s electronic personnel records could be written on more than one level, and how deeply you were able to read them depended on the reader’s security classification—and on how open the targeted records might be to the accessing agency in the first place.
    Wentworth gave Teller a sharp look but continued. “What you see and hear in this room does not leave it. Understood?”
    Procario crossed his arms, his face deadpan. “Of course.”
    â€œWe’ll be good, Mommy,” Teller added.
    Wentworth flashed Teller an annoyed glare. A photograph of Galen Fletcher appeared on the wall, much larger than life. He was smiling, a pipe in his right hand. Teller felt a fresh pang at the image; Fletcher had been more than a friend, more than a sponsor. In many ways he’d been Teller’s mentor, the man responsible for Teller being who and what he now was.
    â€œWe’re putting it out that Fletcher had personal problems, problems that caused him to take his own life. In a sense that’s true.”
    â€œIn a sense?”
    A second face appeared on the wall next to Fletcher’s, a much younger man, in his forties perhaps, lean, sharp edged, a bit grim.
    â€œRichard Nicholas,” Chavez said. “Our deputy chief of station in Mexico—and a traitor.”
    â€œFletcher brought word to Langley personally four days ago,” Larson said. “Nicholas sold us out, possibly starting a year ago.”
    â€œHe sold our Mexican network to Los Zetas, and probably to the Sinaloans as well. To date we’ve lost three case officers and twenty-five agents. DEA is losing theirs, too. And we now have reason to believe that our pictures of the cartel hierarchies are false fronts.” As he spoke, Chavez tapped commands into the table, bringing up a wall-sized map of Mexico, the southwestern rim of the United States, and the northern half of Central America, all of it divided into a scattered rainbow of colors—but predominantly in yellow and