The Last Line Read Online Free PDF Page B

cost.
    Alvarado saw Reyshahri admiring the M-60. “We have our friends within the United States government to thank for most of these,” he said, grinning. “Rapido y Furioso.”
    â€œFast and Furious.” Reyshahri nodded. He didn’t need to be fluent in Spanish to translate that. Carefully, lovingly, he replaced the machine gun in its crate. The scandal last year, when the American public learned that large numbers of American weapons had been shipped to Mexico’s drug cartels by the U.S. Department of Justice, had been explosive. Operation Fast and Furious, supposedly, had been an attempt to track arms shipments to the cartels, but somehow the government agencies responsible for tracking them had failed to do so. What the American news media did not know, could not know, was that the visible scandal represented only a tiny piece of the whole story. The weapons had vanished into Mexico without telling the FBI or DEA a thing about where they had gone.
    Now many of them were here, smuggled back into the United States and awaiting shipment to their final destinations. Some had been routed here directly, thanks to the efforts of the operation’s allies in Washington.
    Operation Fast and Furious was the tip of a vast weapons-smuggling iceberg.
    â€œYour distribution network is in place?” Reyshahri asked Alvarado.
    â€œ Sí, señor. My people need only the order.”
    â€œThen do it. You have the order.”
    Alvarado’s eyes widened. “Immediately?”
    Reyshahri nodded. “The longer we delay, the more likely it is that the enemy will discover us.”
    That, of course, had been the chief danger all along. Operation Shah Mat was so big, involved so many people, and had such terrifyingly far-reaching implications that the secret would not be secure for very much longer. They had to strike now, before the enemy was aware of the danger.
    â€œAnd your part in this game, señor capitán? ”
    â€œIt will happen. Eight, maybe ten days. No more.”
    The man hissed, a sharp intake of breath. “Jesús y María.”
    â€œGod willing,” Reyshahri added.

    EXECUTIVE SWEETS
    WASHINGTON, D.C.
    1745 HOURS, EDT
    Chris Teller paused at the door, then held it open for Procario. “After you, Colonel.”
    â€œI hate these joints,” Procario said, grimacing. “Why can’t you get yourself plastered in a decent dive?”
    Both of them were in civvies, Procario in a sports coat, Teller in his usual stone-washed jeans and a gray T-shirt.
    â€œI’ll have you know I’ve done some of my best undercover work here,” Teller said.
    â€œUndercover? Or under the covers?”
    â€œCute.”
    â€œDamn it, Chris, this is embarrassing!
    Once, Fourteenth Street had been D.C.’s infamous red-light district, a seedy, noisome patch of inner-city lights and shabbiness where strip clubs, massage parlors, triple-X-rated theaters, tittie bars, and by-the-hour motels had shouldered one another in salacious intimacy with somewhat more respectable businesses such as liquor stores, tobacco shops, pawnbrokers, and quick-loan joints. That had been back in the wild and woolly seventies, when an intoxicated Wilbur Daigh Mills, honorable congressman from Arkansas, had been stopped at 2:00 A.M. one night by Park Police for driving without his lights—and a stripper with the stage name Fanne Foxe had bolted from the car and gone for an impromptu swim in the Tidal Basin.
    The 1974 scandal had led to Mills’s resigning as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. It had also led to an attempt by the city to clean up the Fourteenth Street strip once and for all.
    Nowadays, new sex-industry businesses were kept out, and the old ones, the ones grandfathered in, were strictly regulated and ruthlessly taxed. The old Pussycat Revue was now Executive Sweets, a high-toned gentleman’s club with a tastefully elegant sign out front and a