The Last Line Read Free

it.
    Plenty of woodland and swamp remained, however, more than enough for training classes such as this one.
    The session was a fairly standard E&E exercise, escape and evasion. They’d driven Teller out in a Humvee and dropped him off at the side of a road three hours earlier. This night’s objective was straightforward—orienting alone across three miles of woodland and swamp with a compass. Teller’s goal was the 5,000-foot airstrip located a little more than a mile south of the millpond. The catch came in having to make the trek in pitch blackness while evading a half-dozen CIA instructors, all of whom were wearing high-tech AN/PVS-21s and coordinating their movements by tactical radio.
    Still, Procario had known Teller for a long time. “I’ll put my money on Chris Teller anyway,” he said after a long moment.
    â€œBullshit. We’ve got the bastard boxed in.”
    â€œThat,” Procario said, his grin broadening, “is exactly when he’s at his most fucking dangerous.”

    SECTOR CHARLIE 1-1
    SECRET CIA TRAINING FACILITY
    0240 HOURS, EDT
    Teller watched the moving infrared target a moment in silence. Getting caught didn’t bear thinking about. Farm instructors had been known to zip-strip trainees they caught, put them through a mock interrogation, even beat them up in the sacred name of verisimilitude. Classes like this one weren’t just about proving you could avoid contract security bully-boys like Red Three. They were to demonstrate means of surviving after you were caught.
    Chris Teller had already decided that he would be having none of that, thank you. His trainee days were over. He’d been through the Farm’s basic indoctrination course eight years ago, and he’d attended several specialization classes since. His presence here this weekend was nothing more than MacDonald’s latest attempt to make life as unpleasant as possible for him, something the woman seemed to regard as her sacred duty.
    Right now, though, MacDonald wasn’t his problem. He had five Klingons on his tail, and they were going to be royally pissed when they found out what he’d done to Klingon number six.
    The CIA did not play well with others. Among themselves, they referred to the Central Intelligence Agency as “the Agency” or “the Company” or even “the Firm.” Other U.S. intelligence services—and there were fifteen of them at the latest count aside from the Agency—referred to the CIA as “the Empire,” a term that inevitably had devolved into the villains of the popular science fiction franchise. The Klingons got the lion’s share of the intelligence budget, the Klingons got the attention on Capitol Hill when it came to procurements, and the Klingons didn’t like to share the goodies.
    For a DIA case officer like Teller, working with the CIA was a necessary evil, something to avoid if possible, to get through quickly when necessary.
    This time around, unfortunately, there’d been no avoiding it.
    Thirty yards farther along, the ground began growing soft underfoot, the swamp dragging at his boots with each step. He kept going until he reached the water’s edge, then stopped, looking back. He pressed the SEND button on the tactical radio. “Man down! Man down!” he called. “Red Three’s in trouble, sector one-one!”
    There was silence for a moment. Then, “Who is this?”
    â€œRed Three is in trouble!” Teller repeated. He switched off the radio and began wading out into the pond.
    The water was cold and utterly black. In the distance, he heard a shout—and his NVDs showed three infrared beacons converging in the woods behind him. Good. If he’d injured Red Three, he wanted the man to get treatment, and the call would also serve as a diversion. After a moment, he pushed off from the muddy bottom and began swimming. The AN/PVS-21 was waterproof to a depth of ten