The Last Line Read Free Page B

pulling a half-kilometer swim in the bargain.
    The stuttering whop-whop-whop of a helicopter approached out of the darkness.
    Those red lights—an ambulance. The helicopter must be a medevac chopper. Shit. He must have hit Red Three harder than he’d realized.
    â€œOkay,” he said. “So where do we go from here?”
    â€œI don’t know about the rest of us,” a new voice said from behind Teller’s shoulder, “but you are in a world of shit.”
    It wouldn’t be the first time.
    â€œSo what else is new?” Teller asked.

    SMITHSONIAN MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY
    WASHINGTON, D.C.
    1345 HOURS, EDT
    Galen Fletcher smiled thinly as the security guard patted him down, checking for weapons. How ironic. He lived in a country awash in guns, and he had to come home, to the nation’s capital, to be properly frisked.
    The guard finished and waved him through.
    â€œThank you for your patience, sir.”
    â€œNot a problem,” he replied, shrugging back into his jacket.
    As he moved into the crowded entryway of the newly renovated Smithsonian Museum of American History, the warmth, the energy of the place enveloped him. The meetings at headquarters, which had begun at eight sharp, had continued straight through lunch and left him in a bit of a daze, so to help clear his head, he had decided on an afternoon walking tour of the landmarks along the National Mall in downtown Washington, D.C. They’d meant so much to him when he was younger.
    Long ago … when it was so much easier to believe.
    Surrounded by chattering tourists with their cameras and backpacks, the CIA’s Mexico chief of station glanced around him, catching a glimpse of his reflection in the polished steel columns—gray hair, distinguished features, conservatively dressed in his usual navy blue Brooks Brothers suit and red tie. He was reminded of how much like an investment banker he appeared—like his father and his father’s father. He hadn’t chosen that path, though. His had been a life of clandestine intrigue, of service to his country.
    Fletcher passed the glass display cases containing trinkets from the country’s past—a muscled G.I. Joe action figure, a chipped wooden cradle, a curvaceous Barbie in a black-and-white swimsuit—and headed up the wide staircase. He strolled through the second floor and stooped to inspect a letter by George Washington, squinting to make out the looped script.
    If we consider ourselves, or wish to be considered by Others as a United people, Washington had scrawled, why not adopt the measures that are characteristic of it—Act as a Nation  …
    He smiled again, reflecting on his life, on a career in the service of his nation. His start with paramilitary and field operations training at the Farm, then the long climb through the ranks. The days of dust and sorrow in Beirut as a young case officer working to solve the marine barracks and U.S. Embassy bombings. His stint in Sudan—what a godawful place—trying to prevent the fall of the government to forces that would be less inclined to see things the American way. The trip to North Korea in 1994 with former president Jimmy Carter on his mission to defuse tensions there; that had been a close one, the time when he’d first recognized his own mortality.
    Five years later, he’d had a closer brush with death, when he’d been deputy chief of station in Côte d’Ivoire. He’d helped save the life of the Chilean ambassador in Liberia during a tense stand-off with the Liberian monster Charles Taylor.
    That encounter had earned him the CIA’s ultimate honor, the Intelligence Medal of Merit. Now, at a time when intelligence collection had never been more imperative to the security of the United States, he knew more than ever the significance of the honor bestowed on him. Honor was at the core of everything he had done, everything he had become, everything he