Read Online The Last Line by Anthony Shaffer - Free Book Online Page B

smaller version of its more famous big brother, was less than fifteen inches long with its folding stock removed and weighed less than eight pounds with a full magazine. With a cyclic rate of fire of better than fifteen rounds per second, it sounded like a miniature buzz saw. The security guard flopped backward, arms pinwheeling, and came to rest sprawled across an ornamental tree planter. Carballo turned and loosed the rest of his magazine randomly into a crowd of shrieking people, dropped the empty magazine, and snicked home a new one.
    Three more shops, three more grenades. He dropped the now empty canvas bag and strode toward the front entrance. He hoped Mannie was behind him, but he didn’t stop to look. Mannie was a big boy and could take care of himself.
    As he emerged onto the sidewalk once more, he nearly collided with a a traffic cop in shorts, helmet, and a windbreaker riding a bike. That one wasn’t armed either, but Carballo cut him down with a burst from the Mini-Uzi, slamming bike and rider sideways into a brick wall. Other people on the sidewalk shrieked and scattered. Carballo snapped off the rest of his magazine in a quick succession of bursts until the weapon was empty.
    More gunfire sounded from inside the mall. It sounded like Mannie was having fun. Kicking up his heels, just like he’d said.
    Fuck him.
    He reached the idling automobile and yanked open the passenger-side front door. “Vámanos,” he said, sliding in.
    â€œWhat about Mannie?”
    Carballo looked at his watch. Nine minutes had passed. “Un tecado gilún,” he said. “Leave him!”
    As more explosions sounded from the mall, blasting out the glass doors at the entrance, the getaway car sped off down the street.
    In the distance, sirens wailed.

 
    Chapter Four
    CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
    LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
    1318 HOURS, EDT
    15 APRIL
    â€œI’ve never heard of this,” Larson said. “Damn it, why weren’t we informed?”
    The five men had gone down to one of the OHB’s employee cafeterias for lunch. As they ate, they continued to discuss the technological twist Teller and Procario had been describing to them.
    â€œHey, new stuff is coming out all the time,” Teller told him. “This thing is still in beta, but it would be easy enough to get you guys a copy, let you try it out.”
    â€œSo it’s like a virus—” Chavez began.
    â€œA very, very smart virus,” Teller said.
    â€œâ€”and it just leaps from phone to phone?”
    â€œRight,” Procario said. “It’s called peer-to-peer transmission.”
    â€œAnd it creates a map of phone use,” Chavez said. “That’s … amazing.”
    â€œHey, welcome to the twenty-first century,” Teller told him. “All the thrills of sci-fi, and outmoded Dark Ages concepts like privacy magically become a thing of the past.”
    The system they’d been describing had recently come from a high-technology think tank in Washington, one of dozens of corporate entities in the town feeding information, analyses, tools, and, occasionally, informed guesswork to the policy makers. Teller knew that something similar had already been field tested by the NSA, but the deep-black National Security Agency didn’t like to share with anyone.
    The software was called Cellmap.
    â€œSo how do we deploy it?” Chavez wanted to know.
    â€œWe find a cell phone that’s part of the net we want to map,” Teller told him. “It would have phone numbers of other contacts. It uses those to locate other phones on the network.”
    â€œKind of like a computer virus making copies of your e-mail list,” Wentworth suggested.
    â€œPretty much. Even if the user didn’t save contact phone numbers, the phone would still have a list of all the numbers it’s called in its memory. Cellmap nestles down in the phone’s memory, gets the list of numbers, and