Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista (54 page)

Click.  Hundreds of tents and tarps were being erected on the National Mall in Washington.  The vanguard of the Poor People’s Party was vowing to camp there until two weeks before the Constitutional Convention, while growing in numbers every day. Their stated goal was to lead a 150-mile march up Interstate 95 through Baltimore to Philadelphia, where millions of poor people would surround the convention with “people power” and demand that…

Click.  The FBI agent continued going through the national news channels, looking for any mention of the assassination of the governor of New Mexico.  Maybe it had been covered, and he had just missed it.  Or maybe events in
Nuevo Mexico
just didn’t rate as national news any more. Maybe the state had slid beyond the national interest horizon.

Well, Alex Garabanda remembered what had happened yesterday. He even had his own personal video recording of the Rally for Social Justice. He wondered if he was ready to watch it again…if he ever wanted to watch it again.  He drained his vodka and orange juice, pushed himself up from his easy chair, and dragged his gray daypack over toward the television.  He took out his camcorder, fumblingly set up the connection to the TV, and then lurched backward and fell into his chair again.

***

Ranya kept walking
up the sidewalk without looking back, made a right at the top of the block, and then another right, heading back down toward the playground.  She was wondering if the two men in the blue sedan were waiting for her to show up, or if they were watching the house for other reasons.  Alexandro Garabanda was an FBI agent, so perhaps New Mexico politics were involved.  Or maybe they were just waiting for someone else there, a third party.  Or maybe they were just innocently killing time. Maybe it was merely a coincidence, where the two men were parked…

No, she couldn’t accept that.  Now she had a new problem. Garabanda might leave his house at any time, and she wouldn’t be able to follow him very far in the Solaris.  Neither could she approach his house while the two men were watching it.  

What could she do to get them to leave? What kind of diversion could she create, while keeping a low profile?  She could take out a neighborhood transformer with the Dragunov, and create an instant power failure.  She could burn an empty house.  She could torch one of the empty cars parked in the line in front of the gas station on Tramway.  

Ranya sat for a while in the playground, on the same cement bench Garabanda had used, watching all around the area for any signs of surveillance on the Solaris.  When she was satisfied it was clean, she walked toward the car and then continued past it, again searching for new watchers, her paranoia spiking to astronomical levels.  Finally she returned to the car and quickly climbed inside.  It was already stifling hot and she had to open the side windows.  The indicated power level was up to 19%, a slight improvement.  She pulled off her sweatshirt, squirming in the car’s tight confines.  She was wearing a black t-shirt underneath.

She saw a middle-aged Hispanic woman come out of a house on the other side of the street, walking a Chihuahua on a leash. While waiting for her dog to do its business, the woman seemed to be staring at her in the solar car.  Ranya turned the ignition switch and pulled out.  Her new intention was to find a spot where she could observe the two watchers across from the Garabanda house.  Camino Del Cielo curved slightly to the left as it went uphill.  She pulled over to the curb 200 feet behind the blue sedan, obscured behind a long roll-off construction dumpster.  The green steel dumpster was sitting at curbside in front of a house undergoing renovation.  From her driver’s seat, she could just see the back of the blue car, and the Garabanda house across from the two watchers.  His garage door was still rolled open.  There was finally time for some water, and a few stale donuts.

The open-topped dumpster in front of her appeared to have been in that location for a very long time, long enough to be overflowing with trash.  Dirt and crud was piled up around it on the asphalt.  She looked more closely at the house by the dumpster.  It was empty, with a half-finished room addition on one side. The project had obviously stopped in mid-construction.  The bare plywood of the addition was gray and warped from long exposure to the elements.  Lumber cutoffs and building debris littered the unkempt yard of dirt and weeds.  

Ranya wondered what all of the abandoned houses on Camino Del Cielo were doing to the property values on the rest of the street.  It had clearly once been a thriving middle class neighborhood, but now it had fallen to seedy ruin and disrepair.  Its rundown condition reminded her of the neighborhood around Mr. De Vries’s house, west of Albuquerque.  

She briefly thought about the man she’d never met in life, whose Dragunov rifle now lay behind her in the back of the wagon, covered with a dirty blanket.  Jan Pieter De Vries, she guessed by his name, was probably a South African Boer. She wondered if he was a recent immigrant to the USA, driven out of that country by a hunger for freedom.  Well, at least he’d gone down fighting, which was more than she could say for most Americans.

Ranya had no way of knowing the remarkable journey the Dragunov had already taken, since its creation in the drab central Russian industrial city of Izhevsk in 1979.  She would not have guessed that the rifle had been lifted from a dead Cuban “advisor” in 1987, when Lieutenant De Vries had gone into Angola with the South African Special Forces, to battle the communist SWAPO guerrillas.  The Dragunov had thereafter stayed continuously in his possession, craftily hidden and eventually smuggled into the USA, when he emigrated from the RSA. 

If Ranya Bardiwell had known this particular rifle’s unique history, she might have understood why he fired those ten bullets, killing three members of the Falcon Battalion.  Jan Pieter De Vries was not the type to avoid a scrap with a Marxist paramilitary unit.  Leaving his first homeland had been hard enough.  He was no longer a young man, and he was done with running from communists.  It was now his turn to fight a guerrilla campaign of resistance—and he had taken his best shots.

These were the stories the Dragunov held, but it lay mute behind her, keeping its secrets.  The only time the long rifle spoke out loud, was when someone put eye to scope, and finger to trigger.

***

Alex Garabanda was sitting in his old easy chair
getting quietly sloshed. The digital video recording from the “Rally for Social Justice” was clear enough on the small television, even with some office window glare and contrast problems. The recorded audio quality of the band playing on stage was terrible, and the Spanish lyrics were barely understandable.  For the second time he saw the busloads of extra Milicianos arrive, taking up their security positions around the stage area.  He saw Carlos Guzman, “El Condor,” conferring with a small group that he supposed were junior officers, all of them wearing old-style woodland pattern camouflage uniforms and pistol belts.  Each zoom and pan of the camera’s lens had been his decision, and watching the video took him straight back to yesterday’s events.

He saw Luis Carvahal arrive, and chain his bicycle to the fateful tree. He saw Luis look up toward him, and give a little nod of recognition in his direction.

***

Two hours, a long hot shower
and many aspirins and glasses of water later, Basilio Ramos was ready to deal with the problem of the dead man in his bed, who he now realized was Professor Robert Johnson from the university.  By now he remembered that Johnson had been a guest at his post-rally reception last night.  The dead man was single, and had come to his villa alone.  Johnson’s keys were gone, and there were no extra cars inside of the fence.  Ramos deduced that Ranya Bardiwell, that Arab bitch from hell, had used it to flee his property.  

Basilio Ramos burned with rage, thinking of how she had not only betrayed him, but how she had drugged him and then photographed him in ways that could not ever be explained
.
To add greater insult to his injury, she had somehow gotten inside of his safe, and had robbed him of his most valuable possessions in the world: his painstakingly collected hoard of gold coins and gemstones.  Most of his lovely Krugerrands, Maple Leafs and American Eagles, the fruit of dozens of ranch “liberations,” were gone. How had she learned the safe’s combination?

Bardiwell had even stolen his custom-made .45 caliber pistol, which he had personally lifted from the cold dead hand of a wealthy Anglo rancher.  The bitch even took his web belt and holster!  How would he be able to explain the loss, when he had a staff meeting to attend? One of his loyal Zetas would have to provide a substitute, something to put into a replacement holster.  He could not attend the afternoon staff meeting without his customary accouterments of leadership.  It was unthinkable!

Ramos wrapped the dead professor in the filthy sheet, dragged him across the bedroom floor and into his bathroom, and finally heaved him up into the bathtub.  The man was stiff with rigor mortis, and Ramos had to put his foot onto the corpse’s chest to shove him down into the tub. The man’s dead eyes were still bulging from his purple face, still staring at nothing. 

Professor Robert Johnson, the stupid gringo, had to disappear from the planet earth.  But first he had to disappear from this bedroom and this property, and for that, Basilio Ramos had a razor-sharp hunting knife. Several inches of the blade near the hilt were serrated into triangular saw teeth.  It was going to be a disgusting but necessary job to reduce the corpse to smaller, manageable segments that could be discreetly carried out in plastic bags, one piece at a time.  

Ramos knelt by the side of the tub and carefully studied the body, considering which extremity to remove first.  The professor was a disgusting specimen, a piece of human shit.  He was a traitor to his own people, and a homosexual pervert.  Cutting him into pieces was no more than a distasteful job to do.  Unpleasant, but necessary.  No different than butchering a deer or a pig, he told himself.

On the other hand, he thought (while working the knife’s blade through the tendons of the professor’s right knee joint) that under the right circumstances this could actually be extremely pleasurable.  Oh, yes, indeed it could.  That is, if it was Ranya Bardiwell under his blade, and if she was securely tied up and very much awake and alive, while he was doing the cutting.  

He remembered with satisfaction how the Jewish traitor and spy named Luis Carvahal had screamed and struggled while burning to death, tied to that tree by his neck.  The gringo radio man Rick Haywood had also met a fitting end, skinned alive while being dragged to death, deserving every bit of his pain for the trouble and embarrassment he had caused with his big fat gringo mouth.

As Ramos severed the last gristly knee sinew and the professor’s lower leg dropped free and thumped into the bottom of the tub, he wondered how much more gratifying it would be, when it was that Arab bitch Ranya Bardiwell struggling and screaming under his knife blade!

But those pictures!  Those pictures could not ever—ever—get out, to be seen by his men!  He had to face the ugly truth: as long as she had copies of the pictures, she not only had his gold and his guns—she also had him by his
cojones
.

24

She gazed up the street
for a half an hour, munching donuts and sipping water, wondering if Garabanda was going to leave his house before the two men in the blue four-door sedan.  She considered more means of creating a diversion that might cause them to leave their position. In the end, she decided to just wait and see what happened.

Finally, at quarter till twelve, the blue sedan pulled away.  It headed up the hill and made the right turn at the stop sign, retracing her recent walking route.  She gave them ten more minutes, in case they were just circling the block, or they were going to be replaced by another surveillance team.  Departing around noon made some sense, if they were on a schedule and acting under orders.  She optimistically hoped that their shift was now over for the day, and they were not going to be replaced.

Garabanda’s garage door was still open.  She knew that there might never be a better opportunity.  Another Milicia surveillance team could be on the way.  What was she waiting for, an invitation? She decided to go for it.  She put the black and red Lobos ball cap back on, mentally slipping back into wolf mode.  She smiled at the thought.  She was already wearing her wraparound sport sunglasses.  The .45 pistol went under her belt, Mexican carry, covered by her untucked black t-shirt.  There were no reloads.  Eight bullets would have to do whatever needed to be done.

It was time to move.  She slipped out and quietly closed the Solaris’s locked door, and crossed the street to walk up the sidewalk toward 4875. She passed a nicely dressed family getting out of a mini-van, who were obviously returning from church.  The husband stole an appraising look at her, while the wife quickly shepherded their small children into their house.  The absence of people out and about, of kids playing or parents gardening seemed strange to her on such a beautiful day. In half a minute she was approaching the Garabanda’s short driveway, which led at a right angle from the sidewalk to the open garage.  Until this moment she was a lawful pedestrian like any other—until she made that turn toward their house.

The key to success was not breaking stride, was not looking around or acting unsure or furtive in any way.  She smoothly turned ninety degrees to the left and walked directly into the open garage, and disappeared into its cool darkness. 

She’d done it.  Step one, a huge step, was accomplished.  She had penetrated the perimeter.  There was no reaction from the street, no neighbor coming around to check.  Now she could just wait right here, until Garabanda eventually came out through the interior door to get into his Crown Vic.  When he came to get into his car, she’d be ready to ambush him.  He wouldn’t have a chance to defend himself—which was just the way it should be.