Strong Cold Dead (20 page)

Caitlin saw Jones addressing some uniformed officials who'd just arrived, and he approached her as soon as he sent them off.

“The colonel agrees Daniel Cross was behind this,” Caitlin told him. “If he's really got something he wants to give to ISIS, we just found it.”

“You mean we found what it can do, Ranger.”

“Which still doesn't provide even a hint about what he was doing outside that Indian reservation.”

Jones massaged his scalp through his high-and-tight haircut. “I can see why Captain Tepper finally hammered your ass to a chair.”

“As you can see, the nails didn't hold. You suspected an ISIS plot in Texas, with Daniel Cross a primary part of it. Then he disappears and this happens. But, in between, he shows up to watch the Comanche protest from the peanut gallery. You telling me you don't see a possible connection there?”

*   *   *

The air outside was hot and steamy, but still welcome. Being back in the fresh air left Caitlin grateful for the unseasonably hot sun and the sweat she was now free to wipe from her brow and cheeks with a bandanna lifted from her back pocket. It had been her father's, and her grandfather's before that, but neither had ever come up against anything like this.

Caitlin felt a vibration in the front pocket of her jeans and remembered her cell phone was still tucked there.

“I just got your message,” Cort Wesley greeted her. “Please tell me you're not in Austin.”

“What do you think?”

“I'm headed there now. Give me a place to meet.”

“Not here, Cort Wesley. The Comanche reservation. You and me need to have a talk with Dylan.”

She could hear him sigh over the phone. “What's he done now?”

Caitlin recalled the item in the evidence bag Doc Whatley was keeping tucked in his desk drawer for safekeeping. “Could be nothing.”

“And if it isn't, Ranger?”

“I'll explain when I see you, Cort Wesley.”

 

44

H
OUSTON,
T
EXAS

“Jackson Whole Mineral,” Cray Rawls said, inside Sam Bob Jackson's office. “You come up with that all on your own?”

“Like it?” Jackson asked him, swabbing the sweat from his forehead with a colored handkerchief.

“About as much as I like the rest of this state, Sam Bob. Somewhere between a colonoscopy and getting my prostate checked. How does anyone even live here?”

“You did, after that couple adopted you. Brought you all the way here from North Carolina.”

“Even gave me my own room: a windowless closet in the basement they kept locked to keep me from giving in to the devil's temptation.”

“That wasn't in your bio,” Jackson noted.

“Neither was the fact I was homeschooled, which in that particular household meant the Bible morning, noon, or night. You ever wonder why I haven't set foot inside a church since?”

Rawls had his back to a set of finished oak bookshelves lined with framed photos of Sam Bob Jackson with Texas celebrities, most wearing cowboy hats. A wide-screen television was tuned to the local news with the sound muted.

“You want to explain to me why you had this high school boy kidnapped?” Rawls asked, while gazing out the window toward the Katy Freeway beyond.

Jackson's reflection in the window glass grew so still even the fatty ripples on his face stopped moving. “There's a lot at stake here. I felt I had to take the initiative, so I used the boy to send a message.”

Rawls nodded, hating the ridiculously low temperature in Sam Bob Jackson's office, given the scorching temperature outside. He thought about how the environmentalists were always up his ass and figured they'd have a field day in a building like this, where the temperature left you bleeding icicles, in stark contrast to the blast furnace beyond.

“A message to the boy's father, for sending four of our workers to the hospital.” Rawls nodded. “I get that. What I don't get is you taking such a risk without knowing squat about the guy.”

Jackson didn't look surprised at all. Instead, he looked at Rawls smugly. “He did a stretch in Huntsville. Worked as an enforcer for the Branca crime family out of New Orleans for a stretch. A thug, that's all.”

“Really? He puts four guys in the hospital without suffering a scratch and all you can tell me about him is he used to be mobbed up and did some time?”

Jackson shrugged again. “So what do you want me to do?”

“Your job. What I'm fucking paying you for.”

“Hey, I'm the one who found this deal for you, Cray. What's that short for, by the way?”

“What's
what
short for?”

“Cray. Cray
ton
or something?”

“No, Christopher Raymond. One thing I got left my real mother gave me.”

Jackson's teeth curled over his lower lip. “That Bible-thumping couple … I heard they got killed in a fire and you inherited all they had—enough to get you out of Texas.”

“True enough.”

“The fire was suspicious,” Jackson added, after a pause.

“You should keep that in mind, next time you decide to make a move like this without consulting me.

“It's under control, Cray.”

“Is it? I don't think so, given we've still got a full construction crew sitting in the shade on my dime, all because some Comanche are communing with nature. All the more reason to find out more about this guy Masters you decided to pick a fight with.”

“No other choice I could see.”

“You shouldn't have been looking. You're hired help, my friend. Next time you get it in your mind to make a decision on your own, find a bucket of ice water to stick your head in. This goddamn state's full of two things—oil and bullshit—and I don't have any use for either. The sooner I can get this mess cleaned up, the sooner I can fly the friendly skies the fuck out of this circus you call a state.”

Rawls finally turned from the window, and west Houston's Energy Corridor beyond, and focused on the muted wide-screen television, which currently showed a slew of flashing lights and a cordoned neighborhood in Austin.

“Like I was saying…” Rawls noted, shaking his head.

 

45

A
USTIN,
T
EXAS

“So, what do you think?” Daniel Cross asked the two men in the front seat of the car parked as close as they could get to Hoover's Cooking. “You guys happy? You wanna give me high marks, praise, something like that?”

Zurif and Saflin turned toward him at the same time, startling Cross enough to send his shoulders whiplashing back against the seat rest.

“Praise comes only from Allah,” said Zurif. “But you can rest assured you have proven yourself before His eyes.”

“And the rest of this holy mission follows in accordance with His will,” Saflin added.

Zurif nodded in agreement. “We are nothing when measured against the scope of that. The sooner you realize and accept your place, the more peace you will find basking in Allah's good graces.”

“I told you I'm not interested in converting. That's not what this is about.”

“Actions speak louder than words,” said Saflin. “You are now one of us, a soldier in the army of the one true God, who owes all to Him and His word.”

Saflin and Zurif kept talking, but Cross stopped listening to them. Suddenly these two men were no better or different than the bullies and braggarts who'd terrorized him through every year of his schooling. He could almost hear them chanting “Diaper Dan,” the way kids in school did sometimes. Nothing had changed, and he felt stupid for deluding himself into believing that it had. Except he was right—it
had
changed, because he was the one with the power now,
him
. He was the one who had injected the contents of the syringe into the jug of cooking oil, the kind cooks slather over their grills. All Saflin and Zurif did was provide the distraction and then plug up the kitchen exhaust fan outside to make sure the oil could do its work.

“Well, let me tell you boys something,” he said, suddenly emboldened by the endless stream of law enforcement, fire, and rescue vehicles. Their flashing lights made the street look like the Fourth of July beneath the helicopters battling for space in the sky overhead. “Everybody in that restaurant is dead, every single one. As in one hundred percent, as in I delivered what I promised, as in I'm serving up—no pun intended—the ultimate weapon to you, so your friends in the Middle East can save themselves from the coalition that's been kicking their ass.”

“They're your friends, too, now” from Zurif.

“That's what you wanted, isn't it?” from Saflin.

“A little fucking respect would be nice, maybe a thank-you,” Daniel Cross said. “Maybe you don't get what you're looking at over there, but it's a microcosm of what you can do to the whole of the goddamn U.S. of A.,
thanks to me
. Now,
that's
terror.”

Saflin and Zurif looked at each other, their glances furtive and excited at the same time.

“The proper communiqués have been sent,” Zurif told him.

“We're expecting a message as to when to expect arrival, any minute,” added Saflin.

Cross leaned forward again. “Wait a minute. They're coming
here
? From the Middle East?”

“A top-echelon team under one of the senior commanders. What did you expect?” Zurif asked.

“It's what you wanted, isn't it?” Saflin asked.

Cross couldn't answer either of those questions, because he hadn't thought that far ahead. He was starting to think that maybe, just maybe, this time really was different. He found himself gazing ahead again, not just toward the chaos he'd wrought but also toward the future he was helping to create.

“O say can you see…”

He spoke the words instead of singing them, but the effect was the same. Both Saflin and Zurif looked as if they were about to speak, when a uniformed Austin policeman rapped his knuckles against the driver's side window.

 

46

M
ONTREAL,
Q
UEBEC

After doing battle with the Hells Angels earned him a Royal Canadian Mounted Police medal, Pierre Beauchamp had been reassigned from his regular duties to an RCMP task force responsible for coordinating antiterrorist efforts with the Mounties' American counterparts. His heroism in a gunfight that had left all the Angels dead and their marijuana grow house burned to the ground had gotten him laid up for several months with a bullet wound. The medal and his reassignment had preempted his plans to retire, a decision he didn't regret for one moment.

Until today.

A bulletin reached his desk about a potential terrorist attack 1,700 miles away, in Austin, Texas.

Texas,
he mused, thinking of the state for the first time since the real hero of that gunfight against the Hells Angels, five years before, had saved his life.

The second bulletin changed “potential” to “suspected,” while still offering scant details. Those details arrived an hour later, in a third bulletin that came, encrypted, through the most secure communications channel possible. Beauchamp read it three times, growing colder on each occasion. He put his jacket on before he went in to see the task force commander.

*   *   *

“I understand the severity of the situation,” Captain Claude Baston told him. “And we're already in close contact with our counterparts in the United States. What I'm not understanding, Sergeant, is why you need to go there.”

“Because this has happened before, Captain,” Beauchamp said, thinking of what a trapper named Joe Labelle had found when he stumbled into an Inuit village in Nunavut, around eighty-five years before. “And it happened up here.”

 

47

B
ALCONES
C
ANYONLANDS,
T
EXAS

“We getting out?” Caitlin asked from the passenger seat of Cort Wesley's truck.

A late afternoon thunderstorm had sprung up suddenly from the day's heat, leaving rain, swept away by the wipers, pooled in the windshield's corners. Drops dappled the freshly waxed finish on the hood of the truck. A combination of the sun's return and the hot engine pushed steam up into the air, which drifted off in smokelike clouds.

“I'm still trying to get my arms wrapped around all this,” he said, hands squeezing the steering wheel, even though the truck was parked, its engine cooling.

Caitlin had just told him about the contents of the evidence pouch Doc Whatley was currently storing in his desk drawer. She had immediately recognized the silver Miraculous Medal that Dylan never took off, because it had belonged to his mother and had her initials—MT, for Maura Torres—on the back. The medal had been recovered not far from the body of the construction foreman, splattered with the man's blood.

“I was already figuring what I'm going to do to those guys who threatened Luke,” Cort Wesley continued. “Don't know if my arms are big enough to get around this, too.”

“Neither of us thinks for a minute Dylan had anything to do with that construction worker getting murdered.”

“Which means somebody's trying to set him up. Any guesses as to who?”

“Something's been bothering me about Ela Nocona from the beginning.”

“Yeah, my boy sure can pick 'em, can't he?”

“Must take after his father.”

Her quip produced no smile from him. “How long can Doc Whatley keep this under wraps, Ranger?”

“Keep
what
under wraps, Cort Wesley?” Caitlin said, waiting for her words to sink in before resuming. “Everything comes back to whatever's going on inside that reservation.”

“Speaking of which…” Cort Wesley began, and then explained what had struck him earlier in the day.