The Wizards 1: Combat Wizard
Page 16
“Oh, lord. What a can of legal worms you two have opened!”
“Ray, it’s only a can of worms if we're found out. So far as the Army knows, we’re just two more missing people; it happens over there, even now. The jihadists are still holding a sergeant that they captured, and sometimes they can't pick up enough of the bodies after an IED blows to tell if what's left came from one person or three. If someone is looking for us over there, maybe putting a bit more effort into spying on the terrorists, that’s not a bad thing as far as I’m concerned.
“Right now, we need for you to keep quiet about our secret. We have other secrets too, and I don’t know how many of them you now know.”
#
Two hundred miles to the southeast, another person had discovered part of the secret.
Colonel Henderson had finally realized why the photo in the paper looked familiar. There were some differences, but still…
It could be the same man, he thought, the one believed by the Army to have been taken prisoner or killed, the man that the School had sent off to the Army under the name Tagliaferro.
It could be; he couldn't be sure, but it was worth a closer look in order to be certain.
The colonel packed a light bag, put the remote in just in case, and serviced his car.
Colonel Henderson left early the next morning. He was well into the flat desert of West Texas by early afternoon, and he expected to be in El Paso within three or four more hours, depending on road construction and conditions on Interstate 10.
The colonel hummed along with a CD as he followed the interstate west.
Chapter Fifteen
Peter Paul Henderson, Colonel, US Army retired, had become known to his friends as ‘Paul’. That was the way he signed the register at the Downtown Holiday Inn in El Paso. Paul Henderson, with a credit card number from USAA and an address in San Antonio; there are many such, and Paul Henderson was just one more anonymous traveler. He attracted only ordinary attention from the clerk when he checked in.
He was uncertain as to how he should proceed, now that he’d arrived. Boredom, a nagging sense of unfinished duty, and simple curiosity had propelled him to El Paso. Now that he was here, he decided to review the newspaper article and the YouTube video that he’d saved on his laptop. After that, he would take the time to look around the bustling city and perhaps visit Fort Bliss.
The post had grown and changed from the days when it hosted the world’s air defense students. Back then, Fort Bliss had supported the sale of American missiles and gun systems to whomever might think they needed such and had the ability to pay. The defense industry had provided the weapons and earned good profits from the sales, while the Army had trained the mechanics and crewmen who would employ the systems should there be a need.
A plus for checking Fort Bliss was that Chief Tagliaferro had been a soldier. It really was ridiculous, making one of the former students an officer, even if he was only a warrant officer! How much could such a person possibly know about soldiering? Could he even behave properly in the Officer’s Club? Whoever had made that decision was likely deranged!
Perhaps he was still associated with the Army in some way, if indeed that had been Tagliaferro he’d spotted in the video. And then, there was the UTEP connection to explore. The incident in the video had happened on the UTEP campus near one of the parking lots.
There might be no real connection, and it might not be the man he remembered, but it broke the routine of his golfing and reminiscing with the other veterans who’d settled around San Antonio. If this trip turned out to be no more than an impromptu vacation, so be it.
He plugged in his cell phone to charge the battery, then used his laptop computer and the hotel’s WIFI connection to check for email. There was nothing of importance, so he clicked on the Facebook link; he had a number of friends and associates who shared his moderately conservative views. After clicking the 'like' button a few times, he took the time to study the video and article that he’d saved on the laptop; this occupied him for the next half hour.
The connection that had seemed to be a lead now looked much more unlikely; this trip might well be a wild-goose chase. The evidence from the poor-quality photo in the Times article and the video, likely shot using a cell phone camera, just wasn’t conclusive.
Still, he was here now. He would visit UTEP first, then Fort Bliss. There were museums there, weren't there? And UTEP's buildings used architecture that wasn’t common anywhere else in America. The university called it Bhutanese, or perhaps faux-Bhutanese; anyway, it was interesting, so he would explore, and perhaps during his visit someone would discover additional information that had not been on the video, information that he could use to make a decision. Tagliaferro or not Tagliaferro? That was the question.
While he waited for the cell phone to charge, he used the room telephone to call the Times. There was no name associated with the article; the byline read 'Times staff writer', but perhaps there had been something that hadn’t made it into the original article.
He spent the next two hours trying to track down the reporter who’d written the article; much of the time had been spent cursing the newspaper's labyrinthine voice mail system. But he’d finally gotten through, which spoke more to his powers of concentration and endurance than to the navigability of voice mail.
The reporter admitted that he had written the short article, using information taken largely from the video, but also from cursory interviews with the people who were around when the traffic incident had occurred. No one knew the young man who’d pushed a child from danger and had taken a tumble in the process, and no student had shown up for treatment of scrapes or road rash. There was indeed no certainty that the man was a student at all; he might have been an employee, a visitor, or some sort of independent contractor. He might even have been a tourist who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. No one knew. So the reporter had written a short filler piece and sent it off to the editors before moving on to other assignments.
#
Henderson drove the short distance to UTEP and, after half an hour's searching, found a place where visitors were permitted to park.
From the parking lot he strolled down the gentle slope, through the heart of the campus, simply looking around in curiosity. The buildings were striking, but after a time they took on a sameness. There were also the rock outcroppings on campus to be seen, and a deep gully or small canyon near the campus entrance off Mesa. A number of students were doing something in the gully, supervised by someone Henderson though was likely a grad-student teaching assistant. Perhaps they were examining the rocky outcrops?
This had once been a school where most of the students had come to study geology, then gone on to work around the world as engineers. There was less demand now for hard-rock mining engineers but the school still maintained an excellent geology department, and was generally a good place for any student to study science. Biology of the surrounding desert region was also a favored branch of study at UTEP and the university now owned a sprawling parcel of land called Indio Ranch. Henderson had driven past the exit that led to the old ranch, located back in some of the roughest, most God-forsaken country in West Texas. The ranch had since become a living laboratory, not so much for ranching but for experimentation and study of the desert ecosystem. Henderson picked up a brochure and found it interesting, but he would not leave San Antonio for El Paso; the two cities simply did not compare.
Paul Henderson finally had seen enough and left the campus. He picked up his car from the parking area where he’d left it, swore at the parked-overtime ticket he’d acquired from a zealous campus parking enforcement officer, and consulted his map. Tomorrow he would look around Fort Bliss; today had been interesting, but not productive.
Behind him, he left a very alarmed young ma
n who now sported a beard and longish hair.
Paul Henderson had passed within perhaps twenty yards of Surfer but hadn’t noticed him at all. Surfer was not the man in the video, so Henderson simply hadn’t been looking for him.
But Surfer had felt that tickle of familiarity from Paul Henderson’s mind and had been momentarily frozen with shock and fear. By the time he’d recovered, Henderson had strolled on, never noticing the anonymous bearded man sitting on the concrete steps that led from street level into the SUB. Paul Henderson, studying the architecture of the buildings, had paid no attention to someone who was really in appearance just one more young man sitting on the bordering walls around the building.
#
It took a moment for the two to answer.
I was trying to decide what to do about Henderson. If he spotted me, I could suddenly be as dead as the others from the School already were. So could Surfer, if Henderson saw him before he found me. Henderson might not be any superman, but we had to think of him as walking death for the two of us.
I began to consider the Henderson problem; if he was indeed here, then it might well be a matter of his life or ours. I’d faced that decision before in Afghanistan. Henderson was just as much my enemy as any Muj I’d killed in the Middle East, and Surfer was certain the man he'd sensed was Henderson.
I felt no inclination to sacrifice myself. The School had essentially tried to do that already, sent me off to a war zone because they had no better use for my newly-awakened Talents. For all the things I could do, they hadn’t really been any more effective than a larger number of grunt infantrymen would have been, and I was barely more immune to the killing IED’s than the new mine-resistant armored trucks. For that matter, the School had no idea I had that immunity. They had sent me away because they had no other use for me, and I had discovered the bubble after I joined the Army.
No; Henderson might think he was hunting a rabbit if he was looking for Surfer; but if he found me, the rabbit would have claws, long, sharp, lethal claws.
I was walking death too. I could do it, kill him in a heartbeat. Tickling the ass of that colonel was just fun and games; I could tickle Henderson, too, and it wouldn’t be a prank at all. A heart attack or a lethal stroke, I could easily do either of those.
Maybe I could do even more; if Henderson hurried me, well, it might make the cops wonder, but I was much stronger now regarding my Talents. The cops could wonder all they wanted about how Henderson got that fist-sized hole in his chest, but cops don’t look for extraordinary things. They’d be looking for someone with a sledgehammer, not an ordinary-looking guy with no visible weapons.
Then I thought of Ray. He knew about us and about the efforts to eliminate the graduates, but only the three of us knew about Ray. No one else knew that Ray had met us or that he had begun to develop his own Talents because of an accidental melding of our minds, his, Shezzie’s, and mine. Unlike Surfer, Shezzie, and me, no one was looking for a retired Army sergeant. Maybe Ray could help.
I began to try to establish the resonance necessary to communicate with him.
So I sent an OK and waited. If he was driving through downtown, the freeways are pretty tight; there aren’t many places where you can pull over for a phone call via cell phone or concentrate while passing messages through our own communication link.
I tried to think of something to say, but sometimes there just isn’t anything. Then I thought of something.
#
Surfer left the campus and hurried to his car, then headed north on Mesa. He gassed up and grabbed some snacks before accelerating onto Interstate 10; the westbound interstate loops around the Franklin Mountains, so it runs north when passing the UTEP campus.
He was still upset as he passed the Anthony exit, but had calmed slightly. A few miles up the road was the exit to Interstate 25 northbound; Surfer kept driving. He took out his cell phone and dialed a number. A few minutes later, the phone was put away and Surfer was westbound, past the prison, up the long grade just west of Las Cruces, and finally he picked up speed again as he topped out on the surface of the mesa.
As he approached the Deming exit, he took the time to contact T.
Shezzie and I had bought a cabin on the north side of the village; the cabin was isolated even more than the village itself was.
This was intended to be our final hiding place should every cutout fail.
We had been there long enough for people to get to know us, so strangers coming into the village now would attract much more attention than the friendly young couple who lived in the cabin up the canyon road. The village welcomed visitors and new residents, although residents had reservations regarding the troublesome priests who were being stashed by the Catholic Church at a retreat near the highway. But the priests rarely, if ever, came into the Springs.
Visitors who acted like tourists attracted little attention, but other visitors were often the subject of lively interest; they might be some of those pedophiles, after all!