Strong Light of Day

by Jon Land

  “Who’s Cort Wesley?” Jim asked him, the two of them somehow managing to share a smile.

  92

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “I take no pleasure in telling you all this, Mr. Masters,” Tepper said, his voice sounding tinny over the cell phone’s speaker. “You deserved to hear the truth a long time ago, but your dad made Jim Strong promise him you’d never hear it from him or any Ranger.”

  “He must not have wanted me to think of him that way.”

  “As a hero, you mean?”

  “Because he did it for me. He wouldn’t want me to bear the burden of his death. Would’ve preferred me hating him for the way he went out. Wasting away to nothing, all weak and all.”

  “Guess it makes perfect sense when you say it that way,” Tepper told him.

  “Maybe he didn’t just do it for you, Cort Wesley,” Caitlin said suddenly.

  “How’s that, Ranger?”

  “Your dad boosted appliances. He carried a gun, showed it a few times, but never shot anybody in the commission of one of his crimes. I don’t think the poison in those tanks made him sick. I think he was already sick, and this was his way of trying to go out on his own terms.”

  “Without telling me, even from his hospital bed?”

  Caitlin shrugged. “Part of those terms. We think we know our parents, Cort Wesley, but we don’t, not any better than our kids know us.”

  “Or we know them,” Cort Wesley said pointedly, Luke back on his mind.

  “I suppose,” Caitlin agreed, whatever she’d meant to say, instead, frozen in her throat. “Anton Kasputin didn’t die in the explosion, obviously, Captain.”

  “No, Ranger,” Tepper confirmed somberly, “he didn’t.”

  She looked toward Jones in the backseat. “This jibe with your thinking on Alexi Gribanov?”

  “Perfectly. As Kasputin, he manages to survive that battle and ends up staying here. Setting up shop while awaiting a call from Russia he never figured would come.”

  “Wait a minute,” interjected Cort Wesley. “How’s he connected to those documents on agroterrorism you found in Afghanistan?”

  “The plan targeting farmland in 1983, the formula and schematics al-Qaeda got their hands on, was virtually identical to what’s happening now,” Jones said to both of them. “The pesticide stockpiled in that warehouse your fathers blew up wasn’t intended to create a superstrain of bugs, it was only supposed to kill the soil, make it impossible for it to absorb water.”

  “Oh, that’s all?” from Captain Tepper, over Caitlin’s phone speaker.

  “So what Dane came up with at his petrochemical plant had nothing at all to do with it,” Caitlin said.

  “Only so far as Gribanov must’ve reported to somebody back in Russia what was happening, not realizing that one of his own men was already talking up a storm. So in comes your invisible man to secure the intent of the original plan.”

  “Which was?”

  “Wiping out three-quarters of our nation’s food supply. Turn us from exporters into importers as our economy goes in the tank.”

  Cort Wesley started to run his hands through his hair and got only halfway. “And this invisible man comes here accompanied by that hit team on the interstate, and almost surely more.”

  “Which is sure to complicate things once we get to Midland,” Caitlin added.

  “Just the way you like them, Ranger,” Tepper noted over the speaker. “Gives you a whole new nationality to wipe out. We’ll just call it payback for them having the bad sense to try to smoke you in that ambush. Had no idea they were about to get caught in the path of Hurricane Caitlin. Just make sure you’ve got enough bullets to blow their way.”

  “Always, Captain,” Caitlin told him.

  93

  MIDLAND, TEXAS

  “I must tell you,” Yanko Zhirnosky said to Calum Dane, after the demonstration was complete, “I’m glad to be doing business with you.”

  “We still got some bugs to work out,” Dane told him, glad he’d instructed the Bass brothers, Frank and Fred, to keep things at level one, to lessen the odds of another screwup in their demonstration of the immersive video game technology they’d developed for Dane Corp. “But the potential is unlimited—internationally.”

  “Everything is international these days, and about to become even more so. What do you call this again?”

  “Immersive video gaming. Means that the game is played from within.”

  “You have vision, comrade, as do I. I know what I want out of this. Less clear is what you do.”

  “My oil fields aren’t going anywhere,” Dane told him. “But they’re not going to make me history’s first trillionaire by themselves.”

  “And you think this will?”

  Dane grinned so broadly he could feel his cheeks pinch. “Here’s the thing, Yanko. I’m dog shit to the ruling class, like I can’t wash the smell of oil off myself. In their minds, I got lucky with a shovel. You see where I’m going with this?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “These men own the country, like your oligarchs back home, only multiplied by ten. America isn’t a democracy and hasn’t been, really, since the railroads and robber barons. Only I grew up more like a worker on those rails than the foremen holding the chains. Because here’s the thing: I spent the early part of my life working on behalf of those who still think I’m dog shit today, and too much of the rest of it kissing their asses to get where I am, while I lost one boy to war and another to the temper I inherited from my own father. Know what, though? I’m there now, and nothing would give me greater pleasure than the lot of them kissing mine instead.”

  Zhirnosky grinned back, jabbing a finger at the air. “You’re going to short their stocks. You’re going to short shares in their companies so when the rest of that pesticide is released you’ll effectively own them. The world’s first trillionaire.… Has a nice sound to it, very nice.”

  “When this is over, you’ll be running your country … and I’ll be running mine.”

  And that’s when all the lights in the warehouse went out.

  94

  MIDLAND, TEXAS

  Caitlin, Cort Wesley, and Jones had driven slowly past the warehouse linked to the address from which the guards at the Glasscock County farm had driven, then retraced their route back before stowing their SUV out of sight off South Country Road.

  “How many vehicles you make in the parking lot, Ranger?” Cort Wesley asked her.

  “Seven.”

  “I counted eight.”

  “The eighth was an old truck with flat tires. And I think Calum Dane himself’s inside that warehouse.”

  “How the hell you figure that?” Jones asked her.

  “You notice how those vehicles were parked?”

  “No.”

  “Four of them abreast, away from others, where the sun would’ve been shining during the day. That tells me they showed up in a convoy after nightfall. You want to try telling me who else would be showing up in a convoy at night?”

  Jones rolled his eyes, his big, anvil-shaped head seeming to puff up further. “We’ve got three pistols between us, and maybe a few extra clips.”

  “Magazines, Jones. They’re called magazines. Man with your field experience should know that.”

  “You’re a piece of work, Ranger.”

  “Let’s talk about that field experience of yours,” Caitlin said, watching Jones shaking his head now. “As I recall, you know your way around an electrical transformer.”

  * * *

  Caitlin and Cort Wesley slid up to the fence line enclosing the flat-roofed slab warehouse of a building that Captain Tepper explained had belonged to a now-bankrupt distributor of industrial plumbing parts. Ten thousand square feet, and they had no idea how the interior was laid out, or any modifications to the original design that Dane might’ve made.

  “I make two guards outside the front door,” Cort Wesley told her. “Nobody else.”

  “They look Russian to y
ou?”

  “How can I tell?”

  “I was kidding, Cort Wesley.”

  He didn’t even smile. “We mount the fence on an angle they can’t spot us from. Take them out first, as soon as Jones turns out the lights.”

  “Lots of men sure to be inside,” Caitlin reminded. “As many as four truckloads.”

  “You sound like Jones.”

  “He was talking guns, I’m talking targets.”

  “A lot to ask of what bullets we’ve got, Ranger.”

  “So what else is new?”

  * * *

  “That wasn’t us,” Fred Bass said.

  “Emergency generators should be kicking on any second,” Frank added.

  Beriya stepped out of the shadows, flanked by Zhirnosky’s eight private guards. “It’s an attack.”

  “That’s a load of crap,” Calum Dane scoffed. “Nobody even knows we’re here.”

  “It’s the Texas Ranger,” Beriya persisted, seeming to sniff at the air.

  “How can you know that?”

  “Because we failed to kill her when we had the chance. This is hers.”

  “Then finish the job,” Zhirnosky ordered. “Do it right this time.”

  Beriya shook his head, his hair looking like ash-colored straw matted to his scalp in the thin spray cast by the wall lanterns that had automatically flashed on. “First I will see both of you safely on your way.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Dane echoed.

  “Except you’re not coming, comrade,” Zhirnosky told him.

  “I thought we had an arrangement.”

  “If Beriya is right, then you led this Ranger here somehow. What is it you’re not telling me? Because if she’s after you, that means she’s after me, too.”

  Dane snapped his toothpick in two with his teeth. “We’re talking about a single bitch here, one bitch,” he said, thinking of killing the kid with the prosthetic leg who’d messed up his shareholders meeting, just as the shooting started outside.

  * * *

  Eliminating the two guards stationed before the doors had fallen on Cort Wesley. Using the night, finding the pockets of the deepest darkness. Just like he’d done on infiltration missions back in his days with special ops, which seemed like a hundred years ago, the memories feeling like somebody else’s.

  The two guards never knew what hit them.

  The third man, who they hadn’t seen perched on the roof, was something else again.

  Caitlin heard his heavy steps clanging across the flat tin roof, glimpsed the assault rifle in his grasp as she fired off four shots and hit him with three, tearing his feet out from under him. Not bad under normal circumstances, but tonight those bullets were gold she couldn’t afford to spend.

  But Cort Wesley retrieved the downed guards’ AR-15s and tossed one to her.

  “Where’s Paz when we need him, Ranger?”

  “I was just thinking the same thing, Cort Wesley.”

  And they burst through the warehouse’s front door with guns blazing.

  * * *

  Calum Dane felt as if he were drunk, the world swaying around him, all out of kilter. As the gunshots burned the air before him, he felt he was about to slide off the world into some bottomless abyss. He actually wondered if he was asleep, since the entire experience was marred by a kind of soft focus, viewed through a fog that had settled before his consciousness.

  He mind flashed back again to killing the kid in New York, the hyperfocus and exaggeration of every one of his senses that he’d felt—from the smell of blood and urine when the kid pissed himself to the shiny brightness of that blood as it splashed everything and everywhere in the room. This was the opposite of that. The world had turned heavy and slow on its precarious perch, and Dane had the sense he was sliding downhill on ice, unable to stop.

  He knew it was Caitlin Strong, just as he somehow grasped something else: she knew, knew about everything, from his beating the kid to death in New York, to the petrochemical plant that couldn’t remain standing, to the real reason he’d snatched those kids up from a field trip to save their lives.

  How had she found him here?

  What if she’d found the kids? What if the guards he’d left at the farm had given the location up?

  Things were going from bad to worse. Survive Caitlin Strong and he’d still have Zhirnosky to contend with. Both men were committed to using each other—a fine prospect, until things turned sour and the world tilted on its axis, trying to spill him off. Zhirnosky’s mere presence in the United States, not to mention his reason for coming here, would make him vulnerable to his many enemies, who’d give no quarter—Putin in particular. If this all got out, Zhirnosky was finished.

  Which meant the Russian would use the small army he’d brought along to finish Dane as well.

  He spotted the Bass brothers cowering in the corner, behind the control panel for the immersive game system prototype, and steered himself their way.

  * * *

  Cort Wesley heard the echoing whir of the emergency generators kicking in, through the gunfire, the cavernous warehouse suddenly aglow in faded light, as if someone had activated a dimmer switch. It reminded him of the first light of dawn, the world coming to life, as the AR-15 danced in his grasp, a pair of magazines taped together jungle style by the make-believe Rambo he’d shot dead outside. That gave him sixty shots in total, and he’d likely need them all, judging by the fierce fire from at least eight enemy gunmen, maybe more.

  And that’s when time froze, as it always did in moments like this, nothing but the staccato bursts of sound and glimpses of movement registering with him at all.

  Here we go again.…

  Time changed. Places changed.

  But not battle, one exactly like the last and the next. Context, location, and purpose always distinct, while sense and mind-set remained the same.

  And Cort Wesley took to this one just as he’d taken to all the others. Nothing was forgotten; each piece of every other battle he’d ever fought had left an indelible mark. There was the sense of the assault rifle vibrating slightly as it clacked off rounds, warm against his hands, steady in his grasp. The sight of the muzzle flash, strange metallic smell of air baked by the heat of the expended shells, and his own kinetic energy. The world reduced to its most basic and simple. There was the gun, his targets, and nothing else. Welcome and comfortable in its familiarity, with all thinking suspended and instinct left to command him.

  * * *

  Bodies fell. How many, Caitlin couldn’t say or tell. It felt like a crazed arcade game, right down to the moment her AR-15 clicked empty and she saw “RELOAD” flashing across the screen in her mind. Only she had nothing to reload with. She was back to where she started, with maybe a half-magazine jammed home and a single spare to replace it.

  She’d taken cover behind a thick concrete pillar a moment before her assault rifle stopped firing, and now she felt chips of it flying off into the air in small clouds that dissipated as quickly as they’d come. The sensation grated at her teeth, left her gnashing them, as if the whole experience was happening from the inside of her out, instead of the exact opposite.

  She spotted a burly, squat man riding the protective shadow of a massive shape that made her think of Guillermo Paz, when she had spotted him that last time, waging war against an insect horde that might’ve been plenty more than a million strong for all she knew. In Caitlin’s mind, Paz was going to come bursting through the ceiling at any moment to stop the flight of the giant and whoever was riding his shadow. She thought she’d glimpsed Calum Dane briefly, couldn’t be sure, but knew he was here someplace.

  In contrast to the battle against the swarm of beetles back on the farm, this one smelled of nothing but the heat flash of the gunfire and something like superheated wires. Then the world went dark again, pierced almost immediately by slabs of light that somehow sprouted form and substance as the impossible grew before her eyes:

  An army of chiseled, well-armed men charging to her re
scue amid a landscape dominated by giant insects that seemed to walk on hind legs. Like something she’d seen Luke lay waste to with controller held in hand before the big screen television in the living room.

  Like something out of a video game. And that’s when Caitlin realized she was inside one, moving from one hellish scene straight into another.

  95

  MIDLAND, TEXAS

  “This is whacked, man, seriously whacked!” one of the Bass brothers whined to Calum Dane.

  “Shut your hole, man!”

  “Fuck you, Fred!”

  “Fuck you, Frank!”

  The brothers argued, but they continued to keep the game running and the projector beams firing as the artificially intelligent video beings of their own creation waged fake war in the midst of a real one. Would have made a great commercial for an upcoming release of a game system worth tens of billions of dollars, if it hadn’t been so absurd.

  Viewing that bizarre counterpoint of the real versus the fanciful made Dane realize just how incredible this system really was. Impossible to tell, really, which figures were real and which weren’t. Except for the giant bugs, of course, which made Dane think of the disaster he’d unleashed across the state of Texas, destroying his reverie and renewing the survival instincts that might guide him safely out of this mess.

  Still, the perfection of the game system’s functionality, the thought of how much money it had taken to compose every computer-created dot that formed the matrix of the figures inside the game, claimed his mind. Until, anyway, he heard a pop and red lights began flashing all over the massive game console prototype.

  “Oh, shit.” From Frank.

  “Oh, fuck.” From Fred.

  * * *

  It took Cort Wesley an elongated instant, the length of a long breath, to realize he was inside some kind of video game, projected everywhere around him. He’d never done a single drug in his life besides booze, but he knew plenty of people who had, and he wondered if this was what being on an acid trip felt like. The world turned fantastical from taking a hit of LSD.