Strong Cold Dead

by Jon Land

  “I don’t know.”

  “Despite all that annual training you receive at Quantico?” Jones chided. “Come on.”

  “It just doesn’t feel like a pathogen to me.”

  “Something else?”

  “Something worse,” Caitlin told him, not yet sure why.

  42

  AUSTIN, TEXAS

  Caitlin followed Jones through the remainder of the tube, parting the last dangling sheets of heavy plastic to enter the normally down-home confines of Hoover’s Cooking. She imagined she could smell eggs frying, bacon cooking, and coffee lifted off BUNN warmers to be poured into the restaurant’s bountiful cups. But all that slipped away, along with her breath, when the sight beyond her helmet’s faceplate was revealed.

  Several of the bodies were lying frozen on the floor, arms extended as if to claw forward along the tile toward the entrance now encased in biohazard plastic. Others sat straight up, only the dead sightlessness of their frozen eyes giving away the fact they weren’t waiting for their meals to be served. Still more were facedown on tabletops or booths strewn with spilled liquids and food. A few were slumped in their chairs, their limbs canted at odd angles, as if they had been trying to rise when whatever had happened in here struck them. It was like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting drawn by the devil, amid the pie cases and walls covered with fifteen years of pictures from the history of Hoover’s Cooking.

  “Welcome to the party, Ranger,” Caitlin heard Jones say.

  A combination of the suit’s confines and the encased building’s lack of ventilation left her feeling she was being roasted alive. At Quantico she’d been part of any number of drills to prepare her as a first responder to such calamities, but the props and stage dummies had in no way achieved their goal. The suit’s restrictions and independent air supply kept all odors from her, though, for which she was glad.

  “Give me your first thoughts,” Jones said, alongside her now.

  “Spacing of the bodies indicates a time lag that puts airborne transmission more in doubt,” Caitlin started, getting used to the echo of her own words inside the helmet. “That means the victims might have ingested whatever killed them, as opposed to breathing it in, making the means of delivery a toxin placed inside something they ate or drank.” She raised a glove to swipe away the sweat forming inside her helmet, forgetting the presence of the faceplate for the moment.

  “Toxin,” Jones repeated. “Quantico must’ve treated you well, Ranger. Most would say ‘contagion.’”

  “Contagion implies ‘spread from person to person.’ There was no spread here. It hit fast and it hit hard.”

  “Are you ruling out natural causation?”

  “That’s a new term on me, Jones. But if you’re asking if this could’ve been caused by poisoning through means other than a concentrated attack, I’d say the odds are slim to none.”

  “You learn to make that kind of judgment in Quantico?”

  “You asked me a question and the answer’s a matter of common sense. Naturally occurring disasters like this—Legionnaires’ disease, methane dumps, toxic sludge—aren’t unprecedented, but none of them carry a hundred percent mortality rate.”

  “So,” Jones ventured, his faceplate misting up and then clearing in rhythm with his breaths and his words, “assuming enemy action was in play, what stands out the most in your mind?”

  Caitlin walked about the restaurant, careful to step over the victims who had slipped from their chairs or died crawling for the door. To a man and woman, they looked to be in the throes of both pain and panic. She stopped at a table occupied by two boys and two girls wearing school uniforms, backpacks tucked under their chairs, their faces pressed against the tabletop as if they’d been glued there.

  “Looks like they were all struck within maybe a thirty-second window,” Caitlin theorized, turning away from the kids.

  “Makes sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t, Jones. It makes no sense at all. Unless all the victims were sharing a toast or a piece of birthday cake, as it turns out there’s no way ingestion could’ve caused what we’re looking at here.” She started to turn back toward the table occupied by the facedown kids, then stopped. “What happened to all the other people who ate here before them? How is it they walked out of here to go about their day, none the worse for wear? Goes back to what I was saying before, what was bothering me about the notion of whatever did this being airborne. I assume you’ve taken air samples.”

  “Preliminary analysis on-site doesn’t show a damn thing, Ranger.”

  “Because this isn’t a disease, Jones. I wouldn’t expect the CDC to be much help, either.”

  “Got a better idea?”

  Caitlin looked around the restaurant again, her mind conjuring the smells of the place anew. “Whatever it is hits the anatomy like a sledgehammer, and it’s got to be something all the victims would have ingested within seconds of each other, for the timeline to work.”

  “All well and good, Ranger,” Jones said, “only what you’re describing doesn’t exist, either in or out of nature.”

  Caitlin met Jones’s eyes through the faceplate of his helmet. “You mean it didn’t until today.”

  43

  AUSTIN, TEXAS

  Back at the staging tent, Caitlin couldn’t wait to yank off her hazmat suit and dump it into the orange drum stickered with warnings.

  “What did the dead have to say, Ranger?” she heard Guillermo Paz ask her. She turned to see him leaning lightly against one of the poles holding the tent up.

  “Not enough to be of much good,” Caitlin told him.

  Shedding the suit hadn’t helped her shed from her psyche the residue of what she’d just experienced. One of those ultimate nightmare scenarios you train and prepare for but never for a moment believe will ever happen.

  “Aristotle once said that ‘death is the most fearful thing,’” Paz noted. “But he was wrong, wasn’t he?”

  “You tell me, Colonel.”

  “You already know the answer, best articulated by my friend Heidegger, who believed that anticipation does not passively await death but mobilizes mortality as the condition of free will in the world.”

  “In other words, by this happening, we’re enabled to stop it from happening again.”

  “I believe that’s what Martin Heidegger was getting at, yes.”

  “You don’t seem especially bothered by all that, Colonel.”

  “Because it defines my purpose, my reason for being.”

  “Is that Heidegger too?”

  He smiled. “No, Ranger; yours truly. But Heidegger was very well acquainted with evil. He didn’t just endorse the Nazis with the coming of World War II, he joined them. Became rector of the University of Freiburg, where he did his best to mold young minds to the Nazi cause. The impressionability of young people makes them extremely dangerous when motivated. When I was in Daniel Cross’s apartment, I noticed the books on his shelves. He seemed as enamored by the Nazis as Heidegger.”

  “You think Cross was behind what happened here?”

  “Don’t you, Ranger?” Paz eased closer to her, forcing Caitlin to turn her gaze even more upward. “People leave residue of themselves behind wherever they go,” he said. “Imprints of their actions as plain and recognizable as photographs. It’s why my mother almost never left the shack in the Venezuelan slum where I grew up; she couldn’t bear to be around the evil and ugliness so many left behind in their wake.” The colonel paused, seeming to need a moment to compose himself—a first, in Caitlin’s memory. “I recognized Daniel Cross inside that restaurant as soon as I entered. I might as well have been looking him in the face.”

  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

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  “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. Crayton 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

  AUSTIN, TEXAS

  “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 p
romised, 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

  MONTREAL, QUEBEC

  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.