Strong Cold Dead
Page 19
And now, that moment had come.
“King me!” the boy pronounced, as al-Aziz realized that winning the game was impossible.
This game, anyway, he thought, as he kinged the boy. Back in Syria, he trained boys of this age to behead men kneeling at their feet. How to handle the heaviness of the sword and turn its weight in their favor. The angle, the aim, the cut—it was all about technique.
“I could teach you how to play better,” the boy was telling him, as if he honestly felt bad. “So you could win.”
“I could do the same for you.” Al-Aziz smiled.
Perplexed, the boy looked at the game board, which showed him far ahead. “But I’m already winning.”
“There are other games.”
Al-Aziz gazed across the aisle and pictured this boy slicing off the heads of his parents and siblings as they slept. In his experience, that was a great test, revealing a young warrior’s true mettle and level of loyalty to the caliphate. He must renounce everything in the past so that he might turn toward the future unencumbered. Al-Aziz genuinely believed he was doing these boys a favor. The process had yielded ISIS some of its finest young warriors.
“Mister…,” the kid was saying.
Al-Aziz gazed about the plane. The majority of passengers were sleeping now. He wondered how many heads he could take before anyone stirred. Imagined them cowering before his masked form, his sword splattered with blood, which had splashed the walls and windows of the plane as well.
“Hey, mister.”
They wouldn’t fight back because they were sheep. In killing them, al-Aziz would be performing a service, ridding the world of their burden. They served nothing and no one, did not understand the vision for the world as expressed by the one true God al-Aziz existed merely to serve. Al-Aziz wouldn’t rest until that day had come to pass. The power and efficacy of his beliefs was about to be more righteously rewarded than even the caliphate’s supreme leaders had dared to foresee.
“Mister…”
They would bring their greatest enemy to its knees, al-Aziz himself now responsible for wielding a sword that could slaughter millions instead of one. A great gift, bestowed by Allah Himself, in recognition of al-Aziz’s devotion to the word of the one true God, a devotion that wouldn’t cease or even abate until all the nonbelievers were gone. Nine others were accompanying him on this blessed mission, all taking other flights, on other airlines, to different cities, en route to their rendezvous a day later. Nine others, to bring the total to ten, the same number the prophet Muhammad himself had killed when he conquered Mecca. A holy number.
Ten.
“Mister!”
Al-Aziz finally turned back the boy’s way.
“It’s your move, mister,” he said.
Al-Aziz smiled. “Yes, it is.”
PART SIX
Cattlemen and ranchers went to war over the practice of stringing barbed wire around plots of land. Bands of armed “nippers” worked at night cutting the barbed wire, causing an estimated $20 million in damage. The Texas Rangers were called in on patrol. Ranger Ira Aten proposed arming the fences with bombs triggered to explode when the fence wire was cut. The idea was nixed. (September 1, 1883)
—Bullock Texas State History Museum, “The Story of Texas”
58
BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS
“I made us a snack,” Ela said, clambering down the plank steps, back into the root cellar.
She sat down on the blanket across from Dylan and laid a plate down between them.
“It’s corn,” she continued, as Dylan peeled the foil off one of the ears, “grown right here on the rez. I cooked it over a fire upstairs.”
Dylan finished peeling, noting a grayish-black patch that swelled out from a patch of kernels. “Looks like you burned it.”
“Nah,” Ela said, working the foil from her own ear of corn, “that’s what makes it a delicacy.”
Dylan gave the discolored growth a closer look. “Fungus? Mold?”
“Just eat it, dumb-ass. It’s a secret my people have kept for centuries, our greatest secret. Now, hand me my phone.”
Dylan did, still holding the ear of corn by a section of foil he’d left in place so he wouldn’t burn his fingers. Then he noticed that Ela had driven a roasting stick into one of the ends, so he could eat the corn while holding it, instead.
Ela took the phone and slid the cursor from left to right. “I said my phone.”
“Whoops, sorry.”
Dylan gave Ela her iPhone and took his back, watching her fire off a text as he raised the corn toward his mouth.
“It smells like shit.”
“But it’s good for you, that fungus included.”
He ate around the tarry patch anyway. Once they’d both finished, Ela handed Dylan a cup of the tar-colored tea, playing with the zipper of his jeans under the spill of lantern light.
“Stop,” he said, giving her back the cup and easing her away from him.
She took the cup and laid it aside, then went back to his zipper.
“I said stop.”
“Come on,” Ela said, flashing Dylan the smile that melted his insides, “we won. I want to celebrate.”
“What’d we win?” Dylan asked her. “You said this was all about maintaining the purity of the land. That we couldn’t let them spoil what nature had wrought—your words, Ela. You said this was about the survival of your people. That’s a quote, from when you got me to leave school.”
She pushed him down, atop the blanket on the uneven floor, straddling his torso, her butt pressed against his crotch. “We were never going to win everything. We won enough.”
“You never win with these kinds of people,” Dylan insisted. “They only let you think you have. Believe me, I know.”
Ela started pressing down on him. Dylan felt his insides flutter. “We’re the ones letting them think that they’ve won,” she said.
“What happened to my medal, the one that used to belong to my mother?”
Ela moved her toned butt back and forth. “You’re wearing it.”
Dylan pulled his shirt back to reveal a pair of chains, but not that one. “It was found near that dead guy’s body. How’d it get there?”
He took the tea she’d laid near him and spilled it onto the ground, its pungent aroma and black tar coloring telling him it was even stronger than the last batch of peyote tincture. “I was wearing it when we tripped, Ela.”
“We didn’t trip.”
“No? What would you call it then?”
“Opening our minds to a deeper, higher plane, where our emotions could communicate directly.”
“My mother was wearing that medal when she was murdered. My father gave it to me, said she’d want me to have it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“How’d it get out there?”
“How should I know?”
“Because I was wearing it when we reached that deeper, higher plane. Maybe our emotions communicating directly wasn’t such a good idea.”
Ela stopped rubbing against him. “You think I did this?”
“There’s not a lot of other options.”
“You don’t remember us being together all night?”
“I don’t remember much of anything.”
“Both of us ended up passed out. You were still passed out when I woke up—early, like I always do.”
“With the sun.”
“Close enough,” Ela said.
Dylan looked up at her, straddling him. He believed her because he wanted to. In that moment, he realized he’d been a fool for walking away from school to accompany Ela on this crusade, which had ended when the oil company agreed to fund a whole bunch of scholarships, provide job training, and, in the meantime, put every unemployed Comanche on the reservation to work laying the pipeline.
“You knew this protest shit wasn’t going to work,” Dylan said to her. “You knew you and your Lost Boys weren’t going to stick it out, from the beginning.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“Tell you what?”
“That was the plan all along.”
“Because it wasn’t.”
“So you’re telling me you weren’t working with the tribal elders on this the whole time?”
Ela swung her legs off Dylan and sat up next to him. She took his hands in hers.
“I’m going to forget you said that. It was my grandfather who told me to back off. After that man was killed,” she added. An afterthought.
“With his blood ending up on my medal.”
“Back to that again?”
“We never left it.”
Ela let go of Dylan’s hands. “My grandfather said there could be no more death. He said the spirits were angry, just like back in 1874, and if we didn’t make peace, the same thing would happen now that happened then.”
“What happened then?”
She looked away, the spill of the kerosene lantern light catching only one side of her face. “Ask your Texas Ranger.”
“I could be arrested, you know. I could end up getting charged.”
Ela smiled. “You have friends in high places, boy.”
“Caitlin’s not going to obstruct justice to protect me forever. Sooner or later, I’ll be called to the table.” Dylan hesitated. “Maybe you’ll be called, too.”
“Me?”
“As a witness. My alibi.”
“Even though we both passed out.” She took his hands again. “Are you sure you were wearing the medal that night? Can you really remember?”
“I wear it all the time, girl.”
“But you could have lost it earlier in the day, even the day before. If you wear it all the time, you might think it’s still there even when it isn’t, right? Doesn’t that make more sense than your girlfriend setting you up as a suspect?”
Dylan could feel his insides melting at the way she had referred to herself as his girlfriend.
“Because that would mean I had something to do with the murder,” Ela continued. “An accomplice, accessory, or something. Is that what you think?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You might as well have.”
Dylan pulled Ela in close and kissed her, as hard and as deep as he’d ever kissed anyone.
“That’s better,” she said, brushing the hair from her face when they finally separated.
“I don’t know why I did that.”
“Because I was about to, and you sensed it.”
Dylan blew the hair from his face and rolled his eyes. “Please.”
“Please what? You told me your dad talks to a ghost who steals root beer from him. You told me your Texas Ranger’s got some warrior protecting her, who’s part witch and has visions of the future. But you don’t think you knew I was going to kiss you and kissed me first?”
Dylan let himself smile. “What if I did?”
Ela smiled back. “That’s better.”
“What?”
“You, back to being you,” she said, pulling the shirt up over her head. “And me being me.”
59
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“You got something you want to say, Ranger?” Cort Wesley asked Caitlin from behind the wheel of his truck, en route back to the Balcones.
“Just trying to sort things out, that’s all.”
“You mean the part about Sam Bob Jackson ordering the Boyd brothers to scare me, through Luke?”
“A muff like Jackson doesn’t tie his shoes on his own. That means Cray Rawls is the one we really need to nail for this.”
“I haven’t met either of them yet.”
“Let me save you the trouble, Cort Wesley. Rawls is like any of a thousand rich jerks I’ve met over the years who think their money and power makes their shit taste like chocolate. I’ve learned never to put anything past men like that.”
They were headed north to the Comanche reservation to check out the caves dug out of the hills overlooking White Eagle’s patch of land, where Dylan thought he had spotted somebody lurking about, a few nights back.
Cort Wesley glanced across the seat at her. “And where’s Daniel Cross fit on the scale?”
“Come again?”
He gave her a longer look. “You need to stop beating yourself up over this.”
“Over what?”
“Not changing the kid’s ways. It was ten years ago. You did what you could.”
“Well,” she admitted, to him and finally to herself, “I should’ve done more.”
“Did Cross actually build a bomb, back then?”
“He would have.”
“You don’t know that, Ranger.”
“But I do now, don’t I?”
“Caitlin—”
“No, Cort Wesley, let me finish. I knew he was trouble from the first time I laid eyes on the kid, but I got it in my head I could change him. First I had a little talk with the kids who’d been bullying him into submission.”
“Oh, boy, here we go…”
“I let those boys have it, and their parents too. Visited the wrath of the Texas Rangers upon them to make my point.”
“Did it work?”
Caitlin shrugged. “Well, Daniel Cross never did blow up the school. But maybe if I focused my energies on him he wouldn’t be planning to blow up the whole country now, so to speak.”
“Of all people,” Cort Wesley said, shaking his head.
“Of all people what?”
“Of all people, you should know some people are just born bad. You told me this kid’s mother was a prostitute and that the couple that adopted him wasn’t anything to write home about, either. You ask me, that’s because they would’ve much preferred to have returned him, when it became clear they were raising a monster.”
“Daniel Cross wasn’t born a monster, Cort Wesley.”
“Oh no?”
“He was born with a genius IQ. Forty points less and maybe he’s loading a gun instead of planning to build a bomb. Adults failed him at every stage of his life, from his mother all the way to me. And ever since I realized who he was, from that old picture, I’ve been racking my brain, trying to figure what else I could have done.”
“It ever occur to you there was nothing more you could’ve done?”
“Nope, not for a minute.” Caitlin’s phone rang. “Captain Tepper,” she told Cort Wesley before answering it. “I’m off the clock, D.W.”
“Not if you’re wearing your gun, Ranger, and since you’re not asleep, it’s a safe assumption you are. Whatever you’re doing, stop, and get over to the office five minutes ago to join the party.”
“What gives, Captain?”
“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. But I can’t tell you anyway, given this isn’t what your friend Jones calls a ‘secure line.’”
“He’s there too?”
“It’s his show, Caitlin, and you definitely want to be here when the curtain goes up.”
60
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
Caitlin and Cort Wesley entered the conference room of Company F headquarters late. Everyone else was already assembled, including Doc Whatley, an honorary Ranger named Young Roger, and four unidentified faces occupying equal quadrants of a wall-mounted wide-screen.
“I guess we can begin now,” said Jones from the head of the table, clearly indicating that Homeland Security was in charge here. “Doctor Whatley, chief medical examiner of Bexar County, has been assigned by Homeland to run point on this until CDC and other authorities are totally up to speed.”
Caitlin thought she saw Jones’s eyes glimmer when he said “other authorities.” And then his gaze moved to her, holding briefly, as if he could read her thoughts, before continuing.
“We’ll get to a review of the particulars of yesterday’s incident in Austin shortly. First, I want to cover something goddamn divine Providence has dropped in our laps.”
Jones touched a remote, ch
anging the wide-screen view from the four faces to a shot of three men inside a car. Caitlin recognized the occupant in the back as none other than Daniel Cross. She’d never seen the two in the front seat before.
“The man in the driver’s seat is Razin Saflin,” Jones continued, again seeming to read her mind. “The one seated shotgun is Ghazi Zurif. Both born to first-generation Americans whose parents emigrated from Lebanon and became model American citizens—their children too. Their grandchildren are something else again.”
Jones touched another button on the remote and the screen split into two halves; the left displayed a dossier on Saflin, and the right a dossier on Zurif.
“Our intelligence indicates they showed no interest in Middle Eastern or Arab affairs whatsoever for the first twenty-seven years of their lives. That all changed when ISIS hit the ground running. Suddenly, they began making trips to the home country they’d never visited before—three in all. On each occasion they took side trips to Turkey, where our assets in the region lost track of them. Homeland flagged them for scrutiny by the FBI after incidental evidence showed they crossed over into Syria, at least one report further indicating they had direct contact with ISIS leaders. Our boots on the ground here have tried to reach out to them through traditional social media channels, employing the latest code words, but those overtures have been spurned at every turn, making them a lower surveillance priority, particularly when they exhibited no pattern of activity consistent with homegrown terrorist behavior.” Jones paused dramatically. “That all changed yesterday.”
Jones flipped back to the original grainy picture of Saflin and Zurif, with Daniel Cross centered in the backseat between them.