Blowout

by Byron L. Dorgan

  Carrying her that far was going to be next to impossible, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to leave her. She’d never survive.

  Something nudged Osborne in the back, and he shoved Ashley to the ground to shield her as he spun around and pulled out his pistol. The bastard had come back after all.

  For a long beat, he had a hard time accepting what he was seeing. But it was a horse, saddled, its reins dangling from the bit. Maybe whoever was lying dead beside the road had ridden here on the horse, but the only place he could think of was the Roundup Lodge, which was fifteen miles to the south.

  Didn’t matter. Osborne took up the reins, gentling the horse with a few soft words, and he picked Ashley’s nearly inert form from the ground and awkwardly put her up in the saddle, his bad leg nearly giving way.

  The horse was shivering, and it looked as if it were nearly on the point of collapse. The animal might carry Ashley, but not both of them. The situation was what it was. Osborne shrugged and leading the horse by the reins he limped back to the road’s surface, and started to the west toward the main gate, not at all sure it was possible for him to make it that far.

  Ashley said something, and he turned back to her.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  She raised her head from the horse’s neck and looked at him. “You’re here,” she said.

  “I’ll always be here,” Osborne told her. “Now shut up, we’re going for a little ride.”

  “Okay, Nate,” she said, and she lay forward again on the horse’s mane, in and out of consciousness.

  One step at a time, Osborne told himself. If he could make one step, he could make the second. Just a matter of will, and he was back in Afghanistan waiting for the attack to come.

  A Ranch House

  Belfield, North Dakota

  BARRY EGAN SLEPT until three in the afternoon, the fierce winds that had buffeted the farmhouse through the morning hours not letting up until early afternoon. And it was the relative silence that finally roused him from a dream in which he was a worker in a meatpacking plant. Except that the gutted carcasses hanging from their ankles on the processing line were not cattle or pigs. They were humans, and working all alone in the vast abattoir he sang and hummed some tune he couldn’t recognize. He was a man happy in his job.

  And waking, completely refreshed, he knew that his work was far from over; in fact he’d just begun.

  The ranch was a couple of miles west of U.S. 85, and he’d stumbled on the dirt track just off Thirty-seventh Street SW, recognizing it as just the sort of a place he was looking for, the nearest neighbor a mile or so away.

  Pure blind luck that came only to the righteous of heart and purpose.

  He padded nude into the bathroom to relieve himself, glancing with only mild interest at the old man and woman whose throats he’d slit after he’d roused them out of bed and herded them into the shower.

  This morning after he’d killed them, he’d made his way through the snowstorm twenty-five yards to the bunkhouse where two hands were asleep in their beds and shot them both in the head at point-blank range. Then he’d parked the Caddy in the barn that was empty of livestock—he figured they’d either sold off any animals they might have had, or they were old and had retired from the business—before he went back to the house and cooked himself a big breakfast: a couple slices of ham, half a pound of bacon, four eggs, four pieces of toast, and the better part of a quart of milk. Hard, satisfying work always made him hungry.

  Back in the corridor to the family room and kitchen Egan realized that his hands and arms were covered in dried blood, and in the kitchen the counters, the front of the fridge and stove, and the frying pans and dishes in the sink were also bloody.

  Marks of a good job well done. It’s a tough old world, his daddy had drummed into his head. But the old bastard would have been proud of him last night.

  “No loose ends here, by Christ,” Egan told himself.

  He went into the guest bathroom where he took a long, hot shower, after which he found a pair of scissors and cut his hair very short, not quite a flattop, leaving a five o’clock shadow on his chin just like the old man in the shower.

  “An honest haircut for an honest man,” Egan told himself.

  Back in the couple’s bedroom he dressed in clean underwear, white socks, a dress shirt, and a blue serge suit that was a little short in the legs and a little tight in the chest, but not impossibly so. He found a red tie, and worked out a reasonable Windsor knot. The shoes were too small, so he used the kitchen sink to clean the blood off his own boots, and when he had them on he went back to the family room where he turned on the television to KDIX, out of Dickinson.

  As the set warmed up he found a beer in the fridge, and sat down at the counter to watch Days of our Lives, and wait for the weathercast. He figured that he had a number of options. First of course was getting out of the immediate vicinity—depending on the weather either east to the airport at Bismarck or north across the border back to Regina—he thought that he’d seen something on TV at the Rough Riders before they’d snatched the broad that the storm would be concentrated more to the south—or even west all the way to Billings.

  That was the easy part, because he would either make it out of here using the old man’s clothes and ID, plus the Ford 4x4 F-450 pickup truck he’d spotted in a shed next to the barn, which would go through more serious shit than even the Caddy could, or he would get himself cornered and die in a shoot-out. Sure as hell he wasn’t going to give himself up and spend the rest of his life behind bars. He looked fine in drag, and he just knew what would happen once he was in the can because of his dark good looks.

  During a commercial break a good-looking girl in short dark hair and an earnest small-town breathlessness came on to explain the back-to-back fronts coming down from western Canada that mixed with a rapidly rising warm, moist air mass that had moved up from the Gulf and had caused the first storm, and in another eight hours would cause the second, even larger blizzard.

  “If you have to drive anywhere—which we recommend you don’t—better get it done before midnight, let’s make it ten this evening, because if you’re caught out on the highways after that you could be in some serious trouble.”

  Egan had the notion that the weather girl had no clue what serious trouble was all about, because when it came it almost always bit you in the ass and left marks. And he was in some serious shit, yet he’d known all his life that it would come to this point sooner or later. But at least the weather was cooperating, and he figured that if he could make it to Minneapolis ahead of the second storm front, he’d have a chance of renting a car—if the dead rancher had a credit card—and could make it down to Louisville where the Posse had some friends who could help out.

  Because listening to the weather girl talk, her words flowing around him like wind chimes up in a tree, little snatches of music now and then, he’d come up with the inkling of a plan. The last big thing.

  Clyde Thompson, the dead rancher, had an American Express credit card, was a member of AARP, though he was only fifty-two, AAA, the National Cattleman’s Beef Association, and the North Dakota Farmers Union. He had a pair of twenties and four ones in his wallet, and a photograph of a young man, probably himself, in an army uniform, an M-16 slung barrel down over his shoulder in what looked like a jungle. On the back he’d written: Grenada 12/12/83.

  Too bad, Egan thought, glancing toward the bathroom door. The bastard fought for his country and had come out of it in one piece. Until now. It was indeed a tough old world.

  He found the keys to the Ford along with a parka in the mudroom just off the kitchen, and went out to the shed where he started the truck and checked the gas. The tank was full and with luck he figured he’d make it all the way without filling up.

  Back in the house the soap opera was on, and Egan opened another beer and sat down to wait until it got dark, and think about just how he was going to tackle his next job—his last job—never once considering the
probable outcome of something so radical and especially not the why of it. Because he knew that last part; he had it down cold, had it that way for as long as he could remember.

  He’d told a friend out in Kalispell once that when he died he wanted to be buried upside-down, so that the whole world could kiss his ass. He was angry for a life he figured had passed him by, all the way back to high school when he’d been called slimy. And it was only years afterwards when he’d realized they’d teased him because at his house his mother thought that bathing too often would leach the natural oils out of a person’s body. Saturday night baths were plenty good enough for decent folk.

  And other things had happened; with a girl in Houston, a couple of friends in Frisco, a job that went seriously south in Detroit, a Social Security disability application that had been turned down three times because not one bastard doctor had been willing to certify that he had bad back problems.

  Egan had a list of grievances that he’d been adding to year after year, like saving pennies and nickels and dimes until they came up to some serious money and weighed so much they sometimes brought a man to his knees.

  Time to cash ’em in, he thought.

  Federal Bureau of Investigation Field Office

  Christmas Eve

  Minneapolis

  FBI DIRECTOR EDWIN Rogers had initiated an encrypted video call with Deborah Rausch, the Minneapolis SAC. It was nine in the morning in the Midwest and Deb was sure that she looked like hell, her hair a mess, her eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep and worry. She’d always had the tendency to take things on her shoulders, most of the time unnecessarily so, but this time she was in the genuine hot seat.

  “Glad to see that you’re on the job, Mrs. Rausch, but sorry this had to come during the holidays,” Rogers told her. He was dressed just like in his official photograph, in a dark three-piece suit, the tie snugged up and straight. The same as his attitude, formal and constant.

  “Thank you, sir, but Mr. Egan hasn’t taken a day off. I assume that you’ve seen my overnight.”

  “Yes, and I have to brief the president later this morning, so I wanted to know your gut feelings.”

  “We’re going to catch this guy, if that’s what you mean, Mr. Director. He can’t keep hiring people and then kill them when the operation has been completed. He’s going to run out of associates. These guys may be crazy but a lot of them are pretty smart.”

  “You think that someone will turn him in?”

  “Almost certainly, or else he’ll make a mistake, get himself into something from which he can’t slip away.”

  “He’s a determined man.”

  “Indeed he is,” Deb said. And it stung deeply that the bastard had made it right here to Minneapolis, right under her nose, in a stolen truck, with a stolen ID and credit card and had flown to Louisville and disappeared before anyone had reported the murders of the rancher and his wife. It was the kind of mistake that cost SACs their jobs.

  “How are Sheriff Osborne and Ms. Borden?”

  “They’ll be released from the hospital in Dickinson this morning. No permanent harm, but it was close.”

  “And work at the Initiative?”

  “I’m told that they expect to have it back up and running sometime after the first of the year,” Deb said. “Excuse me, Mr. Director, but you know all of this.”

  “Yes, but you may not know that there are some other aspects that you’ll have to take into consideration.”

  “Sir?”

  “We’ve uncovered some evidence that points to a possible source of Mr. Egan’s funds.”

  “Yes, sir. We’re looking for his bank accounts, most likely in Bozeman, though there are a few other possibilities, and we’re checking his relatives and friends, but as you can imagine they’ve not been very cooperative. He’s probably using fake IDs including Social Security numbers, and we’re running down a few leads on that score. We know that he spent a few days in Upper Peninsula Michigan, at a mobile home an uncle owned, and the RCMP in Regina said that a couple matching Egan’s and Mattson’s descriptions—Egan was masquerading as a woman—paid for a room for ten days but left the first night.”

  “Yes, that’s in your report. But we’ve uncovered a possible connection with Venezuelan intelligence. I can’t give you all the details yet, the CIA is mostly involved, except to warn you that if Venezuelan funds are involved they’ll almost certainly be funneled through an American interest. The consensus thinking at this point is a contractor service.”

  Deb was caught a little flat-footed, and yet she and her staff had suspected an outside source of money because the Posse never had been very well funded. Most of their money had been used to stockpile emergency rations, clean sources of water in case of a nuclear attack, bunkers and underground shelters, and small arms and ammunition in case the federal government finally made its move against the population. The transformation to a dictator state would be led by the IRS, of course, which was why the Posse’s main strategy had always been a refusal to pay income tax: why finance the expected suspension of all civil liberties, including habeas corpus, the right to free speech, religion, and assembly, and most important, the right to bear arms? Which meant they never had the kind of money it had taken to mount the attack on the Initiative.

  “Any leads, sir?”

  “Nothing solid yet.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Assuming we’re right in thinking that Venezuelan intel is involved, what do they hope to gain by trying to shut down the Initiative? It’s only an experiment, from what I’m told. Nothing of an industrial level is expected anytime soon. Or was it just an attempt to embarrass us?”

  “It’s more than that,” Rogers said. “But your main concern for the moment is to look for any unusual activities in your district.”

  Deb resisted an impulse to laugh out loud. Her father had served in Congress from Nevada, but he’d only lasted two terms. “It’s a different world out there,” he’d said. “They play by different rules, different expectations, and at a different pace. And a lot of the times they get themselves into positions where they have to state the obvious as if it were something they’d just discovered. They’re not bad people, just different than me.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but aren’t we just picking up the pieces now? Their attack on the Initiative failed, and so did kidnapping General Forester’s daughter. There’s nothing left for them. I suspect that Egan has gone to ground somewhere and will probably stay there for the immediate future.”

  “We don’t think so,” Rogers said.

  “You’re expecting another attack?”

  “We’re pretty sure that SEBIN is politically committed. One of our special envoys was assassinated.”

  “Yes, sir, Rupert Mann, and the president recalled our ambassador. The word is Mann got caught in the middle of a drug cartel war.”

  “The president sent him to deal with the oil ministry in Caracas. Shortly after the talks broke off, Mr. Mann was kidnapped and taken to a secure spot outside the city where he was beheaded with a chain saw.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “And it wasn’t the Caracas police who investigated, it was SEBIN. It’s why the president recalled our ambassador and expelled theirs.”

  The media had reported the recall and expulsion of ambassadors as a reaction to Chávez ordering a steep hike in the price of crude—but only for oil shipped to the U.S. But this was completely different. She sat at her desk looking at the director’s unblinking image on her monitor. It had begun snowing again last night, and the entire upper Midwest was all but closed down.

  “Those could be the opening moves of a war,” Deb said. “And that’s plain nuts.”

  Rogers nodded. “Right on both counts, Mrs. Rausch. Keep your people on their toes, because this is just the start.”

  “At least we know they won’t try to hit the Initiative again. The place is too well guarded now.”

  “Most of those tr
oops will be pulled out as soon as the storm abates.”

  “That’s crazy, too.”

  “The orders come from the White House. Officially the Initiative has nothing to do with the dispute over oil.”

  “But we know better.”

  “Exactly,” Rogers said.

  PART THREE

  MID-GAME

  New Year’s Eve

  44

  D. S. WOOD’S BOEING 737 with the Trent Holdings logo of three interlocking circles touched down at Havana’s José Marti Airport a few minutes after two in the morning, direct from Mexico City. It trundled down the deserted taxiway to an empty maintenance hangar, and once inside the engines spooled down and the big doors rumbled closed. Two men in coveralls pushed wheeled boarding stairs to the front hatch and left.

  Wood had been advised to come to Cuba alone, without his secretary or advisers, for a meeting that he could not afford to miss. And, considering the source of the request, he’d been unable to demur.

  “We’ll only take two hours of your time,” Margaret Fischer had promised.

  “This have anything to do with my oil derivative funds?” Wood had asked, something clutching at his chest. If word had begun to leak just how shaky Trent’s cash position was the piranhas would begin coming to the surface. And of the carnivores Margaret was the worst. It was she who’d come up with the idea for credit default swaps about the same time Blythe Masters over at Morgan Stanley had. And like many of the other top names on Wall Street, when the securities meltdown had swept the entire world, Maggie had come out with scarcely a bruise.

  “Try coal,” she’d told him.

  The company’s airplane was laid out in four palatial sections: the master bedroom all the way aft, a boardroom and communications center just forward, the main lounge forward of that, and the cockpit, galley, and quarters for the pilot, copilot, and one flight attendant at the front.

  The hangar was in semidarkness, an SUV parked to one side. But peering out a window Wood couldn’t make out if anyone was inside the car.