Strong Darkness

by Jon Land

  It looked like Kai, a lot like Kai, enough to set Dylan’s heart fluttering the same way it had the first time he’d laid eyes on her. Just a trick of his imagination conspiring with his vision and the lobby’s dull, atmospheric lighting, he decided.

  The more the boy looked, though, the more the woman really did look like Kai. And then she was heading his way, Dylan’s breath starting to bottleneck in his throat with the certainty that this was no trick of his imagination or vision at all.

  “We need to go!” she said, voice hushed, as soon as she reached him. “Hurry!”

  “Huh?” was all Dylan could manage, leaving him feeling lame and stupid.

  “They’re coming. I saw them on the street. There’s no time.”

  “Coming for…”

  “You and your father. Hurry, please.”

  Dylan felt himself rise. “I’ve got to warn him,” he said, the only words he could muster, prepaid cell phone in hand in the next instant, but Cort Wesley’s phone went straight to voice mail.

  “Now, please.”

  Dylan’s eyes fixed on the alcove housing the elevators. “Just stay here. I’ll be right back.”

  Kai grabbed him by the arm before he could move, holding him in place. Her grip was deceptively strong and she’d grasped his arm at the elbow, pressing in a way that he began to feel it go numb. Then her eyes bulged, Dylan catching four men in sports jackets worn over dress shirts without ties making their way through the lobby.

  “Kiss me!” Kai said, in more of an order than a request.

  “Huh?”

  “Do it!”

  And when he couldn’t, she did it for him, leaning in and kissing him hard on the lips. Kai eased him into a slight spin that obscured both their faces from view, backing off only when the four men disappeared into the elevator alcove.

  “I know people who will help us,” Kai said, her voice steady but hushed. “We must leave.”

  Dylan couldn’t take his gaze off the elevator bank. “I need to help my dad.”

  “You need to come with me,” Kai told him.

  And then Dylan saw the gun in her hand.

  76

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  Caitlin had her SIG out, already turning when she saw none other than Jones struggling to lean forward. The hand that had found her shoulder was trembling now, the rest of him a quivery mess with blood soaking through his shirt and jacket from clearly more than a single wound.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Only surprise,” he managed through dry lips, his voice cracking, “being it wasn’t you who did it.”

  “Who did?”

  He slumped back in the SUV’s backseat, everything about him looking smaller, all the intimidation and bravado that defined him leaking out with the blood. “I fucked up, Ranger, I fucked up bad.”

  Caitlin gunned the engine. “I’m getting you to a hospital.…”

  “No,” he wheezed louder, trying to reach out for her again, but failing. “No hospitals, unless you want to get me killed for sure.”

  “While that’s tempting, Jones, I know a doctor who owes the Rangers a favor for helping to keep him out of jail. Guy’s name is de la Cruz. Rangers busted him a few years back,” Caitlin continued, already reversing fast and then jamming the SUV into gear, “for performing unsanctioned plastic surgery procedures. I saw pictures of some of the people who came in for facelifts and came out looking like they were wearing Halloween masks.”

  Jones tried to smile and failed. “Is that the best you can do?”

  “Don’t worry, it’s not like you need to have your nose fixed,” she said, going for her phone.

  * * *

  Caitlin ended the call and dropped her phone in the cup holder. “He’s waiting for us,” she said, tearing down the road now for de la Cruz’s house in East San Antonio. “What the hell happened, Jones?”

  “What happened was you were right. Dead-on, one hundred percent bull’s-eye, your aim true as goddamn ever.”

  “Make sense, Jones.”

  “You’re right about me too, Ranger. I like to believe my shit don’t stink, but that doesn’t mean I need to carry somebody else’s load.”

  Caitlin screeched into a turn, nearly colliding with one car and then another, and just managing to right the SUV and speed on. The former doctor, Juan de la Cruz, was fifteen minutes away in a part of the city still patrolled by gangbangers. Any more than fifteen and Jones looked like he might bleed out.

  “You’re babbling, Jones. Keep quiet until we get there.”

  “This isn’t babble, Ranger, it’s the truth. Maybe the first time you ever heard me tell it. I had things wrong.”

  “You’re talking about Li Zhen, this whole deal for his company to build the fifth generation wireless network,” Caitlin said, stopping short of telling Jones what Young Roger had just told her about Zhen’s background.

  “You don’t think we did it out of goodwill to better international relations, did you?”

  “Not even for a minute. But who’s we, Jones?” Caitlin asked, checking his condition in the rearview mirror.

  “Usual suspects. Kind of people who make me look noble and honorable. I guess it’s the price of doing business in the world we live in.”

  Caitlin flew through a yellow light and then risked a red, cars spinning out all around her. “About what?”

  “Oh, everything maybe, but especially Yuyuan. This whole thing is bullshit. The deal isn’t about business, it’s about Li Zhen. I should have seen it, but missed all the signs.”

  “Signs of what?” Caitlin asked him.

  No response.

  She took her eyes off the road to twist round and jostle him gently in the backseat. His closing eyes snapped open again, full of life for the moment.

  “Signs of what?”

  “Li Zhen played us,” he said, picking up his last thought, as if Caitlin had said nothing at all. “Dangled something we couldn’t hope to resist before us and we jumped on it like a dog in heat.”

  “You’re not gonna die until I kill you, Jones, and I swear I’ll do that unless you say something I can understand.”

  “Elections, Ranger. Is that plain enough for you?”

  “What about them?”

  “Only that thanks to Yuyuan’s fifth generation network, we’d be able to fix any one of them we wanted.”

  77

  NEW YORK CITY

  “Now I’m gonna ask you this one more time,” Cort Wesley continued, “and if you don’t answer me, I’m gonna get up and walk out of here, and leave you to figure out how to piss for the rest of your life.”

  “Kai came from China,” Mareno told him, sweat starting to bead up on his powdery, bronze features, “the syndicate there.”

  “Run by who?”

  “The Triad,” the man said, glancing downward again. “Chinese organized crime.”

  “I know who they are.”

  “Can you loosen my belt?”

  “Not until you tell me more about Kai.”

  “There’s nothing more to tell.”

  Cort Wesley slid his chair closer until he was almost in the man’s face. “I’m not going to ask you again, hoss,” he continued, his voice gone smooth and flat.

  Mareno said nothing, his lips quivering again behind whatever he was thinking. Paying him no further heed, Cort Wesley rose stiffly and walked toward the door in a measured step, never looking back.

  “The Triad turns them into sex slaves as young girls,” he heard the man say, as his hand hit the doorknob. “I’m talking nine or ten years old. They don’t want them any older, feel it takes that long to train them properly.”

  “Like dogs, you mean. Human fucking trafficking,” Cort Wesley said, feeling the contents of his stomach curdle at what he was hearing. “Keep talking.”

  “What else can I tell you?”

  “Everything you know about Kai. More than you’ve said already.”

  “The Triad doesn’t kidnap or steal—they don’t have
to in China when boys are all anybody wants to raise. They barter. You want something from them, they take something from you. A deal is a deal.”

  “And you’re just an honest broker, that it, hoss?”

  “I’m a consolidator. We’ve got twenty more offices like mine across the country, well over a hundred across the world. The Triad’s only one of our suppliers. These girls come from everywhere, even right here in the U.S. of A. It’s big business. Huge.”

  “I’m going to bring it down,” Cort Wesley said, hands clenched into fists at his sides, his spine coiled in tension and neck held so rigid that his head was beginning to throb.

  The man’s gaze turned pleading, desperation starting to set in. “I’m starting to feel it now. Come on, help me out. For fuck’s sake, get this shit out of me!”

  “Kai ran away for a reason. She came back to Providence for a reason. Nothing happens without a plan. I want to know what all this is about. I want to know what she’s up to and why my son almost got killed for it.”

  “Look, I told you all that I know. You want any more, there’s someone else you need to track down—the person who told us we could find Kai in Providence.”

  “Tell me more, hoss.”

  “All I’ve got is a phone number, a man who took a personal interest in finding her. I don’t know his name. The number he gave me doesn’t even exist anymore.”

  “You remember it?”

  “Just the area code: eight-three-oh. Ring any bells?”

  Cort Wesley felt the iron bands through his neck and shoulders tighten even more. “It’s Texas. New Braunfels.”

  Cort Wesley could tell from the desperate, pleading gaze stretched across Mareno’s taut skin that the man had told him everything helpful he knew. He wanted to get back to Dylan, back to Texas and the hell out of New York where just walking down the street left you covered in a film of grime clinging to air choked by car exhaust.

  “Hey,” Mareno called when he turned the knob and pulled the door open. “Hey! You forgetting something here?”

  “It’s just a couple bags of frozen peas, hoss,” Cort Wesley told him, moving into the hallway. “Minute or so in the microwave and they’ll be good to go.”

  He’d started to close the door when the gunfire began.

  78

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  Caitlin waited in the screen porch fronting Juan de la Cruz’s home in East San Antonio while the former doctor worked on Jones in a back bedroom. She sat in a ratty chair, the fabric upholstery holding a musty smell from the moisture reaching it through the screen. It felt vaguely damp to her, but she’d chosen it for the vantage point it provided of the street and surrounding neighborhood. Twice she’d taken out her cell phone to call Captain Tepper to request backup, but had returned the phone to her pocket on both occasions.

  What, after all, was she supposed to tell him? Beyond that the possibility existed that Homeland was “watching” her phone, anticipating that Jones might have reached out to her after the attempt on his life failed.

  The third time Caitlin took out her phone, she dialed Cort Wesley’s number but it went straight to voice mail. He was on his way to the Flatiron Building when they’d talked earlier, but since then nothing, adding to Caitlin’s discomfort and the anxiety that felt like fingernails scratching at her skin since Jones had finished describing the connection between Yuyuan and Homeland from the backseat of her SUV.

  * * *

  “Elections, Ranger. Is that plain enough for you?”

  “What about them?”

  “Only that thanks to Yuyuan’s fifth generation network, we’d be able to fix any one of them we wanted.”

  Jones had sucked in a breath and let it out in a long wet wheeze that sounded like the air was coming through a dozen different holes. “Comes down to homeland security, Ranger.”

  “Doesn’t it always?”

  “This was different. Look around you. Americans are capable of doing more damage to this country than any foreign power could ever do.”

  “We’ve been through this before, lots of time.”

  “Just the preliminary rounds, Ranger. Forget about homegrown terrorists and right-wing fringe groups plotting insurrection and civil war. They’re inconveniences; uncomfortable and unsettling, but inconveniences all the same and nothing more.”

  “As opposed to what?”

  Jones was trying to recapture his breath again. “Politics, Ranger.”

  “Losing blood makes you even more cryptic than usual, Jones.”

  “Politics in general, and elections in specific, are the biggest threat out there. Anybody can run for office and pretty much anybody does these days, no matter how fucked-up in the head they might be.”

  “Comes with the country, Jones.”

  “Really? You can line up all the terrorists hiding in our midst and all the crazy preachers building an army on the lunatic fringe and they wouldn’t even compare to the damage the wrong elected officials can cause.”

  “Wrong,” Caitlin repeated.

  “You just nailed the watch word. You can’t solve everything with a gun,” he said finally. “Sometimes you need a different weapon. It’s not so much making sure the right people get elected as making sure the wrong people don’t. We’re not trying to stack the deck here, Ranger, just make sure the country gets dealt a fair hand.”

  “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” she’d asked him.

  * * *

  And now Jones was fighting for his life because he’d bucked the system he helped create. In ironic counterpoint, Caitlin, the very person who trusted him the least, had become the only person he could trust at all.

  So she remained vigilant and ready, her eyes sweeping the street for anything out of place: person lingering too long by a window, a car driving by more than once, a delivery truck crawling along as if in search of an address. Then a screen door with a bad spring slammed behind her and Caitlin spun in her chair to find the former physician Juan de la Cruz standing at her side. His bloodshot eyes regarded her and he reeked of both the alcohol he’d been drinking and the clinical variety soaking through his skin.

  “You can see him now.”

  79

  NEW YORK CITY

  Cort Wesley spun back into the hotel room, fortunate the door had not closed all the way.

  “I warned you, you dumb hick!” Mareno blared.

  The pistol he’d taken off one of the man’s guards palmed now, Cort Wesley kicked over the chair to which Mareno was still bound.

  “Hey!” Mareno cried out, after his head smacked the carpet.

  The door burst inward in the next instant ahead of a hail of submachine-gun fire. The bullets seemed to hit everything at once: walls, windows, drapes, furniture. Two figures surged into the room, ready to continue the spray when Cort Wesley lurched out from behind the door. Neither man had a chance, requiring only a pair of bullets each. One’s finger clamped reflexively on the trigger as he fell, stitching a jagged design of bullets across the ceiling and far wall in a neat arc. He fell atop Mareno, Cort Wesley leaping over both of them when the next three men charged into the room abreast of one another.

  Cort Wesley reached the window of the old hotel that opened onto a fire escape, its glass fractured by the initial barrage of bullets, and crashed through it as a fresh trio of fire streams traced his path. Cort Wesley hit the ledge hard, already rolling toward the ladder extending downward. He dropped down it to the next platform, pistol steadied in both hands when the torso of one man emerged from the window above followed by a second.

  Cort Wesley got off four shots in rapid succession, but the jerking of his initial target’s body conspired to spare the second man his bullets. The result was a fresh spray of automatic fire unleashed his way before he could get off any further rounds. The echoing twang of the steel jacketed rounds sparking off the iron rails turned his ears to mush, and Cort Wesley fought against the urge to return fire blindly. He had only the single magazine of fift
een for the nine-millimeter Glock, plus the one in the chamber. He hadn’t been keeping a mental tally of shots fired, figuring he’d used four inside the room and another four out here so far, leaving him eight bullets.

  Eight bullets for the two remaining gunmen. Plenty normally, but he had little maneuverability in such narrow confines, complicated further by his adversaries’ holding the high ground. When the next spray of automatic fire burned closer to him, he had no choice but to fire three shots upward. That held the remaining gunmen at bay long enough for him to slide down the handholds of the ladder to the next level down. Just starting another drop when one of them loomed overhead, submachine-gun barrel angled downward straight for him.

  Cort Wesley released one hand and fired upward with the other. He took the man in the throat with the first bullet and under the chin with the second, but not before the barrage clanged close enough to his hand grasping the rail to strip it free and send him plummeting. He hit the next platform hard, his momentum carrying him over the edge still three stories up. Dangling with one hand holding on and a second clinging fast to his weapon. And then the fire was spitting at him from two directions at once, both above and below, clinking off steel and heating up the air around him.

  Cort Wesley saw what he had to do, where his only chance at survival lay, even as the impossibility of the maneuver struck him. Not that it mattered, since he was already committed to the action in both mind and body. He managed to unlatch the hook on the ladder, letting its rungs unfold and stretch straight for the sidewalk. His firing angle above cleared and he found his trigger halfway into the plunge. Dimly aware of the fourth gunman pitching up and over a platform rail, falling straight past him and beating him to the concrete.

  His ladder stopped ten feet from the sidewalk. Cort Wesley’s Glock was already steadied by then, firing his final bullet downward in the same moment he felt the clunk of the ladder’s sudden end jolt him to a stop. It was an improbable shot, if not an impossible one, the angle going against physics, especially with fire pinging and clanging all around him, the heat of the bullets so intense it was impossible to say whether he’d been hit or not.