by Blake Banner
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ll go to the farm and get your mother and Sean back.”
She searched my face for a moment. “And then?”
“Then I’ll make Vasco pay for everything he’s done.”
“Let me come with you, Lacklan. Let me help.”
I shook my head. “No.”
“If you die, I want to go down with you. If you live, when you leave, I want to go with you.”
I grabbed hold of her shoulders. There was a hot, wild excitement inside me which I fought to control. I growled, “No! Stay here, Primrose, stay safe. I will come back and I’ll bring your mother and Sean with me…” I hesitated, then shook my head. “I don’t want you hurt… Go inside and wait for me.”
I clambered into the cab, slammed the door and, with the lights off, began the slow descent toward the depot. For a mile and a half, the snow was deep, and a layer of ice had formed under it, covering the road and causing the truck to slide and swerve as I moved forward, forcing me to crawl at a snail’s pace, with the freezing wind lashing at my face through the yawning hole where the windshield should have been. It took me almost ten minutes to get to the turn off to the depot. And there, something made me stop and stare. Suddenly, the place looked incongruous, absurd, with its high wall, its gate, and a snow plow clearing the path during a blizzard. A path for what?
I remembered the ten-wheeler truck I’d seen leaving, headed south. I tried to see in my mind what lay south. South was just desert: hundreds of miles of desert, and route 400, which turned west near the end of the Humboldt Range to connect with the I-80, just north of Lovelock. Whether you were going southwest to California or northeast, it made more sense to turn left and north at that junction. It made no sense at all to turn south.
I didn’t know right then why it was important, but I knew, with absolute certainty, that it was. I spun the wheel and turned off the road and down the track, bumping, sliding, and skidding toward the structure. I pulled up outside the gate and swung down from the cab, wincing in the icy wind, shielding my eyes with my hands, and made my way around the hood. The gale whistled in the pylons and groaned over the plain, raising great clouds of snow and rattling the wooden fence. The gate was padlocked. I pulled my Sig from my waistband and put a round into it. It came loose and I put my shoulder to the boards, forcing it open.
I found myself in a broad yard stacked with heavy-duty plastic drums, about four feet tall and three feet across. At a rough estimate, I guessed there must have been at least a couple hundred of them, maybe twice that number. In the poor visibility, with the darkness and the blizzard, it was hard to tell. I waded through the snow, struggling to keep my footing against the wind, and came to the closest of the drums. The lid was sealed on with steel bands. Whatever was in them, it sure as hell wasn’t carrots. I took my Sig again and shot off the two bands, then unclipped the lid and pried it off. I shielded my eyes and stared. It was full of dirt. I reached in with my gloved hand and grabbed some to look at it more closely. It was coarse dirt.
I stood back and stared at the rest of them, stacked three high, five deep against the fence. Why? Why would you store tens, maybe hundreds of tons of dirt like that? I looked at the shed. It was huge, and suddenly I was wondering, if outside there were hundreds of drums of dirt, what the hell was on the inside? And as I wondered that, I saw there was a window, high up on the near side, and in it I caught a glimpse, a dim reflection, of light.
I explored further and found that there was a huge, steel roller blind at the north end, and a wooden door on the far side, away from the gate. I struggled over to it. It was locked, and at the top and bottom of the door, there were also deadbolts.
On the outside.
I slid back the bolts, took my Swiss Army knife from my pocket, rammed it in the lock, and, with my Sig in my right hand, I eased the door open.
More than a barn, it was a huge hangar, easily fifty feet across and at least seventy feet long. The ceiling was high, maybe twenty feet, supported by an A-frame of rafters. Here, inside the hangar, there were also drums stacked against the walls, three and four high, five and six deep. But what struck me most, as I took it in, was the peculiar structure against the wall in the far right-hand corner. Made of drums, it formed a kind of pen, or enclosure, with blankets laid across the top as a roof. And through an opening, about four feet across and five feet high, I could make out the unmistakable wavering light of fire. I wasn’t exactly surprised. A deadbolt on the outside of the door can only mean one thing: you want to keep somebody on the inside.
I closed the door and walked slowly toward the enclosure, keeping my gun trained on the opening. There was total silence. When I was ten feet away, I said, “Whoever you are in there, come out with your hands in the air.”
After a moment, there was a slight movement, a rustling, and then a pair of feet in Nike trainers appeared, followed by a pair of filthy jeans, and then the torso and the head of a man, probably in his late thirties, ducked out. He had black hair and olive skin, and two got you twenty he was one of Aloysius Groves’ illegal Mexican employees; and this was his fair and equitable food and lodging. I beckoned him out and pointed at the portal through which he had emerged.
“Are there more of you in there?”
He shrugged and shook his head, looking back at the opening. Another face appeared, this time a woman, probably also in her mid-thirties. She came out too and I took a step closer, peering in. I caught a glimpse of bodies, legs, people sitting, cramped together in firelight, improvising warmth against the storm.
I slipped my gun back in my waistband and said, “Amigo.” I put my hand on my chest and repeated. “Amigo.” I pointed over at the enclosure. “Cuantos? Cuantos hombres y mujeres?” How many men and women? They looked at each other, wary, but afraid and beaten down. The fear was written large in their eyes. The man spoke.
“Cien, cincuenta hombres, cincuenta mujeres. Somos familias. El lo quiso así.”
My Spanish is poor, but I knew enough to get it: there were a hundred of them, fifty men and fifty women. Families. And from what I could make out, ‘el lo quiso así’ meant, ‘He wanted it that way.’
Slowly, one by one, others began to emerge, most of them in their mid to late thirties.
I frowned, shaking my head, telling them with my face that I didn’t understand. “Quien?” I asked. “Quien lo quiso así?” Who wanted it that way?
“El jefe. El señor capataz, el señor Vasco…”
Vasco. Vasco wanted it that way.
Why?
fifteen
They tried to tell me. They tried to explain, and they bombarded me with questions, too, streaming from the small opening in the enclosure in their dozens, gathering around me, grabbing hold of me and talking all at the same time: was I a cop? Was I immigration? Was I FBI? Who was I? Why was I there? They wanted to go home.
I tried to tell them I didn’t speak Spanish, I was not a cop or a Fed, but they weren’t listening. They were talking, terrified, clamoring, begging, pulling at my sleeves, clawing at my arms. I backed away toward the door, signaling with my hands that they should stay, and be quiet. Gradually, they stopped, fell silent, and stood, a small, frightened, bewildered crowd in the middle of a vast, frozen hangar, with the flickering light of the flames behind them.
“Esperen aquí,” I said. “Con el fuego. Volveré.” Stay here, with the fire. I will be back.
I stepped into the freezing gale and, pulling up my collar and hugging my jacket close around me, I struggled back the truck. My mind was in a whirl, but I had no time to think it through. I fired up the engine and drove slowly back to the road, not daring to go above six or seven miles an hour. Every time the needle edged toward ten, the wheels began to spin and the truck skidded and slewed on the ice beneath the snow.
Finally, I made it to the blacktop, Route 400. Already it was beginning to disappear under a thick, white blanket. The entrance to the farm on the other side was invisible amo
ng the billowing clouds of white flakes, but I had a fair idea of where it was. I crawled onto the road, pointed the nose of the truck at where I thought it should be, and gently pressed the gas. The truck trundled forward and gradually the white wall, and the big white arch, emerged from the blackness at the end of a short driveway, among the mist of wind-blown snow. When I was sure I was lined up with the center, I floored the pedal and rammed nearly four thousand pounds of truck right through the big, iron gate.
It gave and I slithered and slewed through to the sound of screeching, tortured metal. Any other day and the noise would have been heard for miles, but with that gale blowing, the crashing, grinding, and scraping of iron and steel was lost, blown away on the wind.
I continued for fifty or sixty yards up the driveway toward the house, but eventually the truck skidded on the frozen track and buried itself nose-first in a snowdrift. It was good enough. I grabbed my kit bag and jumped down from the cab. Squinting and wiping the freezing flakes from my eyes, I made out the glimmer of light from the farmhouse windows. I shouldered my bag and started to trudge through the drifts toward the lights. Nobody tried to stop me. There were no shouts, no dogs, no spotlights, no gunfire.
The house turned out to be a big, mock Georgian manor. At the front there was a gabled portico supported by Greco-Roman columns. But at the back, where there should have been a landscaped, formal garden, instead, maybe fifty yards away, there was a complex that looked like stables, a barn, and some kind of living quarters for the hands. I figured the fields and the crops were further back, made invisible by the storm.
I didn’t pause or hesitate.
Vasco was confident he had me. He had a dozen men, and his opponents were a teenage girl and a single man, struggling to survive in a blizzard out in the wilderness. But the SAS is founded on the principle that a single man can sometimes do more damage than an entire army, if he knows what he is doing. To say I knew what I was doing might be to overstate the case. I was making it up as I went along. But I knew that when the time came, I would know what to do. That single man struggling to survive in a blizzard was now wading through the snow up to his kitchen door, with murderous intent.
He hadn’t posted perimeter guards because of the blizzard, and the ones he had posted inside the house were, like him, confident that their enemy was either freezing to death or being shot to death back at the guesthouse. I stood back from the light and peered through the kitchen window. It was hard to make out details, my eyes were watering from the freezing wind, and the glass was frosted with ice, but I could see a guy sitting at a large, pine table, watching something on a small TV. On the table beside him was an automatic. One here, another presumably at the front door. How many more?
I turned and looked over my shoulder. There was the long building that looked like the living quarters for the hands. There was light filtering out of the windows. Some of his men, at least, were in there. There was only one thing to do. I couldn’t stay put in those temperatures much longer. I had to go inside. I buried my kit bag under a drift, walked up to the door, and banged. The guard’s logical assumption would be that it was one of the hands. Usually your mortal enemies don’t come up and knock on your kitchen door in the middle of a blizzard.
I saw him turn and look. He got up, picked up his piece and walked over to the door, looking over his shoulder at the TV and laughing as he went. I pulled my Sig and cocked it, and aimed at where his head was going to be. I wanted to shoot him while I was outside where the gale would muffle the sound.
The door opened and he stood staring with his mouth open. I said, “Make a sound and I’ll blow the back of your head off. Do as I say and you’ll wake up alive tomorrow.”
He closed his mouth.
I said, “Step outside and throw your weapon in the snow.”
He did as I said and held up his hands.
I asked him, “How many inside the house?”
He wasn’t about to be a hero. “Mr. Groves and his wife and the boy, me and Phil in the entrance hall. All the other boys are in the lodgings over yonder.” He indicated the long building I’d pegged as the living quarters. “Look, mister, we never meant no harm. It’s just…”
“Can it. What about Abi and the boy?”
“They’re upstairs, safe and sound…”
I shot him between the eyes, picked up his piece—a 9mm Taurus, Beretta look-alike—stepped inside, and closed the door. A burst of canned laughter greeted me, like what I’d done was funny. I stood in the middle of the terra cotta-tiled floor and listened. The kitchen was big, spacious. Outside, I could hear the moan of the wind, with an occasional high whistle. There was the babble from the TV, the hum of the large, silver fridge, and nothing else.
I moved toward the door that gave on to the rest of the house. I had no idea of the layout or if the exit from the kitchen would take me past the hall and Phil. I eased it open and peered out. Still no sound. I was looking down a passageway toward a beveled column, a large fern, and a white, marble floor that seemed to open to the right. Opposite me was a wall that, after a moment, I realized was the side of a staircase that rose to the upper floor. That meant the column and the fern were in the hall.
I slipped my Sig in my waistband and drew my knife from my boot. Then I moved very slowly along the passage. Step by step, the hall came into view. It was spacious and absurdly ornate, with a statue of Eros in the centre of a circular floor. Imitation Louis XV furniture with gilded legs stood against the walls, and ferns were positioned beside multiple, unnecessary Greek pillars. It was like the lobby of a gaudy, nineteenth-century hotel.
Seated with his back to me in one of the Louis XV chairs was a man in his late twenties. He had no TV to watch, so I guess, in desperation, he had picked up a book. He seemed to be absorbed in it. I paused and listened. There were still no sounds. I took two long, silent steps that brought me beside the column just behind the fern. He was six feet away, with his head slightly inclined, looking down at the book in his lap. He was angled slightly to the left, facing the door. The fern would be in my way, making it awkward, but it was doable.
I slid my left foot forward, brought my right level. He was now three feet away, and I acted swiftly and brutally. I took another step with my left foot, clamped my left hand over his mouth and nose and simultaneously rammed two inches of the blade into the vertebrae in his neck, an inch below where they meet the skull. Bleeding was minimal, but it severed all communication between his brain and the rest of his body, including his vital organs. His heart stopped, his diaphragm stopped, what air he had in his lungs hissed out, he could not scream.
I left him looking at his book with dead eyes and ran silently up the stairs to the galleried landing that overlooked the hall. It extended in two passages from left to right and led to bedrooms on either side. At the end of each passage there was a sharp, right angle bend toward the back of the building, where the two wings formed a kind of horseshoe. I moved to the right and out of sight, and again stopped to listen. This time, I heard the faint murmur of voices.
I moved slowly, pausing after each step, homing in on the sound. It grew steadily louder until I came to a door at the end of the corridor, by the corner. I couldn’t make out the words they were speaking, but it was a man and a woman. The woman’s voice was soothing, gentle. The man’s voice was whining, complaining. It wasn’t Abi and Sean, so it must be Karen and the boy, Arnold. I had no use for them, so I moved on, around the bend. At the far end there was a window, black glass smeared with snow, in the walls, and two more doors: one in the far wall; the other, by its position, must give on to the same room where I could hear the murmured conversation.
The far room was empty, and I was about to return and explore the other wing when a noise made me stop. It was a voice, clear and distinct, coming from the room where Karen and Arnold were. I froze. He must be right by the door.
“Mommy, please talk to Daddy. I really miss her and I want her to come and visit me…”
Then
the unmistakable sound of a toilet lid being put down and water flushing. A door closed and the talk was muffled. Clearly it was an en suite with a door to the passage. The words he’d spoken intrigued me and a gut feeling told me that what I had listened to was important. I tried the handle. The door was locked, but thirty seconds with my Swiss Army knife changed that and I slipped in and closed the door softly behind me. There was another door opposite that led into the bedroom itself. It had an old-fashioned keyhole and I knelt down and peered through. I couldn’t see much, but there was a large bed on the right, and to the left I could make out some armchairs in front of an open fireplace. I figured they were fifteen or twenty feet away and were turned with their backs to me, facing the fire at an angle. I could risk easing the door open a few inches. I turned the handle and pulled. Karen was speaking.
“Sweetheart, there are things you can’t always understand and it’s best to leave those things up to Mommy and Daddy. And sometimes, the people you want to be with and play with…”
“I don’t play anymore, Mommy, you know that! I’m twenty years old now!”
He laughed and she answered with a smiling voice. “To me you’ll always be my special baby boy. And even if you are a big man now, you still you have to realize that you are not just any man, you’re Arnold Groves! And that makes you special. That means you can’t just have any old person coming to visit you.”
They were quiet for a moment. Then, he said, “But, I used to have friends come and play…”
“Well, that was when you were a child, Arnold, honey, and it’s different when you’re a child.”
His voice turned resentful. “Everything changed when Joe came to live with us. He ruined everything. I don’t like Joe!”
“Now I don’t want you talking like that about Uncle Joe. He’s our special friend and he helps Daddy a lot. Why, I don’t know what we’d do without Uncle Joe!”