by Jon Land
16
EAST SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT
“Bad news, amigo,” Pablo Asuna told Cort Wesley over the throwaway cell phone Masters had bought in Walgreens. “There’s a price on your head.”
“Juárez Boys or Mexican Mafia?”
“Take your pick. People are busing in to punch your ticket. Word is gun stores from here to El Paso are selling out of bullets.”
“Guess I got my work cut out for me.”
Cort Wesley’s response to learning a bounty had been put out on him was to park Asuna’s old Ford in the middle of East San Antonio’s gang haven and look for a bar. When he’d grown up, this was a nice place to live. Hispanics mostly, many of them illegals having crossed over from Mexico, carving out their own modest slice of the American dream. When he’d gone inside five years ago, half the houses had grates on the doors and bars on the windows. Now all of them did.
Cort Wesley imagined living in fear, no one to call to report a drug deal going down or local boy being shot out of fear they’d be deported themselves. The gangs worked and lived here with impunity. Even the cops had programmed the streets out of their dash-mounted navigation devices.
Cort Wesley knew the thing about responding to a threat was not to show fear. The enemy thinks he’s got you based on sheer numbers. Trick was to show the world the numbers didn’t matter.
He found a bar on the east side in Windsor Oaks, home to endless rows of dilapidated town houses where the gangs ran smack and recruited new bangers out of the hopelessness. The bar was furnished with a pool table and a half dozen customers who kept their eyes tipped downward over their warming brews or empty shot glasses. The scent of stale beer rose from the rotting floorboards, reminding him of how his clothes had smelled after the beer can exploded in his grasp in Pablo Asuna’s garage.
Cort Wesley fed eight quarters into the pool table’s slot, slammed it back in, and listened to the freed balls rolling into position. He racked them, chose a cue and sent the balls scattering across the table with a neat break. One ball plunked into a side pocket and a second rattled home in the corner.
He played both roles, stripes and solids, alternately; even changing cues to better simulate actual competition. He knew it was only a matter of time before word reached the right people he was here, people who didn’t keep to themselves. Cort Wesley hoped it wouldn’t take too long because he really didn’t like pool, and the waiting was the worst.
Turned out it didn’t take very long at all.
The door to the bar rattled open and five bangers came in at once, fanning out through the smoke wafting in the air. Weapons not out yet. Tough guys enjoying the process of making their point. Sneering and grinning and letting him know their purpose. Probably waiting for him to go for his gun, make the first move.
Cort Wesley listened to the clack of their footsteps, the sounds as good as sights in the bar’s murky lighting. He reached down into the ball return to rerack for a fresh game.
His hand came out with the Smith & Wesson 9 millimeter, firing at spots and shapes. He hit the first two bangers in his sights with relative ease, then dove to the floor and rolled to avoid the wild spray of bullets fired by the others.
Conscious of his dwindling bullets, he lowered his aim, felling another with shots to the leg and gut while a fourth ran for the door and the fifth dove behind the bar. Cort Wesley knew the fourth had made it out when a narrow plume of sunlight poured into the room, and turned his attention to the fifth.
He approached the bar with gun leading the way, ready in case the final banger popped up firing with the pistols he had glimpsed in both the kid’s hands. Cort Wesley put two bullets into the murky mirror forming the bar’s back wall. A sea of shattered glass sprayed downward, giving him the opening he needed to lunge over the bar and aim his Smith at a terrified kid who’d already shed his pistols. Gazing up at Cort Wesley in terror, pleading with his eyes.
“You tell your friends what happened, you hear?”
The kid nodded rapidly, still showing his hands.
“You tell ’em there’s a lot more where that came from if they wanna come looking for me.”
Cort Wesley backed away from the bar, eyes cheating for the door in case the final banger was lying in wait for him. He doubted it, but you could never be too careful. He was breathing hard, conscious of the stench of sulphur mixing with stale beer, wood rot and cigarette smoke.
Just as word had reached the streets about the price on his head, so it would now spread about what had happened to the first group come to claim it. In the life Cort Wesley Masters had chosen for himself, there was no running, no hiding, no negotiating. You were better than your enemies or you weren’t. And if you weren’t, you died.
Cort Wesley continued on, stepping over the first two he’d shot. He slid through the door sideways; gun raised in case one of those perched at the bar had been a scout. But their eyes remained uniformly fixed away from him.
He stepped into the hot sun, grateful for the once-over it gave the cold clamminess that had settled over his skin. He thought about Caitlin Strong, standing in a similar bar in El Paso, ready to draw on him. Nothing like that today, the final banger nowhere to be seen and long gone by now.
His throwaway cell phone rang. Cort Wesley snatched it to his ear and recognized one of Pablo Asuna’s numbers from the caller ID.
“Yeah,” he greeted.
“Busy?”
“Not anymore.”
“That’s good, amigo. ’Cause I found your Texas Ranger for you.”
17
SURVIVOR CENTER, THE PRESENT
Clayton sat in the second seat of the Expedition, checking off the names on the list before him. Seven patients inside, in addition to Peter Goodwin. A night janitor and a charge nurse. No other center personnel would be present this late, the building buttoned up for the night.
A six-man team accompanying him might have seemed like overkill, but Clayton preferred it for the precision and speed it allowed. In and out in under five minutes. Nobody left alive inside when they were done.
Just a simple night’s work.
Caitlin sat by her husband’s bedside, chair pressed close enough to the rails for her to reach right through them and touch him. She’d been moving herself closer with each session. But the closer she got, the more it hurt, bringing back memories of the distance that had grown between them before Peter had left for Iraq.
Peter’s sleep cycles were a random mess, when he slept at all. His torturers had clearly used sleep deprivation among just about every other terrible technique, and the result was to throw his body clock permanently off-kilter. Peter existed, he didn’t live, and the treatment aimed at bringing him back into the world was about changing that by restoring first his understanding, and then his quality of life.
But Caitlin hadn’t returned to the center at midnight to continue that process. She’d come back late because the cloud of shock had cleared enough to make her think like a Texas Ranger again. Disable the camera in his room, and no one would ever know what she raised with Peter tonight. She could work unencumbered by fear that Rita Navarro or someone else might eavesdrop on their session and question why her words sounded more like interrogation than treatment.
She’d reviewed all the documents that had accompanied Peter to the center a dozen times now. He’d been found in Bahrain, where Caitlin assumed the torture that had so damaged his mind and body had occurred. So he goes to Iraq to build a cable television grid and ends up killed in an IED explosion. No remains to be sent back, very sorry for your loss.
So what was the army, or whoever else, covering up? Why not just tell Caitlin the truth, that he had disappeared and was feared kidnapped? Perhaps they were expecting a ransom demand that never came.
That, though, begged the question: what did Peter know worth torturing him over?
Cort Wesley passed the Survivor Center for the sixth time on foot. His mind locked on the first glimpse he’d gotten of Caitlin Strong. Tu
rning around from a table in an El Paso bar to the sight of patrons scattering and a woman wearing the badge and Stetson of the Texas Rangers standing twenty feet before him, jacket hitched back to reveal the butt of a squat SIG Sauer pistol in its unsnapped holster. Her fingers danced in the air over it, form-fitting jeans hanging low over her boots. Cort Wesley was a good shot, but had never been in a position to have an outcome determined by the quickness of his draw. Even then, that’s not what stopped him from answering her challenge. No.
What stopped him was the woman’s eyes wanting him to do it, begging him to do it. Cort Wesley looked into those eyes and knew if he obliged her, she’d shoot him down, emptying her gun in the time it took him to find his trigger.
His mind kept flashing back to the long moment that passed while he decided whether to go for his gun or not. Caitlin Strong looked at him like she knew that, knew what lurked in the deepest depths of his soul just as she knew there was no way he could draw and fire before she put a bullet between his eyes.
In that instant of hesitation, Cort Wesley realized she had beaten him in a way no one had ever beaten him before and stole five years of his life in the process. He needed to take something just as precious from her in order to go on. Otherwise, the anger would keep festering until it chewed his insides into shoe leather.
The tail Pablo Asuna had put on Caitlin Strong had followed her here, called Pablo to report once she’d entered the building. Cort Wesley didn’t bother asking himself what the hell she was doing at a place like this because he didn’t care. Whatever it might have been was going to end real soon anyway.
The woman had framed him. Putting a bullet in her head was just payback for five years stolen away, memories whittled from his making until there was nothing left to hold onto anymore. The new memories would start tonight with the past vanquished. Might not be much of a future, but Cort Wesley couldn’t worry about that until Caitlin Strong fell just like the three he’d left in the bar.
Except he’d never killed a woman before, not even once. He tried to tell himself it didn’t matter, that payback was payback. No reason to look at things any deeper than that. No reason to feel all stiff and knotted up over something that should have been much simpler than he was suddenly making it.
Cort Wesley was about to head inside the building when the doors to a black Expedition opened, forcing him to continue on down the street.
18
SURVIVOR CENTER, THE PRESENT
“It’s time,” Clayton said, dropping his notepad to the carpeted floor before him.
His men moved in eerie rhythm, the simplest moves, like opening the Expedition’s doors, seeming synchronized. They’d been over the building’s schematics and each knew his part. Clayton never rehearsed his missions. Rehearsing got men dependent on everything being where they expected it to be. He preferred to choose the right men and let the circumstances dictate the precise order of their actions.
The simplicity of this operation defied the brutality it called for. But he had to cover his tracks and covering his tracks meant making this look like a gang strike. Something senseless and territorial instead of the carefully executed plan it actually was.
Appearances were everything, Clayton thought, as he climbed out of the Expedition with his men.
“Do you remember them hurting you?” Caitlin asked Peter, her hands squeezing the bed rails to still their trembling.
“No.”
“Do you remember talking to me yesterday? We talked about the people who hurt you somewhere far away from here.”
“Where?”
“A hot place where the sun burned your skin as soon as it touched it.”
“I don’t remember the sun.”
“It burned your face. It must have come through a window when they wanted it to and burned your face.”
“I don’t remember it burning me.”
“That’s all right.”
“I remember the cold. I remember it wouldn’t go away no matter how much I wanted it to.”
“Good, Peter.”
Caitlin had been addressing him by name more frequently, an attempt to get him to accept his own identity. Just a small thing, but success in treating disorders like Cotard’s was about stringing lots of small things together. During the grueling months spent completing a two-year master’s program in sixteen months, she had never once come across Cotard’s syndrome specifically. In principle, though, it was similar in symptom and treatment to any number of disassociative personality disorders. Caitlin had done her thesis on schizotypical behavior in war veterans, and some of them had presented with symptoms similar to Peter’s. The key, she had learned from the case studies, was to poke and prod such patients. Forcing them to confront too much at once risked making them withdraw even further from reality.
“Why’d you call me that?” Peter asked suddenly.
“It’s your name,” Caitlin managed.
“I don’t have a name. You have to be alive to have a name.”
“Were you ever alive?”
“Everyone was alive once.”
“Can we talk about what that felt like?”
“Why?”
“I thought you might want to.”
“I don’t,” Peter said, agitation beginning to flare slightly on his features.
“What about someone you remember?”
“I remember you.”
“From yesterday.”
“And the day before.”
“Go back further, to when you were cold.”
Caitlin decided to take a chance, even more glad she’d deactivated the camera in Peter’s room for this session. She reached over and touched his shoulder, thumb pressed lightly into one of his two torn rotator cuffs.
Peter flinched, jerked away from her.
“Tell me about the cold.”
“You weren’t there. The ones who were didn’t have faces.”
“They wore masks?”
“They didn’t have faces. I remember their voices.”
“What did they sound like?”
“You.”
“They were women?”
“They didn’t have faces.”
“But they sounded like me.”
“Yes.”
“They spoke English well?”
“Like you.”
“Did they have accents, like Arabs?”
“Arabs?” Peter asked with an utterly blank stare, as if that word wasn’t present in his revised vocabulary.
“Their accents.”
“No, no accents. Like you.”
“Like me.”
Peter nodded. “Americans.”
The black Expedition was still parked in front of the Survivor Center when Cort Wesley circled back up the block. He angled for the building entrance, his steps feeling slow and labored. It didn’t seem to be getting any closer as he moved, like the sidewalk had turned into a treadmill, an endless concrete ribbon with no beginning or end.
A stoplight turned green in an intersection up ahead and a small pack of cars slid forward, forcing him to turn away from the spill of their headlights. When they were past him, Cort Wesley palmed his Smith & Wesson and started across the street.
19
SURVIVOR CENTER, THE PRESENT
Clayton’s team had moved straight to the building’s main entrance. Black specters that looked like fissures in the night instead of motion through it.
The six of them with Clayton leading the way had the lock popped and door resealed in less than five seconds from leaving the Expedition. They headed down the short entry hall purposefully, approaching the charge nurse seated behind a reception desk.
“Can I help—”
Clayton fired a silenced pistol shot into her forehead before she could finish. Impact forced her and her chair backward against the now blood-splattered wall. She bounced off it and flopped forward, coming to rest facedown on her desk blotter and exposing the gaping hole in the back of her skull.
Clayton hear
d a mechanical buzzing sound, a floor polisher probably, and pointed to the right down a hallway. Two of his men slid down it, hugging the wall, stopping at an open door. Clayton heard “Hey!” before one of them let loose with a burst from his submachine gun, sound suppressor affixed to its barrel.
In his mind, Clayton checked off the charge nurse and night janitor, the only two people in the center other than the eight patients on the second floor, including their prime target. The man he’d designated previously remained down here to secure the floor, while Clayton led the others for the stairs.
“Americans,” Caitlin repeated. “Do you remember any of their names?”
Peter’s eyes pulled off her, as if trying to escape whatever the fleeting memory had conjured up.
“Peter, please, try to help me. Do you remember any of their names?”
He fixed his eyes on the blinds drawn over the window, growing more distant. Caitlin walked around to the other side of the bed, back in his line of vision.
“Names, Peter. Try to remember the names.”
“What names?” he posed fearfully, as if just awaking from another nightmare.
“Of the Americans.”
“Americans . . .”
“Where it was cold.”
Peter shivered and looked away from her again, giving Caitlin time to leave him in peace and process what she had learned.
She had assumed the obvious: that Peter’s capture by radical Islamic terrorists had been covered up by his employers, since a death had less broad ramifications than a kidnapping. But the facts, the means of his torture, had never really supported that conclusion and now she understood why.
Because it was Americans who had tortured Peter.
Cort Wesley opted against using the main entrance. The building’s rear opened into a shallow side street used only by service vehicles. He’d never been good at picking locks but a single thrust of his elbow cracked a window through its weathered wood frame. Cort Wesley cleared the shards away, unlocked the door from the inside, and eased it open.