by Jon Land
Caitlin looked around the room, not at him. “This ever happen to you?”
“I always finish what I start.”
“Present tense, Smith.”
“There’s a reason why I’m posted in this part of the world, Ranger. And I believe in my country.”
Caitlin finally turned his way. “So did my husband.”
She backed out of the room first, moved to the second bedroom and reached out for the knob of the closed door. Her brain gave the command to turn it, but her hand wouldn’t comply, as if she’d still find Peter on the floor, cowering in fear and pain, stinking in the indignity of his own body waste. She closed her eyes and that gave her the will she needed to complete the effort. She pushed the door inward, feeling its heaviness matching that of the one at the apartment entrance.
“I’m sorry,” Caitlin told him.
Peter tried not to show how disappointed he was. “Hey, in vitro almost never works the first time. Odds again. We’ll just try again.”
“I’m worried it’ll never work.”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause maybe I’m not supposed to have kids. Maybe there aren’t supposed to be any more Strongs.”
“No more Strongs becoming Texas Rangers, you mean.”
“Would that bother you?”
“Not so long as it’s his choice and not yours.”
“Could be a ‘her,’ you know.”
Peter kissed her lightly. Caitlin ran a hand through his sandy brown hair. It was thinning on top but he wore it long to disguise that fact. He still had big doe eyes the world hadn’t shrunk yet and a grin that usually made her smile too in spite of herself.
“Not a chance,” Peter said.
. . .
The room was beyond night black, it was pitch. Windows seemed to be nonexistent, which she knew was impossible, given Peter’s sunburned skin, which meant heavy wood or even steel shutters had been installed, to be opened and closed based on the whims of evil men.
Caitlin felt the chill in her receding, overcome by the hot flash of anger that spread downward from her face. Instead of freezing, she was suddenly sweating profusely enough to smell the salt rising out of her body. Her mouth was so dry she could barely swallow. Her hand felt for the switch, flipped it on.
What barely passed as light shed dim radiance that struggled to descend from the ceiling. Either the fixture had been covered with some kind of colored tape or fabric, or an extremely low-wattage bulb had been installed. Another trick of Peter’s torturers, she guessed, regulating the light to confuse day and night until they became indistinguishable from each other. Time lost along with the dignity of life itself.
Caitlin felt herself seething, picturing it all in her mind as her eyes adjusted well enough to the dark blur. It wasn’t a medieval torture chamber, full of terrible devices atop a blood-splattered floor. Quite the opposite. As far as she could tell, the sum total of the entire room was a single bare mattress set atop a steel cot built into the wall. There were chains and manacles affixed to the cot’s iron posts, along with a simple steel table and two folding chairs coated with rust. Beyond that, nothing. Benign interrogation, as Smith had called it.
What she saw, though, was still enough to bring the chill back, battling the heat flush that continued to surge through her.
“You shouldn’t feel guilty,” Peter said, hugging her tight.
Caitlin tightened her arms around him. “I really wanted this. I wanted it so much. Not at first maybe, but for sure now.”
“There’s other things we can do, try.”
“Waste of time, money.”
He eased her away from him. “I was talking about adoption.”
“No.”
“We’ll talk about it later.”
“My answer’ll be the same.”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause every time I look at him, I’ll think about my own failing.”
“How about a her?” Peter said, hoping for a smile.
The sad blankness remained fixed on her expression. “I can’t do it, I just can’t.”
He got up off the couch, started away.
“Where you going?”
“You tell me, Caity. Where am I going? Where are we going?”
“We’ll figure it out, Peter.”
“I hope so, because I can’t do this anymore. You wanna know the real reason I want a kid so bad?” he asked, staring at her harshly for the first time she could remember. “Because I’m tired of raising the one I married.” He turned away and started to walk off. “I can’t do this anymore.” He stopped and looked back at her. “An opportunity’s come up, something that’ll take me away for a long while. Tell me not to take it, Caity. Tell me not to take it and I won’t.”
Caitlin didn’t meet his gaze, didn’t respond. She heard the front door open and close again.
“This is definitely the place,” Smith said from the doorway.
“Why didn’t they kill him?” Caitlin heard herself ask him.
“They weren’t here. Pulled out would be my guess, leaving only the local babysitters, who didn’t know shit, behind. When they didn’t come back, the babysitters abandonded the place. Probably figured they were leaving your husband to die.”
“Was this military?”
“Not at all. Military doesn’t use babysitters.”
“I meant private military.”
“You want to pin this on somebody like MacArthur-Rain, don’t expect any help from me.”
“Why?”
“Because a few years from now I’ll probably be working for them.”
Caitlin took out her disposable camera and started taking pictures of the room with the heavy wood shutters open and the dark fabric peeled off the light fixture. Her mind framed each shot in the moment before the flash ignited and then held it in her mind like a memory card.
The chains looped round the steel bedposts, hanging off the side of the bed. . . .
More chains affixed to the bed’s legs coiled like steel snakes across the scuffed floor. . . .
The bare white walls that were chilling in their cold starkness. . . .
The grated windows that accounted for Peter’s checkerboard sunburn. . . .
The heavy shutters that could turn day to night. . . .
The flat table behind which Peter had likely sat across from his interrogators. . . .
A simple black hood used to cover his face to further disorient him lying beneath that table. . . .
What looked like a metal washbasin they had likely filled with frigid water and held his face in propped up in a corner. . . .
The camera in her hand took on the feeling of a pistol, Caitlin imagining she was firing bullets instead of snapping pictures, wiping out the men who had perpetrated this horror.
Caitlin backed up into the doorway, trying to get a few shots capturing the full but meager scope of the room. Smith approached her a few times, only to stop as if repelled by the electricity dancing off her skin.
What had they wanted from Peter? What secrets of Fire Arrow had they tried to pull from his decaying mind?
In spite of herself, Caitlin pictured the whole ugly process, the vision curtailed every time she tried to project the questioning process. Her imagination could only go so far, certainly not to the level of what all this had been about.
Not yet anyway.
The camera’s shutter button locked, the roll empty. Smith chose that moment to finally address her.
“We should get going. Before anyone notices.”
“Nobody noticed Peter.”
“You need help booking a flight out?”
Caitlin turned toward him, camera held at her side like a pistol. “Trying to get rid of me, Smith?”
“You make me feel uncomfortable.”
“Because you’ve been on the wrong sides of rooms like this?”
“Just never had to deal with the fallout before. And the people I visited in rooms like this weren’t American-born computer g
eeks; they were foreign terrorists.” Smith hesitated. “This would be a good time to get things straight in your own head.”
“Meaning?”
“You want your husband back, Ranger?”
“None of your goddamn business.”
He ignored her response. “Because that man’s gone and he’s not coming back. So if you’re thinking about picking up your lives where they left off, or even starting over, you can forget about it.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“I’m just getting started. I know something about guilt, Ranger, and you think that’s going to be enough to hold the two of you together, think again. You’re no more the same person than your husband is. You want some real advice: move on, for both your sakes.”
Caitlin found herself thinking of Cort Wesley describing himself as a much different man coming out of prison than he’d been when he went in. But the mere consideration of him brought the guilt back and left her desperate to move her thoughts somewhere else.
“You’re a walking cliché, Smith,” she said, more to change the subject than anything else. “Anybody ever tell you that?”
“I only used to be. Used to be an anachronism too. Then 9/11 happens and all of a sudden my phone’s ringing off the hook. Old school’s made a comeback because it’s the only way we can win.”
“The scary thing about people like you, Smith, is that you honestly believe your own bullshit.”
“And in my country, like I said before.”
“Sometimes,” Caitlin told him, “it’s the same thing.”
80
SALTILLO, MEXICO, THE PRESENT
The final stop on Cort Wesley’s list was an address in Saltillo. It made sense, he figured, the city being one of the few true highlights of the Mexican economy, with residents enjoying the highest income per capita in the country.
Saltillo’s economic base was built on the construction of tile and manufacture of multicolored serapes for export. More recently a Daimler-Chrysler truck assembly plant had moved in, along with General Motors and Delphi Auto Parts. The rich and broad-based factories that dominated the city of more than a half million people would make the perfect setting for a state-of-the-art chip assembly plant. The labor was relatively skilled and plentiful, and warehouse-style spaces could be found in abundance. Add to this the fact that the city was shielded on one side by the Zapalinamé Mountains and offered swift flight through the Chihuahuan Desert on another.
The problem was the address he pulled up to was no more than a shuttered storefront in plain view of El Complejo Industrial Ramos Arizpe, the sprawling industrial complex that housed the massive General Motors plant. Cort Wesley parked his car farther up the street, so as not to disturb a group of boys kicking a soccer ball about. He approached the building and rapped on the door to no avail. The collection of dust blown in from the desert, built up on the windows inside and out, was enough to tell him the storefront had been abandoned for some time.
He noticed that the boys about Luke’s age who’d been kicking the soccer ball had stopped, gathering to watch him. Cort Wesley wondered why they weren’t in school, a new manner of thinking given the way the last week had unfolded.
“Buenos días,” he said, moving lightly toward the boys.
“Buenos días,” a few of them returned, suspicious of the big stranger whose Spanish betrayed his American roots.
“Anybody know anything about that building across the street?” he continued.
The boys exchanged silence and shrugs until Cort Wesley produced some dollar bills from his pocket and spread them about.
“Does anybody know anything now?”
“No.” The oldest-looking boy grinned, stuffing the bill in his pocket.
“I know a little,” another boy said.
The older boy punched him in the shoulder.
“What?” the younger boy snapped, emboldened. “I can tell him if I want.” Then, to Cort Wesley, “For this many more.” And he held up five fingers.
Cort Wesley flashed a five-dollar bill and handed it to him. The boy wedged it deep in his pocket, beaming with satisfaction.
“Sometimes men come out of that building, men who never went in.”
“It’s haunted!” an even younger boy chimed in.
The oldest boy bounced a soccer ball off his head. Once, twice . . . the third time, Cort Wesley caught the ball and held it against him.
“Casa del Diablo,” the boy he’d paid said. “That’s where they come from.”
“House of the Devil,” Cort Wesley said in English.
“It’s not a house, it’s a town,” the oldest boy said, eyeing the soccer ball in Cort Wesley’s grasp.
“It’s not a town, it’s a place like hell.”
“You’re stupid,” the oldest boy said, twirling a finger at his temple. “Loco.”
“It’s real, I don’t care what you say. It’s where the men come from. Once someone went inside to see and they never came out.”
Cort Wesley cocked his gaze toward the storefront, flipped the soccer ball back to the oldest boy, then started across the street.
“Where you going?” the boy who’d pocketed his five asked him.
“Inside.”
81
BAHRAIN, THE PRESENT
Caitlin stood on the sidewalk, imagining Peter’s trek from Umm Al Hassam all the way to the Bab Al Bahrain. He had been found by the authorities right around this time. Nine months ago that would have put the sun directly to the northeast in the souq’s direction.
Peter had walked toward the sun. It made perfect sense. How he managed such a distance in his weakened condition was all that escaped her. A response to shock probably.
Caitlin’s next and final stop was the British Embassy where officials proved gracious enough to let her use her second disposable camera to snap pictures of the room where Peter stayed while his unprecedented situation was being sorted out. The small room had been unoccupied since then and, even though it had clearly been cleaned, Caitlin thought she detected the same stale smell that had wafted off Peter in both the Survivor Center and, later, the hospital. As if the pain of his suffering had been indelibly burned into his being to become part of whatever fabric he touched.
Click, click, click . . .
The process here proved easier than back at the apartment, hope captured in the view window instead of pain. Smith and a British Embassy official hung back through the process, giving Caitlin her space. She tried to imagine how she might introduce all the pictures to Peter, how he might react to them, based on the cautionary words spoken by Rita Navarro.
“Can I give you some advice?” Smith asked her before they climbed back into his car.
“Coming from an expert in these matters, go right ahead.”
“You need to forget what you’ve seen.”
“A little late for that, I expect.”
Smith looked at her grimly. “Then turn back the clock. When all this is over, get hypnotized, get drunk—whatever it takes.”
“That your secret?”
“You live with it long enough, you get calluses where you need them. You don’t have those, Ranger. You may think you do, but you don’t.”
“I appreciate you looking out for me, Smith.”
“It’s not just you, it’s the men you’ll wanna make pay for what they’ve done, what you’ve seen. That kind of thing pulls you in and doesn’t let you out. And that’s a place you absolutely don’t want to be.”
“Already been there,” Caitlin told him, “and know the territory.”
82
SALTILLO, MEXICO, THE PRESENT
The kids watched Cort Wesley use a stray brick to hammer the lock free of the hasp bolted into the door frame. Opening a secondary lock was as simple as smashing the glass portion of the door and reaching a hand through the jagged shards.
The city of Saltillo was built over a network of natural limestone tunnels, accessible beneath the Cathedral de Santiago and running al
l the way to the city’s limits. The appearance of men exiting the store without entering could only mean that someone in the vast Mexican underworld, perhaps even Garza himself, had forged an access route to those tunnels beneath this storefront in order to negotiate the city freely, unencumbered by law enforcement. Or perhaps that access had been there all along, and the storefront had been chosen for that express purpose.
Either way, the link between Mexico’s thriving criminal enterprise and the clandestine manufacture of computer chips might well be serviced by a dummy address from which the air exchangers could be routed anywhere without leaving a paper trail. Routed to a place called Casa del Diablo.
The House of the Devil.
Once inside the store, Cort Wesley used a stray board to tap the chipped tile floor in search of the tunnel entrance. When his search yielded nothing, he turned to the walls, finding not a hatch but a doorway opening onto a wooden ladder leading downward. Cort Wesley pictured Garza’s drug dealers and enforcers claiming the tunnels as their own private traverse beneath Saltillo proper. Free access to Mexico’s richest city—a criminal mastermind’s dream.
Few without intimate knowledge of the United States’ urban underbelly and prison system had little notion of how powerful the Mexican Mafia had become. Once little more than a disjointed series of street gangs, the group was now organized into a formidable and dangerous force in every major city across the country. Someone had linked the previously disparate gangs into a deadly unit dedicated to drug dealing and murder. Cort Wesley had witnessed the Mexican Mafia’s work firsthand during his days with the Branca crime family in south Texas. But he had always passed Garza himself off as nothing more than a myth.
Until now.
There was too much coming together here to suggest anything but a single centralized figure behind it all. Drugs and murder was one thing, after all; manufacturing high-tech computer chips, like the one Jimmy Farro called Cerberus, something else again.