Strong Enough to Die: A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  “Too late for that.”

  “This ain’t a discussion to be had right now. . . .”

  “It is for me, Captain.”

  “Let me finish. You want a simple answer and there ain’t one.”

  “Did they take money or not?”

  “Not for black tar heroin, no. The point was to keep that deadly shit out, but to do that we had to open up the way for the runners to bring the marijuana on through.”

  “ ‘We,’ D. W.?”

  “What we did back then cut a lot of ways. Sometimes to do the most good, you gotta do a little harm. Black and white had already vanished from the spectrum. Was a gray world then and it’s even grayer now.”

  “Jesus Christ . . .”

  “Did we let it go? Yes, we did. Did we ever take a dime for looking the other way? No, we did not, not a dime or a single penny, and that’s the God’s honest truth.”

  Caitlin held her eyes closed, and they were still closed when she responded. “Don’t know if I can live with that, Captain.”

  “You trust your dad and granddad, and me, you can. We did plenty worse in our service, believe you me, and some of that makes up the stories that have become full-out legends. Truth be told, we saved a lot of lives keeping that black tar shit out of the country and you’d be best advised to keep that in mind before you go passing judgment.”

  “Guess I’m no one to be judging anybody.”

  “What you did with Harmon Delladonne?”

  “As good an example as any.”

  “You did what you thought you had to, Caitlin.”

  “It feeling right doesn’t make it that way.”

  “No, but that’s as close as we can be expected to come. And we’re really up against it on this one now, Ranger. We don’t break this case soon, we don’t break it at all.”

  “Just buy me those two days. That’s all I need.”

  “Your horoscope say that or something?”

  Caitlin moved the cell phone to her other ear. “Peter’s the key to this, Captain. Once he tells us what’s really going on, we can break Harmon Delladonne, the governor and MacArthur-Rain over our knees.”

  “Something else I need to tell you. Remember your husband’s coworker ran her car off the road?”

  “Sure.”

  “I asked them to have another look at the coroner’s report. Too much head trauma and burns to tell if she suffered an aneurysm or not, but there’s strong indication she was dead before impact.” Caitlin heard Tepper suck in a deep, labored breath. “What exactly we looking at here, Ranger?”

  Caitlin thought of the pictures that would be ready any minute. “That’s what I hope to be able to tell you soon, Captain.”

  88

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  Caitlin spent the next twenty-four hours by Peter’s bedside, trying to prod his mind from its mire. At first the pictures gained her nothing but the pained stare she had come to know so well.

  But then something began to change. Whether spurred by the pictures or not, Peter began focusing on the disassembled parts of the laptop she had left behind. Caitlin watched him work on the circuit board, connecting it to the cable box, jerry-rigged into the television, while paying her no heed whatsoever.

  She’d had the best of the pictures she’d taken in Bahrain blown up to eight-by-ten, a kiosk-style machine at the drugstore spitting them out one after another. As Peter continued his dutiful work, Caitlin laid the pictures of the Bahrain apartment where the torture had taken place across the bed in places Peter could not help but see. He began to regard them slowly, even if just to uncover some of the precision tools atop which they lay. As night bled to day and then back to night, his scrutiny of the pictures began to intensify.

  His expression began to change as soon as he summoned the will to reach out and touch them, neither the empty visage Caitlin had seen upon first meeting him in the Survivor Center nor the focused intensity of the former I.T. expert reconstructing the machines in the room toward some unknown end.

  “Peter?” she said, but he didn’t regard her.

  Each time his attention returned to the pictures, his looks grew more lingering and quizzical. Each time the interludes between his scrutinies of them grew shorter.

  “Peter,” she repeated, still with no results.

  Finally his expression tightened. His breathing became more rapid, his face going through a myriad of emotions as if recovering all of them at once. His upper body spasmed once, then a second time. He began to tremble and shake horribly, his whole body trying to turn itself inside out. He gasped for breath, going red in the face. It was all Caitlin could do not to take him in her arms and comfort him, because she knew there was no comfort to be offered for what must be coursing through his mind that was fighting to free itself.

  “Uh,” he muttered, “uh.”

  Caitlin recalled Rita Navarro’s words of warning and came to feel she’d made a terrible mistake. What right did she have, with a dime-store degree and all of one patient to her credit, to play with anyone’s life? What had she been thinking?

  “Peter.”

  He started to look at her.

  “Peter!”

  He finished turning his head, met her gaze.

  “It’s me, Peter. It’s Caity.”

  Peter screamed, bit his lip, dribbled blood, screamed again. His eyelids flickered madly, as if rerecording his memories in fast-forward. Then he threw himself backward, pushing as far as the wall at the head of the bed would let him.

  Caitlin moved and his eyes followed her. They bulged, looking ready to burst from their sockets, his gaze cast over her shoulder, no doubt seeing the vanquished ghosts from Bahrain.

  “Everything’s all right,” she tried to soothe. “You’re safe. Listen to me, Peter. You’re safe.”

  His expression relaxed slightly, becoming more confused than terrified. He regarded Caitlin dispassionately, as if seeing her for the first time.

  “I won’t let anything happen to you, Peter. I promise.”

  “Who? What?”

  Caitlin reached out and took his hands. “It’s me. It’s Caity.”

  “I, I, I . . .”

  “Peter.”

  He continued to regard her, recognition flashing as he caught up to the present.

  “Where, where,” he started, lips forming the word before it emerged. “Where . . .”

  Caitlin reached out and took his hand. “I’m here. I’m with you, Peter.”

  He yanked it from her, pushed himself away. Swung his gaze about the room in terror, as if momentarily believing he was back in Bahrain.

  “You’re home, Peter. You’re in San Antonio.”

  “Where?” he asked her in a voice she at last recognized.

  “Home. Do you remember what happened to you?”

  Peter’s eyes were alive again but wild, his mind still racing to catch up with his life. “Why am I in a hospital? What happened to me?”

  “Do you remember what they did to you?”

  “What who did to me?”

  Caitlin tightened the spread of the pictures from the apartment in Bahrain so Peter could better see. He regarded them through narrowed eyes, his breathing rapidly picking up. He started to fidget, touching the photographs with a finger while making no effort to turn away from them. When he finally did, his eyes found hers, brimming with a spark of recognition.

  “Caity . . .”

  Caitlin made small talk with him for what felt like an hour, not sure really since she was afraid to look down at her watch for fear of losing him again once their stares broke. But his gaze sharpened more and more as he listened to her words. He asked for water, then food, acknowledging her presence in the room, while not necessarily her all the time. And the pain was always there, displayed in a wince or grimace, not far behind any single gesture, no matter how simple.

  More time passed, during which Peter studied the pictures closer, arranging them in chronological order atop the bedcovers as if to recons
truct the missing parts of his life. He didn’t shake this time, showed no signs of panic other than a slight rise in the level of his breathing.

  When he finally looked up and let his gaze linger on hers, Caitlin swallowed hard and pushed the next words past the lump clogging up her throat. “What happened, Peter?”

  89

  HOUSTON, EIGHTEEN MONTHS BEFORE

  The livery car with Peter Goodwin and the members of his Fire Arrow team inside took the downtown Houston exit off the Sam Houston Tollway, bypassing the airport.

  “Excuse me,” Peter said to the driver.

  “Orders, sir,” the man said to him and then lapsed into silence.

  “Wait a minute, whose orders?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “What’s going on? Can you say that?”

  The man’s response was to slide the partition back up, walling himself off from his four passengers. Minutes later, with the first of the morning light burning across the sky, he pulled the limousine into MacArthur-Rain’s underground garage. Two plainclothes security guards were waiting there to escort Peter and his team of two men and one woman up in a private elevator that took them in rapid fashion to the very top floor of the building.

  The elevator doors opened to reveal a man Peter recognized from both Fortune magazine and coverage of various congressional hearings at which the man had been summoned to testify.

  “I’m Harmon Delladonne,” he said greeting them. “I’m sure you’re aware of that. What you aren’t aware of is that you work for me. MacArthur-Rain owns your company. RevCom is one of our subsidiaries.”

  Delladonne’s office was huge and sprawling, taking up a good measure of the floor with the ceiling stretching two stories in height. Peter noticed a loft area was under construction. Wrapped artworks rested against matte-finished light walls, the scent of fresh paint still heavy in the air. He noticed a Japanese shoji screen tucked in a corner and some Oriental tapestries laid out over an elegant seating area composed of laquered furniture and rattan.

  “Would have been nice if somebody had told us,” one of Peter’s team members said.

  “There’s a reason why we didn’t, I assure you, due mostly to matters of security.” Delladonne had a monotone voice that sounded prerecorded, like the GPS machines offering turn-by-turn directions. “In the post-9/11 age, with all the work we do for the government, keeping our efforts decentralized is another word for discretion, safety too. It was all for your own good.”

  “So we’re going to Iraq for MacArthur-Rain?” Peter asked him.

  “Actually you’re not going to Iraq at all. That was just a cover. Security reasons again. But the letters you write home, or e-mails you send, or phone calls you make, will appear to come from there. More discretion.”

  “For our own good,” Peter added for him.

  Delladonne forced a thin smile. “Indeed, especially your financial good. The work you’re about to enter into on our behalf will make you all very wealthy.”

  “And what work is that?”

  “Fire Arrow, of course.”

  Peter tensed. “And what does that have to do with the government exactly?”

  “Don’t be naïve, Dr. Goodwin. Everything involves the government these days.”

  Calmer now, Peter studied Harm Delladonne, but couldn’t get a fix. He was more like a creature of animation than a real person, his features constantly shifting. Not a hair out of place and an even tan that looked sprayed on. A still photograph set to jumpy motion—that’s what he made Peter think of. He knew Delladonne’s father had been the founder of the company, but it was Harmon who had built it into the international industrial behemoth that it was today. When Eisenhower bemoaned the growing power of the military-industrial complex in his farewell speech, MacArthur-Rain had been exactly what he’d been referring to.

  “We’ve been following your work on Fire Arrow very closely,” Delladonne continued. “We want to commend you on developing technology that will help keep this country secure for decades to come. Technology we now control.” Delladonne waited for Peter’s response. When none came, he continued, “You should know that we also feel Fire Arrow has additional untapped potential. Different applications of the project that intrigue us.”

  “Which applications are those?”

  “All in good time, my friend. That’s why you and your team members are here, after all.”

  “I’m not your friend.”

  Delladonne’s eyes took on the look of marbles wedged into his sockets. “Yes, you are, Dr. Goodwin, because otherwise you’re my enemy. You see, you’re either with us or against us.”

  “MacArthur-Rain or the country?”

  Delladonne flashed his animated smile. “Same thing.”

  90

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  Caitlin sat there looking at Peter, his face pale and drawn, not sure what to make of what he said. “Did you lie to me?”

  “No, I just didn’t tell you all of the truth.”

  “About Fire Arrow.”

  “I couldn’t, Caity. I had to sign papers, nondisclosure agreements thanks to all the national security issues involved.” He gazed at his twisted, swollen fingers, as if to imagine completing such a simple task now.

  “So the integration stuff, that was just a front.”

  “No. That’s where Fire Arrow started, what must have attracted MacArthur-Rain’s attention to RevCom in the first place.”

  “You really thought you were going to Iraq?”

  “Right up until the moment Delladonne told me we weren’t.”

  “What is Fire Arrow, Peter? If you can remember, if you can tell me, it’ll help me help you.”

  “They’ve got to be stopped.”

  “They will be.”

  Peter stiffly brushed the pictures aside, worked the laptop’s keyboard toward him and fumbled for the remote for the television. “It’s what I’ve been working on here. Didn’t even realize that while I was doing it. Felt like a dream, or like someone else was doing it and I was watching. I thought I was sleeping and in the dream I didn’t exist. But I wasn’t really dead either.”

  Peter shifted the laptop around so its screen was facing her. “See.”

  The laptop screen now featured a video feed of her and Peter. At first she thought the source was simply the computer’s internal webcam; then she realized the angle was all wrong.

  “The television,” she realized, utterly dumbfounded. “It’s coming from the television.”

  “Because that’s what MacArthur-Rain wanted,” Peter told her. “To turn every television in the country into a window into every home.”

  “How?”

  “Long story. Begins in the wake of 9/11 when anything done in the name of national security was deemed acceptable, including spying on our own citizens.”

  “The Cerberus chip,” Caitlin muttered.

  Peter’s once lifeless eyes widened. “How did you know—”

  “Never mind that for now,” she said, recalling the visit she and Cort Wesley had paid to Jimmy Farro. “What else did the government do, besides give a whole new meaning to the term spyware?”

  “Televisions. Every set manufactured after 2002 was outfitted with a built-in camera.”

  “How? Where?”

  “Simple really: Standard IrDA.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Stands for Infrared Data Association. For our purposes here, that refers to the infrared receiver already in place keyed to the television’s remote control.” Peter lifted his gaze toward the wall-mounted television again. “On that set the receiver’s right there in the center, what looks like a small window. See?”

  Caitlin followed his gaze and realized it was indeed the receiver’s viewpoint currently projected on her laptop’s screen.

  “With government approval,” Peter continued, “MacArthur-Rain had CCDs, Charge Coupled Detectors, installed on every digital television manufactured from 2003 on: essentially smal
l, virtually undetectable silicon grids of photo sensitive capacitors that most of today’s digital cameras, and cell phones, use to record imaging.”

  “But televisions can’t transmit that kind of signal.”

  “No, but computers can.”

  “Fire Arrow . . .”

  Peter nodded. “That’s right. The Fire Arrow wireless integration software picks up the data stored in the CCDs in every television in the household, whether on or off. The detectors are motion sensitive, activated once sensors pick up the presence of someone in the room.”

  “Are you saying MacArthur-Rain can spy on everyone in the country at once?”

  “No. Processing that much data in real time would be virtually impossible for any server. The plan was to go after more specific targets, similar to other more mundane surveillance programs. But if you’re asking me how many—”

  “I am.”

  “—then I’d say the system could handle several million households at once, more as time went on. Look at it as super high-capacity data mining.”

  “Cerberus wasn’t the only thing the government stuffed up its sleeve after 9/11,” Jimmy Farro had told her and Cort Wesley. “I heard rumors, stories, about something even worse, something even more invasive maybe not right away, but not too far down the road.”

  “Political enemies, anyone who disagreed with the causes the government, and MacArthur-Rain, supports,” Caitlin said, rotating her gaze between her dual images and feeling a chill at the thought of potentially being processed in a nanosecond by a central server as well. She looked back at Peter suddenly. “And you gave them Fire Arrow to make it all work.”

  “I had no choice. RevCom owned Fire Arrow and MacArthur-Rain owned RevCom. No choice at all.”

  “But if you gave them what they wanted, why did they torture you?”

  “Because,” Peter told her, “they wanted something else.”

  91

  HOUSTON, EIGHTEEN MONTHS BEFORE