by Jon Land
Peter Goodwin sat fidgeting in the chair before Harmon Delladonne’s ebony wood desk. In the few days since he’d been here, construction on Delladonne’s loft area had been completed. The musty smell of lubricant from the newly erected spiral stairwell stretching up from floor level filled the sprawling room.
“Your specifications for the Fire Arrow chip have been approved,” Delladonne told him. “Once we have the final schematics in place, we’ll be ready to move on to the manufacturing stage.”
“Then my team members and I can go home. From Iraq, I mean,” Peter added.
Delladonne looked at him. “Not quite yet. I appreciate your patriotism, Dr. Goodwin.”
“Giving you the ability to spy on virtually every American doesn’t make me a patriot.”
“It does if it makes this country easier to defend from enemies committed to destroying us.” Delladonne rose and walked out from behind his desk, taking the chair next to Peter’s. “It’s about avoiding another 9/11, Dr. Goodwin, potentially one that’s far worse. I want you to picture those hijackers staying at hotels the night before. Hotels with Wi-Fi, hotels with computer access via the television in every room. If Fire Arrow was active then, we would’ve known, wouldn’t we? Our software would have flagged those sons of bitches and 9/11 could’ve been prevented. Yes?”
“That’s the point,” Peter acknowledged.
“And what if those terrorists could have been eradicated on the spot as well?”
“I’m not following you.”
“Eradicated—killed.”
“I know what the word means, Mr. Delladonne. It’s the context that confuses me.”
Delladonne held up a small cylindrical object with dual, uneven prongs extending out from one side. “You know what this is, of course.”
“Simple capacitor.”
Delladonne flashed that same smile again. “Capacitor, yes. Simple, no.”
“And what does this have to do with me?”
“We need you to tell us how to make it work.”
92
SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT
“Work how?” Caitlin asked him.
Peter ran his hands over his face. “My head hurts, Caity, I hurt everywhere. I can’t talk about this anymore.”
“Please.”
“Not now.”
“You’ve got to, Peter, before it slips away.”
“My head . . . I can’t.”
“Delladonne killed your three coworkers. They all died of brain aneurysms, but he killed them somehow, didn’t he?”
Peter was trembling, hands still covering his face.
“It . . . hurts.”
“I know.”
“I can’t.”
“Please try. For your friends Delladonne killed. For what he did to you.”
Peter’s expression had gone utterly blank, looking more through Caitlin now than at her. “I refused. Told him I wouldn’t do it.”
“What did Delladonne do then?”
Peter’s expression flashed back to life, eyes widening in fear again. “He made me watch.”
“It’s one-way glass,” Delladonne explained, holding the capacitor in his hand, “your friend doesn’t know we’re watching him.”
Peter looked at Darnell Stimson, one of the three members of his team, working quietly behind a PC, alone in the room.
“He can’t see or hear us,” Delladonne continued, passing a silent signal to a technician on the other side of the room in which he and Peter were standing. “I’d like to show you something.”
Seconds later, Stimson’s hands and arms began quaking. A spasm rocked his body, his legs shooting up and out, kicking the worktable as he tumbled over backward. He hit the floor writhing horribly and then stilled, eyes locked open and sightless as a thin trail of blood seeped from his right ear.
Peter began banging on the glass, yelling Stimson’s name futilely before swinging back toward Delladonne. “What’d you do to him? What the hell did you do?”
“What do you think I did?”
Peter noticed smoke was rising from the computer’s housing. He imagined he could smell the stench of burnt metal and wires. “Shocked him. Electrocution.”
“Try again, Dr. Goodwin.”
Peter gazed at the capacitor Delladonne was still holding. “Some sort of wave or pulse traveling through the computer.”
“That’s better.”
“Oh my God,” Peter said, realizing what Delladonne meant. “A laser, fired through the computer’s internal webcam.”
“A pulse laser specifically, what we like to call a directed-energy weapon,” Delladonne explained. “Enough energy stored in the capacitor to fire it once and once only. Superheats the brain enough to cause an aneurysm. Almost the perfect crime, but not quite. That’s where you come in.”
Peter was looking through the glass again at Stimson’s body. “I’m not a murderer.”
“I invented the technology myself while at college,” Delladonne said, ignoring him. “Had the help of the entire computer-science department—they just didn’t know it. I tried to get my father to buy into the concept but he wouldn’t listen. So I demonstrated it to him—firsthand.”
Peter couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“That’s how this company became mine, Dr. Goodwin, allowed it to be shaped in accordance with my vision. My father may never have told me where the name MacArthur-Rain came from, but he told me the future was ours and he was right.”
Peter looked back at Darnell Stimson through the glass. “I’m going to have you arrested.”
“You haven’t even asked me what the problem is, what I need you for.”
“And I don’t intend to.”
“The problem is the high-power consumption of the pulse superheats the capacitor, burning it out, and fries the circuit board in the process. Leaves the kind of trail that would betray our intentions and capabilities, and we simply can’t have that. I was able to replace my father’s computer so no one was any the wiser, but clearly a more practical solution is warranted. My people here tell me it’s a matter of regulating and containing the energy flow so only the minimum amount of energy required is utilized. And they also tell me that makes it a software problem. We’ve been at it for years now without any progress. Now that you’re here, that’s going to change.”
“Fire Arrow,” Caitlin muttered when Peter finished, struck by the irony. “But why you?”
“The Fire Arrow software technology was all about regulating signal flow for integration purposes. Use the least energy possible to avoid overloading a system’s storage capacity so nothing would freeze up. Delladonne’s problem with his pulse weapon was overload but the principle was the same. He wanted me to moderate the flow of energy into the capacitor, make his weapon work without shorting out the entire circuit board. No burnt wires or fried capacitor left behind as evidence. Just a person suffering an aneurysm. It might take the victim longer to die, days even, eliminating any possible connection whatsoever. Even the computer would still work.”
“So MacArthur-Rain wasn’t just out to spy . . .”
“No, no, not at all.”
“. . . they wanted the ability to kill anyone they were spying on.”
“Anyone meaning everyone. Ultimately. Inevitably. The capacitors rigged to work in conjunction with the new Fire Arrow chip in perfect harmony.”
“But their victims would have to be online.”
“At first.”
“At first?”
“Integration, remember? Everything in the house running off the computer, including televisions that already have cameras inserted in their infrared remote receivers. You think it would be hard to build the capacitors into them too?” Peter was speaking rapidly now, ahead of his thoughts, his agitation increasing. “Not now, not yet. But a few years down the road—that’s what Delladonne was looking toward. Securing the future, he kept saying, securing the future. Fire Arrow made it all possible. Fire Arrow.”
C
aitlin hesitated. “Could you have done it?”
“I don’t know. I think so. The principles weren’t all that difficult. But I never tried. Pretended I was cooperating. Then I crashed their system, whole damn mainframe along with every speck of work they’d done up until that point. Took them days to reboot and rebuild the program.”
“Imagine that pissed off Delladonne some.”
“He tested the system on another of my coworkers when the system was back up. Waverly, the woman.”
“She was killed in a car crash according to the police report.”
“Bates was the last, when I still wouldn’t cooperate.” Peter began sorting through the photos now strewn over the bed. “I can’t remember any of this, not consciously anyway, not yet.”
“Maybe it’s better.”
“Feels like it all happened to somebody else, somebody who’s dead.”
“Definitely better.”
“I need to know, need to see it all, be able to put it together.”
“Give it time.”
“There’s a lot still missing. I remember you being a Ranger, but not what kind of car you drive. I remember what our condominium looks like inside, but not the outside of the building. I remember things, but can’t tell if it’s me in the memories or somebody else.”
“We’ll get through this, Peter. That’s a promise.”
“You don’t sound like you mean it.”
“Want to hear me say it again?”
“It’s not that. Something’s . . . different. You’ve changed.”
Caitlin thought of Cort Wesley. Her eyes met Peter’s and in that instant she felt certain he knew what had happened in the back of her SUV. “We’ve both changed,” she said lamely. “Thanks to Harm Delladonne. It’s time to make him pay for that.”
He shook his head slowly. “You don’t know them, Caity. You don’t know these people.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“They don’t lose. They can’t lose. They own the world, Caity. That’s what you’re up against.” He managed to finish his deep breath. “I’m sorry I lied to you.”
“I understand.”
“I want you to understand I was doing it for us. I thought if I could make that kind of money . . . but our problems were never about money, were they? I remember that much too.”
“They weren’t our problems, they were my problems.”
Peter’s gaze drifted to her shirt. “You’re wearing a badge, Caity.”
“I’m back with the Rangers.”
Peter flirted with a smile, looking as if he had almost forgotten how. “That’s good, right?”
“Definitely.”
“It feels like yesterday we talked about that, right before I left—for Iraq, I thought. Remember?”
“I do.”
“How long ago was that?”
“A while.”
“How long, Caity?”
“Eighteen months.”
Peter’s lips trembled. His eyes emptied, blinking rapidly, then he returned his gaze to the pictures from Bahrain.
“It’s like there’s a wall I can’t get through, a wall with no door,” he said, touching the pictures again as if that might make a difference.
Caitlin heard a knock, the door opening before she had a chance to acknowledge it to reveal Captain D. W. Tepper standing there, face puckered into a grim, wrinkled mask.
“We gotta go, Ranger.”
“What happened?”
“Get a move on. Tell ya on the way.”
Caitlin’s legs felt like steel-weighted posts as she started toward the door. “Bad?”
“As it gets,” Tepper told her.
93
HOUSTON, THE PRESENT
“It’s done,” Emiliato Valdez Garza told Harm Delladonne.
“Your efforts are appreciated,” Delladonne replied.
“Appreciated? Is that really the best you can do, me bailing your gringo ass out of this and all?”
“I believe the continuance of our relationship is in the best interests of both of us.”
“Best interests. I guess you can call them that. Right now that means getting my hands on this genius of yours.”
“We went at him with everything we had.”
“That’s a vacation compared to what I’m going to do. You should have called me in the first place, kept things in the family. Could have avoided all these complications.”
“It will all be worth it in the end,” Delladonne told him.
“You’re right. Know why?”
“I’ve got a feeling my answer won’t be the same as yours.”
“On account of us having different priorities, you mean, eh? Truth is the contrabando I move for you is no different than drugs or people to me. Just another form of merchandise. You trying so hard to make your country strong, you don’t realize you’re helping me do the same with mine.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Garza.”
“Then let me enlighten you, Mr. Del-la-donne. I’m shit to you, just like Mexico is shit to America. But all this money you’re paying me is helping to build a Mexican Mafia army in every city your country’s got. You spend all your efforts keeping America safe from her enemies outside, you don’t realize what my people can do from the in.”
“You telling me all this—what am I to make of that?”
“That it doesn’t matter you know, because you can’t stop it. The Mexico of my ancestors is coming back, Mr. Del-la-donne, and you’re helping to make it happen. So, muchos gracias.”
“No más disparates.”
“You think this is nonsense, eh?”
“I think you’re crazy.”
“Crazy enough to work with you.”
“We’re both businessmen, Señor Garza.”
“And you don’t give a shit how I do my business, so long as I can clean up your mess for you. Don’t realize I could be making a bigger one in the process.”
“Are you threatening my country, Mr. Garza?”
“Just saying it’s something you’re gonna have to live with.”
“I’ve lived with worse.”
Garza almost laughed. “You really don’t know who you’re dealing with here, do you?”
“No,” Delladonne told him. “Do you?”
94
ALAMO HEIGHTS, THE PRESENT
The entire street had been blocked off by the time the car with D. W. Tepper, Caitlin and Cort Wesley pulled up. Tepper’s badge thankfully still got them passed through the barricade and they drove through to join the armada of rescue, local police, highway patrol, Ranger and unmarked vehicles that had turned the road into a parking lot.
“I still don’t damn well know how this happened,” Tepper said. “Kept this whole thing off the books. Didn’t even use the walkies, just cells.”
“But the house,” said Caitlin, “it was listed as confiscated by the Rangers.”
“At one point, sure.”
“There you go,” sneered Cort Wesley, still gnashing his teeth.
He leaped out of the SUV before Tepper got it all the way to a stop, Caitlin not far behind with the captain himself lumbering after them. They got as far as the local San Antonio cops who’d strung crime-scene tape haphazardly across the last of the curving front walk, affixed to a pair of tall orange cones.
“That’s as far as you go,” one of the locals said, sticking out his chest.
“Maybe you missed my badge,” Caitlin told him.
“No Rangers allowed. Them’s the orders.”
“Two of our men are the ones who got shot in there.”
“Hey, they’re not my orders, ma’am. Talk to the highway patrol. This is their case now, on orders of the governor through the Department of Public Safety.”
“It’s Ranger,” said Caitlin. “And you can kiss my ass.”
She gave Cort Wesley a tug on his shirt to make him back off with her. His arm felt like banded steel. She got a shock from just touching him.
&
nbsp; “Anything more about the boys?” he said to the cop, trembling from the effort of restraining himself.
“Who’s asking?”
“Their father,” Caitlin answered, “and I’d strongly recommend that you answer.”
“Nothing. Whoever shot up the place must’ve taken them along,” the cop replied matter-of-factly.
Shot up was an understatement, Caitlin thought. She counted eight bodies still lying atop the lawn and sidewalk, awaiting the arrival of a crime-scene unit. The front of the mansion itself looked like a war zone. Chips and divots marred the red-brick exterior and there wasn’t a single window left whole. The door was the worst, the scariest of all, because it was gone. Missing altogether, along with most of the frame and vertical windows on either side. Caitlin imagined the two Rangers inside holding the fort against an onslaught of a dozen or more gunmen. Ultimately, based on the missing door and the tire tracks dug into the lawn, the attackers had driven a car or truck straight into the door and rammed it. Even then the shards of windshield glass littering the walk and nearby lawn showed the Rangers inside hadn’t gone without a fight.
“Okay,” Captain Tepper told Caitlin and Cort Wesley after they’d retreated to the shade of an elm tree, “this is what we got. Witnesses report either six or seven vehicles, none with license plates, tearing down the street to the house. Four or five bangers jump out of each and start shooting. One of the witnesses, a Vietnam vet, said it reminded him of the Tet Offensive. Rangers took four, five bullets each but not before taking down at least eight of them and wounding a half dozen more.”
“Mexican Mafia?” Caitlin asked him.
“By the look of things, yeah.”
“Garza,” muttered Cort Wesley.
Tepper snorted and coughed up some mucus. “No sign of your boys anywhere we can see. But those Rangers would’ve kept them safe right up to the last.”
Cort Wesley turned back toward the yellow crime-scene tape strung before the entrance, shoulders straightening as if he were ready to tear right through it. “I wanna see inside,” he said, starting forward.