“Because of you?”
“Because of the government. This Howard fellow is very hard line, no? Much harder than Blair was.”
Caitlin rubbed her hands together against the cold as her breath plumed white in front of her. It was hard to believe the weather was still fucked up so long after the Wave. She had indeed been instrumental in clearing Mirsaad’s passage to the EU from Kuwait, back to his wife and two children, as they were then. Even though he was married to a German national, there was no guarantee he’d have been allowed back in during the insane time after the Disappearance. And Bret had been insistent that they help him after the Jordanian had done so much to pluck him to safety from the chaos of the American retreat. But of course, mere philanthropy and favor trading would not have been enough for Caitlin to secure the Jordanian’s travel permits. Not in the toxic atmosphere of 2003. She had lobbied on Mirsaad’s behalf because she knew there was a chance that one day he might be useful as an asset.
That day was upon them.
None of this did she say aloud, of course.
“The Brits aren’t so bad,” she said, replying to his complaint about the Tory PM. “You have to remember they could have gone down the tubes like France. Looked like they would for a few weeks there.”
“But the forced deportations, Caitlin? The Enclosures? Surely these things are excessive. Certainly now, if not then. The moment of crisis has passed. There cannot be any real chance of that sort of violence breaking out again, can there? Have they not got rid of a hundred thousand of these so-called jihadis and their sympathizers? Pure ethnic cleansing if you ask me.”
“Probably more than a hundred large,” she admitted. “But I won’t argue with you about British policy. I can’t vote. I’m still a guest there. How they run their country is up to them.”
Mirsaad halted at a corner from where she could see the coffeehouse. It was gaily lit, with crowded tables clustered around charcoal burners. The clientele seemed a mixed bunch: old German and Middle Eastern, men and women, some of the latter wearing scarves and some not.
“Ah, but you are not just a guest, are you, Caitlin?” Mirsaad ventured before they got any closer. “And you are not a police officer. In my experience, in Europe at least, police officers do not flit about on their own in the dark.”
She smiled. “No, Sayad. I am not a police officer. But I am looking for the man who came after my family and your friend. And I need your help to find him. Or at least to start looking.”
“And what about my family, Caitlin? Will they be safe if I help you? I can make decisions for myself, but I cannot recklessly endanger my wife and children with a clear conscience.”
She regarded him dispassionately. He was a very intelligent man and street-smart with it. There would be no bullshitting him.
“There is some danger, Sayad. The man I’m after, he’s a bad motherfucker. But so am I.”
“I believe you are, Caitlin. But Bret loves you and trusts you as the mother of his child. For this reason, because you are a mother and not just a bad motherfucker, I will trust you, too.”
“Let’s get a coffee,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “The coffee is good here. Ahmet the Turk is away much of late, but he sends good coffee back to his relatives.”
32
Texas Administrative Division
“You can’t do this to us, mister. We ain’t done nothin’ worth a hangin’.”
Miguel paused as he made to slip the noose over the man’s head. It was the plaintive, pitiful appeal in his voice that nearly stayed the vaquero’s hand.
Then he shook his head angrily. “You are a rapist, a slave trader, a murderer, a cattle thief, a taker of land, and a destroyer of good families … I could go on, but we shall just skip to the hanging, I think, my friend.”
The road agent’s eyes frosted over like a poison lake on a hard winter’s morning as the noose went around his neck. He was not long ago a boy, with fresh acne on his cheeks and the full head of thick and springy blond hair that had been washed an hour ago for his execution. That had been his only request of them. There was none of his youth left in him, however, and precious little of the rest of his life in front of him. There could be no doubt he had walked a vicious and depraved path these last few years, and whatever innocence he might have been born with, poor choices and ill circumstances had pressed it entirely from his existence.
“Vete y chinga a tu madre,” he hissed, spitting the words in Miguel’s face.
Some of the Mormon women trilled and fluttered in disgust, but the Mexican cowboy smiled thinly and tightened the rope around the man’s unshaven neck, adjusting the knot back and forth until it sat correctly behind one ear. The young bandit’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he tried to swallow, and two bright red spots stood out on his unusually feminine cheekbones. Miguel wiped flecks of the boy’s warm saliva from his face with the back of one hand.
Sofia, standing not far away, regarded the scene and Miguel with cold, frosty detachment. No one else had seen or knew of the world-class whipping he had given her after she had saved his life. What had startled Miguel was not so much that she’d disobeyed him but that she didn’t react to the punishment at all. No tears, no pleading, nothing at all. He might as well have been whipping a couch or a particularly obdurate mule.
Miguel wasn’t sure which had frightened him more, Sofia’s lack of reaction or the fact that he’d lost control and beat her so much harder for it. And that after she had saved his life. She had, by all accounts, been murderously effective. The Mormons were not even aware she was behind them until well after most of the shooting stopped. She had killed seven men and one woman, a camp whore who had been advancing on Ben Randall from behind with a knife. The engineer had not known until he was told by young Orin, who saw the woman’s throat suddenly explode for no immediately obvious reason. Sofia was changing in ways Miguel could not fathom, changing into something he might not care for, and he seemed to be powerless to do anything about it.
This morning, for instance, she was determined to have whatever additional measure of revenge she could take from the hanging. Miguel was of two minds about that. It was an ugly thing to kill a man in cold blood, even for justice, and he would wish to spare her what she was soon to witness. On the other hand, perhaps it might bring some relief if she could see that sometimes bad men did meet a bad end. Perhaps she could have some faith that the agents who had murdered the rest of their family might one day also swing from a rope or die in a pool of their own blood. At any rate, she was here and he would not deny her in spite of her disobedience last night.
Miguel returned his attention to the task at hand.
“You must be a very brave man to be able to spit like that when you are so close to death,” he said. “Me? In your shoes I would have a very dry mouth.”
“Cocksucker,” the agent muttered.
Miguel nudged his horse away from the younger man and pulled lightly at the reins to reposition himself alongside the next road agent. There were three of them, hands tied behind their backs as they perched on their saddles beneath the spreading arms of an elm tree that sat on a small rise overlooking the town. The other two were older than the boy, one a hulking, bearded menace to humanity, forever scowling at Miguel as if through the pure intensity of his loathing he might somehow effect a change in his situation. Whereas the boy and the other surviving agent, a thin, grim-faced streak of misery and tribulation, sat on their horses with their elbows and wrists bound behind them, this black-bearded monster was chained from wrist to shoulder, so fiercely had he resisted the arrangements for his hanging.
“I am going to put the noose over your head now,” Miguel told him. “I can understand that you are thinking of resisting with whatever violence you might yet be capable of, but if you trouble me with this, I shall put your eye out with my thumb. Do you believe me?”
The man’s small, porcine eyes, almost lost within the folds of his fat face twinkled with mali
gn intent, but he looked at Miguel and saw the simple truth of the vaquero’s threat. He nodded once and bent his head forward for the rope.
The third agent was some sort of gang boss. Not the lead agent—Miguel had blown his head off in the Hy Top Club—but a senior lieutenant of sorts. The other two had deferred to him after their capture, and he had tried to negotiate a settlement with the Mormons by which they might retain their lives. Thankfully, the Mormons weren’t having any of it.
“Anything to say?” Miguel asked.
The gang boss responded with a sickly smirk.
“Texas will make my reckoning with you, Mexico. And all your family.”
He grinned darkly in the direction of Sofia, and Miguel had to restrain the urge to put a knife into his guts.
“Let us pray,” Cooper Aronson said, loudly as he opened his Bible with a bandaged hand. Big Ben, Adam, and Willem D’Age knelt in front of him, their heads bowed.
The youngest of the agents broke then. The pimpled boy cried out, “I can’t believe you’re gonna to do this to us without even a trial. You people are fuckin’ hypocrites.”
His eyes darted left and right, looking for a sympathetic face in the small group of witnesses, but mostly what he found was scorn and even now, at this late stage, fear. Miguel saw him lock eyes with Miss Gray, the girl he had stayed behind to rescue after young Adam had taken the others to freedom. She was shivering and attempting to break free of his gaze, but he held her with a sort of dreadful hypnotic power.
“You tell ’em, Sally. You tell I didn’t mean no harm. It was all just a little fun, weren’t it … I didn’t hurt you none. You even told me you liked it; you said you wanted it that way.”
The poor girl turned a bright shade of red before blanching nearly white and falling into the woman next to her, all but fainting away. Sofia scowled fiercely at the condemned man and hurried over to Miss Gray to see what assistance she might lend. Miguel suspected that if his daughter still had the Remington at hand, the one he had taken from her after last night’s violence, she would have put a round through the man’s heart.
We need to get through this, he thought.
He prodded his horse forward again and rode up next to the youngest agent.
He spoke in a low voice but with great power. “If I were you, I would be looking to make this as painless a leave-taking as possible, señor. If I were you, I would shut my mouth now, unless I wanted to die with my neck stretched and my insides hanging out over my belt, swinging in the air for the crows to pick.”
He casually drew the knife with which he had killed two men the previous evening, stropped it slowly on his jeans, and gave the road agent his stone face.
Tears were leaking from the young man’s eyes, and his lips were quivering with the effort of not crying.
“Why don’t you shut up and die like a man?” growled the bearded monster beside him.
“Why don’t you show me?” the boy spit, and lashed out with his boot, catching the other agent’s horse in the flank.
It leapt forward with a shriek. The rope securing the giant to the tree went taut, his massive legs shot forward as he jerked back, and the animal sprang away. Every branch in the massive old elm seemed to shake as his weight pulled the rope tight. Miguel grimaced at the sound of his neck snapping, and a few of the women screamed and turned away in horror. The substantial corpse twitched and kicked a few times before finding its rhythm, a long, swinging pendulum ride.
“Goddamn you, Billy,” said the gang boss before clamming up again.
Miguel shook his head sadly, although not too sadly. “Another murder to account for when you reach the other side, boy.”
“A murder?” the young man wailed. “But you were fixing to do the exact same thing to him!”
Aronson, who had stopped in shock, resumed his prayers. A baptism for the dead, he’d told Miguel it was, which seemed to have things quite ass-ended around to the cowboy, but he was not one to interfere in the worship rights of others. Only the sound of the young man’s whimpering and his urine dribbling down his pants legs into the dirt could be heard as Aronson spoke.
“Willem D’Age, having been commissioned of Jesus Christ, I baptize you, for and in behalf of this man we shall call John, who is just now dead, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, amen.”
He sprinkled water from a canteen on the heavily bandaged head of his comrade.
“What are they doing?” the boy asked, sniffling up a runny nose.
“Baptizing you,” Miguel explained. “So you might have a chance in the next life, since you are shit out of luck in this one.”
“But I been baptized. As a proper Baptist, too,” he protested. “Tell them no. I don’t want their stupid heathen god interfering with me.”
Miguel shrugged. “Let them be, boy. It is the same God. And believe me, you have bigger problems today.”
Without further preamble he smacked the lad’s horse sharply on the rear, and it whinnied in distress before bolting away.
“Hey!” the lad yelped, but whatever protest he might have wanted to make was cut short by the snapping thud of the rope. His body added its fresh rhythm to the dying swing of his comrades.
Aronson splashed more canteen water, this time on Adam’s head, and repeated the prayer. “Adam Coupland, having been commissioned of Jesus Christ, I baptize you, for and in behalf of this man, we know only as Billy, who is just now dead, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, amen.”
The last of the road agents, the boss of the crew, drew in a deep breath as Miguel rode over, but he seemed composed enough now that his time had come.
“Will you tell them your name so that they might baptize you properly?” Miguel asked of the man.
The agent seemed to ponder the matter for a few moments. He took a deep breath of cold Texas air through his nose and held it for a few seconds before slowly letting it out. Then he looked Miguel straight in the eye.
“No,” he replied, allowing his gaze to drift away from Miguel to the peaceful vista they enjoyed from the gentle rise overlooking the forested hills to the southwest. “No, I really do not think I will give you or anyone else the satisfaction.”
“Satisfaction be damned,” Miguel said, letting his anger show through. “You have your orders from Fort Hood, do you not? You have your orders, your mission, your blood money, everything from Blackstone.”
The agent smiled.
“Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe neither. You’ve got my life, puta. You can’t have my name. And you can’t have my country, neither. But rest assured, I will be sure to give your regards to the devil.”
And with that, he spurred his own horse out from beneath him and dropped into eternity.
“I would not advise staying here long,” Miguel said as they walked away from the freshly mounded graves.
“You think there will be more road agents?” D’Age asked.
“Possibly not. From what I hear, they have their own territories. But there are TDF patrols about, and if they were in contact with these men, they will soon notice that they have gone.”
The morning was cool despite the late hour. It would be time for lunch soon, but Miguel wondered whether the Mormons would have any appetite after the foul passage of the day so far. At first light they had buried the dead from the gunfight with the help of the three survivors, laying them down in soft ground near a small water hole not far from the football field. Then they had buried the other three in the same place after hanging them. Three of the camp whores had survived their wounds, and Miguel understood that an intense debate was under way within the Mormon ranks over what to do with them. The smart thing would be to silence them, too, but he had no stomach for that, and the Mormons would not hear of the suggestion. Taking them or leaving them seemed to be the only options, and both were beset with problems.
He wiped his sweating brow. A few wispy strands of white cloud stretched across otherwise hard blue skies, an
d the sounds of cattle mustering drifted over the tree line.
They had buried Peter Atchison, their horse wrangler, who had been killed by an agent’s bullet, under a chestnut tree some distance away. The tenor of the small party was subdued, and their leaders were of a mind to move both cattle and people to the far side of town for a few days’ rest before breaking trail again.
Sofia, who had been walking a few yards ahead with Adam and Orin and a fully recovered Sally Gray, dropped out of the group of youngsters and stood waiting until Miguel, Aronson, and D’Age caught up with her.
“I need a moment with my daughter,” Miguel said.
Aronson and D’Age nodded. “Of course.”
Sofia still seemed stiff, cold, constantly searching her surroundings. Miguel remembered a better time when his little princess had taken an intense interest in anything new, always curious. He placed a hand on her shoulder and guided her off to the side. She came along willingly enough, something Miguel did not take for granted these days.
“Are you all right, Sofia?” he asked in Spanish. He did not want anyone to overhear this discussion.
After clearing her initial surprise at the change in language, Sofia responded in kind. “Suppose so.”
This morning was not the first time she had seen death, of course, but it was the first time she had seen men killed in a detached and calculated fashion, if one could call the messy execution that.
“I am sorry about what I did last night,” Miguel said. “I lost control of myself.”
“I understand,” she said in a tone that lacked any warmth or emotion.
“Do you?” he asked. “Do you really understand? You are all that is left to me. You are the future to me. But also my past. Every one of us who has ever lived lives on in you. All of our family. You are everything. For that reason, in small measure, but mostly, almost entirely, because I love you more than anyone or anything in the world. How could it be otherwise? Do you understand how important it is to me that you reach safety?”
She cocked her head to the left, another new tic she had picked up. “Where is it truly safe, Papa? Can you answer me that?”
After America Page 34