by Jon Land
Caitlin heard a quick clacking noise after which her screen flash CALL ENDED and provided the length.
“Well?” Tepper prodded.
“He’s lying,” she said, the pounding between her ears even worse now.
Tepper gnashed his teeth and blew out enough breath to rustle the daisies that sat in a table vase between them. “I once shot a pitbull got loose from a dog-fighting pen and bit into a boy’s arm clean to the bone. Damn thing’s jaws stayed fastened tight even after I put five slugs into him and he was deader than Elvis. Ended up prying the dog’s jaws open with the jack from my truck.” He stopped and rested his elbows on the table. “Question being, do I need to go outside and fetch that jack now to pry you off this?”
“Serles said no one knows what he’s facing better than Colonel Gilroy, all things considered.”
“I heard him. So?”
“I take that to mean Colonel Gilroy’s an amputee too. Except the ‘Colonel Gilroy’ I talked to last night had all his parts. I’m guessing he was some Washington drone wanted to make sure my investigation wouldn’t go any further.”
Tepper rubbed his nose with the nicotine-stained fingers of his right hand. “So you figure this Gilroy, or whoever he was, was the one who set up the ambush?”
“Doesn’t matter whether he was or not specifically. What matters is why. Mark Serles was telling the truth before. We find out why somebody tried to kill him in Iraq and we’ll have our answer.”
“And I’m guessing you got an idea where to find it.”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
45
CONCEPCIÓN DEL ORO; THE PRESENT
Cort Wesley drove Caitlin’s SUV with Paz’s legs balled up in the passenger’s seat, even though he’d pushed the seat all the way back. The steering wheel felt moist under his grasp, and he couldn’t find a comfortable temperature level no matter how much he played with the controls. Either too hot or too cold, nothing in the middle. Outside, the open vistas of the Mexican wilderness, baking beneath the sun burning in a cloudless sky, only added to his tension. Nothing to see, nothing that looked any different from the last hour or the hour before that. As if the scenery was moving and the SUV standing still. That’s what it felt like to him.
“Where we headed again, Colonel?”
“North.”
“You said that before.”
“It’s still the case.” Paz was consulting a handheld GPS device with a digital readout and rigid casing Cort Wesley recognized as pure military ordnance. “For another hundred miles or so.”
“It’s been two hundred already.”
Cort Wesley continued up the two-lane road, passing the endless collection of trucks grinding their way through the sun and heat whenever opportunity allowed. They sped through small towns and villages that sprouted atop narrow patches of flora stitched into the desert or in the shadow of numerous mountain ranges that were an outgrowth of the Sierra Madre or Chowchilla ranges. Except for the trucks and an occasional pedestrian, the only evidence of life was scrub or dirt brush blowing across the rocky, gravel-strewn desert floor that looked white under the unbroken sun that owned the sky. They might have been on the road to hell, for all Cort Wesley knew, the world gone hazy and fried beyond the tunnel provided by the pavement.
“Nice piece of equipment you got there,” Cort Wesley said finally, eyeing the GPS gadget now resting on Paz’s huge lap. “Not something you can pick up at Radio Shack or Best Buy, is it?”
“Walmart,” Paz said simply, before turning to look at him. “You want to know more about the army I’m building?”
“Long drives tend to make me curious.”
Paz nodded in concession. “What you need to know is this: three of my soldiers found a pair of men in the town of Concepción del Oro who had your son yesterday.”
“But they don’t have him now.”
“We’ll be there soon,” Paz said, turning back to the sunbaked world that seemed to sway beyond the SUV’s windshield.
With that he jogged the GPS device to a touch screen complete with digital keyboard and tapped in a message. Cort Wesley glanced over, trying to read it, wondering if he was riding into some sort of trap himself and then realizing he didn’t trust a single goddamn person in the world besides Caitlin Strong.
* * *
“My men found them here,” Paz said, as they snailed along Concepción del Oro’s main street, formed simply by a number of small markets and meat shops, stores that sold sundries, and others that seemed to cater to the occasional tourist passing through.
That single thoroughfare was built at the base of a hill on which the majority of the residents lived in white adobe-style homes that were uniformly small and single story with roofs the color of red clay. A trio of nearly identical cantinas battled for the business of the town’s twelve thousand residents, half of whom lived in the surrounding rural communities. Farmers mostly who trucked their crops to the open-air Zacatecas markets in Mazapil and El Salvador. A collection of plastic and wooden chairs sat empty before each of the cantinas, the patrons chased into the darker cool of the buildings by the oppressive sun. Once the sun sank behind the hillside and nearby mountains, the temperature would drop by twenty, maybe thirty degrees this time of year. For now, though, the street was deserted, as if Paz’s and Cort Wesley’s very presence had chased everyone inside.
“Which one?” Cort Wesley asked Paz as they slid by the second cantina and approached the third. He was squeezing the wheel so tight the muscles of his forearms pulsed and throbbed.
“As a boy, I watched the priest who taught me how to read and write gunned down by street thugs because he wouldn’t pay them off,” Paz said, instead of responding. “It was the only time in my life I felt weak and helpless.”
“Which bar, Colonel?”
“My soldiers took the two men into the desert where they say they last saw your son,” Paz told him. “So you will not have to feel weak and helpless today.”
Cort Wesley felt his flesh begin to prick. “They say anything else?”
“I’ll let you ask them yourself.”
46
SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT
“Thanks for returning my call so quickly, Mr. Smith,” Caitlin said to the man on the other end of the line, speaking into the hidden microphone on her replacement rental car’s Bluetooth device.
“It’s Jones here in Washington, remember? And when I see a Texas number on the Caller ID, I start to hyperventilate. Had to catch my breath before I rang you back.”
“Glad you decided to anyway.”
“Hope I can say the same when we’re done.”
Caitlin pictured Jones in some innocuous Washington office holding the telephone in a hand more comfortable squeezing a gun or a knife. He went by “Smith” the first time they’d met in Bahrain when he was stationed at the consulate there, then became “Jones” when he returned stateside last year just before they’d met up again in Washington. Jones was a fountain of information that gushed mostly when it suited his needs. But he’d helped Caitlin out twice now when he didn’t have to, the two of them both lone wolves while roaming diametrically different territories.
“Need to pick your brain, Mr. Jones,” she told him.
“Don’t you always? Tell me, Ranger, you kill anyone lately, some badass bikers up in Canada maybe?”
“I see you been keeping tabs on me.”
“DEA called to inquire about your credentials. I warned them to shred your file and make believe you don’t exist.”
“Guess they didn’t listen.”
“I told them if they brought you in, the lead would be flying. Said you just couldn’t help yourself and you weren’t one to discriminate either; you just kill everyone in your sights.”
“Haven’t killed you yet, have I?”
“I’ve learned to stay out of your kill zone. After Casa del Diablo and Juárez, you’re a legend in the circle. Some of the toughest guys with a lifetime of training, as close to James Bond
as you’ll ever see, asking me if it’s all true.”
“And what do you tell them?”
“That they’re not the only gunfighters left on the planet.” Jones’s tone turned almost whimsical. “Man, how I miss that world.”
“Your ass in a chair instead of a jungle.”
“Better to serve you anyway, Ranger. What is it today?”
Caitlin told him the story of Iraq war medic Mark John Serles claiming a shaped charge blew his legs off after a dying spy or contractor muttered something to him while bleeding out.
“Oh boy. You sure he didn’t see that in some straight to cable movie on HBO?”
“Maybe one that missed the part about whoever’s behind all this trying to blow me up last night.”
“They dead?”
“Not yet. Kid gave me some coded designations that sound military. Thought you might be able to help me make sense of them.”
“Go ahead, Ranger.”
“One-four-seven-dash-eight-six-three, followed by Alpha, Delta, Charlie … And then Operation Rising Dawn.”
Silence.
“Jones?”
More silence.
“Hey, Jones, you still there?”
“I need you to repeat those— No, goddamnit, never mind. Ranger, how the hell do you keep stepping in this shit?”
Caitlin felt suddenly cold and eased down the window part way to let in some warmth. “What kind of shit is it this time?”
“Where are you?” Jones asked her.
“In a car.”
“You’re talking to me from a car, on a cell phone?”
“That’s right.”
Silence again.
“Okay, Ranger, this calls ends in fifteen seconds. Enough time for me to tell you to go straight to the airport and get on a plane for D.C.”
“Look, I got—”
“Seven seconds. I’ll be waiting for you there.”
“Hey, Jones.”
Too late Caitlin realized when only a click greeted her.
47
CONCEPCIÓN DEL ORO; THE PRESENT
Paz directed Cort Wesley to the left just past the main drag, banking away from the hillside layered with simple homes. They drove down a one-lane, flattened patch of earth that barely passed for a road, Cort Wesley thinking about returning Caitlin’s SUV to her with its suspension shot to hell. The commercials may have shown the thing going off road, but those thirty seconds or so were about the duration it was built to handle such contours in the land.
He kept following the road as it dipped, rose, and flattened some more until the sight of an older model Humvee glowed in the narrowing distance. As they drew closer, Cort Wesley discerned a trio of uniformed men who might have been miniature versions of Paz standing over a ragtag pair who must’ve been the ones who’d made off with Dylan. God help them if they’d done anything to the boy, or if Paz’s silence ended up a harbinger of some very bad news better heard firsthand.
As it was, the only other thing Cort Wesley saw in drawing closer was a pair of holes dug by the two men likely to occupy them if they didn’t cooperate to the fullest and, maybe, even if they did. Climbing out of the SUV into the last of the day’s heat, Cort Wesley could see one of the men was wide as a tree stump. The face of the second kneeling man was curled in agony, a sweat broken by pain pouring down his face.
“They speak only Spanish,” Paz said, suddenly by his side. “I knew you’d want your own answers from them.”
“Where’s their vehicle?”
“An old van parked alongside the cantina where my men found them. They were inside drinking, looked like they’d been in the desert for the better part of a day and night. My men checked the van and found evidence your son had been held in the rear.”
“See your men had them dig their own graves, Colonel.”
“Something to pass the time, outlaw,” Paz told him, “while they waited for us to arrive.”
Cort Wesley kept walking until he was standing before the two kneeling forms, his shadow cast over both of them.
“I’m the father of the boy you brought out here,” he said in Spanish. “You’re going to tell me where he is or I’ll plant you in these two holes myself.”
The one who looked in pain was trembling too much to speak. The other, the fat man, swallowed hard enough to steady himself.
“We do not know, señor.”
“That’s not a good start, kind of start that’ll get you dead in a hurry.”
“No, things did not go as planned! You must believe me!”
“What happened?”
“You will kill us!”
“Only if my son is dead. Is he dead? If he is, you better tell me now or I’ll make it hurt so much you’ll be begging for me to kill you.”
“We do not know, señor.”
Cort Wesley pulled the SIG Sauer pistol Caitlin had given him and racked back the slide.
“We were supposed to meet the other man out here to give the boy to him!”
Cort Wesley forgot about the gun he was holding. “What other man? The big, bald guy—LaChance?”
The fat man looked up into the sun. “I don’t know his name, but that is him.”
“He took my son from here?”
Silence.
Cort Wesley remembered the gun.
“He was supposed to!” the fat man blared, when Cort Wesley stuck it against his forehead. Eyes squinting at him now. “But something went wrong.…”
48
CONCEPCIÓN DEL ORO; THE NIGHT BEFORE
Dylan had to piss like crazy when they finally pulled over, the reduction in heat radiating through the van’s one frosted-over window telling him night had fallen. They’d stopped several times to add water or coolant to the engine, Dylan getting to know the grind of the van’s hood rising and thud of it being slapped back down into place. And once the damn thing had broken down altogether, leaving him roasting inside for hours bearing the worst heat of the day while the two men worked on the van and argued loudly the whole time. One of them had opened the van’s rear door long enough to grab a toolbox or something and then lots of clanking and banging followed as they tried to get the engine started again. He tried to guess their position by the hours they’d been on the road, never hitting even a decent speed and not once letting him out to piss, even when the van broke down, until now.
Dylan heard the rear door being jerked open and felt the wash of a flashlight brighten the world beyond the sack covering his face. He’d been busying himself with getting it loose and almost had it off when the fat one who smelled like unwashed work clothes yelled at him in Spanish.
“¡Vayamos!”
They dragged Dylan out of the van and stood him up, yanking off the sack with flashlight aimed straight for his face, so fiercely bright his eyes glued closed from the stinging. He felt a pair of hands holding him up on either arm, the one on the right weaker, almost flaccid, and he guessed that was the man who walked with a bad limp and heavily favored his right side. The two stiffs would be expecting a scared kid so weakened from the long ordeal and grateful to be out in the air that he’d succumb to their wishes and maybe not even notice they stank to high heaven.
Dylan sniffed the air, thinking of how he stank too when the picture he’d been building in his head changed dramatically.
“Water him and make sure he pisses,” came a third voice he recognized. “I don’t want any accidents stinking up my truck. I got a bunch of stops to make the rest of the way myself.”
Dylan finally got his eyes pried open and saw the big bald man with an arrow tattooed down the crown of his skull standing on the other side of a thin culvert that had once carried water and now carried nothing but scrub and dead mesquite. He held a plastic water bottle that he tossed to Fatty, who twisted the cap off and angled it over Dylan’s face.
“¡Abra la boca!”
Fatty didn’t need to tell him to open his mouth twice. Dylan squeezed his lips apart as far as he could and felt the slightly warm
water gush over his face, enough finding his mouth and throat to relieve his incredible thirst. Fatty poured fast, probably expecting Dylan to gag, but the boy gratefully guzzled as much as he could until the water backed up and spilled all over his shirt. Only then did he gag, but not much or for long.
The gag gave him some moments to consider the unexpected, since he’d figured only on Fatty and one other—the gimp, as it turned out. The biker guy was a wild card, standing silhouetted by a black pickup with the biggest tires Dylan had ever seen short of a monster truck. Even then the bald man stood well over it, making him nearly a foot taller than Dylan and half that bigger than his dad. There was plenty of stuff tucked in the truck’s bed beneath one, maybe two or three balled-up tarpaulins.
“Now make sure he pisses,” the bald guy was saying in Spanish now.
So Fatty grabbed Dylan by the shoulder and thrust him forward, aiming him toward the night dropping fast over the mountains. Dylan started walking, a surprisingly hard task along such uneven ground with his hands latched behind him by the plastic flex cuffs that didn’t flex much at all.
“Far enough!” Fatty said, after the desert floor dipped into a slight depression.
“You gonna undo my hands?”
“No.”
“Then how am I supposed to piss? Come on, I gotta go like a race horse,” Dylan continued, not having to feign his squirming. “It’s not like I’m gonna run off out here.”
Fatty weighed his words only long enough to reject them, then reached around Dylan and unzipped his jeans. He could never remember a time where he felt more uncomfortable than feeling Fatty’s heavy, callused hands working him free of his sweat-soaked boxers.
The stream came quickly, blessed relief that dulled that particular agony, along with the constant ache in his balls from the bashing they’d taken last night, though it seemed much longer than that now. He seemed to piss forever, Dylan waiting for the stream to slow before he swung fast toward Fatty and soaked a leg of his filthy overalls with a warm river of piss.
Fatty lurched back, first stumbling and then catching his heel on a rock that spilled him over backward to the ground.