by Jon Land
Dylan never saw him hit, because he was already running. Lighting out into the darkness toward the mountains with hands cuffed behind him and dick swinging free of his pants.
“Hey! Hey!” Fatty called.
Dylan tensed. If there was going to be a shot, here’s when it would come, while he was still in sight before the darkness swallowed him. He had no real plan at that point, just knew that plunging deeper into the desert where the cool of the night would soften him for the coming heat of the next day and the buzzards wasn’t an option.
He thought fast, his mind working just the way his father had described in those rare occasions when he said anything at all about his own experiences. The lights of some nearby town twinkled in the distance but that distance was likely miles and his captors, especially the bald guy, would figure that was his most likely destination.
Nope, they could wait him out under current conditions no matter what plan he picked. If it was just Fatty and the gimp, his options were many. The big bald guy reduced them to none that were much good.
But he had the darkness, and that was something. Lots actually, since there was no better camouflage. Dylan could hear Fatty laboring after him, not sure if it was the breeze or his breathing he heard between desperate pleas to the gimp and Baldy for help.
“¡El huye! ¡El huye!”
The darkness would shield Dylan for a time. As soon as the night gave up the heavy thumping of the big bald guy’s boots giving chase, though, he knew his advantage, swinging dick and all, would be short-lived indeed. What that told him was that he better come up with something else and fast.
Dylan’s thinking froze, redirected. Because the night wasn’t the only thing he had working for him at all. There was something else, if only he could get to it.…
49
CONCEPCIÓN DEL ORO; THE PRESENT
“The boy went off into the mountains,” the fat man said.
“You never found him?”
Both kneeling men shook their heads vociferously.
“No,” the fat one insisted. “We searched all night and most of today. Finally we were so tired and thirsty, we had—”
“I don’t give a shit about that. Tell me about your boss, the bald guy.”
“He searched with us through the night.”
“Left just after dawn,” the other man said, speaking for the first time through the pain stretched across his lips. “Said if we didn’t find the boy or his body, he’d come back and kill us.”
“Then it’s a good thing the colonel and I showed up instead, isn’t it?” Cort Wesley asked them and watched the men’s eyes dare to linger on the massive, sun-blotting form of Guillermo Paz for the first time. He’d stood rigid through the whole exchange, his breathing gradually picking up with a restrained fury etched over his expression. Cort Wesley wondered what he was thinking about. “So, did you find him?” he asked the kidnappers, dreading the answer.
“The boy got away,” the fat man said, his voice cracking. “If he was hiding, we would have found him by now.”
Cort Wesley gazed into the world of the mountains and endless desert beyond it. If Dylan had doubled back for Concepción del Oro, if he was safe, he would’ve found a way to reach him or Caitlin. So he hadn’t done that, which left only the desert. Frigid at night, steaming during the day. Hiding out under some meager, desperate cover with hands cuffed behind his back. Cort Wesley gazed out into the endless emptiness beyond, trying not to picture Dylan already dead within it. His hand quivered as he thought seriously of taking the SIG from his belt and putting a bullet in the fat man’s face. Derive some sense of satisfaction from watching the hollow point shell obliterate flesh, bone, and brains.
“I wanna know how I can find LaChance,” Cort Wesley blared instead.
“Who?”
“Your big, bald boss, you stupid fuck!”
“I don’t know.”
“Somebody contacted him yesterday from San Luis Potosí.”
“Not me,” the fat man insisted. “The one in charge.”
“And where’s he?”
“Gone.”
“With the rest of the kids you stole,” Paz interjected suddenly, the edge in his voice as sharp as a razor’s.
The fat man swallowed hard and kept his gaze on Cort Wesley. “I’ve told you everything I know!”
Cort Wesley gazed out into the distance.
“Are you going to kill me?”
Cort Wesley thought about Dylan heading for the mountains, the boy smart enough to know the only thing waiting for him there was death. So he wouldn’t have headed in that direction, at least not for long with all three men pursuing him through the night, leaving …
“Jesus Christ,” Cort Wesley realized, recalling a slim part of the fat man’s tale. “Jesus Christ…”
He saw Dylan, thought like Dylan, became Dylan. Moving through the night, taking advantage of his captors’ panic over letting him escape.
“LaChance’s truck,” Cort Wesley heard himself saying, glaring down at the fat man. “Can you tell me anything about the license plates?”
The fat man looked up, as if measuring his eyes for a sign of his intentions, and nodded. “Sí, señor, they come from Texas.”
PART FIVE
One Ranger is a potent power for good and the Legislature should provide a sufficiently large mobile force that can be sent to points of the state as needed without delay. The Rangers are crime deterrents and we should have an ample supply.
—Texas state senator J. W. Reid, 1927
50
WASHINGTON, D.C.; THE PRESENT
Caitlin’s plane touched down at Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., late in the afternoon, when the airport was just starting to get busy again. She’d just made an AirTran flight in San Antonio that connected with her Washington-bound flight out of Atlanta with only fifteen minutes to spare. Jones, as wide in the shoulders as ever and back to his military-style crew cut, stood waiting for her at the gate just beyond the Jetway.
“And me thinking only passengers were permitted past the security checkpoints. You make yourself invisible or something?”
Jones clearly wasn’t in the mood for humor. “That were possible, I would’ve made you disappear a long time ago.”
“Where we going?” Caitlin asked, falling into step alongside him.
“Washington.”
“Thought we were there already.”
“Not really.”
* * *
They drove out to a nondescript office building that overlooked Dupont Circle, its white exterior discolored in some patches and blackened in others by a combination of Metro train exhaust and blowback from an ancient heat exchange system that must’ve dated to the time of Lincoln. So plain was the building that it had no doorman, reception desk, or lobby security, and boasted wall-mounted mailboxes an eight-year-old could pick with a piece of his Transformer toy.
“Not much,” Jones said, holding the door open for Caitlin, “but we call it home.”
“We,” she repeated.
Jones shrugged and made sure the door caught behind him. “Press doesn’t even know this building exists. Last cameraman to show up came to the wrong address.”
“Saved you the trouble of killing him.”
“Don’t worry, I confiscated his memory card.” Jones angled to the right, toward a small coffee shop that was really just a coffee station offering snacks and beverages with a single man behind the counter. “He’s mine, don’t worry. Let’s get a table.”
“Something wrong with your office?”
“Elevators in this building are too slow and we’re not going to be here very long anyway.”
Caitlin let Jones’s remark dangle and accompanied him into the snack bar. He made straight to a table set in the rear, placed so those seated couldn’t be seen through the windows from the street beyond. Caitlin followed, wondering if the pastries and fruit on display were real or just props. She felt as if she was on a movie set.
&n
bsp; “First, I need the name and info on this medic of yours,” Jones told her.
Caitlin pulled a piece of paper from the pocket of her jeans. “I wrote it down for you.”
Jones took the paper from her, shaking his head. “You carried it with you all the way down here?”
“Yup.”
“Haven’t I taught you anything?”
“Figured it beat e-mail.” Caitlin watched Jones digest the information on her piece of notepaper quickly before tearing it into shreds with a disdainful stare. “This kid in danger?”
“I can’t believe the army left him out there this long,” Jones said in response. “No wonder they can’t manage a war right.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“It’s out of your hands, Ranger.”
“The hell it is.”
Jones’s eyes narrowed, seeming to change from blue to ice-colored. “You want to help this kid?”
“Damn right.”
“Then stop wasting time better spent with the folks who can help you scrape this shit off your shoe.”
The look in his eyes was different from the last two times circumstances had brought them together. Jones, for all his bravado, looked uncertain. Jones looked scared.
“One-four-seven-dash-eight-six-three,” Caitlin recited from memory. “Alpha, Delta, Charlie.”
“Let’s start with Operation Rising Dawn.”
“Whatever you say.”
“Iraq War, first months after we went through that country like shit through a goose. What comes next?”
“This a quiz, Jones?”
“Humor me, Ranger.”
“Holding the country together, something you did a lousy job at.”
“Point taken. What would we have needed to get it done right?”
“Men. Troops.”
“Yes. Now try again.”
“Resources.”
“Warm.”
“Cooperation.”
“Warmer.”
“Friendlies willing to change loyalties.”
Jones pushed his chair a bit more forward. “And how exactly do we manage that?”
“With money.”
“Blazing hot, Ranger.”
“Operation Rising Dawn,” Caitlin repeated.
“All about keeping the country running. Infrastructure, utilities, hospitals, food deliveries—simple stuff like that stops and there is no country.”
“But that’s exactly what happened.”
Jones looked annoyed. “Leave me the floor, Ranger, please. I know full well it ended up as a cluster fuck, thanks to that civilian fool Bremer who couldn’t run a hot-dog stand, much less a country. But that doesn’t mean Operation Rising Dawn didn’t lay it all out for him, step by step, starting with retaining the Iraqi army which, of course, Bremer and his troglodytes chose to ignore. There was nothing wrong with the plan. The plan would have goddamn worked, if he’d simply followed the instructions that came included with the batteries. Just trust me on that.”
“Okay. I’m with you so far.”
Jones crossed his arms and laid his elbows atop the table. “Now go back to your blazing hot point.”
“Money. You’d need plenty of it to keep all those people on, basically employ an entire nation to keep essential services up and running.”
“Twelve billion dollars. That was the number we came up with and the amount we sent to Baghdad.”
“Twelve billion dollars?”
“In cash. Loaded onto a C-130. I supervised the process myself. Alpha, Delta, Charlie—A, D, C—basically refers to an inventory coding, short for ‘Administrative Control.’ Standard bureaucratic bullshit.”
“And one-four-seven-eight-six-three?”
“What do you think, Ranger?”
“Sounds like a bank account number.”
“Close enough,” Jones nodded. “A designator for the money itself. The plan was for the cash to be portioned out by Bremer and company, the most incompetent bunch of fools I’ve come across in my entire career. Watching them make decisions was like watching a blind guy throwing darts: sooner or later you figure he’ll hit at least part of the board, but, you know what, in this case they didn’t.”
Caitlin couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Paul Bremer was in charge of dispersing twelve billion dollars in cash?”
“He was in charge of rebuilding the country, making amends, selling Girl Scout cookies. The twelve billion was supposed to give him the means.”
“Supposed to?”
Jones’s expression was stone cold. “Because it vanished, Ranger.”
51
WASHINGTON, D.C.; THE PRESENT
“Not all of it,” Jones continued. “Somewhere around a half. As much as seven, as little as five. Four maybe.”
“Vanished.”
“Like into thin air, without a trace. Poof!” Jones finished, blowing air though his fingers. “All I can tell you is that we loaded twelve billion under Administrative Control Designation 147-863 into a C-130 and, depending on who you listen to, only a fraction of it made it to Baghdad. Of course, anyone you listen to couldn’t possibly be sure because nobody bothered to inventory or count it. They just loaded the pallets straight into transport trucks and headed down the Purple Heart Highway from the airport to the grounds of a Saddam palace Bremer had appropriated so he’d have some place to hang his work boots and take a shit in one of the seventeen bathrooms.”
“You don’t sound happy.”
“Who do you think took the flak for all the bullshit? I’ve been chasing my tail on this ever since.” Jones sat back, looking suddenly more reflective but also bitter, the left side of his face rising in something between a sneer and a scowl. “You recall the name of the dying man who passed the info onto your medic?”
Caitlin searched her memory. “Kirken-something.”
“Dale,” Jones completed, “Kirkendale. Glad you didn’t write that down, anyway.”
“He was your man.”
“He had an office in a building like this too—let’s put it that way.”
“Same floor?”
Jones looked like he was fighting a stomach full of acid. “No, a different one. He was a forensic auditor, a glorified accountant really, as good with numbers as I am with bullets. And he had a family. That’s why he agreed to go over there to trace the missing money, ’cause of the pay boost. It was only the Green Zone, right? Who dies in the Green Zone? He was weapons trained because he had to be, not ’cause he liked it.”
“Wasn’t gonna be much he could do about a sniper.”
“He was targeted personally, Ranger. His investigation had gotten him places nobody expected him to reach. That made him a risk to the powers-that-be.”
“I know the feeling.”
“Come again?”
“You’re behind the curve, Jones. Last night, somebody tried to blow me up after I found out Sergeant Mark John Serles had been transferred out of the Intrepid.”
“Means the force behind the missing money is still covering their tracks.” He smirked, seeming to enjoy looking across the table at Caitlin. “Guess nobody told them who they were up against.”
“Get back to the missing money.”
“Kirkendale and his forensics team were able to back trace eight billion dollars of it. While plenty of that had gone nowhere near where it was supposed to, and assholes like Halliburton had overcharged us to a frightening degree, the missing four was the real problem.”
“Where the hell it went,” Caitlin followed.
“Exactly, because the options were limited and the more Kirkendale reduced them, the scarier they got.”
“How so?”
“When money the military is technically responsible for disappears, where do you look?”
“The military.”
“Sure. Bremer was a neo-con, a hawk among hawks.”
“Strange criticism coming from you, Jones.”
He looked stung by her remark, wrinkling his fac
e in derision. “I like what I do, Ranger, and I’m damn good at it. But when the man at 1600 Pennsylvania tells me to holster my weapon, that’s what I do, because I know there will come a time when he needs me to take it out again and I can’t do that right if I’m too busy pissing and moaning.”
“Back to Bremer.”
“I’m not saying he had anything to do with the four billion that vanished, not directly anyway. But it wouldn’t have been hard for him, or the Cheney disciples who rode in on the same plane, to look the other way while the money was put to other uses.”
“Like what?”
Jones rose fast enough to rattle the table. “Need someone else to fill in the remaining blanks.”
“Where?”
“Homeland Security.”
52
SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT
Cort Wesley stepped into the dark cool of Miguel Asuna’s body shop in East San Antonio. Back when Cort Wesley was working for the Branca crime family, this had also served as a chop shop where stolen cars were taken to be disassembled for parts. He’d once heard Asuna boast he could strip a Mercedes in thirty minutes flat.
The way Cort Wesley felt now reminded him both of prison and war; in prison it was the potential of getting shivved that kept him on edge, while in war it was the chance of getting shot. Today it was any lingering stare or flash of recognition that could mean the cops were not far off, ready to bring him in on that extradition beef since Caitlin Strong hadn’t. Cort Wesley played out the scenario of what he’d do if confronted a hundred different ways, none of them good.
“Hey, look who’s here!” said a big man, as he wiped grease from his hands with a grime-splattered rag.
Miguel Asuna was twice the size of his little brother Pablo, Cort Wesley’s late best friend, and by all accounts was still living and working on the fringe of the law.
“It’s been forever, Masters,” Asuna continued, swallowing his hand in what felt like a giant paw. “What, five or six years?”
“Closer to seven.”
Asuna looked Cort Wesley over as if he were considering an estimate on damage. “So you back in the trade, jefe?”