Strong Vengeance

by Jon Land

  79

  HOUSTON, THE PRESENT

  Guillermo Paz swung round in the desk chair when the office door opened; the man who entered was so drenched in the rays of the late-morning sun streaming through the glass that he had to squint and raise an arm to shield his eyes.

  “Been a long time, Colonel,” the man greeted, coming up just short of a smile.

  “That it has, Payne.” Paz continued to regard him casually. “You know, I never asked you what your first name was.”

  “That is my first name. The last is Battles.”

  “Payne Battles? That’s a joke, right?”

  Payne Battles wasn’t laughing. “I notice my receptionist wasn’t at her desk.”

  “Must be on break.”

  “Along with the two guards who weren’t at the door?”

  “What can I say, Mr. Battles? Good help, it’s hard to find these days. Rest of your staff won’t be interrupting us either. They’re kind of indisposed too.”

  Battles glanced back toward the door and then, just as quickly, abandoned any thought about the possible flight it offered. “Is this business?”

  “As in Venezuela’s national interests?” Paz shook his head. “I don’t share those anymore.”

  “So I heard.”

  “Of course you did. When I refused to kill all those villagers three years ago the assignment fell to X-Ultra, didn’t it?”

  Battles smirked, ever so slightly. “We do good work, Colonel. You know that better than anyone.”

  Paz rose, the chair rocking back and forth from the force of his bulk. “Done any in these parts lately?”

  “Domestic? Not in our job description yet, but we’re reconsidering based on the needs of local police forces with their numbers so depleted by budget cuts.”

  “You gonna cut them a break, Payne, maybe give them a reduced rate for machine-gunning parking violators and speeders?”

  Battles started forward, further into the spill of the sun, refusing to shield his eyes any longer. “How’d you get in here exactly?”

  “You mean because none of the building elevators stop on this floor. What number is it exactly?”

  “If you’re looking for work,” Battles started, trying to sound like he was in charge.

  “No, I’ve got plenty of work, more than I can handle.”

  Battles smirked, angling himself to move the sun from his eyes. “I’ve heard rumors about some of it. The drug cartels in Juárez for one. That what happens when somebody gets on your bad side?”

  “You’re about to find out.”

  * * *

  “CIA developed this,” Paz said, holding a vial up for Payne Battles to see from the desk chair to which he was now duct taped. “Liquid explosives. Kind of like a stable form of nitroglycerin. But here’s the catch, Payne: it’s meant to work internally. Heat sensitive to 98.6 degrees. Guess you can figure why,” he said, circling around to the rear of the chair. “Back in Venezeula, before my transition, I tried it on victims through injection, drink, and dart. I prefer drink.”

  With that, Paz jerked Battles’s head back, flicked off the top of the vial, and jammed it down the man’s throat. Battles gagged and retched, but couldn’t keep from swallowing the vial’s thick and salty contents.

  “You got about five minutes before it heats up. Don’t worry, Payne, you won’t be going alone. Your associates in the other offices here on the floor will be keeping you company.”

  Battles was still coughing, spittle and phlegm dripping from his mouth with portions congealing in both corners. His face wrinkled from the liquid’s awful taste and he shuddered from the oozy sensation of it crawling its way down toward his stomach, a thin coating left in its wake.

  “It hits those juices in the gut, the temperature starts rising,” Paz told him. “You made a big mistake in Marble Falls last night. Your men went after someone important to me.”

  As if on cue, four explosions sounded in rapid succession, shaking the walls and rattling the windows like the percussion of a thunder strike. Paz thought he felt the glass at his back actually buckle a bit. Two more blasts followed almost immediately.

  “See, Payne, just like I told you,” Paz said, starting toward the door.

  Battles’s face had turned a dark shade of red, his cheeks starting to purple as he struggled for breath, mouthing words without sound.

  “You happen to meet God, Payne,” Paz told him from the door, “give him my best.”

  80

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  Captain Tepper was smoking a Marlboro and making a show of checking his watch when Dylan and Luke beat Caitlin and Cort Wesley in a race to the front door of the building housing the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office. “You boys get on inside, so I can shoot the adults here,” he said.

  Luke and Dylan slid past him, Luke turning back when they reached the door. “You shouldn’t smoke, Captain.”

  “On second thought, why don’t you stay out here so I can shoot you too.” The boys disappeared inside and Tepper’s eyes fixed on Caitlin. “Why do I get the feeling Hurricane Caitlin has reached category fifteen proportions?”

  “Sorry we’re late, Captain.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind. It’s the U.S. government and the state of Texas that mind. In case you forgot, we’re facing a bit of a crisis, a crisis Doc Whatley says could be a whole lot worse than we ever imagined.”

  “He say why?”

  Tepper stamped his cigarette out under his boot heel. “No, Ranger, he wanted to wait for you to get back from Louisiana. Find what you were looking for there?”

  “I’ll explain everything later.”

  “Except some trouble in Houston reported earlier today.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Bunch of investment bankers got blown up by experimental liquid explosives somebody made them swallow.”

  “Market have a bad day?”

  “You think this is funny?” Tepper said, leading the way down the hall now.

  “I thought you were kidding.”

  “Nope. And I’m not kidding either about the fact that your friend Jones later informed me they weren’t investment bankers at all. That was just a front for that Rubicon X-Ultra paramilitary outfit we went up against last night. Guess nobody’ll be coming up against them again.” Tepper stopped to settle his breathing. “You see your friend Paz, you tell him…”

  “Tell him what, Captain?”

  But instead of responding, Tepper circled his lips and blew out some breath in a half whistle. “Hear that, Ranger? Wind’s picking up again.”

  * * *

  “You may be looking at the first man in history to die three times,” medical examiner Frank Dean Whatley told the assembled crowd over the corpse of the man who’d taken the identity of Alejandro Pena.

  His body was laid out, covered by a sheet up to the neck, on a steel table in Whatley’s lab just as it had been on Caitlin’s last visit.

  “Will somebody tell this man I’m not in the mood for riddles right now,” said Jones.

  Whatley smirked, his puckered cheeks bulging like balloons filling with air. “Then try this: I couldn’t get some of those earlier symptoms I mentioned to the Ranger here out of my head, so I ran some additional tests on our friend here. And what I found, well, let me explain.”

  Whatley eased the sheet back, revealing a careful stitch job down the center of the dead man’s abdomen, as good as anything a surgeon might do on a patient.

  “Three things I want to point out to you,” Whatley continued, directing their attention to that scar. “Now, I already reported that my initial exam revealed significant trauma to the inner wall of the abdomen consistent with chronic nausea and vomiting. Next thing I need to tell you is that this man’s blood counts were remarkably low, indicating a truly pervasive infection. The white cells were particularly affected by the fact he also suffered from anemia and there’s evidence of persistent bleeding, of his gums for example, due to low platelet counts.”


  As he spoke, Whatley ran a thick finger up and around the exterior of the corpse’s abdominal wall, illustrating and enunciating each of his respective points. Then he lifted one of the corpse’s arms that looked more like a doll’s than a man’s.

  “Finally, I’d like you to take a look at his skin. You can see signs of intense reddening, blistering, and ulceration that is also present on his other arm, both legs, and scalp.”

  “I think I noticed it on his torso too,” Caitlin noted.

  “Very observant, Ranger,” Whatley complimented, twisting the arm around so Caitlin could view the other side. “So tell me what you make of this.”

  Caitlin studied an assortment of blotchy bumps and nodules. “Looks like a real bad case of acne or hives maybe.”

  “Specifically caused by damaged sebaceous and sweat glands. And what about this?” the medical examiner queried, directing her attention to a patchwork of skin that looked scraped raw.

  “That’s easy,” Caitlin said, almost smiling. “I remember it from the days of traipsing through the woods to shoot with my granddad and coming home infested with poison ivy. That’s what my skin looked like until the calamine lotion kicked in.”

  “Very good.”

  “You want to tell us what all this adds up to, Doc?” requested Tepper.

  “Theoretically?”

  Tepper started shaking his head. “Why can’t anybody give me a straight answer anymore?”

  Whatley eased the corpse’s arm back down to the slab. “Well, the anecdotal data’s pretty reliable on this particular subject, although this is the first time I’ve actually seen a case of it. Then again it’s not what killed this man, but it would have eventually and before too much longer. I checked the case studies, almost all of which come from post–World War Two Japan and Russia in the late 1980s, and the findings are consistent.”

  “You keep me here guessing any longer, Doc,” Tepper interrupted, “and I’m gonna put you on that slab myself.”

  Whatley covered the body back up. “This man was suffering from radiation poisoning, Captain.”

  81

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  “I don’t believe his condition was due to prolonged exposure,” Whatley continued, “like the kind exhibited occasionally by clumsy X-ray technicians or nuclear plant workers toiling in unsafe conditions mostly seen in foreign countries. It was much shorter term than that, but intense.”

  “How so?” Jones asked him.

  “Well, a ‘gray’ or ‘Gy’ is a unit of radiation dose absorbed by matter. To gauge biological effects the dose is multiplied by a quality factor that is dependent on the type of ionizing radiation. Such measurement of biological effect is called ‘dose equivalent’ and is measured in ‘slevert’ or ‘sv.’”

  “Doc, I know you’re enjoying yourself here, but you have utterly lost me,” said Tepper.

  “Then let me put it this way. To exhibit the range and severity of the symptoms experienced by Alejandro Pena, or whoever he is, we’re talking about an exposure level of twenty slevert over approximately a one-month period. That’s about a million times the normal annual dose of radiation deemed safe for a human being, which is point-zero-zero-five. If it had been the radiation that had killed him, as it would have before too much longer, I’d pinpoint his cause of death as acute radiation syndrome, or ARS.”

  “Any ideas on how he got it?”

  Whatley shook his head, his balloon cheeks deflating. “Sorry, Ranger, that’s where I draw a blank.”

  “What about exposure to uranium?” Jones asked him.

  “As in the construction of a nuclear bomb?”

  “That’s what I was thinking, yeah.”

  “Then banish the thought. Overexposure to elements like uranium, plutonium, or other radioactively toxic materials present entirely different from this. No, this is more consistent with a containment problem at a nuclear plant. I’ve done plenty of reading on the mess they had in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami, so I’m unfamiliar with the effects.”

  “So maybe we’re talking nuclear waste here instead,” Caitlin posed, feeling like she’d just swallowed an ice cube.

  “That would be my thought, Ranger, exactly.”

  Caitlin turned toward Tepper, running her eyes over Jones and Cort Wesley briefly on the way.

  “Don’t even say it, Ranger, don’t even say it,” Tepper charged, waving a thin, nicotine-stained finger at her.

  Caitlin swung toward Jones. “How good’s your database on American-born Muslims?”

  “I don’t think you want to know.”

  “Then you’ll want to run a check on those with engineering or construction experience, someone with the kind of skills that could have convinced Teo Braga that he could handle the disposal of a whole lot of barrels of radioactive waste.” She turned back to Tepper. “That’s where Braga fits into this, Captain. Al-Awlaki’s people figured out what he was up to and offered up their services. Simply stated. I imagine, given the dangers involved, that there weren’t a lot of others waiting in line for the job.”

  Caitlin noticed Jones stiffening, his gaze avoiding hers.

  “Something wrong, Jones?”

  “You really need to ask me that?”

  “I can tell when you got something else on your mind. Why don’t you tell us all what it is?”

  Jones met her gaze and held it as he walked out of the room.

  “What’s his problem?” Tepper wondered.

  “I don’t even know where to start to answer that. But I do think it’s time I took another run at Teofilo Braga.”

  Tepper scratched at his scalp. “Well, you better have something more sure than this to stick in his face, Hurricane.”

  “I believe I do now, Captain,” Caitlin said, holding her gaze on Cort Wesley. “I believe I do.”

  * * *

  “Hold up a sec there!” Tepper called to her just as she and Cort Wesley reached the lobby doors, Dylan and Luke back in tow.

  Caitlin stopped and Tepper caught up huffing, so winded he had to lay his hands on his knees to steady himself. “You all right, D.W.?”

  He straightened back up. “I promised to tell you the rest of the story about what happened when your dad, granddad, and I got back from the bayou.”

  “I believe it can wait, under the circumstances.”

  “I’m not so sure about that anymore, Ranger.”

  82

  SAN ANTONIO, 1979

  “Well, that’s bullshit if I ever did hear it!” said Earl Strong upon being given the news.

  “It’s the way things are done these days, Dad,” Jim explained, trying to console him.

  “Then the way things are done these days is crap. Texas Rangers don’t yield ground to nobody. What do these federals expect me to do, go home and take a nap? Hell, they don’t even want to know what we found down in the bayou.”

  “On account of the fact that they don’t care,” said D. W. Tepper. “I already told you, there were some Mexican laborers on the island at the time of the killings they can connect to a ritualistic killing cult south of the border.”

  “The federals actually interview any of these ritualistic killers?”

  Tepper shook his head. “They disappeared afterwards. FBI is basing their suspicions on that one fact alone. They issued all kinds of bulletins, to what good I don’t know since if they’re back in Mexico we can’t touch them, ritual killers or not.”

  “I normally shoot men who bring me news that bad, D.W.”

  “You wanna do that to the messenger, go ahead.”

  Then Earl’s gaze softened just enough. “Nah, I enjoy your company too much and it’s gonna be fun watching you puke your guts out again.”

  “Huh?”

  “You, me, and Jim are going back to Galveston Island.”

  * * *

  Sheriff Plantaine again accompanied them to the crime scene that looked pristine compared to only two days before. The crime scene tape was gone, along with the
cones and sawhorses the locals had set in place, and rain had washed the ground clean of both blood and whatever stray evidence might have remained.

  “Okay,” Tepper, even more white-faced than on their last visit, said to Earl and Jim Strong, “we’re here. Now what?”

  Jim used an old kerchief to mop his brow. “The old man and I got a theory.”

  “Old man?” Earl raised.

  “Eighty would seem to qualify there.”

  “’Cept I’m seventy-nine. I’ll accept the label next year.”

  “Anyway, Ranger Earl and I got to thinking that the key here is the map that brought those boys this far.”

  “On account of the fact that Chansoir drew it by accident when he meant to draw the one that normally sent treasure hunters deep into the bayou where no treasure was waiting for them,” Tepper concluded.

  Earl spoke before Jim had a chance to resume. “Our point being that maybe these frat boys surprised the first party he drew the same map for. Maybe surprised them in the process of not just searching for the treasure, but after they’d actually found it.”

  Tepper tried to process what he was hearing. “Wait a sec, are you boys saying Lafitte’s lost treasure is real?”

  This time Jim spoke first. “We’re saying it’s a possibility that would provide clear reason to murder five innocent fraternity pledges who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Tepper felt his stomach starting to dance again and settled himself with a few deep breaths. “Well, it makes more sense than Mexican laborers who happened to be part of a killing cult.”

  “Yeah,” said Earl, “I did some checking on that.”

  Both Jim and D.W. waited for him to continue.

  “Turns out,” he resumed, “all of the contractors currently on the island can account for all their workers.” He looked toward Sheriff Plantaine, whose mouth had dropped and was about to respond in protest. “Also turns out the four you were referring to were off the island with permission and returned last night. So take these murdering Mexicans out of the picture and what we got is whoever got to the island ahead of those frat boys, following the identical map.”