“They’ve got the men and the firepower on their side,” Alex pointed out. “It may not be right, but if we try to put up a fight … well, I’m afraid some innocent people might be killed, and I don’t want that.”
“Neither do I. I always swore I’d never let ’em take my guns away, though. My daddy fought in the Big One when he was just a boy, and he always said that if they ever come to take away our guns, that’d be the end of the country he fought for.”
“They’re saying that it’s just temporary.”
Post shook his head. “Do you really believe that, Chief?”
Alex had asked herself the same question, and she had to answer honestly. “No, I don’t. I think once they get their hands on everybody’s guns, we’ll never see them again.”
“That’s right,” Post said. “Then they’ll go to some other little town and pull the same stunt there, and some place after that, and another and another until the only ones who got guns are the army … and them thugs who come up across the border, like the ones who killed poor Inez McNamara.”
There wasn’t a thing he had said that Alex could dispute. She believed he was right. And yet there were cold, hard facts to face.
“They didn’t come up with this idea overnight. They’re ready for anything we might do, Wendell. We’re going to have to cooperate with them and hope that somehow the courts will step in and put things right.”
Post snorted in disbelief. “That ain’t never gonna happen, Alex, and you know it.”
Alex sighed. “We have to hope.” She put a hand on the rifle that rested on the counter. “Can I take this and turn it over to them? If I don’t, they’ll come in here and arrest you. If you shoot at them, they’ll kill you.”
She didn’t doubt that for a second.
Post sighed and pushed the rifle toward her. “Take it. There’s gonna come a time, though, when you and me and ever’ body else in this town is gonna have to ask themselves what’s worth fightin’ for … and dyin’ over, if need be.”
Alex knew he was right about that, too.
Holding the rifle well away from her body, she stepped out onto the sidewalk. “Clear!” she called to the FPS troopers at the end of the block. More men had joined them. “I’ve got his gun. You can have it.”
They rushed down the sidewalk toward her. One of them snatched the rifle out of her hands, and several more charged into the store, broken glass crunching under their boots.
“Wait a minute!” Alex cried. “What are you doing? I got the gun!”
She heard angry shouting inside that was cut off abruptly. She moved to go in, but black-clad men blocked her. A moment later, the men who had gone inside reappeared, dragging a groggy Wendell Post between them. The storekeeper’s head was bleeding from a place where he had obviously been hit with a gun butt or something else.
“This man is under arrest for failing to comply with the executive order,” one of the FPS men said.
“But I got his gun,” Alex protested.
“Doesn’t matter, ma’am. He’s in our custody now.”
“You can’t—”
Alex stopped short. Of course, they could do it. They could do whatever they wanted. They were in charge now, them and their liberal masters back in Washington. They had waltzed right in and taken over as if it was their right to do so—and that was exactly what they believed.
And she had let them do it. God help her, Alex thought as sickness roiled her stomach, she had let them do it.
BOOK FOUR
CHAPTER 28
“How long are we going to stay here?”
“Relax, Earl. Nobody’s trying to kill you, are they?”
“Well … no.” A bitter tone entered Earl Trussell’s voice. “Not for the past couple of days, anyway.”
“Then you’re ahead of the game,” Ford said. “I’m grateful that nobody’s tried to kill me for more than forty-eight hours.”
“You would be, you Neanderthal. “ “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but they won’t do nearly as much damage as automatic weapons.”
“Will you two shut up?” Parker asked from the window of the camper, where he moved aside the curtain every so often to check on what was going on outside. “It’s bad enough that we’re stuck here in Pissant, Texas, without the two of you yammering at each other all the time.”
“He started it, the big gorilla,” Earl complained. “And you can finish it,” Parker pointed out. “Just tell us what we need to know.”
Earl was pale to start with, but his pallor deepened as he shook his head. “I can’t. They’ll kill me.”
“Maybe we’ll kill you if you don’t,” Ford said.
“No, you won’t. You’re the good guys, remember?”
“This day and age, it’s gettin’ harder and harder to tell the good guys from the bad guys,” Ford drawled.
He was stretched out on one of the camper’s bunks with his hands behind his head and his legs crossed at the ankles. The casual pose belied the fact that he was ready for trouble. They had been lucky since escaping from Corpus Christi with Earl Trussell as their prisoner, but Ford knew good luck never lasted. Bad luck always came along to replace it.
They had bought this used camper for cash in a little town south of Corpus, hooked it onto a pickup they had stolen that also had stolen license plates on it, then headed west into the largely empty southern tip of Texas.
The camper wasn’t all they bought. Parker and Ford picked up a couple of throwaway cell phones to replace the government-issued phones they had, well, thrown away. Off the bridge into Nueces Bay, in fact. Those phones would have been too easy to trace, and after everything that had happened, the two agents were no longer a hundred percent certain who they could trust.
It was a debate they’d had several times while driving all night across the flat Texas landscape. Ford was ambivalent about calling in and reporting that they had the target in custody. Parker was dead set against it.
“We were set up, Fargo,” he had declared as they argued. “The only reason we were there at that hotel in Corpus was so those guys could kill the little guy here and pin the blame on us. And there’s only one way they could have known we’d be there.”
“Our bosses told them,” Ford had said.
“Exactly. Or somebody who works for our bosses, anyway. If we let them know where we are, there’ll be another hit squad on us in a matter of hours.”
Ford hadn’t been able to dispute that logic, but he was still uneasy about their best course of action. “As long as we’re in the wind, they’re going to think we’ve gone rogue,” he had warned.
“Better that than being dead.”
Again, indisputable logic.
“I vote for staying alive,” the prisoner had piped up from between them on the pickup seat.
“You don’t get a vote,” Ford growled. “At least, not until you spill who you are and why so many people want you dead.”
“We want to know what was on that laptop of yours, too,” Parker had told him.
So far, though, they hadn’t gotten him to reveal anything except his name: Earl Trussell.
Early the next morning, they had stopped at this RV park in a small crossroads town and laid low ever since. Parker had walked across the highway several times to get food for them at the Tasty Kreme drive-in, which appeared not to have changed a bit since being built sometime in the 1950s.
Now Ford continued, “Speaking of lines blurring, we could always torture the little weasel, Brad.”
Earl sneered at him. “Do you worst, big shot.”
“Wouldn’t the worst torture be torture that didn’t make you talk? The best torture would be the stuff that makes you talk.”
“You can’t make me talk.”
“That’s just little guy bravado. Next thing you know, you’ll be threating to murdalize me.”
“Yeah, well, if I could—”
“Pipe down,” Parker said, tensing at the window. “An SUV just pulled up and stop
ped at the office.”
Ford swung his legs off the bunk. “So?”
“So it’s black and the windows are heavily tinted.”
“Doesn’t have to mean a thing,” Ford said, but he reached for his gun anyway. He felt better with it in his hand.
“Guy’s getting out and going in to talk to the park manager.”
“You recognize him?”
“Never saw him before.”
Both agents knew that didn’t mean a thing. The Company had plenty of assets working for it that they had never seen, and freelancers could always be hired for a sensitive job, too.
But at least the man in the RV park office wasn’t a known killer.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous.
The problem with a camper trailer like this was that you couldn’t just park it. There were things you had to do in order to set it up properly. Which meant that you couldn’t just hop in the pickup and drive off at a moment’s notice, either. You had to take time to unhook.
“Nobody else has stopped here since we came in yesterday morning,” Parker said. “If the guy’s looking for us, he’s gonna have to check us out.”
The camper had only one door, and it was facing the office. They couldn’t get out, climb in the pickup, and drive away without being seen by anybody who was looking in this direction.
“Anybody still in the SUV?” Ford asked.
“I think so. Hard to tell through that dark glass, but I believe there’s another guy in the front seat.”
“Yeah, they travel in pairs, at least.”
From the stool where he was sitting next to the tiny kitchen counter, Earl asked, “Guys, are … are we gonna be all right?”
“I don’t know,” Ford said. “If you’re going to tell anybody why you ran away from Casa del Diablo, now’s the time, Earl. You may not get another chance.”
It was almost a blind shot, but the sudden flare of surprise in Earl’s eyes told Ford that he had scored. Earl had run away from a place called Casa del Diablo. That was more than they had known for sure a moment earlier.
“The first guy’s coming out of the office,” Parker reported. “He’s shaking hands with the manager. Now he’s getting back in the SUV…. It looks like they’re leaving.”
“Really?” Ford asked, unwilling to believe just yet that their luck had held.
“Yeah, they’re pulling out onto the highway—” Parker’s breath hissed between his teeth. “No, wait a minute. They’re backing up. The tailgate’s starting to come up—”
Ford lunged off the bed, grabbed Earl’s arm, and yanked him off the stool. Earl yelped in pain as Ford said, “Go! Go!”
Parker slapped the door open and the three men leaped out of the camper. Ford just had time to think that if he was wrong, they had not only revealed their presence unnecessarily, but they were going to look mighty silly, too.
But alarm bells were clamoring in his head, and as the SUV’s tailgate lifted even more, he saw that he was right. A man crouched in the back of the SUV, pointing a grenade launcher at them.
The RPG shot out from the weapon, trailing smoke and fire as it rocketed toward the camper.
Ford and Parker launched themselves into dives that carried them away from the camper, and since Ford still had his hand clamped on Earl’s arm, he dragged the little guy with him. They hit the ground next to the pickup just as the grenade struck the camper and exploded. The earth jumped violently beneath them. The blast blew a huge hole in the camper and knocked it over on its side.
Parker came up on one knee, gun in hand, and opened fire on the SUV. It was probably armored and had bulletproof glass in the windows, but with the rear gate open, that gave him an opening. He poured several shots into the back of the SUV while Ford and Earl scrambled to their feet.
Neither agent asked the other if he was hurt. As long as they could move and fight, they would keep going. Ford jerked the pickup’s passenger door open and shoved Earl in. Then, joining Parker in firing at the SUV, he ran around the front of the truck and slid in behind the wheel.
The seat was littered with broken glass. The blast that had wrecked the camper had blown out the pickup’s rear window. The engine was all right, though, and turned over as soon as Ford hit the key.
Parker put a foot on the rear bumper and vaulted into the pickup bed. “Go!” he yelled to Ford, who floored the gas. The pickup leaped ahead.
Another RPG sizzled toward them, but Ford had gotten the vehicle moving just in time. The rocket-propelled grenade burned past, only a few inches from the pickup’s tailgate, and slammed into some mesquite trees at the edge of the RV park, turning them into kindling.
A barbed-wire fence loomed in front of the windshield. Ford never slowed down. He aimed the pickup between two fence posts and hit the wire at full speed. It parted with several loud twangs! The truck bounced across an open field, smashed through another fence, and slewed onto a dirt road.
“At least one of the bastards is still alive!” Parker called through the broken rear window. “The SUV just pulled out of the park and is coming after us.”
“If I let it get close enough, can you shoot out a tire?”
“Hell, no! It’s bound to have run-flats on it, anyway.”
In the pickup cab, Ford turned his head to look at Earl as the vehicle raced along the dirt road, raising a cloud of dust behind it.
“There’s only one thing to do,” Ford told Parker. “We’ve got to give them Earl.”
“What!” Earl said in a high-pitched squeak of terror.
“Good idea,” Parker agreed. “They’ll still have to come after us, of course, but since Earl’s the one they’ve really been after all along, they’ll have to stop and kill him first. That’ll give us a little breathing room.”
“Wait, wait!” Earl babbled. “You can’t—”
“He’s already told us he’s never gonna talk,” Ford said. “I’ll be damned if I’m gonna die for something without even knowing what it is.”
“And you saw the way they broke out the heavy artillery right away, back there at the park,” Parker said from the pickup bed. “They didn’t even know for sure it was us in that camper. They want Earl dead so bad they were willing to take a chance on slaughtering innocent people, just because it was possible he was there.”
“All right, I’ll talk, I’ll talk!” Earl screeched. “Don’t throw me out! Please! What is it you want to know?”
“What’s Casa del Diablo?”
“A research lab in the mountains out in West Texas. I worked there.”
“Research into what?” Ford asked.
Earl took a deep breath. “Biological weapons.”
“Bio-weapons have been banned.”
“Tell that to the guys running the place, and the guys who give them their orders.”
“What did you do there?”
“I’m a chemist. You might not believe it to look at me, since I’m so handsome and all, but I’m actually pretty smart.”
“Not smart enough,” Ford muttered. “What did you do, think you could blow the whistle on them and they’d just let you get away with it?”
Muddy sweat coated Earl’s face. He wiped some of it away and said, “You don’t get it, Ford. The stuff they’re making there … it’s bad. Really, really bad.”
“And the government’s funding it?” Parker asked. He had been listening through the broken window.
“Somebody is. I don’t know who. I just figured … well, it had to be somebody pretty high up.”
Ford glanced back at Parker, and as the eyes of the two men met, Ford knew they were sharing the same thought:
There were several people in Washington who might be able to marshal the sort of forces that were arrayed against them.
But there was only one man in Washington who definitely could.
“Yeah, I think we’re gonna be about as rogue as rogue can get,” Ford muttered.
That is, he amended to himself, if they survived the next fe
w minutes with pursuit closing in behind them.
CHAPTER 29
Ford hoped that the dirt road they were on would lead to a highway, or at least another paved road. The pickup they were in almost certainly didn’t have the power of the SUV following them. The SUV’s engine probably had been souped up so it would be capable of more speed.
So maybe it was a good thing after all that they were on a dirt road, Ford decided after a moment’s thought. That way the SUV’s extra power was less of an advantage for the pursuers.
The problem was that the road was getting narrower and rougher, and if that trend continued, it was liable to peter out completely, leaving them with nowhere to run.
Ford glanced at the side mirrors. The pickup’s tires were kicking up so much dust he couldn’t really see anything else behind them, but he knew the would-be killers were still back there. Based on the intel Earl Trussell had just spilled, they couldn’t afford to let him live, or anyone else who had been in close contact with him and might have found out about Casa del Diablo.
Might as well put the time they had left to good use, Ford thought. He said, “All right, Earl, tell me more. What are they making at this House of the Devil?”
Earl hesitated, then shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I don’t guess it really matters anymore, does it? We’re all gonna die anyway.”
“Just in case we don’t, the more people you tell, the better. The more people who know the secret, the less reason those guys back there have for wanting you dead.”
Earl frowned. “You know, I never really thought about it that way.”
“You planned on blowing the whistle when you stole that laptop and ran away from there, right?”
“I didn’t steal the laptop,” Earl objected. “It was mine. Well, the government owned it, I suppose, but it’s the one I used all the time. And yeah, I figured I ought to tell somebody what was going on there before a lot of people died.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Earl shook his head and sighed. “I … I got scared. I thought maybe I was making a big mistake. So I decided to take a few days and think it over while I made up my mind.”
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