River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy)

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  As Robb emerged from the wreckage, he offered a loose-limbed shrug. “I get a sense of fear, right?” he said, his breath steaming in the chill air of late afternoon. “That may be too weak a word. More like terror.” He gestured over his shoulder. “It’s especially strong back where you said the room the fire started in was, right? I’m assuming it’s a trace emotion Ingersoll left behind, and if that’s correct, then just before he died he was freaking petrified of something.”

  “The knowledge that he was about to burn to death might do that to a guy,” Truly observed. “What about what Millicent said she asked him to look into in the first place? The disruption of the ley lines?”

  Another shrug. “That’s been an ongoing issue since that night. It might be why I can’t pick up anything more concrete than that generalized sensation of terror here. But it seems to be easing up a bit now, right, like maybe it was an anomaly caused by some specific incident, and it’s normalizing again.”

  Truly tucked his gloved hands under his arms. The temperature seemed to be dropping by the minute. “That’s something to be thankful for, I guess.”

  Robb glanced over his shoulder, as if worried that something might have followed him from the house. “Depends on what caused the disruption in the first place. If it was something really bad that decided to stick around for a while, it might have only affected the ley lines when it originally passed through. Metaphorically speaking, of course. It might not have been an actual passage, but simply a change in status.”

  “Sounds like you’re almost describing something physical, like an object entering our atmosphere.”

  “Not physical per se, but otherwise the analogy isn’t bad.”

  “Like a wave of…what? Power?” Truly genuinely wanted to understand what the man was saying. “Passing through the energy fields?”

  “More or less.” Robb drew a series of roughly parallel vertical slashes in the air with both hands, then turned them and did the same horizontally. “Think of the ley lines as a grid, like longitude and latitude lines on a globe, right? Except they have no known beginning or end point, they just continue infinitely throughout space. Through our universe and however many other universes there are. Anything that moves has to move through those lines, but most things—you, me, an airplane, a cricket—don’t disturb them, because although we generate psychic waves, they’re so minute as to not matter. Something that would disturb them—especially to the extent that they seem to have been disrupted the other day—would have to carry major occult weight. And if something that significant passed through, it would have caused a ripple effect. To mix my metaphors, imagine that the lines are a body of water that envelops the Earth. Whatever passed through would have caused wavelets that ran all the way around, eventually slapping against each other and generating mini-wavelets that started back. Finally things would calm down again, but it would take a while. And whatever the original force was, it wouldn’t necessarily be gone now, just not moving around anymore.”

  “You’re not making me feel any better here, Robb.”

  “I tell all my clients that they may not like what I tell them. Same goes for you.”

  “How bad could it get? If you’re wrong, and things don’t go back to normal?”

  Robb shrugged. “That’s impossible to say. How bad would it get if, say, gravity stopped working? Or the oceans all dried up overnight? Depending on the severity of the disruption, we could be looking at that kind of scale. As I said, I think it’s getting better, that the disruption was temporary. But I don’t know that for sure, nor do I know how long the ripple effects might last.”

  Robb rubbed his slender, ungloved hands together to warm them. Truly watched him, then looked back at the burned rubble. He couldn’t find a diplomatic way to phrase his next question, so he just asked it. “So you picked up a sensation of fear from a spot where a man burned to death. That it?”

  Robb blinked and blew into his clasped hands. “One other thing, but I don’t know what it means. A vague sense of a river. Is there a river around here?”

  Truly had studied a map of the area on the plane out. “The headwaters of the Rio Grande are nearby. It’s not much more than a mountain stream, this high up, but that’s the biggest. Plenty of lesser rivers and creeks in the area, too.”

  “Maybe that’s what it is, then. I don’t know…it’s just this feeling. Flowing water. A river. Could mean anything, or nothing at all.”

  Truly stamped his feet. The ground was hard, the coldness shooting up through his shoes.

  “You know what I would do? In your place?” Robb asked.

  “What?”

  “Bring Millicent over here.”

  “Millicent Wong?”

  “Nobody’s more sensitive than her. If there’s anything to find here—and I think there is—she’ll be able to grab ahold of it. I wish I could, but it’s defeating me. And it sounds like she’s upset enough by the whole situation that she might be willing to make the trip.”

  Which Truly knew he’d be paying for. In more ways than one, he had no doubt. It would entail another argument with Ronald Loesser, for starters. When he came back empty-handed from this trip, after a brief command appearance at his father’s home in Michigan, Loesser’s limited patience would have run out. He would have to be very convincing, or he’d have to lie about where he was going and why.

  And if she came up blank, then what? With the official report calling Ingersoll’s death an accident, he was running out of options fast.

  On the bright side, he didn’t really need to solve this thing. Maybe asking Millicent to come to Colorado would be good enough to convince her and the others that he was serious about looking after them.

  That, after all, was what this had been about from the beginning. The appearance of concern, not the real thing.

  His masters in Washington would be proud.

  SEVEN

  Truly dropped Robb Ivey off at the airport after dark. From there, Robb would catch a United Express flight to Denver, then fly home to San Francisco. He hated flying, had ever since 9/11, when it had changed from being an occasional treat to a frustrating annoyance. At least he had no luggage to deal with. It had been a long day, but Sandra was home with the twins—two boys, eight years old—and they were a handful and a half. Then there were the dogs, two Italian greyhounds, and they demanded attention as well. He had made the journey a one-day turnaround, scheduling the first flight that would get him into Alamosa and the last one that would take him away.

  When he was growing up, his older sister had played Donovan albums until her record player wore out, and he had grown up hearing the warbling Welshman. Now he wished Donovan’s Trans-love Airways was an actual option, because at least they would probably serve vegan food and spiritual enlightenment, and he was pretty certain that neither were part of United Express’s customer service regimen.

  Plus, Donovan promised that Trans-love would get you there on time, and that also seemed a thing of the past.

  Alamosa’s tiny airport was far from crowded, but even here he saw people standing at the security checkpoint holding their liquids in zippered plastic bags. The whole idea was absurd. It was like the whole country, maybe the whole world, had gone nuts.

  And Agent Truly, of course, worked for one of the nuttier organizations around. Robb had agreed to perform some tests for them, because he had wanted to test his skills in a rigidly controlled environment where, he suspected, no one would expect him to actually succeed. Besides, he loved his country, and if the CIA could use him for some productive purpose, he would happily do as he was asked.

  So far, with this one exception, it had been a lot of testing and retesting but without much in the way of positive contributions. For that matter, this one hadn’t worked out the way anyone would have preferred. But at least it resembled useful, even if it hadn’t really proved to be.

  Truly was an odd duck, too. His wide blue eyes seemed to take up a full third of his face, like he was some
cartoon icon designed for maximum cuteness. Hard to take seriously as a CIA agent with that face. He projected an absolute lack of guile, which might come in handy as long as it was only an illusion.

  He had seemed distracted, too. His body was in Colorado but his mind was elsewhere. Robb had sensed that a woman was involved. Maybe he had broken up with someone recently, or maybe the trip had brought back strong memories of someone he had been to Colorado with in the past. Robb had tried not to pry, but some things just forced themselves on him when the emotions were strong enough. In Truly’s case, they had been raw and powerful.

  With thirty-five minutes before his flight, he decided to go into the restroom. He’d been holding his bladder since halfway down the mountain from Ingersoll’s place, and he felt ready to burst. A few minutes in there, and then he’d go through security and wait at the gate.

  “Fly Trans-love Airways” repeated over and over in his head.

  Thanks, sis.

  * * *

  Captain Vance Brewer had been debating whether to kill both men since they had arrived at the psychic’s house up in the San Juans. He had reached the scene before them, and had hunkered down in the trees about six hundred yards away. By the time the two men showed up, he had assembled a parabolic microphone, set it up on a tripod, and pointed it toward the ruins. When they got there—as the old man’s drawings had predicted they would—he could hear every word, as easily as if he’d been standing right next to them.

  In the end he had decided to let them go. The guy who drove, the baby-faced man with the big blue peepers, didn’t seem to know anything about anything. And the other one, the one who was clued in, was clearly working for him. He was a psychic, apparently, but maybe not a very good one, since he had drawn a blank here, not even sensing an onlooker.

  Brewer followed them to the airport and parked at the curb with a Homeland Security placard on his dashboard when baby-face let the tall, bald psychic out.

  The guy had just gone into the men’s room, which meant Brewer had to make a final decision now. Restrooms were an ideal killing ground—almost no business or institution had put surveillance cameras in them yet, although cameras were commonplace everywhere else. And you could lock the body up in a stall, so by the time anyone found it (even janitors weren’t inclined to disturb a man in a locked stall) you could be long gone. He had gone inside the terminal after the psychic on the off chance that the guy been lying to baby-face—that he really had learned something he hadn’t shared with his boss.

  Brewer watched the men’s room door for thirty seconds, forty. Finally, he went inside. The tall man stood before a sink washing his hands. Brewer stopped in front of the mirror, ran water into his own hands and dashed some onto his face, wiping it off the bridge of his flat, prominent nose, smoothing down the short, once-black hair (more gray in it every week, he mused) that he combed back off his forehead. He pretended to examine the bags that had formed under his eyes these last few years, the lines at the corners of those eyes, the creases around his mouth, while he watched the psychic wash up. At fifty-two, Brewer had a physique that men in their early thirties envied—a few pounds not precisely where he’d like them, maybe, but solid and muscular, flat-stomached, with broad, sloping shoulders and a thick neck and ripped, powerful arms that ended in hands that looked big enough to choke a lion.

  “Getting old sucks,” he said after a few moments.

  “Tell me about it,” the psychic replied. He gave Brewer a long, curious look in the mirror, then turned away, shook water from his hands, turned to the automated paper towel machine, waved in front of it. A towel dispensed and the psychic tore it off, wiped his hands dry. It wasn’t until he was tossing the wadded-up towel into the trash that Brewer decided to let him live.

  Your lucky day, pal. Good thing for you I don’t think you know shit.

  By the time Brewer was out of the restroom, the psychic was passing through the security checkpoint. Brewer watched his back until he was out of sight, then went back to his car. He had a long drive ahead of him, through the night. He hated to be away from the old man for too long.

  Who knew what the geezer might draw next?

  EIGHT

  From the air, El Paso and Ciudad Juárez looked like a single city bisected by the Rio Grande. Like Paris and the Seine, or London and the Thames, Wade thought. From the low point of the river’s concrete channel, buildings spread across the hills, reaching farther every time he flew in or out, it seemed, a quickly metastasizing cancer of urban sprawl.

  Which, given that his main reason for coming was to see Byrd before leukemia finished him, might not have been the best analogy. Fortunately, he hadn’t spoken it out loud, and he could chastise himself mentally for it without embarrassing himself.

  CNN had kicked in for a first-class seat home, and as much downtime as he needed. Wade understood the unspoken warning that he’d better not need more than a month or six weeks, including the holidays, since twenty-four-hour cable news waited for no man or woman, however damaged.

  He could always find another job, though. He’d never find another Byrd McCall. Which meant he would stay right here as long as it took. It would be just fine with him if the war ended while he sat beside Byrd’s hospital bed. The days of captivity had been a bitch, no denying that, but over the long haul he thought the days of reporting on mass deaths—forty in a marketplace on one day, seventy at a police station the next, then thirty-four job seekers killed by a car bomb, American troops slaughtered by IEDs, and more, and more—wore on him even harder.

  It was all part of the job. Adding to the stress, stateside politicians blamed the media for not reporting the good things that were happening: schools being opened, electricity being restored. That wasn’t the case, though. Wade longed for positive stories, if only to clear his palate of the shitstorm that was his daily life, and the daily life of virtually everyone else in Iraq. And yes, schools were being opened. Not as many as had closed, but that was partly because the population of school-age children had shrunk, what with refugees fleeing the country and more kids dying every week. As for electricity, it had been restored, which was better than no electricity at all. But even in Baghdad’s wealthiest districts, it was an on-again, off-again thing—a few hours a day at best.

  As the plane dropped toward El Paso International, he felt the weight of war lift off his shoulders, as surely as if he were leaving it behind at thirty thousand feet. Another weight—the anxiety of facing a dying friend—was replacing it, but that he was willing to bear.

  These last few days had been strange, almost as bizarre as the captivity itself. After being checked out at Ibn Sina hospital in Baghdad (some cracked ribs, two teeth gone, various bruises and lacerations), he had spent a day being debriefed by military intelligence officers. Based on his description, they had backtracked and found the bombed-out mosque, but the tunnels beneath it were empty, a colonel had told him unhappily, with no indication that they had been occupied anytime in the recent past. Wade wasn’t trying to keep any secrets, although he had glossed over the more unbelievable aspects of his escape, wanting more time to think over what had happened—and to convince himself that it wasn’t all in his head—before discussing those. Colonel Cox said that the neighborhood had been populated when the troops went in, which didn’t square with Wade’s experience. He suffered the colonel’s thinly veiled implications that he was hiding something, but he was glad to get on a plane.

  His next stop was the American military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where his injuries were looked at once more, and a new batch of intelligence officers took a shot at his story. He told it the same way, glossing over the weirdness. He spent a night there, then got on yet another airplane, bound for Atlanta and CNN headquarters.

  At CNN, he received a hero’s welcome, with cameras rolling the whole time. The footage must have aired fifty times in the next twenty-four hours; every time he caught the channel, on a hotel set or in an airport, it seemed to come up again, like cole
slaw that had sat in the sun too long at a Fourth of July picnic.

  After dinner with some of the network’s top brass and a night in Atlanta, he finally got onto a flight for El Paso. He had taken several long, hot showers in the interim, but he hadn’t shaved; he wouldn’t be on camera for a good while, and it seemed like the right time for him to grow back the beard he’d had to hack off for his first television gig, all those years ago.

  Because it promised decent gas mileage, Wade drove a rented Ford Focus straight from the airport to Providence Memorial Hospital, on Oregon Street. The hospital was a collection of yellowish tan buildings, several stories tall, just up the hill from UTEP. The neighborhood was full of medical facilities, so many that it seemed everyone on the streets must be either a sickie or a student.

  Unlike the hospital in Germany, which had stank of disinfectant, or Baghdad’s, which reeked of blood and decay, Providence’s scent was clean and fresh. Even here, he was recognized and fussed over. While he hoped it wouldn’t be a regular occurrence, it did help him cut through the red tape and find out where Byrd’s private room was, in the Young Tower.

  Byrd looked awful.

  He smiled when Wade entered the room, but his gums were pink and raw, his face gaunt, as if it had begun to collapse in on itself. The skin was bruised and covered with sores. His formerly thick brown hair was gone, stolen away by chemotherapy. The scar across his left eyebrow stood out more than it used to, the damaged tissue there slick and white. He sat up in the bed, bracing himself on his right arm, which had lost its muscle tone, along with most of the fat, leaving behind loose, ruined flesh.

  “I look swell, huh?” Byrd said as Wade regarded him. “You look good, though, under those bruises.” He stroked his chin. “Beard, too. I like.”