River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy)

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  Which presumably Captain Vance Brewer had, since Owen LaTour said he spent a lot of his time at the peak. “Is that it?”

  “So far,” Robb said. “If I turn up anything else, I’ll let you know.”

  “Thanks, Robb. I appreciate the insight.”

  “Just take care of our people, Truly.”

  “I’m trying, man. Honestly.”

  “I know. Incidentally, I’ve been in touch with Simon Winslade and Johnny Crow. Simon tried a ritual summoning, to see if he could shed any light on what’s going on, but he said it turned into a disaster that nearly killed him. And Johnny’s in Las Vegas—not all that far from you, right? He says things are well and truly—no pun intended—fucked up there, occult-wise. Do me a favor, Truly. If it looks like things are going haywire, give me a head’s-up, okay? Let me get out of Dodge.”

  “I’ll do that, Robb. Thanks again.”

  He hung up the phone and sat there on the bed. Clearly, the army was hiding something at Victorio Peak. Was it gold? Or was it something more rare and precious, something to do with the power the region’s indigenous population had sensed there?

  Given Brewer’s involvement in the Ingersoll matter—presumed involvement, Truly amended, based on the fact that he had probably murdered Millicent Wong when she came to look into it—he suspected it was more about the power than the gold. Either way, he wanted to find out.

  * * *

  Specialist Owen LaTour was scared, which was just the reaction Vance Brewer had been hoping for. The young soldier had spotted him at the gym on Picatinny Avenue, where he’d been sweating through a basketball game with a handful of soldiers younger and taller than himself. To his credit, Owen had waited around until the game was finished, with Brewer’s team victorious, and then had approached the captain privately, drawing him toward empty bleachers. In hushed tones and tremulous voice, he had described his meeting with the CIA agent.

  “He knew your name, sir,” Owen said. “And he had your picture. I thought he knew you. Besides, he was with the CIA, and they’re on our side.”

  “There are a lot of sides,” Brewer said. “And a lot of players on each one, or crossing over between them. You know the DoD has its own intelligence service, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” Owen said. He swallowed anxiously, and wouldn’t meet Brewer’s gaze anymore.

  “Do you know why? Because the others are run by civilians. That means we can’t trust them. They have their own agenda, and it isn’t necessarily ours.”

  “But they’re not the enemy,” Owen protested.

  “They’re not always our friends,” Brewer said. “They don’t always see things the way we do. They may not be the enemy, but that doesn’t make them our pals.”

  “I didn’t mean to do anything to compromise you, Captain.”

  He wasn’t sure he had been compromised at all, since Owen LaTour couldn’t have known much about him. “Precisely what did you tell him?”

  “I was pretty buzzed, sir,” Owen said. “I think all I said was that I’d seen you in the area of Victorio Peak. That’s really all I can remember.”

  “When did you see me there?”

  “I don’t know. I drive people over there once in a while. I just saw you sometime, and remembered you because…I don’t know. You’re just a memorable guy.”

  Brewer couldn’t argue. He had tried to blend into the crowd, but in the end he couldn’t do much about it. He was who he was, and if people noticed his broad shoulders and wide nose and jutting jaw, he couldn’t control that.

  Just now he chose to emphasize his gray-blue eyes. He grabbed the younger soldier’s chin and turned his head up. Owen met his gaze fearfully, which was exactly the response Brewer intended. “Listen to me,” he said, lowering his voice to a menacing whisper. “If you see that bastard again, you keep your mouth shut, and let me know immediately. And you never, ever, talk about me or anything else you see here on the base to anyone from the outside. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s all, then. Dismissed.”

  Owen snapped to attention, saluted, and hurried away. Brewer gave serious thought to trailing the soldier and killing him. He decided not to, because he doubted the man had given away any genuinely useful information, or had it to give if he had wanted to. Killing him would make Brewer feel better temporarily, but in the long run it might create more problems than it solved.

  He rushed to the locker room, showered quickly, then dressed and hurried to a Jeep. Driving through the populated sections of the base, he controlled the impulse to floor the accelerator. As soon as he had left the collection of dun-colored buildings behind, out in the back country, he pushed the Jeep for every ounce of speed it had to give.

  He parked in the small lot outside Victorio Peak’s operations center, in the shade of a tall mesquite. A handful of other vehicles had parked nearby. Most people on the base never knew there was anything here at all, and those assigned to staff the center were closemouthed about it. Brewer went inside, nodded brusquely to the M.P. on door duty, and strode down the long hallway that led deep into the mountain’s interior. Here he found more doors, including one that required a retinal scan to pass through.

  This door gave him access to a tunnel carved thousands of years ago from the rock of the mountain itself, and improved upon by the U.S. Army over the past several decades. Brewer took the tunnel to another, smaller tunnel, one that—except for the electrical conduits tacked to the walls—felt hardly different, he imagined, from those the Indians must have used before Columbus brought disease and promise and civilization to the savages. His footsteps sounded dully on the rock floor, as if they were swallowed up by the walls instead of echoing. Halfway down this tunnel was a steel door.

  He inserted his key into the lock and gave a twist. The lock released, and he tugged on the handle. Inside the little room, the old man sat at his table, drawing pictures. The floor around him was littered with ones he had finished and shoved out of his way. His pencil was a gnarled stump. The stench of him—well, Brewer was used to that. It would have made young Mr. LaTour run puking into the hall, he was sure.

  Brewer picked up a couple of the latest pictures. Still drawing masks? he wondered. But when he looked at them, a chill raced through his body. He had seen the old guy draw a lot of things, some of them more than passingly strange. But they had always made some sort of sense, always reflected something that existed in the world, whether it was masks or locations, people or animals or objects.

  These did not fall into that category at all. These were beings, creatures, but not human ones—or worse, partially human, but not entirely so. They weren’t any animals that he could recognize. Their facial features were humanlike, but not right—the proportions were out of whack, mouths and eyes far too large, ears and noses minimized almost out of existence, and in the mouths, so many teeth…

  The bodies were even worse. They changed from picture to picture, but they were all monstrous, freakish. One had a bare belly with an extra face showing, as if pressed up against its skin from the inside. One had at least a dozen arms, all ending in thin fingers as long as the arms themselves, so that the character almost looked like she was wearing fringe. Another sat spread-eagled, clearly naked, but where its genitalia should have been there was a fly’s head, its many-faceted eyes rendered in incredible detail for a blind artist. Yet another was only a head, the shading of its neck turning it into liquid that flowed away from it, forming a river.

  Perhaps worst of all, this one and several others bore words. In all the old man’s years in this room, Brewer had never known him to write words on his drawings. Now he had, and they shook Brewer to his core.

  “Too late,” the man had written. The letters were shaky, but distinct.

  “Too late.”

  Suppressing a shiver, Brewer tried to figure out what came next.

  FORTY

  Molly drove through the streets of El Paso. She knew it was El Paso, because a part
of her recognized the streets: Montana, Radford, Hardaway, Raynold.

  But only a part.

  The rest of her—most of her—saw an entirely different landscape.

  She saw buildings flattened, piles of brick and stone spilling into the streets, smashed glass glinting among the rubble. Cars and trucks were abandoned everywhere, the promise of escape they offered illusory in the end. Floodwaters were receding, leaving rings of muck behind, coating everything with a film of dark goo. Power-line poles had fallen. Uprooted trees and limbs and leaves were scattered amid the wreckage. Everywhere—everywhere—bodies lay: corpses bloated in the streets, bodies hanging from windows, as if trying to get out or get in, one dangling from a flagpole, rope tied around a leg that threatened to give way at any moment, another cut nearly in half, looking like it was crawling underneath a stalled delivery truck.

  Among the corpses, vultures feasted, their bare gray heads slick with blood.

  This was El Paso as it could be. The world as it could be. Not Molly McCall’s vision of it, because she was no longer simply Molly McCall.

  She was Kethili-cha, and devastation was her due.

  She was Kethili-cha, and power belonged to her.

  She was Kethili-cha, and at long last, she was free.

  Early in her awakening, she had forced Wade to kill for her, drinking in his terror and confusion as he looked into the mirror and saw his father’s face looking back. His overwhelming guilt had been delectable. Thinking of that morning in the coffee shop, while Molly tried to draw information from him and Kethili-cha tried to pretend she didn’t know what was really troubling him, she had to laugh out loud.

  That sort of pleasure-by-proxy, while she relished it, was too inefficient in the long term. She saw the killings through his eyes—tasted blood and sweat, smelled the tang of horror in his victims’ sweat and piss—but finally, she yearned to kill with her own hands, letting the deaths of others fill her own senses.

  Her time had come. The reign of Kethili-cha had begun again.

  Molly’s phone rang. Kethili-cha wanted to ignore it, but Molly took over, yanking it from the purse she had tossed on the passenger seat of her brother’s SUV. Probably Frank, she thought, calling to fire me. “Hello?”

  “Molly, it’s Wade.” His tone was somber. Something was wrong. The mood of triumph she’d exulted in moments ago vanished.

  “What is it? What’s happened?”

  “It’s Byrd, Molly. I’m sorry. He’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “I was in the hospital. I told the nurses I was going to the cafeteria for a while, and they found me after it happened.”

  She was having a hard time tracking. “After what?”

  “Byrd died, Molly. He was in his room sleeping, and then he was gone.”

  She scanned the street ahead, saw an open space, and shot into it. Still holding the phone at her ear, she shut off the engine with a trembling hand. The other gripped the steering wheel. “He died?”

  “Peacefully, they say.”

  “Who was with him?”

  “Nobody. He was alone.”

  “Oh my God, Wade, alone? Byrd died alone?” She didn’t understand why, of everything, this fact seemed so important.

  “That’s what they told me, Molly.”

  “Okay, okay. I… are you still at the hospital?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I’m on my way, then. I’m in the car. I’ll be there in a few.”

  “Drive carefully, Molly. If you need me to come and get you—”

  “No!” She screamed it into the phone. “Sorry, Wade. I’m okay. I’ll drive over. Just don’t leave him alone anymore.”

  “I’ll be here, Molly. Don’t worry.”

  She folded the phone and dashed it to the floor on the passenger side, as if it alone had been responsible for the news.

  How could there be a world without Byrd in it?

  Nothing makes sense anymore, she thought. Nothing at all…

  FORTY-ONE

  Truly needed to find out what was going on inside Victorio Peak, but he wasn’t likely to gain access to it.

  Unlike most of his fellow CIA drones, however, he had another option, one they couldn’t imagine, and wouldn’t believe in even if they could.

  Hell, he wasn’t sure how much he actually believed. Having run out of other choices, however, he was willing to give it a try. So he had called Bernard Frontenac in Paris. The CIA had sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into trying to develop the application of remote viewing to intelligence purposes. Their success had been limited at best.

  Bur Bernard was supposed to be one of the best they had. If anyone could “see” inside the mountain, it was him. A gamble, to be sure…but maybe Truly’s best chance.

  “Have you found it?” Truly asked. “Almost in the middle of the state, east to west, but not far up from the border. Above Las Cruces.”

  “Yes, yes, I have located it on the map,” Bernard said. Truly could hear the rustle of paper over the phone. “Now, please, Mr. Truly, a moment of silence.”

  Truly shut up. Bernard cleared his throat. The map rustled again. Bernard hummed a little, tuneless. Mouth noises.

  Truly waited as patiently as he could. These things couldn’t be rushed, and he wasn’t the one trying to…well, whatever it was Bernard was doing. Reaching across the miles, across the Atlantic and most of North America, mentally homing in on a spot that was, for him, just one of those triangles on a map indicating a mountain. He had asked for days to prepare, and Truly had given him ten minutes, then called back after seven.

  He was glad the Frenchman wasn’t a mind reader, because he might have known that Truly wouldn’t be able to pay him from the agency account. If he got anything useful out of the man, he would write him a personal check.

  “A big man, you say. Gray and black hair?”

  “That’s right. He has a prominent nose, heavy, dark eyebrows, a jaw he could break down a door with.” He hadn’t known how many rooms, or whatever there were inside the mountain, or how to narrow Bernard’s search, except to have him try to locate Vance Brewer within it.

  “Yes, yes, I see him. His shoulders are as wide as two of me, side by side.”

  “Sounds like him,” Truly agreed. He didn’t know if he believed what he was hearing. Bernard sounded convinced, though, so he’d play along unless it got too outlandish.

  “He is alone in a small room. No…no, not alone, forgive me. The room is very small. It has one door and no windows. The walls are rock, like a cavern. There is a table. The other person, a man, an old man, he sits at that table. Something is on the floor. Paper, many pieces of paper. This man, your man, he looks at some of them, crushes them in his fist. He is angry, perhaps, or frightened, or both.”

  “What’s he afraid of? The other man?”

  “No, I think not. This other man, he is very old. He holds a pencil and writes—no, he draws. Pictures. This is what your man holds, some of these pictures. They are the things on the floor, the papers, as well.”

  “Can you see what they’re pictures of?”

  “No…no, they are too faint. They are drawings, pencil drawings, but of what I cannot say.”

  “Anything else, Bernard? I need more to go on.” Impatiently, he clicked the TV remote, pressed mute even as the image flickered into life. On the screen, fishermen in the North Atlantic battled giant waves. The waves looked as real as what Bernard described. Illusions, in other words, tricks of light and photons or whatever made TV images work these days.

  “One thing more, I think. The old man, the one making the drawings? He is very old. From him I get no sense of vitality, of life. He only draws, like an automaton. And I believe he is blind.”

  “He’s blind? He’s drawing all these pictures without seeing them?”

  “So it would appear, Mr. Truly.”

  “And you’re seeing what’s happening now? Right now, as we speak?”

  “That’s correct. The man—your
man, the military officer, although he wears no uniform, he has thrown his papers down, the drawings he held. Now he goes to the old man. He is angry, I think. He knocks the pencil from the blind man’s hand, takes the blind man by the elbow, pulls him from the chair. The old man’s legs are weak. I think he does not walk much. His legs tremble. The stronger man leads him toward the door. The old man is very weak, very pale. His hair is thin, like hair you see on a dead man. I sense he has not left this room in a long time, but your officer is taking him out of it now. A very, very long time, it is, since he has been out in the sun. He goes willingly, though, following your soldier out the door.”

  “What else, Bernard? Keep going.”

  “A strange word. I don’t see it, but it is there in the room with them just the same, I can sense it, almost taste it.”

  “What is it? What’s the word?”

  “Kethili.”

  “What does that mean, Bernard? Can you tell anything else?”

  Bernard swore. “Rien de tout,” he said. “It is gone, all of it. I have lost the image. Forgive me, Mr. Truly. These things happen.”

  “No problem, Bernard,” Truly said more graciously than he felt. His dad’s influence, he was sure. All those lessons in diplomacy. “Thanks for all you’ve done.”

  Bernard tried to chat further, but Truly felt a sudden urge to get out of the hotel and up to White Sands. He cut off the Frenchman with another quick thank-you, and hung up the phone.

  FORTY-TWO

  Wade paced the hospital hallways. Byrd’s body had been covered with a sheet, just like in the movies. By now it might well have been taken away. Surely every hospital had a morgue. When Molly got here, he supposed they would have to go down there. He checked his watch again, on his wrist along with the yellow rubber bracelet that hadn’t halted Byrd’s cancer after all. Thirty-three minutes and counting and where the hell was she. Assuming it was “down.” Would she have to identify the body? That made no sense. Byrd had been in their hospital for weeks, months. Surely they knew him as well as anyone by this time.