Strong from the Heart--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  69

  MARBLE FALLS, TEXAS

  “Why do I think this isn’t a coincidence?” Jones asked the two of them, reaching their table but stopping short of sliding in.

  “Take a seat, Jones,” Caitlin said. “We need to talk.”

  “That’s supposed to be my line.”

  “Used to be, when you had the world at your feet with the Department of Homeland Security.”

  “Pull up a chair and maybe you can punch your ticket back in,” Cort Wesley added.

  Jones slid in on Cort Wesley’s side instead. “How’d the two of you know I’d be here?”

  “Your expanding waistline would be at the top of the list,” Caitlin told him. “Force of habit would be a close second.”

  Jones glanced down at his belt and at the paunch that had begun to grow over it, in stark contrast with the washboard stomach he’d long prided himself on. “Pie’s better than booze to drown my sorrows, Ranger.”

  “Maybe you should try opiates. Word is they’re in especially plentiful supply these days, like somebody opened a spigot law enforcement has no idea how to close.”

  “What the Ranger’s saying,” Cort Wesley picked up, “is we just might be able to make those sorrows of yours go away. What would you say to that, Jones?”

  “That I’m buying.”

  * * *

  Cort Wesley laid it out for him, leaving nothing out, from Luke OD’ing, to Cholo Brown, to torching a pill mill clinic, to getting sprung from jail by Doyle Lodge. Not surprisingly, Jones seemed most interested when he got to the warehouse itself, to what he and Nola Delgado had discovered inside. The only thing Cort Wesley left out was mention of the four dead gunmen they’d left behind.

  “And what was it you realized?” Jones asked when Cort Wesley got to the end.

  “My original thinking was that that warehouse and all the others being operated by Roland Fass were acting like self-storage units for illegal drugs.”

  “A reasonable assumption even for you, cowboy.”

  “I don’t know what’s in those fancy storage units, but it’s not petrochemicals—that’s for just about sure. My guess is we’re looking at piperidine.”

  “An organic compound that’s used in the manufacture of numerous pharmaceuticals,” Caitlin elaborated, “most notably opiates in general and fentanyl in specific.”

  “I know what piperidine is,” Jones said, sounding as if he needed to prove himself all over again. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “I think this warehouse serves as the manufacturing base of whoever’s behind an increase in opioid distribution all over the country,” Cort Wesley told him. “I think all these drugs, including maybe the ones that almost killed my son, are being made right here in Texas.”

  Jones looked from Cort Wesley to Caitlin before letting his gaze settle on both of them. “Tell me what I’m missing here, unless we’re just having a nice, friendly conversation over pie.”

  “You want your two oh two area code restored,” Caitlin told him. “We can help you with that, if you help us with this.”

  “Okay.” Jones nodded. “I’m still listening.”

  “A second survivor got pulled out of Camino Pass earlier today.”

  Jones couldn’t stop his features from freezing solid. Caitlin tried to recall another time when she’d told him something he didn’t already know.

  “And Doc Whatley, the Bexar County ME, has a notion as to how it was this kid and Lennox Scully managed to survive the cyanide.”

  “I appreciate the heads-up.”

  “I thought you’d appreciate being on the inside, once he confirms his findings, which should give you a leg up on the competition when it comes to figuring out how to weaponize the stuff.”

  Jones tried to conceal his excitement over the prospects of that, but he couldn’t stop fidgeting in his seat as he pretended to regard the pie selections on the menu.

  “And what do you want from me in return for such a courtesy, Ranger?”

  “I think those warehouses, and the man named Roland Fass who’s fronting them, are protected, Jones. I think this whole operation is the work of somebody or somebodies who can pull the kind of strings most folks don’t even know exists. And I think you may have a notion as to who they might be.”

  Jones started to look down at the menu again, then stopped. “Hypothetically speaking?”

  “Nothing’s hypothetical with you, so cut the bullshit,” Cort Wesley snapped at him.

  “True enough, cowboy,” Jones said, managing to flash his old cocky sneer. “And it just so happens I do have some theories on the subject. But that’s all they are, theories.”

  Caitlin waved to a nearby server. “Love to hear them, Jones. Let’s get our order in, so you can get started.”

  70

  HOUSTON

  “You took your goddamn time calling me back,” Fass said, not bothering to disguise the anger in his voice.

  “I know you have trouble comprehending that once in a while I need to attend to the nation’s business, son,” Senator Lee Eckles told him. “So what’s got your britches wedged so far up your ass? Did another four of the men you hired get gunned down?”

  “You said you wanted me to do some counting. So I did. Much more of our stock than I anticipated has been contaminated with hydrogen cyanide, the same stuff that wiped out that town.”

  Eckles remained expressionless. “How much we talking, exactly?”

  “First off, we’ve confirmed that the contamination, for reasons yet unknown, has only affected the current lot.”

  “How much of it we talking about?”

  “A representative sampling indicates somewhere around half.”

  Dead air filled the line on Eckles’s end this time.

  “You still there, Senator?”

  “How many pills are we talking about here?” Eckles asked finally, his voice cracking with an edge of excitement.

  “Enough to dump a whole lot of people in the grave, boss.”

  “Can you just answer the question?”

  “A few hundred million.”

  “Did you say hundred million?”

  “As much as two hundred and fifty. Half the current stock on hand. I told you, I’ve been doing a lot of counting.”

  More dead air.

  “I’ve got another job for you,” Eckles’s voice returned, breaking the silence. “Contact the lab quick as you can. Talk to the chemists, the ones who uncovered the contamination.”

  “About what?”

  “How to replicate the same results, on purpose, in the production process.”

  “We’re not set up for that. We’ll need to bring in experts, construct new labs. That’ll take lots of time and even more money.”

  “We have plenty of both, Roland. Tell me the experts you need and I’ll see that you get them. Send me the specs of what you need built within our existing facility and I’ll make the necessary arrangements.”

  Eckles heard Fass sigh deeply on the other end of the line.

  “This is an entirely different operation. We’ll basically be starting from scratch, Senator.”

  “Who do you think said ‘Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it’?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Robert Oppenheimer, while he was building the bomb for the Manhattan Project. A fair comparison, don’t you think?”

  71

  MARBLE FALLS, TEXAS

  They ordered three different flavors, in order to better mix and match the slices, even though Caitlin knew that Jones was loath to ever share his selection. Given his expanding waistline, she had no reason to expect that wouldn’t be the case today.

  “Remember my old life, before Homeland, when we first met and tried to work together?”

  “CIA.” Caitlin nodded. “You were a spook.”

  “‘Shady’ wouldn’t begin to describe plenty of the stuff I did, pretty much par for the course in ove
rseas assignments. They give you a job to do and never ask how you did it.”

  “What’s this have to do with that warehouse in Houston, pill mill in Humble, and the big spike in opioid distribution nationwide?” Cort Wesley asked him.

  “Only everything, in another time and place that serves us well here. Before I met the Ranger, I was working as a Company liaison with drug interdiction efforts in the Golden Triangle.”

  “That sounds like an oxymoron to me,” Caitlin noted.

  “And, in large part, it was. The efforts were mostly bullshit, window dressing to hide the true nature and history of the cozy relationship between the CIA and Burmese and Thai warlords. On the surface, we were turning a blind eye to the biggest drug pipeline into the United States. Below the surface, we were running one of the biggest drug operations in modern history.”

  “Air America,” Cort Wesley muttered, just loud enough for Jones to hear.

  Jones nodded. “Only the CIA wasn’t just involved with the transportation of the drugs. Back in the day, as in Vietnam and its immediate aftermath, heroin was refined in a laboratory built at the CIA headquarters in northern Laos. And, as a result, a decade after supposed U.S. military intervention, Southeast Asia represented seventy percent of the world’s opium supply.”

  “You want to explain how this history lesson is relevant to what we’re looking at today?” Caitlin prodded.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Jones asked her. “What you called ‘Air America’ never really stopped operating; it just stopped flying.”

  “Why can’t you just answer my question?”

  “You’ve got to understand the context here, Ranger. Right, cowboy?” Jones continued, looking toward Cort Wesley as if for support. “All those Company men back in the Vietnam days believed that what they were doing was in the best interests of America, that their cause was just.”

  “The ends justifying the means and all that shit,” Cort Wesley interjected.

  “Context, cowboy, remember? The CIA genuinely thought communism was headed to the U S of A and that it was the Company’s job to stop that from happening. They needed to stop the Red threat at all costs, and if that meant making a deal with a lesser devil in their view, then so be it.”

  “In other words, men like you turned the local population into your drug mules,” Caitlin said, shaking her head as if not believing what she’d just said.

  “I know this may come as a shock to you, Ranger, but the world is bigger than Texas. We didn’t take advantage of anyone and we didn’t turn anyone toward the drug business who wasn’t already there. Growing opium was a natural agricultural enterprise for these people and they had been doing it for a long time before the Americans arrived. When we got there, they continued to do it, only, thanks to the air support services we provided into and out of the areas in question where the product originated, they were actually able to improve their lifestyle, provide better for their families. Much better.”

  “What you’re saying,” noted Cort Wesley, “is that Air America was good for the local economy and you were just doing a good deed here.”

  “Well, not me personally,” Jones corrected. “My mother was still wiping my ass at the time, believe it or not.”

  “Could I choose not to think about it?” Caitlin asked him. “And how’s this relate to all those warehouses we believe are stockpiling product that it now appears is being manufactured right here in Texas?”

  “Have you listened to a word I said, or have those pills you’ve been living on turned your brain to mush?”

  “That’s right, Jones, you weren’t there when I blew a hole in the world.”

  “From what I hear, you’ve fallen in.”

  Caitlin could feel her skin heating up, like she’d strayed too close to an oven burner. “Heard from who?”

  “When someone with a rep like yours gets hooked on pills, word spreads, reaching even the new circles in which I move now.”

  “I’m not hooked.”

  Their server arrived with their slices of pie, and Jones went right to work on his first piece of strawberry rhubarb, speaking through his first mouthful. “I’ll bet that’s what the cowboy’s son said, too, after he OD’d. Right, cowboy?”

  Cort Wesley hardened his stare, said nothing.

  “Anyway,” Jones continued, looking back at Caitlin, “if you’d listened to what I’ve been saying, you’d have figured out that a new cabal of power brokers, from Washington and parts unknown, must have followed the Air America model. Filling a void that appeared at the perfect time for them.”

  “What void is that, Jones?” Caitlin asked him.

  “Believe it or not, the government’s efforts have begun to put a sizable dent in the practices that have allowed the illicit prescription narcotics trade to flourish. Pill mills like the one the cowboy here took a torch to are going as extinct as dinosaurs. Big Pharma, meanwhile, is under tremendous pressure from Congress to clean up their act. Having already made their billions on the rampant overproduction of opioids, they’re starting to adhere to systems and protocols aimed at reducing the flood of the drugs that made them as easy to get as aspirin in some places. The distributors who are equally responsible for this unadulterated mess have had no choice but to play follow the leader. Need I go on?”

  Caitlin decided to do that for him. “The end result is a shortage of the pills, which have become far less readily available. A void, like you said, leaving this reconstituted version of Air America to fill that demand with a fresh supply.”

  “Hey,” started Cort Wesley, “at least the CIA’s goals made sense, however ridiculous the domino theory seems in retrospect. What exactly are the goals of this new Air America, at least in principle?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “I wouldn’t have asked if it was.”

  “Money, cowboy, billions and billions of dollars of it, maybe even hundreds of billions, to do with whatever they see fit. Maybe to get candidates they support elected. Maybe to influence foreign elections or, taken to an extreme, to finance regime change when the current regime was acting against American interests.”

  “In other words,” Caitlin said, shaking her head, “as long as it conforms to the catchphrase ‘against American interests,’ anything goes. Both during the Vietnam War and today. Does anything ever change in your world, Jones?”

  “My waistline, apparently,” he said, although that didn’t stop him from digging into his second piece of strawberry rhubarb.

  “You think a reconstituted version of Air America might be running the biggest drug operation in the entire country,” Caitlin concluded.

  “I think that’s what you’re describing, to a tee.”

  “How do I find the men responsible, Jones?”

  “Jesus, Ranger, get a clue, will you? You can’t get to these people; nobody can. Even a gunfighter like you would get smoked if you tried to flush them out.”

  “Not the first time I’ve heard the bull I’m riding at the rodeo will get my skull crushed.”

  Jones’s gaze bored into Caitlin, all of his attention fixed on her as if Cort Wesley wasn’t even at the table. “What about your great-grandfather, Ranger?”

  “What about him?”

  “He rode that bull in the rodeo a long time before you did.”

  72

  MEXICO; 1898

  The sun still burned blistering hot in the sky, when a rocky, downward-sloping ridgeline revealed oddly fertile lands, rich in flora and growth, beyond.

  “Behold, Ranger,” said a beaming Felipe Wong, sounding like a father showing off his newborn child. “I believe you know what you’re looking at.”

  William Ray Strong had only limited experience with the bright red flowers growing in the field below, which seemed to stretch forever. But he’d seen the results of opium addiction firsthand, a scourge that seemed to show up in Texas overnight, without explanation, and showed no signs of receding. If ever there was a time and need for the old days and methods the Ranger
s had used while chasing Comanche raiding parties and Mexican bandits, it was over this. The only judge those druggers needed was a Colt, and the only jury the shovel used to dig their graves.

  “When we emigrated from China twenty-five years ago,” Wong continued, “we brought the seeds with us. Most thought this to be a random act undertaken in the hope of replicating the success of growing poppies in our new land.”

  The Ranger watched Wong stiffen atop his horse, his expression curling as if he’d bitten into something sour. His pride at displaying the product of his ambitious efforts was replaced by regret and bitterness over the circumstances that had brought him to Mexico in the first place.

  “Most of us worked those fields back home, Ranger, little more than slaves, deemed easily replaceable. Just like the Chinese who built your railroads,” Wong added, with a fresh twinge of bitterness lacing his tone.

  “I had my own experience with that, going back a few years. Worked with the famous hanging judge Roy Bean.”

  “I know of that experience,” Wong told him. “You served my people well when no one else would bother. You stood up for them when no one else would, against powerful forces who wielded many guns.”

  “Well, that’s true enough.”

  “I heard a few of those the railroad brought in were famous gunfighters who started killing in your Civil War and never stopped. I heard you faced them down.”

  “That was a long time ago, mister.”

  “It’s why I wanted to meet you, all the same.” Wong patted his horse, then continued. “It’s why I’m sorry I have to kill you.”

  William Ray remained unmoved. “Plenty of men have come at me with that same intention, including those gunfighters you just mentioned, who had me outnumbered by a bunch. You’d be wise not to follow them.”

  “I admire your system of justice, your laws, for the contrast they pose with China’s, where those of a lower caste have no rights. I told you before how the common belief is we immigrated here randomly, but that’s not the case at all. We came to Mexico because we already knew the land and climate were ideal for growing poppies. We came to Mexico because we knew we could own it, instead of serving as slaves the way our brethren have, north of the border.”