Strong As Steel

by Jon Land

“Because they’ve developed some notions, theories. Have ruled things out and narrowed the options down to some general parameters. Until four days ago, that information was above even my security clearance, and mine is about equal to the president’s.”

  “Dallas changed things.”

  “For me it did,” Jones affirmed. “But it was those four bodies at Bane Sturgess that altered the dynamics of this for the whole damn country.”

  “History repeating itself the other day in New Braunfels.” Cort Wesley nodded. “Okay, so we know you don’t have these bone boxes.”

  “Obviously.”

  “And we know whoever sent those gunmen to Communications Technology Providers to cover their tracks doesn’t have them either. So, Jones, here’s my question,” Cort Wesley continued. “If the good guys don’t have these ossuaries, and the bad guys don’t have them, who does?”

  78

  SPINNAKER FALLS, TEXAS

  “I’d join you if I could, Ranger,” Wyatt Bass continued, “but that would leave the place untended.”

  “I think I can handle this myself,” Caitlin told him.

  “You speak Spanish?”

  “I do. Might be helpful if you made the intro, just to smooth the waters, so they don’t take off running.”

  “They won’t,” Bass said stiffly, no sense of doubt whatsoever in his voice. “Because if you’re there, they’ll know it’s because I sent you.”

  “There” was the crumbling Spanish mission, bathed in the vapors and coarse smoke from the burning trench, which had thinned somewhat as the winds died down. Approaching the mission, though, still felt like stepping into the effects of nuclear winter.

  In addition to the stilled pump jacks, Caitlin also noticed a horizon dotted with similarly frozen wind turbines, evidence of another failed attempt to breathe life into this moribund area. Drawing closer in her rented SUV, she realized that the mission itself was bigger than it had looked from the convenience store parking lot, and with portions in much better condition than even her initial impression had indicated. The walls looked sturdy enough to again support the manning of the ramparts in battle, structurally sound to the point that they could hold the requisite cannons. The courtyard beyond was dominated by the bell tower attached to a Spanish mosaic chapel built by the original Spanish settlers of this frontier, who, in search of a better life, ended up facing all manner of bandit and Indian. Stephen Austin had founded the Texas Rangers to “range” the land and provide law and order, setting the tone for all who came after them to serve justice on those who harmed the innocent.

  She supposed things hadn’t really progressed all that much.

  Caitlin emerged from the SUV, certain she was being watched, and walked with both her gun and badge plainly in view but with her hands in the air to alert whomever that she came in peace. Hell, if she’d had a white kerchief, she might be waving it now.

  Drawing within a stone’s throw of the mission, she watched the big wooden double doors open to the inside, the warped wood dragging against the ground. A Caucasian figure emerged at the head of a small group of Latinos. He signaled them to stop and then continued outside the mission’s walls to approach Caitlin alone.

  “I’m going to guess this isn’t a social call, Ranger.”

  Caitlin lowered her hands but kept them in view as she stopped. “But I’m not here to roust the people here, either. As far as the rest of the world knows, I was never here and neither were you.”

  “Then, by all means, step inside.”

  Caitlin started walking again, coughing out the chalky residue that had settled in her lungs from the trench fire burning a quarter mile to the south. Passing through the open gate, she saw the inside of the mission to be thriving, taking on the aspect of what it must have looked like two centuries before. The courtyard was as well landscaped as the desert conditions would allow, wiped clean of scrub brush and dried gravel. Rows of plantings that somehow thrived in the desert climate sat amid a combination of wood and stone benches and a circular seating area that she took for an outdoor classroom. The chapel and its spiraling bell tower dominated the rest of the courtyard, obscuring most of the single-story structures that clearly had been rebuilt. An old truck packing a pair of tanks labeled “Propane,” which must have supplied the mission’s power, was parked parallel to the church, the tanks’ silvery finishes blinding in the sunlight.

  The man who’d invited her in was tall and lean, mustachioed and wearing a red plaid kerchief around his neck for easy drawing up over his mouth to ward off the trench fire fumes and residue, which was already clinging to her clothes and skin like glue. He had the look of a movie cowboy whose name doesn’t make the end credits, except that his rawboned look and tanned, leathery flesh was real and not the product of makeup.

  “I’m Daniel Aidman, Ranger,” he said extending his hand. “Wyatt Bass called ahead to tell us you were coming.”

  “Explains why those men you got poised on that wall didn’t shoot me,” Caitlin said back, taking Aidman’s hand. “Aidman’s not a Spanish name, last time I checked.”

  “My mother was Mexican, as are all those who reside within these walls.”

  Caitlin glanced at the gunmen wielding .30-06s, stationed on the wall and positioned to be invisible from the outside. “They were already up there before I made my way over, Mr. Aidman. Care to tell me what they’re guarding against?”

  “Intrusion,” Aidman said, and left it there. “This is our home.”

  Caitlin could tell there was something else but didn’t press the issue, with other priorities in mind.

  “You ACLU, something like that?” she asked Aidman.

  “I was ACLU, then something like that.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was considered too obstinate and none too good at following the rules.”

  “I can relate to that, sir.” Caitlin looked around at the people who continued to spill out into the courtyard from wherever they’d been hiding. “Don’t suppose any of these folks have credit cards, Mr. Aidman, but I’m guessing you do.”

  Aidman remained silent, swallowing hard as Caitlin extracted the copy Young Roger had made for her of the piece of the credit card receipt she’d extracted from the ash.

  “I’m guessing the numbers we were able to salvage from this,” she resumed, handing it to Aidman, “match one of your cards. I’m guessing you purchased some sundries before you made your way out into the desert outside of Sonora, where, from that mesa, you had a front row seat for all the excitement.”

  Aidman continued regarding the piece of paper, avoiding Caitlin’s gaze.

  “Could you tell me if I have that right, sir?”

  He finally looked up and handed the piece of paper back to Caitlin, after folding it back into quarters for her.

  “I’d like to show you the chapel, Ranger. We can talk inside there, get out of the heat.”

  “It was a simple question, sir.”

  “But the answer is considerably less so. Goes back a whole lot of years.”

  “How many?”

  Aidman grabbed Caitlin’s stare and held it, his eyes saying more than his words. “1994.”

  “Let’s check out that chapel, Mr. Aidman.”

  79

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS; 1994

  “I want the whole world to know what I’ve known my entire life, Tejano,” Luna Diaz Delgado continued, addressing a visibly shocked Jim Strong. “That there is no God.”

  “Well,” he managed, collecting his thoughts as he coughed out the chalky residue that had collected in his lungs while following the winding path of the Red Widow’s escape tunnel, “that explains your claims about it having been a curse that killed those three men we couldn’t identify. But it wasn’t a curse that just attacked your hacienda, señora; it was an army. And, given a choice, I think I’d rather take on a curse.”

  “Who are they?” Delgado asked him.

  Jim hesitated, caught in the grip of ruminating on his own faith
, or lack of it. He hadn’t been to church even once in the near decade since the murder of his wife, the last and only woman he’d ever loved. He despised not so much God as religion in general, with a fervor that approached his feelings toward drug gangs and wife beaters. There’d been a time in his life, after his daughter was born, when he’d gravitated toward the Church to do the right thing. It was to please his wife, sure, but he took comfort in the notion that the mere act was bringing him closer to God, something that could definitely prove advantageous in his particular line of work.

  A devout Catholic, his wife had gone to church far more often. And then Mexican druggers had gunned her down inside his own home with four-year-old Caitlin hiding just steps away. She bore no memory of that night, but Jim remembered speeding home when word reached him, seeing her in the company of local cops and D. W. Tepper, with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders.

  Jim’s weakness as a man, and what had ultimately dropped him into the bottle for a stretch, was the need to always have an enemy. The spare room in their modest home was papered with wanted posters and police reports covering the most heinous of crimes committed by the most brutal criminals who’d escaped the clutches of the local police. Each of them became his quarry, as if Jim was determined to stamp out every bit of evil from one side of Texas to the other. A mandate he’d taken on because, clearly, God couldn’t be relied on to do His job.

  What kind of God lets an innocent woman be murdered under witness of her own daughter?

  The question might have been a cliché, just as it was a cliché that Luna Diaz Delgado was one of the few survivors of the massacre that had ended the wedding of her parents and made her an orphan. So here he was, in a tunnel with a woman who’d murdered her own husband and then blamed the cartels, which gave her the excuse she needed to wipe out their jefes, along with the families of the jefes, as a warning to anyone who might otherwise have taken up arms against her. Delgado had learned long ago, in a painful and bloody manner, that the number one rule of pursuing power of any kind really was to be more ruthless than your opponent. Being willing to do the unthinkable, to go beyond what those opponents were capable of acting upon or even considering.

  “We should get going, señora,” Jim said to the Red Widow.

  “You haven’t answered my question yet, Tejano. Who are these people that are doing this? What are they after?”

  “Seems pretty obvious to me that they’re doing everything they can to protect this secret you’re so determined to release to the world.”

  “The truth is the truth,” Delgado said stiffly.

  “Not in the minds of most folks, on this topic. Their faith won’t let them think differently on the subject.” Jim stopped there, but another thought occurred to him. “There’s a difference, señora, between struggling with your faith and losing it altogether.”

  “You believe that’s the case with me,” the Red Widow said, as the end of the tunnel appeared, “and you’re right. But, tell me, where does your faith come from?”

  Jim tapped his holster. “The twenty-five hundred feet per second my bullets travel.”

  * * *

  “You’ve got who with you just short of the border?” D. W. Tepper said, through a mouth that had dropped almost to the floor.

  “You heard me.”

  “I need to hear it again, to make sure my hearing’s not even worse than I thought it was.”

  “The Red Widow.”

  “Luna Diaz Delgado?”

  “Is there another Red Widow in these parts? We’re just south of the border and I don’t want to cross until there’s somebody friendly on the other side.”

  “I’m not sure that describes me, in this particular case, Ranger Strong.”

  “Maybe you didn’t hear what I said about more gunmen than fought in the Battle of the Bulge attacking her home today, Ranger Tepper.”

  “Maybe you should’ve joined them.”

  “How fast can you get down here?”

  * * *

  Jim Strong checked Luna Diaz Delgado into the very same roadside motel where the man with no face had taken the mirrors off the walls of his room. Not only did he figure that this was the last place the same man would look for her, but also it was the kind of place that didn’t ask a lot of questions. The clerk who checked him in, while the Red Widow remained in D. W. Tepper’s truck, also seemed to be ecstatic over serving the needs of the Texas Rangers.

  “Let’s keep this between us,” Jim said, shaking the man’s hand.

  “Does this make me a deputy or something?”

  “Close enough.”

  Back in the truck, parked out of sight from the clerk’s view, Jim could sense the tension that had settled between Tepper in the front seat and la Viuda Roja in the back. He knew he should come clean to Tepper about what Delgado claimed was inside one of those shipping crates that had gone missing, but he still could see no sense in risking the destruction of two careers as opposed to one.

  “You know what they say about in for a penny, in for a pound,” Tepper noted, after Jim had escorted her into the motel room. “When I picked the two of you up, your baggage came along for the ride.”

  “The woman and I travel light.”

  “You, maybe. She’s lugging around more weight than Marley’s ghost.”

  “Leave it be, D.W.,” Jim said, his gaze straying to the motel room door across the lot from where Tepper had parked in the shade. “At least for now.”

  “Only if you give me a notion as to where this is headed next. Back to Buster Plugg, maybe?”

  Jim shook his head. “There’s nothing more to get out of him than what he inadvertently gave up already. This man with no face paid cash, so we got no credit card number to run. And there’s no sense in pulling the prints from that room where he took down the mirrors, because we won’t get a match on them anyway.”

  “So, like I said, where is this headed, where are you headed next, Ranger Strong?”

  Right then, Jim hadn’t thought that far ahead. Since Delgado had no more of a notion of who was behind the gunmen who’d attacked her home than he did, there wasn’t much more she could do to help him, but she was still all he had.

  “I’ve involved you enough in this, Ranger Tepper,” Jim said.

  “I’d say ‘Anything else you need,’ but I’m guessing that’s a call you won’t be making.”

  “Actually, D.W., until I can figure out how to get mine back, I could use your truck.”

  * * *

  “How long you think you’ll have to keep me stashed here?” Luna Diaz Delgado asked him.

  “You know what’s waiting for you back home, señora. What about your kids?”

  “As soon as word about what happened reaches those responsible for their safety, they’ll disappear until I say different.”

  “Then we’ve got some time,” said Jim Strong, “and I’m going to need your help figuring where to go with this next. Bullets have been flying on both sides of the border and it’s a safe bet plenty more’ll follow unless we figure out who we’re dealing with.”

  Delgado sat on the edge of the bed, the television muted before her. Jim could see her spine stiffen as she regarded him.

  “Those crates are my property. I want them back.”

  “We can cover that issue down the line, señora, assuming we survive this.”

  She looked toward the room phone. “One phone call and I can have fifty men here to serve our efforts.”

  “You had that many down at your hacienda and we still ended up in an escape tunnel.”

  “You haven’t exactly posed another alternative.”

  “Choosing no alternative’s better than choosing one that requires an unacceptable risk.”

  The Red Widow rose from the bed. “You think someone inside my organization is talking,” she stated, in what had started as a question. “You think my organization is compromised.”

  “Tell me more about the crate in question.”

  “The ossu
ary containing the bones of Christ was found in a cave outside of Jerusalem, in 1959, by archaeologists and historians who thought they’d found the Holy Grail,” Delgado related. “By the time their ship returned to Turkey, they were all dead, and according to the story that’s been passed down, someone at the port knew the cause to be a curse, from reading the burial inscription.”

  “Sounds awfully convenient that the whole crew was dead and somebody just happened to be in the vicinity who knew how to read ancient languages.”

  “That’s what happened, Tejano.”

  “No, that’s the story. We don’t know what really happened, because it may well have been embellished or exaggerated over the years.”

  Delgado nodded, conceding his point. “I don’t know how many times those ossuaries changed hands since 1959, only that the dealer I purchased them from swore to the authenticity of that one in particular.”

  “What made you trust him?”

  “The fact that he knew what would happen to him if he was lying. I could track him down again, if you think he could be useful.”

  Jim pondered that for a moment. “He’s dead, señora, almost for sure. Killed by the same force behind the attack on your hacienda, because he sold you out.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Only option I can see, and that tells me he feared this other party even more than he feared you. And who else could have told them about your connection, so they’d know where to look?”

  “That doesn’t leave us with a lot, Ranger.”

  “I do have one idea,” Jim told her.

  * * *

  “My truck wasn’t enough?” D. W. Tepper said, picking up his phone on the first ring.

  “I decided to take you up on your offer.”

  “Thought you didn’t want to ruin two careers.”

  “Just make sure nobody notices you digging up some information I need.”

  “Concerning?”

  “Airports, Ranger Tepper, specifically international flights on private jets.”