Strong As Steel
Page 28
“Good notion, Ranger Strong. On account of the puppet master pulling all these strings would never send armed commandos on a commercial flight.”
“There are eight airports within a hundred-mile area around here that fit the bill, D.W.”
“Give me until morning.”
* * *
“You don’t have to stay,” Luna Diaz Delgado said, joining Jim Strong on the covered walkway outside her room.
“Get back inside please, señora.”
“You worried about me running off?”
“I’m worried about the man with no face coming back.”
“You said this was a safe place to hide.”
Jim Strong turned toward her, grasping the twelve-gauge he’d propped against the flimsy chair, to make sure it didn’t fall. “I said it was as safe as could be expected, under the circumstances.”
Thunder rumbled in the distance, the already stiff wind picking up with a big storm’s portent riding it. Jim Strong could almost smell the ozone in the air as the wind whipped the first big drops into his face.
“You can keep watch as easily from inside the room, Tejano.”
“Not really.”
He felt Luna Diaz Delgado close her hand warmly around one of his and tug lightly. “Please.”
Jim got her meaning right away, even though it had been a long time since he’d felt such a grasp. He saw it in her eyes, too, a combination of longing and loneliness, combined with the inability to ever let her guard down. Jim wondered if he’d let his guard down for a single moment since his wife was murdered. Always worrying, always fretting, always seeing the men who’d killed her in every lowlife he hunted or came across. He’d killed so many men because of what those druggers had done, and he would be killing plenty more as long as he was strong enough to hold his pistol.
As the Red Widow led him back inside the motel room and locked the door behind him, Jim realized she was the first woman who’d made him feel this way in the whole decade since his wife’s death. He worshipped women for any number of reasons, but he could never understand why not a single one had ever led him to doing what he was about to do tonight.
Jim realized, in that moment, that it wasn’t beauty or personality or vulnerability; it was nothing like any of those.
It was strength, power.
Jim Strong imagined that, had he been in Delgado’s shoes through the series of violent encounters that had come to define her, he would’ve acted just as she had, every time. He realized that the last thing he wanted was a woman who needed him, and la Viuda Roja needed no one at all. She had been effectively alone since the murder of her parents on the day of their wedding. Though Jim had been alone for a lot fewer years, that experience was magnified by raising his daughter, Caitlin, and intensified by the bloodlust that had followed his wife’s murder.
Falling into bed with Luna Diaz Delgado was like slipping off a dock into the water. The impact was hard, but not crushing, and then it gave way to the whole dark world receding, with him sinking into it.
In those moments, the bones of Jesus Christ didn’t matter, the man with no face didn’t matter, the powerful forces above him didn’t matter, whatever had really killed the men in that train car didn’t matter. Even his wife’s killers didn’t matter.
All that mattered was the woman tangled in knots with him, whose beauty was enhanced by a power no one had given her, power she had seized even though it was never supposed to be hers to take. A woman who lived in the moment yet had a high regard and respect for the bigger picture of time.
They would do this in the thin spill of light from the muted television, they would do it and need never speak of it again. A dream more than a memory, which would fade, as all dreams did, with time.
It was already fading, with Luna Diaz Delgado still wrapped in his arms and the motel phone ringing, as dawn pushed the first of the sun through the flimsy drawn curtains.
“I think I found your private jet for you, Ranger Strong,” greeted D. W. Tepper, “but you’re gonna have to hurry.”
80
SPINNAKER FALLS, TEXAS
“My father told me that story,” Aidman finished. “He was the one who was involved with your father, twenty-five years ago. I’ve got a pretty good notion of how the story ends, but that’s as much as I know for certain.”
“Including how those bone boxes ended up ultimately buried in the ground fifteen miles from here in the Sonora desert. Are you suggesting your father played a role in that?”
Aidman shook his head. “If he did, he never told me.”
Caitlin gazed about the chapel, trying to fill in the blanks of the story, things Aidman had left out or hadn’t gotten to. All the pews were long gone—whether stolen or rotted, Caitlin couldn’t say. In their place, the floor was dotted with makeshift seating formed of whatever the Mexicans squatting in the mission could salvage and covered with floral linens that, she guessed, either Wyatt Bass or Aidman himself had donated. She sat on the creaky remnants of a pew the squatters had managed to reconstruct. All the makeshift seating had been arranged to face the reconstructed, raised altar, where pristine white sheets covered coffin-size tables upon which candelabras and the tools of the blessed sacrament rested. It seemed odd that so much effort had been paid to a holy cause, given this mission’s involvement in potential proof that the son of God was just a man like everybody else.
Which brought her back to Daniel Aidman’s father, whom he’d clearly succeeded as an activist lawyer fighting for the undocumented. How long ago had they claimed this mission for their own? Could it be that they’d occupied it back in 1994 and had remained here, unmolested by authorities, ever since?
“I’ve told you everything I can,” Aidman said defensively, his shoulders looking board-stiff and his expression set in a way that made it look permanently molded on his face.
“But not everything you know, sir, starting with what role, exactly, your father played back in 1994 and what role these people you’re protecting have been playing ever since.” The words spilled out as fast as Caitlin could form her thoughts, the realizations piling atop one another. “I don’t think they remained here by accident, and I don’t think this location was chosen at random. Tell me, Mr. Aidman, if I pulled your dad’s bank records, would I find a whole bunch of withdrawals to support whatever cause he committed the people he was protecting to? And if I pulled yours, would I find similar evidence that you’re still enlisting these people in the same cause that began in 1994?”
“I don’t think you need me to answer that question, Ranger,” Aidman said, sounding far away.
“As a lawyer or a man?”
He looked down, then up again. “Interesting, isn’t it? Both of us following in our fathers’ footsteps. Even if you don’t believe in God, you have to believe in fate, Ranger.”
“Many would say they’re the same thing, sir.”
“What about you?”
“I’ve learned not to dwell on such things,” Caitlin told him.
But she couldn’t help thinking of Colonel Guillermo Paz’s many ruminations on the subject. Paz believed that God was part of everything, and his search for a relationship, at least an understanding, with Him had led him to all manner of pursuits to prove himself worthy. Even Paz, though, acknowledged that true worthiness began with what you saw in yourself, what looked back at you from the mirror instead of from on high.
“I told you I don’t have all the details of what followed in 1994.”
Aidman’s words lifted Caitlin from the trance into which she’d slipped.
“My father and I,” he continued, “didn’t always get along, and I didn’t realize how much I loved him until he passed. It was the least I could do to pick up the cause he felt he’d been entrusted with. I don’t know how much he remained in contact with Jim Strong after the crates, and bodies, were buried.”
“Any idea who belongs to those four skeletons, sir?”
Aidman started to shake his head, then st
opped. “I imagine they were part of the same force behind the murder of that train crew and the theft of those crates to begin with.”
“Your father say anything else about this man with no face?”
“Never; not a word. I wish I could tell you more, but the rest of the story’s been buried in the family plot with my father for a decade now.”
“What was his name?”
“Francis, but he went by Frank. It was brain cancer that got him, and those last few days he thought it was 1994 again. He talked a lot about your father. He didn’t even know who I was at the time, but he knew Jim Strong.”
Caitlin’s throat grew heavy at that, and she let the sweep of her gaze take in the chapel’s reconstructed interior yet again. “Somebody had to pay for making this place inhabitable, and defensible, again. First your father, then you. Feel free to stop me if I’m wrong, but I think the people squatting here are directly connected to our fathers, dating all the way back to 1994. I think they helped Jim Strong then and, ever since, have been guardians of the ossuaries and bodies my dad must’ve dumped into that hole in the desert. And I’m betting that means somebody here must’ve seen something on the night last week when those bone boxes were dug out of the ground by some hired guns working for the same force as the man with no face.”
“That’s quite a mouthful.”
“I just want to talk to whoever was out there that night, Mr. Aidman. Since you know me, just like your dad knew my dad, you know they’ve got nothing to fear from my end. In fact, maybe there’s something the Rangers can do to help them out. We do carry some weight in these parts.”
“They’re long gone, Ranger,” Aidman said, “disappeared just like the ones who helped your father twenty-five years ago.”
“Back to Mexico, no doubt,” Caitlin reflected. “That explains how Luna Diaz Delgado learned those crates had been recovered from the desert. Whoever those men were, they must have done some talking when they got back home. That’s how word reached her. You might as well have taken out an ad in the newspaper.”
Aidman looked put off by her comment. “I’ve spent a good portion of my life safeguarding this secret, Ranger, as…”
Aidman’s voice trailed off, Caitlin not about to let that go. “As what, Mr. Aidman?”
“As God is my witness,” he said softly.
“Guess we’ll see about that, won’t we?”
81
SPINNAKER FALLS, TEXAS
Caitlin reached Cort Wesley just as he was landing in Atlanta with Jones. She filled him in on the additional information provided by Daniel Aidman, keeping it as brief as possible. Then she stopped off at Wyatt Bass’s convenience store. She wanted to thank the man for his help, as well as prod him a bit on the story Daniel Aidman hadn’t quite finished, specifically the role played through the years by the people squatting in that mission. It would be easy to pass them off as nothing more than frightened immigrants hiding out from the authorities in the middle of nowhere, but that was the problem.
Why settle here when there was no work for them anywhere close by?
Unless the source of that work was defined by the old mission and whatever had transpired there in 1994. She didn’t believe for a moment they’d just happened to be watching that site in the Sonora desert the night somebody had come for the long-missing crates. Caitlin was starting to think that it was a ritual, a duty, a job in return for which the people here received housing and protection, at the bequest of Frank Aidman, first, and now of his son, Daniel. And she was hoping Wyatt Bass could shed some light on all that.
She’d never attempted a count of the cases she’d worked as a Texas Ranger, so many of them black pits lined with despair. The light of the wronged, the hurt, the killed, and the innocents they left behind had long provided the only illumination she needed. But this particular case was more like a black hole that nothing could light. The more she searched for answers, the deeper into the darkness she sank. Kind of like swimming underwater and running out of air before you can make it back to the surface.
The bells jangled again as she pushed her way through the entrance to the convenience store, assaulted instantly by the dual scents of blood and gun smoke. She saw Wyatt Bass first, his upper body resting on the countertop, his head hanging straight down, his arms splayed to the sides as if someone had crucified him on the shattered, blood-streaked glass. Shards lay on the floor, and Bass’s sightless eyes were angled as if to look at them.
Caitlin spotted his killers next. The two of them were sitting side by side on the floor, posed just as the bodies in the New Braunfels alley had been, looking like they’d passed out drunk.
Except for the neat bullet holes carved into the center of their foreheads, bullet holes shaped like stars.
PART NINE
When they started talking about giving us computers, you know, I was a street officer. I didn’t have any use for a computer. I didn’t think a Ranger should be tied down to an office. Anyway, they issued all of us laptops and sent us to a weeklong computer school so we would know what a cursor was and where the power button was. When I got back to Laredo, I used mine as a doorstop.
—Texas Ranger Doyle Holdridge as quoted in “Law of the Land,” by Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly, April 2007
82
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
“Right this way, gentlemen,” one of the guards in the building’s lobby said to Cort Wesley and Jones, leading them down a short hallway toward what looked like a service elevator.
The sprawling steel and glass headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was located in Druid Hills, Georgia, near the campus of Emory University. It was a relatively easy drive from the Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport, especially when an SUV was waiting on the tarmac for the two of them after the private jet completed its taxi.
At the elevator, the guard pressed a code into a keypad. The door opened and he leaned in enough to insert a strange-looking key into a slot tailored for it and turned, activating the cab. Cort Wesley noticed there were no floors listed or bulbs to light up; nothing other than that single key slot.
“Where we’re going doesn’t exist, even for the vast majority of people who work in the building,” Jones explained, ignoring the guard’s presence as the cab sped downward
“Sounds ominous,” Cort Wesley noted.
“Let me put it this way. You could destroy the world a million times over with what’s stored where we’re headed, where we’ll find the leftovers from 1994.”
“Good idea to keep that from the world.”
The elevator door slid open and they spotted a man with a powder-blue lab coat and horn-rimmed glasses waiting for them in this subterranean level of the CDC.
“Just remember, this is off the books,” he said, by way of greeting, leading them forward. “You were never here, and I never saw you.”
“Be hard for you to see us if we were never here, Doc. We can address you as ‘Doctor,’ right?”
He stopped and looked back at them, focusing almost entirely on Jones. “As long as you forget you ever saw me. When the likes of you show up here, it’s never good. Usually means we’re about to add some new residents to the Crypt.”
He used that word casually, and Cort Wesley could tell Jones knew exactly what he was referring to. After passing through four additional layers of security, they found themselves inside an atrium-style structure contained behind cinderblock-thick glass, leaving them standing beneath it all, enclosed in what was effectively a glass bubble or dome.
The Crypt.
“How much do you know about this place?” the man whom Jones had addressed as Doc asked.
“My first visit.”
“Well, let me give you the short version of what you’re looking at. Take a look around,” Doc continued, doing just that through his thick glasses, “and picture an atmospherically preserved corpse behind each of those doors about us.”
“Standing room only,” Jones noted.
“We’re still listening, Doc,” said Jones.
“I wanted to give you the opportunity to take it all in.”
“We’ve already taken enough in back in Texas. That’s why we’re here.”
“1994, right? The bodies originally recovered at Fort Stockton?”
Jones nodded. “Those would be the ones, on top of four new ones who’ve likely just arrived on the premises in the very same condition, separated by twenty-five years.”
Doc turned more of his attention on Cort Wesley. “When we get a body killed by an infection we can’t positively identify or even find, that body is preserved here in stasis.”
“It looks like some medical version of a library,” Cort Wesley said.
“With all manner of death contained in the card catalogs,” Doc said. “The earliest residents of this place are actually mummies that ended up here after their sarcophagi somehow led to the deaths of the archaeologists who discovered them. We also have remains lifted from graveyards the world over, but behind most of the doors you see around you are bodies dating back over seventy years, since the time the CDC was established, in 1946.”
“Talk to me about 1994,” Jones said.
Doc gazed upward. “Those three bodies are somewhere up there, truly one of our most baffling unresolved cases. And the potential risk factor is off the charts—a seventeen on our own particular scale, truly rarified air.”
“No pun intended,” Jones smirked.
Doc didn’t smile, and had the look of a man who never did. “In this case, the ranking was due primarily both to the swiftness of death and the unidentified nature of the causative factors.”
“What killed them, in other words,” Cort Wesley interjected.
“To this day we’ve never positively isolated the agent in question. We have a notion as to what it is, but it’s one elusive son of a bitch.”