Strong As Steel

by Jon Land

  “I was to going say you’re even better than I’d heard.”

  “You, too, given that all I’ve heard said makes you out as an assassin. But you’re a gunfighter too, a man killer, when someone just as ready is trying to do the same to you.”

  “Thank you, Ranger.”

  “I’m not sure I meant it as a compliment, Nola.”

  She nodded, her gaze going from flat to bittersweet. “Me either.”

  “We are what we are.”

  Nola settled back in her chair and laid her boots on the tabletop, just skirting the pistols resting there. “So, what’s this about? We going to start celebrating each other’s birthdays? You going to invite me for Thanksgiving dinner? Maybe we can watch the ball drop together on New Year’s in Times Square.”

  “None of that. You need to speak to Dylan.”

  Nola huffed out some breath. “I don’t care whether you believe me or not, but my feelings … well, I really liked him.”

  “You give fentanyl to everyone you like?”

  “Only the ones I want to stay alive.”

  “One more milliliter and he would’ve been dead.”

  “I knew what I was doing.”

  “Because you’ve done it before, probably with that extra dosage.”

  “You want me to deny it?”

  “Wouldn’t matter if you did.”

  Nola pulled her boots off the table, eyed the pistols with their barrels resting against each other. “Our work isn’t finished, Ranger. That man with no face worked for a group of religious whack-job zealots who call themselves the Order. He’s still out there—they’re still out there.”

  Caitlin shook her head. “Not interested.”

  “As in finishing what our father started?” Nola shot back, frustration lacing her voice. “Am I hearing this right? The great Caitlin Strong running from a fight?”

  “We’ve already won.”

  Now Nola shook her head, her breathing edging up a notch, a kid on Christmas morning who didn’t get the present she asked for. “So you just wanna have at it, go for the guns and see who’s better?”

  Caitlin smiled, then chuckled.

  “What’s so funny?” Nola said, snapping forward.

  “That’s something I would say. Actually, it’s something I have said.”

  Nola settled back again. “You ever tell a man you’d shoot his balls off, if he had any?”

  “Once or twice,” Caitlin said, after a nod.

  It was Nola’s turn to nod. “We could go on like this for a while.”

  “We could.”

  “Comes with the blood, I guess. So maybe you’re not the only one who’s strong as steel; maybe we both are.” Nola stopped, then started again, her thoughts veering. “I’ve got Dylan’s cell number. I’ll call him.”

  “To say good-bye. One gunfighter in his life is enough for any man or boy to handle.”

  Nola smiled. “I’m good with a lot more than guns.”

  “I’m sure you are.”

  Nola leaned forward and folded her arms on the table. “Is this where you tell me that you’ll be coming if I step out of line?”

  “No, because I know you won’t. You’re el Barquero, the Ferryman. Taking people to their death is what you do, and there’s no shortage of passengers for your boat down here. I’m not going to try to talk you out of being who you are, or what you are, either. So long as that’s what it is and not what the Red Widow made you.”

  Nola stiffened. “Don’t call her that.”

  “Why not? She earned the title.”

  That struck a chord in Nola. “We really are the same, Ranger, aren’t we?”

  “What happened to ‘Sis’?”

  Nola shrugged. “I made my point.”

  “Here’s mine: We’re not the same. I may be a gunfighter, but you’re a killer.”

  “Like I said, the same, only on different sides. If the fates were different and your Jim Strong had married Luna Diaz Delgado, she’d be your stepmother.”

  “But they weren’t. And he didn’t.” Caitlin stood up, hovering over the table as she holstered her pistol. “We won’t be seeing each other again, Nola.”

  “No? Even if the Order comes back?”

  “They won’t.”

  Nola scowled at her. “You can’t be sure of that, Sis.”

  “Yes, I can,” Caitlin told her, “because I still have one last card to play.”

  100

  AUSTIN, TEXAS

  The state capitol building in Austin was one of the most ornate in all of the country. Topped by the beautifully forged iron statue of the Goddess of Liberty, it was built way back in 1888, surrounded by twenty-two acres of parklike lands highlighted by statues and monuments to important people and moments in Texas history. These were not just for remembrance; they were also a testament to the bravery and traditions that persist to the modern day.

  Caitlin stood in the back of the rotunda, listening to Lieutenant Governor Maurice Scoggins wrap up his speech to the delegates of the Texas House of Representatives, which had included a formal announcement of his intention to run for governor, earning him a standing ovation. Scoggins’s security team escorted him from the chamber, but he was intercepted by Caitlin before he got more than ten feet.

  “Do you have a minute, sir?” she asked Scoggins, as the pair of men on either side of him stiffened.

  He made a show of checking his watch. “I’m already late for my next meeting, and I’m afraid I’m booked for the rest of the day. Can we do this tomorrow?”

  “It’s in your best interests to do it now, sir.”

  It was the look in her eyes, more than Caitlin’s words, that led Scoggins to capitulate. He nodded to his security guards and moved off to the side, his back turned to the chamber so none of those exiting would notice him.

  “Make it fast, Ranger, please.”

  “I wanted to thank you personally for your help.”

  “My pleasure, and I apologize if we got off on the wrong foot,” he said dismissively. “Now, if you don’t mind…”

  “See, that’s the problem, sir. I do mind; I mind very much. I mind you getting in my dad’s way in 1994 and in my way last week. Turned out, those men who confiscated the Communications Technology Providers computers from our Ranger company office really were CID. Only their mission was off the books. Care to guess where their orders came from?” Caitlin stopped there, jostled by the increasingly crowded lobby confines. “Maybe we should finish this somewhere more private.”

  * * *

  Scoggins posted his guards in front of the men’s room door to make sure no one else entered. Caitlin waited until one final man exited, in the wake of a stall toilet flushing.

  “Get in your way? I assure you, Ranger,” Scoggins started, before she could resume, “I’ve done nothing of the kind. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “And I suppose you have no idea what the Order is, either.”

  The lieutenant governor just looked at her.

  “Let me give you a hint, sir. It’s an organization that fancies itself protectors of the Church and the pillars on which the Church was founded. Ring any bells?”

  Scoggins remained silent.

  “The Order is a remnant of the bad old days, of all the Church’s conspiratorial, power-mad nonsense from centuries ago. You know what they say about the more things change.… So here we are. We traced a phone number, dialed by a man named Enrico Molinari, to you, sir. Molinari was the Order’s top operative—or should I say assassin. But you already know that, don’t you?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t,” Scoggins said, trying to remain nonchalant, except for the sweat that had begun to bead up on his forehead. “And once I’m governor, I’m going to turn the Texas Rangers, relics that you are, into crossing guards.”

  “Oh, I’m actually not here for the Rangers today, sir. I’m here on behalf of Homeland Security.”

  That seemed to get Scoggins’s attention.

  “
I’ve got a friend at Homeland,” Caitlin continued, smiling inwardly at referring to Jones that way, “who’s looking to reestablish his bona fides and who filled in a few holes for me about the Order’s reach, purpose, and priorities. I’m guessing those changed a whole lot after they figured out they let the ultimate weapon slip through their hands a generation ago. Tell me, sir, how’s it feel to watch it happen all over again, this time for good? You know what else is done for good? You.”

  “I’ve heard enough,” Scoggins said, starting to reach for the door handle.

  Caitlin slammed a hand against the door to prevent him from opening it.

  Scoggins finally swiped the sweat from his forehead. “I’d think real hard about your next move, Ranger.”

  “I already have, sir. It’s a shame, watching such a promising political career go down the drain, but it beats prison—so long as you give us the names to make your secret society not so secret anymore, especially the man at the top—the Prefect, or whatever it is you call him. I’m sure my friend at Homeland would really appreciate the gesture, maybe even enough to spare you from vacationing at Guantanamo for the next twenty years or so. The Order aren’t the only ones who can make people disappear. How much did they have to do with your political career, exactly? Until today, you were about to walk into the governor’s mansion. I’d fire them from your campaign if I were you.”

  “You’re a real piece of work, Ranger.”

  “I want those names, sir. You have a pen or would you like to use mine?”

  Scoggins shook his head in genuine disbelief. “All this because of a phone call?”

  “A series of them, actually.”

  “And that’s all you’ve got? That’s your proof? I chair a committee on how unsecure cell phone technology today really is.”

  “Oh, sorry to have given you the wrong impression, sir. The phone calls I’m talking about weren’t placed recently; they were placed twenty-five years ago.” Caitlin held Scoggins’s stare as she continued, “From a motel outside San Antonio.”

  His lower lip was trembling now.

  “Turns out modern technology can work surprising wonders with old phone records, especially when the number called was a dummy exchange. Turns out the real number belonged to a cell phone back from the dinosaur days.” Caitlin held his weakening stare again. “Your cell phone, sir.”

  Scoggins swallowed hard. His mouth started to open, then closed.

  “Of course,” Caitlin resumed, “the real giveaway was the number itself, that three-number prefix I figure you must’ve chosen yourself: four six three.”

  But she could tell, from the man’s befuddled expression, that she had that part wrong.

  “Check the keypad on your phone,” she told Scoggins. “Four six three spells G-O-D.”

  EPILOGUE

  In that rough rural terrain, no officer excelled like the Texas Ranger. He knew his prey and his territory, but tenacity was his greatest asset. Indeed, a Ranger’s charge was to range the frontier: to cross city and county lines, to spend a week or a month or a year in pursuit of his quarry, to suppress lawlessness with any weapon at his disposal. It fell to other Texas officers to mingle with the public and wear starched uniforms. A Ranger was a Ranger because he was bred for the prairies and the backwoods. He personified the frontier and lived by its rough-hewn ethic. In the city he always seemed out of place. When Joaquin Jackson visited New York a few years back and toured the Harlem projects with the city vice squad, he believed he had stepped into Ranger hell. “I could never do what y’all do,” Jackson told the city cops. A Ranger belonged in the wilderness. He was the earthiest of Texas lawmen, and yet there was always a little bit of the dreamer in every Ranger, for he lived the dream of the virtuous wanderer, slaying serpents in God’s garden; every man who coveted Rangerhood sought his mythic place among the wanderers.

  —“The Twilight of the Texas Rangers” by Robert Draper, Texas Monthly, February 1994

  * * *

  “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Caitlin asked, rising from her chair in the waiting room when Cort Wesley returned.

  “Not something I’d want to do every day,” he said, scratching his arm where they had injected the contrast dye for the CT scan to read.

  “Hey,” she said, gaze tightening on him.

  Cort Wesley looked down, realizing the ease with which he’d managed the simple motion. “I told you my arm was getting better. Just needed a good gunfight to wake it up again.”

  “Your father wasn’t much older than you when he died, was he?”

  “It was cancer that got him, Ranger, not a stroke.”

  “My point being that maybe it would have. I think you caught a break. We’re talking genetics here.”

  “Something else I can blame my old man for.”

  They started walking toward the elevator, both eager to be gone from all the pain bouncing about the walls.

  “When’s your next appointment with the neurologist, Cort Wesley?”

  “The office is supposed to call me when they get all the test results. But, like I told you, the doctor didn’t seem to be too worried. He sees what I’ve got every day.”

  Caitlin nodded, looking away for a moment before fastening her gaze back on him. “It’s okay to be scared.”

  He grinned. “Leroy said I should’ve told you about that.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “I still can’t hold a gun right, Ranger. I still can’t make a fist tight enough to punch Jell-O.”

  “You think that’s all you’ve got?”

  “I think it’s what I’m best at, and I don’t know how much good I’d be to anybody else if I couldn’t do it anymore. Hell, right now I can’t even open a pickle jar.”

  “What did you tell Leroy?”

  “That I was afraid of looking in the mirror and not recognizing the person who looks back.”

  Caitlin let him see her smile. “Every morning, when I do that, you know what I see? A woman who’s got to overcome that fact every time she straps on a gun. I know it’s not physical, not a stroke, but it’s there, and it never goes away. And I find a way to get past it, because it’s who I am.” She tightened her gaze on him. “And when you look in the mirror, who you are is going to look back, even if your fist isn’t as tight as it used to be.”

  Cort Wesley smiled too. “I told the doctor I want to live to be a hundred.”

  “What’d he say to that?”

  “That if I beat this long enough, they could try a brain transplant.”

  “Come on,” Caitlin scoffed.

  “I’m serious. They’re experimenting on rats.”

  “Glad I’m not a rat.”

  “Imagine waking up a different person, Ranger.”

  Caitlin smiled. “Seems like I do that every morning already. And by the way, Cort Wesley, I’d be glad to open that pickle jar for you.”

  * * *

  The San Fernando Cathedral was packed for Father Boylston’s funeral. Guillermo Paz had staked out a seat in the very last pew, one he had refinished himself a few years before, so as not to cause a stir for the other mourners. He was glad to see so many coming to pay their final respects to his priest, a fitting testament to a man who had been their priest, too. Until the stroke, Paz had spoken to Father Boylston only a few times outside the limits of the confessional, where he’d made his priest privy to his deepest, darkest secrets, which would have scared an ordinary man.

  The organ music had just begun to play softly, when Caitlin Strong and Cort Wesley Masters took seats on either side of him. Paz exchanged glances with them both, his eyes saying all that needed to be said, as the priest presiding over the funeral mass took his place on the dais.

  “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake,” he began, speaking into the microphone. “Some shall live forever, others shall be an everlasting horror and disgrace.”

  “It’s from Daniel,” Paz whispered, over the soft, melodic hum of the organ. “One of my
priest’s favorites.”

  “But the wise shall shine brightly like the splendor of the firmament,” the priest continued, “and those who lead the many to justice shall be like the stars forever.”

  “Well,” Caitlin whispered back, reaching up to lay a hand on Paz’s shoulder, “I think we can relate to that.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Well before I started Strong as Steel, I understandably had no idea what it was going to be about, but I knew it was going to be different than the last books in the Caitlin Strong series. That’s because I’d gone from casting the Chinese as the bad guys (Strong Darkness) to the Russians (Strong Light of Day) to ISIS (Strong Cold Dead) to Nazis past and present (Strong to the Bone). Pretty tough to top all that, right?

  I started thinking about casting Caitlin and company in a more traditional big-scale thriller, without having any idea what shape it was going to take. Then, lo and behold, I was Googling one thing, only to find something else—a headline—totally by accident:

  BURIAL BOXES MARKED WITH JESUS’ NAME REVEALED IN JERUSALEM ARCHAEOLOGICAL WAREHOUSE

  Sometimes, as they say, fortune really is the residue of design. I had found my McGuffin, as Alfred Hitchcock might call it, perfect fodder for a high-stakes thriller that centers on a secret unearthed somewhere in the Texas desert. Since this is the book’s afterword, I’m not giving anything away when I say to you now where the whole concept of those ossuaries in Strong as Steel, and the bones allegedly contained in one of them, originated.

  But I didn’t want to do The Da Vinci Code again, nor did I want to suggest something as controversial as the bones of Jesus being found in the Texas desert. So, I asked myself, what might make the bones contained inside that particular ossuary just as dangerous to the world if discovered? And the answer brought me to the familiar ground of biotechnology—in this case, how the bubonic plague, aka the Black Death, could morph into something even deadlier than its original form, something that would make for a great weapon of mass destruction.