Strong Cold Dead (19 page)

“The truth is,” al-Aziz continued to the villagers, “I did none of those things. God did them, with me serving merely as His vessel, stripped of my own will in lieu of a higher power's. I live to serve Him. That is where we differ, you and I. I live to serve God, while you would besmirch His name and disrespect His greatness with your blasphemy and disloyalty.”

Al-Aziz couldn't tell how many of the villagers grasped his words, but soon they'd all understand the intent that had brought him back here, the example that needed to be set.

“I gave you a chance the last time I came, in spite of all your indiscretions. I warned that if you continued serving as a way station and support center for the forces of the West, I would send all of you to the realms of hell, instead of just your leaders. But even that, I fear, will not be enough to turn you from the darkness to the light we are shining on the new world. What sets the caliphate apart is our belief that there can be no compromise. Conquering the world starts with a single village, for that world can be no stronger than the weakest link, represented by that village and all the others.”

He stopped and patted another child's head. She shrank back from his touch, clutching her mother, leaving al-Aziz wishing he could wipe the unclean stink of her off his hand. Around him, the sense of fear and desperation rode the air like a cloud, a fine mist of hopelessness sprayed by the weak willed and weak minded. Somewhere near the back of the dusty square, a young child was shrieking. Others, more children and adults, were choking back sobs or wiping their eyes free of tears.

“Today this village ceases to exist,” he resumed, walking on. “Today we burn your homes, your crops, your animals, your possessions. Today we take everything that defines you in the evil you have chosen embrace instead of giving yourself to the one true God. But He is a merciful God and has willed me to treat you in that vein. The last time I came here, I took the heads of twenty men identified as leaders. Today, being merciful and compassionate, I will take none. I will spare your lives and let you remain in your homes.”

Al-Aziz paused just long enough to give the villagers of Ras al-Maa a semblance of hope. Then he snatched the gift back from them.

“On one condition,” al-Aziz continued. “Each parent must take the life of their oldest child. Refuse, and your entire family dies.”

The villagers' hope vanquished with the stiff wind that blew through the square, whipping the dust into miniature funnel clouds. The villagers dropped to their knees, begging, pleading, screeching, sobbing. The sounds were so joyous to his ears that al-Aziz could barely contain himself from smiling.

“You pray to a God who does not hear you,” he said, his voice rising above their desperate cries. “He does not hear you because He is not here to listen. Only I am here. And when you pray, it should be to me, for the power of the one true God I serve as proxy for.”

Al-Aziz stopped again to better enjoy the sounds of his majesty. A teenage boy, brandishing a knife he'd hidden under his shirt, tried to rush him, only to be snatched from the ground by Seyyef and held dangling in the air until the giant crushed the boy's throat and discarded his limp form back to the dusty ground.

“A village must pay for the indiscretions of each part as if he was acting for the whole. Because no one stopped the charge of this one, my terms have changed: each family will take the lives of their
two
oldest children, instead of one. Dishonor me again and it becomes three. We will begin now, one family at a time, so others may watch and heed the lessons of the indiscretions that necessitated me coming back here today. I trust I shall not have to come back a third time.”

Seyyef approached and handed al-Aziz the satellite phone he'd left with the giant for safekeeping.

“Yes?” the ISIS commander greeted, listening to the report from Syria, feeling his spirits perk up even more. “And this has been confirmed?… No, I'll want to handle it personally. Initiate the travel protocols for my men and I, and alert the proper contacts in the United States to prepare. Where again, exactly?… “Texas,” al-Aziz repeated, after the voice told him.

 

41

A
USTIN,
T
EXAS

Caitlin had suited up in full hazmat gear for drills but never for real, and she was amazed at how different everything felt. The suit was bulkier, hotter. The helmet tended to fog up worse than she recalled, and the portable oxygen supply was heavier. As soon as she stepped outside the command and control tent, the sun, which had chased off that lone dark cloud, felt like it was melting the suit's space-age material into her skin. Approaching the wobbly tube attached to the covered entrance of Hoover's Cooking felt like scuba diving on land, right down to the peculiar buzz she felt in her ear from the air pushing through the tank into her lungs.

“Can you hear me?” she heard Jones ask through her helmet's built-in microphone.

“Loud and clear.”

“I've been inside already, Ranger, so I can give you the lay of the land and the chronology, as best as we've been able to reconstruct. Zero hour was right around one hundred and sixty-seven minutes ago and counting. We know that because that's when a regular who'd come in for lunch rushed outside, puking his guts out, after finding what you're about to see.”

She looked at him through her mask. His face was absent of smirk and snarl for the first time she could remember.

“Austin authorities pushed the appropriate panic button,” Jones continued. “Most of the cavalry's still en route, but they got the containment procedures enacted faster than any drill ever conducted for a city this size, including getting the man who dialed nine-one-one into isolation. I'm starting to love Texas almost as much as I hate it.”

“We're real good with disasters, Jones,” Caitlin told him, nodding inside her helmet. “Far too much practice, unfortunately.”

“Nothing that prepared you for what you're about to see, Ranger. You can count on that.”

Passing through the tube en route to the thick plastic sheeting separating Hoover's Cooking from the outside world was like some crazy Disney World ride played out for real. Caitlin half expected mechanical or animated creatures to jump out or launch an attack on her from outside the tube.

“The victims were all eating lunch,” she heard Jones say in her helmet. “Various stages of their meals.”

“So they didn't die at the same time, in the same moment?” Caitlin asked, her voice echoing in her ears.

“Pretty damn close. Within seconds of each other, as near as we can tell. Suggests something airborne, doesn't it, Ranger?”

“I don't know.”

“Despite all that annual training you receive at Quantico?” Jones chided. “Come on.”

“It just doesn't feel like a pathogen to me.”

“Something else?”

“Something worse,” Caitlin told him, not yet sure why.

 

42

A
USTIN,
T
EXAS

Caitlin followed Jones through the remainder of the tube, parting the last dangling sheets of heavy plastic to enter the normally down-home confines of Hoover's Cooking. She imagined she could smell eggs frying, bacon cooking, and coffee lifted off BUNN warmers to be poured into the restaurant's bountiful cups. But all that slipped away, along with her breath, when the sight beyond her helmet's faceplate was revealed.

Several of the bodies were lying frozen on the floor, arms extended as if to claw forward along the tile toward the entrance now encased in biohazard plastic. Others sat straight up, only the dead sightlessness of their frozen eyes giving away the fact they weren't waiting for their meals to be served. Still more were facedown on tabletops or booths strewn with spilled liquids and food. A few were slumped in their chairs, their limbs canted at odd angles, as if they had been trying to rise when whatever had happened in here struck them. It was like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting drawn by the devil, amid the pie cases and walls covered with fifteen years of pictures from the history of Hoover's Cooking.

“Welcome to the party, Ranger,” Caitlin heard Jones say.

A combination of the suit's confines and the encased building's lack of ventilation left her feeling she was being roasted alive. At Quantico she'd been part of any number of drills to prepare her as a first responder to such calamities, but the props and stage dummies had in no way achieved their goal. The suit's restrictions and independent air supply kept all odors from her, though, for which she was glad.

“Give me your first thoughts,” Jones said, alongside her now.

“Spacing of the bodies indicates a time lag that puts airborne transmission more in doubt,” Caitlin started, getting used to the echo of her own words inside the helmet. “That means the victims might have ingested whatever killed them, as opposed to breathing it in, making the means of delivery a toxin placed inside something they ate or drank.” She raised a glove to swipe away the sweat forming inside her helmet, forgetting the presence of the faceplate for the moment.

“Toxin,” Jones repeated. “Quantico must've treated you well, Ranger. Most would say ‘contagion.'”

“Contagion implies ‘spread from person to person.' There was no spread here. It hit fast and it hit hard.”

“Are you ruling out natural causation?”

“That's a new term on me, Jones. But if you're asking if this could've been caused by poisoning through means other than a concentrated attack, I'd say the odds are slim to none.”

“You learn to make that kind of judgment in Quantico?”

“You asked me a question and the answer's a matter of common sense. Naturally occurring disasters like this—Legionnaires' disease, methane dumps, toxic sludge—aren't unprecedented, but none of them carry a hundred percent mortality rate.”

“So,” Jones ventured, his faceplate misting up and then clearing in rhythm with his breaths and his words, “assuming enemy action was in play, what stands out the most in your mind?”

Caitlin walked about the restaurant, careful to step over the victims who had slipped from their chairs or died crawling for the door. To a man and woman, they looked to be in the throes of both pain and panic. She stopped at a table occupied by two boys and two girls wearing school uniforms, backpacks tucked under their chairs, their faces pressed against the tabletop as if they'd been glued there.

“Looks like they were all struck within maybe a thirty-second window,” Caitlin theorized, turning away from the kids.

“Makes sense.”

“No, it doesn't, Jones. It makes no sense at all. Unless all the victims were sharing a toast or a piece of birthday cake, as it turns out there's no way ingestion could've caused what we're looking at here.” She started to turn back toward the table occupied by the facedown kids, then stopped. “What happened to all the other people who ate here before them? How is it they walked out of here to go about their day, none the worse for wear? Goes back to what I was saying before, what was bothering me about the notion of whatever did this being airborne. I assume you've taken air samples.”

“Preliminary analysis on-site doesn't show a damn thing, Ranger.”

“Because this isn't a disease, Jones. I wouldn't expect the CDC to be much help, either.”

“Got a better idea?”

Caitlin looked around the restaurant again, her mind conjuring the smells of the place anew. “Whatever it is hits the anatomy like a sledgehammer, and it's got to be something all the victims would have ingested within seconds of each other, for the timeline to work.”

“All well and good, Ranger,” Jones said, “only what you're describing doesn't exist, either in or out of nature.”

Caitlin met Jones's eyes through the faceplate of his helmet. “You mean it didn't until today.”

 

43

A
USTIN,
T
EXAS

Back at the staging tent, Caitlin couldn't wait to yank off her hazmat suit and dump it into the orange drum stickered with warnings.

“What did the dead have to say, Ranger?” she heard Guillermo Paz ask her. She turned to see him leaning lightly against one of the poles holding the tent up.

“Not enough to be of much good,” Caitlin told him.

Shedding the suit hadn't helped her shed from her psyche the residue of what she'd just experienced. One of those ultimate nightmare scenarios you train and prepare for but never for a moment believe will ever happen.

“Aristotle once said that ‘death is the most fearful thing,'” Paz noted. “But he was wrong, wasn't he?”

“You tell me, Colonel.”

“You already know the answer, best articulated by my friend Heidegger, who believed that anticipation does not passively await death but mobilizes mortality as the condition of free will in the world.”

“In other words, by this happening, we're enabled to stop it from happening again.”

“I believe that's what Martin Heidegger was getting at, yes.”

“You don't seem especially bothered by all that, Colonel.”

“Because it defines my purpose, my reason for being.”

“Is that Heidegger too?”

He smiled. “No, Ranger; yours truly. But Heidegger was very well acquainted with evil. He didn't just endorse the Nazis with the coming of World War II, he joined them. Became rector of the University of Freiburg, where he did his best to mold young minds to the Nazi cause. The impressionability of young people makes them extremely dangerous when motivated. When I was in Daniel Cross's apartment, I noticed the books on his shelves. He seemed as enamored by the Nazis as Heidegger.”

“You think Cross was behind what happened here?”

“Don't you, Ranger?” Paz eased closer to her, forcing Caitlin to turn her gaze even more upward. “People leave residue of themselves behind wherever they go,” he said. “Imprints of their actions as plain and recognizable as photographs. It's why my mother almost never left the shack in the Venezuelan slum where I grew up; she couldn't bear to be around the evil and ugliness so many left behind in their wake.” The colonel paused, seeming to need a moment to compose himself—a first, in Caitlin's memory. “I recognized Daniel Cross inside that restaurant as soon as I entered. I might as well have been looking him in the face.”