Strong Cold Dead (32 page)

“Oh no?”

“Barely qualifies as an associate.”

“Then we're getting somewhere.”

Cray Rawls straightened his shoulders and crossed his legs. “What do I have to do to make this right, Mr. Masters?”

“Ever hear of Homeland Security?”

“Is that a joke?”

“Answer the question.”

“Okay,” Rawls relented, shaking his head. “I've heard of Homeland Security.”

“Right now, you're talking to me,” Cort Wesley picked up. “You don't tell me what I want to know, I let the colonel there take over. He works for Homeland. Isn't that right, Colonel?”

Paz nodded, once.

Rawls uncrossed his legs and leaned forward in his chair. “Wait a minute. What am I missing here? What's Homeland Security's interest in all this?”

“You talk to me, Cray, maybe you never need to find out. Let's say that Indian reservation now involves a big, fat national security issue. You keep playing coy here and you might find yourself a resident of Guantanamo with all your assets frozen.”

This prospect didn't seem to faze Rawls at all. “I'm not some sand jockey who tried to blow up a plane with his underwear. And I just beat a major class action beef back East.”

“Where they let you have lawyers. No such luck when dealing with Homeland, right, Colonel?”

Paz nodded again. Once.

Rawls flashed a smirk that looked only partially forced. “You really think I'm buying this shit? You think a man like me can disappear, no questions asked?”

Cort Wesley took a few steps closer to him, glaring down. “For sure. But you can spare yourself the bother of all that by just telling me what it is you're after on that Comanche land.”

Rawls swallowed hard, his eyes flashing like the tiny lights on a computer modem. “You in a position to offer some guarantees, Mr. Masters?”

“Like what?”

“What I'm after on that reservation stays mine.”

“How about this?” Cort Wesley spoke down at him. “You get to keep your freedom.”

“You got this all wrong, cowboy.”

“What'd you call me?”

“Hey, you're from Texas. It was meant as a compliment.”

“Sure it was.” Cort Wesley crouched just enough to be even with Cray Rawls. “Let's try some simple yes-or-no questions. Is there oil on that land?”

“I wouldn't know.”

“So you're after something else.”

“I'm telling you, you're way off on this, cowboy.”

“Let's go back to yes or no. Are you after something else?”

“Yes.”

“On that reservation?”

“Yes.”

Cort Wesley stood back up. “Essay question now. Describe for me what it is, exactly.”

“Not a weapon.”

“I didn't ask you to say what it isn't.”

“It can't hurt anyone, only help. And I mean help on a level truly beyond your comprehension.”

Cort Wesley turned toward Paz. “You want to have a go at him, Colonel?”

“No, wait!” Rawls pleaded, hands thrust before him, bulging eyes fixed on Guillermo Paz. “It's about how long those Indians have lived through the generations, the contents of their medical records.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Potentially the greatest medical find in history.”

“What else?”

“Isn't that enough?”

“Depends,” Cort Wesley said, crouching down again, an instant before he heard a ping, followed by something whizzing through the air over him.

The same instant that Sam Bob Jackson's head exploded.

 

77

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

“You're looking good, Ranger,” Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer Pierre Beauchamp greeted Caitlin, upstairs in Captain Tepper's office where he'd been waiting for her.

“I wasn't the one who got shot on the last case we worked together, Mountie,” Caitlin returned, taking his outstretched hand.

Beauchamp shrugged humbly. “All worked out for the better. Thanks to
us
taking down those Hells Angels, I ended up reassigned to a Joint Terrorism Task Force dealing primarily with border issues.”

“Big shot now, eh?” Caitlin asked him, doing her best to mimic a Canadian accent.

“You've been doing pretty well for yourself, too, from what I hear.”

“If you count being a pain in just about everybody's ass, I suppose.”

“You take down the Hells Angels, you can take down just about anyone.”

“They're nothing compared to what we're facing now.”

“ISIS, from what I've heard.”

“You've heard right. And my guess is your coming all the way down here is connected to them. Something my captain said you're only willing to share with me, I'm figuring's, got nothing at all to do with border issues. That because of our history, Mountie?”

“More on account of the fact that I know you'll believe what I've got to say, Ranger.”

Beauchamp laid it all out as quickly and succinctly as he could; he was a no-nonsense man, good at making his points. Except for a touch of gray at the temples, he looked exactly as Caitlin remembered him: straitlaced and by the book, from his demeanor to his dress to the way he held himself. His pants were perfectly pressed and his shirt showed nary a wrinkle, to the point that Caitlin figured he must have changed after getting off the plane. He had a boy's plump, rosy cheeks but a gunman's steely-eyed stare that could look both ways and straight ahead at the same time.

Beauchamp closed Captain Tepper's office door before launching into the tale of a Canadian fur trapper named Joe Labelle who, in 1930, happened upon an Inuit village in Nunavut, Canada, where the entire lot of residents had vanished at virtually the same time. Meals had been left uneaten, fires were untended, and big jugs of water, filled at a tributary off the nearby Lake Anjikuni, had been abandoned on the ground and left to freeze.

“For a long time,” Beauchamp told her, “it was Canada's version of your lost Roanoke Colony.”

“Difference is, that mystery's really never been solved,” Caitlin reminded, “while I'm guessing yours was.”

“Not to the knowledge of many, Ranger. I knew I had to get my ass on a plane as soon as I read the situation report on what happened at that Austin restaurant. Eighteen dead, was it?”

“Twenty-two, including the staff.”

“That Inuit village numbered twice that.”

“But they disappeared.”

“Turned out, they didn't disappear at all. Turned out, Labelle found what was left of them, after somebody had burned all the bodies.” He paused, then continued, “Near as I've been able to tell, the residents of the village were all struck down within minutes of each other.”

“Sounds like quite a leap, Mountie.”

“Not when you consider the trapper's story, along with the on-scene reports from my predecessors. Just about the entire village was eating, or about to eat, supper at the time. And the fact that the food still on their plates told the first Mounties on the scene that whatever happened, happened fast. Just like in your restaurant.”

“And what did those Mounties say about what killed your villagers?”

“Nothing, because they didn't have a clue, especially given that whatever evidence there might've been had gone up in smoke.”

“What about whoever did the burning? Did this trapper Labelle mention anything about them?”

“He didn't. But the Mounties who responded to Labelle's report recovered two still-whole bodies not far from where the rest of the bodies had been burned. One had his throat cut, and the other his wrists. They died sitting back to back. I believe it may have been determined they were brothers.”

“One cut the throat of the other, then slit his own wrists,” Caitlin concluded. “Makes sense. What doesn't is why they did it, and why they burned the bodies in the first place.”

“The tribe was relatively primitive, having lived the same way for centuries. They were also superstitious, beholden to the spirit world for guidance. The brothers might have returned to the village and saw the mass deaths as the work of evil spirits who intended on taking over the bodies of the dead.”

“Their only solution being to burn them.” Caitlin nodded.

“Exactly. Knowing the whole time they'd have to die too, to stop the spirits in their tracks.”

“And this is what that trapper stumbled his way into.”

Beauchamp moved to the window and opened the blinds all the way, as Captain Tepper was normally loath to do. He wrinkled his nose at the stale scent of cigarettes that hung in the air like a stubborn cloud, and opened the window all the way, in the hope of vanquishing it.

“Labelle's trapping trails had likely brought him to the village before. He probably knew some of the residents.”

“But not what killed them.”

“No. The trapper lit out through the cold and snow for civilization and ended up at a ranger station with a telegraph, ranting that whatever killed all the villagers was following him.”

“What,”
Caitlin repeated, “as opposed to
who
.”

“The cold had turned him delirious. He passed out after the wire was sent, and he thought the whole thing had been a bad dream, when he finally woke up.”

“What else did the Mounties find when they got to the village, Pierre? You wouldn't be here if there wasn't
something
.”

Something changed in the Mountie's expression. His cheeks paled, and the flatness of his face suddenly seemed to lengthen it. “There was, Ranger, and this is the part only
you
are going to believe.”

 

78

H
OUSTON,
T
EXAS

The echo of the broken glass and hiss of the bullet were still cutting through Cort Wesley's skull when he yanked Cray Rawls off the chair and dragged him to the floor, where Guillermo Paz was already lying, safe from the angle at which the shooter was firing.

“There's a taller building, three hundred yards to the west,” Paz noted. “That's where the shot was fired from.”

“Three hundred yards,” Cort Wesley calculated, running the distance through his mind. “Shooter's no rank amateur.”

But that same mind had already moved in another direction altogether, the puzzle pieces starting to link together. Somebody was covering their tracks, somebody who didn't want anyone else to learn what Sam Bob Jackson and Cray Rawls knew: the truth about what was on that Indian reservation.

Not oil.

Something else.

Clear enough.

“I'll move on the building,” Paz was saying, “as soon as we're outside.”

“Got to get there, first.” With that, Cort Wesley pushed closer to Rawls, across the rug, positioning himself right next to the man's ear to make sure Rawls heard what he said. “We're going for the door, into the hall. Don't raise even a hair on your neck. You hear me? Nod if you do.”

Rawls managed what passed for a nod, fingers stretching out to pull himself through the nap in the carpet.

Cort Wesley drew his gun; Paz had his in hand already. The sniper would know he'd missed at least one of his primary targets, along with the two men whose presence he couldn't have anticipated. In point of fact, Rawls was only alive now because Cort Wesley had yanked him to the floor ahead of the inevitable second shot, which as a result had never come. That meant a backup team would be left to finish the job. They were either en route to this office now or were lying in wait downstairs.

Pfft, pfft, pfft.

More gunshots showered flecks of glass through freshly bored holes. Those had been fired in desperation. The shooter was hoping to panic his intended victims, make them launch into a desperate rise. Cray Rawls started to do just that, but Cort Wesley pushed him back down before he got anywhere.

Pfft, pfft, pfft.

Still pulling himself across the carpet, Cort Wesley couldn't chase from his nostrils the scent of blood and gore from Sam Bob Jackson's ruptured skull. Paz was in the hallway by then, reaching back inside to drag Rawls the rest of the way. He kept his gaze fixed toward the office entrance, in case the backup team elected to storm the premises.

The moment his upper body crossed through the door frame, Cort Wesley was thinking origins, and only one possibility came to mind: ISIS.

The two men Homeland had managed to identify from an Austin patrolman's body cam … Cort Wesley couldn't remember their names, but clearly their cell had gone active. They wanted whatever was on that land belonging to the Comanche, and they didn't want anyone to know that they were after it.

Back on his feet, finally, out of view of any windows, Cort Wesley jerked Rawls upright and held him against the wall to the side of the door.

“What's on that land, you son of a bitch? What are you hiding?”

Rawls's features had calmed, his eyes suddenly as steely as they were evasive. “Get me out of here and I'll tell you everything you want to know.”

Cort Wesley pulled him on again, drawing almost even with Paz, once they reached the reception area.

“No one's coming,” the colonel reported, eyes and gun focused on the bank of elevators immediately beyond the office's glass front wall.

“Downstairs, then.”

“Dressed as first responders, police or medical.”

“How do you know?”

“How do you think, outlaw?” Paz said to him, leaving it there.

“Right,” Cort Wesley said, stretching a hand out toward the paneled wall, where it met the glass. “Just what I was thinking.”

And with that, he pulled the fire alarm.

 

79

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS