Strong Cold Dead (40 page)

Both the sprawl and the clutter bred by the carnival would work in their favor, offering additional camouflage for Paz's men. Jones never questioned Paz on how he handled such matters, just pointed the big man in a direction and let him off his leash.

“I hope you're reading this right,” Caitlin said to him.

“Just keep your nose out of it, Ranger.”

“Be glad to, Jones, after you tell me why they're meeting where thousands of people can see them?”

“Good question. Got an answer?”

“Only that maybe it was the fourth man's idea,” Caitlin ventured, an instant before Jones's iPad began chiming.

*   *   *

Daniel Cross had laid it all out for Hatim Abd al-Aziz. How he could make the weapon work in either an open or a confined space. How much it would take, and how long to handle the logistics. The ISIS commander drank his words in, almost giddy at the prospects and enamored by the supply his men would soon be returning to the Indian reservation to collect.

Al-Aziz seemed to bow his head slightly. “You said you were not a Muslim.”

“I'm not.”

“Perhaps not in this life. But in another you were a soldier of God, likely fighting by my side then as you are now. Perhaps then, too, you bestowed a great gift upon our movement, to enable us to realize God's will. Tell me how it will happen. Tell me the instruments by which His plan will be realized.”

“Extreme temperatures, like when the stuff is cooked, release the aroma. That aroma indicates the neurotoxin has been activated. If you can smell it, you're dead.”

“Extreme temperatures,” al-Aziz repeated. “That would, of course, include percussion, yes? I speak of spreading this toxin over a wider expanse through the use of explosives.”

“For sure,” said Cross, nodding enthusiastically, “if the results of the testing I've done is any indication. One thing to keep in mind is that the effects last only as long, and reach as far, as the aroma. Once the smell dissipates, it's over.”

“But if such a blast were detonated over a city as crowded as, say, this place?” the ISIS commander wondered, spinning his gaze about Klyde Warren Park.

“You'd have close to a one hundred percent mortality rate,” Daniel Cross told him, imagining just that, on these premises in the coming days.

“One hundred percent.”

“No survivors. None whatsoever.”

“Bismillah,”
al-Aziz said, closing his eyes. “In the name of Allah.”

The park had continued to fill up around them, only narrow gaps left between the various rides, booths, and attractions of the carnival stretched across the rolling, flat lawn. The result was to compress the crowd tighter and tighter.

If such a blast were detonated over a city …

Cross imagined it happening here, instead. Thousands dead, literally within seconds. Falling as they stood.

Wow,
was all he could think.

 

99

B
ALCONES
C
ANYONLANDS,
T
EXAS

“You really going to shoot us, Chief?” Cort Wesley asked White Eagle, buying the time he needed to ease Dylan all the way behind him. “Go ahead. We'll say hello to your granddaughter, or whatever she is, for you.”

Doubt crossed White Eagle's expression, not fitting him right.

“She's dead down there,” Cort Wesley continued. “Her cousins, too. Killed by human monsters I intend to hunt down, if you'll stand aside and get out of my way.”

The old man remained rigidly planted in place, but his expression wavered, its confidence gone.

“You don't think I could take that gun away from you or shoot you dead right now? But I'm not going to do that, because it would be too easy. You put your crazy thoughts inside that girl's head and never bothered to rein her in when she went too far.”

The shotgun began trembling in White Eagle's grasp.

“You goaded her and those boys into pretending this was still the nineteenth century. You got them killed, old man. I don't care if you're a hundred and fifty years old or a thousand. You're a self-centered asshole who didn't take care of the people who needed him.”

“Where is she?” White Eagle stammered.

“Just inside the chamber where you stored your killing concoction those dead kids were going to unleash on Houston, until Ela stopped them. But she couldn't stop ISIS, so get out of my way and let me do it.”

The shotgun barrel dropped toward the ground, as if suddenly weighed down. Cort Wesley started to advance, but White Eagle latched a bony grip onto his arm, holding him briefly in place. White Eagle's expression crinkled into a patchwork quilt of hatred and disgust, segmented by the way the sunlight framed it.

“Nothing else has worked,” the old man insisted. “For almost two centuries, nothing else has worked. The defilers and spoilers of the land must be shown the error of their ways. They would build and build and build, until our way of life is gone. I stopped Rockefeller then. I'll stop these men now.”

Cort Wesley shrugged off his grasp. “Yeah, keep telling yourself that.”

He started on again, angling Dylan before him in case White Eagle had a mind to use the shotgun.

“Ela's map, that part of Houston,” the boy said. “You recognize it, right, Dad?”

“Yes, son, I believe I do.”

 

100

D
ALLAS,
T
EXAS;
K
LYDE
W
ARREN
P
ARK

“Stand down! Stand down!” Jones ordered Paz and his men, who'd moved into flanking positions around the picnic table. “We've identified the fourth bogey! Repeat, we have ID on the fourth bogey!”

Caitlin and Jones had accessed the park off Olive Street and had appropriated an information kiosk next to Moody Plaza to set up a command center. Captain Tepper and Pierre Beauchamp, meanwhile, had hung back, near the exit closest to the picnic table in question, off Pearl Street and not far from the St. Paul DART station. If any of the targets fled, the thinking went, it would be in that direction.

Caitlin gazed at the flashing red box enclosing the fourth man at the picnic table. “Friend of yours?”

“The fucking Antichrist has joined the party. Head of ISIS's military operations. As in top dog. As in Hatim Abd al-Aziz, beheader in chief.”

Caitlin hitched her light windbreaker back to expose her SIG Sauer. “Man like that wouldn't have come alone.”

“Tell me something I don't know, Ranger. Colonel Paz, do you read me?” Jones said into his throat mic.

“We've identified six men already,” Paz reported into their ears, “all heavily armed. My men are moving on them now. And I know this al-Aziz. He's an ethnic Chechen, raised in Turkey, who trained with my secret police in Venezuela. As brutal as they come, and always travels in the company of a man known only as Seyyef.”

“The name never crossed my desk,” Jones said.

“It's not a name so much as a title:
seyyef
means ‘executioner' in Arabic. There's an old Arab folktale about a giant, shunned by a village, who gets revenge by blocking the sun from their crops. He was called Seyyef, too, for starving the villagers to death.”

“A giant,” Jones repeated. “You got eyes on him, Colonel?”

“I will. My men are in position and ready,” Paz reported.

Homeland Security's private army, reserved for situations just like this.

“What's the certainty you've marked all the fighters al-Aziz brought with him?”

“In this crowd, not certain at all. Six seems light. I'd expect two or three more. Somewhere.”

“What about Seyyef?”

“I'm still looking.”

“A man that big shouldn't be too hard to find.”

“Are you sure I'm not standing right behind you now?” Paz wondered.

Jones spun to find only Caitlin standing there.

“Something on your mind, Ranger?”

For some reason, she couldn't stop thinking about Daniel Cross. Viewing him, seated at that picnic table, she was seeing the same frightened, gangly boy she'd met in an Austin jail over a decade before. She'd promised him she'd stand by him, always stick around, and then had gone away. Now fate had brought them back together, though Cross was on the verge of doing far more damage this time, unless she could stop him.

Caitlin spied a banner strung between two posts hammered into the ground just off the carnival's makeshift midway. “How about we take the battle to them, Jones?”

*   *   *

“Tell me more about this holy weapon,” Al-Aziz said to Daniel Cross, his marble-like eyes seeming to flash. “The Indians have used it themselves?”

“According to legend, yes.”

“Legend,” al-Aziz echoed. “Then how is it this weapon has been kept secret for so long?”

“First of all, the
cuitlacoche
that's grown on the reservation is consumed there. And the Comanche have built up a natural resistance to its deadly effects, after making it a staple of their diet for so many centuries. Secondly, I've determined that the deadly strain of the fungus is limited to a relatively small patch of wild-growing corn in a remote corner of the reservation. I figure that's because the water feeding that area leaches out of a truly ancient aquifer, with just the right acid and alkaline balance to turn that particular strain of fungus deadly.”

Al-Aziz leaned back, scratched at his freshly trimmed beard, and then crossed his arms. “And how many, here and elsewhere, could we kill with the amount of this fungus you can harvest off the Comanche land, before the authorities and this Texas Ranger catch on?”

“Not enough. But the fungus isn't the real weapon here; the water that produces it, the way it interacts with
cuitlacoche,
is,” Cross told him, thinking of the still pond he'd found inside a cave just off the reservation. “With that water, I can figure out how to synthesize as much of the weapon as you need, a potentially unlimited supply.”

Daniel Cross cast his gaze beyond al-Aziz, toward the now jam-packed crowd. Barely any foot of space on the former overpass was unoccupied for more than a second. Kids dragged their parents toward the rides, which spun in elegantly graceful motion, in stark contrast to the way the world really worked. Nearby, water splashed into the air from the mini flume ride, where cackling children rode faux motorized logs about a sweeping course. Cars clanked past them on the roller coaster that wound its way over the entire length of the carnival.

“It would take time, but I could do it,” Cross heard himself tell al-Aziz, hating all the smiles more than anything else.

Smiles that disappeared when the first gunshots rang out.

 

101

K
LYDE
W
ARREN
P
ARK,
D
ALLAS,
T
EXAS

Except it wasn't gunfire at all but fireworks Caitlin had purchased at a nearby stand, which was already selling them in anticipation of the coming Fourth of July.

FIREWORKS
!
TWO FOR ONE SALE
! read the banner she'd spotted.

She'd lit four packs aflame within seconds of each other, tossing them in that many different directions in the immediate area of the picnic table where the ISIS commander was seated with Daniel Cross and the kid's homegrown handlers. At first, all she could feel was a collective ripple in the crowd, as the press of startled carnival patrons reacted instinctively, before almost settling back down, once the truth became clear.

And then the ISIS fighters appeared, bursting out from everywhere at once, it seemed.

The crowd packed along the midway saw the gunmen first, the assault rifles sweeping about behind hateful, determined glares, fingers ready on triggers, waiting for their targets to appear, initially believing the firecrackers had been real gunfire. The chronology tightened, unfolding in still shots instead of video, starting with the recognition that it had been merely fireworks that had drawn them out, not gunshots.

The gunmen froze, eyes shifting but holding.

The carnival patrons froze, too, for the length of a breath, maybe two. Then they began to run, scattering in all directions at once, a swarm quickly filling what little space remained between the rides that swept and soared about the landscape, packed with children and families.

Leaving the ISIS fighters alone, holding their ground.

Exposed for Guillermo Paz's men to fire upon.

*   *   *

Al-Aziz had his own pistol out by then, aimed across the table at Zurif and Saflin, who had already lurched to their feet, backing off.

“You betrayed me…”

“No!”

“And now you pay the price for your treachery before Him!”

With that, al-Aziz shot them both in the face as Daniel Cross watched, realizing only then that he'd risen to his feet, too, and that urine was running down his leg. Al-Aziz swung toward him, pistol leading.

“We will kill them,” the ISIS commander sneered hatefully. “We will kill all of them!
Allahu a'lam
 … Allah knows best!”

Al-Aziz grabbed Cross by the arm and dragged him into the panicked throngs, as actual gunfire burst from everywhere at once.

*   *   *

The familiar scent of gun smoke filled the air as Caitlin shoved her way against the grain of the crowd, in al-Aziz's and Daniel Cross's wake. Every time she drew reasonably close, another surge from the crowd forced her back. The jostling was uneven, unpredictable, thrown to the whims of the gunfight that had erupted between Paz's troops and the ISIS gunmen.

The clang and echoing racket of fire made for a constant din in the air, like soft thunder rumbling from one clap seamlessly into another. The panicked cries and screams drowned it out in splotches, the whole scene backed by the melodic hum of the local radio station's greatest hits medley playing over a set of freestanding loudspeakers, which toppled to the ground under the panicked flight. Divergent streams of patrons fled the park in all directions, in the shadow of the skyscrapers enclosing it, darting into traffic running east and west, which had almost immediately ground to a complete snarl punctuated by screeching brakes and honking horns.