Strong Enough to Die: A Caitlin Strong Novel Page 2

  “No, no man. No boy.”

  “Just you then, eh?”

  “Who?”

  “You.”

  “No, not me. There is no me.”

  The glass felt suddenly too heavy to hold, so he returned it to the merchant with a trembling hand and moved on, aware that the hand ached badly now as well. He held it up to his face as if to look for the source of the pain, coming away only with the realization that the fingers looked gnarled and swollen.

  He walked, as if trying to find a place where the pain would go away. If he closed his eyes and tried very hard to detach himself from his body, sometimes he could. But he couldn’t close his eyes now, couldn’t stop, spurred by the vague awareness of something out there worse than the pain that would catch up to him if he let it.

  He approached the luscious smells of food roasting on spits and outdoor grates. The food sizzled and hissed amid the pungent scents of garlic and lemon. Merchants served heaping plates of it up to waiting customers who carried them away in search of a seat at the chairs and tables set in the shade of a crowded veranda.

  The smells turned the man’s shrunken stomach. He tried to remember eating, could not recall a single bite or swallow. He came to an empty spot at a table in the shade, abandoned with a half-full plate left behind. The man touched his hand to the thick sauce pooling on one side, swiped his tongue across his fingers.

  Coughed, gagged, retched. Sank to his knees.

  Soon he was surrounded by a circle of people looking down, seeming to see him. But that, of course, was impossible.

  Because there was nothing to see. After all, he didn’t exist.

  WASHINGTON, D.C., 2008

  Harmon Delladonne saw Clayton coming and snapped up from the bench overlooking the Mall. His suit trousers flapped in the stiff breeze, and he ran his hands through his slicked-back dark hair before setting off down the street to let Clayton catch him in stride.

  “Fifteen minutes late, Clayton,” Delladonne greeted, feeling a slight drizzle dampening his shoulders. “Fifteen minutes.”

  “I came as soon as I could, sir.”

  “That’s time I’ll never get back, valuable time lost for good.”

  “We could have spoken by phone,” Clayton suggested weakly. Like Delladonne, he stood just over six feet, though much broader in the shoulders with narrow high-pitched cheekbones and a wide forehead that had an almost Neanderthal quality about it. “My line’s secure.”

  “Never trust machines, Clayton,” Delladonne told him. “Don’t even use a cell phone. Too easy to track a man’s movements with it. I know because my company does it. All the time. Anybody in the country. Anytime, anywhere. One of MacArthur-Rain’s many government contracts.”

  Delladonne understood the technology he had helped create well enough to know how easy it was to become a victim of it. Even the outdoors weren’t totally safe, not with surveillance cameras on every street corner and long-range listening devices that could hone in on a conversation from a quarter mile away. But stay on the move, keep your lips angled low when you speak, and you could feel relatively insulated. So whenever in Washington, Delladonne never took meetings in his satellite office, never took meetings at lunch, hardly ever took meetings at all. The one exception was the Senate hearing he had been called here to testify before, only to have an ally remove his name, temporarily anyway, from the witness list at the last moment. A good day indeed, until he heard about Bahrain.

  “I assume you wanted to discuss another of those contracts with me,” Clayton was saying.

  “Your initial report about Bahrain has been confirmed. Now tell me how this happened.”

  Delladonne’s route kept the Mall, Capitol Building and White House in view at all times. He liked it that way, liked the sense of ownership it implied, even if right now that ownership was going to hell. The day was gray and dismal with the promise of rain. Back in Houston it had been hot and sultry, the air holding signs of a blistering summer. But all that had been chased back by the dreariness of Washington, a city he had come to loath.

  “Our Bahrain operatives panicked,” Clayton reported. “Heard a U.S. government oversight inspection team was coming in.”

  “Government oversight,” Delladonne repeated. “What a joke.” But he didn’t sound at all amused.

  “The Bahrain facility wasn’t supposed to be on the list released to the new administration. It was private, after all.”

  “They were all private, Clayton.”

  “But the CIA worked the site originally. Extra funds spent on soundproof padding the walls. You know the drill.”

  “MacArthur-Rain didn’t retain your ser vices to tell me what I already know.”

  Clayton remained silent, feeling Delladonne’s stare boring into him. Clayton knew how to intimidate even those to whom he was subservient. But Delladonne was different. Delladonne might be thin enough to break over his knee but he was the first man, enemies and associates alike, who actually scared Clayton.

  “May I speak plainly, sir?”

  “Be careful, Clayton.”

  “My people in Bahrain went at this man for six months to get out what he was hiding in his head. They failed.”

  “You mean, you failed.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then say it. Say you failed.”

  “I failed,” Clayton conceded.

  “Accepting responsibility—that’s a good start. What comes next?”

  “We find him.”

  Delladonne stopped and turned to face Clayton, his eyes like black daggers of ice. “What makes 9/11 such a great tragedy, Clayton? What’s the first thing that comes to your mind?”

  “This country attacked. All those deaths.”

  “This country being attacked, yes. But the real tragedy lay in not enough deaths.”

  Clayton just looked at him.

  “We knew an attack was coming eventually,” Delladonne continued. “We had the level of response the country would accept down to a cost-benefit analysis of the number of lives lost. The first reports putting the death toll over 20,000 would have been the best thing that ever happened to this country because people would’ve embraced everything MacArthur-Rain wanted to do overnight. But when it turned out to be barely 3,000 we had to scale back. The world did change that day, just not as much as it should have.”

  Clayton bristled. “I lost friends, sir, and, frankly, I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

  “We all lost friends, and I’ll tell you what I’m getting at. We’re close to that point again. The gains we’ve made are incremental, but they’re there. And what this man you lost has locked up in his brain can give us the power to accomplish everything we’ve always wanted. The key to securing the future, Clayton, and I am not exaggerating.”

  “If it’s still in his brain, you mean, sir,” Clayton cautioned.

  “What I mean is that if we can’t get it, you’ve got to make sure no one else does either.”

  HOUSTON, 2008

  “Want a sandwich, Davis?”

  His wife’s voice drew him from his trance, and Davis S. Bonn looked up from his computer, flexing his fingers. His middle name was actually Lewis, but Bonn had adopted the S because it looked better on his byline. “Sure,” he said, “I’d love one.”

  His wife Tayanna tried to see what he was writing but he shifted in his chair to block her view of the monitor. They had met a decade before while Davis Bonn had been researching a story about the Khmer Rouge’s alleged intrusion into Thailand. The story had gone nowhere but Davis had fallen in love with his interpreter and managed to wrangle a visa for her to return with him to the States.

  “Come on,” she whined, “just a peek.”

  “Not until I’m finished. You know the rules.”

  “I just thought that this time . . .”

  “This time especially,” Davis told her, holding his ground.

  Tayanna relented and started for the door, looking back at him before she closed it. “
Just so long as you’re sure about this.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Because these are dangerous people.”

  “All the more reason to bring them down.”

  “Always the crusader.”

  “Just a jounalist, Anna.” Davis cracked a smile, as he always did when he called her that. “A journalist in search of a book deal.”

  “So long as you live to see it published.”

  “And the check cashed.”

  Tayanna smiled and, this time, closed the door behind her. She’d already mixed up the chicken salad and made sure the toast was just the way he liked it, the lettuce cut thin, before laying the sandwich on a plate surrounded by potato chips. Taking it in hand, she returned to Davis’s office and entered without knocking.

  “One sandwich made to—”

  Tayanna stopped. The plate fell from her grasp and shattered on the floor, the twin halves of the sandwich leaping in opposite directions.

  Davis Bonn lay slumped on the floor convulsing, bulging eyes fixed on the ceiling where a faint wisp of smoke had risen.

  “Dtaay!” Tayanna screamed.

  She rushed to her husband and dropped down, trying to still the spasmodic tremors in his arms and legs.

  “Davis!” she screamed, noticing only then a thin trail of blood dribbling from his right ear. “Davis!”

  His eyes failed to acknowledge her and then locked open altogether, his extremities settling stiffly. Tayanna bent over him and began administering CPR, continuing until exhaustion and hopelessness finally overcame her.

  By the time she dialed 911, twenty minutes had slipped away into some mournful netherworld, and the stench of burnt wires she’d already forgotten was gone.

  PART ONE

  By 1823, there were serious problems with raids by the Comanche, Tonkawa and Karankawa Indians. Under Mexican law, Col o nel Stephen Austin was authorized to form a militia to ward off Indian raids, capture criminals and patrol against intruders. In May, while Austin was in Mexico City, his lieutenant, Moses Morrison, used this authority to assemble a company of men to protect the Texas coast from the Tonkawa and Karankawa Indians.

  After returning to Texas in August of 1823, Austin asked for [an] additional ten men to supplement Morrison’s company. He called for “ten men . . . to act as rangers for the common defense. . . . The wages I will give said ten men is fifteen dollars a month payable in property.” These two companies are regarded as the first ancestors of the modern Texas Rangers.

  —Mike Cox, with updates from the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum staff, “A Brief History of the Texas Rangers”

  1

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  “But you made it,” Rita Navarro, director of the Survivor Center for Victims of Torture, said from behind her desk, after Caitlin had left her story off with being felled by the second bullet.

  “Barely,” Caitlin told her.

  “And the other Ranger, Charlie Weeks?”

  “He didn’t make it.”

  Navarro slid back slightly from the edge of her desk chair, checking the résumé before her again as if in search of new information. The light in her cramped office, once a treatment room in the clinic that had formerly occupied this building, came from ceiling-mounted, overly bright fluorescents. But natural light wasn’t an option since the room’s windows had been frosted over by a thick layer of dust and grime. Sometime during the transition from clinic to treatment center, the building had been allowed to fall into a state of disrepair requiring more funds to remedy than were available.

  “I’m glad to have had the opportunity to meet you, Ranger Strong—”

  “I’m not a Ranger anymore.”

  “—but what exactly are you doing here? We never advertised for a security specialist.”

  “No, you advertised for a counselor and therapist. That’s what I’m applying for.”

  “Oh,” Navarro said dismissively, and flipped to the second page of the résumé. She was younger than Caitlin had expected. Her name suggested a Hispanic heritage, but Caitlin thought she detected some Native American, Commanche probably, in her peaked cheekbones, narrow jaw and straight dark hair that dropped to the midpoint of her back. She had an engaging smile that Caitlin had so far glimpsed only upon exchanging a quick handshake, finding Navarro’s firm and slightly callused, evidence of a woman who liked to garden in her free time.

  Caitlin crossed her legs, then uncrossed them. The stiffness of the wood chair forced her to hunch forward, leaving her shoulders tense. And she was beginning to regret her decision to swap her jeans for pressed light cotton slacks. The jeans did a better job of accentuating her curves and making her long legs stand out less. At five foot nine she had her father’s height and grandfather’s short torso, a model’s body she’d often been told before adding substantial muscle to her frame with regular weight lifting workouts. Her wavy auburn hair was the longest it had ever been, tumbling just past her shoulders. Besides the hair, Caitlin looked no different than she had five years before. Maybe she was trying to freeze time going back to that night in the West Texas desert near the Mexican border. Do that and maybe she could figure out how to make it run backward too.

  She still got out in the sun a lot, leaving her skin drier and tighter than she’d prefer. But her complexion was smooth and dark, the rosy cheeks she’d been teased about as a child staying with her to this day.

  “After leaving the Rangers, I went back to college and got a master’s in psychiatric social ser vices,” Caitlin explained. “Got myself certified in crisis management and intervention. Nice complement to my undergraduate degree in sociology.”

  Navarro went back to the first page. “You were, let’s see, seven years with the highway patrol before you joined the Rangers.”

  “You need at least that much service with the Texas Department of Public Safety before the Rangers will even consider you.”

  “I understand only one of every hundred applicants actually makes it.”

  “Something like that. Since I was the one I didn’t give it much thought.”

  “Family tradition, it seems.”

  “Yes, ma’am. My granddad was the last of the real gunslingers. Took down a gang that had robbed four banks in the street outside number five.”

  “By himself?”

  “He happened to be having a cup of coffee in the diner across the way. My dad could hit the bull’s-eye with his pistol from a hundred yards nine times out of ten. And my great-granddad and great, great-granddad took part in some of the most famous Ranger campaigns in history.”

  “The Mexican War being one of them.”

  “That’d be my great, great-granddad. He was there all right, fighting skirmishes on both sides of the Rio Grande. What makes you ask?”

  Navarro tapped her desk with her index fingers, flashing a look that suggested she was leaving something unsaid. “I looked you up on the Internet. Seems like you were in the process of making your own legend with the Rangers.”

  “Not really.”

  “But you took down the man they called the most dangerous in all of Texas. McMasters or something.”

  “Masters. Cort Wesley Masters.”

  “You didn’t list that on your résumé.”

  “It was just an arrest. I made dozens of those.”

  “Only female Ranger ever, is that right?”

  “There’ve been a few others, but it never quite worked out, ma’am.”

  “I imagine it could be a tough job for a woman.”

  “Well, truth be told, it’s a tough job for anyone, but it’s a lot to ask of a woman, especially, to ride into some Texas town been doing things a certain way for a long while and tell the elected sheriff that you’re the resident Ranger on a case he thought he was in charge of.”

  “Didn’t seem to bother you much with this Masters.”

  “I had some luck, ma’am.”

  Navarro let it go at that, passing Caitlin a faint smile that said she
knew there was plenty more to the story. Caitlin was grateful, in no particular mood to rehash her near gunfight with the most feared man in the state. Today was about moving forward, not back.

  Navarro studied the pages again, less cursorily this time, no longer feigning interest. “You received a commendation for what happened at the border, saving your partner and all.”

  “I didn’t save him for long.”

  “Special Medal for Valor, it says here.”

  “I didn’t deserve it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we got ambushed. Seems all wrong getting rewarded for being ambushed.”

  “You left the Rangers on your own?”

  “I did, ma’am.”

  “Not on disability, it says here.”

  “I wasn’t disabled.”

  “Six months after the gunfight in which you were wounded.”

  “There was the hospital stay.”

  “Two months,” Navarro said, after consulting the pages before her, “to treat two primary bullet wounds.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Rehab cost you another two,” Navarro read. “Then you rejoined the Rangers for two months, before leaving for good.”

  “You want to know what happened.”

  “I am curious as to the circumstances.”

  “How much you wanna hear, ma’am?”

  “How much you want to tell me?”

  2

  EL PASO, TEXAS, NEAR THE MEXICAN BORDER, 2004

  Caitlin had never been shot before, knew in those moments she was lying on the ground intertwined with Charlie Weeks that all the stories she’d heard about the feeling didn’t do it justice. It wasn’t the pain that scared her; it was the heat and the awful stench of her own burnt-smelling blood.

  But she had the good fortune of dropping into a slight depression in the dirt that offered the mea sure of cover she needed to right herself and the Ruger.

  “Where are they? Can you see them?”

  The words were shouted in English again, the speaker closer than he’d been before.