Strong Darkness Read online

  And an American label at that.

  “You seem unimpressed, my friend,” Li Zhen said, trying to keep the disgust he felt for the man from creeping into his voice.

  “With your efforts to reassure me that things haven’t spun out of control here, you’re damn right.” Brooks was sweating despite the coolness dominating the air, even for October in Texas. “You should have told me the truth about the girl, Li. Holding back serves neither of our interests.”

  “Personally or those of our countries?”

  “What’s the difference?” Brooks smirked. “And that’s the point I’m trying to make here.”

  Zhen knew “Brooks” wasn’t the man’s real name but didn’t care about that any more than he cared about the man himself. He was a distraction, a part of his overall operation to be tolerated as necessary and placated as much as possible.

  “Did you think we wouldn’t find out the truth?” Brooks, or whoever he really was, continued. “We’re pretty good at this stuff. You should keep that in mind.”

  “I have, my friend,” Zhen said, his voice calm in a cold and disinterested manner. “I always do. The girl will be found.”

  “Which implies she hasn’t been yet. That’s why I’m not reassured by your insistence that the situation is contained, especially since your efforts ended up putting an innocent kid in the hospital. It’s only a matter of time.” Here, Brooks enunciated his point by tapping his watch, further annoying Zhen.

  “A matter of time before what?”

  “Your indiscretions lead back to you. And if they lead back to you, there’s a risk they could lead back to us, and that’s a risk we cannot accept.”

  Zhen simply shook his head, seemingly unmoved as he gazed about the garden. “All this beauty and you seem not to even notice.”

  The Yuyuan Gardens, as Zhen had come to think of them, formed an elegant testament to a tradition dating back thousands of years in his home country. A classical mix of tumbling waterfalls, flowering plants, and thickly lavish vegetation all laid amid beautiful layered stone and rock of varying colors and sizes keyed to the particular area of display they inhabited.

  “What’s that have to do with anything?”

  Zhen smiled, enjoying the fact that the American believed he, and his people, were in charge, just as the Triad had upon their initial meeting. “I built this garden because I wanted the employees of Yuyuan to find true beauty just steps away from their offices. Because in this beauty they will find purpose to their work. They will know that while their individual contributions might seem to mean nothing when compared against the greater whole, each of those contributions are actually like all of the flowers you see around you. Each one adds its own element of beauty. Remove it and the garden suffers. But in beauty, there is also danger.”

  Zhen strolled on, leading the American along the garden’s winding paths, the flowers they passed so beautiful that they looked part of a landscape painting dropped onto the scene instead of grown there. He caught his own reflection in a still stream, feeling he had not aged a single day in the sixteen years since his new life had begun. He wore his still thick hair slicked back. His complexion was unmarred by wrinkles and his skin tone even except for a tint of red that seemed to perpetually flush his cherub-like cheeks.

  Zhen stopped before a nest of beautiful red, pink, and white flowering plants. “This is oleander, among the most beautiful flowers known to man,” he told Brooks. “But also among the most poisonous. Just breathing in the aroma from a strain as pure as this is enough to induce symptoms that include heart palpitations that can lead to death if not treated almost immediately. There are stories of besieged Chinese villages burning fields of oleander to forestall the approach of their enemies, sometimes turning them back altogether.”

  Brooks nodded impatiently. “So your point is that the girl is beautiful and dangerous. I get that, Li.”

  “Actually, that’s not my point at all. In the case of oleander it is not the flower that may cause death, it’s the ignorance of the man unaware of the danger it portends. Do you see my point?”

  Brooks smirked again. “Let me make my point, Li. Your whole operation here is under my control and my discretion. We may serve each other’s needs, but it happens on my terms. Is that clear?”

  Zhen bowed slightly in feigned reverence again.

  “What is it that old Chinese curse?” Brooks asked him. “‘May you live in interesting times,’ isn’t it?”

  Zhen just looked at him.

  “Well,” Brooks continued, “I suppose we’re both cursed, aren’t we? That’s a point we need to keep in mind in the hope the day never comes when we find our interests opposing each other.”

  At that, Li Zhen reached up and pulled an entire oleander flower, stem and all, from its bush.

  “For that day,” he said, handing it to Brooks.

  * * *

  Li Zhen remained alone in his gardens for some time after Brooks departed, stroking the oleander petals as if the flowers were pets, enjoying the risk he was taking by sucking in their deceptively dangerous aroma. Finally he entered the building through a private entrance and stepped into an elevator cleverly disguised as a closet. The compartment swept him downward through four stories of hardened concrete to make sure the true purpose behind Yuyuan’s very existence was never detected by spy satellites orbiting hundreds of miles in space.

  The elevator opened onto an underground floor that made up a single cavernous space that could have been part of a brokerage house or call center, except its stations were unmanned. Everything in Li Zhen’s true headquarters, the ultimate product of his initial meeting with the Triad captains all those years ago, was automated. And everything keyed off two dozen wall-sized monitor screens that provided the floor’s only light until sensors picked up his movements and activated the dull fluorescents recessed overhead. Each screen represented a region of the United States, all of them showing a constant scroll of numbers rolling from top to bottom. Those numbers, collected and received from a pair of satellites launched by the Chinese government, were then programmed into the drive of a supercomputer that powered the various substations lining the floor before terminals that might as well have been manned by ghosts. Their screens glowed eerily, the collective light forming a kind of haze in the floor’s dehumidified air that seemed thick enough to touch.

  The total count, according to the central monitor, had exceeded a hundred million for the first time two days ago and was already a hundred and twenty-five million now. And before too long, Li Zhen fully expected that number to double to nearly two hundred and fifty million.

  Representing eighty percent of the United States population.

  All of whom would be dead in a week’s time.

  PART TWO

  When we see him at his daily task of maintaining law, restoring order, and promoting peace—even though his methods be vigorous—we see him in his proper setting, a man standing alone between a society and its enemies.

  —Walter Prescott Webb, The Texas Rangers

  12

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  “… if you’re not gone by midnight, Ranger.”

  Finneran’s threat seemed a better fit for the Old West, but Caitlin knew it was to be taken seriously nonetheless. The last thing she needed, especially in the wake of plowing members of the Beacon of Light Church into a drainage trench, was to get embroiled in yet another fiasco certain to draw unwelcome attention to her and the Rangers.

  From Rhode Island Hospital, Caitlin and Cort Wesley went to Spats, the bar just off the college-dominated Thayer Street, where, according to Detective Finneran, Dylan was last seen before he was attacked.

  “Sure, I remember him,” the manager, a stout muscular man named Theo, said, handing Dylan’s picture back to Cort Wesley. “Comes in a lot with his friends. Always smiling. Good with the girls.”

  “He was in here with some friends last night,” Caitlin picked up. Theo’s olive skin and slight accent made
her peg him as being from the Middle East, Lebanon or maybe Turkey. “Before he was attacked.”

  “Oh, man,” Theo said, shaking his head. “Just goddamn awful.…”

  “My son,” Cort Wesley said, still holding the picture.

  Theo shifted his shoulders and stretched his arms, trying to find comfort in the sports jacket that fit him too snugly. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

  “For what it’s worth, what was an eighteen-year-old kid doing drinking in a bar?”

  “Nobody said he was drinking.”

  Caitlin let her eyes drift over the tables squeezed below the bar area beneath a host of wide-screen televisions where kids who looked to be little or no older than Dylan were filling glasses out of tall plastic tubes with beer foam clinging to the empty portions. “What else do people do here?” she asked Theo.

  “You didn’t let me finish,” he said. “Sunday night that kid—Dylan—came in here and met some friends at a table in the back over there and ordered a tube.”

  “One of those,” Caitlin said, pointing toward the tables in the lower area of the bar where a hockey game was projected on one screen and a basketball game on the two others. She didn’t notice who was playing.

  “Yes. But before it got to the table, a girl showed up. Dylan must have recognized her because he joined her at the bar right away.”

  “You tell this to the Providence police detectives?”

  “Sure. They asked the same questions you are pretty much.”

  “Did it look like Dylan was expecting her?” Caitlin asked, thinking of the text message Dylan supposedly received.

  “I couldn’t say. Sorry.”

  “Can you describe the girl?” Cort Wesley asked him.

  Theo hedged.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I just want to choose my words carefully here. The girl wasn’t a Brown student. Only time I ever saw her she was alone and not just here either.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I manage the place across the street too. I’ve seen her at the back bar there, when we open it as a nightclub called Viva. I had her pegged as, well, a working girl.”

  Caitlin and Cort Wesley exchanged a wary glance.

  “That’s why I noticed when she walked in here last night,” Theo continued. “College kids aren’t her kind of crowd, especially a kid like your son who could probably have any girl he wanted. I don’t know how old she was, but I’d guess twenty-four, maybe twenty-five. Always very well dressed. Reminded me of a model, something like that.”

  Caitlin could see Cort Wesley’s mind veering in a different direction.

  “How’d my son get in here exactly, Theo?”

  “He’s got an ID.”

  “A fake ID, you mean.”

  “They all have fakes, Mr. Masters.”

  “Dylan didn’t have one when he left Texas.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Could you describe the girl for us?” Caitlin interjected, before Cort Wesley could respond to Theo’s challenge.

  “Are you a cop or something?”

  “Something. A Texas Ranger.”

  “You got any jurisdiction up here?”

  “So long as Providence is part of the United States. You mind describing the girl now?”

  “Long dark hair, not much over five feet tall. Very beautiful and exotic-looking,” Theo finished. “Oh, and she was Chinese.”

  Caitlin felt her cell phone vibrating in the pocket of her jeans and drew it out. “It’s Paz,” she told Cort Wesley.

  13

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  “How’s the boy, Ranger?”

  “How’d you know to ask, Colonel?”

  Of all the relationships Caitlin had ever enjoyed, the one she maintained with Colonel Guillermo Paz was by far the strangest and most inexplicable. It had begun under violent circumstances over five years ago now with them on opposite sides and had continued with them having joined forces ever since.

  Paz, a former colonel in the Venezuelan secret police and Hugo Chavez’s personal attack dog for a time, said it was because he’d seen something in Caitlin’s eyes that had changed his life forever. He seemed single-mindedly and resolutely committed to protecting her at all costs to himself. That protection now extended to Cort Wesley and his two sons and probably anyone else who was important in Caitlin’s life. When a secretive hit squad had attacked Caitlin, Cort Wesley, and his boys on the streets of a Texas town, Paz paid a visit to the squad’s headquarters in Houston where he proceeded to pour an experimental explosive down their throats that blew them up from the inside. When a kill team composed of Mexico’s worst killers launched an attack during one of Dylan’s high school lacrosse games, Paz rode to the rescue wedged out of a sunroof firing twin assault rifles. The list went on.

  The colonel had a small private army in his charge now, operating under the auspices of a Homeland Security spook whose name varied by the assignment and who believed Paz was beholden to him, whereas Caitlin knew Paz was beholden to no one. They didn’t see each other very much but he always seemed to know when she needed him, or was about to.

  “I had a vision,” Paz told her. “I used to see things only in my dreams, like my mother, who had the sight. But now I get them when I’m awake too. I saw the outlaw’s oldest boy in this one consumed by flames.”

  “Dylan was attacked last night. He’s in a hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. That’s where Cort Wesley and I are right now.”

  “Providence, Rhode Island?”

  “The boy goes to school here now, Colonel. College.”

  “I’m teaching at one of those myself now.”

  “Really?”

  “English to those who don’t speak it yet,” Paz said, not bothering to elaborate further.

  “What else did you see in that vision, Colonel?” Caitlin asked him.

  “This is just the beginning, Ranger. But I don’t think I’m telling you anything you don’t already know.”

  “What about a young Chinese woman? Anything about her?” Caitlin asked, not believing she was actually posing the question.

  “Not that I’ve seen yet,” Paz told her.

  He tried to recapture the broader message of his vision in his mind. But it was more a series of still shots than a moving portrait, denying him a clear picture. Then he recalled what had come after the flames had receded, leaving a scent on his nostrils like scorched wood and earth and flushing heat through his blood that made his skin feel oven-baked. He’d gazed out the window at nothing where the shifting trees enveloped the parklike grounds of San Antonio College beneath a moonlit sky, nothing at all.

  “Darkness,” Paz heard himself say softly.

  “Say that again.”

  “I saw darkness, Ranger.”

  “Nothing we haven’t seen before, Colonel.”

  “This is different. You’ve heard of the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger?”

  “Only that the Nazis were rather fond of his teachings.”

  “That’s because he wrote extensively on the connections between being and action, that by undertaking actions which do not support that being a man risks degeneration. Heidegger believed the wasteland was not so much a place as a state of mind we effectively banish ourselves to if we don’t stop resisting the nature of our being and just accept it.”

  “What’s the point here, Colonel?”

  “Goes back to the point you raised about the affinity the Nazis held for Heidegger. They saw in his writings moral justification for their actions because they were acting upon the natures they perceived themselves to possess. Following the path they were meant to take. You see where I’m going with this?”

  “Nazis represent as dark an evil as man has ever known,” Caitlin assumed.

  “There’s a new darkness coming,” Paz told her. “I saw it take the outlaw’s boy in its grasp when he crossed its sweep. Be warned that it’s not about to stop with him. This darkness is hun
gry for more and I could see no end to its reach in my vision.”

  “There’s something bigger involved here. That’s what you’re saying, Colonel.”

  “Isn’t there always?”

  14

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  Theo provided Caitlin and Cort Wesley with the names of the two Brown University students Dylan met up with at Spats the previous night. He also provided one of their phone numbers and the information that neither played football, in contrast to Coach Estes’s assertion that Dylan had been with some fellow freshmen players prior to the attack.

  “Are we in trouble?” Salaar Khan asked when they met in the Delta Phi fraternity house lounge, inside a brick-walled quadrangle draped in ivy where Greek life on campus was centered.

  “That depends,” Caitlin told him and fellow Delta Phi brother Ross Julian beneath the glow of a video game frozen on a big wide-screen television hanging from a wall over the room’s fireplace mantel.

  “Is this official?” Salaar picked up. “I mean, you’re a Texas Ranger and this is Rhode Island.”

  “We’re here because Dylan’s my son,” Cort Wesley interjected.

  “Do we need a lawyer?” Salaar asked.

  “What did I just say?”

  “We heard what happened,” Ross said, speaking finally. “How can we help?”

  What struck Caitlin most about these two Brown University juniors was how young they looked. Then she thought of Dylan lying in a hospital bed and started to feel the heat building inside her again. The video game frozen on the mounted wide-screen television looked to be one of those shoot-’em-ups where players with soldier avatar figures got points for each kill. She’d seen Luke playing similar ones, cringing every time a fake gunshot rang out through the surround sound, wondering what it might do to the video-game industry if every player had to witness what real violence looked like. Luke, Cort Wesley’s fifteen-year-old younger son, was enrolled at a Houston boarding school now, and she found herself starting to worry whether something bad was about to befall him. Maybe she should’ve asked Paz about that too.