Strong from the Heart--A Caitlin Strong Novel Page 5

  “Sir,” Fass restarted, “my comments pertain to the fact that whatever happened has been contained to Camino Pass. There is no indication of exposure beyond the town’s borders.”

  “Exposure to what?” the southerner drawled.

  Fass found himself focusing on the two globes that hadn’t spoken yet, waves of soft color rolling around inside them as if they were in sleep mode or something. “We’re not sure, sir. Our facility is rock solid—literally. And none of the chemicals we’re working with could produce this kind of result.”

  “What about some combination of them?”

  “I’ve considered that, but my people assure me it’s impossible. We have redundant measures for our redundant measures, and the mere notion of looking at that for causation would require an outside stimulus in the form of an explosion or a systemic breakdown of our security measures that never occurred. If it had, you would’ve heard the alarm bells all the way to Washington. I have no idea what killed that town, sir, but I have every confidence it had nothing to do with our work. We need to look elsewhere for a cause.”

  “Where?” demanded the southerner. “Outer space maybe? Because nothing on God’s green earth could kill an entire town the way this one died, son.”

  “But it didn’t kill everyone, did it?” the original voice noted. “There was a survivor. Can you explain that?” he asked Fass.

  “Not at all, sir. Not until we have a better idea of the cause.”

  “We’re concerned this was the result of hostile action, an attack that missed its intended target.”

  “You think our facility was targeted?”

  “I said we were concerned. The alternative is that we caused this somehow, in which case…”

  Fass waited for the voice to continue.

  “In which case,” it finally did, “there will be questions, challenges, attention drawn plainly where we don’t want it. We don’t need that; we can’t have it.”

  “There’s nothing that could possibly draw any attention to our work, even from the Texas Rangers.”

  “You’re missing the point, son,” said the southerner. “We need to keep whatever did all this killing contained as well. Can’t have anybody sniffing around the area. Can’t leave any clues for them to follow. You getting my drift here?”

  “I believe I am, sir. I’ll handle it as soon as I’m back in Texas.”

  “Make sure you do,” said the other talking snow globe. “Our work has produced great results. We are remaking the world, Mr. Fass, and we must continue to remake it, through any and all means at our disposal. No setbacks. That’s priority number two.”

  “And priority number one?” Fass asked, eyeing the silent snow globes as if expecting them to speak at last.

  “Right now, we need to uncover what wiped out Camino Pass.”

  12

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “I couldn’t help but notice you were looking for a physical education teacher,” Guillermo Paz said to Principal Mariana Alonzo, from across her desk at Canyon Ridge Elementary School. “When I was here earlier today, I mean.”

  Paz waited for a response, but all he got was a nod.

  “Got an application,” he asked her, “something I can fill out?”

  “Do you have any experience, Mr.…”

  “Paz. Guillermo Paz. And it’s colonel, not mister.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It’s not official by American standards. It was my rank in the Venezuelan military and, later, when I was running the country’s secret police, aka Dirección Nacional de los Servicios de Inteligencia y Prevención, or the National Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services. I wouldn’t expect to be submitting any references from those days.”

  Alonzo nodded, clearly pleased by that.

  “My Texas Ranger still calls me colonel. I figure if it’s right for her, I should keep the title.”

  “Your Texas Ranger?”

  “Figure of speech, and a long story not germane to the subject at hand, meaning my application.”

  “We were talking about experience.”

  Paz shifted in the chair, which was much too small to accommodate his size. It creaked in protest every time he moved, so he did his best not to shift positions even in the slightest. Mariana Alonzo looked distinctly uncomfortable in his presence, her gaze constantly shifting to the door or the wall clock—he couldn’t tell which.

  “As in teaching experience,” she elaborated.

  “Oh,” Paz said, “I’ve got a lot of that. I always schooled all the operatives who served under me on the finer points associated with their work. Would you like some examples?”

  Alonzo leaned forward, seeming to relax a bit. “Yes, please.”

  “Well, it’s important to be able to kill using a gun, knife, or your bare hands. Proximity, lighting, the relative stealth nature of the mission are all factors determining the ultimate choice. Instinct plays a factor here, of course, and that’s something that can’t be taught. But for men who’d advanced to the special ops level, this is a conscious decision, and I wanted to make sure I taught my men how to make the right one.”

  Paz stopped, impressed with his answer. Principal Alonzo looked frozen behind her desk.

  “Another example,” he jumped in. “Back in Venezuela, to be honest, we weren’t trying to win any hearts and minds. But when a village misbehaved and required punishment, it was important for me to teach my men restraint. For example, don’t kill a whole family, just the oldest son, to teach them a lesson. Don’t burn down the whole village, just a building or two. And never touch the crops. That was especially important, because destroying the village’s food source would most likely drive them even closer to the rebels, defeating the purpose of our coming there in the first place. I taught my men to understand the geopolitical realities we were facing, taught them that we wanted the locals to fear us but not necessarily hate us. That was an important distinction. You see my point?”

  Alonzo tried to nod. “What about experience working with children, Colonel?”

  “Well, I already told you about my work at that day care center some of your students attended—you could ask them for references. I taught English to immigrants for a while, and some of them were kids. Oh, and I volunteered to run religious services at a local homeless shelter, but there weren’t many children in attendance at those. Occasionally, you’d get a mother with a couple kids hiding out from an abusive spouse. I’d look at her through the whole of the service, reading the fear in her eyes and watching her flinch at every loud noise. A few times I asked these women to tell me their stories, and then I’d pay a visit to the men who abused them. The men in question never bothered those women again.” Paz couldn’t help but crack a smile there. “So, hey, I guess you could say I taught them something, too.”

  It was hard to tell from Mariana Alonzo’s expression whether she agreed.

  “But you know who I’ve taught the most to? Myself. See, jefa, I was a different man when I first came to this country ten years ago. Did I tell you about that?”

  “Er, no.”

  “You need to hear this for some historical perspective. See, I came to America to kill several people, most notably my Texas Ranger. Of course, she wasn’t my Texas Ranger back then. So we’re trying to kill each other and our eyes meet and I see in my Ranger’s something I’d never seen in my own. I realized that was what I wanted to see when I look in the mirror, so I entered a kind of transitional period. I thought it would get me where I wanted to be, but now I realize it really isn’t the destination that matters, it’s the journey. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who said that, even though a lot of people attribute the quote to Jerry Garcia.”

  Paz noted that this distinction produced no response from Alonzo.

  “My priest, Father Boylston, put up with me until he suffered a stroke. I visited him every day in the long-term care facility and was the only one who could get him to eat. I’m going to tell you something, jef
a. The doctors said he couldn’t understand things anymore, but I knew he could hear what I was saying, even if he couldn’t respond. Nobody asked me to be a pallbearer when he died, and that bothered me, because I thought I owed it to my priest to carry him into his next life after he helped carry me to a new place in mine.”

  Alonzo leaned farther over her desk, looking like she was glad it acted as a barrier between her and Paz. “Father Edward Boylston?”

  “The very same. Do you know him?”

  “He baptized me, Colonel.”

  Paz found himself missing his priest, in that a moment, more than any other time since the man’s death. “He listened to my confessions, jefa—no easy task, as I’m sure you’ve figured out for yourself. He never judged me, because he felt that was God’s job. But he helped set me on the right path toward finding myself and seemed pleased when I figured out that path was endless, all on my own. Because every time you find yourself, you’re already somebody different and it’s time to start the process all over again. You see what I’m getting at here?”

  Mariana Alonzo nodded as her eyes met Paz’s, no longer looking afraid. “When can you start, Colonel?”

  PART TWO

  SAMUEL H. WALKER

  Hays and his men were usually outnumbered in their skirmishes with Comanche and Mexican forces, but managed to hold their own thanks to their highly effective use of a more modern weapon: the revolver. Soon after Samuel Walker joined Hays’ Ranger company in 1844, they and 14 other Rangers took on some 80 Comanches in the battle of Walker’s Creek. Armed with the first practical revolver, designed by Samuel Colt, the Rangers came out on top in the fierce clash. Walker was seriously wounded, but recovered to become a celebrated Ranger captain during the Mexican War. In late 1846, he made some simple suggestions to improve Colt’s revolver design, and the upgraded “Walker Colt” became the deadliest weapon of the war. Walker was killed in a clash with Mexican forces at Huamantla in October 1847.

  —Sarah Pruitt, “8 Famous Texas Rangers,” History.com

  13

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “Watching you,” Captain D. W. Tepper commented, after Caitlin had finished bringing him up to speed on what had transpired in Camino Pass. “Got anything to support that assertion?”

  “Just my gut. I’m thinking it was one of those high-altitude drones, pretty much invisible to the naked eye.”

  “Is your gut telling you anything else?”

  “Yes, sir. Your office smells like cigarettes.”

  “That’s your nose, not your instincts.” Tepper pulled a half-gone pack of Marlboros from his top desk drawer and flashed it toward Caitlin. “One of the advantages of you being out all day is I can do as I please in my own office.”

  “That include chopping years off your life?”

  “With you determined to put me in an early grave, what’s the difference? Homeland Security’s talking about blowing Camino Pass off the map. You want to give me the short version of what you think happened there?”

  “It wasn’t hostile action, an attack, or anything like that.”

  “Your gut tell you that too?”

  “If this were a bioterror attack, some kind of experiment on a town located in the middle of nowhere, the perpetrators would’ve beaten us there to check the results of their handiwork. But there was no trace of any fresh vehicle tracks, other than the ones made by the Homeland RV. No sign of anyone entering the homes for some kind of assessment before we got there, either. And if somebody had beaten us to the town, they would’ve found Lennox Scully ahead of us.”

  “I hear he made for a great welcoming committee, Ranger.”

  “If I woke up to find everyone around me dead, I’d tend to react the same way.”

  “Except you would’ve come out guns blazing instead of with scissors.”

  “Give me some credit, D.W. I didn’t shoot anybody today.”

  Tepper stuck a cigarette in his mouth and waited for Caitlin to reach across the desk and pluck it out, resuming when she didn’t. “No, but sometimes your words do as much damage as bullets. I’ve been fielding calls about you going up against ICE all day, press included. One reporter asked me to confirm that you’d shot one of their agents.”

  “What’d you tell them?”

  “That it couldn’t be true, because the report said you only put one of them down. Where’s your friend Jones when we need him?”

  “Working for one of those private security firms, last I heard. Making the big bucks, after Homeland gave him his walking papers. Any leaks on Camino Pass?”

  “Nope. News blackout is holding for once. Doc Whatley was waiting at University Hospital when Mr. Scully arrived.”

  All major cities, Caitlin knew, had designated a level one trauma center as a crisis response center. This entailed, among other things, a ward outfitted with isolation chambers and vacuum-sealed labs where most everything could be handled without coming into physical contact with anything potentially hazardous or toxic. The process made heavy use of robotic instruments and hazmat suits attached to flexible, accordion-like tubing that allowed the examination team to move about the lab without fear of contamination or infection.

  “I understand a second Homeland team is currently clearing the bodies,” Tepper continued. “Doc Whatley’s gonna be a busy man.”

  He was referring to the longtime Bexar County medical examiner, Frank Dean Whatley. Whatley had been handpicked by Jones for the duty, grousing but secretly happy about taking on the job for the relevance it provided him. A man devoid of outside interests or hobbies, he feared nothing more than his looming retirement and had so far successfully resisted all efforts to force him out.

  “I wonder what he’ll make of a single survivor to go with those near three hundred dead,” Caitlin noted.

  “A drunk, right?”

  “You think that’s relevant?”

  Tepper finally lit his Marlboro. “I think it suggests maybe a bad habit’s the secret to staying alive.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that, D.W.”

  “Tell me more about this feeling you were being watched,” Tepper said, making sure to blow his cigarette smoke in Caitlin’s direction.

  “Felt like crosshairs were zeroing in on me.”

  “You in particular?”

  Caitlin shrugged. “I think somebody was waiting to see who showed up. Maybe the ghost of my great-grandfather. I seem to recall a story about him having his own experience in Camino Pass, maybe a hundred and twenty-five years ago.”

  “That all you remember?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Then let me tell you want happened when he got there…”

  14

  CAMINO PASS, TEXAS; 1898

  “Yup, I feel it too, girl,” Texas Ranger William Ray Strong said, patting his horse Jessabelle lightly on her hindquarter. “Something sure ain’t right.”

  William Ray knew something was wrong as soon as he’d reached the outskirts of Camino Pass, a Texas town Mexicans could hit with stones from across the border. He’d felt it the moment the church steeple and dusty assemblage of buildings came into view, a gnawing in his gut that almost felt like some spoiled piece of food was working its way through his system. The gnawing tightened into a knot as he’d drawn closer, leaving the Ranger to wonder whether the Mexican bandit he was here to pick up and deliver to the county seat in Presidio, forty miles down the road, to stand trial was somehow involved. That got him figuring that maybe this simple prisoner transport wasn’t going to be so simple, after all.

  He’d become a Texas Ranger in 1874, the same year his father, Steeldust Jack Strong, had taken on none other than John D. Rockefeller over the lands of an Indian reservation. All of seventeen back then, a mere boy, in stark contrast to what he’d become in the years since, fighting more battles and killing more men than he cared to count. Many of them had been Mexicans, which made William Ray all the warier anytime his duties brought him this close to the border, to the point where he was
always leery of a potential ambush. It had happened before with other Rangers, the plotters inevitably ending up on the short end of the stick—literally, in the case of one Mexican gunman who’d been sent back across the border splayed across his saddle with a shard of lumber stuck up his rear end.

  But William Ray suspected no such thing here. This was something else, something that made the air feel chalky, with a palpable sense of fear permeating it. He had the name of the bandit he was to escort north stuffed in his saddlebag someplace, forgotten until he sorted out the source of whatever had so discomforted him upon entering Camino Pass.

  He reached the small houses that dotted the outskirts of the town, just short of the main drag featuring a building that housed the sheriff’s station, saloon, small hotel, and mercantile exchange. Most of the residents were laborers who relied on odd jobs and seasonal work on either side of the border. There were a few farmers and ranchers sprinkled in among the couple hundred residents, none of whom were in evidence until William Ray heard a door crack open. He eased Jessabelle to a halt in order to peer back at whoever was peering out.

  “What happened here?” William Ray asked a shapeless figure beneath a thick mane of gray hair.

  “You a Texas Ranger?” the older woman said, having spotted the gleam of his badge in the spray of sunlight.

  William Ray pulled back his jacket all the way to display the whole of his badge.

  “You come to fetch them all back?”

  “Who?”

  “The children and the men who gone after them. They never came back neither.”

  William Ray felt something gnaw at his insides. “What happened to the children?”

  “Taken.”