Strong Cold Dead Read online

  The two men on the other side of the booth were uniformly flat faced, their gazes caustic. Both were average looking, nondescript, just like him, except they had neatly trimmed beards and he barely needed to shave at all. Cross was tall and thin, with a waist that hadn’t changed much since middle school and still struggled to hold pants up, even with a belt. His brown, stringy hair was almost as oily as it had been back then, his skin, too, and his acne was just as bad—lately to the point that he had to go back to using the medication that made him smell like antiseptic.

  “What do you think you were achieving?” the second man, Ghazi Zurif, asked him, gazing about the restaurant again.

  Cross tried to smirk, to be the guy in control, which was what they’d made him feel like, until now. It was what he’d enjoyed most about this whole experience: being the one in charge, calling the shots for a change. Now it seemed like he was back to being no different from “Diaper Dan,” the nickname given to him in second grade, when he’d wet himself in class after the teacher refused to let him go to the lav. The nickname had stuck all the way through high school.

  “Nothing,” Cross told the two men who’d made him feel like Diaper Dan again. “I was just hanging around, watching. What’s the big deal?”

  “You were warned to be careful in your movements,” said Saflin, who had a drooping eye. “That’s the big deal.”

  “And you weren’t supposed to leave the apartment without informing us,” Zurif added.

  “Am I supposed to ask permission before I take a shit, too?”

  Saflin shot a hand across the table, brushing against Cross’s iced tea and nearly spilling it. The hand clamped onto the hand in which Cross was holding the steak knife and squeezed the wrist so hard that Cross felt his fingers go numb, the nerve held in a way that sent pain shooting up his forearm, all the way to his elbow. The steak knife slipped from his grasp and rattled against the floor.

  “You think this is a game?” Daniel Cross felt Saflin’s hot breath blow into him like air from a sauna, his droopy eye bulging wide now, the angle of his glare making one side of his beard look longer than the other. “What did you think was going to happen when you left those posts all over social media, enough to command even the attention of Allah?”

  “You are performing His will,” said Zurif. “Today you risked the plan He has set into motion.”

  “Come on, man,” Cross rasped, the agony knifelike now, until Saflin let go. Cross tried to shake the life back into his hand. “I thought we were in this together.”

  “You’re in it with us,” Saflin corrected. “But not together.”

  “I’m not a Muslim,” Cross reminded. “I just hate this damn country, want to see it get what it deserves.”

  “Muslim or not, you are following the will of Allah, as we were when we answered your call.”

  “We’ve been granted operational authority,” Zurif added.

  Cross was about to poke fun at the term, then thought better of it. “What’s that mean?”

  “It means you need to prove yourself before us,” Saflin explained, “this theory of yours, so Allah may bless the plan.”

  “It’s not just a theory,” Cross said, rotating his gaze between the two of them. “You want to kill a whole lot of people at once. I’ve come up with the weapon that can do it.”

  “That’s what we need proof of before Allah,” Zurif picked up. “A demonstration to show you’re not full of shit. Before we get the okay to move to the next stage.”

  “A demonstration,” Cross repeated.

  “And there’s something else,” said Saflin. “Someone was watching your apartment building.”

  Cross felt a tremor slip through him, starting in his stomach and spreading upward. “What’s that mean, exactly?”

  “It means Allah saved you by guiding you away, proof of His blessing over our holy mission.”

  Zurif leaned across the booth, too, close to Cross’s now forgotten plate of food. “And it means you made somebody’s list, triggered an alarm somewhere. Not to worry. That’s what Allah has placed us here for.”

  “To keep you safe, so you can make good on your promises before the eyes of God,” Saflin added. “Now, about that demonstration…”

  13

  AUSTIN, TEXAS

  Jones parked the van up the street from the rundown apartment building off East Saint Johns Avenue, shielded from view by leaking bags of trash piled high on the sidewalk. Guillermo Paz had counted a half dozen cars propped up on blocks since they’d hit this part of town, hopelessness riding the air as plainly as the stench of uncollected garbage.

  “You know the drill, Colonel,” Jones told him. “The target’s a lone wolf as far as we can tell. Can’t be sure, of course. That’s why you’re here.”

  “Lone wolf,” Paz repeated, glancing into the rear of the van, where the team members he’d chosen for this operation were gearing up.

  Like him, they were veterans of the Venezuelan secret police, better known as the National Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services, or DISIP. Part of a never-ending and self-replenishing supply of soldiers, culled from the best and most ruthless that American dollars could buy. In return, they offered plausible deniability for Jones’s black flag operations, undertaken on behalf of a shadowy subdivision of Homeland Security. As far as Washington knew, the colonel and his men didn’t exist, and that suited Paz just fine.

  “The target made overtures to ISIS via social media, but we lost the trail when he started pinging them via the Deep Web.”

  “But that’s not why you required my services, is it?” Paz asked him.

  “Nope. You got the job, Colonel, because something finally pinged back.”

  14

  AUSTIN, TEXAS

  Paz and his men were dressed like civilians, locals, secure in the knowledge that this wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where residents were likely to call the police to report suspicious behavior. The apartment to which he and his three men were headed overlooked a rat-infested alley at the back of a building. This particular slum seemed to have a nondiscrimination policy, drawing its hapless from among various ethnicities and backgrounds. According to the intelligence gathered by Jones, Daniel Cross was the product of a rape, his mother having been a prostitute at the time of his conception.

  Paz hadn’t read any more of the file because he didn’t need to. Half of Cross’s genes belonged to a rapist, which in Paz’s mind was as low as life could get. He’d come to realize that everyone is a prisoner of their own birth. Just as Paz had inherited psychic abilities, brujería as he called it, from his mother, Cross clearly carried the crazy, violent gene from his father’s side.

  According to visual surveillance, Daniel Cross was presently hunkered down in the apartment, working behind a computer. The lock on the building’s front security door was broken, and Paz led his men through, submachine guns whipped out from beneath their coats. They shoved a kid zooming toward the door on a skateboard out of the way and stepped over a drunk passed out on the stairs, en route to Cross’s third-floor apartment.

  Paz stood before the door, his men taking their flanking positions. An electronic sweep before he’d been given the go signal revealed no trip wires or any other defense against intrusion. Not that Paz required such intelligence. He trusted his own instincts and the brujeria he’d inherited from his mother more than any machine, and right now that brujeria told him he had nothing to fear. But he also was struck by an odd feeling he couldn’t quite identify, that left him distinctly unsettled.

  Shaking the sensation off, Paz lifted his right leg off the floor and aimed the heel of his boot straight for the flimsy latch. The door shattered on impact, the hinges themselves as well as the latch, sending the splintered remnants rocketing inward.

  A shaft of light illuminated a shape in a desk chair, swinging toward him, silhouetted by the flimsy, drawn blinds, something dark and shiny held in his hand. Sound-suppressed fire from his men tore the figure apart.
The whole chair wheeled backwards and slammed into the blinds, which dropped from their mounts and folded over what was left of what had been sitting there.

  “Madre de Dios,” one of Paz’s men muttered.

  * * *

  “A dummy?” Jones repeated, wondering what Guillermo Paz had tucked in his hand, when he returned to the van.

  “Stuffed animal, actually, dressed in clothes and a baseball cap.”

  “Don’t tell me, Colonel: facing away from the window so my surveillance team wouldn’t figure things out.”

  “The blinds cracked enough to let them see what they expected to.”

  “Yeah, there’s a post in Alaska waiting for them, as of tomorrow.”

  “I left my men in the apartment to make sure it was secured for your tech team. Tell them to watch out for the candy wrappers.”

  “Candy wrappers?”

  “They’re crumpled up everywhere. Hershey bars, I think.”

  “You could have told me that much over the radio, Colonel,” Jones said.

  “But there was something you needed to see,” Paz told him, showing Jones what he’d been holding. “Right away.”

  Jones looked at the framed picture, shaking his head. “Oh, shit…”

  15

  WEST HOUSTON, TEXAS

  “Well, poke me with a stick!” Sam Bob Jackson said, entering the reception area of his office with a wide grin, hands clasped before him as if he were praying. “If it ain’t Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong, in the flesh!”

  Caitlin popped up from her chair and extended her hand. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Jackson.”

  The owner of Jackson Whole Mineral clasped the hand in both of his. “I am so sorry to keep you waiting. I knew a Texas Ranger would be coming, but I didn’t know it’d be you, by God.” His eyes narrowed, head canting slightly to the side, as he pulled his hands back. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t, sir.”

  “Why, I’m the one who presented you that commendation on behalf of the Texas Chamber of Commerce after you plum near saved the state from those Russian fellas fixing to do us harm, just like your daddy did back in his time. Hell of a thing, wasn’t it?”

  “I’m not allowed to comment, Mr. Jackson, though I am curious about how you came by the information you did.”

  Jackson winked. He was a big man, with a triple chin dangling over a string tie that made him look like a fake cowboy. His belly hung well over his belt, which looked to be stitched from the same leather as his boots.

  “Well, Ranger,” he winked, “I suppose we both got our sources.”

  Caitlin nodded, figuring it was best to leave things at that.

  “Now, let’s go down the hall to my office so I can help you out in whatever it is that brought you here.”

  Jackson Whole Mineral occupied a floor of a gleaming new office tower located, appropriately enough, in west Houston’s Energy Corridor, with a clear view of the Katy Freeway out one of Sam Bob Jackson’s office windows. Caitlin took a seat in front of his desk and watched Jackson struggle to adjust the designer blinds just enough to keep the sun from her eyes.

  “There we go,” Jackson said, finally. “You comfortable?”

  “I am, sir.”

  “How about something to drink?”

  “Your assistant already offered.”

  “Yeah, Muriel’s a peach, ain’t she?”

  Jackson Whole Mineral advertised itself as an experienced and trusted purchaser of oil and gas mineral and royalty interests throughout Texas, Louisiana, and, most recently, the Dakotas, thanks to the Bakken oil field up there. As a third-party consolidator, the company’s role was to generate the best possible offers for clients who, like the Comanche, were looking to sell off interests in their land. Toward that end, the company maintained a staff of geologists, engineers, and economic analysts whose job was to get their clients the highest possible return for either leasing or selling their oil and gas interests.

  Still giddy, Sam Bob Jackson reclined comfortably in his leather desk chair, propped his boots atop his desk, and laced his fingers behind gelled hair that smelled like something out of a bakery. He looked like a caricature more than a man, but the persona seemed just genuine enough to leave clients with a comfort level bred by an old-school Texas oilman who seemed fit for an episode of Dallas.

  “So, what can I do for you, Ranger? You didn’t specify the reason for your visit.”

  “That’s because my visit isn’t part of an active investigation, nothing like that,” Caitlin told him. “I’m just here for some background on the Comanche Indian reservation outside Austin.”

  Jackson nodded, poking at the air with a finger that looked as thick as a cigar. “Where those young folk are staging a protest.”

  “That’s the one, sir.”

  “You mind calling me Sam Bob, Ranger?”

  “Not at all.”

  “On account of we got history between us and all, and I’m not just talking about that award the Chamber gave you.”

  “No?”

  “Your daddy got mine out of a whole mess of scrapes. He was a good man, my daddy, kind and generous to a fault. But he couldn’t hold his liquor, and Jim Strong was always there when a bender got the better of him.” Jackson pulled his boots off the desk and rocked his chair back forward. “Be glad to return that favor any way I can.”

  “Well, sir—”

  “Sam Bob.”

  “The truth is, I understand you were hired by the Blackfoot up on the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota. And I understand there was some trouble up that way, as well, in the course of more than thirteen hundred wells being dug.”

  “There was indeed, Ranger, regrettably.”

  “I believe the tribal chief who pushed the whole deal through, Tex G. Hall, ended up establishing his own energy consortium, with a shell company established by you, according to the paper trail. Hall’s currently facing a slew of indictments and has been implicated in a pair of murders.”

  Sam Bob Jackson forced a smile, trying to look casual and undaunted but unable to disguise the edge that settled in his voice. “Does your jurisdiction extend to North Dakota, Ranger?”

  “No, sir, but it does to the Balcones, and some of the Comanche have expressed concern over your involvement there, as well.”

  “You’re speaking of those protesters, I assume.”

  “There were protesters up in North Dakota, too, Sam Bob, who got it in their mind to draw attention to what fracking would do to their land. From what I’ve heard, they were pretty much right.”

  The giddiness fled Jackson’s expression like air from a balloon. His face suddenly looked smaller, his gelled hair not as shiny.

  “That’s something you’d have to take up with the oil companies Jackson Whole sold off the mineral rights to.”

  “Well, Sam Bob, the protests I’m talking about happened before the drilling operation began, when your company was still running the show. And one of the leaders of the Blackfoot protest ended up in a coma after a serious car accident. Another disappeared and turned up drowned, after falling out of his skiff while fishing the Snake River. Another of the leaders had a change of heart and ended up with a brand-new home for his whole family.”

  Jackson interlaced his fingers again, this time with elbows laid atop his dark wooden desk. “What exactly are you getting at, Ranger?”

  “Who would have the most to lose by a protest like that gumming up the works?”

  “The Natives, for sure. And the oil companies who’d bought the leases, of course.”

  “And if they’d decided not to drill and pulled up stakes within a specified period, on account of not wanting to push their way past a bunch of kids standing in their way? That would leave Jackson Whole holding the bag, wouldn’t it? On the hook for the nonrefundable advance you paid the Blackfoot, and the Comanche in this case, for the rights to sell or lease mineral rights to their land.”

  “You still haven’t answ
ered my question, Ranger.”

  “What question was that?”

  “How I can be of service to you.”

  “That’s because I came here to be of service to you. I believe it’s in everyone’s best interests here to make sure that no harm comes to those young Comanche standing their ground, ’cause we both know this’ll pass soon enough. Time and money getting lost are nothing compared to lives. And it’s in those same mutual best interests for you to tell me who might be capable of something like that—which both of us would regret. I just figured that a civic-minded man like yourself would want to do right. Make sure nobody gets hurt in a way that would reflect badly on everyone involved. Would I be correct in that regard?”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Jackson said, sounding as if he meant it.

  “That’s good, sir, because Texas has one thing North Dakota doesn’t, Sam Bob.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Rangers,” Caitlin told him.

  * * *

  Once back on the road, Caitlin finally checked her phone for messages and saw three labeled CAPTAIN TEPPER, along with five additional missed calls from Tepper. She was ready to pocket her phone without returning them, when he called for the ninth time.

  “Glad you decided to answer this time, Ranger,” Tepper greeted her.

  “I couldn’t read the caller ID, Captain.”

  “You think I’m stupid?”

  “Yes, sir, for killing your lungs with those damn Marlboros.”

  “Turns out the chair I assigned you hasn’t been sat in. Turns out you showed up where local cops are trying to prevent a riot, outside an Indian reservation, and then paid an unauthorized visit to some mineral company for no good reason at all, other than to piss somebody new off.”

  “I’m guessing Sam Bob Jackson called you.”

  “Yes, he did. We had a very congenial talk after I explained that I was revoking your day passes off the grounds of the lunatic asylum you belong in.”

  “You mean the one called Texas?”

  “Give it a rest, Caitlin. You pay the man a visit without even a clue of what it is you were investigating, without any authorization whatsoever, concerning something you don’t even have any jurisdiction over. Is that about right? Oh, hold on. I left out the part about putting you behind a desk until things quieted down at Department of Public Safety headquarters in Austin. Well, Ranger, the volume has now been officially turned up even louder.”