Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 (19 page)

Unlike the fat pigs, the two meth heads were razor-thin with sunken cheeks. Their teeth were worn nubs, consumed by the constant need for sugar. You could turn a pretty good trade in Kansas City if you started cooking up crystal meth in an abandoned home or disused McDonald’s. Workers trying to get through gruelling shifts or long drives frequently resorted to it, trading short-term alertness for long-term health problems.

Their eyes stared out at her now from darkened pits. One man caught her looking at him, and smiled back with real malevolence. Not that one, she decided.

She wished she had something to read, something to hold in front of her face and hide behind, but no way was she going to waste money buying a copy of the local newspaper. It would just be filled with the usual garbage from the resettlement authorities, proclaiming Kansas City to be a paradise found. Not a word of the meth epidemic, of course, or the shootings, stabbings and other crimes that were a regular occurrence in the lives of most people here. Or at least, the people she knew. Sofia took to staring out of the window at the big rigs as they grunted and rumbled around on the tarmac. Occasionally one of her fellow diners would finish his meal, get up and leave, but most of them seemed content to sit for a while. She wasn’t sure what they were waiting for. The weather wasn’t likely to improve, and it wouldn’t be light for many hours. Perhaps they were all worried about bandits.

Sofia picked at her fries when they arrived, hating the oily taste. But the more she ate, the hungrier she seemed to grow. After half an hour, she had finished the lot.

She became aware that the two youngest drivers, the speed freaks, were staring openly at her. They appeared to be talking about her, pointing, greatly amused by something or other. It made her wish she’d been able to stop by the apartment. Papa kept three guns there in a cabinet: his saddle gun – a sort of sawn-off shotgun he’d always carried with him on horseback – his Winchester repeater, and the .357 Colt he had been teaching her to use. She would’ve been grateful to have that handgun with her now, tucked inside the waist of her Levi’s, hidden under the weight of her hoodie top.

Thoughts of the loft at Northtown, and her father, seemed to uncap a deep wellspring of sorrow, which bubbled up inside her so quickly she was almost overwhelmed. She took a deep breath and threw down the rest of the water. The drugs must’ve been wearing off, she realised. All she wanted to do was go home, crawl into her bed and wake up in the morning to discover that it had all been a horrible, cruel dream. To find her father there making breakfast for them both and teasing her about how grumpy she was in the mornings. If she could do that, she would promise Jesus and Mary to never disrespect Papa again. To always do as she was asked. And for ever after to appreciate what she had.

Sofia pressed her lips together, lest the merest whimper escape from them. She bit down and swallowed her grief. She would allow herself to grieve properly later on, in private. For now, she had other priorities. Actions changed the world for the better, not feelings. Papa had taught her that.

She looked over again at the meth-head pair and returned their stare, hoping to infuse it with enough hostility to forestall any interest on their part. So intently was she glaring at them that she completely missed the threat approaching her from the side.

‘Seems like you might be in a lot of trouble, Miss.’

Hours later, back in his office upstairs and nursing a Gentlemen Jack, Jed Culver had reason to ponder the role of serendipity. He was not somebody who believed in chance. Victory went to those who prepared, who stayed focused, and who did not relent no matter how much damage they were taking. And yet, sometimes the merest happenstance could change everything.

It was something Henry Cesky had said while he was bitching about Blackstone locking him out of government work down in Texas. Jed had no doubts at all that the businessman had been blacklisted for his role in toppling Mad Jack’s military junta a month or so after the Wave, and then for publicly and volubly aligning himself with Kipper during the election that eventually followed. Blackstone was indeed a vengeful cocksucker. Bill Gates wasn’t welcome down in Fort Hood either.

But he was a sloppy, arrogant, overreaching cocksucker too.

Culver sipped at his bourbon and enjoyed a warm, satisfied smile as he flipped through the folder he’d just received by safe-hand courier from Vancouver. Some things were worth sitting up late for.

He had seen this file before. Or rather, he had been briefed on its contents a few weeks earlier. The briefing did not cover the sort of information most people would’ve thought relevant to the files in front of him, amid his city scape of stacked folders and binders crammed with information about the government of Texas. But Jed Culver, alone in all the land, now knew there was a link. The safe-hand courier had travelled down from Echelon HQ in Vancouver because, a short while after Cesky had complained of being locked out of salvage operations in Texas, the vast archive of information stored inside Jed’s grey matter had begun to reformat itself around a potential link between two apparently disconnected data points.

He held in his hand an after-action report, written up, he was gratified to see, by a Special Agent Caitlin Monroe. He well remembered talking to this woman shortly before she had parachuted into New York in a last desperate attempt to lay hands on the Emir. Baumer was his real name, of course. But back in the old world, with its old wars and blood hatreds, he had also been known as al Banna, and he had been a medium-level functionary of al-Qaeda’s globally franchised jihad. The task of infiltrating and disrupting his particular cell of that hydra-headed monster had been the responsibility of one Special Agent Caitlin Monroe. Not surprising then, that she’d been the one to tag him as the provocateur behind New York.

Jed flipped slowly through the Echelon file.

‘Oh, Agent Monroe,’ he said softly to himself. ‘You are going to be my new best friend.’

He read and re-read the relevant paragraph.

The Subject Lupérico stated that extraction of Subject Baumer was effected by Subject Ozal using the assets of the Hejaz Shipping Line, a wholly owned subsidiary of Subject Ozal’s Hazm Unternehmen (Corporation).

‘My new best friend forever,’ he added with a smile.

Culver now turned his attention to the file balanced on his lap. A report from the Secretary of the Treasury’s office concerning contracts signed by the government of Texas,
ultra vires
– or in layman’s terms, ‘beyond the powers’ of that government. On page 25 of Annex B, he had what he wanted. A listing for a salvage contract, worth twenty-five million New American Dollars, signed between the Blackstone administration and Hazm Unternehmen. The contracts were notarised and exchanged one week before the Hejaz Shipping Line was confirmed by Echelon London to have sent three large vessels carrying somewhere between four and five hundred combatants from the Libyan port of Tobruk into American waters, where they eventually made landfall on the East Coast. At New York.

‘Gotcha . . .’

‘Cindy French is my name. I haul that big-ass classic Kenworth out there, the one with the sky-blue cab? Rocky Mountain double? Got me a load of Maersk containers heading down to Corpus Christi.’

Sofia hadn’t said a word, hadn’t invited her to sit down, but that’s what this Cindy was doing – sliding herself into the booth, juggling a plate piled high with fried chicken and mashed potatoes, and two huge paper cups filled with Coke. When she had herself comfortably settled into the booth, she pushed one of the drinks across and smiled. The smile reached into Cindy’s clear blue eyes, drawing to Sofia’s mind memories of her grandmother.

‘Here, hon,’ she offered, ‘the Coke isn’t half bad here. And take some of these taters off of my hands. They’re probably instant, but beggars can’t be choosers. I loaded myself down with a dozen-piece chicken meal so if you want a drumstick, I’d be willing to spare one. But the
gravy
– oh, that is first-rate sausage gravy right there, straight out of the pan. You can’t go wrong with that.’

Sofia checked across the room. The two men who’d been creeping her out had lost interest now.

‘Don’t you worry about them, hon,’ said the woman. ‘They won’t bother you while I’m here. I once gave those boys an ass whoopin’ with my favourite tyre iron. Taught them some manners. I won’t abide poor manners in a man.’

She picked up a chicken breast and bit into it with evident relish, rolling her blue eyes as she chewed. Sofia watched the woman, who was shorter than her by a good few inches, work her way through the plate of food. It was hard to tell her age. There was a strange, childlike quality to her, especially in the giddy way she ate. Through that veneer, however, there lurked something else. Sofia wasn’t sure what it was, but at the end of a long and terrible day she found she wanted to trust this woman very much.

After swallowing her mouthful of food, Cindy spoke again, not looking at Sofia, but still concentrating on her plate.

‘You know, I’m not going to be here for long.’

She finally looked up. The smile was still there.

Sofia didn’t know what to say. For a split second just now, she thought she’d been tracked down by the police. Instead she seemed to have attracted the attention of a crazy person. Kindly, but possibly crazy. Who went up to complete strangers at a truck stop, sat themselves down, and started insisting they share their food, all the while telling them they were in trouble? No one she had encountered. Everyone wanted something, that was the rule Sofia Pieraro had learned.

Still, she could turn this to her advantage. She had come to the diner looking for someone like this Cindy French. Not so much a crazy woman, but somebody she might be able to trust to move her a little bit further down the road.

‘I am not in trouble,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m just looking for a ride.’

French laughed. Indeed, she laughed so much she had to stop eating.

‘If you came here looking for a ride, believe me, you
are
in trouble, young lady!’ She took a long pull on her Coke, indicating that Sofia should do the same. ‘You look like you need a little pick-me-up. And you don’t look old enough to drink coffee. Go on, you got about half a gallon of Coke Voltage in there, enough to keep you buzzing until sun-up. Take a drink.’

She did need something to wake her up, that was true. Her nap in the taxi was entirely too short, and she was finding it difficult to keep her eyes open here, even under the harsh fluorescents, with the music cranked up loud and the other diners roaring at each other. She was wrung out, all but destroyed by one of the worst days of her life. And she’d had some bad ones.

‘You said you needed a ride, hon. Where you headed?’

The girl found herself momentarily unable to answer. She had come looking for a lift down to Fort Hood, in central Texas, or at least in that direction. But she’d intended to seek out the transport herself, by approaching someone she thought looked trustworthy. She may well have approached this chicken-eating Cindy French had she seen her first.

‘I am going to Texas,’ she said in the end, deciding to run with a version of the truth.

‘Really? Going down to the Federal Mandate, are we?’ The truck driver pulled a drumstick out and tossed it onto the spare plate. ‘Go on. Eat up.’

She was almost tempted to lie and say, yes, she was headed for the Mandate, but she caught herself at the last moment. Anybody with a legitimate reason for travelling down to the Texas Federal Mandate would’ve had any number of legitimate means of getting there. The government did not expect settlers to make their own way through the badlands. Most people would know that, and somebody like French, who probably drove those routes all the time, would definitely know.

‘No,’ replied Sofia. ‘I need to get to Fort Hood.’ There – she had done it.

Cindy continued with her meal, but raised one eyebrow as if Sofia had played a particularly interesting hand in a game of cards. She steered a ball of mashed potato on the end of the fork and used it to mop up some gravy. The mouthful of food prevented her from speaking, but it was obvious she was giving some thought to what she would say next.

Sofia took the opportunity to look around the diner once more. A quartet of soldiers came in from the cold, snapping their hats against their thighs before heading off to the counter. As they passed her, she waited to see if they were army or local militia. One of the younger ones smiled at her, shaking his head before moving on to get a drink.

She was becoming worried that this was taking too long. That a police cruiser would pull up in the next minute or so and the officers who had come to collect her at the apartment would find her here, obviously preparing to run away. If they found her, they’d make certain that she didn’t get another opportunity for a long time. Oh, they’d say they were doing it in her interests, but they didn’t truly know what her interests were.

‘Fort Hood? That’s an unusual place for a young lady to be lighting out to on a night like this,’ said French. ‘Especially a young lady like you.’

She gave Sofia a look that contained a long, unspoken reproach for her foolishness. ‘You’re Mexican, aren’t you? I mean, originally. I can tell from your accent you moved around a little. I guess we all have the last couple of years. My dad was part Mexican himself, served in the army. He’s dead now.’

‘The Wave?’

Cindy shook her head. ‘No, he died long before that. My mother broke his heart. She could be a real bitch. Now the Wave, it
did
get her. Surprised it didn’t spit the old dragon right back out. Anyway, come summertime, I park the rig on the beach for a week and pick up some sun. I get dark pretty quick, like you. That’s thanks to the old man. Or rather, his mama.’

Sofia nodded and took another piece of chicken. She was much happier talking about their past than providing details of her plans for the future. She even relaxed for the first time as she took up her own greasy fork to scoop up some of the mash.

‘I was young when we left Mexico,’ Sofia said. ‘My father . . .’ Her voice caught for a second before she forced herself to move on. ‘Papa got us onto a boat leaving Acapulco. Just before all the really bad riots and the killing started. The boat took us to Australia and we worked on the big farms there. For the government. It was not so bad. The work was no harder than we had known at home, and the camp where we lived was very good. Nuns came to teach us. We came to America to settle.’

She was unwilling to go into any greater detail. If French found out what had happened to her family down in Mexico, or even what had happened to her father more recently, she would call the police immediately. There could be no good reason why somebody like Sofia would want to return to a place that was the source of so much misery. Best let the woman’s imagination fill in the gaps for herself.

‘That would explain your accent,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard some mighty strange ones the last couple of years, pushing eighteen wheels all over the country. Yours sounds like you don’t really come from anywhere. Or maybe that you come from everywhere.’

It seemed a rather rude thing to say, but she refused to bristle in response. Perhaps Cindy was simply teasing her, trying to get on her nerves, to see how she would react. It was quite obvious she was intrigued, possibly even suspicious.

‘My voice sounds normal to me,’ Sofia replied with a shrug. ‘But what is normal? You are right, we hear many voices these days. In my class at school, there are people from twenty-six different countries. We have all of our flags pinned up on the wall.’

‘So, you’re at school here, then?’

Madre de dios . . .
She cursed herself for having given away such a crucial piece of information. School children no longer lived the sheltered lives they had in the past. A typical school day ran until lunch, then everyone went off to their respective jobs, such as hers at the hospital. They were all expected to work, in the gardens, in the salvage efforts, in any position that needed filling, even if it happened to be shovelling the remains out of the reclamation zones. And as she had found out down in the Mandate, even to risk their lives on the frontier.

But there was no good reason why a schoolgirl would be in the Corrington Road truckers’ diner looking for a ride down to Texas, particularly not a schoolgirl like her. A Mexican. She might well have had a job washing dishes here until two o’clock in the morning, of course, but there was no way she should’ve been this far south, sticking her thumb out by the highway. She tried to cover the total ignorance of what to say next by filling her mouth with more potato.

The clink of knives and forks around them seemed much louder than it had just a minute ago. Cindy’s cutlery was crossed perfectly on her plate. The woman said nothing more, apparently content to wait on an answer. When the silence became difficult to endure, Sofia spoke up again.

‘I said I went to school here,’ she muttered, unable to keep a petulant tone out of her voice.

‘That you did. That you did.’ Cindy smiled again and pushed the plate away. She’d finished the meal and was leaning back now, enjoying what was left of her drink. ‘But you didn’t say why you were travelling to Texas. And that’s what makes me think you’re in trouble.’

If Sofia had a guardian angel, he whispered into her ear at this point.

‘I’m not in trouble,’ she said in a flash of improvisation. ‘My sister is in trouble.’

She received a nod in acknowledgment for that. ‘I see, and just what sort of trouble is your sister in, down in Texas?’

‘Meth,’ she replied. ‘To begin with, anyway. Then she had to pay for the drugs.’

French regarded her with a blank face, as though she had yet to make up her mind about the story. ‘And how is she paying for it? A Mexican girl, down in Texas.’

Sofia wasn’t sure just how far to push the story. She hesitated to say anything. The woman seemed to take her reticence as a form of distress. Her face softened, becoming almost motherly.

‘Is she working in one of the government brothels down there, hon?’

Sofia hadn’t thought of that. Her imagination didn’t run to such things, but it sounded like a good story. She nodded uncertainly, her eyes darting around the dining room as if she was concerned someone might overhear.

‘And so, do you mind me asking, young lady . . . I don’t even know your name, by the way.’

‘My name is Sofia,’ she answered, instantly regretting it. She should’ve used a false name . . . If the police put out a bulletin, it could be picked up by the radio stations and then everybody would be looking for the little runaway Mexican girl called Sofia.

Damn.
The mistakes just kept piling up.

‘Thank you, Sofia. Now, if you don’t mind me asking, why are you looking for your sister? You said you came here with your family. Surely it doesn’t fall to you to bring her home.’

She really did have to lie this time. But as she was learning, it was always easier to wrap a lie around a kernel of truth. ‘I am all she has left,’ she said. ‘Our father . . . died recently.’

She felt awful. It must surely have been a mortal sin to invoke her father’s name in such a fashion. And yet, she was doing this to avenge him, and all of the family. So no, she thought, rallying silently, she was not doing the wrong thing by using Papa’s memory in such a fashion. She was doing what needed to be done.

It was upsetting, however, and Cindy seemed to be attuned to her distress. The truck-driving lady suddenly looked older under the harsh, flat light inside the diner. She even reached across and squeezed Sofia’s hand. It was the sort of thing that would usually have caused the teenager to jerk away. She didn’t like people touching her. Yet oddly enough, she sat there, transfixed by Cindy’s warm, blue eyes.

‘Sorry, hon,’ she said. ‘I can be a pushy old hippie sometimes. I didn’t mean to pry. You are obviously carrying a world of hurt. I could see that as soon as I came in. I can also see those assholes Jasper and T Dawg sizing you up. It wouldn’t be the first time. Fuckers . . . Pardon my French.’

She finished the last of her Coke, sucking up a few final drops with a loud slurping sound before wiping her mouth with a napkin.

‘Tell you what, Sofia, I’m really not happy with the idea of you trying to haul ass all the way down to Texas on your own. You can ride with me, if you want. I can see, sitting here across from you, that there’s going to be no telling you otherwise. You won’t be talked out of this, will you?’

Sofia Pieraro shook her head.

Cindy smiled. ‘Too much like me. I can also see you got a few miles on you, kid, but you got some hard road ahead of you, too. And God knows what you intend to do when you get down there. I can’t imagine some fat government pimp in Fort Hood is going to stand for you waltzing into his bordello and carrying off your sister. Is she of age?’

Sofia’s face must have communicated her confusion.

‘I mean, is she over eighteen years old?’

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘She is only fourteen.’