Mariposa (23 page)

Chapter Forty-Five

Lion County

The boy was still asleep in the backseat. The long twilight had dwindled to a blue and gold haze on the straight horizon. Black low mountains to their right. Twilight the most dangerous time of day: eyes still adjusted for bright but dark settling in.

William wondered what Kapp and Curteze might have thought if they had seen him releasing the snakes into the scrub. Just ordinary agents—honorable young men caught up by the thrill of what they thought was a simple rescue, and a chance for a little payback. Payback played a big role in cop psychology.

Strangely, for William, sitting in the driver's seat both figuratively and literally, it mattered not at all. He was at the point in his career where simply having a career—and surviving the twists and turns of that career—meant a hell of a lot more than showing the world's tricky players who was really kicking butt and taking names.

Curteze, riding shotgun, was passing the time by engaging in showbiz trivia.

"All right, then. Where's the big guy in
Lifeboat
?"

William frowned, pretending to take his time. Then: "Newspaper ad. Fat guy in a suit—before and after."

Curteze murmured his irritation.

"Well?" William asked.

"Yeah, that's it. What about
Psycho
?"

"Through the window after Janet Leigh comes back to the real estate office. He's wearing a cowboy hat."

"Everyone knows that one.
Rear Window
?"

"Winding a clock in the songwriter's apartment."

"Have you seen them all?"

"Every single film, including the silents," William said. "He shows up twice in
The Lodger.
"

"Fuck you," Curteze murmured, shrinking down in the seat. "Bet is off."

"We weren't betting," William reminded him.

"I saw
Vertigo
," Kapp said. "Hated it when the cop slid off the roof. Gave me nightmares as a kid."

"What about Jimmy Stewart?" Curteze asked. "Didn't you worry about him?"

"I knew
he
was going to make it. The movie wasn't even started yet."

"When I was a kid, I always told people I was born in Texas," William said. "Sounded braver than being born in California. Alamo and all that."

"John Wayne as Davy Crockett, Richard Widmark as Travis," Curteze said.

"Billy Bob Thornton as Crockett," William said. "Screaming out his lungs when the Mexicans kill him."

"I didn't understand that part," Kapp said.

They switched positions and Kapp swiftly ground the Yukon over the rough ranch road, swerving to avoid huge potholes that loomed at the last second.

Curteze took out a Thermos of coffee and tried to pour William a cup. Most of it slopped.

"U.S. 62 in a couple of miles," Curteze said, consulting his pocket GPS. "We're west of the Guadalupe Mountains. They got lots of tanks out here, it says—Army tanks?"

"Cattle tanks. Ponds, lakes," Kapp explained. "Give me some of that."

"Drive better and maybe I will."

They had to cross twenty miles north over the old grazing acreage, now left dry and dusty in the drought.

"Texas feels like a foreign country," William said.

"Might as well
be
a foreign country," Curteze said.

"It's what some of these folks have always wanted," Kapp said as he swung the wheel left. They lurched around a hole big enough to hide a cow. This road had seen better days. Still, there was enough traffic out here that a Yukon—especially a Yukon equipped with a citizen transponder—might not seem out of place.

Already, they could see the lights of El Paso on their left. They'd meet 62 and drive west. Their next obstacle might come at a Texas Ranger checkpoint this side of the New Mexico border. There had been some incidents between New Mexico state troopers and Texas Rangers in the last few months. Shots fired, patrolmen and troopers down. First shots of the new civil war, some called it. New Mexico was staying loyal to the federal government.

Large parts of Texas were on their own track, and nobody in Washington had the guts or the money to stop them.

Kapp pointed out the driver's side window and let out a chirpy whistle. "Got a bird," he said. "Flying low and matching speed. About the size of a crow."

William saw it and shook his head.

"Mexican standoff," Curteze said. "We don't have brown faces, and besides, the border boys don't report to the Rangers anymore."

"If it
is
a border security bird," William said. "Talos flies a lot of its own surveillance."

After five years of extreme drought, illegal immigration from Mexico had reached catastrophic proportions. South of the Rio Grande, two million people were starving and the U.S. could not afford much in the way of relief aid. The Chinese and Europeans were helping but it was not nearly enough. Under this pressure, Texas went its own way, but mostly tolerated Border Security and ICE.

Even so, the feds did not report to the state and certainly not to Talos's auxiliaries.

"We'll probably end up with bullets in the backs of our pointy little heads," Curteze said.

"Shh," William said, and nodded at the sleeping boy.

Kapp drove on into the darkness. The crow-size drone kept up with them until a mile before the highway, then buzzed off into the night.

Ahead, headlights flashed in pairs—straight on, not the distant lights of traffic. There were at least a dozen vehicles—most the size of pickup trucks—lined up between them and 62.

"We're going to have to park," William said. "Looks like they've laid down a blockade."

"How would they know where we are?" Curteze asked, keeping his voice low. "The birds can't tell us from a rancher—right?"

"This whole thing's a crapshoot," William said. "Half of our plan is they don't want to start a war. Maybe they do. Feds are certainly distracted right now—it might not even hit the national news."

Kapp lurched the truck left, away from the highway, off the ranch road and into the scrub.

The ride got rougher.

Chapter Forty-Six

El Paso

Joe Mason shook hands with Jane Rowland and Tom Cantor and offered them chairs in his small office. Six-two, with reddish-brown skin, a square face, and thick black hair trimmed to a spiky mat, Mason's eyes were rimmed in red and hauled double loads of dark, weary bags. He was Assistant Field Office Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—ICE.

"I wouldn't want you Washington types to think all Texans are traitors," he said. "We're the most loyal citizens in the USA. Don't forget it—not while you're in this office."

Steel-barred windows, ubiquitous awards and service plaques, wall-mounted rack of service and Lynx spex, neat desk with empty in-and-out baskets, defined both Mason and his workspace.

"Never crossed my mind," Jane Rowland said.

Tom Cantor sat beside her and leaned forward to scratch his shoulder.

Mason watched them both, wrinkle lines making not quite a grin at the corners of his lips—sussing out their relationship.

Just being around Tom made Jane nervous. His big child eyes gave no hint of either his intellect or his influence. Tom was utterly essential to dozens of clandestine operations. He had carte blanche entrance to so many agencies and yet never let on to anyone about his activities—even if those activities crossed paths.

Secret in one office, more secret still in another.

Not that he ever showed a hint of thinking he could lord it over her. No, ma'am. Ms. Jane Rowland—of the agency that had once split off from an agency that nobody officially acknowledged—was definitely the boss, and Tom Cantor was delighted to be in her employ.

Based on what she knew, that made her even more nervous.

"Airplanes," Tom said, as if that explained anything. His long, scraggly gray hair—wrapped around a high, balding forehead—made him look like a gentle-eyed Rasputin.

Mason finally allowed his smile to crack—and never was the word more apt. That expression looked as out of place as a wide split in an adobe pot. He waved one hand. "We've been sending warnings about Lion City and Talos for over a decade. Used to be no one in D.C. listened—too many oxen hitched to that particular wagon. Now some of these yokels have taken to plunking up our patrol vehicles—and of course they just love knocking down our birds, if they can see them. We've never tied incidents directly to Axel Price . . . but after a while, you'd be thick not to wonder."

Tom looked up, awaiting a useful point.

Mason took this bug-eyed presence with admirable tranquility. "We installed your transponder in one of our midsize, low-profile birds, with retrieval capability. We use them to pick up surveillance bots. She's out there following the county line, slow as a condor—transmitting to VRI right now."

Mason took down three spex, waved them over a small code plate, then handed two to Jane and Tom. The third set—curved dark lenses, very stylish—he slipped over his nose and ears with all the panache of an Elvis impersonator. "They've cut back half our personnel in the last six months. Our guys have families to support. I don't like to think some of them have gone over to Price, but it wouldn't shock me. We're down to about a quarter of the birds we flew two years ago. Still, if they're not too expensive, I'd love to put those snakes on our team . . ."

"Not a word," Jane reminded him.

"No, ma'am." Mason smiled. "But I hope you'll give us the next field test."

"Where's your pilot?"

"In Houston," Mason said. "We'll transfer to a local pilot shortly—one of our best. But I'm still wondering—why not just send in Hostage Rescue and pluck out your man?"

"Price would shoot him," Jane said.

Mason soberly absorbed this. "What are we heading for here—insurrection?"

Jane narrowed her eyes. "Your passengers will ping back to the code signal," she said. "That'll make them visible. They have to be picked up quickly."

"Curvalicious," Tom said.

Mason stretched out his arms, then grabbed his jaw with one hand and waggled it back and forth, working out tension. "Already in the program," he said. "Bird is turning over control . . . now. El Paso will fly the bird."

For the next three hours, Jane and Tom sat in Mason's office, watching the unmanned aerial vehicle's track of the west Texas landscape, drinking coffee.

Jane longed for white tea.

"We're covering their range," Mason said. "Unless they've run out of juice, they're still out there, squiggling around in the dirt and brush."

She pushed her spex down on her nose. "Discouraging," she said.

Mason was commendably patient, low-key—and good at politely keeping track of the one person in the room whose physical reactions seemed off.

Tom was fidgety. His face had worked its way through several phases of comic concentration, with occasional half aware glances at Mason, at Jane—only to smile and relapse into his own world, somewhere out between the stars.

Jane took note of Mason's unease. She touched Tom's arm.

"Tired," Tom said. "Anyone have an Ibuprofen?"

"I'm full of coffee," Jane said, pushing up from her leather-cushioned chair arms. "How about a break?"

"Right," Tom said.

"Down the hall and to the left," Mason said. "Leave the spex here or alarms will go off."

In the restroom, Jane washed her hands—soaped and rinsed three times—then joined Tom in the hall. Tom had not been to the bathroom since their flight. He might indeed be from another planet.

"You're making Mason nervous," she said. "He's like a dog in a room with a quail—and you're the quail."

Tom shook his head. "Can't help it," he said. "I'm being twitched."

"What's that mean?"

"Ever since day before yesterday, somebody or something has been tracking everything I do. My work—my secure networks. Cameras. Traffic lights. I keep thinking Gene Hackman is going to jump out and yell boo."

Jane folded her arms and looked at him askance.

"I've put two and two together," Tom said. "It ain't you, right?"

"No."

"Because I'm a pro, you need me—you wouldn't fuck with me or try to scare me. Could be anybody, then. But the more I think about it, the more I ask myself, why isn't he looking at
you
, too? And then I realize, he is. He must be. You're the show runner, so he's more interested in you than in me. He's tracking me—because I'm helping
you.
"

"I'm the only one you're helping?"

"Of course not," Tom said. "But it seems tied together."

Jane stepped over to the barred window at the end of the hall. Three cameras peered down from shiny dark covers in the drop ceiling. "Gene Hackman. That's good. What makes you think it's a he?"

"Well, we ceded our constitutional rights to any number of federal agencies, including yours, back in the bad old days. So I could easily enough picture a bunch of young hackers lined up in a dark room, tickling joysticks and taking control of every security system in the world, at the 24/7, caffeine-strumming command of, say, Laura Linney. They could aim satellites, take control of foreign CCTV, station millions of agents on every street corner, ready to pull out in black Suburbans or hop on Vespas . . . Cool. But that's not what's happening."

"How do you know?"

Tom gave her a quizzical glance. "Because I'd help design and install anything like that. I'd be Laura Linney's main man."

"Oh," Jane said.

"I love severe." He winked, not at all salaciously.

"We need to get back, Tom," Jane said, uneasy with the way this conversation was going.

Tom's demeanor switched to abject worry. He leaned in toward Jane to whisper, "He leaves an analog signature. A sound recording. Right?"

"Does he?" Jane said.

"I'm not going to violate any confidences if I tell you what that signature is. Because you already know."

"Do tell."

"A crying child. More specifically, a sobbing little boy."

"I see," Jane said, her arm hairs rising.

"He's smart, perfectly capable of breaking into this system, this fly-by-wire setup, and screwing us over. What if he's working out of Talos, or more scary still, out of MSARC? We gave up so many secrets to get those loans—"

Jane slapped her hand over Tom's mouth and pushed him to the wall. "Shut up," she said.

"Sorry," he said, muffled.

She let him go.

"Nothing has ever been able to track me that way before," Tom said, pulling down his shirt and trying to look dignified. "I'm good, I travel light. I'm mostly invisible. What if he means us harm? You should have told
me
what you knew eighteen hours ago."

Tom's hound-dog eyes turned critical.

Jane followed him back into Mason's office, feeling not just unease now but anger—because she no longer knew what was secure and what was not, and that meant she was vulnerable, and that meant all her colleagues—including Tom Cantor—
knew
she was vulnerable.

In their line of work, that perception was killer.

The Border Security drone flew over the southern extent of its range when it encountered Talos craft operating at the same altitude.

Mason spoke in a tense undertone to his remote pilot, then turned back to Jane and Tom. "We've been through this sort of standoff before. We've never taken direct fire from their birds—only from the ground, and only if we're near the Talos campus. Some of our pilots enjoy hot-dogging, but I just made sure we don't provoke a response. Don't want them thinking we're tracking any sort of unusual target. They can have armed vehicles out in that range within half an hour. We're back on visual now."

Jane and Tom put on their spex and looked out over the dark early morning landscape. The cameras switched to FLIR—Forward Looking Infrared—then to infrared enhanced by computers and overlaid with satellite imagery.

Cross-hairs centered to a small circle.

The circle zoomed.

"Got something moving," Mason said. "Is that your snake?"

"Wow," Tom said.

"That's it. Only one," Jane said, disappointed.

The pilot dropped the drone quickly—too quickly, it seemed, as the black, green-speckled desert suddenly swooped up and the horizon shifted to a high line.

The display now changed to satellite side-scan radar, combined with the drone's IR perspective—additional overlays marking roll, pitch, and altitude.

The drone circled over the edge of the Talos campus.

"Maybe it got lost," Mason said.

The drone sideslipped into a steep helix.

Jane gripped the chair arm.

"Steady," Mason whispered.

The drone straightened as its descent smoothed and leveled at a hundred feet. One more veer east and it raised its nose and dropped spindly gear, then jounced and lofted twice before rolling to a stop.

The cross-hairs squared and the camera jogged left and right, then zoomed on a rounded W of shadowy curves—just a hint of motion in the detectors.

One snake.

"Send the signal," Jane said.

The drone lowered on its gear and somewhere behind them, in virtual sound, they heard whirring. The view shifted to the dropping ramp.

With a faint rustle, the snake maneuvered around a shrub, approached the ramp, and cautiously wormed into the craft's hold.

The ramp swung shut.

"Amazing," Mason said.

Jane settled back in her chair, chin almost on her chest. "No way of knowing whether it got what it came for," she said.

The pilot's voice announced takeoff. "I've got three Talos craft within a kilometer radius," he said. "Looks like they're taking an interest."

The drone was quickly airborne.

"Beeline home," Mason instructed. "Do not outmaneuver, do not engage."

"Up and away. Precious cargo—one, repeat, one snake," the pilot said. "We'll have it delivered in forty minutes."

"We always get our snake," Mason said, and glanced at Jane.

"Our team is bringing in the necessary equipment," Jane said. "We'll do the rest in the hangar—by ourselves, please. No observers, no assistance."

Tom took off his spex, shook his head with a sigh, and slumped in his chair. He was instantly asleep. His real duties began when the snake was returned.

If it carried what they were hoping for.

And failing that, if they couldn't save Fouad Al-Husam.