Strong Cold Dead (35 page)

Rawls started to open the folder, then stopped. He looked up to find Caitlin staring at him, her face utterly blank.

“I met your boy myself, when he was fourteen,” she said, “a gangly, bullied freshman who'd threatened on MySpace to blow up his high school. I couldn't help but feel bad for him, the kid being so smart and all, and being tortured by bullies. I got him out of that scrape, gave him a second chance, thought I could make a difference in his life. But then things took a bad turn for me. I left the Rangers for a time and lost track of him, and for the past few days I've been blaming myself for his involvement in all this. But now that I know he's got your blood pumping through his veins, I guess nothing I did would've mattered, would it, Mr. Rawls? I never had a chance, and neither did he.”

Rawls clutched the folder in his lap tighter.

“Here's what's going to happen, sir,” Caitlin said, rising from her chair and standing over him. “You're going to tell us everything you know about that land. You're not going to wait for your lawyer, you're not going to pass Go and collect two hundred dollars, you're going to talk. And if you don't, the whole world is going to find out that you fathered a child who's planning a terrorist attack that'll make nine eleven look like a drill. Have I got your attention?”

Rawls looked up at Caitlin in painfully deliberate fashion, as if he had to wait for some puppet master to pull on his strings. “That's blackmail.”

“No, sir, it's the truth.”

“You don't understand.”

Caitlin leaned forward and grasped the arms of Rawls's chair, forcing him to twist himself tight and small, further exaggerating her advantage. “Then make me understand.”

“Tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars … That's what it's worth.”

“What
what's
worth?”

Rawls looked as if bile had just kicked up his throat. “The cure for cancer.” He paused, and then continued. “Not just a cure. A vaccine that can stop the disease at the genetic level. The data was anecdotal, but still convincing enough.”

“What data?” Caitlin managed to ask, the air seeming to thicken even more, to the point that she wondered if that was thunder she heard in her suddenly throbbing head.

“About this particular tribe of Comanche, dating all the way back to your great-great-grandfather's time. They've got so many other health issues of note—alcoholism, liver failure, malnutrition, breathing problems from smoking, drugs, diabetes, heart disease—that nobody paid attention to the fact that the tribe enjoys a cancer occurrence on the order of a thousand times less than the overall population.”

“Keep talking.” Caitlin nodded.

“I get this data, the question I ask myself is why.”

“What made you look in the first place?”

“The belief that the truest medical miracles can be found in nature.”

“Most valuable, you mean.”

“That too, yes, Ranger. I admit it. I'm a greedy son of a bitch who looks back on his youth like somebody took a sandblaster to it. What do you think I'm thinking of when I'm hitting the heavy bag, like you saw me doing? I'm thinking about all those nights my mother brought men home. When I hid in the corner, in the dark, until they left. You know what? I can't remember what a single one of them looked like, but they all smelled the same. And that's what I smell when I'm pounding the bag, and I keep pounding until the smell goes away.”

“How about all the women you beat up, Mr. Rawls, like Brandy Darnell? What do they smell like? Having wrong done to you doesn't entitle you to do it to others.”

“Don't preach to me, you bi—”

Rawls just managed to stop himself in time.

“I'd rather shoot you, but I won't,” Caitlin said. “Better get back to this cure for cancer, before you give me reason to change my mind.”

“You going to let her talk to me like that?” Rawls said to Jones.

“Like what?” Jones asked him.

Rawls forced himself to look back at Caitlin. “It's like I said.”

“What did you say?”

“No one paid attention to the fact that those damn Indians almost never get cancer. Not just an improbability, a virtual
impossibility
.”

“So what'd you do?”

“I asked myself why. I asked myself how. See, the medicinal applications of plant life are hardly new. As I'm sure you're well aware, many valuable drugs of today, like atropine, ephedrine, tubocurarine, digoxin, and reserpine, came into use through the study of indigenous remedies. And chemists continue to use plant-derived drugs such as morphine, Taxol, physostigmine, quinidine, and emetine as prototypes in their attempts to develop more-effective and less-toxic medicinals.”

“Something was different on that rez, I'm guessing.”

“It sure was, Ranger. Those other examples I mentioned don't necessarily have any effect on the people indigenous to those lands. What's different on the Comanche land is that the cancer anomaly could only be the result of something the Indians ate or drank.”

“Native Americans,” Caitlin corrected. “They're called Native Americans.”

Rawls pursed his lips and frowned. “Sure. Whatever you say. The point is, these
Native Americans
weren't getting cancer, as a direct result of something they were ingesting.”

“The water?” Caitlin asked him, thinking of how they'd found Daniel Cross's candy wrapper near the stream running through the cave overlooking White Eagle's patch of land.

“That was my first thought, too. I spent months having the water tested, over a year, spent millions before I gave up. Figured I had everything wrong, that I was delusional.”

“Yeah, greed'll do that to you.”

This time Rawls ignored her insult, checking his watch as if wondering what had become of his lawyer—who was currently en route to Houston. “I don't give up so easy, Ranger. Since you're so well acquainted with my background, I assume you know that. The water didn't test magical, but some of the samples didn't test normal, either. Something was definitely going on, likely spurred by cracks deep underground, from fault lines on which the reservation is located. The water was contaminated with something, which I came to believe might be working its magic in other ways.”

“The crops,” Caitlin realized. “Something the Comanche were growing.”

Rawls settled back in his chair. “I've said enough.”

“You ever test any of the animals on that rez, sir?”

“Animals?”

“Like the bats that live in the cave formations.”

Rawls looked genuinely curious. “Why?”

“Because I did, after a colony of them attacked me. Turns out they're a species of Mexican free-tailed bats, common to the area, known for nesting under the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin. What's not common is that the ones in that cave were maybe ten times bigger than the ones found under the bridge. And here's the kicker: the average life expectancy for Mexican free-tailed bats is between four and six years, but by all accounts, the one we tested from the rez was at least fifty.”

That got Rawls's attention.
“Fifty years?”

“Could be a hundred. The testing's not finished yet.” Caitlin paused again, to let that sink in, before continuing. “So, if you weren't drilling for oil, what exactly are those workmen supposed to do, now that the protesting's over?”

“Whatever's growing on that land is being affected by the chemical composition of the groundwater leaching up from an aquifer we can't reach through normal means. And to properly recreate the conditions, I'm going to need an oil well's worth of that magic water.”

“And if you're right, I imagine a barrel of that water will be worth a thousand times more than a barrel of oil.”

“Closer to ten thousand times, Ranger.”

“So here's where we're at, Mr. Rawls.” Caitlin nodded. “Your cat's out of the bag, as far as the government goes. Keep obstructing us and you'll end up a coconspirator with whoever we nail in connection with ISIS. You want to tell him how things go from here, Jones?”

She stepped aside so Jones could take her place, looking down at Cray Rawls, but he took a seat on the edge of the desk instead, showcasing the cowboy boots he figured made him a genuine Texan.

“Who you think you're talking to here, hoss?” he said, the slightest Texas twang evident in his cadence. “I'm Homeland Security, and you won't find a Miranda warning card anywhere on my person. I snap my fingers and—poof!—you disappear. We'll seize your assets, freeze your accounts, turn every employee you've got into a person of interest, to make their lives a living hell, too. See, there's no gray area with Homeland, and we never have to defend ourselves in court. You're in or you're out. So which is it?”

Rawls fixed his gaze back on Caitlin. “If I tell you what you want to know—”

“No deals, Mr. Rawls,” she interrupted. “The only thing I can promise you for sure, in return for your cooperation, is not to go public with the fact that your son might be directly aiding and abetting the biggest terrorist attack by far in American history. I can't take anything else off the table.”

Rawls shook his head, moved his eyes from Caitlin to Jones and then back again. “When did this stop being the United States of America?”

Jones answered before Caitlin could. “When ISIS decided to use a weapon of mass destruction they found on land you currently control.”

“A man like you never gives everything up until his back hits the wall, Mr. Rawls,” Caitlin picked up. “That's where you're at right now, and you've got one more chance to come clean about what else you're after on that rez besides water.”

Rawls's expression tightened into one familiar to Caitlin from the Houston boxing gym where they'd first met: exhaustion, after he'd punched himself out and could barely raise his arms. “Just one question, Ranger. How much do you know about corn?”

Before he could continue, a knock preceded the office door opening, and Captain Tepper poked his head in.

“We got a lead on these bastards,” was all Tepper said.

 

86

B
ALCONES
C
ANYONLANDS,
T
EXAS

Dylan parked his truck off the rez, in a grove set well back from the entrance, near a trail through the woods that Ela had shown him. During the drive north, he'd noticed a tear in the tan cloth upholstery, down the middle of the passenger seat.

That made him think of the day he'd bought his beloved Chevy S-10, after his freshman year at Brown, without telling his dad, and how it had conked out almost as soon as he'd gotten it home. Instead of being pissed, his father had taught him how to change the starter, then the alternator, and finally, the battery. Never criticizing him for the purchase or preaching something like “What'd you expect for five hundred bucks?”

Dylan had bought the truck because it was the same age as him, and something felt right about that. Having a vehicle under him that had grown up on the same track, with lots of secrets and stories to share. He'd put in a new radio, sound system, tires, shocks, and custom bed liner, and had waxed, polished, and rubbed until the finish looked showroom new and rain fled from the paint before it could even bead up. But he'd never done anything, not a damn thing, about the upholstery, and now there was a tear down the center of the passenger seat, leaving him to wonder what he could and should have done differently.

Kind of like what was bringing him back to the reservation now. He was glad he had the truck to think about during the drive, because it spared him too much further contemplation of what Ela and the Lost Boys were up to. She had been playing him the whole time, ever since they'd first met, in Providence. Had almost surely set him up as a suspect in the murder of that construction foreman.

Then why rescue me, clipping the baling wire with a cutter she just happened to bring along? Why drive all the way to Shavano Park to face my father and Caitlin?

Dylan slid through the woods, past waist-high concrete pillars marking the beginning of Comanche land, his dad's Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter scratching at his skin. His iPhone was probably back in Ela's root cellar, so he'd bought one of those cheap phones at a drugstore on his way up to the rez, just in case he needed it.

His route brought him back to White Eagle's property, where he could finish checking out that shed, or maybe confront the old man about whatever he was really up to. He heard the flutter and then lapping sounds of the waterfall next to White Eagle's home, and he clung to the cover of the trees the rest of the way. Dylan stopped there and pressed out a text, starting with,
IT'S DYLAN
, since his father wouldn't recognize the throwaway phone's number. He kept it short and sweet, his mind having cleared enough to realize he was in over his head here and needed his dad to dig him out.

No one was in sight when Dylan reached the edge of the clearing—no sign of Ela, White Eagle, or any of the Lost Boys. The door leading into the shed he'd inspected was open, blown by the wind against the frame, where it rattled on impact with the hasp. Walking out into the clearing under cover of night was one thing. Doing it now, with light streaming everywhere, presented an entirely different challenge.

His dad had warned him not to find a false sense of security in a gun, to never do anything with one in his possession that he wouldn't do without one. But Dylan couldn't help but feel emboldened by the steel of the nine-millimeter heating up against his skin. Like a flashlight cutting through the dark, its presence propelled him out into the clearing, where he clung as much as possible to the shadows that shook and trembled in cadence with the wind rustling through the trees that cast them.