Dark Target (31 page)

“And you think it’s Koenig?” Vasquez said.

“He has means and motivation. Nobody else is on the radar,” DeLuca said. “He tried to tell me Sergelin was heading up a Russian
ASAT program, but I think Sergelin is his partner and he was just trying to send me on a wild goose chase. We’ll know more
if we can tie Huston to Davidova. Maybe they were afraid she knew what Escavedo knew, or that she had the disks. The fact
that they’re trying to erase their tracks, so to speak, makes me think they’re getting either careless or cocky or paranoid
or all three. The good news is, that increases the likelihood of their making a mistake. The bad news is, that mistake could
be killing one of us.”

“We don’t know what their reconnaissance or biometric identification capabilities are, exactly,” Romano said. “Is it strictly
NRO intel or do they have something beyond that? The whole idea was to find people like Bin Laden and take them out surgically,
rather than send troops or bombers or whatever, and to get ’em before they have a chance to duck back into their spider holes.
The point is that there are probably a number of ways they can target you, with or without SIGINT, so what we were thinking
was that rather than try to hide indoors or wear sombreros, we’d send a false positive. I wish I could say I was as confident
as I was before that all communications passing through this vehicle are secure—I still believe they are with 95 percent certainty,
but 95 might not be good enough, so what I’ve done is recoded the GPS report signals on your personal phones and SATphones
and mission transponders to send a phantom image, an echo, so that anybody looking down is going to think we’re all one hundred
meters farther west than we actually are, meaning if Darkstar wanted to hit us, it would hit that white van at the end of
the parking lot instead. Maybe we should put an orange No Parking cone there, come to think of it. Anyway, the first shot
should miss. I couldn’t say how long it would take them to realize they missed, or by how much. I’d say if it happens, toss
your phones as far as you can and take cover, but at least it will give you a fighting chance.”

“Just be careful,” DeLuca said. “Dan, you’re on Major Huston. Mack, Hoolie, you’re still on Leon Lev—he set up Cabrera, so
he’s onboard. He connects Koenig and Sergelin. I’ve got a stop to make and then I’m going to talk to Koenig. Alone.”

“I don’t think…” MacKenzie began.

“Alone,” DeLuca repeated. “Any backup that goes with me is going to be unprotected in the firing zone. It’s possible that
if I tell him he’s blown, he’ll make a deal.”

“It’s also possible he’ll melt you like the Wicked Witch of the West,” Sykes said.

“I promise I’ll wear sunblock,” DeLuca said.

An hour after the briefing, a green Neon pulled into the parking lot. Sami was carrying a bag of groceries in each arm as
he followed Rainbow and her daughter Ruby to the motel office, where he booked them a room across the hall from his own.

DeLuca had just finished getting dressed after a shower when Sami knocked on his door. Sami filled him in on the last twenty-four
hours. They’d driven to San Antonio, where they found the house where Malcolm Percy’s sister Alexandra lived, in the King
William District, south of downtown. She’d answered the doorbell with a smile on her face and invited them in when she recognized
them as members of the Brethren. When Rainbow identified herself as Ruby’s mother and said she wanted to speak to her daughter,
Alexandra Percy demurred and asked Rainbow if she’d gotten permission from Brother Antonionus, to which Rainbow replied that
she didn’t need permission.

“Alexandra called her brother and I guess he said it was okay,” Sami said. “The poor kid was terrified to go outside. Then
when we get back, he tells Rain she’s no longer one of the Brethren and that her transport ticket has been rescinded. Look,
I know it probably sounds silly to you, but it really meant something to her. She’s taking it pretty hard.”

“How about the kid?” DeLuca asked. “How’s she holding up? She tell you what she saw?”

“I told her I was taking her to a man who was going to explain to her what happened,” Sami said. “I told her she didn’t have
to say anything until we met him.”

“Well let’s go then,” DeLuca said. “Who’re you taking her to?”

“You,” Sami said. “They’re in room 432.”

The girl Ruby was sitting in a stuffed chair by the window, playing a hand-held video game, dressed in pink sweatpants and
a pink zippered sweatshirt with a hood. Her mother, Rainbow, was watching a pay-per-view movie on television,
The Bridges of Madison County,
starring Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep. Rainbow was wearing jeans and a black shirt, rather than the festive red DeLuca
had seen her in before. It made him sad. Sami introduced DeLuca, saying, “Ruby, this is my friend David, and he wants to help
you understand what you saw in the desert. Is it all right if he talks to you?”

“I guess,” she said, not looking up from her game.

“Can I call you Ruby?” DeLuca asked, sitting opposite her at the table.

“My name is Susan,” she said.

“She changed her name,” Rainbow explained. “I think all nine-year-old girls change their names. I wanted to be called Stella
until I was twelve.”

“Can you tell me what you saw in the desert, Susan?” DeLuca said. “The night you were out there with your friends?”

“I didn’t see anything,” she said.

“Did you see a girl?” DeLuca asked. “A Native American girl with long black hair? Kind of pretty?”

“She was Native American?” Ruby asked.

“Yup,” DeLuca said. “Cocopah, from near where I used to live, in Yuma, Arizona. I used to know a lot of Cocopahs. Her name
was Cheryl Escavedo.”

“What kind of Indian name is that?” Ruby/Susan asked.

“It’s Spanish,” DeLuca said. “There was a lot of intermarriage over the years between the Cocopah and the people who lived
south of the Mexican border. And she was also a soldier. Do you remember if she was dressed like a soldier? Was she wearing
sort of tan pants and blouse with little spots and lines on the fabric?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It was dark. And then it wasn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I only saw her in the light for a little while. Like when somebody takes a picture.”

“Like the flash on a camera?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Sort of.”

“How far away were you?” DeLuca asked. “Like from here to the door? Here to that car? Here to that silver motor home over
there?”

“Not so far, maybe,” she said.

“It’s great, Susan, that you can remember and tell me about what you saw, because we were hoping to find out what happened
to Cheryl Escavedo.”

“It was an ascension,” Rainbow said. “It was probably a mistake, because we were there waiting and she wasn’t even one of
us.”

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to just hear it from Susan,” DeLuca said to Rainbow, as gently as possible. “Could you tell if
she was carrying anything? Did she have anything in her hands?”

“I don’t think so,” Ruby said.

“Was she walking or running or standing still?”

“She was running.”

“Then what happened?”

“She was caught in this light.”

“But only for a split second?”

“Yeah.”

“Was she lifted up? Did you see her sort of floating?”

“No.”

“Maybe you looked away for a second?” Rainbow offered.

“I didn’t look away,” Ruby said. “She was just there one second and then she wasn’t.”

“What did she look like? What was the expression on her face?”

“I didn’t see her face. She was looking down. Sort of bent over.”

“Did you hear anything? Smell anything? Feel anything?”

“It was hot. Like the wind was hot.”

“Did this light come from anywhere? Like when you shine a flashlight?”

“I don’t know,” Ruby said. “I don’t think so.”

“And did this scare you?” DeLuca asked.

Ruby looked at her mother, tears welling up in the corners of her eyes.

“Were you afraid it could happen to you?” he said. “And you don’t want it to happen to you, even though you know you’re supposed
to be happy about it. Because that’s what your mom and her friends have been waiting for. But it’s not what you’ve been waiting
for, and you didn’t want to disappoint your mom.”

“I just want things to stay the way they are,” Ruby said, her voice trembling. “I don’t want to change.”

“It’s all right,” DeLuca said, thinking. “You don’t have anything to worry about, Susan. It wasn’t an ascension. It sounds
to me like Sergeant Escavedo shape-shifted. Her uncle told me her totem was a raven, so that’s probably what happened.” He
turned to Sami. “Her uncle will be relieved to hear that. He was worried that she was in trouble.”

“So she turned into a raven?” Ruby said. “Like in
Brother Bear
?”

“Brother Bear?” DeLuca said.

“The movie,” Ruby said. “This Indian named Kenai dies and his soul goes into a bear.”

“Yeah, something like that,” DeLuca said. “Anyway, she’s okay. Thank you, Susan. Sami—can I talk to you in the hall?”

He walked Sami toward the elevators to make sure Rainbow and her daughter wouldn’t be able to hear them through the door.

“I don’t have time to explain but just keep them indoors and you guys should be all right. Rent all the pay-per-view movies
you want and order room service but keep them inside. Romano will get you up to speed. What name did you register them under?”

“Mary and Karen Peterson,” Sami said.

“Good,” DeLuca said. “Who are they?”

“That’s them,” Sami said. “That’s their real names.”

“Okay,” he said. “Talk to Romano. And don’t talk to anybody from the Brethren. Any of you.”

Peggy Romano had called General Koenig’s office and spoken to Lieutenant Carr, who informed her that the general was spending
the weekend at his ranch in Arizona, outside the town of Ajo, between the Goldwater Testing Range and the Tohono O’Odham Indian
Reservation. It was a ten-hour drive from Albuquerque. DeLuca had one stop to make before getting onto the freeway.

He let himself in the back door to Cheryl Escavedo and Theresa Davidova’s apartment. It was probably a waste of time, but
he’d been turning over in his mind where she might have hidden the disk. She would have put it somewhere where somebody could
find it if something happened to her, but not somewhere obvious, like between the mattresses, and probably somewhere where
she’d have access to it in case she wanted to take it with her quickly. She knew she was in danger, but she wasn’t sure how
much, or she would have taken greater precautions. Something Dan had said had given him an idea.

The cat wound herself through his legs, so he went to the cupboard and opened a fresh can of cat food for her. The cat purred
in appreciation, devouring the contents of the dish DeLuca had set on the floor. He picked up her litterbox, which by now
had a strong smell to it, dragged the wastebasket out from beneath the sink and slowly, carefully, poured the dirty cat litter
and the dried cat shit into it. Nothing. When he lifted the newspaper lining the bottom of the pan, he saw a Ziploc bag containing
a single writable CD. It was something like storing it with a natural two-week timer. She probably expected Theresa to find
it. Had she in fact found it and put it back?

He ran the Ziploc bag under the faucet, watered the plants, then turned off all the lights and stopped back at the Red Roof
Inn, where he gave Peggy Romano the CD. Romano sneezed.

“I’m allergic to something here,” she told him. “Where’d you find this?”

“The cat had been… playing with it,” DeLuca told her.

A cursory perusal revealed only a series of financial reports that didn’t mean much to either of them, not the smoking gun
DeLuca had hoped to find. He told Romano to forward the contents to Walter Ford.

“Call me as soon as you learn anything. By the way,” he said. “We’re going to need to find somebody to take care of their
cat, apparently. Let me know if you can think of anything. And if you have time, we need a couple American Girl dolls for
room 432.”

A message from the Democratic representative from New Jersey was waiting for him when he checked his voice mail. The message
said, “Agent DeLuca, Bob Fowler here. Sorry for my surliness, the last time we spoke—I had a staffer check you out and we
were both impressed. No contact here, that anybody can turn up, from Sergeant Escavedo. And the sailing in Delaware Bay was
delightful, but I do appreciate your concern. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.”

THE HOUSE WHERE MAJOR BRENT HUSTON lived looked pretty as a postcard, a large, newly constructed neocolonial in the foothills
outside Colorado Springs, in a neighborhood of large pretty-as-a-postcard newly constructed neocolonials on cul-de-sacs with
American Eagle-themed mailboxes. Huston’s house was immaculately groomed, the kind that could sit for fifty years and never
approach cozy, with trimmed hedges, manicured border gardens, and a line of young spruces as symmetrical as Christmas trees
separating the front yard from the back, a pair of maples in the front yard with slate flowerboxes around their bases, the
driveway clear of snow due to heating coils embedded in the blacktop, according to the thermal imaging camera that Sykes and
Jambazian had brought along, rendering the walls of the house as transparent as glass. The house still had its Christmas decorations
up, including a small crèche made from plastic figurines on the lawn beneath the French window. According to the thermal images
viewable on Sykes’s PDA, Huston was alone, sitting in front of the fireplace reading a book, or perhaps a magazine. Sami stayed
in the car to keep the house under surveillance while Sykes rang the bell.

“Guilty,” Jambazian told Sykes via his nanotransmitter, viewing the thermal image. “When he heard the doorbell, he threw whatever
he was reading in the fireplace.”

“I’m guessing it was either
Juggs
or
Mother Jones,
” Sykes said.