Authors: David DeBatto
“I would,” DeLuca said. “I’ll read these later.”
“They were in love all right,” Yutahay said, as DeLuca scanned the pages, perhaps fifty in all. “But she was in a relationship
with an older man who was very possessive of her, and very jealous. She was afraid of him because she knew he could make her
life very difficult.”
DeLuca came to a set of pages that were folded and stapled shut.
“What are these?” he asked.
“You can open that if you want to,” Yutahay said, “but it’s just my son and Sergeant Escavedo having cybersex. I think that’s
what it’s called. Typing dirty things back and forth. I don’t think it’s of value and I wanted to respect their privacy, but
I didn’t want you to think I was keeping anything from you. It was difficult for me to read, but I suppose that’s just my
generation.”
“I don’t suppose it’s necessary,” DeLuca said. “Does she name this older man, by any chance?”
“She uses three asterisks,” Yutahay said. “I gather she was afraid of even naming him. Do you know who it could be?”
“I think three asterisks could stand for three stars,” DeLuca said. “As in a three-star general.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Ben Yutahay said. “Know of any around here?”
“I do,” DeLuca said. “Do you think Marvin might have tried to do something foolish?”
“Marvin does foolish things all the time,” Ben said. “But I don’t think trying to find someone you love is foolish. I don’t
think refusing to believe someone you love is dead is necessarily foolish—it has a kind of nobility. I was hoping if I could
have a look around at Koenig’s ranch, I might be able to tell something.”
“Why don’t you come with me then?” DeLuca said. “Though I have to tell you something. And there are things that I can’t tell
you, but you should know that there could well be a high degree of danger involved, in the form of a new weapon the military
has developed that General Koenig has at his disposal.”
“Just don’t expect any stoical Indian ‘it’s-a-good-day-to-die’ crap from me,” Yutahay said. “I saw
Little Big Man.
I liked it a lot, but when I die, I’m going to go kicking and screaming, just like my ancestors did.” He opened his coat
jacket to reveal a sawed-off shotgun, hanging from a sling. “I took this off a drug smuggler two years ago. It’ll blow a hole
the size of a garage door into just about anything.”
“I welcome the company,” DeLuca said.
They drove south of town on Darby Wells Road, past a dusty and desolate RV ghetto where the fattest tree trunk was thinner
than a girl’s wrist, across Gray’s Wash and Daniel’s Arroyo and past the turn to the New Cordelia Mine, closed, the sign said,
up into the high country where the palo verde and saguaros gave way to scrub oak and chaparral. In the distance, DeLuca saw
a pyramid-shaped mountain and thought it looked familiar, though he couldn’t recall where he’d seen it. Then he remembered—the
mountain had been in the background of Major Huston’s hunting triptych. The truck rumbled and rattled along the gravel road.
A dozen miles from town, they turned off the main road and traveled another half mile before reaching an iron gate extending
across the road beneath an arch with the words “Koenig Ranch” carved into the wood. There was a surveillance camera mounted
atop a pole and an intercom by the gate.
“What were you going to say to him?” Yutahay asked him. “I was hoping you’d have a plan.”
“I don’t know,” DeLuca said. “I never know. If you spend too much time preparing what you’re going to say, you lose the ability
to respond flexibly to the moment. I usually think of something.”
“Do you mind if I get out?” Yutahay asked. DeLuca said he didn’t mind.
He walked to the intercom and pushed the button. After a moment, a voice said, “Yes?”
“David DeLuca to see General Koenig,” he said.
There was a long pause, then the lock buzzed for a moment, and the gate swung silently on its hinges, opening inward. When
he returned to the truck, Ben Yutahay was crouched in the dirt, examining the pickup’s front tire.
“Something wrong?” DeLuca asked.
“Not with your truck, but I didn’t want the camera over there to see what I was doing, so I’m pretending,” Yutahay said. “Cheryl
was here. It rained here. A couple days before she disappeared. This is where the red mud we found on her tires came from.
And those are her tire tracks. The sun baked the mud and froze them for us to find. Here she is, driving in, and here she
is, driving out. It couldn’t be plainer.”
“So she went from here to her uncle’s?” DeLuca said.
“Other way around,” Yutahay said. “She switched cars at her uncle’s, then came here, then went to Spirit Mountain. And this
track at my foot is to my son’s motorcycle. It’s newer. Maybe yesterday. It traces over the others. He stopped here a moment,
because there is his boot, and then he went to the intercom.”
DeLuca looked down and saw only indecipherable ruts and grooves.
“How about tracks coming out?”
“I don’t see any,” Yutahay said, staring at the dirt a moment longer, then spitting. “Maybe we’ll find him on the porch with
his feet propped up.”
The road continued for another two miles, affording at one point a view, as the road climbed, of a paved airstrip below where
a twin-engine jet, a Gulfstream 2, sat on the tarmac. They passed a barn and corral where a dozen saddle horses grazed without
looking up at the old truck that rumbled up the road. The house was built of logs on a stone foundation, though the structure
was, to a log cabin, what the White House was to a White Castle hamburger joint. Yutahay commented that the logs used to build
the house were Douglas fir and had probably been shipped in from the Pacific Northwest. The roof was cedar shake, with a massive
stone chimney rising from the center, and next to it, a widow’s walk where DeLuca saw that a telescope had been set up on
a tripod, though it was pointing toward the horizon and not the sky, the house resting on a promontory where a table mesa
dropped precipitously to the valley below. There was a large swimming pool next to the house, and beyond the pool house and
patio, a large inflated white dome.
“Tennis court?” Yutahay wondered.
“That’s what it’s supposed to look like, anyway,” DeLuca said, thinking to himself that it was also not a bad place to hide
the dish array Scott said Koenig would need to command Darkstar.
“How much are they paying generals these days?” Yutahay asked. “This guy is loaded.”
“His family had money,” DeLuca said. “But you’re right.”
Beyond the tennis court, he saw a helipad where a Sikorsky S-72 sat waiting, its blades slowly rotating in preparation for
flight. Koenig was on the porch, having a few words with his pilot, who saluted and moved toward the helicopter as DeLuca
parked the truck. Yutahay said he wanted to wait outside and perhaps have a bit of a look around. There was a five-car garage
at the side of the house opposite the pool, where DeLuca saw a black Lincoln Navigator, a World War II-era vintage Willys
Jeep, and a variety of ATVs and off-road dirt bikes. Yutahay promised he wouldn’t go far.
“Would your friend like to come in, Agent DeLuca?” Koenig said as DeLuca saluted.
“No thank you, sir,” DeLuca said. “Officer Yutahay isn’t military. He’s with the Tribal Police, but he’s just an old friend
who wanted to take me over to the res after this.” DeLuca noticed a hand-held Mark 40 grenade launcher resting across the
arms of an Adirondack chair on the porch. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything. You look like you’re expecting trouble.”
“Trouble in the form of beavers,” Koenig said. “We’re flying down to dynamite a new beaver dam. Ordinarily we’d ride in on
horseback but I’m in a bit of a hurry today. My wife and family are waiting for me in Colorado. Apparently the beavers have
impeded the flow of water to my neighbors to the south. They’re second only to man in their ability to alter their physical
environment.”
“You’ve done a nice job of altering yours,” DeLuca said. “How long have you had this place?”
“My great-grandfather built it,” Koenig said. “My family are seafaring people, but he wanted a piece of the West. Teddy Roosevelt
used to come here to hunt. We can talk inside.”
The house was decorated in a mixture of western ranch and New England antique styles, Shaker furniture, an old rocking horse,
cloth dolls in a glass case, Persian rugs, nautical brass knickknacks, a massive wagon wheel light fixture in one room, a
chandelier constructed of elk antlers in another. The foyer opened onto a great hall filled with the mounted heads of enough
deer, antelope, elk, and mountain goats to form a small herd. The furniture was Stickney and mission style, dark wood in straight
lines, leather couches, bookshelves filled with leather-bound tomes, mica lampshades, Bavarian steins, Remington bronzes of
cowboys on horseback and Indians hunting bison, gold-framed Russell Chatham oil landscapes mixed with portraits of ancestors
on the walls, though the main feature of the room was the fireplace, which was large enough for a man to stand upright in,
built of stone with a massive slate mantel above it.
“You already know Lieutenant Carr,” Koenig said, referring to the young officer who stood in the kitchen doorway with an apron
around his waist, his sleeves rolled up. Carr grinned the same cocky grin DeLuca had noticed before.
“Lieutenant,” DeLuca said in acknowledgment.
“Not only is Lieutenant Carr a fine aide, but he’s also a gourmet chef,” Koenig said. “A fine butcher, too. Ninety percent
of the taste of venison is how the animal is dressed. My grandfather had a Navaho who did it for him, but I think Lieutenant
Carr is as good with a filleting knife as he was.”
“You flatter me, sir,” Carr said, returning to the kitchen.
DeLuca ran his hand across the mantel.
“Spectacular fireplace,” DeLuca said.
“That’s made from stone quarried on the property,” Koenig said. “We’re sitting on the crest of the Tertiary Chico-Shunie basolith.
We get a lot of porphyritic quartz monzonite, hematite, feldspar, quartz diorite, cuprite, malachite, pegmatites, and fanglomerates,
among other more minor lithologies. A lot of people don’t even know what’s under their feet.”
“You certainly do, sir,” DeLuca said.
“I used to do a lot of rock collecting as a boy along the fractures and footwalls. My grandfather didn’t believe in letting
his grandchildren spend their time idly. There were usually tests at dinnertime. Can I get you something to drink? An iced
tea?”
“That would be fine,” DeLuca said. Koenig asked Lieutenant Carr to get the drinks. Carr returned a moment later and handed
DeLuca his. Koenig drank from his own glass. DeLuca decided they probably weren’t going to poison him. He sipped.
“You must get a lot of gem hunters asking you if they can collect on the premises,” DeLuca said. Koenig raised an eyebrow.
“Occasionally,” he said. “But you’re not here for a geology lesson, and I don’t have the time, so why don’t you tell me why
you are here? I have a pretty good idea, but why don’t you tell me? By the way, after your first visit, I made some calls
about you. It’s very impressive. Major Huston said you put away more of Saddam’s blacklist friends than anybody else. I didn’t
read what happened to your friend Mohammed Al-Tariq, but regardless, you should know that I’m expecting a lot from you.”
Koenig was clearly unconcerned at DeLuca’s suddenly showing up at his door. He’d expressed very little surprise. It was almost
as if he’d been expecting him. DeLuca saw a door that opened onto a study where a laptop computer glowed on the desk. He wondered
what a search of the hard drive would turn up.
“The Al-Tariq file is still classified,” DeLuca said. “I’m sure you could gain access if you wanted to.”
“I’m sure I could, too. Did you find the disks?”
“I did,” DeLuca said.
“And what was on them?”
“I don’t know yet,” DeLuca said, gambling that Peggy Romano’s firewall was as strong as she said it was, and that Koenig had
not been able to intercept the e-mail that Walter Ford had sent. “What I mean is, I’m not sure. It looks like financial information,
bookkeeping stuff, but I haven’t really had time to study it yet. I was going to wait until I had more information before
I showed it to anybody. As it stands, I haven’t told anyone I’ve found them.”
“Because?”
“Because I’m not exactly sure where I stand, actually, vis-à-vis Darkstar,” DeLuca said. “Right now, I could either stop you
or help you. And frankly, I’m not sure what I want to do. I was hoping maybe you could talk to me.”
It had been his experience that most criminals were essentially lonely. It always surprised him when, interrogating a gang
member or street criminal, an offer of simple friendship led to the disclosure of information. Criminals had secrets, and
keeping secrets was hard for anybody—only the most deeply psycho-emotional sociopaths could do it in a prolonged way with
any sense of comfort. Most people wanted to confess. The question was always how to get them talking in a way they felt safe
and supported. The approach had worked for him in Iraq. Perhaps it would work here. Koenig saw himself as a man’s man, a vigilante
going it on his own, historically wronged but doing what he considered the right thing, even though nobody would ever agree
with him. Part of him had to long to be understood.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Koenig said.
“I’m read on,” DeLuca said, “but I have a feeling they didn’t tell me everything. Only you would really be in a position to
do that. Right now, they’re looking for a nonfunctioning piece of space crap, or they’re looking for proof that Darkstar is
operational, which gives them a different set of headaches. My own team doesn’t even know how I’m adding this up, but I think
I have that proof. Not just the disks. How did you and Cheryl get involved?”
“We got involved because I put my personal needs in front of the country’s and ended up compromising the only program we have
that’s going to keep this country safe, and save millions of lives,” Koenig said. “When my grandfather ran the Navy during
World War II, he made sure the job came before the people doing the job. People are the weak link. Always have been. Fortunately,
with the new technologies, it’s going to take fewer and fewer people to get the job done. When I told Cheryl the situation
had gone too far, she couldn’t handle it. If I have difficulty suffering fools, of either gender or whatever the rank, I’m
not going to apologize. I saw in your service record that you have some of the same difficulties. First Gillette and then
Reicken. You have a way of disposing of your superior officers, DeLuca.”