Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista (25 page)

The skinny leather-clad director gave one more look around and called, “On my mark: three—two—one…ACTION!”  The plastic timing slate snapped shut in front of the camera lens.

After a beat, the center of all of this attention began his rehearsed script.  “Hi, I’m Bob Bullard, your regional director for the Department of Homeland Security.”  As he spoke, he walked a few steps across the boardwalk toward the camera, and then he stopped on his mark. A circular logo patch on the left breast of his windbreaker read “U.S. Department of Homeland Security” around a tiny blue eagle.

Off camera, the director pointed a finger, and an attractive twenty-something girl in a red one-piece swimsuit walked behind Bullard from the left. She was carrying a small surfboard under her arm, her golden hair lifting on the breeze created by an unseen fan. 

Bullard continued with his memorized lines of text.  “As we all know, this has been a year of difficult problems and unique challenges.  But with challenges, also come opportunities.”

A seagull wheeled off into the sky and out over the sea behind him.  

“Once again, the Southwest Region has led the nation in security awareness and preparedness.  We should all be proud of that record, but we can always do better.  I don’t need to remind you that improving homeland security means improving the economy, and increasing everyone’s prosperity and well-being.” 

From the right, a middle-aged Hispanic couple pedaled behind him on a pair of bicycles, grins plastered across their health-exuding faces.  In the distance beyond the white sand, a pair of surfers paddled out through the smallish waves.

“So let’s all pitch in, and help your Department of Homeland Security to help you! Let’s do everything we can to win the war on terror and economic sabotage.  Report suspicious behavior, and please give your full cooperation to law enforcement at safety checkpoints.  And don’t forget: you can earn cash rewards for reporting illegal firearms, or stockpiles of hoarded gold.  Call 855-GUN-STOP, or 855-USA-GOLD, and you can help to support your family, while you help to defend your homeland.”

The camera closed in on Bullard’s smiling face, while a sailboat glided across the shimmering water in the distance.

“Okay, CUT!” screeched the director.  “Let’s try it again, people. Surfer girl—Shauna—next time, walk like this: show a little hip action, all right? We’re selling the American dream here sweetie, so don’t hobble by like you’re walking on broken glass, okay?”

“Can I just wear my sandals, then?” she whined, clutching her arms around herself against the morning chill, her board was lying on the cement.

“No, you cannot wear sandals.  Barefoot!  See, it’s right here in the script: ‘barefoot surfer girl walks by.’  And think warm everybody, think warm!  Okay now, places...get ready…and…on my mark, three—two— one—ACTION!”

“…Hi, I’m Bob Bullard, your Southwest Regional Director for the Department of Homeland Security...”

***

The convoy rolled out of the city on I-40,
westbound across the chaparral scrubland under a cloudless sky. There were more than a dozen pickups and SUVs, each carrying a squad of riflemen from the Falcon Battalion. The trucks bristled with black M-16s.  The troops carried over one hundred of the “new” rifles Ranya had found among the mini-storage garage full of surplus rifles. 

They were taking them to what had previously been a public shooting range to sight them in, that is, to ensure that the spot where their adjustable sights were aimed would precisely coincide with the spot where the bullets would actually strike.  This was no trivial matter.  As delivered from the factory, the sights could be a foot or more off from the point of bullet impact at 100 yards, making the rifles useless beyond close range.  Once properly sighted-in, the rifles would be capable of hitting a man-sized target at 400 yards or more. 

Ramos had said that the full unit movement would also serve as a show of force, to show the obstinate gringos exactly who was the new boss.  Eventually, they had to accept the fact that they were no longer in charge in Nuevo Mexico.  If they didn’t like it, he had said, there were plenty of other Anglo states where they could choose to live.  

His black armored Suburban was in the center of the column.  Once again he sat behind the driver, next to Ranya, but this time another soldier was seated to her right.  She felt trapped. At no time since her capture at Chulada did she have an opportunity to escape.  To make her predicament even more difficult, she had to pretend to enjoy the company of Basilio Ramos, and echo the Falcon Battalion’s enthusiasm for overturning the old order in New Mexico.  She stared straight ahead, her hands folded across her lap, recalling her bizarre and disturbing morning.

***

Basilio was already gone
when Ranya had finally awakened, with a crushing headache and a mouth like sun-dried pond scum.  It had taken her several minutes to orient herself in the strange bedroom, and determine that she was alone.  Naked and alone, in a strange bed, in an unfamiliar city. She untangled herself from the silk sheets, slowly raised herself up to a sitting position, and the room tilted and whirled.  She fell back, staring up at a stationary ceiling fan, bracketed between mahogany bedposts.

When she was able, she loosely wrapped the pink top sheet around herself, staggered across the room and checked the bedroom door, which was made of dark wood against the surrounding white plaster walls.  The brass handle turned at her touch, but she didn’t open it, afraid that there might be a guard waiting outside.  Instead, she quietly locked it from the inside by pushing in its gold button.  Her brown backpack and yesterday’s shopping bags were lined up against the wall near the door.

Her eyes were only partly opened as she stumbled to the bathroom, looking for a glass of water and a bottle of aspirin or Tylenol in the medicine cabinet.  She averted her gaze from the mirror until the cabinet door was open, unwilling to see herself in her present condition.  Straining to focus, peering at the rows of prescription and non-prescription medicines while leaning against the sink and quenching her thirst, she had her sudden revelation, and the memories came flooding back.  Oh, the things she had done with that man…

Ranya leaned against the pink marble counter top, her eyes closed and her temples throbbing.  

She found some Tylenol and washed down two caplets, then began reading the other prescription labels, printed in both English and Spanish. She returned to the bedroom and found a pencil and a scrap of paper, and then with weak fingers she laboriously copied down the names of a dozen unrecognized pills and capsules, careful not to disturb their positions on the shelves.

With the list safely hidden, she showered quickly, afraid that Basilio might return unexpectedly at any time.  She was grateful that her short hair took only a minute to shampoo and rinse.  After drying, she wrapped a bath towel around herself, and cleaned her teeth with a new brush, studying them carefully in the mirror, appreciating her slow transformation back to something approximating a human.  Then she opened the small makeup kit she had picked up yesterday at the salon, and applied just a little blush and clear lip-gloss.  She enjoyed these routine feminine rituals again, after her five years of Spartan life in the camps.  Wanting to blend inconspicuously with the Milicianos, she dressed in her green fatigue-style pants and a matching green shirt from the mall’s outdoor outfitting store, and laced on her black and brown ankle-high cross-trainers.  

The glass-paned doors to the bedroom balcony were not locked, and from outside she could see far down the driveway toward the wrought iron double gate, and its guardhouse.  A high fence of iron bars with arrowhead tips delineated the property line, leading to the gate.  A half dozen Suburbans and pickups were parked along the drive, and there were armed guards on duty at the gate.  The backs of other luxury homes were visible on the dusty slopes descending toward the city.  A pair of iridescent black and purple butterflies distracted her for a moment, twirling over the balcony railing and above the house, spiraling high in the sunlight.  Then she went back inside.

The bedroom had an office alcove with a desk and a computer, facing a window with a panoramic view of the city.  She sat down to search the internet for the names of the unknown drugs on her hand-written list, but the screen informed her that it was “unable to establish a connection, try again later.” On the screen there was an icon of a stack of books, she clicked on it and found the computer’s own internal encyclopedia.  The “Omnipedia’s” home page informed her that it had been automatically updated only yesterday. 

One at a time she carefully typed the scientific names of each unknown drug into the search box, and on her third try she found a “morning-after pill” which had been approved by the FDA.  She pondered only a moment and decided she would take it.  The possibility of having another baby, this time fathered by Basilio Ramos, horrified her.  God might not forgive her, but she would not risk bringing another innocent child into the world inside a prison, while shackled to a steel table.  If there was a new life even now growing within her…well, God could add yet another to her growing list of sins. 

But Ranya had not made a list of the drugs in Basilio’s medicine cabinet in order to find a morning-after pill.  On her fifth search, she found the information she was seeking. After carefully typing in
dioxyselbrinphenthalozine
, the computer informed her that this concoction was commercially known as
Libidinol
. The blue and yellow 100-milligram capsule was prescribed for the treatment of “diminished sexual desire” in both men and women.  According to the Omnipedia, it was a controlled pharmaceutical in the United States, subject to certain unspecified abuses, but it was commonly bootlegged and sold in South and Central America. Having found her answer, she quickly logged off the computer.

So that was it. 
Libidinol—the bastard drugged me!
  Probably slipped it into the margaritas, she thought.  She supposed she’d been date-raped…whatever that actually meant, when under the influence of Libidinol.  She had certainly not been unconscious.  Last night, she had been a willing partner.  Wide awake, and more than merely willing.
She had reveled in it.
Could she blame all of her behavior on the Libidinol? Would she have slept with Ramos, even without the drug?  Basilio was surely a handsome man, trim and muscular, but then, he was only her second lover, after Brad...

Brad Fallon had not needed Libidinol to coax her into bed that first time, in the midnight cabin by the nameless river.  Basilio Ramos had drugged her, had taken away her choice, and that made all of the difference.

And now Basilio might return at any moment, anticipating, even expecting, a replay of last night. The thought repulsed her on one level, and yet... She drove those unexpected thoughts away, and refocused on escape, and her mission to reclaim her son.

Brad Fallon’s son.

Their son.

To escape, to be able to find little Brian and take him away, she would need freedom of movement.  Escaping from this house destitute, unarmed and without a vehicle would be almost pointless.  She would need valid identification papers, plenty of cash for food and gasoline, weapons of course, and gear for surviving on the run with a small child.  

To acquire these things, she would need to win the complete trust of Basilio Ramos.  She would have to bend him to her will.  In order to escape, she would need to continue and even amplify her pretense at being a dedicated Marxist, goose-stepping beside him toward a bright socialist future.  That would be the easy part: many of her leftist university professors had unwittingly prepared her to play the role of revolutionary. 

The difficulty would be in maintaining and even increasing Basilio’s personal affection toward her.  But how could she accomplish that seduction, while at the same time refusing to submit to him physically? She found no simple answer to that quandary.  She would just have to cross that particular bridge later, when there was no other way around it.  

She checked in her brown backpack—her folding Strider knife was there, as well as Destiny’s Nikon camera from the van and other items. Ranya wondered if anybody had checked the pictures on the digital camera.  Once she had been grilled by the tribunal, and had passed the various tests and been accepted into their fold, they might have lost interest in what they considered to be her personal effects.  It took Ranya only a minute to figure out how to check the pictures contained within the camera on its LCD screen. 

The first photograph in the queue showed the four students from Michigan, their right fists held high, in front of the red and white
Tierra O Muerte
sign painted on the roadside barn.  The picture was only 48 hours old, which seemed astonishing.  So much had happened since she had taken that photograph!  Now the four grinning student radicals were dead—one of them killed by Ranya’s own hand.

Above all, she didn’t want to be in the bedroom when Basilio returned, so she slipped the folding knife into her right front pants pocket, and left to explore the house.  She wanted to see what limits—if any— would be put on her movement.  There were no guards or anyone else in sight on the third floor.

The rest of the house outside of the bedroom was tastefully decorated in a Mediterranean style, with oil paintings on the walls.  The floor was inlaid in parquet hardwood tiles.  She passed an open door to a small library office with another computer and a huge flat screen monitor.  The other doors were closed and she did not try them.  

At the end of the hallway double glass doors led to another balcony, the doors were unlocked and she went out.  The left side of the balcony offered her a view of the back of the beige stucco mansion; it was only two stories high on the up-sloping side toward the mountain.  Beneath the balcony, only a few yards across a patio from the house, was an oval-shaped swimming pool with a connecting Jacuzzi.  Ranya strolled nonchalantly around the wide balcony; it was large enough for several outdoor chaise lounges and tables. She looked carefully up the rocky hillside toward the mountain, and saw a uniformed soldier with an M-16 rifle standing a little higher than the house, but about 150 yards away. In between them was a broken landscape of sand, rocks, boulders, cactus and a few raggedy juniper trees.