Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista (4 page)

Starr Linssen was roughly her size, it occurred to her…  She pushed down the lever under the silver faucet, and the tub began to drain. Gradually Linssen’s face came back into view as the bubbles disappeared. Ranya studied the dead woman’s slick black hair, just a bit gray at the roots. She opened the medicine cabinet, then looked under the sink, and found an unopened package of black L’oreal hair dye.  It could be done, maybe. It was possible!  Anyway, what else could she do? What choice did she have?  She knew where her son was living, she knew his new name, and she knew who had stolen him from her life!  

***

In less than two hours, Ranya was driving
the dead warden’s black pickup back toward the double-box of high chain link and razor wire, which surrounded the back gate leading away from the base.  On their way to her house, the warden’s ISA identification card had gotten them through the inner gate leading out of the D-Camp area into the rest of the old Army base.  Ranya could only guess if that same ID card would be sufficient to allow her to pass entirely out of the base, and into the civilian world. 

Her hair was dyed black and scissors-cut to resemble the warden’s, as closely as Ranya had been able to manage in the bathroom mirror.  A sun and moon, approximating the warden’s tattoos, were inked in ballpoint on the sides of her neck.  She wore the white blouse and black pants of the dead woman.  To defeat the RFID implants in the back of her left shoulder, she had stripped the circular magnet from the speaker of a portable radio, and secured it in place with generous strips of duct tape.  Another detainee had explained this trick to Ranya, but she had no way of knowing for sure if the big magnet would override the RFID microcircuits or not.  Well, she would find out soon enough… 

Ranya wore Linssen’s gold-framed aviator’s sunglasses and a black ball cap with the ISA patch on the front, to obscure her face.  She hoped that the gate guards would not study her too closely, but would be basing their judgment on Linssen’s familiar black vehicle with its ISA bumper and windshield decals, and her ISA uniform and ID card.  If the warden’s vehicle had any special RFIDs placed in it, Ranya could only hope that they would indicate that it was authorized to depart the base via this back gate.  The vehicle gate was already outside of D-Camp, in another part of the old military base, and she hoped that it had less stringent requirements for permitting outward passage.  In any event, Ranya had no way of knowing the overall scheme of the security protocols that were in effect.

In case it didn’t work, if the guards became suspicious and stopped her for a close inspection, Ranya had the warden’s Glock 19 pistol, loaded with sixteen 9mm hollow points.  She had found it in the locked drawer of the warden’s bedside night table, hidden in a hollowed-out Bible.  Now the ugly black pistol lay on the seat beside her right thigh, concealed beneath a copy of “Homeland Security Today” magazine.  No matter what happened next, Ranya was finished with D-Camp.  She was finished with around-the-clock interrogations, and with months buried alive in solitary confinement, in an underground “supermax” cell.  She was finished with troikas of unseen judges, who handed down sentences of “non-judicial detention” from behind face-blurring translucent screens.

She was not going back.  Deputy Warden Starr Linssen lay beneath her own bed, wrapped in her shower curtain, strangled and drowned and dead.  The pistol beside Ranya’s hip had a round chambered, ready to fire in an instant.

Ranya slowed and made the right turn toward the vehicle gate, her heart hammering inside of her chest.  The inner gate rolled back on grating steel rollers with a clank of chains and the whine of an electric motor, and she pulled the little truck inside the inspection zone.  One of the two middle-aged guards on duty was sitting on a stool inside of his cement block guardhouse, and he unenthusiastically raised himself up to do his duty.  She noted that the service pistol on his belt was hidden beneath the flap of a black nylon holster. It would be no match in speed for her Glock, if they both had to draw in a hurry.  Shooting both guards and activating the outer gate from inside their guard house would be a last ditch desperation measure, but she would attempt it if they tried to stop her now.

She held the ISA card up against the side window a yard from another optical scanner on a steel post, the way she had seen Linssen do it, while keeping her eyes forward.  It was obvious the truck was empty in the back, and held no passenger other than the authorized driver, the easily recognizable deputy warden of D-Camp.  The guard took a step toward the truck, paused just two paces away, stopped for a moment…

And then he waved her forward with a casual flip of his hand.

The outer gate squealed open, and in a moment Ranya was through, bursting forth with immeasurable bounding joy.  In seconds, she had the pickup truck going sixty miles an hour on the ruler-straight blacktop, heading south toward Interstate 40. 

Ranya Bardiwell was out of D-Camp, but she was still far from free.

2

Alex Garabanda had tried
to call Karin several times, but his cell phone had not been able to make a connection.  Finally, when he had gotten through to her phone, she didn’t pick up and he didn’t want to leave a voice mail message.  He knew she was using the caller ID to screen her calls, one of her favorite tactics in their ongoing psychological war.  As much as he dreaded it, he needed to speak to his ex-wife personally, in real time.  Leaving a voice mail would give her too many ways to play him, to blame him if Brian wasn’t picked up from day care.

It was so ridiculous.  It was beyond absurd, because she was working in the same Federal Building only thirty or so feet beneath him.  Karin was three stories below the FBI Field Office, where he was one of the five Supervisory Special Agents.  He could take the elevator down to the IRS offices and physically locate her, but he ruled that option out.  Any such pursuit could and would be written up as “stalking” or “intimidation.” It had been many weeks since he had entered the IRS offices where she worked as an admin assistant.

He left his little office and went out into the bullpen, to use a landline that she wouldn’t recognize on her cell phone’s caller ID. Finally, she picked up.  “Hello?”  She sounded pleasant enough, less than an hour from the close of business on Friday afternoon.

“Karin? It’s me.”

Several seconds went by without a response, dead air. He wondered if the connection had dropped, which happened frequently enough for it to be his first thought.  When she did answer, the warmth in her voice had evaporated.

“What is it?”

“Something’s come up.  I can’t pick up Brian from kindergarten.” Their five-year-old son was in the day care center, on the first floor of the Albuquerque Federal Building.

“Well, sorry, I already have plans.  You have to pick him up.”

“Karin…I can’t.  Really. I have no choice; it’s a meeting I can’t get out of.  Somebody’s come down from Washington…”

“From Washington? Should I be impressed?  Deal with it, Al.”

“I can get Brian at home after six, maybe seven at the latest.”

“Oh, no you won’t.  If I’m getting him from kindergarten, he has to come with me and…with me.  I’ve already made plans—I actually have a life.  And you’re certainly not picking him up after his bedtime.  If you can’t get him from daycare at five, then you’ll just have to come by tomorrow morning and get him, at the house.”

“Karin, I’m sorry, but…”

“That’s right, you are sorry.  I’ll get Brian at five.  You’ll just have to get him tomorrow.  Okay? Buh-bye, Al.”

“Karin…” 

She had already disconnected.

***

Ranya was slumped down
in the driver’s seat of a rusted-out ambulance, behind a defunct auto repair shop that bordered a truck stop.  She was staring across the backs of a row of eighteen-wheelers, toward the truck stop’s mini-mart.  High up on the red and yellow Love’s sign facing the interstate, diesel was advertised for $28.99 a gallon.  Below the price were the words “Cash Only.” 

She finished a plastic container full of fruit salad from the warden’s kitchen, while watching the store for the return of a driver. Much of the fruit she recognized from D-Camp’s fields and orchards.  Linssen’s brown backpack was on the seat beside her, ready to grab.  After 45 minutes of observation, Ranya had narrowed her attention to a pair of trucks that had entered from the direction of Oklahoma City, and immediately gassed up. The driver who returned from the Love’s mini-mart first would be her initial target.

In the meantime, she listened to AM talk radio through the ear plugs on Linssen’s jogging radio, dreading a breaking news announcement about a murder and a prison escape.  The host was yelling about an upcoming Constitutional Convention scheduled to take place in Philadelphia.  It was the first she had heard of it.  Any news that had dribbled into D-Camp was at least a couple of months old.  The new detainees spent at least that long in interrogation centers before arriving.

An hour earlier, she had watched the dead warden’s black pickup roll into a half-acre cattle stock pond. With the hood, doors and tailgate open, the truck had disappeared without leaving more than ripples and a trail of bubbles on the opaque water.  The water would hide the pickup from helicopters, even from their infrared scopes, but by abandoning the vehicle so permanently, she had committed herself to finding transportation at the insignificant crossroads town.  Ranya had changed out of Linssen’s ISA uniform in the concealing shade of a willow tree by the pond.  The dead warden’s casual clothes were loose on her, but with the belt cinched tightly around her waist, the pair of khaki hiking pants she had selected fit tolerably well.  The nylon pants had legs that zipped off above the knees. Ranya decided to remove them and stash them in the warden’s backpack. She was grateful that the dead woman seemed to have been an outdoorsy type.  Linssen’s camping and hiking gear was now being put to good use.

From the cattle pond, it was only a short hike across bare fields to the abandoned junkyard behind the truck stop.  She was halfway between Oklahoma City and the Texas line.  Her newly dyed black hair fell just to her neck, cut straight around at the level of her earlobes.  She was wearing a pale green scooped-neck sleeveless t-shirt over her khaki pants: effective low-key camouflage.  Her neck ‘tattoos’ had been mostly rubbed off with spit and elbow grease while waiting in the ambulance.  She had forgotten to look for makeup remover or cold cream in Linssen’s house.

One of the double glass doors of the mini-mart opened with a flash of reflected afternoon sunlight.  A man wearing jeans, a white t-shirt and a black cowboy hat walked out, he was one of her chosen westbound drivers.  Ranya slipped from the abandoned ambulance, swung on the backpack, and walked through tall weeds behind several other junked cars to the truck parking area.  The trucks were all slant-parked at a 45-degree angle, with their cabs toward her.  She crouched behind a wrecked mini-van, and she watched. His truck was a dusty red Peterbilt, with a generous sleeping compartment behind the seats.

The Stetson-wearing driver walked from the back of his rig carrying a plastic shopping bag, inspecting his tires as he went.  He paused by the passenger side of his cab, unlocking the door with a remote control on his key chain, then stepped up on the platform over his fuel tank.  He was a sunburned and clean-shaved Caucasian about forty or so years old, Ranya guessed.  Not bad looking, but a bit on the hillbilly side.

She moved out from cover, stepped over the guardrail at the property line, and walked toward him displaying her most fetching smile.  She hoped that she came across like an eager-beaver small town truck stop whore.  The Glock was in her right hand, hidden behind her hip.  They were isolated from casual view in the narrow slot between two trucks.

“Hiya, cowboy.  Listen, you wouldn’t be heading west, would you?”

The driver was just opening the door, taken completely by surprise and turning toward her.  “Huh? Uh…well…I…I can’t take hitchhikers. It’s…uh, company policy…”  He was standing above her, his eyes flicking between her face and her chest.

Ranya wasn’t having it.  “Oh please, I insist.”  She raised the Glock and leveled it at his stomach, moving to within a few feet of him, just out of kicking distance.  “Get in. I can handle this rig just fine, no problem, but I’d rather have you drive.  So please, don’t make me put a hole in you. Really, I just want a ride.”  Her smile was gone, her pistol steady.  “Drop the bag inside, climb in and slide across behind the wheel.  Keep your hands where I can see them.  I’m getting in right behind you.  Please believe me: I’ll shoot you if you do anything stupid.”

The driver stared open-mouthed at the pistol.  She waved it toward the cab’s open passenger door to get him moving, and he dropped the bag into the foot well area.  “Look, the company…  Oh shit, forget it.  J-just get in, a-and watch that trigger, okay lady? Don’t slip or any…”

“I won’t slip.  I just want a ride, that’s all.”

“What’s the matter?” he croaked, “A boyfriend after you? Or the law?” 

“Just get this thing started, and get on the highway, heading west.”

“Yes ma’am.”  He slid behind the wheel and did as he was told, starting the massive engine, releasing the brake, and pulling smoothly out of his spot. 

In short order he was going through the gears, merging into the right lane, westbound on I-40.  

She kept the pistol aimed at him, resting it across her stomach.  “I’m going to Albuquerque.  How long until we get there?”

“Albuquerque?  I’m not going that way.”

“Oh really? Change of plans.  This Glock says we are.”

“Look, you don’t understand.  I’m not routed there.  If I go off my route, the GPS is going to alert my dispatchers, and they’ll check me out. Automatically.”  He pointed through the roof with his finger, presumably indicating the location of the GPS transceiver, or perhaps the orbiting satellites. “Then they’ll call me.  And then if I don’t check in, they’ll call the highway patrol, and they’ll come looking for that trailer I’m pulling.  I can’t turn off the GPS. I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.”