Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista (48 page)

There was no need to wait for the Libidinol to kick in; the professor was already eager and ready.  In the hallway she said to him, “You know Robert, Basilio is still in a bit of denial about his bisexuality.  He likes to begin with a blindfold on.  You’ll know what to do when you get there, but don’t say anything.  Just let me do the talking, while we begin the fun and games.”

After quickly undressing (and revealing a disgustingly pale and flabby body), Professor Johnson had indeed known what to do.  Ranya was not personally interested in the sight of the professor performing on the Comandante of the Falcon Battalion.  She had a different purpose in mind, while she took picture after picture with poor dead Destiny’s digital Nikon. She moved around the bed, carefully framing each shot to include Basilio’s face in unmistakable paroxysms of pleasure. After several minutes of receiving oral attention, Ramos seemed to go almost berserk, and even with his arms and legs loosely bound by the hosiery, he clamped the professor’s head between his thighs.

Ranya had underestimated the stretchiness of the nylons.  They were hardly an impediment as Basilio was able to pull the more-thancooperative professor up into a bear hug, and then roll him over onto his stomach.  The nylons were like rubber bands, elongating as Ramos wrestled the professor to a position underneath him.  At first, he received enthusiastic assistance from the professor,who willingly raised his chubby posterior high up from the bed to meet the frenzied thrusts of his hero, the leader of the Falcon Battalion, the Che Guevara of New Mexico.

The Comandante’s blindfold had come off during all of the twisting and rolling, but still he seemed to take no notice of the sexual gender of the recipient of his desire, or of Ranya behind him with the flashing camera. During this violent homosexual act, Ramos threw one arm around the professor’s neck, effectively putting him in a chokehold while continuing to batter him from behind.  Basilio’s face was red from exertion, a mask of both lust and anger, as he alternately kissed and bit the professor’s back, ears and neck.  The bites were hard enough to draw blood, which, almost unbelievably, Ramos then eagerly licked, while Ranya snapped more flash photographs. The quadruple dose of Libidinol had done the job and more.

After several minutes without oxygen, Johnson’s face went from blue to purple, his eyes and tongue were bulging out, and still there was no letup in Ramos’s maniacal tempo.  The Comandante actually sped up for a final minute, grunting and groaning in time with his pounding as he arched up high over the professor’s back.  Ramos was pulling Johnson’s head back, the professor’s neck still trapped in the crook of his elbow between his forearm and bicep.

Ranya heard bones cracking, but she thought that Johnson was already deceased by the time that Basilio Ramos achieved his climax, jerking and spasming above his partner, and then finally collapsing on top of him, his chest and back heaving like a lathered stallion.  Gradually his breathing diminished to a steady droning snore.  Ramos was out cold, his entire body limp, his head nestled serenely over Johnson’s shoulder, next to the professor’s purple-black face, with its swollen tongue and bug eyes. Ranya took a few more pictures, from wide shots to close-ups of both of their faces, one above the other, one possibly sleeping, and one clearly dead. Then she put down the camera, turned away, closed her eyes, and held herself to stop from shaking.

***

Alex Garabanda sat up
on his sofa now, wide-awake, clicking with the remote between the local late news programs.  Details surrounding the governor’s assassination were pouring in. The assassin’s rifle had already been found, in a hallway of the Regent Hotel overlooking the Civic Plaza. He had apparently (the theory went) been spooked on his way out after committing the murder, and had ditched his rifle behind an ice machine as he fled.  The sniper had fired from well back in a room on the seventh floor.  News crews had been permitted to film the jury-rigged shooting table, which was the writing desk pushed into the center of the room.  An upturned waste-paper basket, with a pillow draped over the top, had been placed on the table.  Apparently, it had been used as a support, to prop the rifle at just the correct downward angle.

The curtains and the twin sliding glass doors to the balcony were left exactly as they had been found, opened with a gap in the middle only a few inches wide.  TV news cameras had already captured the “money shot,” the sniper’s view of the Civic Plaza stage.  Even in the darkness of the night, the illuminated speaker’s podium was clearly visible in the slot between the curtains.  The sniper had fired between the metal railings of the narrow balcony outside of the sliding doors.  Zoomed in to mimic the sniper’s telescopic sight, television viewers could see that it was an easy shot.  The podium, some 200 yards away, seemed close enough to hit with a slingshot.

The 7mm magnum bolt-action rifle had already been linked by its serial number to the son of an Anglo rancher.  The rancher and his son had not been seen for more than a month, ever since their family’s property had been confiscated under the Land Reform Act.  Pictures of the thirty-two year old suspect were flashed on the television, as were pictures of the scoped bolt-action rifle.  They showed his New Mexico driver’s license blown up to full-screen size.  His name was Daniel Thomas Milbank, and he had the shaggy blond hair and wide blue eyes of a California surfer. Milbank was an Iraq War veteran, and simple revenge was speculated as his motive.  All the way around, Garabanda thought, it was extremely fast work by the state and local police.  No wonder they had not needed help from the FBI—they already had the case sewn up!  All they needed to do now was make an arrest…

Garabanda wondered if the Anglo rancher and his son were already in custody, or already dead.

***

Surprisingly, the
muy macho
Comandante Ramos
had turned out not to be a firearms enthusiast.  For pistols, Ranya could find only the .45 he kept holstered on his web belt.  This turned out to be a pleasant surprise—it was a Jardine’s Custom, handmade by that master pistolsmith.  Well, why should the quality of Ramos’s sidearm be a shock? Basilio had consistently demonstrated excellent taste in stolen property.  Was there any doubt how he had acquired his Jaguar, this villa, or his gold Rolex watch? She dropped the magazine, and pulled back the slide.  It rolled back as smoothly as buttered ball bearings, and she remembered another custom .45 her own father had once created for her.

Jardines’ had on rare occasions passed through her father’s gun shop. They were strictly top of the line, selling for over $2,000 “old dollars” back in those days, and only to those customers who were willing to wait for months. What the name meant to her now was not worrying about a failure to feed and fire—ever.  With its precision sights, she would be able to hit human targets at extreme pistol range, out to about a hundred yards. The sights had tritium inserts that would glow at night for shooting accurately in darkness.  There were eight hollow point bullets filling the magazine, but she could find no other .45 caliber ammo or extra pistol magazines in the room, not even in his open gun safe.  

The one long arm in the safe was a souvenir she was already familiar with—Mr. De Vries’s Dragunov, the semi-automatic Russian sniper rifle. She was hoping to find a submachine gun or a compact M-4 carbine like those carried by the Zetas—some concealable firepower—but this was not to be.  The Russian rifle was four feet long, which would be quite a liability during her exfiltration. She decided she might need it later, so she would take it.

When she searched the safe, she found Canadian Maple Leafs, South African Krugerrands, American Eagles, Chinese Pandas and other types of gold coins stacked on several interior shelves.  Most of the gleaming coins were kept in specially made plastic tubes, in stacks of ten or twenty.  Many others were in coin-sized clear vinyl envelopes, and some were simply piled loose in cloth or leather bags and small boxes.

How much was gold going for today?  She vaguely recollected that an ounce of gold had been worth seven or eight hundred of the old greenback dollars, before she had been arrested five years ago. She couldn’t begin to guess what they were worth today in blue bucks, after factoring in the recent conversion from greenbacks at ten to one.  Probably enough to start a new life with her son—after she rescued him.

On a top shelf of the gun safe, she found two extra magazines for the long rifle, and five small cardboard boxes with Russian Cyrillic writing on them, all packed together in a large zip-lock bag. The boxes were a bit larger than cigarette packs: ammunition.  She opened a glued flap with a fingernail, and pulled out one of the twenty golden cartridges.  It was a thirty-caliber bullet, about the overall size of a round of .308 or 7.62mm NATO, but it had a protruding rim around the base, confirming that it was the correct ammunition for the Russian rifle.

Ranya held the single gold-colored brass rifle cartridge in one hand, and selected a loose one-ounce gold coin with the other.  They weighed about the same.  If each of the gold coins was worth $800 or more, how much were the 100 cartridges in the five boxes worth? Should she take all of these five or six pounds of bullets?

She thought, what good would extra gold do for her, if she ran out of rifle ammo, and was killed or captured? But how likely was she to get into a fight where she would need all 100 rounds of the high-powered ammunition? Anyway, what good would the extra ammunition do for her, if she was forced into a prolonged shootout against the Milicia? What good had the extra ammunition done for Jan De Vries?

Not much good, she reflected—especially considering that he had been shot while trying to bury his rifle.

Burying the Dragunov was something Ranya Bardiwell had no plan to do.

She decided to take all of the ammo, one hundred rounds.  The Dragunov rifle was dead weight without bullets, so she loaded the three rifle magazines on the spot, with their maximum of ten rounds each.  There was now too much to fit into her brown backpack, along with her clothes, so she found another bag on a closet shelf.  This was a heavy-duty green canvas zipper bag with strong carrying straps.  She hoped it might contain some useful tactical gear, but it was only half-full of sweaters, which she dumped out on the closet floor.  She continued packing.  Besides her clothes and most of the gold, she also shoved into her pack several thick stacks of crisp new $500 and $1,000 “blue bucks,” bound with rubber bands.  Her backpack and the gear bag were quickly getting heavy.  Her pack alone now weighed at least fifty pounds and the kit bag another thirty. The gold was the main culprit—it was amazingly heavy for its size.

She now mentally ruled out trying to escape on the Kawasaki off-road motorcycle she had seen down in the garage.  She couldn’t handle the bike with all of this extra weight, along with a five-year-old son who might struggle and fight with the “strange woman” who had grabbed him. Realistically, she’d need to take one of the cars.

Ranya didn’t know how many (if any) guards might be roaming around downstairs.  There hadn’t been guards inside of the house during the rest of the week, but then, the rest of the week, the governor hadn’t come for a visit.  If any of the Zetas or even the regular Milicia estate guards saw their Comandante’s girlfriend slipping out of his house at half-past midnight, laden down with heavy bags and a rifle…  No.

She went out onto the balcony, and looked down over the driveway. There were only a few other cars left inside of the fenced compound. While she watched, she saw someone being carried bodily down the front steps to a waiting black limousine.  It was Wayne Parker, being hauled out by his three bodyguards like a side of beef.  They seemed well-practiced at the drill, with one man on each leg, and a huge fellow supporting him under his shoulders while his arms flopped down.

Ranya studied the remaining cars, and had a new idea. If she took one of Ramos’s vehicles from the garage, the gate guards might balk at seeing it driven away without him.  Certainly, they would all go on alert the moment one of his automatic garage doors noisily rolled open.  

On the other hand…  She went back into the bedroom, found the professor’s pants and checked the pockets, and found his key chain.  One key was to a “Solaris,” whatever that was.  She went out onto the balcony again. A mini station wagon was parked on the uphill side of the drive, across from the garages.  The light was bad, but there appeared to be solar panels covering the hood and the roof.  Solaris?

What if she took the professor’s car?  There was no reason for the guards not to let a guest’s car leave the compound.  Could they have kept track of which guest went with which car? Not likely.  Their security was focused outward, not inward.  Parker’s limo and an escort SUV were leaving now, with no hassles.  Why not the professor’s Solaris?

And the professor, well, the creep had been single—no huge surprise there.  He probably wouldn’t be missed by anyone at all until his first class on Monday morning, if he were even teaching any summer session classes. What would his little Leninist lemmings do then?  Probably leave after the mandatory ten minutes, without so much as looking into the cause of his unexplained absence.  The school might not get serious about searching for their wayward professor for another day or two.  And if he wasn’t teaching this summer, his absence might not be noted for weeks.

This left the question of the unconscious Basilio Ramos to deal with. She could kill him now, easily (and God knows he deserved it).  A knife or a nylon stocking garrote, and it would be done.  In fact, after what she had seen today, she considered it an injustice to allow him to live at all.  If anything, he deserved to burn, like the man at the rally—after being dragged behind a car as a warm up.  Would God take care of his punishment, if she didn’t? She paced his bedroom, glancing at the two naked men, one alive and one dead.  In the end, she made the hard, cold calculation to allow him to live.  

Alive, he would have every motive to cover up his crime.  When he woke up, his first order of business would be to get rid of the professor’s corpse.  She would actually be helping him with the cover-up, if she removed Johnson’s car from the compound. No body, no car—no crime.