Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista (57 page)

She said nothing as they glared at one another.  Finally she broke the impasse.  “Okay then, tell me how to do it.”

“You? You can’t.  It’s impossible.”

“It’s possible.  Tell me how.”

He took a deep breath and said, “Well…there’s really only one way.”

“Okay, that’s enough, that’s all I need.  How?”

Alex paused again before quietly answering.  “I can take you there.”

She stared at him, thinking, considering the lack of available alternatives.  “Does that mean you’re not going to shoot yourself, after all?”

“No.  No, I won’t. Not now. That’s over, that’s finished.”

“So tell me, why would I want to take the world’s worst FBI agent?”

He managed one more partial smile.  “Because I’m all you’ve got. You can’t get there without me.  You get a better offer, tell me about it.”

***

Alex Garabanda had nothing more to say to her.
  She would accept his offer, or not.  If she didn’t, he would not be any worse off than before.

After a minute of silence between them, she asked, “Do you have any pictures of my son around here? Albums, something?”

There were no framed photographs hanging on the walls, only nail marks.  Karin had stripped away their memories.

“Pictures? I don’t know what my ex-wife left.  You’d have to look around in the closets, I guess.  She probably took everything.  No, wait— my laptop.  I’ve got pictures of Brian on my laptop.”  His brain was functioning only at three-quarters speed.  Now that he was attempting to sound half-intelligent, his tongue felt like a beanbag.

“So where’s your laptop?”

“In my car.  In the trunk.”

“Do I need a password? To see the pictures I mean.”

“No, not for the family albums. Just click the camera icon on the desktop.”

“Okay, good.  I want to see pictures of him, it would mean a lot to me.”  She walked behind him and over to the window, peering between the horizontal blinds, glancing across the street.

He asked her, “Are they gone?”

“You saw them too?”

“Of course I saw them.”

“They’re gone,” she replied, “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have come in.  I waited until they left.  At first, I thought they were after
me
. I thought that somehow, they knew I’d be coming here.  I thought they were already looking for me, and it freaked me out pretty bad.  Who were they?”

“I’m not positive, but I think they’re from the Special Surveillance Group.  They’re part of New Mexico’s own CIA, since the last elections.  I think they’re just leaning on me, letting me know they’re on my case. Yesterday after the rally, they called me up on my cell phone, and they told me that they were the ones who burned Luis Carvahal.  They told me I might be next.  They’re trying to run me out of the state, I guess.”

Ranya leaned against the bare wall next to the living room window and lowered her pistol, still staring at him. “Run you out of the state, huh? You know what?  I heard that phone call, from the other end. Basilio Ramos made it.  We were in some kind of a gravel mine north of the city, in one of his Suburbans.  You ever hear of a radio talk show guy named Rick Haywood?”

“Sure, he’s ‘the king of Albuquerque talk radio.’  He comes on in the afternoon.”

“Well, not anymore.  Right after Ramos called you, they tied him up behind a Suburban, and made him run for his life.  Then he fell, and they dragged him. Dragged him to death.  I saw it, right in front of me.  It was terrible…almost as bad as your friend being burned alive.  Almost…” Ranya was staring out the window between two slats, holding her pistol down against her leg.

“They killed Rick Haywood?”

“The Zetas. They’re the Comandante’s private goon squad.  They blew up his radio station too, that’s what they said.  Ramos said they’re done with Anglo talk radio giving them a hard time.  Haywood was the example.  After they killed him, they were going to bury him in a gravel pit.  At least, that’s what Ramos told his men to do.”

Garabanda said, “They ‘disappeared’ him.  Deleon was assassinated, Carvahal was burned and now Haywood’s been ‘disappeared.’  That means they’re moving to the next level, the next stage.  They’re going beyond politics now, way beyond ‘land reform.’  They’re settling scores, and making examples.  It’s a classic progression.  Classic. ‘Marxist Power Consolidation, 101: State Terror.’  There’s probably old communist textbooks somewhere.  Did you notice how fast they found the sniper’s rifle in the Regent, and how they already had an Anglo pinned for the shooting?”

“Yeah, I noticed. Ramos told me that Saturday was going to change everything.”

“He told you that? When?”

“When? A few days ago.  I was…um…staying with him.”

“You were staying with Comandante Ramos? Where, in Sandia Heights, or at the Albuquerque Academy?”  Alex Garabanda knew about both places.

“At his house.”

Garabanda paused, digesting this information.  This woman had been staying at Comandante Ramos’s house, living under his roof.  That could mean many different things.  “How did…how did you…”

“How did I wind up staying with Comandante Ramos? It’s a long story, are you sure you want to hear it?”

“Why not? I’ve got nothing but time now.”

She was leaning with her back against the wall by the window, and she slid down it until she was sitting Indian style, her pistol held across her lap, but no longer aimed at him.  “Well, after I escaped from the detention camp—that was Friday, a week ago…”

***

Ranya proceeded to tell the FBI agent
of her trip across Oklahoma and North Texas, of her night flight in the small plane to the saltpan near Mountainview, of her ride in the van with the wayward student radicals. She described the accidental ambush at Chulada, which had ended with her under the control of the Milicia, and eventually under the roof of Comandante Basilio Ramos.  The story took a long time, and he frequently interjected with his own questions. He paid close attention when she described how she had been shackled to the wall and subjected to a mock firing squad.  She left out the next part, how she had been forced to shoot Kalil as a loyalty test.

While she was describing her subsequent mall shopping spree and trip to the beauty salon, accompanied by Ramos and his Zeta squad, she noticed that his eyes had closed.  She sat and watched him for several minutes, until she was sure his sleep was genuine.

Ranya could only guess how much alcohol he had consumed, or how long he would be out, but she wanted him secured.  There was a long clothesline in the backyard, running from the house to the cement block wall that separated his property from the house behind them.  She cut the line down, and brought it inside.  She sliced it into four equal lengths, and gently slid them under his wrists and around his ankles, listening and watching him carefully, while slowly and meticulously binding him to the armchair.  The cords weren’t tight, she just wanted to be able to turn her back on him or leave the room without worrying about being jumped. Despite his promises to the contrary, she had no trust in his declarations.  A man who was ready to shoot himself was ready to do anything, rational or not.

Next, she went back into the garage.  His car was not locked. She popped the trunk, and found his laptop inside of a black soft-sided valise. The trunk was jammed full of bags and boxes.  She brought the computer back into the living room, and then she gave the rest of the house a quick search.  It seemed that about half of the furniture had been left behind by his ex-wife.

Papers, boxes and forgotten toys were scattered about.  She lingered in Brian’s old room, guessing what posters had been on the wall between the tape marks and thumbtacks.  There was a tiny red plastic action figure left on his windowsill, facing outward against the glass as if standing guard.  She picked it up and stared at the three-inch tall Spiderman, trying to imagine Brian’s little hand grasping it.  She pocketed the toy and moved on.

With Garabanda tied up and the rest of the house checked out, she could finally sit down on the living room floor with his black laptop computer.  She flipped it open and pushed on the power button, and when the screen came up she clicked the camera icon, and was presented with a selection of picture files.  She randomly clicked on albums, and studied the photos documenting the life of her stolen son, photos taken during her own five stolen years.

There was another house, brick, and a backyard with a grass lawn and a small swing set.  Alex Garabanda must have been the primary family photographer; he was in only a few of the pictures.  Karin Garabanda looked happy in some pictures, but Ranya paid little attention to her.  Brian was a jolly little fellow, given to wearing overalls and bouncy high-top sneakers.  In some earlier pictures, he was wearing only a diaper, splashing in an inflatable wading pool.  Album by album, picture by picture, Ranya reached back into the five stolen years of the life of her son.

There was Brian at about two years old on a plastic pony, grinning up at the camera with wide blue eyes.  Grinning up at his father.  At his father?  No, not at his father!  At Alexandro Garabanda, the FBI agent who had stolen him—not at his father!

The unfairness of it all was crushing.  Five minutes she had spent with Brian, only five minutes, and these federal agents had gotten five years! This child, her child, was a complete stranger to her.  This child who looked up with loving eyes at his abductors, never knowing the father and mother who had conceived him in love and brought him into the world. It was so unfair, so unfair, so unfair!  When would she get a break? When? She closed her eyes and she wept.  

After a few minutes, she went back to clicking through pictures, staring through tears at the stranger who was her son, bitter at the unfairness.

Nevertheless, in so many pictures Brian was smiling, almost always smiling, even if it was not at his real father.  He was not smiling up at Brad Fallon, no, not at poor Brad, gone down into the cold Potomac River these six long and lonely years.  No, little Brian was constantly smiling up at this other man, at this federal agent.  At this willing cog in the machinery of repression, which not only crushed people’s lives between unfeeling gear teeth, but also stole the small children of its victims.  Stole them, to be handed out like random door prizes to jackbooted thugs.

Even so, her son
was smiling
. Brian was constantly beaming with obvious joy at this man taking the pictures, this man who was the only father he had ever known.  Brad Fallon had died before he was born. Didn’t Brian at least deserve to have a substitute father?

Alexandro Garabanda didn’t kill Brad Fallon.  Taking him at his word, Garabanda had believed that the boy was an orphan.  Should she hate him, just because he worked for the same federal government that had spawned Brad’s killers?  The same government that had taken away five years of her life, and stolen her son?

25

Wendy Larmouche was game
to go out on the Customs boat again the following Sunday.  Bob Bullard appreciated that this was a hit or miss proposition. Most women (and men too for that matter) couldn’t handle more than a few minutes of the rolling and slamming involved with taking high performance boats out on the ocean.  It was a particular taste, like the enjoyment of roller coasters.  Wendy’s friend Sandra enjoyed sunbathing and fooling around at dockside aboard the eighty-foot Eldorado, but she could not tolerate the occasionally violent motion of the Fountain racing boat.  Bob was not disappointed that Wendy returned the following Sunday by herself.  As before, they were picked up alongside the Eldorado, downtown on San Diego Bay.

The Customs boat was forty feet long, with four 200 horsepower black Mercury outboards mounted across the transom. The boat was nicely trimmed out in black, gray and blue paint, with HOMELAND SECURITY written along its hull sides. Wendy and Bob both wore black uniforms for their excursion today, with HOMELAND SECURITY printed on the back in white letters.  Bullard had a holstered pistol on his combination inflatable lifejacket and utility vest, which was also black, also with HOMELAND SECURITY on the back.

There were three U-shaped bolster seats in the front of the cockpit, and three more behind them.  Bob took the wheel on the right side, the leader of the three-man Customs crew took the center position to navigate and handle the radios, and Wendy took the left side.  The other two crew members occupied the second row of padded bolsters behind them.  Once the boat was out on the open ocean and leaping across waves, there could be no question of sitting. You could only stand, wedged back against the bolsters, with your knees flexed to take the shock as the hull repeatedly slammed down against the waves.  Today it promised to be calmer on the outside, but still they stood, just in case.  Even crossing a large wake at high speed could send the Fountain airborne.

The three Customs agents voiced no objection to Bob Bullard taking the wheel, as they headed out the shipping channel between the North Island Naval Air Station and the Point Loma submarine base.  He was the boss of all of their bosses, so how could they possibly object? With just one phone call, he could have them promoted, or have them transferred to Alaska.  If he liked to go for boat rides on the weekends, well, that was his prerogative.  They loved their work, and were proud that the regional director took a personal interest in it, and shared their enthusiasm for high-performance boating.  

Running out the ship channel at a leisurely thirty knots, they overtook the usual bright-orange harbor tugs, and passed down the side of a cruise ship coming in.  Bob Bullard wouldn’t push the throttles wide open until they had cleared the sea buoy beyond Point Loma.  He ran up the sterns of several sailboats and then crossed their bows, leaving them wallowing in his wake.  Most were typical Sunday morning day sailors, about thirty to forty feet long.  Their sails were already raised, as they tacked their way back and forth against the light mid-morning sea breeze. It seemed like a hell of a slow way to go boating, but Bullard understood that at least they didn’t need to pay for expensive fuel.