Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista (61 page)

“Right.”

“Where is it? Here in the house?”

“No…”  She wondered if she was being stupid, admitting this to him. But if getting to California meant paying her way, it was time to pony up.

“Where is it then?”

“Take it easy, it’s safe.”

“How can you be sure it’s safe, if you left it outside somewhere?”

“I know it’s all right, because it’s in my car.  Well, it’s not exactly ‘my’ car.  But don’t worry—the guy I stole it from won’t be looking for it. He’s dead.”

“What?” he choked.

“Believe me, he had it coming—but I didn’t kill him.  Basilio Ramos did.”

Alex Garabanda was trying to maintain a neutral appearance as these revelations came one after another, but she could read his suppressed astonishment.  His expressions amused her, as he tried to retain the tough-guy FBI agent façade.  She told him, “The dead guy I stole the car from was just a dirtbag communist professor at the university.  Trust me—the world is a better place without him.  Hey, that reminds me, I took pictures of the whole thing.”

“You took
pictures
? Of a
murder
?”  He shot her a look of incredulity that clearly indicated that he doubted her sanity.  

Well, she thought, so what of it? What good had sanity ever done for her? Sanity, she was beginning to think, was highly overrated.  She replied, “Not just a murder—it was
much
better than that.  It was a
sex
murder.  But don’t get the wrong idea—I didn’t participate.  I just took the pictures.  Well, actually, maybe I did help a little bit…hey, don’t look at me like that! Listen, I took the pictures for a very good reason: blackmail. I don’t want Basilio Ramos coming after me.  Say, that reminds me: I need to make copies.  Can I burn a few discs on your computer? And by the way, your battery’s dead—have you got a charging cable somewhere? What?  What’s the matter? Blackmail pictures won’t work unless you have lots of copies, right?”

***

This young woman is clearly a lunatic,
Alex Garabanda thought.  But to be fair, just who was it who had been aiming a pistol at his heart a couple of hours ago, getting ready to blast himself into the Great Beyond? So who am I to judge anyone’s sanity? He knew that Ranya’s unexpected arrival was the reason he was still among the living.  He was still alive, wasn’t he?  So many aspects of this conversation were beyond the bounds of the reality he thought he understood.  Of course, after the past year, almost any new reality would have to be an improvement.  One thing he knew: the chains binding him to his previous life were broken,
and he was free
. Just as free as he chose to be.  So she wanted to use his laptop computer to make copies of blackmail pictures, pictures of the leader of the Falcon Battalion murdering a communist professor? Well, why not? “Sure, go ahead and make copies.  I’ve got a charging cable in my trunk somewhere.”

“My camera’s still in my car.  I need to go get it.”

“Where’s your car?”

“Down the street, on the other side.  Behind that dumpster.”

“Oh Jesus, you left your car parked right out on the street? It might have been stolen already.  You have to be careful—you can’t just leave cars parked outside.  Not anymore.  You’d better get it off the street before it’s gone, along with your gold.”  He thought for a moment about the best way to hide her car, and get her in and out of his house unobserved. “Okay, here’s what you do: the house behind this one is empty. I’ll go over the back wall and open the garage door.  Pull the car in there.”

***

The front of the classroom
was draped with poster-sized topographical maps and overhead imagery, as well as equipment lists and personnel rosters.  Fifteen Falcon Battalion officers and noncommissioned officers occupied the front two rows of chairs, notebooks open on their laps.

Even though it was Sunday, the leaders were wearing their usual camouflage uniforms for the staff meeting.  Ramos had drawn a 9mm pistol from the unit armory at the Academy, claiming that he wanted a firearm that held more that the eight rounds of his .45.  The Glock was in another black nylon military holster, attached to a new green web belt. None of his men knew that his .45 had been stolen, but the new pistol hanging from his belt was a constant reminder of his betrayal by Ranya Bardiwell.  She had taken his lovely custom-made .45, and now he was reduced to carrying a standard-grade plastic and steel Glock.

The object of their attention this afternoon was Torcido County, in the far north of Nuevo Mexico.  More specifically, the top half of the county, which constituted Wayne Parker’s Vedado Ranch.  This enormous property was to be the site of the upcoming “conference of great importance,” about which Basilio Ramos and his troops theoretically knew nothing.  For a change, they were not planning how to seize a property from its gringo occupiers.  This time their mission was to secure the ranch against any conceivable attack, while its primary buildings were the meeting place for a group of “very important persons.”  Ramos believed that sooner or later, the million acre Vedado Ranch would be confiscated under the Land Reform laws, but for now Wayne Parker was an ally of Gobernador Magón, and useful to the revolution.  For the time being, his false property rights would be respected and even protected.

Comandante Ramos sat front and center among his officers and sergeants, trying to feign some level of interest as Teniente Velasquez droned on about tomorrow’s battalion movement up to Torcido County, and the berthing arrangements for the men.  The Falcons were expropriating a group of off-season ski lodges for their temporary quarters. They would be fed by the resort’s kitchen staff, and so on.  These were routine arrangements for battalion deployments, and Ramos had a difficult time keeping his mind on the details as they were presented.  He felt slightly self-conscious because his mind was still drifting and given to unexpected detours into surreal imaginings.  He avoided talking as much as possible, afraid that his tongue might betray his altered mental state.

He tried to focus on the proceedings.  The Falcon Battalion was moving early Monday morning, tomorrow.  The conference was scheduled to take place on Wednesday, at the mansion and conference center of the Vedado Ranch.  After the officers finalized the plan, the rest of the troops would be briefed at three PM today, giving them ample time to prepare their uniforms, gear, weapons and vehicles for the unit movement.

The million-acre ranch occupied most of the top half of Torcido County, right against the Colorado border.  A key attribute of the ranch was its two-kilometer jet-capable runway, which would allow the guests to arrive and depart without fuss or formality, and of course, with no attention from the media.  The identities of the guests and the purpose of the meeting were secret, and supposedly outside of his “need to know.”

Regardless of that, he had some ideas, some of which he had gleaned just last night during the exchange between Gobernador Magón and Wayne Parker.  Certainly, one topic on the table would be a new federal status for Nuevo Mexico, perhaps as an autonomous region with less direct control by Washington.  In reality, this would merely be formalizing the evolving facts on the ground.  Washington was eventually going to cede control of Nuevo Mexico, because it had no effective means of control.

Because of the high importance of the Vedado conference and its attendees, the Falcon Battalion was going to serve as the primary Quick Reaction Force.  This was only to be expected, considering that they were, by any objective standard, the most elite unit of the Milicia de Nuevo Mexico.  Four state guard Blackhawk helicopters were being provided for the Falcons, supporting them in their capacity as the mobile QRF.  This heavy commitment of fuel-guzzling military helicopters was the best proof of the tremendous significance of the conference.

The areas around the mansion, the conference center and the jet runway were shown in overhead photographs, blown up in tremendous detail and marked with colored tape.  The four Blackhawks would be staged on a runway apron, their aircrews and his best troops equipped and waiting only a few meters away, ready to lift into the sky on a moment’s notice.  Besides the helicopters, the Falcons would also have their own trucks and SUVs to transport them, if they were needed closer to the meeting facilities around the mansion and conference center.  The interior security was going to be provided by a private contract firm, brought in to supplement Wayne Parker’s usual bodyguard force.

The outer security perimeter around the ranch would be manned by Comandante Guzman’s newly formed and hastily trained 5th Battalion. These three hundred troops were only marginally better than typical slovenly Milicianos, having gone through just one extra month of “advanced” infantry training under the tutelage of Comandante Guzman, “El Condor.”  These troops would be transported solely on trucks and buses, positioned to control key road intersections on and around the sprawling Vedado Ranch. In reality, the Peruvian’s 5th Battalion troops would be able to serve only as an early warning trip-wire force.  In the extremely unlikely event that a serious attack was mounted against the conference, Ramos knew that his Falcons would do the real fighting.  

Teniente Velasquez completed the transportation and logistics portion of the staff briefing.  There were a smattering of questions and suggestions, and then he returned to his seat.  Next, Teniente Almeria would brief the communications plan.  The staff meeting was painfully dull.  Ramos had hoped that it would divert his thoughts from the disgusting events of his past night and morning, but it could not. Unwanted hyper-vivid memory flashes continually burst into his mind, and the bald gringo professor was, to say the least, not a sexual partner he wanted to remember!

Ramos compulsively wrung his hands together, still feeling the sticky blood of the dead gringo staining them.  In his bathtub, he had hacked and sawn the dead man’s corpse into manageable parts, and then placed each grotesque piece into a heavy-duty black plastic garbage bag.  He put the bags inside of luggage, and in three trips carried them down to his Jeep, for a solo ride back to the same gravel pit where his men had disposed of Rick Haywood a day earlier. Finally, Professor Johnson’s plastic-wrapped body parts were dumped into an empty steel drum, doused with gasoline, and burned.  The stink was excruciating, and he could still smell it on his skin hours after his last shower.

The majestic pine-covered mountains of the Vedado Ranch would provide a welcome relief.  Hopefully, he would be able to get his mind off the dead gringo professor and Ranya Bardiwell, and try to forget what that Arab whore-bitch from hell had done to him!

While Teniente Almeria went over radio frequencies and call signs, Basilio Ramos daydreamed about the most excruciatingly painful tortures he could imagine for Ranya Bardiwell.  He imagined her naked and screaming on a steel mortuary table, with wire binding her wrists and ankles to its four corners.  Around the room, within her sight, he would assemble every imaginable tool of torture: the razor sharp, the red hot, and the high voltage.  But while he tried to concentrate on her look of sheer animal terror, each pleasant fantasy image he conjured was soon replaced in his mind by one of the filthy and repulsive images she had left for him to see on his computer.  He could not erase those disgusting scenes of his coupling with the gringo professor from his memory!

Someday he would figure out a way to destroy her nauseating photographs, or at least to keep them from dissemination.  But try as he might, he couldn’t think of a plausible way to be certain that all of the digital photographs were permanently wiped out and deleted.  They could already have been copied onto a dozen discs, or stored on a hundred websites.

Ramos stared straight ahead at Teniente Almeria, without hearing a word he was saying.  He ground his teeth, and dug his fingernails into the palms of his clenched fists, which were pressed hard against his knees.  He was torn between his overwhelming desire for painful revenge against Ranya Bardiwell, and his even greater fear of her explicit homosexual blackmail pictures ever being seen by his troops.  

Pictures that would also raise the sticky question:
where was Professor Johnson?
  Why had the well-known socialist professor suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth,
and who had he been with last?

27

There was a seven-foot cinderblock wall
between the Garabanda’s back yard and the yard of the empty house behind his.  The walls between the houses were too high for any other neighbors to observe the activity between these two properties.  After hiding her car in the vacant garage, Ranya stood on a discarded white plastic chair to peer over the top.  Alex Garabanda was waiting on the other side, and she quickly lifted up her heavy backpack and kit bag and passed them to him.  Then she carefully handed over the long Dragunov rifle, wrapped loosely in the blanket from the professor’s car.  

Her .45 was still tucked in front, so she pulled it out and shoved it into her jeans in the small of her back for scaling the wall.  She put her hands on top, and smoothly pushed herself up onto her belly, swung up a leg, and slid over.  Alex Garabanda carried both bags back into his house. She followed him inside with the rifle and closed the door behind her.  The two heavy bags were left on the floor by the back door.  

At every transition point, she was expecting betrayal: when pulling into the empty garage, climbing over the wall, and coming back into his house.  The FBI man had been given ample opportunity during her absence to drop a dime, cover his ass, and have her picked up.  The constant gnawing fear diminished just a bit each time she walked through a door, and was not met by an arrest team.

She unwrapped the rifle from the blanket and laid it across the kitchen table. 

“Nice,” he commented, picking it up.  “Is that a real Dragunov, or a knockoff?” He shouldered the rifle and pressed his eye against the rubber cup at the back of the scope.  She sat at the table while he stood and scanned through his kitchen window toward the trees outside.  Her makeshift rifle sling, made from two of Basilio’s neckties, hung slack beneath the weapon.