Strong Light of Day (24 page)

“I don't think you mean that the way it sounded.”

“Nope,” Cort Wesley sighed, “just the frustration talking.”

“What's changed? He's still the same kid.”

“It doesn't bother you, Ranger?” he asked, shaking his head. “Not at all?”

“Why should it?”

“My dad would've beaten me senseless if it were me.”

“Then I guess it's a good thing you're not him.”

“I just, I don't…”

Cort Wesley's voice tailed off and Caitlin didn't press him to continue, until he was ready.

“Did you ever suspect something was wrong? Tell me the truth.”

“No, because there isn't anything wrong.”

He shook his head, scolded her with his eyes. “You know what I mean.”

“The answer to that is no, too. I never suspected anything because he's a normal kid. Being gay doesn't change that.”

“Well, it changes other things.”

“Like what?”

Caitlin saw a vein start pulsing over Cort Wesley's left temple, as if he were trying hard to come up with an answer, without success, so she spared him the trouble. “I'm sorry.”

“For what?”

“Being judgmental.”

“I get your point,” Cort Wesley told her.

“Do you?”

“You being judgmental with me like I am about Luke.”

“Can't put anything over on you, Cort Wesley, can I?”

He almost smiled. “You know what's really bothering me here? The fact that you were afraid to tell me over how I'd react, the fact that you're worried about how I was going to deal with this.…”

“Well,” Caitlin said, “you kind of proved my point.”

“And the fact that I didn't see this for myself. How could I not have? I'm his goddamn father and I didn't even have a clue.”

“Don't blame yourself.”

“Can't help it, Ranger. If he'd come to me earlier, I can't believe this wouldn't have been easier on him. So I blame myself for not having the kind of relationship I thought I had with my youngest. That's why I'm sitting here steaming.”

“Stop beating yourself up.”

“Why is it easier with Dylan?”

Caitlin's mouth almost dropped. “‘Dylan' and ‘easier' in the same sentence? Do you really mean that?”

“In some ways I do.”

“We comparing love lives of your sons here? Do I need to remind you about some of the romances Dylan's had that almost got him killed?”

“Why don't you just say what you mean?”

“You look at Dylan and see yourself, Cort Wesley.”

“And what do I see when I look at Luke?”

“You shouldn't need to ask me.”

“I just did anyway.”

“You see his mother. When you look at him it gets you thinking about what your life might've been like if you'd made different choices.”

“Like Luke did, you mean?”

“It's not a choice.”

Cort Wesley lurched up out of the porch swing fast enough to crack one of the boards. “I can't think about this any more right now,” he said, stopping short of the porch railing and squeezing his hands into fists. “What do I do about Zach? Do I talk to his parents, invite them over for dinner or something?”

“What makes you think you've got to do anything?”

“I don't know, Ranger; that's why I asked.”

Caitlin looked away, then right back at him. “You hear from Jones?”

“While you were inside,” Cort Wesley told her. “A building blew up on the campus of Kansas State University earlier tonight.”

“What's that have to do with us, with all this?”

“Apparently, the building in question houses the nation's top biosecurity research institute.”

“I've heard of it,” Caitlin nodded. “Agriculture biosecurity, specifically.”

“Which includes something else, Ranger: agroterrorism.”

 

54

P
ENZA,
R
USSIA

Yanko Zhirnosky felt the big SUV thump over the rut-strewn gravel road turned to mud by a recent storm.

“You still haven't told us where we're going,” one of his political party's ministers said, impatience crackling in his voice.

“The future, that's where I'm taking you. Beyond that I don't want to spoil the surprise.”

His armored SUV's run-flat tires took turns dropping into fresh divots dug out of the road, beyond which the thick tree line hid endless fields of scrub brush in Russia's Chernozem, or Black Earth, region. They had set out at dawn, neither Zhirnosky nor any of the four ministers of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia informing even their closest aides of their plans or true destination. LDPR, of course, was a name left over from the party Zhirnosky had usurped and molded in his own ultranationalist image, to the point where Vladimir Putin himself began to fear his right flank, exposed by Zhirnosky's and the LDPR's growing popularity, as shown by the rising number of seats it now held in the Duma.

Zhirnosky's rise to such a standing was made even more incredible by the fact that he'd been one of the prime conspirators in an August 1991 attempted coup aimed at forestalling the collapse of his beloved Soviet Union. Working in concert with other, similarly minded Kremlin leaders, the conspiracy had been hatched with the help of Zhirnosky's mentor and then-head of the KBG, Valentin Krychkov. Ultimately, Zhirnosky had survived the fates suffered by his fellow conspirators by giving up Krychkov to Yeltsin's flacks. Zhirnosky took great pride in the fact that he'd never given in to the drunken fool, and he fretted only minimally over betraying his mentor, since Krychkov was a marked man anyway. Hell, Krychkov would've been proud of him for his actions, since they'd proved he learned his lessons well.

One of those lessons was to never give up on ultimately restoring the Soviet Union to its rightful place of prestige and power. And now, that goal was within his reach, with Zhirnosky himself installed as the nation's leader, once his plan was complete.

“But I can tell you this,” Zhirnosky resumed. “Do any of you believe the future of our nation would not be best served by the fall of America as a superpower and the eradication of the American way of life as it is known today?”

His ministers remained silent and still.

“Does anyone object, then, to fully exploiting an opportunity that fortune has delivered onto us?”

“And what opportunity is that?” one of his ministers asked.

“The reawakening of something we gave up for dead,” Zhirnosky told them all, “a long time ago, during the Cold War that may have ended but never entirely went away, as we have now seen. That is what this trip is about—to demonstrate to you precisely how we will seize upon that good fortune.”

Zhirnosky was a short man, barely five and a half feet tall, who had long adopted a stiff-spined posture to make himself appear taller. His hair was slate gray and fit his scalp like a cap; none of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia's ministers could recall ever seeing a single strand out of place. So, too, Zhirnosky held his expression in a perpetual scowl, born not only of the need to look stronger than anyone he was addressing but also of his mounting frustration over what he saw as the current government's lip service to the heritage and future hegemony of the Russian nation. In that respect, the party's name was a misnomer for the country's most ardent supporters of Russian ultranationalism. In increasing measures, Vladimir Putin was a peacenik when compared to the dogma of the LDPR.

“And what of our supporters in the Duma?” Zhirnosky continued, referring to the lower body of the Russian parliament that essentially ran the country. “What can we expect their response to be to our role in America's inevitable collapse and ultimate disintegration?”

“They are wary of opposing Putin,” noted Igor Lebedev, the party's chief deputy in the Duma, as the SUV thumped on through a wooded area that featured some of Russia's most fertile lands.

“Let me ask the question another way, then: if this had been a scheme hatched by Putin, what would they think then?”

“They would be leading celebrations in the street,” insisted Oleg Malyshkin, a deputy comfortable working behind the scenes to ensure that the LDPR maintained its hard line at all costs and voted as a unified block. “But…”

“But what?” Zhirnosky prodded.

Malyshkin needed to force himself to respond. “We must consider how such open opposition to the ruling party will be greeted.”

“You speak of the future.”

“And the present, if our part in this is revealed prematurely. We all know that our president speaks like a nationalist while acting like a capitalist behind closed doors. He and his supporters will not be happy about the economic devastation wrought internationally by this.”

“Only until they see the entire scope of the plan, something all of you are just about to see for yourselves,” Zhirnosky explained. “We will use it to propel our party to a ruling position. The Soviet Union will be returned to all its previous glory as the true superpower in the world, the United States reduced to utter dependence on us for her very survival.”

The ministers exchanged nervous glances, cushioning themselves against the jars and jolts that threatened to slam their skulls against the vehicle's roof. Around them right now there was only the tree line thickening into a forest in all directions as the convoy thumped up a slight hill.

“Goals achieved long after the plan's original implementation,” said the lone female minister in the vehicle, Valentina Mironov, whose father had been a founder of the original LDPR but who had championed the move to radicalism upon his death. “I believe you were involved, at least peripherally.”

“Peripherally, indeed. It was 1983,” Zhirnosky scoffed, growing even stiffer. “I was a mere boy. I was responsible for the security details of the scientists involved.”

“Protecting them,” another minister wondered, “or watching them?”

“Both. Everything should have gone perfectly once the plan became operational.”

“What happened?”

“We encountered circumstances that could not be anticipated. If you could grasp how close we came, how close we were to preserving our Union forever, how close to
winning.
Well, we are that close again—and to securing the power of our party for generations to come.”

“Of course, our complicity in such a plot could be used against us before we are able to reap its rewards,” Valentina Mironov agreed. “And we must also consider the detrimental, even catastrophic effects to our own economy of the likely collapse of international markets, once the operation's success becomes clear. We risk becoming pariahs, not heroes. We must have deniability here, plausible deniability, lest we risk our careers as well as our lives. And in that respect, comrade, I must question if your thinking is flawed.”

Zhirnosky let himself smile. “That assumes you know what my thinking is. And what you're about to see should assuage any concerns and questions you may have.”

Zhirnosky stopped there, as the SUV crested the hill and the driver slowed so the occupants could see what lay directly beneath them, stretching as far as the eye could see across a vast stretch of open, rolling fields.

“Bo-zheh moy!”
Malyshkin managed. “My God.…”

“Can this be?” followed Lebedev in disbelief. “Am I seeing it right?”

“You are,” Zhirnosky said, unable to restrain the grin that widened his jowls to bulbous proportions. “Behold the weapon we will wield to control our own destiny. Behold the means by which we will secure the destiny of the Soviet Union.” He paused, smiled. “The
new
Soviet Union.”

 

55

M
IDLAND,
T
EXAS

“You have any idea the level of oil reserves in the Permian Basin, Ranger?” Calum Dane asked, picking up his pace slightly on the treadmill.

“I'm afraid I don't, sir,” Caitlin told him, standing on a neighboring one that remained still. She could see a cup threaded over Dane's index finger, connected to an LED readout currently reading ninety-five.

“Thirty billion barrels,” he said, answering his own question. “That's billion with a
b.
”

“I know how to spell it, sir.”

Dane's heart rate touched one hundred as he looked away from her.

“Anyway,” Caitlin resumed, “I appreciate you seeing me.”

She'd been waiting in the lobby of Midland's recently completed and lone skyscraper, the fifty-three-story Energy Tower, which was home to Dane Corp's international headquarters. Calum Dane's private gymnasium was located on the top floor of the old-fashioned slab-design of a building. The surrounding countryside's utter flatness allowed for a view stretching upwards of fifty miles, across pumpjack-littered oil fields currently producing more than a million barrels of oil per day.

“Didn't I also see you at the grand opening of the rechristened Midland International Air and Space Port?” Dane asked, turning to regard her again.

“No, sir,” Caitlin told him, “I'm afraid I missed that.”

“Guess I was mistaken, then. But you did hear we'll soon be offering suborbital space flights from just a few miles from here.” Dane grinned. “A bit more exciting than riding on that helicopter that brought you here.”

“The roof of your building here is plenty high enough for me, Mr. Dane.”

“A building made possible by the fact that the potential of our fields dwarfs other oil-rich geological formations, including North Dakota's Bakken and Texas's Eagle Ford Shale. It's not even close. You are standing smack-dab in the center of this country's biggest boomtown.” Dane held his gaze on her, to the point where he stumbled a bit and had to grasp the treadmill's side rails for support. “I believe your grandfather spent some time in such boomtowns of his day, rode herd over them, I've heard told.”