Strong Light of Day (28 page)

He realized the big man was holding a hand tucked behind his back. When he came close enough into view, Dane also noted his peaked cheekbones and protruding forehead and figured him for Slavic in origin, Russian maybe. He had crystal-blue eyes that seemed not to blink and ash-colored hair trimmed close to his anvil-shaped head.

“The insurance company isn't coming, Mr. Dane,” he greeted, in an accent that was only vaguely Russian, his hand still tucked behind his back. “You'll be doing business with me, instead.”

Dane reflexively swept his gaze about again.

“Don't bother,” the big man told him.

With that, the man brought his hand around from behind him and tossed what he'd been holding onto the ground directly in front of Dane. It bounced once and then stopped, rocking slightly, with a pair of bulging eyes peering straight at him.

Pulsipher's eyes.

Attached to Pulsipher's severed head, which was shedding blood and gore in a pool around where it had come to a rest.

“You have something the people I work for want,” the big man told him.

 

63

M
ANHATTAN,
K
ANSAS

“You still haven't told me what we're doing here, Jones,” Cort Wesley said, after a flash of Jones's ID got them through the crime scene barrier erected of tape, sawhorses, and concrete blocks around the rubble that had been Pat Roberts Hall the night before. “What this has to do with Anton Kasputin, aka Alexi Gribanov, and whatever it was my dad and Jim Strong were working back in eighty-three?”

Jones stopped just short of the rubble that had spilled out from the building's sprawling footprint. “Tell me what you make of what you see.”

“Whoever did this has done it before,” Cort Wesley told him.

“Brilliant. If I wasn't already on my feet, I'd give you a standing ovation,” Jones sneered. “Now tell me something you think I might not know.”

“You plan on answering my question?”

“That's what I'm doing. Now, what else does what you see tell you?”

Cort Wesley gave the rubble a longer look. “The bomber placed the explosives, shaped charges probably, in the basement. Six to eight of them would be my guess, planted at key structural points to achieve what you're looking at right now. How much of this building was taken up by that bioterrorism facility?”

“An entire floor, give or take. So security should've been tight. Metal detectors and bag searches, if I'm remembering correctly, which makes me wonder how he got those charges through.”

Cort Wesley gave that some thought. “If it were me?”

“If it were you.”

“I'd come disguised in the uniform of a campus or, better yet, local policeman. Maybe even highway patrol, something like that. Someone security guards wouldn't necessarily know but would respect, thanks to his badge.”

“Makes sense.”

“Any video feed to help us in that regard?”

Jones shrugged. “Just the cameras mounted outside, and we're checking them. Feeds from the interior cameras weren't backed up and were lost in the blast. And try this out for size: a female security guard was found dead in her vehicle outside a diner in town last night.”

“Our guy, obviously.”

“Sure as shit, unless she happened to swipe her ID to access what used to be this building maybe after an hour after her death.”

Cort Wesley figured that would be a stretch even for Leroy Epps and turned his gaze back on the rubble. The multitude of other authorities on scene, in addition to the rescue crews still desperately checking for survivors amid the rubble, gave him and Jones a wide berth, thanks to the Homeland Security IDs dangling from their necks.

“Whoever did this would know about the cameras,” he told Jones. “He'd know about everything.”

“Ever heard the word
agroterrorism
before, cowboy?”

“Not until you brought it up.”

Jones joined him in surveying the rubble again. “Well, this place housed our best experts in the field. You are looking at the remains of the nation's biggest storehouse of brains and information on potential attacks on our food supply. They'd run the simulations, the scenarios. This was the NORAD of America's heartland, and losing the personnel and the knowledge based here is devastating to the cause.”

“What about redundancy?”

“Cloud backup can't help you with interpretation or reactive strategizing. Assume what was happening in Texas had already registered on this facility's radar. We'll be able to dig up whatever findings they did share, but not their latest thinking on the subject or the kind of hypotheticals they were running. NORAD, just like I said. If you're going to launch an attack by air, you take out Cheyenne Mountain. If you're going to launch an attack on the land, you take out this.”

“Suggests an expedited timetable…”

“Yes, it does.”

“But still not what we're doing here.”

“There was a survivor, cowboy, and he's waiting to talk to us.”

 

64

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

Caitlin sat in her SUV for a time, letting the cabin cool before driving off. She ran the blower on high, still overheating inside from her exchange with Congressman Asa Fraley. She wasn't confused for one moment about how his tires had ended up scattered across the parking lot, and she couldn't resist staying until a flatbed arrived to truck his damaged vehicle away. A big, black SUV. Caitlin pictured him riding in the back, deluded by his own self-importance. When he finally left, it was in the back of a taxi, crammed inside with his aides. Their eyes met briefly when the cab pulled away and Caitlin couldn't resist casting him a wave.

Nice work, Colonel,
she thought.

But the current lightness of her mood couldn't lessen the serious nature of being called to testify before a congressional committee chaired by someone who despised her. Fraley would have all the power in that scenario, committed to doing his utmost to destroy her. The Department of Public Safety and Austin in general publicly saluted her prowess and heroism, while privately bemoaning the spate of lawsuits against the state that she left in her wake. Gunfights caused damage, and parties were lined up three deep in state court with claims aimed at making Texas pay up for the losses incurred. There was even a hundred-million-dollar lawsuit currently stalled in the courts, brought by the stockholders of the former MacArthur-Rain company, who blamed Caitlin for its demise in the wake of the implosion of its corporate headquarters, which had also claimed the life of its CEO, Harmon Delladonne.

Sooner or later the cumulative effect of all that was bound to catch up to her. Asa Fraley knew that as well as Caitlin did, and confronting her with all the assembled facts and innuendo collectively might well be enough to move the State of Texas to finally take action.

Maybe she'd ignore the subpoena, let them come and arrest her instead.

She finally pulled out of the parking lot to head back to Ranger Company F headquarters, located a few miles from the Alamo, picking up the 410 just down the road from the heliport. She checked her phone yet again to see if an e-mail, text, or voice mail had come from Doc Whatley about what she'd asked him to check at the grazing fields of both Christoph Ilg and Karl Dakota.

She'd driven maybe two miles down the 410, from the Department of Public Safety heliport when she saw the construction worker standing in the middle of the road, brandishing a handheld stop sign. Looked like a dump truck had lost its load of gravel smack-dab in the middle of the roadbed, requiring a front loader or shovel to clear. A few cars ahead of her were threading their way through a narrow passage that took them to the very rim of the shoulder, beyond which lay a drainage culvert that had swallowed more vehicles than any auto salvage junkyard in the county.

Caitlin angled her SUV to follow them, the residue of her meeting with Calum Dane clinging to her like the stench of an oil fire from a blown-out rig. She'd been on the scene of several of those when sabotage was suspected, enough to know that no amount of hot water and soap could wash it off. It wasn't so much a smell as a residue that clung to the skin like stubborn beach sand.

Something about Calum Dane made Caitlin want to scrub herself clean. She'd gone up against more than her share of cold-blooded murderers, assassins, serial killers, and predators of all sorts. Dane was none of these but somehow worse than any of them. She felt in him a capacity to do virtually anything, under a complex and correct assumption that he could get away with it. That's what made him so dangerous and left her skin feeling coated by the grime of what he brought to the world. One thing all the monsters she'd confronted had in common was, deep down, they knew their days were numbered, that their time was borrowed and not owned. Calum Dane, on the other hand, was a portrait in vain self-assurance that apparently morally immunized him for taking a belt to his own son.

She'd been trying to think what bothered her so much about the brief glimpse she'd caught inside his office on the way to his personal gymnasium. The walls were utterly bare; no pictures, memorabilia, hangings—nothing at all. Caitlin took that as a symbol of him being a man who wasn't about to give anything away about himself, his true nature insulated by his great wealth, which left him capable of doing anything he felt his entitlement allowed. No compromise or quarter given. The kind of man who gives a million bucks to charities supporting the people whose lives he chews through and spits out.

It was finally her turn to slide onto the shoulder to move past the gravel pile and the traffic snarl it had caused. Caitlin was still thinking of Calum Dane when she eased her SUV forward, noticing in the side-view mirror the crew member holding the portable stop sign lowering it suddenly, attention focused on her instead of the cars stacked behind her.

That gave her the extra instant she needed to go for her pistol and drop down beneath the dashboard in the last moment before the gunfire started.

 

65

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

The shoulder harness held fast to her, and Caitlin barely managed to get it unclasped as shards of glass from the punctured windshield rained down upon her. The gunfire seemed to be coming from three sides at once, all but the rear, the echoes of it mixing with the pings and pocks of the glass breaking apart, the pieces clacking against each other as they flew. She heard the clang of metal dinging and the blare of horns sounded by the hands of stalled drivers desperate to escape.

She thought she might have been screaming herself, but she wasn't sure. She maintained the presence of mind not to fire off her drawn SIG blindly or to drop down out of the SUV, where the multiple fusillades would find her before she could do any worthwhile damage.

Rat-tat-tat … Rat-tat-tat …

Automatic fire now—or maybe it had been there from the start. She had a twelve-gauge stowed in the SUV's cargo bed. Reaching it meant climbing over the seat with bullets still burning the air in all directions, but Caitlin couldn't see winning this fight against five, maybe six shooters with only a pistol.

So she pushed herself up and over the center console, into the back seat, through the fury of fire that pushed air through her ears and left her actually feeling the heat buzz of the gunshots whizzing past her. The sound was deafening, banging off the SUV's interior in all directions at once now, the hot, sulfury smell burning her nostrils, a few of the bullets coming so close they seemed to singe her shirt. It was just as her father and grandfather had always said about how senses got “supersized” in a gunfight. That was her grandfather's term, even though she could never remember him eating at McDonald's.

She dropped a hand over the backseat, into the hatch. Caitlin managed to free the shotgun and draw it up and over the seat, rising just enough to steady it, with her gaze cast briefly out of the rear window pockmarked by shots pouring in through the windshield. Enough of the glass was still whole that she could spot a shape growing before her, seeming to fly over the twisted and tangled snarl of traffic like some dark-clad Peter Pan. Superimposed directly over the SUV's rear windshield wiper, which had somehow frozen straight up, at a ninety-degree angle, over the now-webbed glass.

Guillermo Paz held an assault rifle in either hand, balanced perfectly in his twin grasp as he leaped from one car roof or hood to another, the steel crinkling from his vast bulk. He was zigzagging as he opened fire, muzzle flashes flaring from both bores, though Caitlin couldn't hear his twin barrages above the constant din of bullets continuing to pound her SUV.

She burst upward when the sudden onslaught of his assault forced the enemy fire to abate just enough to tell her Paz's presence had been duly noted. Her first shot blew out the sunroof, deafening her as she crashed through the remnants of the glass.

Caitlin barely heard her next blast, or the two that followed. She'd vanished into the gunfighter's haze, which was brightened only by targets lit up like Christmas trees, cutting through the outskirts of her vision against an empty backdrop. She was conscious of the deafening crescendos of her shots, in contrast to Paz's staccato assault fire. Her skin felt clammy, her shirt moistened by sweat, not blood. Paz was firing from almost directly behind her now, the heat of his bullets whisking past her almost as close as the ones that had blazed through the vehicle.

The gunman who'd been wielding the stop sign was wheeling her way, running for cover, when Caitlin blew half his head off with the twelve-gauge. Her SUV rattled under the fire of two remaining gunmen, who must've escaped Paz's fire, thanks to whatever cover they'd taken.

Screw this!

Caitlin dropped back down through the sunroof, snaring her shirt on a jagged shard of glass, behind the wheel again with a big chunk of fabric torn away behind her. The SUV's engine was still on, racing as if in panicked protest of the fate being suffered by the vehicle.