31.
Jon Stone
The Explorer dropped south out of Indio down through Coachella and into the desert. It stayed in the right-hand lane, never varied its speed from the normal flow of traffic, and did nothing out of the ordinary. Jon found this suspicious.
Stone dropped so far back he cruised along with the Zeiss binos between his legs. Every few minutes he took a quick peek to make sure the Explorer was where it was supposed to be, and, yep, there it was.
They passed Thermal, California, which has the coolest name ever for a desert town, and Jon thought they might be rolling all the way down to Mexico, but not far past the Thermal airport, the Explorer turned east.
Jon tightened it up easy enough, his big black Rover having a supercharged mill, and followed the Explorer along the top of the Salton Sea into a small residential neighborhood surrounded by farms. He called Pike.
“Looks like we’re going to another house. I’m in a little town called Mecca, at the north end of the Salton.”
Pike didn’t respond, which was pretty much like Pike.
“You get any movement up there?”
“No.”
“The geep come back?”
“No.”
No. One word answers. Typical Joe Pike non-conversation.
“Okay. I’ll keep you advised.”
“Jon.”
“Yeah?”
“I three-sixtied the house.”
This meant Pike had circled the house, checking it out. Jon knew this also meant Pike was worried. Pike was the best recon man Stone had ever known, but circling a house surrounded by nothing but sand and dirt was asking to be seen. Pike would know this, too, and understood the risk.
“The shades aren’t just pulled. They’re tacked in place. The house is locked down.”
“You hear anything?”
“No.”
“AC running?”
“Yes.”
“You want to go in, I’ll come back. We’ll bust that fucker wide open.”
“No. Stay on the Explorer.”
“Rog.”
Stone dropped farther back when the Explorer’s blinker came on. He had to be even more careful now in the confined residential streets. His eighty-thousand-dollar Rover stood out in the shabby area like a gleaming black diamond, not that this bothered him. It was another challenge, and Stone loved challenges. They made life interesting.
He checked his GPS, and saw the surrounding neighborhood laid out in a rectangular grid. Easy-peasy.
Three blocks ahead, the Explorer turned right. Stone gave it two heartbeats to let them disappear, then pulled a hard right and stood on the supercharged mill. The Rover bucked like an F18 catapulting off a carrier. When he reached the first cross street, Stone jumped on the brakes, nosed forward, and saw the Explorer crossing the parallel intersection three blocks away.
Stone leapfrogged the Explorer another three blocks, but the Explorer didn’t appear at the fourth intersection. Jon banked left to the Explorer’s street, then left again, then smiled.
“Dead man, you bitch.”
Right side, four houses away, the Explorer nosed into an open garage. Another vehicle was in the garage, but Jon couldn’t tell the make or model. He waited until the garage door closed, then cruised past the house.
The Explorer disappeared into a faded pink house with a red composition roof. Stone drove past, turned around, then backed into a spot across the street and three houses down. He parked between a Dodge pickup and a Toyota Cruiser, hoping the truck and the SUV would help the Rover blend in.
Jon studied the house, and paid particular attention to the windows. The shades were down and tight as at the Indio house, and no sound or sign of movement came from the property. The attic vents under the gables were framed to look like small doors, and one was ajar as if it was off its hinges. Unlike the earlier house with its barren yard, this house had two ragged oaks in the front yard, a broken line of cedars along the side, a white basketball backboard mounted on the roof above the garage. The backboard was peeling and the net was long gone.
Stone was wondering how long it had been since someone sank a ball through the hoop when the garage door jerked to life, revealing the dark green Explorer and a black Escalade. Jon slumped behind the wheel.
The Escalade backed out and drove away directly in front of the Rover. Jon glimpsed the driver and saw a shape in the passenger seat, but the passenger was only a shadow.
Stone was torn between following the Escalade and staying with the Explorer, but decided to stay. You danced with the girl you brought to the party.
Stone crawled into the back seat and unzipped a green nylon duffel. He dug through it until he found a hard plastic Pelican case, and considered its contents.
Jon’s security work often required him to use various bugs and monitoring devices to acquire intelligence. Jon was thinking about taking a look inside the house. He would do this by drilling a hole two-point-five millimeters in diameter through the wall, and inserting a camera and microphone on a wire the size of a #2 pencil lead.
Jon was deciding which drill bit to use when the garage door once more opened, and he closed the case.
Jon was watching the Explorer back out of the garage when he noticed the clutter people accumulate in their garages was missing. No boxes, bicycles, lawn equipment, or Christmas decorations crowded the walls or hung from the rafters. Jon dialed back through his memory file, and realized the garage at the Indio house was also free of clutter.
The Explorer led him north past the Thermal airport into Coachella. Jon thought they were returning to the Indio house, but they turned west through La Quinta and Indian Wells, then south into the desert.
Jon checked his GPS, and saw the highway would track away from the desert communities and into the deep nowhere of the Anza-Borrego Desert, west of the Salton Sea. Traffic thinned, so he dropped farther back until he needed the binos to see the Explorer. They held fast to a steady seventy miles per hour for almost twenty minutes before their brake lights flared. Jon immediately slowed, and glanced at the GPS, expecting to see a road, but saw nothing. He changed from the map to a satellite view, and zoomed the image until he saw a thin filament angled away from the highway. This would be an unpaved county or ranch road.
The Explorer turned off the highway, and immediately kicked up a plume of dust Jon saw without the binos.
He said, “Shit.”
Jon let the gap between them widen. He wasn’t worried about losing the Explorer because its dust trail was so obvious, but following it would be a problem. If he could see the Explorer, the Explorer could see him.
When he reached the turn, he pulled off the highway, and compared the receding dust trail with the image on his GPS. The few unpaved roads showed as thin gray lines that ran for miles before intersecting another thin line. The Explorer was now on a road that angled away from the highway and would soon join another road that paralleled the highway for miles. This second road then crossed a third road that swept back to the highway. Jon smiled when he saw this, kicked the Rover back onto the highway, and pressed hard on the gas.
Four-point-six miles later, at one hundred nine miles per hour, Jon turned off the highway onto the third road, far ahead of the Explorer. The dust was well behind him, and angling away. Jon checked his GPS again, and trailed after them slowly. He followed them into the desert for two-point-three miles until their plume vanished, which meant they had stopped.
Jon stopped the Rover, and searched the tip of the fading plume with his binos until he spotted a glint in the wavery heat. He returned to the nylon bag for a 60x Zeiss spotting scope mounted to a small tripod. The Zeiss had proven ideal for locating shitbirds on the rocky slopes of Afghanistan. He set it on the Rover’s hood, adjusted the focus, and saw the Explorer.
It was parked on a rise near what appeared to be a low stone wall. Two small figures carried something large into the brush. A few moments later, they returned to the Explorer, and carried another large thing away. Jon got a cold feeling one of these things might be Elvis Cole’s body.
They made two more trips beyond the walls, then climbed into the Explorer, and left. Jon was torn between following the Explorer or checking for Cole, but there was really only one decision.
Jon watched until their dust plume faded, then adjusted the Rover’s suspension for uneven terrain and made his way across the desert. He stopped sixty yards from the crumbling walls, got out with his M4, and offed the safety. His scalp prickled like ants were under his skin, and jacked him into full-on combat mode, ready to bust out thirty rounds of 5.56.
Jon picked his way through the brush until he found the Explorer’s tracks, then followed footprints past the wall to a low wash. Jon knew what he would find even before he reached the erosion cut at the edge of the wash. The angry buzz of fat desert flies and meat-eating hornets told him. The stink of rotten shrimp and organ meat told him the rest.
The bodies had been dumped into the cut atop each other in a jumble of plastic-wrapped flesh. White powder was liberally sprinkled over the bodies, but did little to help the smell or discourage the flies. They swirled in an angry cloud, and crawled beneath the plastic.
Jon counted eight, then decided there were nine bodies, both men and women, but could not see them well enough through the plastic to know if Elvis Cole was among them.
Jon slung the M4, photographed the bodies with his iPhone, then returned to his Rover. He pulled off his sunglasses, rubbed his face, and shouted at the horizon.
“They’re people, you bastards. Jesus Christ on a jumpstick, they are fuckin’ PEOPLE!”
He stared toward the cut, stowed the M4, then took off his shirt and tied it over his nose and mouth to keep out the flies.
Jon returned to the cut, and climbed down among the dead. He peeled back the plastic, looking for Elvis Cole.
He knew Pike would ask.
32.
Joe Pike
Wander had not returned, and neither had the Explorer. Young moms and dads passed with kids strapped into car seats, and three boys rumbled past on skateboards. Pike wondered if Cole was inside with Ghazi al-Diri, and if everything was going according to plan.
A woman wearing black utility pants and a black tank top came out of the house next door with a large German shepherd. She had broad shoulders for a small woman, and fit arms, and looked like a commando in all the black, but she didn’t look happy.
The woman and dog walked past the Jeep like they had done this same walk a thousand times and it held nothing new. The dog pulled at the leash, and the woman told it to stop. She seemed angry, but Pike thought she probably wasn’t. They had walked together a thousand times, and each time the dog pulled, the woman complained, and her arms and face showed the strain. Pike wondered why she didn’t change the pattern. Change one element, and everything changes. All she had to do was talk to the dog.
Pike’s phone vibrated. He glanced at the incoming number and recognized Stone.
“Go.”
“They’re dumping bodies. I followed the Explorer into the desert and saw them. They’re killing people in those houses.”
Pike studied the house, and wondered if someone was inside dying.
“Elvis?”
“No. No, man, I checked. They dumped four today, but I counted nine. It is fuckin’ grotesque.”
Pike figured they would be Park’s people.
“Koreans?”
“That’s what I expected, but no. They’re Indians or Pakistanis. How many fuckin’ people has this guy kidnapped?”
This surprised Pike. He wondered if they had been held at the house he was watching, or the Mecca house, or another, and how many more were still prisoners.
“How long have they been dead?”
“The four today, no more than five or six hours. The others have been there for days.”
“Where are you?”
“Inbound now, but the bodies are twenty south of Palm Desert. I fixed a waypoint. What’s happening up there?”
“Nothing.”
Stone didn’t comment, which meant Stone didn’t like it. Pike didn’t like it either. Cole was supposed to be in the house, but Wander had not returned to take him back to his car, and no one else had arrived. If they had taken Cole in the Explorer, he now had no backup, and Pike liked that even less.
Stone read his mind.
“Y’know, we have no reason to believe he was in that Explorer.”
“Uh.”
“But if the Syrian was in Mecca, maybe they dropped off Cole on their way to dump the bodies.”
Pike thought Stone might be right about the meeting at a secondary location, but there was only one way to find out.
“I’m going in.”
“Wait. I’m fifteen out. I’ll make it in twelve.”
“Not going to wait.”
Pike put away his phone, then went to the rear bay. He stripped off his sweatshirt, strapped on a ballistic vest, then pulled the sweatshirt over it. He clipped a Kimber .45 semi-auto at the small of his back, and was about to clip his .357 Python when the dog ran past trailing its leash. Pike stepped to the far side of the Jeep to cover his guns.
The dog ran directly to its door, and scratched to get in. Pike guessed the woman had grown tired of being pulled. She came along the street a few seconds later, scowling, and shouting at the dog to stop. The dog didn’t stop. Pike turned away when she glanced at the Jeep.
When the woman and the dog were inside their home, Pike clipped the .357 to his waist, then drove to the house. He got out with a fifteen-pound sledge, and did not bother to knock.
Pike hit the door square on the deadbolt. The lock crunched into the wood, but the door did not give. Pike swung again, and shattered more wood, but something was blocking the door.
Pike stood to the side. He listened at the hole, but heard nothing. There were no voices, or movement, or men scrambling for guns.
Pike ran back to the Jeep, and drove forward until the brush guard pressed the garage door, and the cheap door crumpled into the garage.
The laundry room door went down to the sledge.
Pike cleared the house fast, leading with the gun, locked out and good to go. The house was now empty. Pike found no bodies, possessions, food, or clothes. The only remaining evidence that something terrible had happened here were the heavy sheets of plywood covering the windows and doors. This house had been a prison.
Pike finished, and stood in the living room, breathing. He tried to listen to what the house knew, but heard only the low steady thud of his heart.
Pike had stood sentry since the gray van delivered Cole to this house, but Cole was now missing.
His friend had been taken.
Pike ran back to his Jeep, backed from the garage, and told Jon Stone to meet him in Mecca.