Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(101)

“Where is she?” White Eagle stammered.

“Just inside the chamber where you stored your killing concoction those dead kids were going to unleash on Houston, until Ela stopped them. But she couldn’t stop ISIS, so get out of my way and let me do it.”

The shotgun barrel dropped toward the ground, as if suddenly weighed down. Cort Wesley started to advance, but White Eagle latched a bony grip onto his arm, holding him briefly in place. White Eagle’s expression crinkled into a patchwork quilt of hatred and disgust, segmented by the way the sunlight framed it.

“Nothing else has worked,” the old man insisted. “For almost two centuries, nothing else has worked. The defilers and spoilers of the land must be shown the error of their ways. They would build and build and build, until our way of life is gone. I stopped Rockefeller then. I’ll stop these men now.”

Cort Wesley shrugged off his grasp. “Yeah, keep telling yourself that.”

He started on again, angling Dylan before him in case White Eagle had a mind to use the shotgun.

“Ela’s map, that part of Houston,” the boy said. “You recognize it, right, Dad?”

“Yes, son, I believe I do.”





100

DALLAS, TEXAS; KLYDE WARREN PARK

“Stand down! Stand down!” Jones ordered Paz and his men, who’d moved into flanking positions around the picnic table. “We’ve identified the fourth bogey! Repeat, we have ID on the fourth bogey!”

Caitlin and Jones had accessed the park off Olive Street and had appropriated an information kiosk next to Moody Plaza to set up a command center. Captain Tepper and Pierre Beauchamp, meanwhile, had hung back, near the exit closest to the picnic table in question, off Pearl Street and not far from the St. Paul DART station. If any of the targets fled, the thinking went, it would be in that direction.

Caitlin gazed at the flashing red box enclosing the fourth man at the picnic table. “Friend of yours?”

“The fucking Antichrist has joined the party. Head of ISIS’s military operations. As in top dog. As in Hatim Abd al-Aziz, beheader in chief.”

Caitlin hitched her light windbreaker back to expose her SIG Sauer. “Man like that wouldn’t have come alone.”

“Tell me something I don’t know, Ranger. Colonel Paz, do you read me?” Jones said into his throat mic.

“We’ve identified six men already,” Paz reported into their ears, “all heavily armed. My men are moving on them now. And I know this al-Aziz. He’s an ethnic Chechen, raised in Turkey, who trained with my secret police in Venezuela. As brutal as they come, and always travels in the company of a man known only as Seyyef.”

“The name never crossed my desk,” Jones said.

“It’s not a name so much as a title: seyyef means ‘executioner’ in Arabic. There’s an old Arab folktale about a giant, shunned by a village, who gets revenge by blocking the sun from their crops. He was called Seyyef, too, for starving the villagers to death.”

“A giant,” Jones repeated. “You got eyes on him, Colonel?”

“I will. My men are in position and ready,” Paz reported.

Homeland Security’s private army, reserved for situations just like this.

“What’s the certainty you’ve marked all the fighters al-Aziz brought with him?”

“In this crowd, not certain at all. Six seems light. I’d expect two or three more. Somewhere.”

“What about Seyyef?”

“I’m still looking.”

“A man that big shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

“Are you sure I’m not standing right behind you now?” Paz wondered.

Jones spun to find only Caitlin standing there.

“Something on your mind, Ranger?”

For some reason, she couldn’t stop thinking about Daniel Cross. Viewing him, seated at that picnic table, she was seeing the same frightened, gangly boy she’d met in an Austin jail over a decade before. She’d promised him she’d stand by him, always stick around, and then had gone away. Now fate had brought them back together, though Cross was on the verge of doing far more damage this time, unless she could stop him.

Caitlin spied a banner strung between two posts hammered into the ground just off the carnival’s makeshift midway. “How about we take the battle to them, Jones?”

*

“Tell me more about this holy weapon,” Al-Aziz said to Daniel Cross, his marble-like eyes seeming to flash. “The Indians have used it themselves?”

“According to legend, yes.”

“Legend,” al-Aziz echoed. “Then how is it this weapon has been kept secret for so long?”

“First of all, the cuitlacoche that’s grown on the reservation is consumed there. And the Comanche have built up a natural resistance to its deadly effects, after making it a staple of their diet for so many centuries. Secondly, I’ve determined that the deadly strain of the fungus is limited to a relatively small patch of wild-growing corn in a remote corner of the reservation. I figure that’s because the water feeding that area leaches out of a truly ancient aquifer, with just the right acid and alkaline balance to turn that particular strain of fungus deadly.”

Al-Aziz leaned back, scratched at his freshly trimmed beard, and then crossed his arms. “And how many, here and elsewhere, could we kill with the amount of this fungus you can harvest off the Comanche land, before the authorities and this Texas Ranger catch on?”