Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(82)
Rawls managed what passed for a nod, fingers stretching out to pull himself through the nap in the carpet.
Cort Wesley drew his gun; Paz had his in hand already. The sniper would know he’d missed at least one of his primary targets, along with the two men whose presence he couldn’t have anticipated. In point of fact, Rawls was only alive now because Cort Wesley had yanked him to the floor ahead of the inevitable second shot, which as a result had never come. That meant a backup team would be left to finish the job. They were either en route to this office now or were lying in wait downstairs.
Pfft, pfft, pfft.
More gunshots showered flecks of glass through freshly bored holes. Those had been fired in desperation. The shooter was hoping to panic his intended victims, make them launch into a desperate rise. Cray Rawls started to do just that, but Cort Wesley pushed him back down before he got anywhere.
Pfft, pfft, pfft.
Still pulling himself across the carpet, Cort Wesley couldn’t chase from his nostrils the scent of blood and gore from Sam Bob Jackson’s ruptured skull. Paz was in the hallway by then, reaching back inside to drag Rawls the rest of the way. He kept his gaze fixed toward the office entrance, in case the backup team elected to storm the premises.
The moment his upper body crossed through the door frame, Cort Wesley was thinking origins, and only one possibility came to mind: ISIS.
The two men Homeland had managed to identify from an Austin patrolman’s body cam … Cort Wesley couldn’t remember their names, but clearly their cell had gone active. They wanted whatever was on that land belonging to the Comanche, and they didn’t want anyone to know that they were after it.
Back on his feet, finally, out of view of any windows, Cort Wesley jerked Rawls upright and held him against the wall to the side of the door.
“What’s on that land, you son of a bitch? What are you hiding?”
Rawls’s features had calmed, his eyes suddenly as steely as they were evasive. “Get me out of here and I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”
Cort Wesley pulled him on again, drawing almost even with Paz, once they reached the reception area.
“No one’s coming,” the colonel reported, eyes and gun focused on the bank of elevators immediately beyond the office’s glass front wall.
“Downstairs, then.”
“Dressed as first responders, police or medical.”
“How do you know?”
“How do you think, outlaw?” Paz said to him, leaving it there.
“Right,” Cort Wesley said, stretching a hand out toward the paneled wall, where it met the glass. “Just what I was thinking.”
And with that, he pulled the fire alarm.
79
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“You won’t find this village or the tributary off Lake Anjikuni on any map,” Pierre Beauchamp continued. “In the spring of 1931 the remains of the village were bulldozed, buried under tons of earth and ice, all trace of anything that had ever been there wiped clean.”
Caitlin continued to regard him from the other side of Captain Tepper’s desk, the two of them standing and facing each other across it.
“And the villages for maybe fifty square miles were emptied,” he continued, “their residents resettled elsewhere, on orders of the government, without explanation. It wasn’t hard to cover things up in 1931.”
“But what were they covering up, besides old Inuit folklore?”
“We caught the Russians sniffing around the area a few years back.”
Caitlin nodded. “I had my own run-in with them not too long ago.”
“So I heard. I’d say Texas seems to attract this kind of stuff, but as I recall, you dragged it with you to Canada and got me shot.”
“I didn’t drag anything with me, Mountie; the Hells Angels were waiting when I got there. Get back to those Russians.”
“It was close to being a diplomatic fiasco, and we didn’t get a thing out of them before the powers that be arranged for their safe passage home.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Wish I was. That’s what put the now missing village and Joe Labelle on my radar.” Beauchamp stopped, as if to study Caitlin across the desk, but it was more to steady his thinking. “Something killed those Inuits as they ate, sat, or stood, and I think that same thing is responsible for the victims found in that Austin diner. And, whatever it is, what’s left of ISIS has come out of their desert to claim it for themselves.”
Caitlin was about to respond, then realized that her silenced phone was buzzing up a storm in her pocket. She yanked it out, saw CORT WESLEY running down the center maybe a dozen times, a single text message grabbing her attention.
“Looks like ISIS isn’t coming, Mountie,” Caitlin told Beauchamp. “They’re already here.”
PART EIGHT
Retired Ranger Captain Frank Hamer (who brought down Bonnie and Clyde) wrote a letter to King George V of England offering the services of 49 retired Rangers to help defend England against German invasion. Although FDR vetoed the idea, Germany got wind of the offer and panicked. In a radio address, Third Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels assured the German nation that the mighty Texas Rangers were not invading. (September 16, 1939)
—Bullock Texas State History Museum, “The Story of Texas”