Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(92)
“Sh-h-h.”
“For what I did.”
“You didn’t do anything.”
“I set you up. Left your medal out near the body of that construction worker, so you’d get hauled in. Get the blame. Turning you into a patsy, following my grandfather’s plan.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does, because I stopped it. I stopped Houston, wouldn’t let them go through with it, any more than I could let them hurt you.”
Dylan looked into Ela’s eyes, grasped her terror.
“It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” she said.
“Sh-h-h,” Dylan soothed her again. “I already texted my dad. He’s coming. He’ll know what to do.”
She shook her head. “It’s too late. They’ve got them—the backpacks I took from my cousins. Wired and ready to blow. To make our mark, our point.” Ela tried to smile, but failed. “Be badasses.”
Dylan looked around the chamber again at those hundreds of pounds of mold, fungus, or whatever—but some must be missing now. Loaded into the backpacks Ela had just mentioned, now in the killers’ possession.
Our greatest secret …
“You have to go after them,” Ela said, her voice strong in that moment, her grip digging into his arm.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Another swallow. “I’ll be okay.”
“For sure.”
Her eyes faded, then came back to life. “My pocket. It’s there.”
Dylan felt about her jeans, which were darkened by blood, until he found a folded piece of paper, similarly stained around the edges.
“What is this?” he asked, unfolding it to find a schematic of some kind, with a bunch of red Xs at what looked like equidistant points.
“Houston. Our plan. The one I stopped.”
“What plan?”
Her eyes faded again, fluttered, closed.
“Ela, what plan?”
She was trying to hold her eyes open, leaving Dylan to picture a bunch of killers who spoke Arabic carrying backpacks filled with some weapon the Comanche had been safeguarding for generations.
“What do the Xs mean?” he asked, regarding the schematic again.
Ela’s breathing came in fits and starts, but her eyes suddenly sprang to life. “Targets,” was all she said, before her eyes closed again.
Dylan eased her head into his lap, cradling it with one hand while the other hand felt for his cheap flip phone to text his dad again.
PART NINE
A lot of the old-time Rangers were not happy when they had to start reading Miranda warnings to suspects. They thought the world had ended. They couldn’t figure out why on earth you would spend months investigating a case and hunting down a suspect, and then once you’ve got him, the first thing you have to say is “You have the right not to talk to me.”
—Ranger Doyle Holdridge, in Tracking the Texas Rangers: The Twentieth Century, edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Harold J. Weiss, Jr. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2013)
89
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“Footage off a traffic camera shows all three of our targets entering Klyde Warren Park in Dallas less than an hour ago,” Tepper explained to Caitlin and Jones, after Cray Rawls had been escorted from the room.
“They wouldn’t be there unless it was to meet someone,” said Caitlin.
Jones started for the door. “I’m going to move every drone we’ve got up to the area over that park, see if we can figure out who exactly that is.”
“How many drones we talking about exactly?” Caitlin asked him.
“Hopefully enough to avert an ISIS attack on the homeland, Ranger,” Jones told her. “Is that good enough for you?”
Jones left the room to work the retasking and make the arrangements to get the team to Dallas. In the meantime, if Zurif, Saflin, and Daniel Cross left Klyde Warren Park before they arrived, the drones would pick them up again immediately.
“I ever tell you I once played the rodeo circuit?” Captain Tepper asked Caitlin, the two of them now alone in the office, which still held the smell of Cray Rawls’s cologne.
“No, D.W., definitely not.”
“Well, I did. Your dad and granddad got a real hoot out of it, especially old Earl. Once, when I was riding some country festival, he shot his gun into the air just as they were lifting the gate. Turned that bucking bronco into a goddamn stegosaurus, I swear, snorting so hard I could feel his breath. Anyway, I lasted seven point three seconds. Made it my last ride ever. I mention that ’cause that’s what all this resembles. Like we’re on the back of a bucking bronc, hanging on for dear life.”
“But it’s happened before, hasn’t it? Back when Jack Strong went up against John D. Rockefeller.”
“You comparing Standard Oil to ISIS, Ranger?” Tepper asked, a note of sarcasm clear in his voice.
“How was it Standard Oil never made inroads in Texas until years later, D.W.? Something happened back then, on the same Indian reservation we’re dealing with now, that scared off one of the most powerful men in American history.”
Tepper’s eyes widened. “Old Earl never told you that part of the story?”