by Jon Land
“First part of my preliminary report precisely,” Whatley told her.
“What about the second part?” Tepper asked him, as if he really didn’t want to know.
“I haven’t decided how to word it exactly, without sounding like I’ve flown straight off the handle.”
Tepper felt for the second cigarette he’d bummed off a patrolman back at the nature center, only to find it had slipped out of his pocket somehow. “Talk to Hurricane here,” he said, gesturing toward Caitlin. “She’s an expert on flying off the handle.”
“Here’s how it plays,” Doc Whatley continued, not absorbing the humor. “I come across a scene even resembling something like this, a mass animal slaughter, I’m thinking about how they died and who did it. Here, there’s no evidence on the corpses to give me any notion as to what happened.…” He stopped here, as if still struggling to form his next thoughts into words. “And also no evidence to suggest anyone or anything did it.”
Tepper and Caitlin exchanged a befuddled glance.
“You want to give us that again, Doc?” she asked, before Tepper had a chance to.
“I can’t find a single track of any kind, not a one,” Whatley said, like he was trying to believe it himself. “If a predator got to these animals, you’d see evidence of that in the form of blood and remains scattered all over this field. But there’s nothing, absolutely nothing. Almost like whatever did this just swooped in from the sky and then swooped back up when they were done.”
“How many head of cattle we talking about?” Caitlin wondered.
“Somewhere around sixty’d be my nearest guess, Ranger, but it’s hard to say.”
“How’s that compare to the wild animal kills you’ve come across in the past?”
“It doesn’t, not in any way, shape, or form. I believe the worst cattle kill I ever saw was by a starving wolf pack that had wandered onto the Texas prairie all the way from Oklahoma. Six head torn to shreds,” Whatley told Caitlin and Tepper. “But there was still flesh and fur left over, and enough tracks to make me estimate three times the actual number of wolves had been involved. No tracks anywhere on this scene, though. And as for flesh and fur, well…”
Whatley let his comment tail off, the rest obvious.
“Can I give you a word of advice, Captain?” he resumed, after a pause he used to steady his breathing.
“You’re going to anyway, Doc,” Tepper frowned. “Everybody else does.”
Whatley let his eyes roam the fields again, awash in the glow of the construction lights, which made Karl Dakota’s grazing field look like an airport tarmac finished in grass instead of macadam. A dull heat radiated off him that had nothing to do with the temperature of the night.
“You may want to call the FBI in on this one,” Whatley finished.
“Yeah, Doc? And what good are the G-men supposed to do me? Believe what happened here is more in Homeland Security’s or the CDC’s realm—hell, maybe NASA, based on the fact that whatever did this seems to have vanished into thin air.”
PART THREE
Born in Lockhart, Texas, William Lee “Will” Wright (1868–1942) was small in stature but relentless in nature. The bespectacled Ranger, called El Capitán Diablo (the Devil Captain), and the members of his company guarded the border in World War I, went after liquor smugglers, tamed oil boomtowns, and took part in shootouts. In his career as a law officer, Wright witnessed the transition of the Rangers from their horseback days to the modern era after 1935. His belief that there should be less political interference and patronage in Ranger affairs became one of the axioms of the new order.
—Bruce A. Glasrud and Harold J. Weiss, Jr., eds., Tracking the Texas Rangers: The Twentieth Century
26
KIEV, UKRAINE
“You should look at me as a friend,” Vyacheslav Beriya said, another finger plopping into the children’s plastic pail set before the groveling shape seated on the couch. “After all, they’re not your fingers.”
The man seated before him, in the chair in the living room of his own sprawling mansion, was sobbing now. He had blond hair that looked ridiculous for a man his age, and Beriya was more convinced than ever that it was a dye job, or maybe even a hairpiece. The man could afford the best money could buy, anywhere in the world, because he had as much money as anyone in the world.
“Surely, you can understand why Moscow is upset with you, turning your allegiance and your investment capital to such poor and wasted use. Consider this an intervention. Consider me your financial counselor, trying to assure your billions are not pointlessly squandered on risky investments promising negative returns.”
Beriya rose to his full height of six and a half feet and sighed, straddling the plastic pail that currently held six of Tutalev Krichenko’s oldest son’s fingers. The fall of the Soviet Union had left Beriya mostly isolated and ostracized, banished to the world of freelance jobs that paid well but provided little satisfaction or respite from the drudgery of his days. Then Vladimir Putin had come along, the mind-set that accompanied him into office having offered Beriya a lifeline. Officials, journalists, holders of office at all levels who stood in the way of the government’s vision of the new Russia faced elimination if they couldn’t be coaxed to toe the line. Others handled the coaxing; Beriya’s involvement came only when subtler methods had failed.
Eventually those subtler methods were abandoned altogether.
“Would you like to hear about the first time I killed something, comrade?” he asked Krichenko.
The man couldn’t manage a nod; he was trembling so much that the figurines on the table next to the couch clattered against the glass.
“I was twelve years old and there was a vicious dog that lived next door to my house. Both yards were tiny and the dog was outside behind the fence all the time, barking and growling. One day it got loose somehow when I was walking by, and attacked me. It sunk its teeth into the arm I’d managed to raise. I don’t remember being scared, just furious. I started hitting it again and again with my other hand, but it wouldn’t let go. We tumbled to the ground, rolling. I found a rock and smacked it in the head and it padded off, whimpering. I could’ve just let it go, but I didn’t. I caught up with it and kept hitting it with the rock until its face was gone. You know what I remember most?”
Krichenko was sobbing now.
“Feeling the dog’s bones crack,” Beriya told him. “And I didn’t stop hitting it until there were none left to crack. I’ve never killed a man that way.”
The Federal Security Service, or FSB, through which Beriya operated, was much more than just an ordinary security service. Combining the functions of an elite police force with those of a spy agency, and wielding immense power, it had come a long way since the early 1990s, when it was on the brink of imploding. Thanks to Vladimir Putin, it had been restored to the glory and power of the former KGB, in large part to make sure men like Krichenko cooperated, and to take proper action when they didn’t.
Beriya lived for the pleasure of his work, but lately he had found himself bored with assignments like the one that had brought him here to Krichenko in his sprawling Mezhyhirya estate, once owned by former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. The gated grounds had featured six guards and two dogs. Beriya had spared the dogs and effortlessly killed the men who’d been trained to expect a much larger and more overt attack, never considering a single man breaching their perimeter. He’d squeezed the uniform top and trousers of the largest over his own clothes, leaving the blood in place to aid in his disguise as he stumbled and staggered toward the front door before collapsing before it. Three guards burst to his aid from within the mansion, and Beriya left them in the very place he’d pretended to collapse. Inside, he unleashed a pair of Strizh pistols on anyone and anything that moved, sparing only Krichenko’s wife and children so he might utilize them later, after binding the oligarch to a chair positioned to ensure he could hear the screams coming from upstairs.
Beriya rustled a hand through th
e ash-colored hair rising just enough from his skull to form a stiff, bristly stubble. “I must say, I am disappointed in you, comrade,” he continued, shaking his head at the cowering man beneath him. “I shouldn’t need to be here. Pride and gratitude for all your riches should have made my visit unnecessary. But you ignored all the warnings, shrugged off all the overtures made by the civilized sorts who, even in Russia, would never believe men like me exist. You didn’t think so either, did you? Thought your dogs and former soldiers were enough to keep you safe. You should have known, comrade, that a traitor like yourself is never safe,” Beriya finished, and dropped another finger into the pail.
“What do you want?”
“I already told you. You need to sign your oil leases over to the state.”
“And I told you such things take time.”
“You have one week, comrade. If the leases are not signed over, you will force me to return—if not here, then anywhere you feel safe. No one is safe from me, do you understand that? And for each visit you force me to make, another of your children’s fingers will end up in the pail,” Beriya said, as the final finger belonging to Krichenko’s oldest son plopped atop the others. “So, what will it be?”
Sobbing uncontrollably now, the billionaire managed a nod, the awful screams that had echoed through the house still ringing through his ears. “I’ll do whatever you ask.” Krichenko stopped his sobbing, looking more mystified than anything, in that moment. “You’re smiling.”
“Because I’m enjoying this. Like you, I take great pride and pleasure in my work.”
Krichenko started to look down at the pail, then stopped. “How could you?”
“How could I what?”
“Do that,” Krichenko said, his voice quaking as he tried to look down into the pail. “To a child … my son.”
His business done, Beriya took the knife from its sheath and wiped it clean with the traitor’s pocket square, which he then stuffed back into his lapel pocket. “It was easy, comrade. He was already dead.”
* * *
Beriya strolled casually across the estate grounds upon which the bodies of Krichenko’s guards still rested. The pair of dogs he’d spared bounded to his side, as if hoping he’d take them along with him. He petted both shepherds and handed each of them one of the fingers he’d plucked from the plastic pail before leaving. The dogs pranced off happily, already working their teeth.
All too easy. It had been so long since Beriya had been tested by a true challenge—all the way back to his days serving with Russia’s Spetsnaz, when he’d tracked down and killed every one of the Chechen rebels behind the Beslan school massacre, in 2004. A lifetime ago.
He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket and jerked it to his ear. “I was just going to call you. Comrade Krichenko has had a change of heart.”
“Excellent work, Major,” his former commander in the FSB complimented. “You are needed elsewhere now, immediately, something of an emergency. In America.”
Beriya felt something stir inside him, anticipation mixed with excitement. “I like working in America.”
“Ever been to Texas, comrade?”
27
SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS
Caitlin sat on the porch swing, holding it still and silent while Cort Wesley was talking to his oldest son, Dylan, over his cell phone.
“Dylan’s in a cab on his way here from the airport now,” he said, voice still heated as he squeezed the phone hard enough for Caitlin to hear a cracking sound from the plastic case she’d bought him.
“You didn’t tell me he was coming home.”
“Because I told him not to, after calling him about his brother, soon as I got the word.”
“Sounds like something I would do.”
Cort Wesley shook his head. “Yeah, he’s learning all the right lessons from you. He must’ve charged the flight to his credit card—my credit card. You have any idea what that must’ve cost?”
“Not a clue, these days.”
“Well, I don’t think he does, either, and he’s the one who signed the slip. Kid doesn’t listen to a word I goddamn say.”
“So what else is new?”
“How about the cost of sending him to Brown University?”
“I thought Brown put together a decent financial aid package for him.”
“Decent only pays for about half the costs, which still leaves me responsible for around thirty thousand a year.”
“Explains why you decided to farm yourself out to Jones, Cort Wesley. What about that inheritance money?”
“Turns out everyone you could shake a stick at must be Maria Torres’s cousin,” he said, referring to the sister of his boys’ mother, who’d been murdered along with her husband and children, a few years back. “Her estate’s gonna be tied up in probate forever maybe.” Cort Wesley shook his head, looked as if he’d swallowed something bitter. “When I put their mother’s insurance money aside for the boys’ education, I figured that was one thing anyway I didn’t have to worry about. Let me tell you how wrong I was. I can’t believe how much this shit costs.”
“Why don’t you let me help?”
“Because it’s not your job.”
“And you need to do his yourself.”
Cort Wesley’s eyes narrowed. “Did I say that?”
“You didn’t have to. You’re as good a father as there is on this planet, Cort Wesley.”
He approached the swing but stopped short of taking the seat next to her. “Then tell me the truth, Ranger.”
“About what?”
“About Luke.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. I saw it in your eyes as soon as you heard me say his name. And something’s not right with that long-haired kid. What was his name again?”
“Zach.”
“Zach claims he still can’t reach his parents. What are they, Luddites or something, traveling without cell phones?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Caitlin told him.
“Then tell me what you do know.”
“That he’s a damn good soccer player. You’ve watched him play.”
“I have?”
“Up at Village School,” Caitlin nodded.
Recognition flashed in Cort Wesley’s eyes. “I met his mother and father, didn’t I?”
“Stepfather, but yeah.”
Cort Wesley dug the heels of his boots into the porch flooring. “What am I supposed to do about this joint that cop found?”
“Illegally, you mean.”
“I’m not a court of law, Ranger.”
“You should forget all about it, for now anyway. Deal with it later.”
“As in how long?” He shook his head. “I never caught Dylan with weed.”
“Doesn’t mean he didn’t have it, Cort Wesley.”
He scolded her with his eyes. “If you know something that I should…”
“I don’t, and I wouldn’t tell you right now if I did. Those boys upstairs are already scared enough.”
Cort Wesley stiffened and swept his eyes about the street beyond the house where his two sons had witnessed their mother shot to death, where they would’ve been killed as well, if Caitlin hadn’t saved them. “He’s around here somewhere, isn’t he?”
“Who?”
He moved to the porch railing and continued looking, able to see more of the street from there. “You know who: Paz.”
“I suspect he is.”
“You suspect.”
“What do you want me to say, Cort Wesley?”
“Oh, I don’t know. How about that you told him this is a psychopath-free zone? That you believe I’m capable of taking care of my own son.”
“Don’t blame Paz for something that’s already eating at you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Caitlin rose and joined him at the railing. “You being gone a lot lately.”
“Being gone as in working?”
“Just make sure you wea
r plastic gloves before you take a check from our friend Jones, Cort Wesley. Whatever he’s got, you don’t want to catch.”
“Yeah, well, there’s not a lot of work out there for special operators who’ve done time in prison, unless you’re willing to go overseas. That leaves me working with Jones, and I make sure every job I do for him knocks off another tuition payment.”
“Any bonus if you avoid collateral damage?”
“I’m not a hit man like your friend Guillermo Paz, Ranger.”
Caitlin looked away, down the street into the night, as if expecting something to be there. “Paz showed up at that nature center because he knew something bad was happening.”
“How can that be, exactly?”
“He said a psychic told him.”
“A psychic?”
“Yup. He gave me her card.”
“And you believed him?”
“I believe the psychic told him, yes. I don’t normally believe in psychics.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Cort Wesley snapped, with plenty of bite to his voice.
“The psychic also told him something bad was coming.”
“Isn’t it always, Ranger?”
“She described it as a bright light swallowing the world.”
Cort Wesley shook his head again, slower this time. “And that’s what Paz is out there protecting us from, a bright light? If I were you, I’d file that psychic’s card under Con Artists.”
“This from a man whose best friend is a ghost.”
“What’s the difference between talking to old Leroy or talking to myself?”
“For one thing, last time I checked, you were still alive.” Caitlin took a deep breath and joined him in gazing out into the night. “Right now, there’s nothing I wouldn’t believe. Hell, that crazy rancher in Austin County flat-out believed space aliens have invaded Texas and, based on what we found in his grazing fields, he just might be right.”
* * *
“Picked to the bone, you say?” Cort Wesley repeated, once Caitlin had finished explaining what they’d found in Karl Dakota’s grazing fields.
