by Jon Land
“We’re gonna need him to finish this, Captain.”
“Right now, I’d settle for somebody making Homeland realize their hit teams aren’t welcome in Texas.” Tepper started to walk away, then stopped. “Oh, and you need to call Young Roger. He said it was important.”
* * *
“Your murder victims weren’t just high-end call girls,” Roger reported, when Caitlin got him on the line. “At least four of the five appeared in porn videos made by the same company that produced the one from the Deep Web.”
“I’m guessing you found those other videos.”
“You bet. The ones in question all go back between twelve and eighteen months,” Roger told her. “But I was able to trace a whole bunch of others the same company had produced going back five years now.”
“Five years,” Caitlin repeated.
“That important?”
“It’s when Yuyuan’s American headquarters opened.”
“Then here’s something that’ll interest you: the videos are shot out of a warehouse studio in Fiesta owned by a shell subsidiary.”
“Of Yuyuan?”
“Yup. I told you that would interest you. We’re raiding the place tomorrow, if you’d like to join in.”
“I’ve got something else I need you to do,” Caitlin told him. “Give me an address to have something messengered to you tonight.”
“What?”
“Cell phones, Young Roger.”
* * *
“I think I’ll ride along with you to the hospital, if you don’t mind,” Caitlin said to Jones, climbing into the rear of the rescue wagon after paramedics had lifted his gurney inside.
“Afraid I might not make it otherwise, Ranger?” Jones asked her, while the paramedics continued to work on him.
“Who’s your source on all things Li Zhen?”
“I’ve got several. What are you looking for?”
“Whatever it is you missed.”
94
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
Cort Wesley stuffed the phone back in his pocket when he saw Dylan riding the escalator down into the terminal building. He could tell by the boy’s expression something was wrong, surely connected to the fact that his flight had landed a half hour before and he was just emerging now. And the girl, Kai, was nowhere to be seen.
He approached the escalator, reaching it just as Dylan hit the bottom.
“She’s gone, Dad. Goddamn made herself disappear.”
* * *
The boy had used the prepaid phone Cort Wesley had bought at a drugstore to call him from Chinatown.
“She’s inside talking to the old guy right now,” he’d whispered. “I don’t have much time. We’re headed back to Texas.”
“You need to get away from there right now,” Cort Wesley told him. “You need to walk out.”
“I can’t,” Dylan said after a pause that felt much longer than it actually was.
“Stop thinking with your dick, son.”
“I’m not. Jeez, Dad,” Dylan followed, and Cort Wesley could picture him shaking his head and blowing the hair from his face with his breath. “I’m playing this like you. Trying to get to the bottom of things.”
“You’re not me. How you feeling?”
“Fine.”
“What about the headaches?”
“I just told you I was fine. And I can’t just up and leave her. Is that what you want me to do? You wouldn’t; I know you wouldn’t. Hold on, she’s headed back into the room. I gotta go. I’ll find a way to let you know when we’re getting in.”
* * *
That way turned out to be a text message, a form of communication that Cort Wesley utterly detested. But the text had contained the flight number and arrival time. Cort Wesley was already in the air when it reached him, having taken another airline that would actually land in San Antonio ahead of Dylan’s flight.
And now Dylan was here, but the girl was nowhere to be found. They emerged into the cool night, Dylan kicking at the concrete with his boots, looking unsure and confused. Like a kid.
“I don’t know how you and Caitlin can keep dealing with shit like this.”
“Neither do I.”
“We read Dracula in one of my English classes. My favorite character was Van Helsing, the guy who brings down the monster. I think I liked him because he reminded me of the two of you.”
Cort Wesley looked at the oldest son he hadn’t even known for the first thirteen years of his life. Thought of Li Zhen trading his daughter in to the Triad like a car for a better model of life. He figured that Dylan’s problem was that he had too big a heart and was able to look past the bad in people to what made them that way. He’d already known too many monsters in his time and Cort Wesley’s greatest unstated fear was that the experiences would scar him for life. In that moment, though, he realized they wouldn’t and couldn’t. This boy was his son all right, growing up in his image and following the twisted example set by him and Caitlin Strong.
“Jesus Christ, Dad.”
“What?”
“Stop looking at me like I’ve got two heads. I’m getting us a cab.”
* * *
Cort Wesley waited until they were in the back of the taxi to call Caitlin.
“Is that a siren?” he asked her, pressing the phone tighter to his ear.
“Don’t ask. Long story. I’d need maybe an hour to explain. Luke’s safe—that’s what you need to hear. I’ve got him with me now.”
“You took him out of school?”
“There wasn’t much of a choice,” Caitlin said, not bothering to elaborate further. “But it all ends tomorrow, Cort Wesley.”
“Where are you going to be tonight, Ranger?”
“Where you just left: San Antonio International.”
95
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
Kai emerged from the supply closet without the wheelchair, walking upright with the same grace and agility she’d kept disguised ever since reaching LaGuardia Airport back in New York.
Ironic that she was costumed to look so much older today, because that’s how she’d felt for so long. Worn, beaten, and what little she had left inside her feeling dried up. Little because they’d stripped it away, scrubbed sandpaper against her psyche and spirit to turn her into what they needed her to be.
The abuse she suffered initially had been limited to the psychological, and it was subtle and brutal at the same time. Brutal in how she was denied anything but passing glances and glimpses of the other girls who’d been taken away from their homes just as she had. Without a social support system, Kai was forced to rely on the women who supervised the home for all her emotional needs. They became both parent and friend, teacher and adviser, providing what she needed the most while never answering any of her most pressing questions or addressing the things that kept her awake long into the night. They were her only stimulus, her sole interaction with the world, creating a longing sense of dependence.
Kai trusted the women, believed they loved her, so when they began ever so subtly introducing her to the skills she needed to perfect, she accepted it as natural. Came even to look forward to those sessions since it was then the most attention was paid to her. And when she behaved and responded well to their teachings, she was rewarded with a doll she could play with. Not as nice as the hand-sewn dolls passed down through generations of her family, but something to cling to at night in the cold and dark before she fell asleep desperate in the hope she might meet her mother in her dreams.
Then her schooling moved on to a different kind of doll, a larger one imitating a boy’s anatomy. Her teachers informed her that she was going to learn how to make boys happy. She thought initially what followed was very wrong. Though Kai didn’t embrace her new lessons, she didn’t reject them out of hand either. There must have, after all, been a reason she was being taught these things, and her teachers were relentless in pointing out that this was a great gift she was being taught to dispense. And with each successive mastery of a
lesson came more privileges, including her choices of foods, more toys to play with, movies she was allowed to watch. She did what was expected of her and, as had been the case with her studies previously, committed herself to excel.
Weeks and months passed. Her lessons began to include films that depicted sexual acts tastefully and lovingly, watched so often that Kai became unaffected by them. They came to define normalcy to her and, again, she saw no point in resisting. She didn’t want to be one of those girls who cried or screamed or tried to run away, and then one day was no longer heard or seen at all. She believed in her heart her father had sent her here for a reason and that someday he would return for her.
That day never came.
But another day did, the beginning of putting her lessons to practice with first young men, mere boys, not much older than her really. To Kai it was no more than a game, another lesson. She had grown up imbued with a desire to excel at everything she did, and why not this? She had been here so long now that it was all she knew, and in the progression saw an end to the process. Her privileges were extended to trips beyond the walls of the house, to malls where she was allowed to buy anything she wanted and taught how to appreciate the best in clothing and jewelry.
Once in a crowded mall she became separated from the chaperone who’d accompanied her. For a brief moment, her heart thumped at the opportunity to run, to escape. But to where and toward what purpose? So she remained just where she was until the woman returned, smiling joyously.
Because she had passed another test.
Because she hadn’t run when given the chance.
And she was deemed ready to begin the next phase of her schooling.
They had a party for her back at the home, pretended it was her birthday. Kai had to remind herself how old she was: almost thirteen now. The days marked off in her head, even though she’d long stopped looking beyond one to the next.
Another lesson.
Strive for perfection.
And that’s what Kai did and had done ever since.
Be the best.
As her father had taught before she was taken away. And so it was around then that, faced with the reality he was not coming for her, she decided she’d focus on coming for him. At first she pictured herself asking him why he had done this to her. Later, she imagined making him pay for it. Longing became hatred and she found purpose in the art of lovemaking they taught her by seeing it as a means to the end of tracking him down. Something she could never achieve until fate placed her in the United States and she saw Li Zhen’s face plastered all over the media in conjunction with his company’s launching of a fifth generation wireless network. And not long after that she came upon a report of a strange murder somewhere in Texas, then another. Murders she recognized from the tortured history of her family that she’d uncovered over the years as well.
History being made to repeat itself and the killings would go on and on, young women much like her senselessly murdered unless she did something. Because Kai felt certain her father was behind the murders. He was a monster. Perhaps her mother and sister had been the lucky ones. But the victims found murdered in a fashion identical to similar victims in America’s Old West had not been lucky at all. And there would be many more of them, sacrifices to the times that her father believed destroyed their family’s hope, unless she stopped him. Alone now, unless …
Unless …
Kai found an empty table in the back of a small bar in the terminal and pretended to study a menu resting beneath a sugar caddy. She eased the cell phone from her pocket and pulled up a number she’d lifted off Dylan’s phone back in Providence. She started to dial it, stopped, then finished entering the digits. Staring at them for what seemed like a very long time before she pressed Call.
96
SAN ANTONIO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
Caitlin arrived at the Jetlinx private terminal in a detached building just off the tarmac in time to watch the private Lear heading in off the runway. She figured it must have taken off from Houston while she was still at the hospital with Jones. She felt like a kid, face pressed against the window as it taxied straight on course for the glass before veering off into a parking position.
She was through the door and heading for the Lear as its door opened and a set of steps lowered to reveal a pair of plainclothes Chinese guards standing at the top. She climbed the stairs and eased past them and into the jet to find an old, thin Chinese man rising from behind a table set in the middle of the cabin between four chairs, two on either side facing inward. He nodded and one of the men moved down the stairs to assume a post on the tarmac while the other eased the door closed and took up vigil before it.
“He speaks no English, Ranger Strong,” the old man told her, rising. His shock of stark white hair looked chiseled to his scalp, more a statue’s than a man’s. “So our words will remain secret.”
“Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Consul General.”
“Please, join me. Sit. Can I get you something?”
“Just the information I requested and you kindly agreed to provide.”
The consul general of the People’s Republic of China attached to Texas stiffened. “Kindness has nothing to do with it. It has become a matter of practicality now that Li Zhen has betrayed both our nations. Understand, Ranger, that only information relevant to Li Zhen’s presence in your country was made known to Mr. Brooks and his people. The rest was withheld for obvious reasons.”
“And what would those reasons be, sir?”
The consul general leaned forward over the table, smiling reassuringly. “In China we consider information to be not just a commodity, but a weapon to be wielded to enforce control and keep underlings beholden and respectful.”
“Meaning you have information about Li Zhen you’ve never shared outside the family.”
The consul general’s expression wrinkled. “Family?”
“The immediate circle in which you move, sir.”
He nodded, grasping her meaning now. “I’m afraid the information you seek is most unpleasant. We would never think of sharing it with anyone if the stakes did not call for it.”
“I understand.”
The consul general shook his head deliberately, the motion looking almost painful. “No, Ranger Strong, I don’t believe you do.”
* * *
The consul general was right; she didn’t. Incoming and outgoing air traffic hammered her ears, and one jet coming in for a landing passed close enough overhead to buckle Caitlin as she walked back to her loaner car. The depths of Li Zhen’s depravity defied even her worst expectations, confronting her with the reality of a nemesis whose moral repugnancy rendered him utterly unpredictable. A sociopath for whom morality was a delusion.
And it was left to the Rangers to stop him, no one else was about to help in the little time they had remaining.
Caitlin’s phone rang. With no Bluetooth to rely on, she jerked the handset to her ear, expecting Cort Wesley to be on the other end of the line.
“You know who I am,” a female voice greeted instead.
“Yes,” Caitlin said, feeling a chill surge through her, “I do.”
97
SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS
Cort Wesley was sitting on the porch swing when Caitlin pulled into the driveway. She wore only a T-shirt and jeans in spite of the cool bite to the fall air.
“Luke and Dylan are both inside,” he told her, the swing rocking slightly. “Guess this is what it takes to bring us all back together.”
Caitlin looked back at the street, then continued climbing the porch steps. “I don’t see Paz’s truck.”
“He’s here.”
“You saw him?”
“Didn’t have to.” Cort Wesley dug a heel into a slat and stopped the light sway of the swing. “Man, Ranger, you look white as a ghost.”
“That’s because I just spoke to one, Cort Wesley.”
* * *
“Hello, Kai,” Caitlin said into her phon
e, the words feeling like marbles banging up against the sides of her mouth.
“I’m sorry Dylan was hurt.”
“He could have died. It would’ve been your fault.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
The phone felt cold in Caitlin’s hand and against her skin. “Criminals say that all the time.”
“You think that’s what I am?”
“It’s what you’re acting like, and I’m not talking about how you make your living.”
“You know I had no choice in that.”
“I’m starting to get a real notion and I’m sorry, I truly am.”
“People say that all the time, too.”
“Difference being,” Caitlin said, still seated behind the wheel of the loaner with the engine off and the windows starting to fog up, “I mean it.” She stopped and took a deep breath, unsure of exactly what she going to say next until the words began to spill out. “I watched my mother gunned down when I was a little girl. I’ve got no memory of that, but it’s with me every day of my life, and maybe all these gunfights I keep getting in are about getting back at her killers. But I can’t get all the monsters, Kai, nobody can.”
“You feel my pain, is that what you mean?”
“Not at all. But I know what pain feels like and what it can do to a person. And it’s done the same thing to me it’s done to you.”
“What’s that, Ranger?”
“It turned me into something I can’t control. Me not running from a fight, gun or otherwise, was never about being brave. It was about that night my mother was killed and doing to others what I couldn’t do to her killers while hiding in a closet.”
“A shrink tell you that?”
Caitlin tried to swallow, but her mouth was too dry to manage the effort. She started to reach for a water bottle tucked into one of the loaner’s beverage holders, then stopped.
“I’ve never shared that with a single other person, but I know you can relate to what I’m saying. Thought it might be helpful for you to know you’re not alone.”
