Strong Darkness

by Jon Land

  “Your father didn’t trade you in like you were an old car.”

  “No, but Jim Strong pretty much ignored what I witnessed, like he was hoping I wouldn’t remember. I only wish he was right.”

  “I remember too. All too clearly. It never stops hurting.”

  “And it never will, no matter what you do here or anywhere else. The pain never goes away and sometimes the more you try to get rid of it, the worse it gets.”

  “Dylan’s lucky, Ranger,” Kai said after a pause.

  “To be alive anyway.”

  “I meant because he’s got you.”

  “You’ve got me too, Kai, and that’s a promise. I know you’re in San Antonio. Let’s meet up, just the two of us.”

  “I called to warn you, Ranger,” Kai said flatly, instead of continuing to engage her. “I’m going to end this tomorrow.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “Stay away from Yuyuan,” she continued. “Dylan and his father too. I’ve been waiting a very long time for this day.”

  “Your father’s a monster, Kai.”

  “That’s the point.”

  “No, the point is you don’t have to be one too. You’re the victim in all this. Dylan saw in you the same thing I’m hearing, so let me help. Just me. No cops or other Rangers, I promise.… Kai?” Caitlin waited again. “Kai?”

  Caitlin looked down at her phone and saw the call had already ended.

  * * *

  “She called you?”

  “Memorized the number off Dylan’s phone. Said she was going to handle things tomorrow. Told me, all of us, to stay away from Yuyuan.”

  “Handle things,” Cort Wesley repeated stiffly

  “That was my thought too.”

  “You think she can pull it off?”

  “I wouldn’t put anything past her. I’m betting she’s spent a good portion of her life getting ready for this day.”

  “You feel bad for her.”

  Caitlin let some of her breath out and took a seat next to him on the porch swing. “Don’t you?”

  Cort Wesley started to shake his head, then stopped as something dawned on him. “I believe I finally get why you and Dylan are so close. Because the two of you are the goddamn same. You both think you can save the world, one person at a time.”

  “You don’t think we should bother trying?”

  “I think it’s a waste of time. Not because people can’t be saved, but because they don’t want to. I spent four years in prison, Ranger, so I’ve seen that firsthand. Know something? You can actually smell hopelessness. I thought it was just my imagination until I visited someone in the pen and there it was again, same as my time in the Walls.”

  “So, what, you want me to learn the scent?”

  Cort Wesley kicked the swing into a slight rocking motion again. “It beats hearing what you want to and seeing what you want to. Because not everybody deserves to be saved. You wanna believe they can, because it justifies the way you go about your business.”

  “You’re way off base here, Cort Wesley.”

  “Am I? How many have you ever told about witnessing your mother’s death? But that didn’t stop you from telling Kai. Anything to help you win her over, put another trophy on your wall of those you’ve saved instead of bagged.”

  Caitlin looked at him for what felt like a long time. “You finished?”

  “I don’t even remember what I just said,” he said, leaning backward with a sigh.

  The swing coasted to a stop. “Then let’s focus on tomorrow.”

  “What do you think Kai’s got planned for Li Zhen?”

  Caitlin leaned forward, the color flushing back into her face. “I don’t care, Cort Wesley, because we’re gonna get him before she can.”

  98

  NEW BRAUNFELS, TEXAS

  Li Zhen clutched the phone tighter to his ear, numbed by what the man on the other end had just told him. “What do you mean raided?”

  “Texas Rangers stormed the studio,” the man said, still trying to catch his breath. “I barely got away. They had a warrant. They took everything. I tried to call our lawyer, but he isn’t picking up. I didn’t know what else…”

  Zhen found himself feeling cold again, just like yesterday when no amount of frigid water could wash away the weakness and frailty revealed by his killing a girl who became Caitlin Strong to him. His hands ached even more than they normally did, his split knuckles swollen to twice their normal size.

  “Texas Rangers,” he repeated under his breath, when the man’s voice drifted off.

  “That would be me,” he heard a voice call from the doorway.

  * * *

  Li Zhen pocketed his phone, identical in all respects to General Chang’s.

  “That’s an interesting phone, sir,” Caitlin continued. “Available only in China would be my guess, produced specifically to run on the new fifth generation network Yuyuan built.”

  “Should I be looking for my pruning snips, Ranger?” Zhen managed, fighting against the urge to launch himself against this woman just as he had the whore who’d morphed into her the day before. Kill Caitlin Strong just as he had killed her likeness.

  “You won’t need them to hear about what we uncovered.”

  “I assume this concerns me.”

  Caitlin nodded slowly. “It’s the reason why I’m here to arrest you.”

  She had served the arrest warrant to the guards downstairs who, under threat of arrest themselves, had escorted her up here to a private laboratory that took up the entire corner section of the building’s top floor and was reserved for Yuyuan’s fledgling pharmaceuticals division. The floor was lined with various reptile, insect, and even a few plant exhibits on display within cages or terrariums placed on stands. Caitlin had the sense she was in some sort of living museum, except for the room’s warm, humid conditions that were conducive to the various species collected.

  Zhen moved to a case inhabited by horned toads, eased back a slot in the top and poured in a dish of dead insects. “Perhaps you’d like a snack, Ranger.”

  “Already ate, sir, but thanks just the same,” Caitlin told him.

  Zhen closed the slot. “You have no authority to arrest anyone here,” he said indignantly. “My company lawyers have been adamant about that.”

  “Oh, I didn’t tell you. It’s an international warrant for arrest. I’m serving it on behalf of the Chinese government.”

  Zhen’s expression turned utterly flat, his face the texture of granite as he moved toward a larger terrarium case where a series of snakes coiled about a miniature jungle scene. A small case resting next to it held three small mice.

  “The warrant was secured just this morning by something called a people’s procuratorate,” Caitlin continued, as she watched him, “on behalf of one of your country’s consul generals.”

  Zhen removed one of the mice from the case by the tail. Still pretending to ignore her, he dropped it into the terrarium and then repeated the process with the second and third mouse, while the trio of snakes inside twisted and turned through the glass.

  “Black mambas, Ranger, the most poisonous snakes on the planet. But their poison, which invokes instant paralysis, has also had miraculous effects on study animals suffering spinal cord damage, actually spurring the regrowth of damaged nerve tissue.”

  “Sounds promising, Mr. Zhen. But it doesn’t change what brought me here.”

  “I understand there is a black SUV parked outside the entrance with three men inside,” Zhen said suddenly, clasping his hands behind his back.

  “They’re Rangers, sir. Backup, in case I need it.”

  Zhen nodded, unmoved by her words as he moved away from the terrarium where two of the snakes had already taken the mice in their mouths. “What do you see before you, Ranger?” he asked.

  “Bugs, sir, lots of them. And some lizards thrown in for good measure.”

  Zhen smiled, the way a teacher might to a student whose mind was dwarfed by the scope of his kno
wledge. “That is because you see only the obvious: the creatures behind the glass, but not the power they have and hope they will someday bestow on mankind.”

  “I’m really not interested, sir.”

  “You should be, Ranger, you should be,” Zhen said, stopping before a fish tank long enough to sprinkle in some flakelike food across the top, and then moving on to a cage laden with sand and brush and filled with yellow scorpions. “Behold the Deathstalker, the most toxic and deadly of any in the scorpion family. But we are only now beginning to realize that its venom also offers treatment for a wide variety of cancers.”

  Caitlin took a few steps forward to close the gap between them. “I noticed you didn’t bother feeding them, sir.”

  “The Deathstalker is a cannibal, Ranger. But they feast only on others in their species who die of other causes. The ultimate in both self-preservation and natural selection, wouldn’t you say?”

  Without waiting for her to respond, Zhen moved on to another glass case, where groups of frogs sat abreast of one another, their jowls puckering as they uttered their familiar call. “And these are African tree frogs. They secrete saliva that once absorbed through the skin causes hallucinations, delirium, seizures, and sometimes even death. But that same saliva may hold a treatment to retard the devastating effects of ALS disease. Do you see the point I’m trying to make here?”

  “I’d really like to get on with this, Mr. Zhen, if you don’t mind.”

  He stiffened. “Things should never be taken at face value, Cat-lan Strong,” he said, seeming to take pleasure in purposely mispronouncing her name. “You see what’s before you and nothing else.”

  “You want to know what I see, sir? I see a monster who traded his ten-year-old daughter to the Triad to secure his own fortune.”

  “Is that what I’m being arrested for?”

  Caitlin froze her stare upon him. “Know what I learned last night?” she said, recalling her meeting with the Chinese consul general who’d flown down from Houston. “That your wife died two weeks before your daughter was born. Did you have her killed, Mr. Zhen? Did you have her killed because she was going to expose you for what you were?”

  Li Zhen continued to stare at her, but his expression had lost its confidence and he was blinking rapidly now, fighting to steady his breathing that had turned short and rapid. “Is that what this people’s procuratorate warrant is accusing me of?”

  “No, it accuses you of rape and incest. Your oldest daughter committed suicide because of what you did, so if you ask me murder should be added to the charge too. How many times did you rape her, how many times did it take before she got pregnant?”

  Caitlin stopped long enough to continue holding Zhen’s stare until he turned away.

  “She was Kai’s real mother.”

  99

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS; THAT MORNING

  A Polycom conference phone sat in the middle of the table, wires strung across the top of the table connecting it to the wall jacket and power outlet. A single light glowed green, as D. W. Tepper strode into the room.

  “Sun’s barely up and I’m already pissed,” he said between a scowl. “Just got word there’s a protest planned outside Yuyuan for today. Highway Patrol says they’re gonna shut the freeway down no later than noon.” Tepper aimed his next words toward the conference phone. “You hear us okay, Doc?” he asked Bexar County’s longtime medical examiner.

  “Loud and clear,” Whatley replied.

  “How ’bout you, Mr. Jones?” Tepper followed to the man from Homeland Security, currently at an undisclosed medical facility under guard of Colonel Paz’s men, who, besides the Texas Rangers, were the only ones he could trust right now.

  “You miss me, Captain?”

  “Not at all, but it is nice not to be butting heads with you for a change. Amazing what getting shot up tends to do for the soul. Young Roger, the floor is yours.”

  Young Roger brushed the long hair from his face and leaned forward. “I spent much of the night examining the cell phones Ranger Strong messengered to me and didn’t find what I expected to.”

  “What’s that mean?” Caitlin asked him.

  “Well, I started with what you told me about the victims, particularly the most recent one—that Chinese general. What you were suggesting is death by ventricular fibrillation. Does that jibe with your findings, Doc?” Young Roger asked, aiming his words toward the speakerphone.

  “Well, I wasn’t able to do much more than a cursory exam of General Chang, but it definitely jibes with what caused the deaths of those homeless men,” Whatley reported.

  “Okay,” Young Roger resumed, “what we’re talking about is essentially using electrocution to cause a heart attack. Now, a low-voltage AC current traveling through the chest for a fraction of a second can induce ventricular fibrillation. Fibrillations can be and usually are deadly because all the heart muscle cells move independently. You end up with contractions so strong that the heart muscle seizes up and stops moving altogether.”

  “You mind backing up a bit, son,” interjected Captain Tepper. “I believe my heart muscle’s been seizing up ever since Hurricane Caitlin here returned to the Texas Rangers.”

  Young Roger leaned farther over the table. His long hair fell in front of his face and he brushed it to the side again with a swipe of his hand. “Think of it this way, Captain. The heart muscle is actually driven by low levels of electrical current—that’s what an EKG, or an electrocardiogram, is actually measuring when they hook you up to a machine in the doctor’s office.”

  Tepper hocked up some mucus and swallowed it back down. “Haven’t had one of those in years, son,” he told Young Roger. “Not since the paper spit out a flat line and the nurse told me I must be dead.”

  “When the electrical signals become too weak or inconsistent with age,” Young Roger continued, “you can stimulate the heartbeat with a pacemaker.” He stopped and rotated his eyes around the table. “What happened to the Chinese general and these homeless men is like a reverse pacemaker—that’s what those cell phones essentially were. The point I made earlier was that it doesn’t take much electric current at all to cause significant physiological damage, including a heart attack. To give you an idea what I’m talking about, it takes a thousand times more current to trip a circuit breaker than it does to bring on respiratory arrest. Right, Doc?”

  “Young man,” came Whatley’s surprisingly clear voice over the speaker, “you are dead on in your assessment. A bad pun, I suppose, in this case.”

  Captain Tepper puckered his lips and regarded the cell phone tucked into plastic and centered between them with clear disdain. “You mind telling me how a device that small, and battery operated no less, could put out that kind of voltage, son?”

  “Voltage,” Young Roger told him, “has nothing to do with it. It’s all about electric current. OSHA estimates it takes as little as exposure to one hundred Ma, or milliamperes, to cause ventricular fibrillation and probable death. So I turned my attention to how a device that small could generate even that level of current. Doc, you notice the phones in question were no longer in working order?”

  “I did,” Whatley confirmed. “Tried to turn them on and nothing happened. I assumed the batteries were just drained.”

  “Close, but not quite. See, all the phones were equipped with chips that had burned out. There were no visible signs of that, but when I tested the chips, it was clear that they were no longer functional. Now, what you need to know about chips like this is that they only use a small portion of their cores at any given time; otherwise, they’d fry.” Young Roger picked up one of the phones through the plastic and held it up for all to see. “What I think Yuyuan figured out was how to utilize the entire core of the chip at once to concentrate an electrical charge of sufficient current to kill whoever was holding it at the time.”

  “So the phone rings,” Caitlin started, “the victim answers it, and the person on the other end triggers this chip.”

  “More
than likely, there wouldn’t be a person on the other end, but a machine. A router capable of sending the signal to the chip the split second the receiving phone is answered. All the killer would need to do is program the number.”

  “But the victim would have to be holding it,” said Cort Wesley. “Have I got that right?”

  “Not necessarily,” Young Roger answered. “It’s a matter of conductivity. Skin makes for an ideal conductor, but kept in a pocket, with only a thin layer of material separating the phone from the skin, could work just as well. So could a phone held in a typical belt clip or holster.”

  “So why did Li Zhen need to build the entire five G network to pull this off?”

  “A few reasons, starting with something called system spectral efficiency, which basically refers to the data volume per area unit. That, coupled with higher bit rates in larger portions of all coverage areas, will combine to allow users in previously outlying areas to download more data much faster. For our purposes, that means a clearer and sharper signal, less degradation from its point of origin along a broader bandwidth.”

  “In a language we can all understand, if you don’t mind, son,” said Captain Tepper, shaking his head.

  “It’s the difference between firing a bullet through the air instead of through water,” Young Roger elaborated, taking the sample phone in hand again through the plastic. “If I dial your phone right now from this very room it could take up to ten or fifteen seconds for the call to actually go through. In Li Zhen’s case, each one of those seconds would weaken the signal his satellites are sending to the point where it might not, probably wouldn’t, be strong enough to generate an electrical charge sufficient to cause ventricular fibrillation. But with the five G network those delays would be effectively eliminated.”

  “But you’re forgetting one thing here: the phones with these killer chips haven’t been released yet,” Captain Tepper noted.

  Young Roger pondered that for a moment. “How long has it been since Yayuan was awarded the five G network contract?”

  “Five years, give or take,” came Jones’s voice over the speaker.