by Sean Black
Blood Country
A Byron Tibor Novel
Sean Black
SBD Publishing
Contents
Praise for Sean Black
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Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Epilogue
Other Books by Sean Black
Copyright
Praise for Sean Black
‘Sean Black writes with the pace of Lee Child, and the heart of Harlan Coben.’
Joseph Finder, New York Times Bestseller (Paranoia, Buried Secrets)
* * *
‘This is a writer, and a hero, to watch.’
The Daily Mail
* * *
‘Ace. There are deservedly strong Lee Child comparisons as the author is also a Brit, his novels US-based, his character appealing, and his publisher the same.’
Sarah Broadhurst, Bookseller
* * *
‘Black’s style is supremely slick.’
The Daily Telegraph
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Justice in our minds is strife.
We cannot help but see
War makes us as we are.
HERACLITUS
1
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
They wanted Byron Tibor dead. What they wanted, they usually got. Perhaps not immediately, or in the manner they had first envisaged, but sooner or later.
It was Lauren Stanley’s task, along with roughly a dozen other individuals spread out over the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and State Department, to make sure it happened.
But before they could kill him, they had to find him. And that was easier said than done. Byron Tibor didn’t want to be found.
That morning, Lauren finally had some good news. After months of dead ends and wild-goose chases, there was a solid lead.
She took a sip of juice, and looked away from her screen, then turned back to the man’s face on it in front of her. It was a low-resolution frame grab taken two weeks previously from a security camera in a Greyhound bus station at Corpus Christi in the Texas panhandle. Even with high-end image-enhancement software, it was hard to tell whether or not it was Tibor.
She moved back to the video footage, hoping to find something more concrete. Maybe the original data analyst at the NSA had missed a trick. She took a sip of juice (substituting carrot, apple and kale juice for coffee was her slender attempt to retain some sense of being healthy while pulling twelve-hour shifts at her desk), then ran back and forth through the footage.
Twenty minutes later she circled back to the same solitary frame grab. The analyst had been correct. That was the best they had – a partial view of his face in profile. It was as if Tibor was in possession of some kind of supernatural power that allowed him not only to know the location and angle of every security camera he passed but automatically to adjust his movement and posture to minimize his facial exposure.
Lauren supposed that this apparent ability might have, in some way, confirmed that this was their target. She knew from the file that he was (correction: had been) one of their most experienced operatives. You didn’t survive in the ultra-hostile environments that Tibor had without the ability to move from point to point while ensuring you popped up on as few surveillance systems as possible.
Most anti-surveillance techniques were nothing more than the rigid application of common sense. Look down, wear a brimmed hat, turn up your collar. Survey where cameras were placed. Assume their placement in certain public areas such as banks and government offices, and act accordingly.
For a man such as Tibor, it was probably second nature. Yes, he was experienced, that would account for it. And, if it didn’t, his file alluded to what were cryptically called ‘augmented abilities’. When Lauren had questioned her superiors as to what they were they had shut down the conversation pretty quickly. It was only by looking at the people Tibor had killed that she was able to make an educated guess as to what those abilities might be.
Like many in the department, she had heard of the program Tibor had been placed in. And, like everyone else, she had put down the rumors of what it had involved to the Chinese whispers that could take hold in the intelligence community. That view had changed as she had spent more time on the hunt for him.
The incidents he had been involved in since he’d gone rogue ‒ or, rather, the details of the incidents ‒ were so fantastical that she had begun to wonder if she was dealing with something more outlandish than she had first imagined. Of course she had sought more information. It had not been forthcoming.
She glanced at her watch, a college-graduation gift from her mom. She should have gone home five hours ago. Not that she had anything to go home to. Her life outside work had narrowed as the demands of the job had expanded. Even wee
kends, which she had vowed would remain sacred, were spent, at least partially, in this windowless office, poring over possible leads, and getting nowhere fast. The man in the Greyhound station might well have been Tibor, but they couldn’t be sure.
Remembering a detail from Tibor’s file, Lauren tapped again on the video player, and pulled the footage back to the moment that the man entered. She advanced the video frame by frame.
There. She stopped on a frame, dragged it over to the image-enhancement software and zoomed in on the man’s neck. Just above his collar there was a small red scar about an inch and a half long. Just like the one Tibor had been left with after he’d cut out the RDF tracking chip that been implanted under his skin.
She cut and pasted the scar into a separate file. She ran it through image-comparison software. The process took less than a second. It was a match.
2
Kelsen County, Texas
It was dark by the time they reached the containers. Dark and bitterly cold. If they had arrived in daylight then perhaps they would have offered more resistance. But it was late, and they were exhausted from a full day of walking in the searing desert heat. The day had begun at four in the morning, and the men escorting them had promised them something to eat if they did as they were told.
There were seventeen in their little group. Four men, twelve women and the little girl, Matilde, who had come with her father because there was no one to look after her at home. Her mother had died the previous year while making the same journey, and her mother’s family had blamed Matilde’s father. He’d had too much pride to ask them to care for Matilde while he was gone. Instead, he had brought her with him, carrying her on his shoulders while she kept a firm grip on the pink bunny rabbit that went everywhere with her.
The tallest of the three white men nodded for the other two to open one of the containers. They did it with ceremony, springing the padlock, wrenching open the door, and ushering the seventeen people inside.
When no one moved, the tall man walked back to the truck. He reappeared a few moments later with some brown-paper lunch sacks. He handed them to an elderly woman standing near the front of the group. She peered into the bag.
‘Food,’ said the man, waving them towards the open door. ‘You go inside, you get fed. Comprende?’
The group began to shuffle forward as the brown bags were handed out. The tall man walked back to the truck. This time he returned with two five-gallon plastic containers of water. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Inside.’
At the back of the group, Matilde’s father hunkered down so he was face to face with his daughter. He brushed a strand of long dark hair away from her eyes, and whispered to her in Spanish. She looked at him, puzzled. He told her it was going to be okay. Did she understand what he was saying? Matilde nodded and clutched her pink rabbit even tighter to her chest.
He straightened up. He could feel a lump forming in his throat. If only he had swallowed his pride and asked his wife’s family to take care of his daughter. But it was too late for that now.
He watched the people ahead of him shuffle forward into the darkness of the metal box. He stepped away from his daughter, and began to protest loudly in Spanish. Those around him shouted at him to be quiet.
One of the white men pushed his way towards him. ‘What’s the problem here?’
Matilde’s father noticed that the man’s right hand had fallen to his gun. He didn’t doubt that he was capable of using it. He quietened down.
‘Okay, then,’ said the white man, satisfied that the eruption was over. ‘And don’t you folks worry, y’hear? You came here to work. We got plenty of work for you. Long as you do as we say, everything’ll be just fine.’
Matilde and her father followed the others into the container. The doors clanged shut. The darkness was complete.
3
At first glance, Byron Tibor had assumed he was looking at a wanted poster. Murder maybe, or rape. Something serious. Something that would make the authorities want to plaster the man’s image all over the county.
The face on the poster was that of a man in his early sixties with a tanned complexion. He had dark, beady eyes that were set deep below a sharp overhang of forehead, and framed by eyebrows with no discernible gap. Razor-thin lips parted to reveal a jagged yellow smile that was more predatory than welcoming. His expression was one of cold, calculating hardness that bordered on psychotic.
This was the third poster Byron had seen that morning but the first time he had stopped for a closer look. A moment passed before he registered the words that accompanied the image. He choked back a laugh at his own stupidity. Of course. It all made perfect sense.
The man on the poster wasn’t a fugitive from justice. Far from it. His name was John Martin, and he was seeking re-election as the sheriff of Kelsen County, Texas.
The poster was a timely reminder of what Byron had always suspected to be the case. If, overnight, you swapped the people on wanted posters with the ones featured on election flyers, less might change than people assumed. The prison population might have nicer teeth, and access to better drugs, while Congress might feature more neck tattoos and wife beaters (both literal and figurative). Otherwise the world would roll on pretty much the same.
Byron tipped his hat in Sheriff John Martin’s direction, and continued along the heat-scorched desert road. As he walked, he reached back to pull a canteen from the rucksack slung over his shoulder, twisted off the cap and took a sip. The water was warm from the midday sun. The landscape that stretched off into the horizon didn’t offer much shade. He took one more sip, and put the canteen back in the rucksack. According to the signs he’d passed, it was four miles to the next town, and he had no idea how long it would be before someone stopped to offer him a ride. If they would stop at all.
Over the past ten minutes four vehicles had passed him, including a truck driver who had slowed down to take a better look, then thought better of it. Byron could hardly blame him. If the situation had been reversed, he would have thought twice about picking up a six foot four, 250-pound hitchhiker, who looked like he’d been living on the road for months.
Byron’s plan was to walk into town and see if he could find a bus. Airports were out, as was renting a car. Both left too much of an electronic trail. Headed for California, he had stuck to hitching rides or transport that could be arranged with cash and no need for identification. It was a lot tougher than he had anticipated.
Ten minutes later, he heard a vehicle behind him slow to a crawl. It inched forward, the driver’s foot barely touching the gas pedal. Byron listened more closely. Another vehicle was coming down the same road behind the first. The driver of the second had braked sharply to avoid running into the back of the one that had slowed down. That they had braked, rather than passing, told its own story.
If you came up fast on a slow-moving vehicle on an open road, you went around it. Usually with a honking horn and a raised middle finger. Unless it was a cop car.
4
Byron kept walking at exactly the same pace. The only adjustment he made was to ensure that his hands were clearly visible by his sides. Then he waited for the low-speed pursuit to catch up with him.
In truth, he was relieved. The heat was relentless. He was soaked in sweat and any half-decent cop car in sunny Texas would have air-conditioning. If he was polite about it, they’d likely take him the rest of the way into town and put him on a bus themselves. Or, when they couldn’t figure out who he was, they might even drop him on the other side of the border. That would suit him fine too.
He had already thought about traveling through Mexico, navigating a course parallel to the border until he reached California. But the Mexican side of the border held its own dangers. It was a volatile place where a lone stranger would be even less welcome. And there was the matter of the crossing. If he used an official crossing point to re-enter the United States, he would need identification.
The patrol-car siren whooped a single blast. Byron did his be
st to feign surprise. He knew better than to turn around so instead shuffled to a halt, and raised his arms slowly in the air.
He heard both the front passenger and the driver’s door open, then a man’s voice: ‘Do not move. Now, I want you lower yourself onto your knees. Keep your hands where I can see them.’
A smartass might have enquired as to how you could simultaneously not move while lowering yourself to your knees. The smartass would have got himself shot. Byron had no intention of being shot. Not because the prospect worried him, but because it would have led to a scenario littered with complications. People in general, and cops especially, tended to react with panic to an individual who didn’t die from being shot in the back at close range.
Byron complied with the instructions he had been given. It took a lot of core strength, and balance, but he did it.
‘Okay,’ said the cop. ‘Now I want you to put your hands on top of your head, and lace your fingers together nice and tight.’
Byron did as he had been asked. He could hear the cop’s footsteps as he walked towards him. He could feel the heat radiating from the blacktop. If the cop asked him to lie face down on the broiling hot tar they’d both have a problem, and right now Byron couldn’t afford to have a problem with law enforcement, if he could avoid it.
Mercifully for both of them, Byron heard the cop close in on him, take the cuffs from his belt, snap them open and start to place them around his wrist. As the cop cuffed him, he ran through the Miranda Rights. He was arresting him on a charge of vagrancy. Except it wasn’t called that. It had been wrapped up in some new terminology that seemed to have been invented specifically by the good people of Kelsen County. There was a mention of ‘public nuisance’. Byron wasn’t sure how walking down the side of a highway made him a nuisance. Maybe they’d been watching him and seen him laughing at the sheriff’s election poster.
