Rampage

by John Sandford

  “Lou said the lead fed told her that he didn’t have an arrest warrant—only a search warrant….Might be an agent in the group I can confide in. Maybe they’ll be on our side….”

  Shay said, “Then Harmon’s idea makes sense. Half of us to L.A., the other half stay on and watch the ranch.”

  Twist nodded. “Don’t think I’ve got much choice. Let’s haul butt.”

  —

  Harmon, Shay, Odin, and Cruz stood in the parking lot and watched Twist and Cade pull out in the Range Rover, and Danny in the Jeep. Emily would drive Danny’s Volvo out of L.A. and meet up with them to make the swap.

  When they were gone, Odin said, “Okay, that leaves just us crazies here. I say we hit the ranch tonight.”

  Harmon: “I won’t do anything that’ll get us all killed. I will not.”

  “I’m with you,” Cruz said.

  “Odin’s the crazy one,” Shay said. “I’ll hold him down, if it comes to that.”

  “I resemble those remarks,” Odin said. “Let’s go get breakfast and get serious about what’s next.”

  —

  Returning to the ranch in the daylight would be a risk, but Odin argued for it as they huddled in a booth at the back of a local café. “That’s when everything is going on. Besides, they have no idea that we’re around—they’ll be as slack as they were the last couple of days.”

  Harmon said, “Only one way I’m going for it. Me and one other person—”

  “Me,” Odin said.

  Harmon continued, “Me and one other person get dropped off way down the highway—like, two miles down. Then we hike back. We know where everything on the ranch is, so we watch the airstrip to pick up on people coming and going. We take some more pictures. And we watch that building where they’ve got the experimental subjects. See what the guard routine is like.”

  “And Cruz and I just sit here?” Shay asked.

  “You’ll probably think of something to do,” Odin said.

  “Hey!”

  “Sorry. Anyway, I’d go with Harmon’s idea,” Odin said. “I want to figure out a way to help those people, if Twist can’t do something with the feds.”

  Shay looked at the time on her cell phone. “They’ll be back in L.A. by six or seven. We should know today what’s going on there.”

  “If they don’t bust everybody,” Cruz said.

  She looked around the table. “So, what’re we doing?”

  “Back to the ranch,” Odin said.

  —

  Harmon and Odin bailed out by the side of the highway, and Shay drove on in Harmon’s Mercedes with Cruz and X, headed toward Silver City. They’d look around town for a while, then cruise the ranch again in the late afternoon, and again after dark.

  Odin and Harmon moved off the shoulder of the road and into the trees, where Odin nearly walked into a rattlesnake. The snake was thoroughly camouflaged, and Odin would have stepped on it if Harmon hadn’t grabbed his arm and blurted, “Whoa.”

  The snake didn’t move, and they detoured around it. Harmon said, “That’s a Mojave. I didn’t know they were around here. Those are bad ones, so keep an eye out. Where there’s one, there’ll be more.”

  They walked slowly and carefully back toward the ranch, with Harmon coaching Odin about pace, concealment, and listening for others. An hour after they were dropped off, they were above the airstrip but saw no planes.

  Harmon left Odin in the pit they’d found over the airstrip and then went to hide himself near the building with bars on the windows to see if he could get a feel for the guard situation there. There seemed to be a shift change at noon, with two guys in and two guys out, but then nothing more, so he went back to Odin, who’d seen even less activity.

  It was midafternoon when they heard the sound of a plane.

  As the others had done, the incoming plane flew along the length of the airstrip, made a turn at the far end, and put down. At the parking ramp, a thin, gray-haired man climbed out of the pilot seat. He was carrying a suitcase-sized bag, and from the way he strained to carry it, it had to be heavy. One of the ranch SUVs pulled up, and the driver helped the man lay the bag inside.

  Harmon took pictures of the plane and said, “With the tail number, you can track down the owner and probably the pilot, if they’re different. At least, my computer guys could have.”

  “Yeah,” Odin said, “Cade and I did that. Dash’s plane is her own. The pudgy guy and Thorne both came in on planes owned by private companies. We’re still digging to see if we can tie those companies to one of our players.”

  Harmon nodded.

  After a moment, Odin asked, “You’ve never said much about what you did with Singular. Just ‘intelligence.’ You have anything to do with me getting waterboarded?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Harmon said. He kept his voice down and added, “Torture doesn’t work. It seems like a simple answer for a big problem. Which it would be, if it worked. But it doesn’t.”

  “So your problem with it is pragmatic, not ethical,” Odin said.

  “Well…if you said, ‘Would you waterboard Mr. X if it’d stop the 9/11 attacks?’ I’d say, ‘Hell, yes.’ But waterboarding Mr. X wouldn’t stop the 9/11 attacks. Might make you feel like you’re getting revenge or teaching somebody a lesson…but even that doesn’t work. What was your lesson from getting waterboarded?”

  Odin said, “I didn’t get a lesson. Or maybe, ‘Don’t get caught.’ ”

  “Exactly. It didn’t change your mind, just made you meaner. Or more determined. From what I understand, you gave up nothing, and you’re not even some combat-ready Ranger or radical Muslim fighter. Same thing when Thorne beat up Cade. Didn’t work. Didn’t get anything.”

  They sat silently for quite a long time, then Harmon broke the silence by asking, “Did the waterboarding hurt?”

  “Not so much physically—I barfed a lot,” Odin said. “But it makes you crazy. You feel like you’re going insane. If you did it to somebody long enough, they probably would go insane. Then, you know, I have the feeling that it’d kill you, if they did it long enough. Not any one episode, but you feel like your body is breaking down. It’s supposed to be mostly a psychological thing, but I don’t think you could take it forever—your body would just give up and die.”

  Harmon shook his head. “Don’t know if I could handle it.”

  More silence, then Odin said, “Shay said you’ve been shot. Is that right?”

  “Yeah, a couple of times,” Harmon said.

  “That’s gotta hurt.”

  “Yup. Do you get snow in your part of Oregon?”

  “Yeah, but it never amounts to much,” Odin said.

  “Well, getting shot feels like being hit in the face with a really icy snowball, maybe with a rock in it. It hurts and stings and goes numb, kind of all at once. If you’ve been hit bad, you go into shock…bleed a lot. At least, I did.”

  “Where’d you get hit?”

  “Got hit in the triceps, and the same slug went through and grooved my back, and got hit another time in the hip. That’s a polite word for butt. I got hit once by shrapnel from an IED, but that was mostly a lot of cuts. I was standing behind a truck when that went off and was hit mainly from the knees down. That hurt like hell. But you know, you get hit, the army gives you some time off.”

  “Good of them,” Odin said. “Why’d you do it for so long? Why are you doing this?”

  A little more silence, then Harmon said, “Because it’s interesting. You know, why bother to go through life if you can’t do interesting shit? Even that crazy animal rights stuff you do. At least it’s interesting. Better than sitting around waiting to die.”

  “Absolutely,” Odin said.

  —

  Another hour passed, then the gray-haired man was driven back to his airplane. Harmon took more pictures of him boarding—he wasn’t carrying the black case this time—and the plane taxied and took off. A few minutes later, a utility vehicle fired up and drove past them toward the end of
the airstrip, a man in a cowboy hat at the wheel. A black bag overhung the cargo bed of the vehicle.

  Harmon said, “Oh Jesus, another one.”

  “What?”

  “That’s a body bag,” Harmon said. “We need pictures. Stay close to me, stay quiet.”

  They scuttled across the slope, stopping to listen, looking for signs that other people might be around, and saw nothing at all. When they were back where Harmon and Shay had been when they saw the first body burned, Harmon whispered, “Stay low. Lie flat. If the guy looks in this direction, don’t look directly at him….People can feel eyes.”

  The man with the body never looked at them. Instead, he built another piñon bier, dragged the body onto it, doused it all with gasoline, and set it on fire. They could smell the burning flesh, and Harmon took pictures; in an hour, the flames were dropping, and the man probed them with a rake. Satisfied that the body was gone, he tossed the rake in the utility vehicle and headed back toward the ranch.

  Odin asked, “Did the guy in the plane kill somebody?”

  “I wondered the same thing,” Harmon said.

  “We’ve got to do something about this,” Odin said. “You saw them getting rid of a body yesterday and another one today. There aren’t that many of them. And we don’t know how many they’ve already killed.”

  Harmon scratched the side of his head and said, after a few seconds, “I don’t know.”

  “If we don’t do something, they’ll get rid of all of them, and then there won’t even be any evidence.”

  “There’ll be evidence,” Harmon said. “When you burn a body like that, you get rid of ninety-nine percent of it, but a good forensic team will find the other one percent. Teeth, hard pieces of bone. That kind of stuff. What I’m afraid of is that if we raid them, and if we don’t manage to pull that off, they’ll bring a tractor out here with a blade and push that ash and dirt into the river. Then it would truly be gone.

  “Come on. Get your shit together. Shay and Cruz will be coming through in a half hour or so. Maybe between all of us, we can figure something out.”

  Odin nodded, his expression fierce. “No more burned bodies,” he said. “One way or the other, no more burned bodies.”

  Cruz picked them up at the side of the road just after four o’clock. Shay was in the passenger seat, wearing a straw cowboy hat she’d bought in Silver City.

  “Another body burned,” Odin said as he and Harmon got in the backseat. X was there, too, and he settled between them.

  “Ah, no,” Shay said.

  Harmon turned around to pull out a fabric rifle case that he kept in the back, put his rifle in it, and tucked the case away under a cooler and their packs.

  As they passed the turnoff to the ranch, they saw a man with a rifle on his shoulder step back away from the road into the piñons. “Hope he didn’t see us on the earlier passes,” Shay said.

  “This is only the third pass for the Benz, and unless he’s the only guy out there, we oughta be okay,” Harmon said.

  They’d gone another ten miles when a white Chevy Tahoe came up behind them and flared its red roof flashers.

  “Now what?” Shay asked.

  “Cruz, keep your hands in sight, on the steering wheel,” Harmon said. “Odin, when Cruz rolls down his window, you roll yours down, too, like you want to hear what’s going on.”

  Cruz took the Benz to the dirt shoulder, shifted into park. The truck pulled off behind them, and a moment later, two men in olive-green uniforms got out. One waited behind the Benz, the other walked up to the driver’s-side window. He was wearing a pistol on his hip and kept his hand on it.

  As he came up to the window, Cruz asked, “What’d I do?”

  The man said, with a Hispanic accent, “Border Patrol. Everybody here an American?”

  “Yeah, we all are,” Cruz said.

  The patrolman looked into the truck at Shay, Odin, Harmon, and the dog, then looked back at Cruz and asked, “You got a driver’s license, paisano?”

  “Yeah.” Cruz fumbled out his wallet, extracted his license, and passed it to the patrolman, who looked at the picture, looked at Cruz, then handed it back. “Los Angeles, huh?”

  “Yeah, we’re all from California,” Cruz said.

  Shay said, “Odin and I aren’t—we’re really from Oregon, but we’re living in Los Angeles right now, going to school.” Odin gave the guy a placid wave.

  The patrolman said, “What are you folks doing here? You’re a long way from nowhere.”

  Harmon jumped in: “I teach archaeology. We were up at Gila looking at some Mimbres sites. These three are students. We’re headed to Lordsburg for the night, then it’s back to L.A. tomorrow.”

  The patrolman said, “Well, okay, then. Have a good trip.”

  As he stepped away, Cruz asked, “How come you’re so far from the border?”

  “We patrol all the main routes north. We could see a lot of heads in this truck, and we always stop a truck with a lot of heads.”

  Cruz said, “Huh. Well, take it easy.”

  “You too,” the patrolman said.

  —

  Cruz eased off the shoulder, and the flashers on the unmarked truck died. As they pulled away, Odin asked, “You think they were really Border Patrol?”

  “Seemed right to me,” Cruz said. “I’ve been stopped before.”

  Shay said, “It’s possible that they’re real Border Patrol and that they also talk to the people at the ranch. You know, some extra eyes.”

  “You’re very suspicious,” Harmon said. “I like that in a young woman.”

  But they were feeling shaky about it. A minute later, the truck caught them again and passed, the patrolman on the passenger side giving them a wave. Shay said, “If they see us up here tomorrow, they’ll be asking more questions.”

  “It’s a complication,” Harmon agreed.

  Shay asked Harmon, “There’s a trailer hitch on this truck, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t know much about trailer hitches, but I know there are different hitch sizes….”

  “I’ve got three different hitch balls stored in the back,” Harmon said. “Why would you need a trailer?”

  “I got an idea,” Shay said.

  Cruz: “That’s not necessarily good.”

  —

  Twist, Cade, Danny, and Emily met up near Joshua Tree, and Danny was full of parting advice before he made his way home.

  “Look, you don’t have to incriminate yourselves. You don’t have to answer a single question. But you can give them information—and if they insist on knowing how you got it, then demand immunity for giving it to them.”

  “You’re talking like a lawyer,” Twist said.

  Danny said, “I’ve had to get advice from lawyers once or twice. That’s what they told me.”

  “Slight difference between a half ounce of weed and mass murder,” Twist said. “These guys might insist a little harder.”

  “If they know enough to ask about it, they’ll know you didn’t do it,” Danny said.

  Cade: “Maybe we ought to have a lawyer with us.”

  “The only lawyer I’ve ever hired specializes in artists’ rights,” Twist said. “Why don’t we see what they want to know and then decide whether we need a lawyer.”

  “Exactly the kind of decision that will come back to bite you on the butt,” Danny said.

  “We’ll see,” Twist said. “We’ll see what the FBI has to say.”

  —

  The agent’s name was Brian Barin. He was eating dinner when Twist called.

  “We need to talk to you,” Barin said.

  “Well, I’m here,” Twist said. “When do you want to talk? And should I have a lawyer?”

  “That’s your call. We’re trying to get information on the incident up in San Francisco in which a young woman was killed and a group of illegal aliens were detained. We believe you can help us with that, given your television interview. At this point, we have no intention o
f arresting you.”

  “At this point,” Twist said.

  “Yes. At this point.”

  “And you want to do this when?”

  “Tonight. Right now. I’m in Los Feliz. I can be there in a half hour or so. I have another agent on standby; he’ll be coming with me.”

  “Make it an hour,” Twist said. “I need to call some people.”

  “An hour it is. Thank you for calling me.”

  Twist thought about it for fifteen seconds, then called the lawyer who knew about artists’ rights, who said he had no idea how to deal with the FBI but knew a woman who did.

  “How do I get in touch with her in a hurry?” Twist said.

  “I pass the cell phone across the table,” the lawyer said. “She’s my old lady. And I’ll tell you, she ain’t cheap.”

  —

  The lawyer’s wife turned out to be about thirty-five, with long blond hair and a briefcase the size of a Volkswagen. Her name was Lynne Tanner, and she got to the hotel about twenty minutes after Twist’s call and took a digital recorder out of the briefcase.

  “I charge two hundred dollars an hour until we go to trial, when it goes to five hundred an hour,” Tanner said. “I rarely lose cases that go to trial, but sometimes I do, because there’s no hope, and we’re just maneuvering for a lower level of conviction than the DA was willing to give us in a deal,” she told Twist as she looked for a place to plug in the recorder. “I need you to brief me on what the feds want, and when they get here, I need you to answer only the questions that I say you can answer. Can you do that?”

  “I can try,” Twist said. “See, this isn’t a typical case….”

  “Tell me,” she said. She glanced at her watch. “We’ve got fifteen minutes. We can stall them for a while if we need to, but not forever. Talk fast.”

  Twist pushed his hands through his hair. “Where to begin…”

  —

  Shay had the idea, had fleshed it out with help from Odin, against the doubts of Harmon and Cruz. Cruz wanted to wait until they found out whether Twist had been arrested—but Shay said that by the time they found out, it might be too late.

  “If Dash’s people get one little hint that we’re out here, it’ll be too late,” Shay said. “They murdered those two people they burned. They’ll have no choice but to get rid of the other prisoners if they get spooked.”