Strong Vengeance

by Jon Land

  47

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  Caitlin let her stare linger on him, resisting the urge to sweep the bar to see if his claim was true. “So who was it, Mr. Thoms?”

  “Who was what?”

  “Your father, uncle, scoutmaster, priest, milkman. Almost all pedophiles were molested themselves at one point. I’m just wondering who’s to blame for making you get off humping little boys.”

  Thoms’s expression remained flat. “You got your gun on me now, don’t you?”

  “Why don’t you try firing yours and find out?”

  “You get me, men who accompanied me here’ll get you.”

  “Chance I’m willing to take.”

  Now Thoms’s face did change, flashing doubt for the first time. Caitlin never took her eyes off him, waiting for the slightest flinch or shift that would tell her he was about to fire. His eyes would tell her first, though, one of Earl Strong’s first lessons.

  “Then what do you say we have at it, Ranger? Gotta warn you, though. It’s not gonna be like gunning down some loser in a high school.”

  “No, it’s not,” Caitlin said, lurching upward and upending the table over atop Thoms in the same motion.

  A gunshot rang out from his pistol, smacking into one of the still ceiling fans overhead. But Caitlin had already swung from Thoms by then, foot on the table to hold him in place while she spotted one of his partners hitting the floor with gun steadying.

  She fired four times, one of her bullets drawing a guttural grunt in the same moment a flicker of motion in the bar mirror gave up the second man lunging out in line directly behind her. Now it was Caitlin who dove, hitting the floor hard as his first bullets blew out the mirror and took a hefty complement of bottles for good measure. She got her gun sighted up on him before he could re-angle his down on her. Five shots fired in rapid succession that blew the gunman backward and spilled him over a table to the floor.

  But the first man she’d hit was stirring in the same instant Jalbert Thoms lurched to his feet. No way Caitlin could hit two men with one gun, instinct directing her to Thoms while she pulled herself across the floor, struggling not to let her jeans get stuck to the wood. Bullets whizzed by her as she fired at Thoms, in motion now toward the back exit and continuing to shoot a cannon-sized semiauto that blew divots of wood in all directions. Looked like a Brin-10 or Desert Eagle, packing the force of a shotgun shell.

  Caitlin heard the wispy clatter of his spurs and felt the spray of splinters shower her as the other man made it back to his knees. He was shaking too much from a chest wound to get his pistol righted, and Caitlin put a bullet from her SIG dead center in his forehead before he could get off another shot. Even then she was twisting toward the back exit, Thoms in her sights in his rush to the door. She had him, squeezing off a final shot that would blow him out of his shoes.

  Click.

  Her hammer fell on an empty chamber, magazine expended, the only other sound that of the back door slamming closed behind Jalbert Thoms.

  48

  HOUSTON, THE PRESENT

  Cort Wesley and Jones padded through the moonless night. The ground fog made for an added blessing, further disguising their approach from the street to the mosque entrance from anyone who might have been watching. They were dressed in black camo gear that included masks forming a tight fit over their faces. Their belts held flash grenades and Browning pistols, extra magazines, and additional sets of plastic cuffs. Their Kevlar vests were outfitted with slots for three refill magazines for the Special Forces model M4-A1 submachine guns slung from their shoulders.

  The door was already cracked open when they reached it with the M4-A1s steadied before them, courtesy of Paz no doubt since Jones’s intelligence indicated the entrance would normally be locked at this hour. Cort Wesley closed it behind him and turned the deadbolt into place. Then he and Jones moved out of the alcove into a hallway to find three of Paz’s Zeta commandos standing over ten men wearing traditional Muslim robes and skull caps, now bound and gagged but clearly unharmed. The Zetas wore no masks and the only one who acknowledged Cort Wesley and Jones pointed toward the door leading into the chapel itself.

  They entered to find Paz standing over the kneeling figure of the mosque’s imam while his remaining three Zetas stood watch over what Cort Wesley could only assume was the man’s family, four children and a wife, all lying prone with their faces pressed into the thin carpeting. The chapel was dark other than the spill of lights directly over the altar that rained down in a V-pattern, suggesting a descent from heaven. Paz had positioned the imam so he was kneeling in the very center of the light spill, his head bowed and eyes terrified when he peered upward.

  “Imam Mustafa and I have been getting acquainted,” Paz said. “Isn’t that right, padre?”

  The imam didn’t respond. Paz held no weapon, just his massive hands upon the holy man’s shoulders, the gesture tender and menacing at the same time.

  “We’ve been discussing the Koran’s view on fate,” Paz continued. “Most interesting but in conflict with my own experience. Tell them, padre.”

  “Insha Allah,” the imam managed hoarsely.

  “If Allah wills,” Paz translated.

  “Colonel,” Jones started.

  “According to the Koran,” Paz continued instead of letting him speak, “everything happens by the will of Allah or, as it is written, ‘Nothing will happen to us except what Allah has decreed for us. He is our protector.’ Have I got that right?”

  Imam Mustafa nodded, keeping his head bowed.

  “Nice lessons in that book of yours,” Paz said, patting him now on the shoulders instead of squeezing. “I especially like the one about peace. Goes something like, ‘If anyone slays a person, unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land, it would be as if he slew all people. And if anyone saves a life, it would be as if he saved the life of all people.’ How’s that, padre?”

  The imam nodded again.

  “Good. Then you won’t mind answering our questions, since they’re all about saving lives, will you?”

  A third nod, the most demonstrative yet.

  “That’s what I thought,” Paz said, hands like meat hooks clamped in place on the imam’s shoulders as he looked toward Jones.

  “Is there a secret basement under this building?” Jones asked the imam.

  A nod.

  “Are there men down there now?”

  A pause before the nod came, less surely this time.

  “Did anyone have time to alert them?”

  The imam shook his head.

  “Are they armed?”

  A strangely noncommittal nod that left Cort Wesley feeling something was off here, wrong and out of balance, but he couldn’t put his finger on what.

  “Do you know a cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki?”

  Imam Mustafa shook his head vigorously.

  “But you’ve heard of him.”

  A single nod.

  “Has he been here?”

  “No,” the imam uttered, speaking toward the floor.

  “Have you seen him in the area?”

  “No.”

  “How many men downstairs?”

  No response.

  “How many men are—”

  “Twelve,” the imam answered finally.

  “Take us to them,” Jones finished.

  49

  HOUSTON, THE PRESENT

  The stairs leading to the basement were contained beneath a false door built into the floor in the mosque library that smelled of old paper, mildew, and paste. Imam Mustafa pulled back a small but elegant rust-dominant rug, revealing a section of the wood flooring unmarred except for what looked like a black imperfection in the center. The imam fit a wooden arrow-shaped key into that apparent imperfection, twisted, and then hoisted the hatchlike entrance.

  “Down there,” he directed.

  “Lead the way,” said Jones.

  At the foot of the stairs, the walkway branched only to th
e right, lit by small overhead fixtures shedding dull luminescence. It was cool down here in stark contrast to the steamy night air outside.

  Imam Mustafa did as he was told, seeming far more scared of the four Zetas who had accompanied them down here, two remaining posted above, than the prospects of what was to come. The four Zetas fanned out forward, taking lead, with Paz immediately behind them and Cort Wesley bringing up the rear with Jones and the imam. For his part Cort Wesley remained leery each step of the way, expecting an ambush at every juncture of the corridor they were in. He’d taken his M4-A1 assault rifle from his shoulder as soon as he stepped off the ladder and hadn’t taken his grip off it since.

  He’d been expecting the firefight to begin well before they reached the heavy steel door that had come into view in the murky light ahead of them. But as of yet no gunman had appeared and Cort Wesley saw no sign of any now.

  “You don’t need your weapons,” Imam Mustafa said, and Cort Wesley felt again that something was out of place here, too many pieces that didn’t feel like they fit right.

  The imam continued on slowly, making no effort to flee or warn whoever might have been hiding in the unguarded room. A keypad was hidden in the wall on the right side of the door. The imam popped open the cover and keyed in an access code, Paz now pushing the elongated barrel of his submachine gun with sound suppressor affixed into Mustafa’s back, studying his every move.

  The door opened slowly, not with a whoosh but a grind.

  And the smell and feel of death flooded outward.

  Cort Wesley knew what awaited them before crossing the threshold: a dozen bodies, to be exact, lying on the floor. Neatly placed with their legs pressed together and hands cupped over their stomachs, the blood pools spread on the floor of the stench-filled room the only thing disturbing the otherwise placid scene.

  “Fuck me,” Jones muttered, surprise trumping his dismay for the moment.

  “You laid them out like this,” Cort Wesley said to the imam, realizing the dead men’s folded hands were smeered with blood, their fingertips having been sliced off to eliminate prints.

  Mustafa nodded. “Out of respect until they are removed.”

  “News flash, holy man,” Jones snapped at him, shining his flashlight over a series of divots and scratches on the cheap tile flooring. “Nobody’s coming back to clean up this mess. They’re gone for good, and they took their computers and whatever else with them.”

  “Their hands aren’t callused or rough,” Cort Wesley said after checking the mangled hands on a number of the bodies. “Their hair’s neatly cut and most are wearing wedding rings.”

  “Grunts,” concluded Jones. “Techies doing our real bad boy’s dirty work, until they outlived their usefulness.” He looked toward Paz. “It would seem your friend the imam knows more than he’s been telling.”

  Imam Mustafa shrank back toward the wall until a pair of Zetas blocked his path. “I provided them sanctuary, that’s all!”

  “It’s enough,” said Jones. “Makes you an accessory to whatever’s about to go down, Holy Man, and if I can’t stop it, I’m coming back for you.”

  “Come back, if you wish, but that does not change the fact I know nothing of what they were doing down here.”

  “But you knew the access code to enter the room,” Paz interjected, his shadow nearly swallowing the imam. “Three-one-eight-five.” He held his gaze on Mustafa as he continued, reciting. “‘Every soul will taste of death. And ye will be paid on the Day of Resurrection only that which ye have fairly earned. Whoso is removed from the Fire and is made to enter Paradise, he indeed is triumphant. The life of this world is but comfort of illusion.’”

  Cort Wesley and Jones looked at each other, then back at Paz.

  “A prophecy foretelling the End of Days,” Paz told them. “Section 3:185 from Surah in the Koran.”

  50

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  By the time she got home hours later, after filling out the paperwork with Captain Tepper hovering grimly over her desk, both Luke and Dylan were asleep. Luke had drifted off with a book in his grasp that she pried free and laid on his night table. As usual, Dylan had his iPod plugged into his ears and Caitlin eased the earbuds out to the soft din of the rap music she’d come to loath and didn’t understand for a minute.

  She resisted the urge to smooth Dylan’s hair, as she laid his iPod atop his spare pillow so he could plug it back in as soon as he woke up. She’d been through so much with these boys, especially him, but moments like this made them shrink by comparison, a fullness rising from her chest into her throat that was unfamiliar and pleasant at the same time.

  She padded back downstairs to the sound of the rocker creaking on the front porch and felt for her gun as she eased the door open.

  “We need to talk,” Cort Wesley said, holding the swing steady with his boot.

  * * *

  “We got ourselves a problem,” he continued, after she had sat down next to him, the swing still in the warm night.

  “We,” Caitlin repeated.

  “You, me, the whole damn country.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. That’s the problem. Let me tell you now what I couldn’t before, why Jones sprung me from that Mexican prison. There’s a homegrown terrorist cell plotting a major attack here in Texas, led by the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.”

  “I thought he was dead.”

  “You and me both. But it turns out he’s here, in the United States.”

  “You mean back in the U.S., since he’s American-born. His parents were from Yemen, but his father was a Fulbright Scholar who earned his doctorate here before taking his family back to Yemen. Al-Awlaki himself remained there for a dozen years before returning to the U.S. for college on a foreign student visa and a government scholarship since he claimed he was actually born in Yemen.”

  “So we paid for his education, that’s what you’re saying.”

  “And his public defender when he was arrested twice for soliciting a prostitute in the late nineties in San Diego.”

  “A true hypocrite.” Cort Wesley paused. “You pick this stuff up at Quantico?”

  Caitlin nodded. “We spent a whole week on al-Awlaki and the ideology he represents, not long before his convoy got barbecued in Yemen. Supposedly.”

  “Jones claims this plot of his could kill a million people.”

  Caitlin felt a chill in the night air. For some reason she thought of Dylan and Luke, sleeping peacefully upstairs. The swing started rocking back and forth, slowly, as if propelled either by the breeze or the nervous tapping of Cort Wesley’s feet on the porch floor.

  “We were supposed to take the cell out, with the help of Paz and the Zetas he brought along for the ride,” Cort Wesley continued. “Problem was we missed the party. By the time we crashed, al-Awlaki’s terrorists were already dead. Grunts, we figure, their service done and fingerprints sliced off for their effort.”

  “How many?”

  “A dozen. The attack’s coming real soon, that’s all we know. The homegrown Muslim radicals we found dead dropped off the face of the earth six months ago.”

  “People don’t drop off the face of the earth, Cort Wesley. They become somebody else so whoever’s looking for them won’t be able to catch…” Caitlin felt something clench inside her. “Uh-oh.”

  51

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  She told Cort Wesley about the car accident victim who had assumed the identity of Alejandro Pena about six months ago according to his driver’s license.

  “Fits the timeline perfectly,” he acknowledged. “He dies in this accident and the rest of al-Awlaki’s grunts get murdered in a mosque basement. Question being what does it all mean?” He studied Caitlin’s expression. “Next question being what else you’re not telling me?”

  “You really want to hear it?”

  “What do you think?” Cort Wesley asked her.

  * * *

  Caitlin told him all o
f it, going back to the hostage situation in Dylan’s school, to manning a desk during school hours, to the fishing trip in Baffin Bay that had ended abruptly aboard the Mariah. Cort Wesley looked at her in disbelief, shaking his head when she got to the part about the black barrels that had disappeared from the drilling site and Teofilo Braga’s potential part in it all.

  “So this pervert was working for Braga,” Cort Wesley said at the end, calmer than Caitlin had expected. But sometimes men like Cort Wesley Masters held their violence just below the surface where it could simmer until it boiled over.

  “I believe Braga’s intention was to warn me off.”

  “Maybe take advantage of the fact that you just got your gun back.”

  “Officially anyway.”

  “Guess he doesn’t know you too well.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’m just another obstacle in his life and he’s gotten all the other ones shoved aside.”

  “First time for everything, I guess.” Cort Wesley leaned back and cupped his hands behind his head, staring out into the night. “Know what? I think I’m gonna go check in on my boys.”

  * * *

  He stood in Luke’s doorway first, the boy looking so much older than last year, his hair the longest Cort Wesley had ever seen it. He was starting to look like Dylan and the boys’ mother, Maura Torres, more and more.

  “Fine boy, bubba,” Leroy Epps said, suddenly by his side. “And that Ranger gal’s doing a fine job raising him.”

  “There a point in there somewhere, champ?”

  “How’s it feel to be free?”

  “I’ll let you know when that’s truly the case.”

  “One of my true regrets is I never saw the outside again ’fore I passed. Didn’t think it mattered much, but in retrospect it sure does. That’s why I come around you from time to time. Get the feel of what I missed.”

  “Your children never came to visit you at The Walls, did they?”

  “I didn’t want them to, bubba. Not for their sakes so much as my own.”

  “Why do I think there’s a lesson in there someplace?” Cort Wesley said, Leroy Epps accompanying him to Dylan’s room where they stood in the doorway and didn’t enter.