“Because plenty of the most effective drug therapies are, at their core, toxic,” Young Roger told him. “And the likelihood is that the Comanche developed a natural immunity and resistance to the toxic effects of this particular cuitlacoche. While this strain might kill anyone exposed to it in concentrated forms, like the people in that Austin diner, it extended the lives of these Comanche to a dramatically quantitative degree and basically eliminated cancer from their existence.”
“So Native peoples have been eating this shit since the time of the Aztecs.” Jones nodded. “Only, not all of them lived forever and, last time I checked, they never created a weapon of mass destruction. One of you want to try telling me what’s different here?”
“I believe I may have an idea,” said Pierre Beauchamp of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
94
BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS
Dylan stroked Ela’s hair, continuing to say anything that came to his mind, in the hope she’d open her eyes again. When she didn’t, he just kept stroking, speaking, and hoping.
He wished he’d never taken that damn Native American studies class, wished he’d never met her or got involved in all this.
What was I thinking?
He wasn’t. Again. Dropping out of school, temporarily or not, to take part in an adventure for a greater cause that had turned out to be a crock of shit. He was only here because he was part of a grand scheme that Ela had ultimately abandoned. But for some reason that didn’t bother him, beyond the fact that he’d let himself be played for a fool.
Again.
It was like he had “Sucker for Love” tattooed across his forehead. Was it really that obvious?
Dylan was a prisoner of his emotions, just as Ela was of her beliefs. In both cases, their vision had ended up skewed; they had seen what they wanted to be before them, instead of what was really there.
“We’re going to stop this,” he heard himself saying. “No one else is going to get hurt.”
He had no idea how the shit piled in that limestone storage chamber worked, only that it had to be the source of whatever Ela and the Lost Boys had really been up to—whatever the schematic, kind of a map, of some area of Houston was really about.
Dylan …
He heard his father’s voice in his head, wanted to tell Cort Wesley that he had been right all along and that Dylan only wished he could do it all over again.
“Dylan.”
This time the voice was accompanied by a gentle but strong grasp of his shoulder. He looked up to see Cort Wesley Masters leaning over him, eyeing Ela sadly.
“She’s dead, son.”
“I … think I knew that.”
Dylan retrieved the schematic, map, or whatever it was from the ground and extended it upward.
“What’s this?” his father asked him.
“You tell me, Dad,” he said, feeling the tears welling in his eyes. “But whatever it is, it’s not good.”
95
DALLAS, TEXAS
“Rawls pretty much confirmed my thinking when he finally came clean about the fact he’s there for water and not oil,” Pierre Beauchamp continued, inside the Black Hawk cabin, as they streaked through the sky toward Dallas. “That Inuit village where the residents all died was located on a volcanic plain, directly over a fault line, accounting for high acid levels from time to time in the river they drew their water from. Before I came down here, I did some checking and learned there’s a similarly ancient volcanic plane located in the general area beneath that Indian reservation as well.”
Probably right in the area of White Eagle’s patch of land, Caitlin thought, as Young Roger leaned forward.
“So you figure some portion of the aquifer feeding the reservation its water has levels of acidity comparable to this river,” he presumed.
Beauchamp nodded. “Corn wasn’t a staple of the Inuit diet; fish was. So, yes, I think the fish was contaminated with the very same toxin that killed all those people in that Austin diner. And since that area has been abandoned ever since, we have no way of knowing how often the toxicity has returned.”
“But like you said,” started Caitlin, “fish was as much a part of the Inuit diet as corn is for the Comanche on that reservation. But I’m guessing only a small portion of the cuitlacoche is affected when the contaminated water leaches upward. And that’s the portion that can be weaponized.”
“All well and good,” Jones noted. “But in case we’re forgetting, those folks in Hoover’s Cooking weren’t killed by accidental leaching. They were murdered, and in case you didn’t read the report, no trace of any such toxin was found in the remains of their food—either what was left on their plates or inside their stomachs.”
“That’s because it was gone,” Caitlin interjected.
“Ranger,” said Captain Tepper, holding his box of Marlboro reds in his lap, “if I weren’t strapped into this damn thing, I’d come over there and shake some sense into you.”
“Hear me out on this, Captain. It’s the only thing that makes any sense, the only explanation for how the waitstaff in Hoover’s was killed too, even though they didn’t eat or drink anything during the same period.”