“How do you think, outlaw?” Paz said to him, leaving it there.
“Right,” Cort Wesley said, stretching a hand out toward the paneled wall, where it met the glass. “Just what I was thinking.”
And with that, he pulled the fire alarm.
79
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“You won’t find this village or the tributary off Lake Anjikuni on any map,” Pierre Beauchamp continued. “In the spring of 1931 the remains of the village were bulldozed, buried under tons of earth and ice, all trace of anything that had ever been there wiped clean.”
Caitlin continued to regard him from the other side of Captain Tepper’s desk, the two of them standing and facing each other across it.
“And the villages for maybe fifty square miles were emptied,” he continued, “their residents resettled elsewhere, on orders of the government, without explanation. It wasn’t hard to cover things up in 1931.”
“But what were they covering up, besides old Inuit folklore?”
“We caught the Russians sniffing around the area a few years back.”
Caitlin nodded. “I had my own run-in with them not too long ago.”
“So I heard. I’d say Texas seems to attract this kind of stuff, but as I recall, you dragged it with you to Canada and got me shot.”
“I didn’t drag anything with me, Mountie; the Hells Angels were waiting when I got there. Get back to those Russians.”
“It was close to being a diplomatic fiasco, and we didn’t get a thing out of them before the powers that be arranged for their safe passage home.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Wish I was. That’s what put the now missing village and Joe Labelle on my radar.” Beauchamp stopped, as if to study Caitlin across the desk, but it was more to steady his thinking. “Something killed those Inuits as they ate, sat, or stood, and I think that same thing is responsible for the victims found in that Austin diner. And, whatever it is, what’s left of ISIS has come out of their desert to claim it for themselves.”
Caitlin was about to respond, then realized that her silenced phone was buzzing up a storm in her pocket. She yanked it out, saw CORT WESLEY running down the center maybe a dozen times, a single text message grabbing her attention.
“Looks like ISIS isn’t coming, Mountie,” Caitlin told Beauchamp. “They’re already here.”
PART EIGHT
Retired Ranger Captain Frank Hamer (who brought down Bonnie and Clyde) wrote a letter to King George V of England offering the services of 49 retired Rangers to help defend England against German invasion. Although FDR vetoed the idea, Germany got wind of the offer and panicked. In a radio address, Third Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels assured the German nation that the mighty Texas Rangers were not invading. (September 16, 1939)
—Bullock Texas State History Museum, “The Story of Texas”
80
HOUSTON, TEXAS
Cort Wesley and Paz reached the lobby with Cray Rawls in tow, just as the evacuation of the building was peaking. The fire alarm continued to blare while building security made a concerted but calm effort to evacuate according to plan. There was no panic in evidence anywhere as the two men escorted Cray Rawls, between them, across the floor.
Cort Wesley’s gaze was primed for anyone probing or scanning the crowd. They’d likely come in the guise of first responders, so their actions wouldn’t particularly stand out. They would look like part of a larger operation connected to the sniper firing from a neighboring building. It was the way such things were done, the way he’d do it.
But there was nothing that set Cort Wesley’s defenses screaming—no glimpse of any figures out of place or moving against the grain, no one studying the building occupants as they emerged into the sunlight. That suggested that the sniper had been the operation rather than just a part of it. Even the best shooter couldn’t be expected to bring down four men from such a distance. That told him that the presence of Cort Wesley and Paz likely had nothing to do with Sam Bob Jackson’s brains getting plastered against the walls, with Cray Rawls’s sure to have followed, had Cort Wesley not intervened.
Cort Wesley watched Paz moving as if he expected—even hoped for—something to happen. But, with Rawls tucked between them, they exited into the harsh light and thick, still air without encountering any resistance at all. The fact that the building from which the sniper had fired looked down on the back of this building but not the front allowed them to skirt through the milling crowd unhindered and without slowing. Paz’s truck was parked closer than Cort Wesley’s, so they headed toward its position, a half block down, the sun just beginning to encroach on the shade in which Paz had parked it.