Strong Light of Day (22 page)

“This isn't a normal run, son.”

“Then what is it?” Cort Wesley asked, his eyes tearing up as his hand rubbed his cheek, which felt numb.

“That don't concern you.”

“If it concerns you,” the boy started, “it—”

He stopped when Boone Masters raised his hand again.

“That's better, boy. What I always tell you?”

“To keep my dick in my pants and tongue in my mouth.”

Boone looked down in melodramatic fashion. “Well, one out of two ain't bad, I guess. Now get yourself up in the truck bed, back under the canvas where nobody can see you, and pretend you're not there,” he said, realizing Jim Strong had said almost the same thing to his daughter last week in Houston. “It's like you're on the same wavelength as that girl.”

“What girl?”

“Caitlin Strong.”

“Who?”

“Never the fuck you mind.”

“Dad—”

“I can't hear you because you're not there.”

Boone waited until Cort Wesley was safely hidden back in place and then approached the perimeter of the warehouse complex along a natural culvert dug out of the ground. He hopped the fence—fortunately not electrified or topped with barbed wire—and moved close to the big doors Kasputin's thugs were hoisting open to off-load the washers, dryers, and refrigerators he'd boosted over the course of the last month. And he got close enough to see what was inside.

“Holy shit,” he muttered to himself, already wondering what Jim Strong was going to make of this.

*   *   *

“Say that again,” Jim requested, after Boone Masters had explained what he'd spotted in Anton Kasputin's warehouse.

“I didn't want to waste your time. Come on, Ranger, I did you a favor here.”

“That what you call deviating from my instructions?”

“Since when do I take orders from you?”

“Since you got your son jammed up. Do we really need to go over that again?”

“I suppose not.”

“Then just tell me what you saw in that warehouse. And it better be good or your boy will be in custody before the day's out.”

“Shelves and shelves of tanks, laid out as far as the eye could see,” Boone told him. “Looked something like scuba tanks, except they were marked ‘Propane.'”

“Propane,” Jim Strong repeated thoughtfully.

“Mean something to you?”

The Ranger nodded. “That natural gas shortage the country's been experiencing has led to a panicked surge of propane sales. Definitely a good idea to stockpile it, if you can.”

“Bullshit,” Boone said, stopping just short of rolling his eyes. “You don't believe it's really propane in those tanks, any more than you believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.”

“I've got my issues with the bunny, but Santa's real as rain. But you're right, Masters. I don't believe for one second it's propane those Russians got tucked in those tanks.”

 

47

M
ARBLE
F
ALLS,
T
EXAS

“Okay, so what really was in those tanks?” Cort Wesley said, when Jones finished his tale.

“Maybe I'm not ready to tell you yet.”

“Maybe that's because you don't know, and that's what you planting a bug in Gribanov's office was all about.”

“Except, according to you, Gribanov's dead now.”

Cort Wesley finally called the waitress over and ordered the chocolate cream pie. It was a few minutes after five o'clock, but she told him she'd honor the happy hour special anyway.

“Okay,” he said, once she'd left with his order in hand, “let me see if I've got this right. The Cold War heats up at the same time Gribanov and his Russian thugs show up in Texas under the auspices of the KGB. First order of business was to wipe out Stanko and his boys. That was to give him the cover he needed, right? One set of gangsters replacing another.”

“Warm, cowboy.”

“A rivalry maybe? Two warring Soviet factions facing off, with only one left standing?

“Cold.”

“Maybe Stanko or somebody on his crew couldn't be trusted.”

“Warm,” Jones said, drawing the word out by slurring the
m.

“Maybe word was one of them was talking to the cops.”

“Warmer.”

“Or Texas Rangers?”

“Hot as blazes,” Jones told him. “Jim Strong was called in when one of Stanko's lieutenants got pinched for statutory rape. I think the girl was fifteen. Anyway, the guy's looking at twenty years in Huntsville and starts singing up a storm. So our favorite gunfighter's dad enlists your dad to do some infiltration for him. The way such things were done in the old days. You really don't remember any of this?”

“I remember stowing away in his truck that night, but that's about it. It was right after he quit drinking, not long before he took sick,” Cort Wesley related. “Best memories I've got of the son of a bitch.”

“Never knew he was a genuine hero, did you?”

“You still got some blanks to fill in that regard, Jones, starting with how you knew I was there that night.”

“I got my sources.”

“You expect me to buy that?”

“Let's table that for another day,” Jones said evasively.

“The answer have anything to do with how this all ended back in eighty-three?”

“That's classified.”

Cort Wesley couldn't believe what he was hearing. “My father involved in something that was classified?”

“It appears he never shared that part of the story with you, either.”

“Only thing he shared was his right hand when we got home, to thank me for riding along in the truck bed. And it wasn't too long after that he went into the hospital and never came out.”

Jones's expression fluttered, his eyes uncertain for a moment, until he slipped back into the guise he wore like a second skin.

“He didn't take sick, did he?” Cort Wesley challenged. “Something else put him in the hospital.”

Jones played with his fork, remained silent.

“Oh, and by the way,” Cort Wesley continued, “he made me ride home under the same canvas in his truck bed that night. I damn near froze to death.

Jones wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Get back to the Gribanov murder.”

“More like an execution,” Cort Wesley told him. “He and the thugs I remember from yesterday killed in identical fashion, pretty much, their bodies arranged like they were getting ready for a birthday party.”

“What's that mean?”

The waitress set two pieces of chocolate cream pie in front of Cort Wesley and he went to work on the first with his fork. Jones gave him a longer look, suddenly more interested in Cort Wesley than the second piece of happy hour pie the waitress had just set down before him.

“It means that somebody killed four guys, weighing in at a half-ton, combined, as easily as most men comb their hair.”

“Wait a minute, you think it was
one
shooter?”

“He's a hell of a lot more than just a shooter, but yes, that's what I think.”

Jones nodded to himself, gritting his teeth and weighing the prospects of what Cort Wesley had just said. “Bad to worse.”

“There's more,” Cort Wesley resumed. He told Jones about the map with circled areas visible only under ultraviolet light. “That means something to you,” he said, studying Jones's reaction when he was done.

“It does, cowboy. It means plenty,” Jones said, sighing in resignation, as if prepared to say something he hadn't been before. “Anton Kasputin survived his final run-in with your father and the Rangers, and he never did leave the country.”

“That a fact?” Cort Wesley said, swallowing his first mouthful.

“He just became somebody else: Alexi Gribanov.”

 

48

M
ANHATTAN,
K
ANSAS

Beriya stood in the shadows cast by the streetlights dotting the campus of Kansas State University. He leaned against a tree, fighting the temptation to light a cigarette, which might reveal him to a passing student or a security officer making his rounds. It didn't matter so much now as later, after the explosion, at which point the last thing he wanted was anyone to randomly recall his presence.

Before him, through the trees, he could see lights flickering in the windows of Pat Roberts Hall. The people behind those windows would be dead in mere moments, too, along with Beriya's primary targets, since death doesn't discriminate among its victims, especially in the kind of blast he'd wired in a basement sublevel.

Campus security procedures being what they were, everybody used swipe cards to access every building. The right one could pretty much get you inside any place you wanted to go, and finding one had been as simple as pretending to have dinner in the nearby Sale Barn Café. There, Beriya had spotted a woman wearing the uniform of a Kansas State security officer, seated at the counter, and he had followed her out of the café once she'd finished her meal. But he didn't approach until she was behind the wheel of her truck. He was smiling and friendly, knees crimped and shoulders sagged to disguise his true height and size.

“Say, do you know where I can find…”

Beriya didn't remember he rest of what he said; he honestly didn't. Could be, in a sleepy town like Manhattan, Kansas, they hadn't even found her body slumped across the front seat yet, much less noticed that the swipe card was missing from her wallet.

Cards belonging to such officers normally accessed all buildings on campus, and Kansas State was no exception. A single swipe, with his face steered away from the security camera aimed down at him, was all it took to get him inside Pat Roberts Hall and then the basement. Accessing his actual target inside would have proven far more problematic, so Beriya opted for a strategy that took that into account.

The entire process had taken a mere hour, and then he emerged into the night and made his way to the cover of these trees to trigger the blast. A safe distance from both the shock wave and the debris field, which likely would be quite large, given the power of the shaped charges he'd set. He held the detonator in his hand, reliving the moments that had made him the man he was, freezing them in a mind that considered all the kills that defined his very reason for being to be the same. The victims lacked any discernible features, since Beriya had no recollection of what the killers of his father looked like anymore.

In those final moments before he triggered the blast, Beriya was a young man again, serving with the OMON forces, short for Otryad Mobilny Osobogo Naznacheniya, commited to salvaging as much as they could of the crumbling Soviet Union. His father, a decorated colonel, had pulled strings to get Beriya assigned to his unit during the Latvian revolution of early 1991. He was just twenty years old and Riga was his first real posting, his first exposure to genuine violence, as the crumbling Soviet Union made a last-ditch effort to hold on to whatever it could. Beriya hardly saw the point of futilely trying to hold things together. But men like his father stubbornly, arrogantly, refused to let go, especially with a general's posting in his immediate future.

When the Riga revolutionaries known as the Popular Front erected barricades in the streets to further rally the people, Beriya's father saw his opportunity to cement his status by crushing them and launched an attack on the Latvian Ministry of the Interior on January 20. The revolutionaries proved far better armed and more skilled than anticipated and a fierce battle erupted. Though severely outnumbered, the elder Beriya refused to let his troops withdraw. Beriya himself was wounded in one of the exchanges and watched helplessly from behind a pillar as the mob descended on his father like crazed dogs and literally tore him apart.

Beriya never turned away, not even once, feeling his sadness and desperation recede behind a curtain of obsession and desire for cold vengeance. He watched the horror, making sure to commit the faces of his father's killers to memory.

Beriya pictured the angry mob descending on his father, as he squeezed the detonator tighter in his grasp, moving his thumb over the activator at the top. He felt the warmth of the moment beginning to consume him, as time and space lost all meaning. In that moment he was twenty years old again and slumped behind a pillar with his own wound sucking the life out of him. Helpless to come to his father's aid, lacking the strength even to spray the crazed crowd with machine gun fire when his father's awful screams had finally stopped.

But Beriya did something else instead: he memorized the faces of his father's killers. And in the days, weeks, and months that followed, as the Soviet Union dissolved and OMON was disbanded, he learned their identities and tracked them down. Eleven men, Latvians who considered themselves heroes to their people.

Beriya couldn't just kill them; killing them, alone, wasn't enough. First they had to suffer, just as he had suffered, watching helplessly as his father was executed by an angry mob. So Beriya made all eleven men watch as he murdered their families—wives, sons, and daughters, mostly; parents in a few cases. Killing his final targets actually left him feeling empty in comparison to watching them suffer the deaths of their loved ones.

Ever since then, the work he did was all about trying to recapture the feeling of that day. Beriya understood he never would or could achieve that, but there were reasonable facsimiles. And the impunity with which he operated gave him license to dispense suffering on the same level he'd suffered, whenever possible. Like making an oligarch watch his son's freshly severed fingers pile up in a child's play pail.

It was the only thing that made Beriya feel alive.

And that's when he depressed his thumb, holding his breath instinctively as the first rumble sounded, like a lingering roll of thunder. Pat Roberts Hall on the campus of Kansas State University suffered no flame burst, initially, just a huge wash of ash and debris contained in a gray-black cloud as the explosion's reach stretched upward until it had captured the whole of the building in its grasp. There were no screams yet, nothing but a deafening roar preceding the blast's shock wave, and the flame spout that burst up from the cloud, as blinding as a flashbulb, seemed to suck the air out of the night.