Mind Bomb

CHAPTER FIVE

Ciudad

Carl Lyons showered off the stink of sweat, gunpowder and CS. All their suspects save Ibanez were in the hospital or in custody. Other than re-invading Mexico, there was very little to do but wait.

Able Team was ensconced in a brand-new, mildly palatial house in a new Laredo suburb. Theirs was the only finished house on the block. The rest of the subdivision had yet to recover from the housing crisis. The Farm had picked it out and it suited Lyons just fine. If the enemy found them here something genuinely spooky was going on. Able had run into spooky before, but in the Ironman’s experience 99 percent of spooky involved ignoring the scary trappings, figuring the angle and then attacking. Lyons followed his nose and took a seat at the kitchen bar. Blancanales handed him a plate of steak rancheros and eggs with enough hot sauce to scar the colon of a normal man.

Lyons took a bite and grunted his appreciation.

His mood took away some of his enjoyment of the food. Lyons had been fighting his war for some time, sometimes in some very strange places under even stranger circumstances. There was that one percentile of spooky that refused to be explained. The Ironman had seen things explainable and otherwise that would haunt him to his grave. He took a meditative sip of his coffee.

He didn’t care for what he’d seen in the past forty-eight hours.

The laptop on the counter chimed. Lyons tapped an icon and Kurtzman popped up. Lyons shoveled down steak. They’d been idle for eight hours. “That was fast.”

“We got a lot of data to crunch still, but we have plenty you want to hear now.”

“What do we have on the khaki lackeys from the ranch house?”

“They’re Zetas.”

Lyons was confronted with a “two plus two equals five” situation. “Zetas?”

“Confirmed. All of them have records in Mexico. Some have sheets here. We have fingerprints and matching tattoos.”

“The drivers?”

“They’ve clammed up, but veteran Zeta wheelmen, all three.”

Lyons confronted the five-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. “Guillotine, Bowling Ball and their guys who hit us in the streets are all New Laredo.”

“That is correct.”

“Last time I heard, Zetas and New Laredo don’t get along.”

“They don’t. As a matter of fact they’re at war at the moment. The Mexican state police and military have made some high-level busts against the cartels this past year in Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and Coahuila. The Zetas, New Laredos and the Gulf Coast boys are all fighting to fill the void.”

“Doesn’t it strike you a bit odd that New Laredo tries to hit us. We hit New Laredo back, but it’s the Zetas that cross the border to come looking for us?”

“Tad bit,” Kurtzman admitted.

“What’s the story on Ibanez?”

“That’s Captain Ibanez to you.”

“What?”

“Oh, you’re going to love this.”

Lyons hated it when the Stony Man cybernetics genius said that. “What?”

“Captain DeLoran Desus de Ibanez. Webb County Sheriff’s Office. ‘DiDi’ to his friends and ‘the Double D’ on the street. Decorated veteran of twenty years on the force. Some people think he’ll make sheriff some day.”

If Lyons got headaches he’d have one. “So what’s he doing leading an army of Zetas in cop clothing?”

“Good question.”

“We got any FBI connection with Ibanez?”

“Webb County Sheriff’s Department works with FBI, DEA and ATF and every other acronym on a daily basis. Ibanez has worked over a dozen multi-jurisdictional task forces. It’s a tangle of red tape but we’re taking it from the latest and working backward.”

Lyons went back to the beginning of spooky. “How’s Miss Valenzuela?”

“Well...” Kurtzman’s craggy brow furrowed. “Cal tranquilized her to get her out of the house and to the hospital.”

“Yeah, and Ibanez, too. So?”

“She never woke up. She seems to be in a coma.”

“Whatever Cal hit her with would have been mild. He knows what he’s doing.”

“Yeah, he used ketamine, just enough to make her comatose.”

“Could she have had a bad reaction to it? Or a mix? He’d given her Valium earlier. She’d been freaking out pretty hard. Could she have been on something else, as well?”

“Blood test showed no known narcotics in her bloodstream. Just the ketamine and Valium. Both low dose. She should be sleeping like a baby, not totally unresponsive to outside stimuli.”

Lyons jumped forward in the timeline. “How’s the Oak?”

“El Roble died about an hour ago.”

Lyons felt a little bad about that. He’d never fried someone from the inside out before. “I didn’t think he’d make it.”

“There were anomalies.”

Lyons quirked an eyebrow. “Drugs in his system?”

“He tested positive for steroids, as you might imagine. It appears he was an occasional user of marijuana.”

“So what was anomalous?”

“His pupils were blown.”

Lyons considered that. “Trauma will do that to you.”

“But from what I read in your preliminary after-action, neither you nor anyone else hit him in the head.”

The Ironman considered Olivar’s robot walk and the things Able had done to him. “No, you’re right. No one hit him in the head. I electrocuted him, though. That’ll cross a man’s eyes.”

Kurtzman made a face. “Read about that, but the doctor said his pupils were blown and at the same time he appeared to be in REM sleep.”

“Rapid eye movement? How could he tell his pupils were blown?”

“Because his eyes were open.”

Lyons paused. “He was dreaming with his eyes open and his pupils blown?”

“He was also trying to talk but you’d fried his mouth and throat.”

Lyons painted the picture in his head. “That’s not creepy.”

“Horror-movie creepy, apparently. Despite his condition he nearly broke his restraints. The nurses went into complete freak-out and refused to tend him. The doctor in charge was literally about to call the Nuevo Laredo diocese to see if they had an ordained exorcist available.”

Lyons shoveled down more steak. Spooky was at 2 percent and rising but he wasn’t about to have the Farm work him up any silver bullets just yet. “So he died.”

“Yes, but not from the fluids filling up his lungs or the internal electrical burns. He didn’t wheeze or gasp or fade. According to the doctor he suddenly shut off, like someone turning off a light. He said you’d have to shoot someone in the head for them to die any quicker. He said working the ER in Nuevo Laredo he’d seen just about everything. Said he’d never seen anything like Olivar, from the moment he rolled in to the moment he punched out. The doctor sounded like a good man and he sounded genuinely shaken up.”

Lyons ate steak. “All right, until you get more on your end I’m thinking we are headed back across the border again, maybe if we—”

“Bastard!” An enraged voice boomed from the other side of the house. “I will kill you!”

Lyons checked the loads in his Python and scooped up his stun-light. He tapped Kurtzman’s window blank but left his own camera and audio rolling.

“Follow me.” Lyons followed the sound of thumps, bumps and profanity.

James stood in the hall by one of the spare bedrooms. “We got a live one.”

“What happened?”

“He came up from the transportation tranquilizer I gave him about an hour ago.”

“Blinking, mumbling and confused as I recall.”

“Right, but not like Valenzuela. More like he’s in some waking dream or coming off a bender. Then about a minute ago he woke up. And I mean snapped into awareness, found himself handcuffed to a bed and he is pissed.”

Lyons opened a chat window and texted Blancanales and Schwarz.

Prisoner awake. He’s seen me ’n Cal. Stay back unless called. Let’s see what Webb County Sheriff’s Department has to say.

Lyons and James strode into the room. Carl set the open laptop on a dresser to give the camera a good view of the prisoner. Ibanez lay spread-eagle on the bed. James had removed his scorched jacket and uniform shirt and dressed his burns. The captain had some pretty exciting blunt-trauma bruising and his eyes were still red and his voice hoarse from the gas. Despite middle age he was built like a boxer in training. Captain Ibanez was full-on Latino but he had a good-ol’-Texas-boy accent thick enough to cut a knife with. “And just who the hell are you?”

Lyons put a great big check by that and smiled. He took out his ancient detective pad and made a vaguely questioning circular motion with his pencil. “What? You don’t remember me?”

“Oh, I am gonna remember you, asshole!” Ibanez snarled. “You have any idea who you’re screwing with?”

Lyons spent a long infuriating moment searching his eyebrows for the answer. “Webb County Sheriff’s Department?”

Ibanez smiled pure hatred. “That’s right, smart guy, and you are so dead.”

Lyons lifted his chin and turned his head to the right and then the left. “You sure you don’t remember me?”

“I’ve put away more scumbags than I can count, but I’d remember you from a lineup.” Ibanez glared bloody murder at James. “And Super Fly over there.”

James grinned at Lyons. “Called me Super Fly!”

“Up yours.”

The Phoenix Force pro was smiling but he and Lyons exchanged a look of agreement. Spooky was at 3 percent and rising. Lyons spread his hands and kept his tone mocking. “This morning? Half a platoon of Zetas? RPGs? Grenades? Kidnapped Mexican nationals? Me shooting you in the chest twice? None of this ringing a bell?”

The captain’s eyes flickered down to his scorched and bruised chest. For a heartbeat Lyons saw pure confusion before Ibanez snapped back to rage. “I don’t know what’s going on here or what your beef is...” Ibanez’s voice dropped low. “But best you kill me, Sunshine.”

Lyons waved his pad. “Nah, think I’ll burn you a steak instead. You like hot sauce, Captain?”

“Screw you! Webb County always pays its debts!”

Lyons picked up his laptop and followed James out. Ibanez shouted after them. “Dead! You’re dead! That goes for you, too, Shaft!”

James grinned happily. “Called me Shaft.”

Lyons wasn’t in a laughing mood. “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.”

James’s amusement faded. “This is messed up.”

They went back to the kitchen and Lyons tapped the video feed back to two-way. “What’d you make of that?”

“Well, if I didn’t know you’d been there personally, I’d—”

“You’d believe him. I know. What do you make of it?”

“Positively anomalous.”

“I keep hearing that word. I don’t like it.”

“You seem to keep running into this behavior on this one, Carl. What do you make of it?”

Lyons looked at James, who shrugged. “I’m going to give him a few minutes to calm down. Then I’m going to want to get a blood sample to run a full toxicological on him, then make an attempt at a real interview.”

“All right.” Lyons let his mind go detective again. He considered the known facts, and all he had was that almost nothing was known. He could work with that. “Bear?”

“Yes?”

“For the moment I am going to back-burner demonic possession.”

“Okay...”

“I need you to search databases, start with Homeland Security and the FBI. I need any suspected act of terrorism or a violent crime where the suspect was caught and denied all knowledge. I would be tempted to start internationally.”

“You know just about everyone says they didn’t do it, in every language.”

“Look for more than that, not just denial but denial of any knowledge, particularly if they got caught red-handed. I don’t care if it’s going to be a long night.”

Kurtzman rubbed his head at the enormity of the task ahead of him and his team. “You’re talking a long week, possibly a month.”

“I’ll give you a hint to narrow down your search. Look for anomalies and look for suspects who later went into comas, went crazy or died.”

The Repair Shop, Zurich, Switzerland

PIRMIN “THE WOLF” WOLFLI worked late into the night. There was nothing wolflike about him. He was short and pudgy. His bulging dome of a forehead, drooping jowls, pendulous ears and heavily bagged, sad-canted eyes made him more like a human caricature of an aged basset hound. Around the office people affectionately called him “Wolfie.” Behind his back less affectionate people called him “the Gnome.”

“The Wolf” was a sobriquet he had first earned long ago in what he warmly remembered as “The Swinging Seventies.” The nickname had been earned by his ruthlessness in hunting down his fellow man. He was in his seventies himself now and by his own admission not much was swinging these days. Wolfli was still a very dangerous hunter of humans; but rather than loping through the shadowy corners of Europe like a wolf as he had in his youth, he now plodded along like the hound he resembled, and used his very well-trained nose to ferret out his prey.

Wolfli let his juniors do the running.

His back office looked like a tiny eighteenth-century European salon. He hunched over his desk, peering through a flex-necked jeweler’s magnifying glass as he performed delicate surgery upon the innards of a 1978 vintage Rolex Sea Dweller diving watch.

Watch repair was a front, but Pirmin Wolfli was a genuine artist. He considered it occupational therapy. The craftsmanship, precision and rightness of a Swiss instrument gave him some hope that the human race was capable of doing at least one thing correctly. It relaxed him, and he was currently under incredible levels of stress. The little bell above his door rang and a tall, beautiful, blonde, buxom woman walked in.

Daniela Winter was his personal assistant both in the shop and in the Wolf’s other line of business. The Wolf took in her perfect carriage and her perfectly tailored charcoal pantsuit. Ninety minutes of a very strenuous style of yoga before dawn every morning and very subtle cosmetic surgeries over the past decade had left Winter at some un-guessable age ranging somewhere from a possible late thirties to an unthinkable fifty. She had once been runner-up in the Miss Switzerland pageant. Winter never mentioned it because it might give a clue as to her real age. The Wolf smiled. He was one of the few people who knew it.

“Pirmin.” Winter was one of the few people on Earth who addressed the Wolf by his first name, and only in private. She spoke in High German. “We have a problem.”

The Wolf gently lifted out a tiny brass flywheel and frowned at the corrosion. The old diving watch had salt-water damage. “I am beset by them.”

“I fear the Americans may have become involved.”

Wolfli set the tiny wheel on the felt in front of him. The operation he was currently running was the most delicate, dangerous and had the highest stakes of his career, and quite possibly anyone else’s on Earth. “Are you sure?”

“It seems very likely.” Winter made a face. “Ferraris thinks it is the FBI. Circumstantial evidence supports his idea.”

It was very likely that one day soon either Winter or Ferraris would inherit the Wolf’s position. Ferraris had the bad taste to be openly in competition for it and to make misogynistic innuendo behind Winter’s back. “Well.” The Wolf peered over his glasses. “Ferraris does bench-press more than you.”

Winter smirked.

“What do you think?” the Wolf inquired.

“It does not smell like the FBI.” Winter waved a casual hand. “To me anyway.”

The Wolf smiled again. Winter was from the central canton of Fribourg. High German was her first language but any Swiss who met her would laugh and say, “That one is Italian!” by temperament. Wolfli himself was from the southernmost canton of Ticino and he had grown up speaking Italian. Winter was the first woman the Wolf had ever recruited and trained. “And what is it that you smell, Dani?”

Winter’s nose wrinkled. “Cowboys.”

The Wolf nodded. The United States was an amazing place, and the FBI and CIA were marvelous organizations. The best of their kind in the world. However, during the seventies and the Vietnam conflict, and the eighties when their President Reagan had decided to win the Cold War, the prime of the Wolf’s fieldwork, the CIA had cemented its cowboy reputation among its fellow nations. It remained a nickname for them to this day in some circles.

The few occasions when the Wolf had been forced to take action against agents of the United States, either personally or by proxy, he had outmaneuvered and eliminated them with ease. They had never suspected him or even known of his organization, and he had left their superiors blaming the Soviets or other hostile players. The Americans were good, but in the Wolf’s experience few of them were chess players, and none were watchmakers. Of course, it was a relatively new century now and everything got better with practice. “CIA?”

“I don’t know. Ferraris described it as ‘renegade, but with extreme precision.’”

The Wolf snorted. Ferraris was a Geneva man and, as Swiss went, very French in style. “Surely you do not suspect private contractors?”

“I do not know. I cannot put my finger on it, but I do not like anything about what I am hearing.”

The Wolf sighed wearily. If the Americans knew what was really going on, all hell would be breaking loose. However, Hell’s fire and chaos appeared to remain confined in Gehenna, for the moment. This led him to believe that the Americans had stumbled upon the side effects. Nevertheless, he could not afford to have them bumbling around. A United States intervention could be catastrophic. The question was, like the watch in front of him, was it repairable?

“Where are these cowboys now?”

“Ferraris reports they have gone dark.”

“We know their line of inquiry?”

“Yes, in fact they were very useful in that regard.”

“They will reemerge. Pick your team. Have them standing by.”

“At once, I will—”

“Have Ferraris lead it.”

Winter controlled her facial expression but the room went as cold as her name.

“You will act as controller, in the field,” the Wolf concluded.

The room warmed a degree or two. Winter loved fieldwork, and field commander on an assignment of this magnitude was huge. However, putting Winter in charge of Ferraris hinted at a possible hierarchy to come. “As you say.” Winter lingered a moment by the door. “Pirmin?”

“Yes, my dear?”

“Do I have permission to exercise the fight-fire-with-fire protocol?”

The Wolf bent over his work. The die was cast. “Yes.”

CHAPTER SIX

The War Room, Stony Man Farm

Kurtzman and Huntington Wethers pored over databases based on Lyons’s search criteria. The initial search had brought up thousands of files. The obvious conclusion was that the world was a violent place. Kurtzman trawled North, Central and South America while Wethers worked North Africa and the Middle East. They’d been at it through the night. Akira Tokaido looked up from his workstation and laughed. “Data dump from Japan! Godzilla size! Who wants it?”

Wethers let out a long breath. “Sometimes, I hate him.”

Kurtzman stared at his vast folder of not much. Besides the recent attacks in Mexico, the Americas were yielding nothing save cartel killings and the usual South American sicko horror. The United States was loaded with anomalous killings, crimes and misbehaviors, but nothing quite rang true to Lyons’s criteria. Kurtzman smiled at his map. “I’ll take it.”

“Transferring now!”

Kurtzman watched file upon file descend upon him courtesy of the Farm’s resident young hacker. In Kurtzman’s experience a great deal of Japanese crime could be considered anomalous. They had a very different culture. Part of that culture was a code of silence when it came to violent crime. It was also an open secret that Japanese authorities cooked their books to make their nation appear to be a nonviolent industrious island paradise. Kurtzman sent the files to his main west screen of the drive-in-size monitor and hit his translation software.

Hunt Wethers tapped his display. “Here.”

“Where?”

“Israel. Haifa to be exact.”

A map of Israel popped up on one of Kurtzman’s auxiliary screens. He tapped a key and data scrolled wearing a frown. “The string of suicide bombings last week? Hezbollah claimed full credit. The Israelis are launching retaliatory air strikes as we speak.”

“Yes, but one of the attackers survived. The suicide vest failed.” Wethers looked over from his screen pointedly. “A teenage girl, off everyone’s radar until last week.”

“She claims she didn’t do it?”

“Full signed confession, save that the Haifa police had a file going and everything prior to her confession has been completely redacted.”

Kurtzman knew where this was going. “The Mossad took over the case.”

“Military intelligence took over the case,” Wethers confirmed. “And while it doesn’t say it in so many words, it sure smells like Mossad yanked the case from them.”

Kurtzman mulled that over. “Haifa and military intelligence.”

“You know something?”