The Gatekeeper, page 21
Weaver makes a sword of the knuckles of his right hand and drives it into Dez’s side.
Dez stumbles back, lightning rolling up and down his frame.
“Did you SCRAM the system?” Weaver asks icily. He dances and jukes on the balls of his feet. “Is the power plant operational?”
Dez’s voice sounds like that of an old man. He’s trying to get his lungs to remember how to inhale. “I scrammed … your mother.”
He’s trying to get Weaver angry again. A calm Weaver is much more dangerous.
“You killed one of my guys yesterday.”
“Aye.”
“Davies had a wife.”
“She coulda done better.”
Weaver moves in again.
Dez swings a couple of well-placed kicks. But Weaver is never where he’s supposed to be by the time the kick arrives. Dez grazes the man a time or two. That’s all. Weaver’s not just tall and well built, he’s fast as hell. And trained.
An elbow catches Dez in the clavicle and Dez smashes back against a plastic drainer of dishes near the sink. Everything goes flying, glasses shatter. Dez’s right arm goes numb.
Weaver dodges another kick and drives his knee into Dez’s stomach. When Dez doubles over, Weaver drives his elbow into his back.
Dez hits the floor.
Weaver kicks him in the gut and Dez rides the kick, rolls with it, gives himself some distance.
He’s on his feet but wobbly.
Weaver is, simply put, the superior fighter.
“Best … ye got?”
Weaver sounds fresh as a prairie breeze. “No.”
They plow into each other. Weaver dodges a high kick and a follow- up punch and a follow-up kick and drives his knuckles into Dez’s kidney.
Dez bounces off the fridge; knocks it askew.
Weaver moves in, aiming his boot for Dez’s knee and, for the first time since the fight began, Dez finally connects. It’s a short, swift rabbit punch into Weaver’s side.
They separate.
Dez goes to one knee but uses the table to right himself again, gasping, blinking sweat out of his eyes.
So far, he’s landed just one blow.
But that one broke two of Weaver’s ribs.
The big soldier starts to move in but his entire right side seizes up. He locks up, pain radiating when he attempts to inhale.
Dez gets a second shot in, going for the man’s jaw.
Weaver drops like an anchor. He tries to get up and Dez kicks him in the same broken ribs.
The kick is more than Dez’s damaged body can handle and he loses his balance, lands on his ass, gasping for breath, right arm numb, his back a growing knot of pain.
He leans back against one of the tables, wiping sweat off his face, breath ragged.
Weaver’s out cold.
Renata Esquivel and Mike Whitney find them like that, a minute after the sounds of the fight stop: Dez on his ass, slowly regaining his breath; Weaver unconscious.
Renata and Mike help Dez up. He groans like an old man. “Are you okay?” she asks.
“Not even a little.”
Renata finds an unbroken glass and brings him water. Dez says, “Ta,” and drains it.
Then he hauls off and kicks Weaver again.
“Hey, hey!” Mike waves him off. “C’mon. He’s down.”
“Tried kicking him when he was up,” he gasps, holding his side. “This way’s better.”
CHAPTER 63
Dez hurts like hell. And he’s tired. He can’t believe it’s Monday; it was Monday last when a tall, lovely woman stepped onto his elevator at the Hotel Tremaine. The weekend is almost a blur: finding the town, the Triton Expediters server farm, the military base, the Taser and the beating, the return to the server farm, the visit to the power station, the fight with Captain Weaver.
Hell of a week.
His side and his back and his legs ache from the beating he took. Captain Bart Weaver was, simply put, the better man in the ring. Dez barely laid a hand on him.
Good thing he has a hand like a car battery.
He raided the commissary at the nuke plant earlier that morning. They had aspirin and plenty of coffee. Enough to keep him going.
Dez drives an all-terrain three-wheeler with a tool wagon attached. He’s got the headlamp on, because the sun isn’t up yet and the ground only looks flat from a distance. When you’re rolling over it, it’s craggy and coarse with great gouges in the earth, waxy weeds as tall as his belt, and bits of debris. He’s driving carefully, slowly. Wouldn’t do to fall asleep and smash into a cactus.
He’s been aiming at lights for the last twenty minutes.
Around 2 a.m., Dez found a tall vertical hole in the Boca Serpiente Valley Nuclear Power Station grounds fence. Likely where the Army had made its incursion last week. He used the tools in the sled to widen the hole and got the ATV through, and has been driving due north ever since. The ocean’s on his left but too far away to see. The highway is on his right but too far away to hear. The stars above are bright. The lights ahead belong to a sprawling ranch house and an adjacent red barn and a small silo. Beyond all that is another fence, a civilian fence, wooden and hand-built, and beyond that are police cars and a couple of TV microwave trucks.
The sun will be up soon.
Dez is within forty meters of the house when the front door opens and a big man with an enormous belly steps out with a shotgun. He’s followed by five more adults. All of them are armed. Shotguns, rifles, pistols. They’d heard his ATV coming because sound travels forever on this land.
Dez parks directly in front of them. This hasn’t been a covert approach; he doesn’t want anyone mistaking that.
He shows them his hands.
Under the porch lights, the six people look haggard and angry. Dez recognizes the man who stepped out first. He’d seen him on television, holding the shoulder of a preteen boy while crying into the cameras.
After everyone’s had a moment to study Dez’s empty hands, he dismounts from the ATV saddle. He’s wearing a T-shirt and jeans, so no place to hide a weapon.
“Who’re you?” Joe Ryerson’s voice sounds like seashells cracking under your boots. The others stand, threatening but quiet.
“Desmond Limerick. You’re Joe Ryerson. Read about you.”
“What do you want?”
Dez leans his ass back against the ATV in a nonthreatening stance. “Friend of mine found out someone was using money stolen from her company to finance everything that’s going on in Sloatville and at the military base. She’s pissed off. Wants an end to it. I’ve been tryin’ to help her do that.”
“Why are you on my property?”
Dez says, “Tryin’ to end this thing. Told you. Think maybe you can help.”
The six people on the porch look down at him and wait. Joe Ryerson studies the newcomer, the three-wheeler, the attached sled with its tie-down tarp. “You bring me weapons?”
“I did not.”
“You bring us food or supplies?”
“No, sir.”
“Then why should I help you? Why should we help you?”
“’Cause I think you got played. An’ I think it might bring you a measure of closure to know why. An’ how. An’ by who. Whom. Sorry.”
Joe Ryerson watches him without moving. Dez waits.
Ryerson nods.
Dez rises off the machine he’s been leaning against. He shows his empty palms again. He moves to the sled and slowly unties the tarp. Slowly. Fatigued and frightened civilians with guns; that’s a recipe for accidental violence. Avoiding accidental violence in favor of well-planned violence is one of the things Dez is good at.
He steps back and takes the edges of the tarp and brings them together, the way you fold bedsheets. He does it again, and again, making a tight, neat little packet of blue tarp.
Joe Ryerson steps down off his porch and studies the body lying on the sled. It’s a man in Army fatigues. He lies on his back, legs straight, arms folded over his chest like a corpse on display for an open-casket funeral.
He has short hair and he’s clean-shaven. Even in the harsh yellow light from the porch, and the light gleaming through the living room windows, Joe can see that the upper half of the man’s face is tanned, the lower half pale. The tan line matches the beard line.
Joe notices the bandages on the man’s left forearm.
He sees, in his mind’s eye, a Detroit Red Wings cap.
He says, “Jonesy.”
The others step down now and surround the ATV and the sled. One keeps an eye and a Colt on Dez.
The people murmur.
Joe Ryerson turns to Dez. “Explain.”
“Captain Bart Weaver, U.S. Army, 75th Rangers.”
“His name is Jones.”
“His name is not.” Dez shrugs. “He has dog tags.”
Someone checks them.
“What happened to him?”
Dez lifts his own shirt and shows Joe the vampire bite marks of Captain Weaver’s Taser, plus the bruises from the fight at the power plant. “We tussled.”
Someone says, “He’s alive.”
Dez says, “Needed him alive.”
“I … Jonesy’s a traitor?”
“Captain Weaver’s a good soldier. I saw him standin’ behind you, on TV, the day your missus passed. My condolences for your loss, Mr. Ryerson.”
Joe studies Dez without the slightest hint of emotion. Those reservoirs were used up days before. Joe’s been running on muscle memory and slowly diminishing momentum.
“He was assigned t’your ranch by the bastards behind all this. He was the starter pistol.”
Someone says, “Starter pistol?”
“Dunno if you’re trackin’ what’s going on out there. Town’s filled up with anarchists, white supremacists, neo-Nazi types.” A couple of guys grumble but Joe Ryerson just watches Dez. “The death of your wife, shot in the back, was the incitement they needed. Patriot Media kept everything at a boil. The guy in charge of Joint Base McKinzie-Clark’s got men loyal to his particular madness, ready to roll. Men like Captain Weaver, here. Jonesy. They tried to take over the nuclear power station tonight, t’use it as a threat.”
Joe watches him awhile. Everyone waits for Joe to make the call. Joe says, “Tried?”
Dez shrugs. “Stopped ’em.”
“How?”
“Convinced a good man to hit the kill switch and eliminate the threat of the power plant melting down. With that threat gone, the real military can deal with Joint Base McKinzie-Clark and the mad monk who runs the outfit. I took Patriot Media an’ its founder off the air. This whole plot’s dead in the water, only the folks in town and the soldiers at the base don’t know it yet.”
He waits.
“Jonesy wouldn’t kill my wife.”
Dez thinks about it a minute. He’d love more coffee and a couple dozen more aspirins. “Heard the story on TV,” he says. “One of the ranch hands, Jonesy, found a dead calf. Your wife went to look. She ran into two soldiers who shot her in the back. Jonesy defended himself, killed the soldiers, told you all about it. Told the media.”
Joe Ryerson nods.
“You went out there? Nearer to the power station? Found your wife’s body?”
Joe nods.
“You find a dead calf, sir?”
Now the others are murmuring, glancing at one another. To the east, the sky is moving from indigo to navy, and overhead the stars are beginning to fade. Dez is beginning to fade. When this is over, he’ll sleep for a week.
Joe Ryerson says, “Jonesy?”
“That was his job, yeah. Light the fuse. Death of an innocent woman, shot in the back. Tell the media. Media tells the world. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people pouring into this county to defend you. Fella name of General Tancredi uses them, uses his loyal soldiers, to take the town, take the base, take the power station as a deterrent. Sets up his own little fiefdom. Hail t’the chief. But it all starts with Captain Bart Weaver shooting Molly Ryerson in the back. For the media.”
Nobody moves for a while. Nobody speaks. Dez aches. Captain Bart Weaver groans, his eyelids fluttering. After the fight, Dez had used the walkie-talkie at the main gate to tell the rest of the soldiers from the Humvee that the SCRAM switch—the power station kill switch—had been hit twenty minutes earlier. The station administrator, Mike Whitney, had been on the horn to the U.S. Department of Energy within seconds, using a secure line. Also the governor of California. He’d explained the whole thing to everyone who’d listen.
The other soldiers had no option but to call into Joint Base McKinzie-Clark for new orders.
Meanwhile, Dez sneaked out the back with a trussed-up Captain Weaver and an ATV with a sled.
From the beginning, when he’d asked Mike to bring him to the power station, he’d hoped it would be Weaver who made the approach. What Dez had in mind all along wouldn’t have worked without him.
The sky near the horizon takes on a bit of a reddish glow. A bank of low clouds to the east turns salmon and slate. Dez is facing west and Joe is facing east and Dez can see the first hints of sunrise reflected in the bloodshot eyes of the grieving widower with the Benelli 12 gauge.
Joe Ryerson says, “I been burning crops out here for twenty years. Rotating the fields. My burns never crossed into federal land. Never. The whole standoff. The threats. The … everything.”
“Yes, sir. Inciting incidents. They needed to get the ball rolling. None of this was of your making.”
“I never wanted any of this. Molly never wanted any of this. We wanted to be left alone.”
Dez juts his chin toward the wooden gate that the man and his wife built by hand decades ago. “Media trucks’re here. Fox, CNN, locals. Patriot Media, too, though I can’t tell how far they can broadcast.” He nods toward the slowly reviving body of Captain Bart Weaver. Now that the sky is lightening, everyone can see that Weaver’s wrists are tied together, his ankles tied together.
Joe looks at the shotgun in his hand for a good long while. Dez waits. Joe turns and sets the weapon next to the nearest wheel of the ATV, and swipes his palms against the thighs of his dungarees. Trying to get the gun oil off his hands.
“What do you want?”
“You wanted t’be left alone, sir. Your wife, may she rest in peace, wanted t’be left alone.” Dez nods toward the gate. “Tell ’em what happened. A week, maybe two, and everyone drifts away.”
Dez steps forward and offers his hand.
After a while, Joe takes it in both of his rough, calloused, farmer hands, closing them around Dez’s as if leading him in prayer.
“Tell the truth,” Dez says. “It’s the one thing them bastards never counted on.”
CHAPTER 64
Malibu Colony Beach, California
Monday morning, Petra Alexandris wakes up in her own bed.
She’d slept atop the sheets in her street clothes. Sleep being an optimistic way to think about the rough, listless night of blistering anger. She sits up, runs her hands through her straight hair. She reaches out of habit for the tablet computer embedded in her nightstand and presses a fingertip to the screen.
Normally, she would be able to bring up music, open the drapes, start the coffee. Start the hot tub, if she wanted. She’d be able to activate the massive, built-in TV monitor set to capture real-time statistics from the stock and money markets around the world. She’d have been able to make the smart-house dance a jig.
This morning, nothing happens.
Since being escorted to her house under armed guard, upon orders from Vincent Guerrero, late Sunday night, all of Petra’s personal household codes had been deactivated. Including the building locks.
Gilded cage.
She changes into togs, does thirty minutes of yoga, hoping it will dispel some of the pent-up anger and frustration. It doesn’t, but feels good nonetheless. She showers, making sure to keep her hair dry.
She slips on soft cotton drawstring pants and a tank and pads out to the kitchen.
She spots the roving guards outside the window. The men have been on rotation since she’d been whisked here by her father, Colin Frye, and Brittany Kinney. The coconspirators who had been using Triton Expediters’ money and influence to fund an armed coup, the goal of which, she now understands, is to create a small country on the Western coast of North America with unparalleled economic and military might.
She walks into the industrial kitchen expecting to find Alonzo, coffee brewing, chopping onions and jalapeños, wearing skinny jeans and looking fine. But Alonzo has been dismissed. Fired, to be exact. By her father, at the suggestion of Vincent Guerrero. Alonzo’s smart-home codes have been deactivated and he’s been banned from the grounds. That’s what her father told her. She wonders if it’s the whole truth.
A young female guard in a black suit speaks into a wrist microphone as Petra enters. “Secondary’s up.”
Secondary. She figured it out last night, that the guards refer to Constantine as Primary and to Petra as Secondary. Their jobs are to protect the primary asset. And to make sure the secondary asset does as she’s told and makes no trouble.
“Ma’am.”
Petra ignores her, gets the coffeepot going. Thank God you don’t need an eight-digit code for that, she thinks.
The security pad next to the kitchen door, which leads to the garage, blinks red.
The whole house is in lockdown. Petra has had no real understanding of how reliant she’s become on the Triton computers that run, well, everything.
Petra pours herself a cup of coffee before the machine is finished and doctors it with half-and-half.
Wordlessly, she pads out of the kitchen and heads to the private office. Her private office, or so she’s imagined.
Her father stands in the Spartan office, a smart-house tablet computer in hand, stabbing the screen with a nicotine-stained finger. The monitor is recessed into a wall and, when off, almost perfectly resembles the walls around it. Now it’s been activated and shows a soccer match. The audio is off. The chyron in the lower-left corner says halftime of a nil-nil tie, Liverpool vs. Havana.
