The Investigator, page 35
“So can I.” Kaiser pulled the Explorer on to the shoulder, parked it, and said, “Let’s go.”
They ran.
They ran, jogged, and walked four and a half miles. Back in Washington, on her regular run, which was flat, Letty could do four and a half miles in a little over thirty minutes if she pushed hard. She and Kaiser took more than an hour and a half to run, jog, and walk the four and a half miles, mostly uphill, through the jammed-up cars, with the crowds trying to move on foot between them. At places, they were simply stopped, unable to push through. From time to time, they could hear gunfire behind them, the militia, they thought, still encouraging the panic. The sound of the ARs and AKs was punctuated by the BOOM of the .50-cal.
There was a crowd at the roadblock. As they came up to it, they were told that the police on the far side weren’t letting people through, apparently worried that some of the militia would try to get out that way.
At the roadblock itself, they found that the cops on the far side had made almost no progress in moving the palm trees off the highway. Letty and Kaiser walked around to the side, jostling through the crowd waiting there, into the headlights of a half-dozen Highway Patrol cars and a man shouting, “Hold it, hold it…”
Letty held up her ID case and shouted “DHS… DHS.”
A man, invisible behind the headlights, called in a Texas accent, “DHS? That you, Letty?”
* * *
They had radios, and the radio linked to the task force in El Paso. Letty told the task force about the trucks going out along the river, to the gun range.
“They must have a way out. You need to get somebody up in the air to look for them. I talked to a woman who said the track runs four or five miles along the river and then stops. There’s an arroyo out there that apparently blocks the road. She said you can’t get up the arroyo, but I’m not sure she knew what she was talking about. You need to put some helicopters out there with searchlights. You need to put medevacs over on the Mexican side, lot of medevacs, everything you got…”
“That’s under way. We saw the TV crew’s video of the bridge going down, the school bus, and you and Kaiser running across there…”
“Lot of hurt kids,” Letty said. “Some of them… they’re gone.”
“Ah, no.”
A second cop: “They’re all out of Pershing? The militia?”
“All of them,” Letty said. “Well. Except the dead ones.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Hawkes made it out.
When she saw the bridge blow up and the school bus go down, she abandoned Low, Crain, and Duran and ran down the hill to the dirt road, caught up with the last slow-moving pickup, banged on the door until the truck stopped, then climbed inside.
“Need to ride with you,” she said to the driver.
“Happy to have you.” He was from Michigan, his name was Carl Waltz, and he had a rough red beard. “Hope we can get out. I dunno…”
“We’ll be fine,” Hawkes said.
“The bridge went down…”
“Yes.”
“Think anybody got hurt?” Waltz asked.
“I hope not. That wasn’t the intention,” she said. That wasn’t her intention; she had no doubt that Low and some of the others had fully intended to blow the bridge with people on it, and no doubt that some had been killed. Low hadn’t told her in advance because he’d known she’d refuse to go along.
She’d gone along too many times, she thought now, nodding when she shouldn’t have, beginning with the killing of the two illegals in the desert. Nodding when the men had proposed the killings of the Blackburns and Winks. Sending Max Sawyer off to die…
For a good cause? She still thought so, but might there have been another way? One in which the Blackburns had been allowed to live? Winks… she didn’t care about Winks, she admitted to herself. Max Sawyer she cared about.
The pickups in front of them were running dark, barely visible in the thin moonlight, a loose caravan kicking up dust as they passed the gun range. They could see the truck in front of them bouncing over rough spots, so they could slow for them. Everything seemed to be working except… there were no trucks trailing them. They were the last in the long line and Hawkes kept looking back, wondering: Low in one truck, Crain and Duran in the other. They should be coming up from behind, but they weren’t.
They took twenty minutes to drive the five miles to the hole, the Arroyo Grande, where there was another ten-minute wait, the pickups slowly going over the edge, men getting out to look at the situation. When it came their turn to go over, Waltz said, “I dunno.”
One of the El Paso militiamen was standing on the edge of the arroyo, knocked on the driver’s-side window, and when Waltz lowered it, said, “You’ll be fine. No problems so far with trucks less good than yours. Don’t hit the gas hard going up the other side. Just drive up, you don’t want your wheels spinning.”
“Like I was on ice.”
“I dunno, I never been on ice. But glad you could make it, buddy,” the militiaman said. “Say hello to your folks back home. And take it easy, you got a valuable passenger there.”
Waltz took it easy, and they went down, over, and up. On the far side, they caught up with the end of the caravan and Hawkes said, “We should be good now. It smooths out.”
“I looked at the maps. I’d like to get on the interstate, but what do you think?” Waltz asked. “You’re the brains of this operation.”
“When we get up to that loop… the farm loop… we should keep going north instead of cutting over to I-10. If there are any cops hunting for us, that’s where they’ll be. The farm roads are fast enough and we get ten more miles in, there’s a whole network of roads, branches all over. Might not be the fastest, but it’d be the safest.”
“Safe is good for me,” Waltz said. “Think we made it on national TV?”
“Oh, yeah. Before we took the cell tower down, I talked to our intel guy in El Paso,” Hawkes said. “He told me we were on every network, all the time.”
“Hell of a thing,” Waltz said. “Hell of a thing. The Alamo.”
“You got our publication on what to do when you get home?” Hawkes asked.
“Yup. Makes sense to me.”
“Keep your mouth shut, and when people ask if you were here…”
“Smile.” He laughed, his head bobbing in delight at the thought. “So they’ll know, but they won’t know.”
“Use cash in the gas stations, stay off your credit card…”
“I got it,” Waltz said.
They drove on, and then Waltz, looking in his rearview mirror, said, “Look back there. A helicopter.”
Hawkes looked back, and she could see a brilliant light shining down on what had to be Pershing, a police helicopter with a searchlight. “Too late,” she said. “Too late.”
“Might not be looking for us,” Waltz said. “Might be looking at that bus.”
“Might be,” Hawkes said. She didn’t want to think about the bus.
* * *
An hour after they left Pershing, they hit the farm service roads. Most of the trucks turned to the right at the first state highway, heading toward an on-ramp at I-10. Hawkes pointed Waltz to the left, and, two hours after they drove out of Pershing, directed him onto a highway that went northwest into the backside of El Paso.
They made it into the city shortly before midnight and Waltz dropped her at the twenty-four-hour Walmart where she’d left her Subaru. They spent a minute pulling duct tape off his license plates, then she gave Waltz a hug and said, “Stay under the speed limit, take care, Carl. I don’t know your plans, but if I were you, I’d head on up to Albuquerque tonight…”
“I got it,” he said. “I’m going through Albuquerque all the way up to Santa Fe and then cut cross-country back home.”
“Maybe I’ll see you up there someday,” Hawkes said.
“Always got a place for you.”
* * *
When Waltz had gone, Hawkes got out her burner phone and tried to call Low, then Crain, then Duran, and got no answer from any of them. Something bad had happened, she thought. And maybe something bad should have happened, since Low had delayed the blowing of the bridge.
She got on I-10 a few minutes after midnight, pointed the car at Tucson, four and a half hours away. She’d find a motel there, with her new ID, get some sleep, change her hair color, and head north into the Rockies.
She had a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash, an AR and a Beretta, and a bottle of L’Oréal Paris Excellence Crème Hair Color in the Red Penny shade.
A new life coming up, a life underground.
Red hair and guns.
Made her heart beat harder.
* * *
By the time Letty and Kaiser got to the roadblock, the first militia trucks were turning onto I-10, streaming up toward El Paso, although some turned back toward Van Horn, planning to catch I-20 north toward Midland, or to simply stay on I-10 east.
The few available police and military helicopters didn’t make it to the Pershing area for more than an hour after Letty requested them and they found nothing. Police on the highway north of the roadblock managed to drag the palm trees out of the way, but it was more than three hours after the bridge explosion before the first police cars nosed into Pershing.
With directions from people who had stayed in town, the first cars carefully followed the dirt track to the gun range, and then on to the Arroyo Grande, where the cops saw the newly carved-out escape route. The police cars were too low-slung to follow past the arroyo, and it was the next morning before the first official truck covered the entire route out.
* * *
At the roadblock, a highway patrolman told Letty that they’d been told to get her and Kaiser to the El Paso command post.
“We got stuff in Pershing, at the motel…”
“When we get through the roadblock, we’ll collect it for you,” the cop said. “For now, I’m running you up to Van Horn, where a helicopter will pick you up. They don’t want to land here on the highway—too iffy.”
“I’m a mess,” Letty said. She plucked at her torn blouse, a hole big enough to expose her entire shoulder.
“That’s true,” the highway patrolman said. “But you might be the only person who cares. You two are sort of a big deal, whatever you look like.”
As they got in the backseat of his patrol car, he grinned and said, “Buckle up.”
Her father had warned Letty against going for rides with highway patrolmen. “When it comes to driving, they’re a little… out there, I guess you’d say. ‘Fast’ isn’t good enough for them.”
Driving to Pershing from Van Horn had taken Kaiser an hour. The trip back to Van Horn took a little more than forty-five minutes. Letty suspected her fingers had made permanent grip holes in the seat in front of her. A version of the Black Hawk military helicopter was waiting at the Hampton Inn parking lot off I-10 in Van Horn, and a half-hour later it dropped Letty and Kaiser into the parking lot at the FBI headquarters in El Paso.
Two FBI agents, one male, one female, walked out to meet them and take them inside. “Got a pretty large contingent of brass hats in here… Got some questions,” the female agent said. She’d introduced herself as Lauren Fix.
The male agent said, “Saw you guys on TV running across the bridge…” His name was Rudy Fischer. “That was pretty heavy. We could see everybody crawling around the bus, then we lost the satellite feed…”
“You’ve got medevac people on the way, right?” Kaiser asked. “Lotta hurt people there.”
“We do,” Fix said. “We’re using everything we got to lift people out. Last count from the Mexican side is we have seventeen confirmed dead. At least thirty injured, some might not make it.”
“Ah, my God,” Kaiser said.
Letty, stone-faced, said, “We knew that, didn’t we? We got their blood all over us.”
* * *
The Pershing task force was scattered around four conference rooms, but the main center was in what looked like a classroom into which somebody had carried all the cafeteria tables and chairs, if there was a cafeteria. Before they went in, Fix asked Letty, “You want to… freshen up?”
“I’m okay,” Letty said.
“You’re covered with blood,” Fix said. “Your forehead is still bleeding.”
Kaiser: “She can wash her face later. We need to find out what’s going on. How many militia have you nailed down?”
“That might not be the best question to ask,” Fischer said. “Because I think the answer is not many.”
“Or even damn few,” Fix added.
* * *
When they walked into the task force center, the dozen people inside stopped talking and turned to look at them. A tall, square, fortyish man with a graying mustache said, “Well, you guys look like shit.”
Letty recognized his voice: “Didn’t have time to put on a dress.”
He smiled and said, in a dry Texas accent, “We’ve secured your rooms at the motel. We got the first cars down there a half-hour ago. There seems to be some issue about sheets and pillows.”
“Yeah. We stole them,” Kaiser said. He scraped two chairs around, and he and Letty sat down.
Letty: “How many have you rounded up? The militia?”
“Five, at this point,” the man said. “We are troubled by that. By the way, I’m Carter Walsh, I’m a major with the Texas Rangers. I was elected to run this show… Have you got anything new for us?”
Letty looked at Kaiser, who said, “We believe the militia was run by four or five people. One of them we killed up near Seminole, Max Sawyer. Of the other four, Jane Hawkes, who called herself Jael, got away, as far as we know… unless you guys got her?”
Walsh shook his head. “No. Not a sniff of her.”
Kaiser said, “The other three, Rand Low, Victor Crain, and Terrill Duran, are dead. Letty and I killed them as they were trying to escape after the bridge explosion.”
Walsh nodded. “We heard there were dead militiamen… apparently that TV crew has shots of the bodies. This is critical: Do you have anything more we can work with? Our well is running dry…”
Letty dug in her pocket and held up her phone. “Did you know that license renewal stickers have the tag numbers on them? We couldn’t risk pulling the tape off the plates, but I’ve got photos of the renewal stickers from sixty-two trucks. Not great pictures, but you can read the tag numbers.”
In the sudden hubbub, Walsh laughed and then said, “Ah, babe: you make my heart sing. And… please don’t shoot me in the balls. Please. And give me that fuckin’ phone.”
Letty poked a finger at him: “One more thing that I didn’t notice until after they took out the cell phone tower—all these guys were taking selfies. You know, themselves at the invasion, like with that mob that attacked the Capitol. When you locate these guys through the tag numbers, you gotta grab their phones. Immediately. They’ll hang themselves with their selfies. A lot of them took their masks down while they were taking them.”
Walsh: “You’re… You guys… I had no idea what you could do. Senator Colles told me, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. Selfies. Jesus H. Christ!”
* * *
In the next hour, highway patrol officials began compiling names and addresses linked to Letty’s renewal sticker photos. The process was all computerized and didn’t take long. Many of the suspects lived in El Paso or within a few miles of El Paso; many of those who didn’t would still be on Texas highways. The patrol would coordinate early-morning raids by a task force of state and local cops to grab all the suspects simultaneously, and to seize their phones.
Letty and Kaiser were hit with a barrage of questions from Walsh and the others—agents from the FBI, the ATF, even an officer with the Army’s CID. The Army officer told them that the young captain they’d spoken to, Colin, used Letty’s iPhone photo to identify a soldier who Colin believed had stolen the C-4. “That’s not certain. We’re working on it. He’s a guy we’ve suspected was involved in black-market activities, selling stolen government equipment. But he’s good, so we haven’t been able to catch him at it.”
At eleven o’clock, Letty and Kaiser were faltering in their responses: they’d been asked too many repetitive questions. The news from Pershing wasn’t getting better: there were now eighteen confirmed deaths, and there were still seriously injured people awaiting transport to El Paso hospitals.
Letty got to an empty restroom, locked the door, stripped down, and took a sponge bath with paper towels. Her clothing was in shreds, but Fix, the FBI agent, was close to her size, and went to her apartment and brought back a pair of jeans and a blouse that fit well enough.
“Nothing we can do about the rust-colored gym shoes,” Fix said, shaking her head. “If I was wearing those shoes, I’d cut off my feet.”
Letty smiled for the first time that night.
* * *
At midnight, as Hawkes was getting in her Subaru at the Walmart, a few miles away, Senator Colles walked through the task force door, dressed as though he was on his way to a dinner in his honor. He shook hands with Kaiser, slapped him on the back, then gathered up Letty for a major squeeze.
“Okay, guys…” He put her down and looked around. “Who’s Walsh?”
Walsh lifted a finger and Colles said, “Let’s send these two off to a motel to get some sleep. We gotta lot of stuff to do tomorrow. Every network in the country wants them for the morning shows. We need them looking good…”
Letty said, “Aw…” and Kaiser said, “I need a haircut.”
“We want you just like you are,” Colles said, rubbing his hands together. “We can do a lot of good tomorrow. Good for our border policy, good for our relationship with Mexico…” He turned to Walsh: “Hey: did you guys catch this Jael person? Hawkes? Last I heard, you hadn’t…”
