Mind Bomb

The fawn-colored boxer lay forlornly, uncomprehending but inundated with his family’s sadness. Lyons dropped to his heels and scratched the boxer behind his ears. Lyons’s inner detective was not buying Maribel being radicalized over a single weekend while under the watchful eye of her aunt, much less at freshman orientation at the University of Northern Texas. The whole thing stank to high heaven. He sighed quietly at Kaliman. “Who’s a good boy?”

Kaliman’s docked tail twitched forlornly a few times as he licked Lyons’s wrist. Lyons nodded. “You and me both, brother.”

Blancanales looked over at Lyons. “Señor Irons, do you have any questions?”

Lyons and Blancanales had come to the Villas’ small farm posing as insurance investigators. One Latin and one Anglo fit the bill. A three-man team would have seemed too much. Schwarz was up in the hills with a rifle maintaining surveillance on the Villa farm and the two approaches to it.

An undertaker would have given his left testicle for the empathy and professionalism the Able Team leader exuded. “I know the state and local police have already done so, but with permission, I would like to see your daughter’s room. Of course you both are welcome to observe.”

Señor and Señora Villa looked at Lyons petting the family dog. Juanita Villa gave Lyons a tremulous smile. “Of course.”

Rafa Villa hung his head for a long moment. Lyons almost thought he had gone to sleep. Señor Villa raised his head and locked eyes with Lyons. “There is something I have not shown the federales.” Fresh tears spilled down the small farmer’s cheeks. “Something terrible.”

Juanita’s head snapped around. “¿Qué, mi amor, qué?”

Rafa Villa rose without a word and walked down the narrow adobe hall to his daughter’s room. Lyons and Blancanales shot each other a look and girded themselves for the worst.

Señor Villa reemerged with an assault rifle. Lyons wasn’t a gun-bunny but he recognized the weapon as one of the relatively new Mexican military FX-05 Xiuhchoatls or “Fire Snake” rifles. The weapon was black and stubby like most modern military weapons. It was Mexico’s first indigenous assault weapon, and only issued to certain units. If you were found with one and not active in the Mexican military it was pretty much a summary death sentence. It was a very strange thing for a teenage Mexican girl to have under her bed. This example was distinguished by a having a nonmilitary-issue, twin-drum, 100-round Beta C-Mag.

Alarm bells rang up and down the Lyons’s spine.

Señor Villa was not carrying the weapon like a holy relic, or like a dangerous serpent involved in his daughter’s death. He carried it crooked in his arm, as if he was going duck hunting. Lyons shot to his feet. In the same motion his Python appeared with slight-of-hand suddenness. “Freeze!”

Villa didn’t freeze. He raised the rifle to his shoulder.

Kaliman lunged and sank his teeth into Lyons’s wrist. Lyons’s shot went low and wide left, and the pistol fell from his hand as Kaliman’s canines found his ulnar nerve.

Blancanales tackled Aunt Sofi off the couch.

Rafa Villa shot his wife in the face.

Blancanales struggled to draw but he was entangled in screaming Sofi. Villa swung his rifle onto Blancanales’s puppy-pile and strode over. Lyons heaved seventy pounds of snarling lockjawed dog into his arms and vaulted the couch. Blancanales managed to lash out with one foot to slam a stacked leather heel into Villa’s shin.

The assault rifle ripped a 20-round burst into the adobe floor a foot from Blancanales’s head. Lyons’s shoulder block hit Villa with every pound of his body and his canine burden behind it. The Villa patriarch went flying with his rifle stitching holes in the roof as he fell backward. Lyons and Kaliman fell on top of him. The boxer gave a muffled yelp but maintained his death grip. Villa struggled beneath them both. Lyons rose up on his elbows and slammed his forehead directly between Villa’s eyes. The Able Team warrior saw purple pinpricks around the edge of darkened vision with the blow.

Rafa Villa went limp.

Kaliman rolled an eye up at Lyons accusingly. He wasn’t letting go. “Damn it...” He’d drained his stun gun into Roble and hadn’t packed a spare power module. Lyons dug his left hand around Kaliman’s trachea, found the dog’s thudding pulse and squeezed off the canine’s carotids. “Bad dog, no biscuit...”

Kaliman’s jaws slowly relaxed in the strangle.

Blancanales rose with his pistol in hand. His face was bleeding in several spots from fragments of flying floor chips. He helped Sofi up. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.” Sofi glanced dazedly at her sister. “Is she dead?”

Juanita Villa’s head was road kill. Blancanales nodded. “Yes.”

Sofi lifted her chin toward Rafa. “Is he dead?”

“No.” Blancanales shook his head. “He’s—”

Sofi Valenzuela drew a Walther PPK from under her blouse and shot Rafa Villa. She calmly spun and shot Blancanales repeatedly in the chest until he fell. As she calmly raised the smoking pistol for the head shot on Blancanales, Lyons rose and shot-putted Kaliman. Kaliman met Tia Sofi like an eighty-pound sack of comatose canine potatoes. Sofi Valenzuela toppled back, ass over teakettle, over the couch wearing Kaliman like a dog feather boa.

Lyons followed his mutt-missile’s trajectory and vaulted the couch. He leg-scissored Sofi’s gun arm and snaked his arms around her neck in a sleeper hold. Lyons cinched down and performed his second strangle of the day. Kaliman raised his head from the floor and managed a hoarse growl. “Pol!” Lyons urged. “Dog! Dog! Dog!”

Blancanales rose shakily. He had taken six rounds in the chest, but the PPK’s caliber was small and his concealed soft body armor had held. Kaliman began lurching to his feet. Blancanales seized the boxer by his collar and docked tail. The hallway had a hardwood floor and he bum-rushed Kaliman down it, sending him sliding like a curling stone. Blancanales slammed the hallway door shut. Sofi sagged unconscious in Lyons’s embrace.

The front door smashed off its hinges. Schwarz swept the scene with the double muzzles of his M4 carbine and the grenade launcher slaved to the forearm. He scanned the room and saw family interview turned into an abattoir. “Clear?”

The hall door rattled on its hinges as Kaliman hit it, scrabbling and snarling. Lyons laid Sofi’s unconscious form out on the floor. This just wasn’t Able Team’s finest hour. “Mostly.”

“What happened?”

Carl Lyons took out a handkerchief and wrapped his bloody wrist. He was starting to develop a major headache from the head butt he had delivered. The only luck he’d seen today was that none of the major arteries were torn open. “Something messed up just happened.”

Schwarz looked at Blancanales, who mopped blood from his face and threw back his shoulders to stretch his aching chest. Lyons never showed it but from long experience Blancanales knew Lyons was as rattled as he was. “Carl isn’t kidding. This interview went from Twilight Zone to X-Files. Get the restraints and the heaviest sedatives we got for Señora Sofi. We need to get across the border with her ASAP.”

Lyons retrieved his fallen Python and began rapidly taking crime scene photos with his cell. The second piece of luck was that the Villa family farm was out in the boondocks. Third was that the rest of the family was out. A cold breeze blew through the Able Team leader. After what the Villa family had already suffered, coming home to this would be hell on earth. “I’m going to sweep the rest of the house for evidence. Get the señora in the car and concealed. I want to be out of here in ten and on US soil in thirty. Call Barb and tell her we have kidnapped a Mexican national and need our border crossing to be shit-through-a-goose smooth.”

Blancanales gazed down at the unconscious murderess and tried to fathom what had just happened. “And tell Barb we want Cal on this one. We need to interrogate this woman when she wakes up, but we’re going to need some subtlety.”

Lyons saw his role being reversed again. “You’re thinking I go hard, Cal goes soft?”

Blancanales nodded. “Yeah, and me observing, ideally unseen, if we can get a proper interview room.”

Schwarz pulled out his laptop. “On it.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Laredo, Texas

The FBI safe house was just about perfect. The Bureau kept it for running undercover stings. It was out in the sticks, and its main joy was that the little half bath off the living room had been faux walled off with a hidden door. It looked out on to the living room through what appeared to be an ornate two-way mirror. Lyons smiled. They had been serious about the war on drugs back in the eighties.

Schwarz sat ensconced in the hidden taping room with sound and video rolling. Blancanales stood beside him taking notes. Calvin James was the new factor in the equation. Blancanales was a psych-ops expert and Lyons an investigator, but James was the Farm’s number-one interrogator. He wore a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his tie loosened against the Texas heat. A pair of reading glasses he didn’t need perched on his nose. He wasn’t wearing a badge but even a cop would have taken him for a sympathetic law-enforcement officer trying to get to the bottom of a mystery. Lyons stood in the background like an angry stone Buddha.

Sofina Valenzuela looked at James in confusion and Lyons in naked fear. Able had kept her under heavy sedation until they’d reached the FBI sting house. Calvin James had flown in on a Farm-chartered private jet. While he had been in transit Able Team had left Señora Valenzuela alone and let her come out of the sedation naturally. For the past hour she had been in what Lyons could only describe as a fugue state. She looked like a woman who had slowly and painfully pulled herself up out of a deep, dark well and now found herself blinking into the noonday sun like a mole.

Lyons’s skin crawled. Everything about this op, since the first briefing at the Farm about the attacks along the border, had stunk; the problem was it was a smell he couldn’t put a name to, save one. Despite shooting her brother-in-law in the face and trying to kill Blancanales, Sofi Valenzuela smelled like a victim. As had her brother-in-law.

Lyons steeled himself to be the bad guy in a destroyed life.

“Where am I?” Valenzuela asked.

Calvin James opened a bottled water. “Are you thirsty?”

The woman focused on the water and spoke in a heartbreaking little-girl voice. “Please.”

Handcuffs at the wrists and ankles bound her to a heavy Edwardian chair. Lyons had a new stun gun in a small-of-the-back holster in case she pulled a Mexican Oak and snapped her restraints.

Calvin James cracked the cap on the water and held it to her mouth. She gulped half the bottle and leaned back gasping. “Why have you kidnapped me? We don’t have any money. It’s all in the land.” Lyons and Calvin shot each other a look. Valenzuela blinked again. “Where am I?”

“You’re in the United States.”

Lyons watched as she did the math, but it wasn’t the malfunction math of the Oak before he had gone all gift-of-emptiness. Valenzuela really just didn’t seem to get it. She flinched as the Ironman strode forward.

“Let me break it down for you.” Lyons held up a tablet and tapped the relevant photo file. It was the bloodbath at the Villa family farm. He brought up scenes of slaughter. “Your brother-in-law, Rafael, went to your niece Maribel’s room.” He rapidly swiped from crime scene pic to pic. “He came back with a loaded assault rifle, one with a 100-round drum. He shot your sister, the mother of his children, in the face five times.”

Valenzuela recoiled.

“Then he tried to shoot you and my friend. I managed to interrupt that. We thought it was over but then you drew a gun and shot your brother-in-law.”

Sofina Valenzuela’s face went slack. “I don’t own a gun...”

Lyons was relentless. “I could almost buy the heat-of-the-moment revenge angle, but then you turned and shot my friend four times in the chest. You were about to shoot him in the head, like you did Rafa. I had to beat you with Kaliman and choke you out. The story of the slaughter is all over Univisión. You are a missing person, considered kidnapped, which you are, and the federal police have an APB out for you.”

Valenzeula looked like she was about to throw up.

Lyons stared down at Sofi like an angry Old Testament God of the Desert with no sense of humor. “You’re telling me you don’t remember any of this?”

She shook like she might fly apart. “No...”

“Yes, you do.”

“I don’t know who you are!” The woman was close to losing it. “I don’t know what you are talking about!”

Lyons loomed in. “Yes, you do.”

Valenzeula squinted and cringed again as if she was staring into the sun. Her voice came out in a little-girl whimper. “My head hurts.”

People who had been choked out often had terrible headaches, but Lyons had put Valenzuela in a strangle. It was a relatively quiet go-to-sleep; some people actually found it refreshing.

Calvin James raised an eyebrow. He spoke sympathetically. “Señora Valenzuela? Do you suffer from migraines?”

“No.” The woman winced. “But my head, it hurts...”

“Do you tolerate aspirin?”

“I prefer ibuprofen...”

James reached into his medic bag and shook out a pair of pills. Lyons noted James’s sleight of hand and saw that one was a Valium. Calvin fed the woman the pills and helped her drink the rest of the water. “Rest for a few moments.”

James inclined his head for a private powwow and the two warriors stepped into the kitchen. “What do you think?” Lyons asked.

“If you hadn’t told me you were there? I’d believe her.”

“If I hadn’t been there? I’d believe her, too. Question is, Cal, do you believe the señora really doesn’t remember anything?”

James frowned and fished a water out of the fridge. “I don’t know her medical history, or if she or anyone in her family has any history of cognitive disorders. Of course, even if she did, she’s related to Rafa Villa by law rather than blood and it wouldn’t explain his behavior. She might have snapped from the trauma in the living room, gone berserk on everybody, and really doesn’t remember. Hysterical amnesia does exist, but it’s pretty goddamn rare, and none of that explains what she was doing with a concealed and unlicensed Walther PPK.”

“It’s louder than a rape whistle,” Lyons suggested. “And more effective.”

“I got a steak dinner that says when I ask her about the gun she says she’s never seen it before, and I’m betting she says she’s never fired a gun in her life.”

Lyons found himself agreeing. “So what do you think?”

“Positively anomalous. I want to give the Valium a few minutes to calm her down and start in again. Let me lead off, and don’t come in hard unless I give you the signal.”

“You got it.” Lyons reached into the fridge for a bottled water and vainly wished it was beer. His tablet beeped. Kurtzman appeared inset in the top right-hand corner of the screen.

Lyons tapped the screen. “What’s up, Bear?”

“Given all the weirdness I decided to keep an eye on you.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I couldn’t get an NSA satellite since you fellows hiding out in the Lone Star State under the aegis of the FBI was a low priority and not worth the hassle.”

Lyons was pretty sure he had a glimmer of what was coming. “But?”

“So, I’m spending a little observation time on a DigitalGlobe private satellite that’s supposed to be working on precision agriculture imaging in your neck of Texas. Akira hacked me in.”

“Nice, so what do you see?”

“You’re about to have company.”

“How much company?”

“Three vehicles. SUVs. They appear to have light bars on top.”

Lyons tapped his screen and spoke to Schwarz in the hidden bathroom. “You hear that?”

“Yup, any police chatter that could be relevant to us?”

“Not on our end. Bear?”

Kurtzman shook his head. “I suggest you assume they are hostile.”

“ETA?”

“Five minutes or less, and unless they’re on patrol or a picnic the only thing at the end of the road is you.”

“How’d they know we’re here?”

“No idea. Possible tracking device on Valenzuela?”

“Gadgets?” Lyons asked.

“I didn’t detect any on her when we took her. Nothing in the house has been or is giving off a radio signal.”

Lyons smiled ugly. “So someone tattled.”

James checked the loads in his HK .45. “And that someone could only be FBI.”

Blancanales spoke over the link. “If these guys are law enforcement, good or bad, there’s a million ways this goes wrong.”

Lyons made his battle plan. “Cal, get Valenzuela secured in the cellar, then come back, stay in the house and cover our six. Pol, you and I are going to meet and greet outside. Gadgets, stay concealed. You’re our ace in the hole if they assault the house.” Lyons went to his gear bag as his team moved. “Jack? We have a situation.”

“So I hear.”

“What’s your ETA?”

Grimaldi had Dragonslayer parked at the Rancho Blanco private airport, clear on the other side of the Laredo metropolitan area. “I can be there in ten flying low and skirting Laredo city airspace. Fifteen if you want me armed.”

“We got about five before they show. Arm up.”

“Inbound.”

Lyons clicked a drum magazine into his shotgun and set his gear bag out by the front door. The ranch house was adobe, which was good for stopping bullets. The front porch was about five feet above ground level and had a nice three-foot-solid running adobe rail save the opening for the stairs. The FBI house was a semidecent little fortress as things went.

Lyons set his shotgun against the porch rail and pulled up a rocker. He hooked his boot under the weapon so that he could flip it up into his hands. Pol came out to join him a moment later. He took a seat on the other side of the stairs to form a cross fire on the frontage and set his carbine out of sight. Calvin James spoke low through the open door. “Valenzuela is secure in the cellar. In position. I have eyes on the road.”

“Copy that.” Lyons saw dust rising in the distance. “Here they come.” A Chevy Suburban materialized out of the heat waves distorting the access road. It was followed by a second and a third vehicle. They weren’t shiny, armored cartel toys. To Lyons’s eyes they looked like well-used-and-abused unmarked law-enforcement vehicles. He and Blancanales watched as the lead vehicle pulled up within twenty meters. The second two broke out to either side and hung back about another ten meters. They’d formed a wedge. Men began spilling out. They wore khaki pants and blue windbreakers, and most sported cowboy hats. The majority appeared to be Latino. All of them had olive-green Glock pistols in duty rigs.

Lyons subvocalized into his mike. “Bear, I don’t suppose you have enough imaging to read what’s on the backs of their jackets?”

“I wish.”

A short man jumped out of the lead vehicle. He doffed his white hat and mopped his brow. The man had gray hair and a perfectly manicured cop mustache. He resettled his Stetson and smiled. “Howdy!”

Lyons waved. “Hey, fellas! What can I do you for?”

“Name’s Ibanez, and I need to ask you a favor. By the way, what’s your name?”

“Favor?” Lyons shrugged. “Shoot.”

“Well, I need to ask you one question.”

“Ask away!”

“And I am begging you.”

“What is it?”

“Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

The man shook his head as if embarrassed by the question. “Tell me you don’t have a Mexican citizen in there being held against her will.”

Lyons cocked his head and shook it sadly in return. “Where are you getting your information?”

“Would you mind if I ask exactly who you work for?” Ibanez countered.

“Not at all, but you go first.”

“Mind if I take a look around?”

“Not at all. Show me the warrant.”

Ibanez frowned but his demeanor remained business-like rather than hostile. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist.”

Calvin James came across the com link. “I’m looking through binoculars. You can’t see it from your angle, but two of the guys, right-hand car, standing behind the driver’s-side passenger door? They have tattoos. On their necks. One’s a spider. The other I can’t quite make out, but I don’t think its regulation, either.”

Grimaldi’s voice and vague rotor noise came across the link. “ETA five, Ironman.”

Lyons smelled a siege coming on. “All right, Ibanez, but you ain’t making any friends, and my people are gonna want to talk to you.”

“Well, I do feel bad about it, and I know my people will want to talk to you after this, as well.”

“And you and I are definitely going to have a little talk.”

“I owe it to you.”

“Fair enough.” Lyons set his water bottle on a little wrought-iron table. He snapped his knee up hard and flipped the AA-12 into his hands.

Ibanez froze for one heartbeat at the sight and slapped leather for his pistol. Lyons cut loose. He put a long burst of CS projectiles into each vehicle on full-auto. Midtraverse he put one round into Ibanez’s chest, then dived through the door.

Blancanales was already through and kicking the door shut. “I hope to God these guys aren’t for real!”

Lyons reached for a reload. “I hope you’re right.”

Kurtzman spoke urgently across the link. “They’re pulling stuff out of the vehicles. Looks like long arms! I—”

“Shit!” James fired a burst from his submachine gun out the window and dived for the floor. “Rocket!”

Small arms began crackling and popping outside. Lyons heard the distinctive thud of an RPG launching off its tube and the hiss of the rocket motor igniting. He rolled behind the couch and covered his eyes and jammed his thumbs in his ears. By some miracle the rocket-propelled grenade hit the adobe of the doorjamb rather than the door itself. The house shook and windows shattered.

“Enough of this less-than-lethal shit...” The Able Team leader snapped in a drum loaded with lead.

James bounced up and dropped back down. “Rocket!”

Blancanales dived to put the kitchen between him and the blast. Lyons and James dived for the hall. The grenade hit the front door and it dissolved in an orange flash. Superheated gas and shrapnel expanded to fill the living room as the heat wash rolled through the house. Lyons sat up and yawned against the ringing in his ears. Schwarz spoke from his concealed position. He’d set up a small suite of minicams to watch the house perimeter. “You got twelve guys hitting the front, five more are breaking off and flanking for the back.”

“Copy that, Gadgets. Hold position, wait for the shot. Pol, don’t let ’em in.”

Lyons fired a burst around the hall doorway. About a hundred bullets seemed to bee-swarm back in response. He could hear coughing and ragged shouts in Spanish. Lyons knew a few words and none of it sounded police procedural.

Schwarz spoke again. “Grenade!”

A green metal baseball looped through the blackened, smoking orifice of the front door and clattered to the floor. Lyons snapped back around the hall door as the grenade whip-cracked and lethal metal fragments buzz-sawed everywhere. Bullets began tearing through the front windows.

“They’re on the porch,” Schwarz reported.

“Wait for the shot.”

“They’re at the back door,” Blancanales reported from the kitchen.

Lyons heard the floor vibrate with boots. Schwarz told him what he already knew. “They’re entering the house, front door and front windows.”

“Take them.”

Schwarz cut loose. The two-way observation mirror shattered. Schwarz had a 60-round, quad-stack magazine loaded in his carbine and he held the trigger down. He took the attackers by surprise and from the flank. Schwarz reaped them like wheat.

Calvin James had flown out for an interrogation rather than a firefight, but the ex-SEAL had packed an MP5 submachine gun just in case. He put burst after burst into the men in the windows. Lyons stayed on one knee and leaned around the corner. He had a straight shot at the back door. Blancanales had an angle on it with his carbine-shotgun combo. The door hammered on its hinges, but the nice boys at the Federal Bureau of Investigations had installed decent doors, and anyone pounding on it had to be standing on the narrow stair.