Mind Bomb

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.”