Mind Bomb

Kurtzman looked away. “I got nothing.”

“Give me and Able a decent cover. Pol takes lead. I want Gadgets on our six in the background. Me and Pol? Our cover won’t have to last more than forty-eight hours but I want it pretty solid, enough to fool a grieving family and any local police.”

Kurtzman saw his solution within seconds. “I’ll have Barb work it up and get you documents, IDs and cover files via courier.”

Lyons nodded and rose. “I’m in a car.”

Ojinaga, Chihuahua

LYONS STOOD TO one side leaning against the family room wall and watched Blancanales work his magic. His partner wore his sixth-best tropical-weight suit and looked exactly like a senior insurance investigator. He exuded paternal concern for the distraught family as he interviewed them. Blancanales didn’t have to fake it. Neither did Lyons. In his own days as a police officer he’d been given the terrible task of informing families many times. Lyons grimaced internally. They meant business when they said there was nothing worse than seeing your children leave the world first.

The Villa family had been destroyed.

For a father of six, Rafa Villa had only just turned forty. His red-rimmed eyes looked a thousand years old. Señor Villa’s shoulders sagged as though they held the weight of the world. His wife, Juanita, cried so hard as her younger sister Sofi held her that her tears might make Jonah build a second ark.

Their daughter, Maribel, had just turned eighteen this month. She had graduated at the top of her class at the private Catholic school her parents had scrimped and saved to send her to. The pretty young girl with glasses and black hair that reached her waist had won a foreign student scholarship to the University of Northern Texas. Her declared major was Library and Information Sciences. Her dream was to be a head librarian somewhere in the United States. Two weeks ago she had gone to Texas for college orientation with her aunt Sofi as her chaperone. Maribel had come back with a somewhat geeky but very earnest blond boy and fellow freshman Todd Potter from Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, who’d texted her surprisingly not bad love poetry.

One week ago to the day Maribel had strapped on a suicide vest of TNT cylinders. The cylinders were wrapped with plastic sheeting containing nuts, bolts and ball bearings. The homemade shrapnel had been coated with rat poison to facilitate uncontrollable hemorrhaging in the victims. Security camera footage showed Maribel Villa stepping into a crowded cantina in Ciudad Juárez, during the lunch rush, yanking off her raincoat and pulling the rip cord fuse. Maribel had killed six people, seven including herself. Two of them had been children. She’d severely injured eighteen others.

It was utterly senseless. During her short life, Maribel had never left Ojinaga until her short trip for initial orientation and dorm assignment at UNT. There was no evidence of her having any political leanings whatsoever. Maribel’s three great passions in life appeared to be classical Spanish literature, the Ojinaga municipal library where she worked after school, and her dog, Kaliman.

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.”