Mind Bomb

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_021f62ae-b052-50cf-ad33-7e7f0f1c0a56)

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?”