Don Pendleton - Mind Bomb

Lyons took a bite and grunted his appreciation.

His mood took away some of his enjoyment of the food. Lyons had been fighting his war for some time, sometimes in some very strange places under even stranger circumstances. There was that one percentile of spooky that refused to be explained. The Ironman had seen things explainable and otherwise that would haunt him to his grave. He took a meditative sip of his coffee.

He didn’t care for what he’d seen in the past forty-eight hours.

The laptop on the counter chimed. Lyons tapped an icon and Kurtzman popped up. Lyons shoveled down steak. They’d been idle for eight hours. “That was fast.”

“We got a lot of data to crunch still, but we have plenty you want to hear now.”

“What do we have on the khaki lackeys from the ranch house?”

“They’re Zetas.”

Lyons was confronted with a “two plus two equals five” situation. “Zetas?”

“Confirmed. All of them have records in Mexico. Some have sheets here. We have fingerprints and matching tattoos.”

“The drivers?”

“They’ve clammed up, but veteran Zeta wheelmen, all three.”

Lyons confronted the five-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. “Guillotine, Bowling Ball and their guys who hit us in the streets are all New Laredo.”

“That is correct.”

“Last time I heard, Zetas and New Laredo don’t get along.”

“They don’t. As a matter of fact they’re at war at the moment. The Mexican state police and military have made some high-level busts against the cartels this past year in Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and Coahuila. The Zetas, New Laredos and the Gulf Coast boys are all fighting to fill the void.”

“Doesn’t it strike you a bit odd that New Laredo tries to hit us. We hit New Laredo back, but it’s the Zetas that cross the border to come looking for us?”

“Tad bit,” Kurtzman admitted.

“What’s the story on Ibanez?”

“That’s Captain Ibanez to you.”

“What?”

“Oh, you’re going to love this.”

Lyons hated it when the Stony Man cybernetics genius said that. “What?”

“Captain DeLoran Desus de Ibanez. Webb County Sheriff’s Office. ‘DiDi’ to his friends and ‘the Double D’ on the street. Decorated veteran of twenty years on the force. Some people think he’ll make sheriff some day.”

If Lyons got headaches he’d have one. “So what’s he doing leading an army of Zetas in cop clothing?”

“Good question.”

“We got any FBI connection with Ibanez?”

“Webb County Sheriff’s Department works with FBI, DEA and ATF and every other acronym on a daily basis. Ibanez has worked over a dozen multi-jurisdictional task forces. It’s a tangle of red tape but we’re taking it from the latest and working backward.”

Lyons went back to the beginning of spooky. “How’s Miss Valenzuela?”

“Well...” Kurtzman’s craggy brow furrowed. “Cal tranquilized her to get her out of the house and to the hospital.”

“Yeah, and Ibanez, too. So?”

“She never woke up. She seems to be in a coma.”

“Whatever Cal hit her with would have been mild. He knows what he’s doing.”

“Yeah, he used ketamine, just enough to make her comatose.”

“Could she have had a bad reaction to it? Or a mix? He’d given her Valium earlier. She’d been freaking out pretty hard. Could she have been on something else, as well?”

“Blood test showed no known narcotics in her bloodstream. Just the ketamine and Valium. Both low dose. She should be sleeping like a baby, not totally unresponsive to outside stimuli.”

Lyons jumped forward in the timeline. “How’s the Oak?”

“El Roble died about an hour ago.”

Lyons felt a little bad about that. He’d never fried someone from the inside out before. “I didn’t think he’d make it.”

“There were anomalies.”

Lyons quirked an eyebrow. “Drugs in his system?”

“He tested positive for steroids, as you might imagine. It appears he was an occasional user of marijuana.”

“So what was anomalous?”

“His pupils were blown.”

Lyons considered that. “Trauma will do that to you.”

“But from what I read in your preliminary after-action, neither you nor anyone else hit him in the head.”

The Ironman considered Olivar’s robot walk and the things Able had done to him. “No, you’re right. No one hit him in the head. I electrocuted him, though. That’ll cross a man’s eyes.”

Kurtzman made a face. “Read about that, but the doctor said his pupils were blown and at the same time he appeared to be in REM sleep.”

“Rapid eye movement? How could he tell his pupils were blown?”

“Because his eyes were open.”

Lyons paused. “He was dreaming with his eyes open and his pupils blown?”

“He was also trying to talk but you’d fried his mouth and throat.”

Lyons painted the picture in his head. “That’s not creepy.”

“Horror-movie creepy, apparently. Despite his condition he nearly broke his restraints. The nurses went into complete freak-out and refused to tend him. The doctor in charge was literally about to call the Nuevo Laredo diocese to see if they had an ordained exorcist available.”

Lyons shoveled down more steak. Spooky was at 2 percent and rising but he wasn’t about to have the Farm work him up any silver bullets just yet. “So he died.”

“Yes, but not from the fluids filling up his lungs or the internal electrical burns. He didn’t wheeze or gasp or fade. According to the doctor he suddenly shut off, like someone turning off a light. He said you’d have to shoot someone in the head for them to die any quicker. He said working the ER in Nuevo Laredo he’d seen just about everything. Said he’d never seen anything like Olivar, from the moment he rolled in to the moment he punched out. The doctor sounded like a good man and he sounded genuinely shaken up.”

Lyons ate steak. “All right, until you get more on your end I’m thinking we are headed back across the border again, maybe if we—”

“Bastard!” An enraged voice boomed from the other side of the house. “I will kill you!”

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?”