Shaman Winter

  The ancestors had learned how to acquire the power inherent in the natural world, the energy of animals. People could enter the spirit of the animal to travel, to fly. Those with the power could penetrate the world of spirits, a reality that was as close as the outstretched hand.

  Now a parallel reality was coming into being. Cyberspace and its cyberdream. Reality, like DNA, twisted and took new forms, and dreams sometimes became nightmares. Either way, he had to learn how to enter his dreams.

  But to enter dreams one needed a guide. Was Cyber to be his new guide? A child would lead him?

  “We’re home,” Lorenza said.

  Sonny looked up. “Ah, yes, I was thinking,” he said, putting aside his books and notes. “If I had known how to use the computer when I was composing my family tree, it would have taken me half the time.”

  “True,” Lorenza replied, “but the books you took to bed are a warm comfort. A keyboard and a blue monitor? I don’t know.”

  They laughed and went inside, where Rita was waiting. Over lunch they told Rita about Cyber. They were just finishing when Cyber called.

  “Mr. Baca, Cyber here. I’ve got some stuff. I ‘visited’ the Los Alamos parallel system. There’s a mountain of info on the nuclear stuff. I don’t have time to break it down. So I looked into your man, Leif Eric? I found out where he lives, how much his salary is, where he buys his toilet paper, when and where he flies out of here, transfers to other places from Albuquerque, et cetera. He flies a lot to Washington, D.C. I thought I should look for a pattern, as you told me. He fights with his wife. Police were called to a family fight one time. Other people in some of the offices gossip about him, and I found some of their e-mail messages. Not nice. He’s a tyrant, they say. Some call him crazy. Imagine, a man in charge of a place that makes bombs and all sorts of other weapons, like laser guns, is crazy. By the way, did you know that recently a very bad accident has happened? Someone was killed at the labs, and they’re trying to hide it. I can dig into that if you like.”

  This kid’s for real, Sonny thought. “Later, right now focus on Eric.”

  “I pulled up his phone calls and made a complete list. One number is at the top. Fine, I thought. He calls the generals at the Pentagon. Oh, no, the number he calls the most is Intel in Rio Rancho. Not a general or the CIA.” He paused, and Sonny knew he was teasing.

  “Who?”

  “He calls a woman. Mona Vandergriff. She runs Intel, did you know that?”

  No, Sonny thought, I don’t know who in the hell runs Intel.

  “No reason for you to know,” Cyber continued. “I suppose the labs use a lot of Intel chips. Anyway, the second number he calls is her home phone. Unlisted of course, but I hacked Intel. They are really lax on their stuff. Even you could hack in.” Cyber laughed. “Just kidding, just kidding. So why does he call her at work and at home? I checked all his flights out of the Albuquerque airport. He stays overnight. He rents cars. As I compute it, he drives to Rio Rancho. Does he go to her office, or to her home? All visits are late in the day or at night. He’s regular as a scientist. Why did I spend the time on this? Because the FBI has Mona Vandergriff under surveillance. Does this help?”

  “It sure does.” Sonny breathed a sigh of relief. Was Leif Eric having an affair with the Intel CEO? If yes, what did it mean? And why would the FBI be tracking her?

  “What else, Cyber?”

  “I checked into Mona Vandergriff’s file. I’ve got her address if you want it.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Sixty sixty-nine Doña Caterina Court. Rio Rancho. And get this. She’s an expert marksman, and she’s met with the leaders of a militia group. That information was hard to get, but I guess she’s a member. I dug deep, but it’s a dead end. I also found something on the man Raven—”

  “Wait a minute. What about this militia group Vandergriff meets with?”

  “There’s very little on it. It has a code name: Doomsday. That’s all so far, but I can look some more.”

  “Be careful,” Sonny replied.

  “I will. Anyway, this Raven has many aliases. But who is he? And why does he appear in the Los Alamos files? Because he was working there—”

  “Repeat that,” Sonny said.

  “Raven worked in the Los Alamos Labs. He used the name John Worthy. He was a courier. You know? A guy who delivers messages.”

  “Worked for Eric?” Sonny whistled softly. It didn’t make sense. Cyber had run into the wrong name, he was confusing people. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. He had security clearance. He went all over the world before he was deleted. He was working in Russia on what seems to be a high-level mission, a big project between the Russians and scientists from Los Alamos. Raven, alias John Worthy, carried messages. Then he was deleted, which means his file is now in confidential files closed to everyone. They got rid of him a year ago.”

  “Hold on.” Sonny put his hand on the phone and turned to Rita and Lorenza, “Raven was working at Los Alamos up to a year ago. Can you believe that? He was a courier, so he was at the right places at the right time. When the Cold War ended, bombs were being dismantled all over the place. Last summer he appears as Anthony Pájaro, an anti-nuke activist. A Save the Earth ecoterrorist. We thought the truck he tried to bomb was just carrying low-level nuclear waste, but what if it was carrying something more dangerous? What if that was really the Avengers’ first try to create the catastrophe they’re looking for?”

  “So the Zia cult was just a cover-up,” Lorenza said. “He was using the women, using Tamara Dubronsky.”

  “The question is,” Sonny pondered, “why was he kicked out? Was there a parting of the ways? Raven has his own agenda, and that doesn’t include taking anyone’s orders.”

  “Or is it just another cover-up, and they’re still in it together,” Rita said.

  “Perhaps.” Sonny nodded. “Go on, Cyber.”

  “I also have something on the missing girls. But it doesn’t make sense. Their names appear in lab files.”

  “How?” Sonny asked.

  “Well, when I looked into Raven’s file, the names of the girls appeared. In Raven’s files he lists one as his first wife. There it is, ‘Consuelo Romero, wife.’ That’s the name of one of the girls you said was missing, right?”

  “Right,” Sonny replied, frowning. Just what in the hell was going on? Raven listing a Consuelo Romero as his wife?

  “I checked the Social Security numbers. They match. So I kept digging. Six months later there’s a memo. His first wife, this Consuelo Romero, dies. Raven, this John Worthy, remarries. He lists the name of the second girl as wife, Catalina Garcia. He even gives the addresses you gave me. So what does this mean?”

  Sonny shook his head and sagged into his chair. It just didn’t make sense. He felt Rita’s hand on his shoulder.

  “Qué pasa?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know—”

  Cyber continued. “He listed Consuelo’s name when his name first pops up at Los Alamos, summer 1992. That means that he knew then that he would later kidnap Consuelo. How could he know that? I don’t think so, so the other possibility is that he is now accessing the computer files and putting in information. But why? And Los Alamos has the best encryption and the best Net detectives around. I’m good enough to get through their codes but so can Raven? I figure he’s playing cat and mouse—and you’re the mouse.”

  “Yeah,” Sonny replied. Cyber had just put his finger on it. Raven knew what Sonny was doing. So he was playing games back, going into the Los Alamos files and entering data to shock Sonny, to throw him off guard.

  “Okay, that’s all I got for now.”

  “That’s a lot. Thanks, Cyber, you’ve been really helpful.”

  “I’ll keep digging.”

  “Be careful,” Sonny cautioned. He hung up the phone and related Cyber’s findings to Lorenza and Rita.

  “It doesn’t surprise me,” Lorenza said. “Raven the trickster loves games. He wants
you to know he’s one step ahead of you. You decide to look into his past, and he plants clues to surprise you.”

  “So he knows about Cyber. Is Cyber in danger?”

  Lorenza shook her head. “I don’t think so. Raven is focusing on the girls, on your dreams. The worst he can do is turn Cyber in for hacking, but that’s not his interest. Right now he needs one more girl.”

  “What about Eric and the woman?” Rita suggested. “He has family problems and he sleeps with his alter ego, a woman scientist who speaks his language. Does it mean anything?”

  “It does if she meets with the Doomsday group,” Sonny replied. “But why FBI surveillance? Does Paiz know?”

  “Raven can play games around the FBI,” Lorenza cautioned. “Just like he did up at Los Alamos.”

  “Yes,” Sonny agreed. “Raven is playing games with me, and playing games with his own bosses, the Avengers. And there’s not a damn thing Eric can do about it.”

  “They created a monster, and now the monster is loose,” Rita said.

  “Maybe Eric is an Avenger,” Lorenza said. “He hired Raven not knowing who he really is. Now Raven is using them.”

  “What now?” Rita asked.

  “Got to visit Mona Vandergriff,” Sonny replied, and picked up the phone.

  22

  Sonny called Mona Vandergriff’s office and tried his best to imitate Leif Eric’s voice when the secretary answered.

  “Good morning, this is Dr. Eric. May I speak to Ms. Vandergriff? I’ve developed a cold and I have to break our engagement.”

  “But Dr. Eric,” the secretary said sweetly, “you know Ms. Vandergriff has a D.C. appointment on her calendar. In fact, she told me she would meet you there.”

  “Ah, yes,” Sonny stammered. “My cold has wrecked my calendar. Thank you, thank you very much.” He turned to Rita and Lorenza. “She’s in Washington. Time to check out her place.”

  “What do you expect to find?” Rita asked.

  “A link to a militia group, then a link to Eric. Anything I can use to make Eric confess what he really knows about Raven.”

  Sonny really didn’t know what he would find, but if Raven was playing cat and mouse in the lab computers, and Eric was courting Mona Vandergriff, then he was sure there was a connection. Slim, but the only thing he had to go on.

  “Sonny, you’re playing with fire,” Rita cautioned him, touching him.

  “So’s Raven,” Sonny replied. “And we don’t have much time left.”

  Rita leaned to kiss him and take Chica from his lap, resigned to what he had to do. They went outside into a cool wind. Overhead, gray, driven clouds carried no moisture, but they presaged another storm.

  “Ten cuidao.”

  “You, too, amor.”

  “I’ve got Eddie Martínez protecting me,” she replied. She motioned to the red and muddied Jeep parked two houses down on La Paz Lane. Agent Martínez waved.

  Sonny acknowledged the greeting. “Good to see the Bureau is finally doing something right.”

  “He follows me like a dog. Comes into the café to eat, and does he eat.”

  Sonny looked at Rita. She was feeding agent Martínez? “Don’t feed him too well,” he mumbled.

  Rita winked at Lorenza. “Don’t be jealous, amorcito. It’s bad for your stomach.” She leaned and whispered in his ear, “You’re the only man in my life.” She kissed him.

  Sonny blushed. “Yeah, okay, let’s get the show on the road.” He drove his chair onto the lift and into the van. In moments they were headed toward Río Grande Boulevard.

  They passed Sondra’s stables, where he had once stabled his mare. Keeping the mare had gotten too expensive, so he sold her and bought a gelding to use in bull wrestling in the local rodeos. All of that seemed so far away, another time and place.

  He thought of don Eliseo praying with the medicine men, bending green juniper branches to make the hoop for a dream catcher. Meanwhile, somewhere in his hideaway, Raven played with vials full of deadly viruses and prayed to the destructive energy in the plutonium pit.

  Sonny wondered if the ending of an age meant a return to the cave and the club. Along the street Christmas lights decorated homes, hung from front-yard trees, eaves, fences. A few homes already had electric farolitos lining driveways. It was the season of light, but Sonny felt no mood of celebration.

  “Not much time,” he said.

  “No,” Lorenza agreed.

  “A lot depends on Cyber. Imagine our future hanging on a teenager.”

  Lorenza turned west and over the Alameda Bridge. Out the window the bare branches of the huge cottonwoods rose like specters into the somber afternoon. A thin, gray overcast covered the North Valley. Below them the sluggish Río Grande was a thin slate of brown; it did not look so grand at all. The river bosque was bare and gray. A large flock of crows swung across the sky to roost in the trees. In the west the sun was waning, leaving a lingering nostalgia on the mauve cirrus clouds.

  Time and the river, Sonny thought. As a boy he played on the playas in the summer. The huge sandbars spread for miles along the South Valley where he grew up. Time and the river were innocent then. Who could have guessed that he would, at age thirty-one, be chasing a man bent on destroying the world? Who could have guessed he would be an apprentice to a kind old man who knew more about the soul and its ways than any psychiatrist he had ever interviewed? Apprentice to a curandera who had taken him so deep into his nature that he learned the power of Coyote, his shadow in the animal world.

  “El destino,” he whispered. El destino is the tradition and custom that can trap a man. But it’s more than that. It’s the soul’s connection to the universal destiny, a road map we do not yet know. A fate unfolding itself before our eyes. That’s one reason he liked to read. The poets spoke of fate, karma, a kind of inexorable working of the universe where all the souls wound toward their destiny.

  He wished he could recall something appropriate about time and the river. “Oh, lost and by the wind grieved”… or “The fault, dear Cesar, lies not in our stars, but in the river of our birth.” Life is like a river. The Río Grande had been the river of his ancestors for hundreds of years, and so the bones and blood had seeped into the water.

  A four-by-four boss truck riding high cut Lorenza off. The young cowboy in it grinned. Lorenza started to flip him off, then shook her head.

  “Pendejo,” she said. “He bought a truck, lifted it ten feet off the ground, now he goes around threatening people.”

  “Macho guys,” Sonny added. It was happening. Young men with tough cars and trucks and guns. They blew each other off, and more and more they turned their anger on strangers. Road rage. Rage against life.

  The traffic going toward Rio Rancho moved slowly. Commuters plugged the road. The new Cottonwood Mall seemed to be thriving with last-minute Christmas business. On the hill, the Intel building rose like a giant behemoth, a dangerous whale beached on the sands of the West Mesa.

  Half the computers in the world ran on Intel chips, Sonny knew. The biggest corporation in the state, Mona Vandergriff’s playground. So how did she and Eric figure into the bigger picture?

  “We’ll soon know,” Lorenza said, turning down Doña Catarina Court. “Sixty sixty-nine, right? This should be it.”

  Mona Vandergriff’s brick house sat on a quiet street.

  Sonny looked out the window. The ranch-style house was landscaped in gravel, cactus, a few juniper bushes. Neat xeriscape, a desert landscape for those into water conservation.

  Three houses down Lorenza drove up to the curb and parked.

  “What now?”

  “Take a look inside.”

  “Break in? Hey, this isn’t ’Burque,” she reminded him. “This is Rio Rancho, the all-American city. If these cops find you in the house of the woman who runs Intel, you will spend Christmas, and probably the entire new year, in jail.”

  “It’s the only lead we have.”

  He was studying the quiet residential street. He knew he co
uld be in the house quickly. His first break-in in a wheelchair. And the secretary had said Mona was in D.C.

  “Pretend we’re soliciting for Goodwill if someone gets snoopy,” he said as he let down the lift. “I shouldn’t be gone long.”

  “Cuidado,” Lorenza whispered.

  He let himself down the lift and rolled to the front door. There was no time to scope the backyard. Thankfully, the front door of Mona Vandergriff’s home was handicapped accessible.

  Just in case, he rang the doorbell three times and waited. No answer, no dogs barking, so he jimmied the door and checked for a security system. Nada. He wheeled in, turned, and shut the door behind him.

  A small rose-colored divan and a vanity graced the anteroom. He wheeled himself into a spacious living room. Spotless, new furniture, trendy. Rio Rancho chic, Sonny figured.

  No children. He wheeled to the patio door, checked for backyard dogs. Nada. The woman lives alone. He made his way down a hallway toward the bedroom area. Pictures adorned the wall. One from “your friend” Ronald Reagan. Other top government officials, including the FBI’s Doyle. A shot of her at NASA, one in Russia standing next to Yeltsin. The photo that made Sonny pause was Mona at the beach. Next to her stood a tanned, muscular Leif Eric. “Mona my love, thanks for a week in heaven.” Signed, “Leif.”

  “Lordy,” he whispered. Mona Vandergriff was quite a beauty. Dark short hair, a pleasing smile, a wrinkle or two beginning to appear around the eyes, but those only lent her a mature, aggressive look. She was smiling, apparently happy with the week in heaven.

  The fun-loving twosome didn’t exactly conjure up militia-outfitted Avengers. Not the kind of people who would blow up a bomb to take over the government.

  Three huge mirrors adorned the bedroom walls, all reflecting the king-size bed. The carpet so plush the wheelchair almost stalled. Sonny chugged to the closet and opened the door. What he saw made him gasp.

  Neatly hung behind Mona’s business suits were two camouflage military uniforms. Militia wear. Cyber was right. On the floor, mountain boots. On the shelf above, where women normally kept shoes, sweaters, and purses, were stacked two AK-47s. High-powered stuff.