Shoreline

by Carolyn Baugh

  Nora frowned, listening carefully.

  “Anyone who attacks God is fair game. It’s always been that way.”

  “What do you mean, attacking God?” asked Nora.

  “I mean suggesting that God,” he paused to make air-quotes around the spoken word, “has a chosen people beyond the borders of your tribe, or suggesting that he communicates in a language other than yours, or that he has more than one way of being worshiped—or, worst of all, that he has rules about living life that are less strict than the ones you follow. This diminishes his power, right? If he isn’t almighty and all-powerful—if his power isn’t absolute, then what power does he really have?”

  Nora pondered this, feeling how the breath entered and left her body as she listened to Chid’s voice.

  “Anyway,” he continued. “Looks like Baker doesn’t have to cope with how Pennsylvania schools handle God—if they’re schooled at all they’re homeschooled. No registry anywhere.”

  “Tried and true coping strategy,” murmured Derek.

  “Taxpayer?” Ben inquired.

  Ford tapped the keyboard of his laptop and looked nonplussed. “He’s been off the grid for some time now.”

  “Where? The compound?”

  “Maybe. Quite possibly his family has been holed up there with him. Part of the problem with storming in is all the possible kids. We can’t forget Waco, right?” Derek said this, his tone affirming the fact that he was the one at the table who brought it up the most and was forgetting it the least.

  Nora looked at him, then dropped her eyes to her laptop unseeingly. “What does he have planned next?” she asked finally.

  Chid sighed. “I think if I were running this revolution I’d do what militia in other states have done but only inelegantly,” he said finally.

  Nora, Ben, and Ford looked at him.

  Chid spread his hands wide as though it were obvious. “Occupy something!”

  “Inelegantly?” pressed Nora.

  “Well, large groups of men usually get snacky midway through a good occupation. It gets ugly,” Chid said. He and Ford started chuckling.

  “What?” asked Nora.

  Ford shook his head and looked back down at the screen.

  “What?” she asked again.

  Chid said conspiratorially, “When they appealed for food and supplies, we joined the movement sending sex toys to the Oregon militia, care of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.”

  Nora and Ben glanced at each other, processing this, then burst out laughing in unison. Ford actually blushed. In that instant, Nora adopted the theory that he and Chid were together. That would be twice in one week she’d uncovered a romance around the conference room table. She started sneaking glances at the two men as they chewed their pizza.

  Ford, eyeing the last slice, said, “This would be so much better with beer.”

  Nora saw that as an obvious attempt to change the subject.

  Ben grinned, winking at her. “Nothing like beer at dawn…”

  The beer references brought the specter of Pete to the table. Nora frowned, leaning forward. “So what do we really know about Gabriel Baker?”

  “Pretty normal guy,” said Chid.

  “For a racist psychopath,” said Ben.

  Chid shrugged. “Those are usually the scariest. The ones you don’t expect because they seem so normal. But the thing is, he has to be a very … well, a very…”

  “What?” Ben demanded.

  “Some of his discourse is just…”

  Ben gave Nora a look. She shook her head. “Chid does this. We are learning to cope.”

  “Okay, look, listen to what I mean. Where’s that webcast of his…”

  Chid pushed the remote. The plasma screen TV sprang to life. Chid started jumping from minute to minute through the webcasts Baker had sent the press. He frowned hard at the screen, as though chastising it for not rendering up that which he sought.

  Finally, he leaned forward. “Oooh, yes, here…”

  Gabriel Baker stood, his back to a copse of trees. He wore an olive green T-shirt. He was tanned, with a neatly trimmed beard and searing blue eyes.

  Nora listened carefully.

  “And now it’s time to reach out. Not just to the patriots as we have done, but to the larger populace. It’s time to make America great again. It’s time to reclaim this country for its Christian heritage, its Christian values, its foundational vision.”

  “He’s reading from a teleprompter,” Ben said.

  “Yes, it looks like it,” Nora agreed.

  “Shhh,” Chid said.

  They looked at the screen and back at Chid.

  “What?” asked Nora.

  “The thing he just said, just now!”

  Annoyed, he waved the remote, sliding the cursor backwards. “We cannot shy away from antinomianism if the laws are themselves perfidious and base.”

  “See?” Chid asked.

  “What? What’s that, antinomianism?” asked Nora.

  “Exactly,” said Chid, crossing his arms and looking satisfied.

  “What?” she said again, irritated.

  “Well, it means freeing oneself from the necessity of obeying the law because the law is perceived as unnecessary, but the point is he mispronounced it.”

  Nora blinked. “So?”

  “So, if you’re writing a speech to present your views to planet earth, you would probably pick words you know.” He was making little karate chops into the palm of his hand for emphasis as he spoke.

  Nora looked at Chid warily. “Okay…”

  Chid leaned forward, tapping the remote against the table, black eyes flashing. He gestured with the hand that still held a crust of pizza. “Unless you are presenting someone else’s words.”

  “Someone else? Someone like who?” asked Nora.

  “Well, that’s the trick, isn’t it?” asked Chid.

  Nora raised her eyebrows. “Apparently?”

  “Yes, apparently, yes, definitely. So, the question is, from whence all these references to nineteenth-century German cultural elitism and from whence the reference to Wagner’s essays and from whence—”

  “Yes, we get the picture. What’s your theory?” asked Ben.

  “He’s got a handler,” Chid said, polishing off the last of his pizza crust. “He’s … a lackey. A pretty face. Maybe even a fall guy.”

  They sat around the table digesting this.

  “Do you think there’s a connection with the owner of the property out on the lake?”

  “Well, yes, but we can’t find a real-life existence for him, can we?” Chid sighed. “The phantom Joseph Geyer. I mean, there are Joseph Geyers aplenty, but there is no logical connection to anything going on here. He doesn’t seem to own any other property in the area. A man without history.”

  Nora thought about this at length, then asked slowly, “You guys have, what, four motorcycles now. Do they match?”

  Ford nodded vigorously. “Only in that they’re pretty cheap. Not something you’d ride to a biker festival.”

  “It’s a rally, not a festival,” Nora said.

  “Yeah, Derek,” added Chid. “No maypoles here, man.”

  Ford laughed. “I stand corrected.”

  Silence fell. Nora realized she too needed her laptop, and so went to get it from her desk. She took a moment to pace among the maze of desks, muttering the name, “Geyer,” over and over and sounding slightly unhinged even to herself.

  When she hadn’t returned in five minutes, Ben emerged from the conference room, looking for her. They fell into step together, skirting the clutter, then ended up by the bank of windows overlooking State Street.

  She turned to him, saying, “I think we should go. I can’t stand this waiting. I want to be there.”

  “Schacht asked us to hold off, asked us to work behind the scenes. CIRG is all about this stuff. We need to do exactly what we’re doing,” Ben said.

  “Technically CIRG is all about this stuff, too,” she pointed out. She set
her laptop down on a now-cluttered desk.

  “Well, it’s all hands on deck then. But the fast-roping out of helicopters thing is not in my skill set.”

  Nora sighed at him. “I knew you were too good to be true.”

  They stood for a while in silence, looking down at the just-stirring city. A city bus rumbled by, mostly deserted. A few people made their way along the sidewalks in the half-light. Nora wondered how to get it back, how to trust the person across the street not to shoot you.

  Ben seemed to sense this. “This isn’t real, Nora.”

  “How can you say that?” she demanded. “Of course it’s real.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head, and sitting down on the window ledge. He looked thoughtfully out over the street. “This isn’t the normal. They want you to think that this is some majority way of thinking about the world. But it isn’t. Normal people don’t want this. Normal people don’t want pain and conflict and won’t choose it. Life’s hard enough.”

  Nora listened, wanting to believe him. “I had a pretty strong belief that people are basically good, you know? And then I watched a woman shoot a little girl. Just, shot her. For no reason except that…” She had not yet cried, and hot tears were suddenly spilling from her eyes.

  Ben watched her, and she could see his concern. She had never cried in front of him before, and she saw him trying to decide if he should pull her into his arms. He finally extended his hand and she clutched it hard.

  “She was shot because she looks like me, Ben,” Nora whispered.

  “Nora, it happens every day. Every single day,” he answered. “We know this. And so the sane people have to call the crazies back from the brink.”

  “I hate how I feel about these people,” she said in the same wet whisper. “It makes me doubt everything I know. About God, about the balance of good and evil, about everything.”

  Now he pulled her toward him, cupping her chignon in his hand, then sliding his fingertips along the length of her jaw, then brushing away her tears with his thumbs.

  “They can’t really have understood what they’re doing, Nora. Don’t you get it? The messages they’ve gotten have dehumanized all their victims. This onslaught of racist webcasts and gun-show rhetoric and campaign slogans and AM radio fear-mongering … So they don’t even think of them as real people, just foils for whatever is wrong in their lives.…”

  Nora was nodding. “And it’s just a game. Some kind of Xbox deal.” Nora wiped the palms of her hands over her wet cheeks.

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s a game. And the more they play, the more they have to play.”

  She sagged against him and let him carry her for a moment.

  “We should go back in,” she murmured.

  “We should,” he agreed. “Just … give us another minute to stand like this. Just one.”

  They stood, still, silent. She had missed his breath in her hair and the expanse of his chest. She leaned against him, feeling the warmth emanating from him, and she decided she could pick what was real.

  She planted a soft kiss on his cheek as they pulled apart, then she grabbed her laptop and they walked hand-in-hand back to the conference room. They disentwined their fingers as Ben pulled the door open.

  She steeled herself.

  Chid and Ford were talking together intently.

  Her hopes rose. “Any word?” she asked.

  Chid said, impatiently, “You know they’ll call us if there’s any change, Nora.”

  But Special Agent Ford held Nora’s eyes, then turned to Chid. “Easy, man.” He looked back at Nora, “Ask as many times as you want. It’s fine.”

  Noting a change in the way he was talking to her, she looked a question at him.

  Ford said, “I lost my partner two years ago. Trying to round up some neo-Nazis in Montana. They left me this,” he pointed at his cheek. “Stephen wasn’t so lucky.”

  Nora’s eyes darted from Derek to Chid and she found that Chid’s expression was complex; he managed to look chastened and grave simultaneously. It seemed clear, too, from the way Derek had said “Stephen” that Stephen had predated Chid as both partner and partner.

  “So anyone with a partner on the line gets special consideration. It’s an actual rule,” Ford said firmly.

  Nora looked gratefully at him.

  “Thanks, Derek,” she said.

  “No problem, Nora,” he answered, and she knew that he knew she’d put the pieces together.

  “We interrupted you when we came in,” Ben said. “What did we miss?”

  Chid let out a long sigh. “We were complaining about not being able to track their communications. Even just a typical email account would help, but we really have nothing. The webcasts, as we’ve said, are coming from these dynamic IP addresses and we need time—so much more time than we have here.”

  Nora nodded. It was no time for Pete to be absent.

  Ford said, “Look, it’s the essential problem of dealing with any terrorist organization at this point. It’s just too easy to encrypt anything, and we’ll never have the manpower we need to break every encrypted site in order to monitor what they’re saying to each other. So, say we’re talking about Al-Qaeda or ISIS—first, get me enough Arabic speakers, and there are never enough, then get me my code-breakers, and there are never enough of those either. By the time we break into one site, they’ve abandoned it and started up another with a whole new encryption.”

  Ben said, “Okay, but we’re talking about a bunch of rednecks in the backwoods of northwest Pennsylvania.”

  Ford replied, “Well, yes and no. Our militia organizations are not quite as tech savvy as the overseas terror groups. But their deep-seated conviction that the tyrannical U.S. Government is watching their every move has made them willing to do what it takes to set up very opaque communications webs. Ironically, they end up using most of the same technologies as the foreign groups they make so much noise about.”

  Ben grinned at Nora and began ticking off on his fingers. “Beards, check. Head-coverings, check. Love of wearing camouflage, check. Love of the semiautomatic rifle, check…”

  She joined in, leaning forward in her chair, “Absolute conviction, check. Absolute lack of education, check.”

  Ford added, “Willingness to master the tech to get new recruits and keep the group up to date on goings-on, check.”

  Nora gave Ford points for trying.

  “So what are we left with?” asked Chid.

  Ben answered, “An impenetrable web of angry people.”

  Ford was nodding. “Short of torturing a password out of one of them, you can’t gain access to the site unless you sort through the layers of encryption.”

  They sat in silence, each one thinking. Nora weighed the word torture and found it had chilled her. She felt slightly nauseous, loathing the militia, Goatee … what would she do to him to get information to save Pete? Or any other person on his list of Fourteen Acts?

  She didn’t want to think it through. Chid was staring into space, tapping his pen against the table, swiveling left and right, left and right in his chair. Ben and Ford both had their laptops open, and each one had gone back to tapping on the respective keyboards.

  Nora started to boot up her own laptop, then looked down at her gleaming new BlackBerry. She picked it up, running her index fingertip along its smooth edges. Suddenly she said, “Hey, what are they toting?”

  “Hmm?” asked Ford. “What kind of weaponry?”

  She shook her head. “What kind of smartphone?”

  He narrowed his eyes in thought. Nora saw Ben and Chid were paying full attention.

  She said, “I shot two women at the refugee center yesterday. Another one ran off the road and they took her to the hospital. She had no ID, nothing on her, so they listed her as Jane Doe. I assume we still have all their stuff.”

  Ford was nodding. “We logged three bottom of the line motorcycles, three AR-15 semi-automatics, and three iPhones into evidence. You want to look at their phones
?”

  “We can break into a smartphone, Nora, but it takes a very long time,” Chid reminded her. “That’s what Ford was saying—”

  “Chid,” she rejoined sharply. “I was listening. Unlike the BlackBerry, iPhones have fingerprint pads. Jane Doe is just in a coma—”

  Ben’s eyes widened. With a broad grin he finished for her, “—and so is still in possession of a warm thumb!”

  “If the phone didn’t get turned off or run out of battery…” Nora was saying, knowing she had to add that caveat, knowing they both knew it anyway. Still, she felt lighter, suddenly hope-filled. “Where, Derek? Where would it be?”

  Ford had already pushed back his chair. “The portable stuff got hauled back here, and then just left because—” Ford strode out of the conference room, saying over his shoulder: “I think there was a box, you know—one of those cardboard boxes with the lids.…”

  All three followed him. He scanned the room, then started pawing through the clutter. Nora watched, then asked, “Was Maggie here when you brought it in? She didn’t receive it from you?”

  Ford was nodding, “No, that’s right—she was here, and I set it in her cubicle.…” He hastened his step and then uttered a, “Ha!”

  He bent over a medium-sized box of sturdy cardboard. He squatted, tugging at the lid, and then pointed at three iPhones in plastic baggies.

  Chid peered over his shoulder. “I like the camo case.”

  Nora looked, too. “Better than the one with the Confederate flag?”

  “Glittery pink for me,” said Ben.

  Ford stood, his eyes bright. “They’re all still charged, though it’s pretty low. We’ll take them and try each one. Hospital?”

  “Six blocks down,” Nora said, and with that they gathered their phones and badges, tucking their laptops into carrying cases. After bundling themselves back into their Kevlar, they all headed out the door at a jog. Nora was deeply grateful for something to do. She hoped against hope that her idea wasn’t foolish.

  Anyway, it’s all we’ve got right now.

  Pete, hang in there, man.…

  “We’ll take my car,” she said.

  “No way,” Ben said. “Nora’s gonna drive?”

  She gave him look. “Only in a crisis.” She headed for the dusty Chevy Malibu which the Bureau had provided her.