“You think?”
“We’re not sure. Most of the documentation for the implant disappeared, thanks to Hanlon. But from what we can tell, it wasn’t designed for biofeedback,” she sighed. “Unintended consequences.”
“Can you build more of them? These implants of yours?”
“Not with what’s left,” she said, thinking of Santino. “It’s dead tech until we can reconstruct it, and that might take decades.”
He nodded. The two of them watched the birds return to the nearby trees as the memory of gunshots faded.
“What can I tell you about Nicholson?” he finally asked.
“Everything,” Rachel said. “Start with your first meeting.”
Ahren took a short drag on his cigarette, his colors falling into place as he organized his thoughts. “Guy calls my office up, out of the blue,” he said. “Says he’s looking for a new life. We get a dozen or so like him a year, folks who say they’re tired of society. They’re not, you know. They want society—what they’re tired of? Bein’ told what to do. That’s not gonna change, not here.
“Sometimes we take ’em in, if they’re harmless enough. They’re good for a laugh. One or two might stick around. Most of ’em decide their old life was good enough after I put ’em to work.”
“What kind of work?”
Ahren nodded towards the old quarry at the edge of the firing range. “Rocks out, dirt in. Can’t work the land if there’s no land to work.”
“And Nicholson was okay with that?” Rachel couldn’t imagine Nicholson working with his hands. Or associating as equals with anyone who did.
“Never put him in the quarry,” Ahren said. “He said he was a lawyer. Came in dressed for an interview, sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“Showed up in a shiny truck, and a pair of khaki six-pockets so new they’d never been washed. Said he wanted to join.”
“And you let him?”
“I got no use for one more useless know-it-all gun freak,” Ahren said. “I got all the use in the world for a good lawyer. Told him if he wanted to join, he needed to be licensed to practice law in my state.”
“Was he?”
“Nope. Not then. He drove off. Called my office three months after that, said the paperwork had gone through. Wanted to set up an appointment to discuss terms.” Ahren chuckled, low and slow.
“This had to be raising red flags with you.”
He nodded.
“So why take him on?”
“Free legal advice, m’dear,” he said. “And he got my curiosity up, I’ll tell you, this rich lawyer who shows up on my doorstep, talkin’ to me like I’m dumber than mice. If there’s a game goin’ on, thought I’d play better if I knew the rules.”
“Did you…” Rachel paused, nudging around the edges of what Gallagher had told her. “You’ve heard about the FBI hiding agents in militias, right?”
This time, when Ahren laughed, it was in short, wheezy bursts. “C’mon,” he said. “Credit where it’s due, m’dear. I can spot them a mile away. I’ve been here more ’n twenty years—after 9/11, feds were all the new blood we had.”
“How can you tell they’re FBI?”
Another gesture with the cigarette, this time towards the quarry. “They’ll move rocks all day long without bitchin’.”
Rachel made a mental note to tell Gallagher to remind her men to complain more, and then asked, “What did Nicholson do when he showed up?”
“Took a spare apartment. Moved right in, started goin’ through my files.”
“You let him? Just like that?”
“You keep things from your lawyer, Agent?” He stared at her in curious oranges. “That’ll get you in trouble in the long run.”
Rachel laughed. “You are not what I expected from a militia leader.”
“Militia…” Ahren lit a second cigarette off of the first, and stubbed the old one out in the coffee can. “That’s the third time you’ve used that word, Agent Peng, but I don’t remember using it with you.”
“What do you call this place, then? A commune?”
“Sugar Camp Christmas Trees,” he said with a grin. “Best damned Christmas trees in Pennsylvania. Proudly family-owned and operated.”
Rachel shook her head, and asked, “How big is your family?”
“’bout two to three hundred, dependin’.”
She turned towards the small apartment complex at the front of the shooting range, which would have housed maybe thirty families. Nowhere near two hundred people could have lived there, let alone three. Ahren noticed and said, “More ’n half of my people live ’n work elsewhere. Some of ’em all the way down in New York, New Jersey… They show up on weekends, ’n pitch tents when they want to stay overnight.”
“How many people left with Nicholson?”
“’bout thirty-some men. Almost all of ’em were weekenders, or lived out here in tents.”
“And you let him leave? After he saw your files?”
Ahren held up a finger, pausing their conversation long enough to cough into his handkerchief again. His cough was rougher this time, a wet hacking sound that went on far too long. When it was over, he nodded. “Yeah,” he said, the handkerchief going back into his pocket. “He was here for six months, and that was six months too long. Laziest shit I’ve ever met. Talked about nothin’ but how good it’ll be when we rise up an’ take our country back.”
“Seems like the kind of topic an upstanding Christmas tree plantation owner such as yourself has probably heard before.”
The annoyed oranges in his conversational colors solidified. “You know why I offered to talk to you, Agent Peng?”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“There’s always a government. There’ll always be a government. Takin’ down the one you’ve got doesn’t get rid of government—it just puts a new one in its place, an’ there’s no promise the new one will be better’n the old. I want to be left alone, Agent Peng, and if that means payin’ taxes and makin’ nice with the county sheriff, so be it.
“These little turds, the ones who come out here, hopin’ for the world to end so they’ll rise up ’n take their rightful place as kings? They want the Wild West they see in movies.” Ahren turned the cigarette over in his fingers before taking another long drag. “Never stop to think that there were rules in the West. An’ the kings of the West? They made ’emselves that way through sacrifice and goddamed hard work.”
He paused. “Pardon my French, too.”
“You sly silver fox,” Rachel said. “You used Nicholson to clean house.”
Ahren nodded. “I did,” he said. “He was here for six months and spent every hour yellin’ about what was wrong with America. Talkin’ about armed revolt. I’ve got children livin’ here, Agent Peng. Talk like that makes the sheriff start thinkin’ twice about leaving me and mine alone. Makes the sheriff start thinkin’ I’ve got somethin’ evil goin’ on up here at my little farm. A cult, maybe, or an army.”
The cigarette pointed again, this time at the nearby playground. “Nothin’ evil about protectin’ children, Agent Peng. If that meant chasin’ Nicholson and everyone who thought like him out so he became someone else’s problem, I was okay with that.”
Rachel was so very glad she had left her gun in the helicopter. “Except he took one of our children,” she said, when she was sure she wouldn’t pull a Mulcahy and try to dangle him over the ground by his throat. That wouldn’t work for a bunch of reasons, starting with her height and ending with her fingernails digging out his larynx.
“I’m sorry about that,” he said, red sorrow hanging around him. “I swear, I thought he was a spoil’d rich kid, no real threat to anyone. I just wanted him gone.”
Rachel went over a dozen possible replies, and went with the one that didn’t involve beating the snot out of this self-implied king with the butt of his own rifle. “Right,” she said, as she took out a photo of Iron Core out of her pocket. “Tell me about this guy.”
&nbs
p; “Ah.” Ahren barely glanced at the paper. “Him.”
“Nicholson called him Ethan. His arrest records put him as Ethan Fischer.”
“Yeah,” Ahren nodded. “That’s right. Fischer showed up about three months after Nicholson.”
“After? You’re sure?”
“Yup. Made friends with Nicholson the day he got here. Nicholson got real mouthy after that—he was bad before, but he started recruitin’ after. Always when I wasn’t there, always where I couldn’t see it. He was clever, all a’sudden, and you an’ I both know those new smarts weren’t his. Worse, I’m pretty sure Fischer killed a man while he was here.”
“Really?” She reached out to her phone in her nearby purse, accessed its memory, and began recording. The conversation would never show up in court, but it might provide Gallagher with new leads, or even closure.
“Yup. Goes to a bar with one of my men. Kyle Vanning. Good guy. I liked him. Fischer comes back to the farm, says Vanning went home with a woman. I never see Vanning again.”
“Why do you think he killed Vanning?”
Another long, slow drag. “Well, he was one of yours,” Ahren said. “FBI, I think?”
Rachel laughed before she could stop herself, and then groaned silently; Gallagher would kill her for that slipup. “Hard worker?” she asked.
“Yup.” Ahren stubbed out his second cigarette and stood. “An’ he never made a move on any of the women while he was here.”
“Gay?”
“Professional,” he said, and started walking back the way they came. “You people don’t start what you can’t finish. An’ the FBI came out a few weeks after he disappeared, askin’ questions but sayin’ nothin’. No, he’s good an’ dead, an’ I’m sorry for that, too.”
Interview, over. She pressed him on the details as they retraced their steps—Where was Fischer from? (Don’t know.) Do you have any files on him? (No.) Was Nicholson already a sovereign citizen when he arrived? (Yup.)—and filled in what remaining blanks she could. Nothing stood out as critical.
Once they reached the helicopter, Ahren stuck out his hand. “Been interestin’, Agent Peng,” he said. “An’ while I’ve got you here, let me say that what Hanlon did to OACET was pretty damned low. Government’s been getting in our heads for years. Glad you took yours back.”
“Thanks,” she said, and decided, hey, why not, she was here and she lost nothing by being the bigger woman. “Hey, you saw what I can do with scans on the gun range? I’ve got a set of medical diagnostic scans that an OACET physician made for me. If someone were to ask, I could scan them and point out any health concerns that might pop up.”
Ahren’s hand moved towards the linen handkerchief in his pocket before he could stop himself.
Rachel shrugged, still staring at the far-off too-close mountains. “If I were asked.”
He stared at her, suspicious oranges showing in his conversational colors for the first time since the gun range. “Don’t think anyone’s asked,” he said. He took out his pack of cigarettes and tapped it against his hand, hard. One slid into his fingers. “Good luck figurin’ out this mess you’ve made.”
He lit his cigarette, turned, and walked away.
NINETEEN
As the helicopter cut its way south through the air, Rachel let her mind wander across the fields below, and over the matter of Ethan Fischer.
Time…
Fischer had showed up at Sugar Camp three months after Nicholson’s arrival. Good. That was a point on the timeline. And Josh had confirmed that Fischer had arrived just days before certain politicians working at the Capitol Building had begun discussing their ‘holiday plans’ in earnest. That was another point on the timeline.
She was pretty sure that the chain of events pointed towards a power grab by those same politicians, and that it started when they sent Fischer into Sugar Camp to take control of Nicholson. She was somewhat less sure that the purpose of this power grab was to divest OACET of its autonomy and bundle the agency into, oh, say, Homeland Security, but that was probably wishful thinking on her part. If OACET lost its autonomy, then everything the Agents had fought to prevent would likely come to pass.
Such as being turned into instruments of war.
Rachel had no interest in being someone else’s gun. It was bad enough that she was sometimes dehumanized as part of her job—she refused to be turned over to the Army and sent on missions from the comfort of a padded cell. She would not be the instrument of destruction for China’s civic infrastructure, or the reason that Iran’s centrifuges melted down and irradiated an entire country. Or any one of the many ways that a clever cyborg could undermine modern civilization.
She’d rather die.
Let’s not let it get that far, she told herself. She unclenched her hands and looked at the half-moon circles her fingernails had sliced into her palms. Let’s get off this road before that happens.
One last wistful scan across the pastoral landscape below, and then she kicked Wyatt awake. The psychopath nearly jumped her; she had her gun out and aimed between his eyes before he remembered where he was and brought himself under control.
“How’d you know?” she asked him.
Wyatt stretched, his hands bumping into either side of the bulkhead. “Know what?”
“That we weren’t walking into a hotbed of racist inbred shitheads.”
“Might be,” he said in purples. “You didn’t get the full tour.”
“C’mon.”
He smirked and settled back in his seat again. “Two things. Guess.”
“They were willing to talk to the cops.”
“No, they knew enough to get ahead of talking to the cops.”
She made a non-committal noise. Made sense. Willingness to talk to cops was one thing; that showed they recognized legal norms. But getting ahead and offering to do the inevitable interview… “What’s the second?”
“They’re smart enough to know that Nicholson was poison. A bad militia lets anyone stay. Thinks there’s strength in numbers.”
“And a good one is selective.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Ahren is a million times scarier than Nicholson,” she said. “And a lot more dangerous.”
“If he wanted to be,” Wyatt said. “But he knows that his community is one mistake away from being turned into a crater.” He pulled his hat down over his eyes again, but this time he was feigning sleep; his colors moved back and forth across the cabin, as if he was pacing the floor.
One mistake away… That was relatable, even if she was a little itchy about comparing OACET to a decent law-abiding Christmas tree farm made from acidic soil and firearms. Ahren had been helpful, but she still had too many questions. Her subconscious kept nagging her about connections between Fischer and Nicholson. If Fischer hadn’t been murdered, she could have asked him—
Oh!
She sat up and kicked Wyatt in the soft spot beneath his kneecap. He winced in reds and cracked an eye at her.
“I’m gonna interrogate you,” she said.
He rolled his shoulders one at a time, like a cat making biscuits. “Thought we were past this,” he said.
“Not you-you. You’re roleplaying the dead dude you stabbed with a butter knife,” she said. “I figure you’re basically his doppelgänger. Hell, we’re lucky space-time didn’t fracture when you two made physical contact. So I’ll ask you the same questions I’d ask him, and you’re gonna answer for him.”
“No, I’m not,” he said, tugging his hat low. “He wouldn’t answer your questions. Not unless he had something to gain.”
“Do it,” she said. “Pretend I’ve got leverage.”
“Fine,” Wyatt said, as traces of the warm teal of family appeared in his conversational colors; she filed that tidbit away for later.
“What’s your master plan?”
“Fuck, Peng, how should I know?” Wyatt sat up, finally ready to talk. “That depends on who I’m working for.”
“All right,” she sa
id. Beneath them, the patchwork of soft spring colors rolled by. “Let’s pick it apart. Why work with a militia?”
“’cause there’s a thousand different kinds of militia, and nobody knows what any one of them is doing,” he said. “Like you, walking into that gun show and expecting a bunch of ignorant dicks.”
“That’s fair,” she admitted.
“Militia confuses the situation. Makes you wonder what’s possible. If there are limits on how far they’ll go.”
“Anything else?”
“Good camouflage,” he said. “Nobody aligned with a militia would be working for someone legit.”
“Okay, good,” she said. “Why sovereign citizens?”
“They’re about the best camouflage out there. Nobody understands what the hell they’re doing, and they’re willing to go the distance. Makes ’em scary as fuck to law enforcement.”
“All right. So let’s say your real boss is a politician who works at the Capitol—”
“Sounds likely.”
“—they see this report from an undercover agent in the FBI. The agent’s entrenched in a militia that’s picked up a lawyer who’s also a sovereign citizen. It’s a scenario that’s unusual enough that most folks in law enforcement would sit up and notice. So…what? Your bosses decide this is an opportunity they can exploit, and your boss sends you in to infiltrate the group?”
“Wrong.” Wyatt said. “The objective is to get to Nicholson. The FBI agent’s in my way, and there’s a chance he’d recognize what I am.”
“Oh God, I don’t want to think all of this started with us killing our own,” she muttered.
“Why not? It’d be a red flag if they pulled the agent out, and killing him would endear me to Nicholson. Especially if I could get the agent to confess before I killed him. That’d make Nicholson paranoid, and he’d trust me. He’d rely on me to do what needed to be done.”
Rachel had the urge to go stand under a hot shower for the rest of forever. “What a lovely and very intentional phrase you just used,” she said, as Wyatt grinned at her in pinks. “Why start with a kidnapping?”
Brute Force Page 29
