“Roger, Scorpion. Madman wants to know what you want him to do.”
“Madman, stay with Boomer,” Jonathan replied. “Keep an eye on the rest of the town while you stay on target.”
“How many of you are there?” Mary asked. Her demeanor had become significantly less aggressive.
“Can’t answer that one, either,” Jonathan said. “Frustrating, isn’t it? Let me ask you one. Why didn’t you call the police when you found a burglar in your restaurant?”
“I had my trusty shotgun,” she said, but the smile told him that even she knew that it was an unsellable lie.
Jonathan waited for the rest.
Mary folded her hands and placed them demurely on the table. “I didn’t call the police because I suspected that none of us wanted that. I suspect that I know something about why you’re here.”
Jonathan folded his arms. “Is that so?”
“You’re not police yourselves, are you?”
“No, we’re not,” Jonathan said.
“Not FBI, not CIA, not some other secret government cover?”
Jonathan hesitated. He hated telling lies because they created too many tentacles, any one of which could uncover the lie and once that was done, trust was gone, too. “For your purposes—for the way I think you’re thinking of other secret government cover—I’ll say no. Best not push that one too hard, though.”
Behind him, Boxers sighed loudly. If it were up to Big Guy, no questions would ever be answered, and no details of any op would ever be shared. As for the trust thing, Jonathan had never known Big Guy to give much of shit about that.
“Fair enough,” Mary said. “I figured out the cop part because you broke in, and cops aren’t allowed to do that. And as soon as I saw you in town today, I knew that you weren’t just casual strangers in town. Your necks are too thick.” She winced and glanced over at Jolaine. “Sorry, She Devil. I meant that in a good way. So that leaves the who and the why. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess—I’m going to hope—that your presence here has something to do with that nonsense that’s going on at the top of the mountain.”
Something flipped in Jonathan’s stomach. “What nonsense are you talking about?”
Mary’s features hardened. “If you’re going to insult me or my intelligence, then to hell with you. I’ll just sit quietly, and sooner or later you’re going to leave. I don’t believe for a moment that you’ll shoot me in cold blood. So it’s up to you. You do what you need to do with what I know or without it.”
Boxers coughed out a laugh. “Jesus, you’re a tough lady.” Coming from Big Guy, that was nearly an expression of love.
Jonathan keyed his mike. “Boomer, Scorpion. You can take eyes off our friend Mary. You and Madman come on in and join us.”
They acknowledged, but Jonathan stayed focused on Mary. “Okay,” he said. “You win. We believe that the activities at the top of the mountain are an effort to overthrow the United States government.”
“Goddamn, Scorpion,” Boxers said.
Jonathan figured he wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know.
“I knew it was something like that. So if you’re not with the government, who are you?”
“No matter how many times you ask that question, I’m not going to answer it.”
“Then tell me whose team you’re on.”
Jonathan started to answer, then stopped himself. “What are my choices?”
“Them or us?”
He hesitated again. Defining terms was important. “Who’s us?”
“Patriotic Americans.”
He knew that she was going get annoyed soon, but Mary clearly didn’t understand that she kept answering in double entendres. “You need to understand, Mary, that I’ve done a lot of fighting in my lifetime, and almost all of it was against bad guys who thought they were good guys. The Nazis were patriots, right? Just for the wrong side. If you’ve been keeping up with the news, you’ll know that over the past few years, there are a lot of folks who believe that all the patriots have left Washington.”
“Are you one of those?” Mary asked. She seemed suddenly nervous.
“I’m asking you,” Jonathan said.
Mary shifted in her seat, then jumped as Dylan and Rollins entered the room. “Well, maybe this is where you shoot me, but no, I am not one of those people. I personally have no time for that asshole Darmond or any of his asshole policies or asshole crooked cronies, but they are the assholes we elected. Twice, God help us. If people rise up against them, what’s to stop the people from rising up in the future against a government I like?”
“We’re on the same side, Mary,” Jonathan said. “Anarchy is anarchy, and it’s never to anyone’s benefit. Our job is to verify that they’re doing what we think they’re doing and to interfere with their plans.”
“How will you do that?”
Jonathan shot a thumb over toward Boxers. “If I told you that, Big Guy would take your shotgun and beat me to death with it.”
“Damn straight I would.”
Mary laughed.
“I went first,” Jonathan said. “Now it’s your turn. By the way, meet Boomer and Madman. They’re on my team, too.”
Both of the newcomers looked confused. And they’d have to remain that way, at least for a while.
“Do you know who Mr. Wainwright is?” Mary asked.
“No,” Jonathan said.
“Well, he’s about the most important person in town. He owns almost all of it. He got his money from coal, and then he’s spun it out in a thousand different directions. We’re talking more money than any of us could possibly imagine. Starting about two, maybe three years ago, Mr. Wainwright started building fences. Big, scary fences. Thick steel construction, barbed wire on top. Must be miles of it. The contractors who installed it used to eat here, and I heard them talking. Said they’d done work on a fence for the NRO—whatever that is—and that this fence is comparable to that.”
Jonathan recognized the NRO as the National Reconnaissance Office, an agency that made the CIA look like an open source research library.
“What’s he doing that he needs so much security?” Jonathan asked.
“My question, exactly,” Mary said. “I even asked it to one of those contractor fellas. He looked like I’d said a dirty word in church. Looked around to see if anyone else might have heard, and then he told me to be careful what I said. Never saw them in here again. And let’s be honest, there ain’t a lot of options in Whitesville.”
“What do you think might be going on?” Jolaine asked, earning her a subtle poke in the ribs from Boxers, and a gentle shake of his head. There’s a rhythm to questioning people, a protocol. One of the fundamentals was never to split the attention of the person being questioned.
Seeing that Boxers had taken care of the rebuke, Jonathan let it go. It so happened that Jolaine had asked the question he was going to ask next.
“I can’t imagine,” Mary said. “Well, I can imagine, but what I imagine makes me even more nervous. Anybody with that much money and that much fear of being caught is doing something that he shouldn’t.”
“What about the police?” Jonathan asked. “Have you spoken to them about it?”
Mary offered a bitter laugh. “Sweetie, in this county—hell, in this state—Mr. Wainwright could rape little children in the middle of the street and not get arrested for it. The Council would pass a retroactive law making it legal to do that, limited to the date he did it. Are you catching my meaning?”
“All I’m hearing is that the politics in West Virginia are the same as the politics in Washington,” Dylan said. “Laws are for sale.”
“Amen to that, Good Lookin’,” Mary said.
Jonathan felt an inexplicable flash of jealousy at the good-lookin’ thing.
“Then I guess he finished the fences,” Mary continued, “because the contractor people all went away.” She gathered herself with a sigh. “And then the other people started coming.” She stop
ped. Did she think that she’d just made sense?
“What other people?” Jonathan prompted.
“People like you,” she replied. “Wide shoulders, thick necks. Young people. Not all of them had the thick necks, but there were a lot more trim bellies than fat ones, and they all looked so serious.”
“Who are they?” Jonathan asked.
“I don’t know. Not by name. But they’d pass through town, always in trucks driven by the same people, and they headed up the mountain. As far as I know, I’ve never seen any of them again.”
“They’re building a compound,” Boxers said.
“And what good can possibly come from a compound?” Mary asked. It was hard to be sure in the dim light, but Jonathan thought he saw tears balanced on her lids.
“You’re upset,” Jonathan said.
She seemed embarrassed. Quickly swiped the tears away. “It’s just sad,” she said. “I’ve lived here my whole life, and everything is changing. Everyone is so angry all the time. And now this. Something violent is coming, I just know it. You hear them shooting up there all the time.”
“And still no police?” Jolaine asked. Clearly, she was a slow learner.
“What’s illegal about shooting?” Mary asked. “I can lay a lot that’s bad at the feet of a bought-and-paid-for police department, but that’s not one of them. It’s just so sad.”
Jonathan sensed that he was missing something. He could understand it all being scary and disturbing and about a thousand other adjectives, but sad eluded him. “Is someone close to you involved in what’s going on?” he asked. It was the most obvious source of sadness that he could think of.
Mary placed folded hands on the table again and talked to them. “There’s a boy in town. His name is Tommy Piper. Sad, sad case. I don’t know that anyone knows who his daddy is, but his mama was a real piece of work. She just up and left one day. But Tommy was that poor kid who never seemed to have enough to eat, and never had a bath until five or six days after he needed one. He was maybe thirteen when his mama left—maybe twelve—and the word around town was a hundred percent agreement that he was better off without her. The poor boy had nothing, and the fear around town was that Social Services was going to come around and take him into the system. Well, we all know that boys that age have no place in the system. They’re too old to be cute and too young to be anything but victims.”
“You took him in, didn’t you?” Boxers asked. If ever there was a teddy bear for kids in trouble—a huge, lethal grizzly with a big heart—it was Big Guy.
Mary nodded. “I did. I had a spare bedroom, and a business where he could learn a skill, so why not? I won’t say it was easy, but it was easier than it could have been. That boy has a solid heart, but oh, brother, was his head a mess. I guess that’s what happens when you grow up wild. Stupid stuff, like stealing things from the diner and hiding them in his room upstairs.”
Ah, Jonathan thought. She lives upstairs. That’s how she sneaked up on Jolaine. He felt like an idiot for not researching that more closely.
“Sounds like you did the right thing for the right reasons,” Jonathan said, hoping to move her closer to her point.
“Thank you,” she replied. “Yes, I think so, too. But you know? Towns like this have long memories. He was never really accepted as anything other than the mongrel kid with the neglectful mother that we’re all embarrassed was ever tolerated by the community. Tommy never found his group. He was never accepted by the other children in school and his grades showed it. He didn’t finish his sophomore year in high school. So now he was sixteen, no education, no skills, working in a small-town diner. I worried about him, but I was never his official foster mother, you know? I had no legal authority over him. He worked here and slept here and was just sort of rudderless.”
“You’re speaking of him in the past tense,” Jonathan said. “Is he . . . ?” He didn’t want to finish the end of such an obvious sentence.
“Oh, he’s still alive,” Mary said. “He’s just one of them. Up on the hill. I don’t know how they met up with each other, but he got recruited early on, and I think he was just so happy to be a part of something that he jumped at the chance. One day he came downstairs with a backpack stuffed with stuff, and he said, ‘Mary, thanks for everything, but I’m moving on.’ Then he gave me a big hug.
“Now, you have to know that hugs are not a part of Tommy’s style. It worried me. I asked him what he was going to be doing and he said that he couldn’t tell me. But it was big, he said. Really, really big. He was just so excited.”
“You must have been happy for him to be happy,” Jolaine said.
“I should have been, shouldn’t I? And I guess a part of me was. You want somebody you care about to be happy, of course. But I knew there was something wrong about all of that, and Tommy went up there even before the shooting started.”
“Have you seen him since?” Jonathan asked.
“A few times. I guess he knows he’s got a free meal and pie waiting for him whenever he wants it.”
“How is he?”
“I have to admit that he looks terrific,” Mary said with a shrug and a tentative smile. “He’s filled out quite a bit—in a good way—and he seems more confident than he used to be. But he wears a uniform all the time now, at least every time I see him.”
“What kind of uniform?”
“Looks like army to me, but I don’t really know the difference. A lot like what you people are wearing.”
For Jonathan, all of this confirmed what he’d been suspecting all along. It seemed clear that they’d stumbled upon the location they were looking for. Now, the question was what to do about it?
“What does he tell you they’re doing up there?” Jonathan asked. “How does he explain all the shooting?”
Another deep sigh from Mary. “I’ll tell you the God’s honest truth about that,” she said. “After that response I got from the contractor guys, and after the nervousness I see from everyone around town about that place, I don’t ask him anything. I don’t want to run him off.”
“Is he a violent kid?” It was the first time Rollins had opened his mouth.
Mary recoiled in her seat. The question seemed to have taken her off guard. Perhaps it was too on the nose. But she took it seriously. “Which one are you?” she asked. Are you Boomer or Madman?
“Madman, ma’am.”
“I wish I could answer this differently, but this is part of what’s been bothering me from the beginning. Tommy’s not a violent boy, but he’s an impressionable boy. I think he’d do just about anything to impress somebody he respected. Tommy doesn’t have a lot of time for authority.”
“So, let’s get back to why you didn’t call the police,” Jonathan said. “You’re hoping that we can interfere with all that’s going on up there, don’t you?”
“I’d have thought that was obvious by now,” Mary said with a touch of annoyance.
“Okay,” Jonathan said. “I think we have a plan. But you’re going to have to make a phone call to Tommy.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Never a sound sleeper, Ian Martin had learned over the years to ignore the routine sounds of nighttime. In a hotel, for example, because of the context, he could filter out the movement of people in the hallway—the very sound that would launch him out of bed prepared to fight if he were at home. Here in Camp Wainwright, the common sounds included not just the fauna of the night, but also the rumble of low conversations and the crunch of gravel as soldiers moved from one place to another.
To hear the sound of a car door, however, was a thousand percent out of the ordinary, and it ripped him from sleep to full alert. He rolled out of his rack to go to the window and pulled the blinds aside. Sure enough, someone was opening the door to one of the camp SUVs. It was too dark to make out the identity, but the silhouette clearly showed the outline of a uniform.
Ian spun on his heel and snatched his M4 from its resting place next to his headboard and headed for his bedroo
m door. He cleared the living room in six long strides, pulled open the door, and stepped out into the coolness of the night just as the soldier was climbing into the driver’s seat.
“Hey!” Ian yelled. “Stop!”
The engine cranked.
Ian took off at run, clad only in boxer shorts, and pressed his rifle to his shoulder. He shouted louder, “Stop, goddammit!”
The vehicle remained still. Ian approached cautiously. This was entirely new territory. He had no template to work from. He approached from behind the driver’s door, squinting through the darkness to see who it was, and to assess the level of threat he posed.
Tension drained from his shoulders as he saw the profile of Tommy Piper sitting behind the wheel. The boy’s eyes looked wet, and he looked shaken.
Ian slung his rifle and used his left hand to pull open the door. Tommy was a mess. He wore yesterday’s clothes, his hair was on sideways, and he’d clearly been crying. “Jesus, Tommy. What’s wrong?”
“I have to go into town,” he said.
“It’s two in the morning.”
“I know. I have to go.”
“Tommy, look at me.”
The boy pivoted his head. His eyes weren’t right, reflecting a head that wasn’t right.
“Talk to me, son. What’s going on?”
“It’s Mary. She’s sick. She needs me.”
Ian felt more tension drain. Homesickness was the bane of many soldiers’ existence, most often among the very young and the newly married. It was worst among new fathers. He was surprised to see it in Tommy. Rumor had it that the kid didn’t have personal ties to anyone outside the camp, other than the lady who ran Mary’s Diner. Apparently, she was some kind of foster mother to him. The lack of close ties was one of the factors that made him such an excellent adjutant. He could be trusted not to gab with people he shouldn’t be gabbing with.
“It doesn’t work like that, Tommy. A soldier can’t just leave camp. We have work to do. You know that we’re in a high-security lockdown.”
“Please, Colonel,” Tommy said. The edge seemed to have worn off of his panic, but he was still distraught. “She lives just at the base of the mountain. She’s the only person who’s ever given a shit about me, and she’s never asked me for a thing. If she called, then something is wrong.”
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