by Tyler King
How sad and cynical. This man has everything and appreciates none of it. I’m beginning to see why he and his son don’t get along.
“Look, Avery…” He crosses his legs, leaning to one side against the chair’s armrest. “You seem like a nice girl. I’m sure you have only good intentions.”
It’s something people say right before they’re about to insult you. My hand reaches to where my pocket should be, but I don’t have any in this dress. The shell casing isn’t there. Instead it’s sitting on the dresser in Ethan’s bedroom.
“My family is going through a hard time right now. Linda’s cancer has returned after a period of remission. I’m afraid the outlook isn’t good and Ethan is having difficulty accepting the reality of his mother’s condition.”
A stone sinks in my stomach.
Now it makes sense. Ethan’s disappearance and agitation. The reluctance to talk to me about why he wasn’t at work. The reason he bit my head off and sent me away when I went to his house. The one person in his family he’s closest to, the only one who has ever understood him, is leaving him. And he has no choice but to watch it happen. Slowly, painfully, he’ll watch his mother slip away a little at a time. Until it’s just Ethan and a father he doesn’t love.
“I’m very sorry. I had no idea.”
“As I’m aware, you have troubles of your own.”
Now we’re getting to it. The part where I’m not good enough for his only surviving progeny. Not fit to be seen on the arm of what will be left of the Ash legacy. I’m tainted goods. A tragedy celebrity who grabs all the wrong headlines. Even being at this party, I’m an embarrassment to Paul and the impression he would give his very important guests. He doesn’t understand that I’ve had this conversation with myself a dozen times. When a boyfriend asks about my family and why he’ll never meet them. Relationships don’t last when you only know half the person you’re with. I guess I thought Ethan could be different.
“Mr. Ash, I appreciate your trying to be delicate, but why not just say what’s on your mind? If you’re trying to spare my feelings—don’t.”
I’ve grown impatient with this night. Anesthetized. As I sit here, I feel the wet blanket dripping down my shoulders. The apathy soaking in. Colors gray. Sound and sensation dim. Frosted glass walls rise around me and everything else is just a hazy, muted image on the other side.
“All right,” he says, uncrossing his legs. The pretense falls away and what’s left is the austere severity of a man who holds nothing sacred that doesn’t serve a purpose. “Ethan is prone to…instability. Stressful situations cause him to act out, behave erratically. The situation with his mother being what it is, I suspect that explains his sudden fascination with you. I do apologize for him, Avery. None of this is your fault. I simply think it best that you move on.”
“Why would I do that?”
He takes a breath, jaw working back and forth.
“A time is going to come soon when he will have to accept a new painful reality. When that happens, you are not equipped to handle him. I’m afraid your presence in his life only does more harm than good.”
He might be right. I’m not the one people turn to in search of comfort. I have no particular skills for consoling someone through tragedy. Maybe because I still haven’t learned to evolve past my own. You don’t go to a carpenter who has a broken sign on the door. But I’m willing to try. And I can listen. If I can at least be there for Ethan, hold his hand and let him lean on me—that’s something, right? And if he doesn’t want to talk, I can be someone to share the silence with. The darkness is a little less unbearable when you don’t have to endure it alone. I’ve been there, and I know the way out.
Standing, I smooth the creases from my dress.
“Thank you for having me, Mr. Ash. It was a lovely party.”
I turn around and stop dead. Ethan’s standing in the doorway, a black figure cloaked in shadow. Even from across the room I feel the anger radiating out from his body.
“What’s going on in here?”
“Nothing,” I say, walking toward him. “Just a chat.”
He stalks past me, his expression hard and impassive. I reach for his arm, but he yanks it away and keeps going toward his father.
“What did you say to her?”
Paul gets to his feet and sighs. “Ethan, there’s no cause for dramatics.”
“You don’t talk to her.” Inches from his father’s face, Ethan is composed fury. “Ever. You understand me?”
“Ethan?” I say, standing in the doorway. “Please. Everything’s fine.”
Hurried and vicious, he turns and strides toward me. Ethan puts his hand on the small of my back, pushing, and doesn’t say a word until we get to his truck outside.
“What about my stuff?” I ask.
He tosses me the keys and goes to the passenger side.
“It’s in the truck. You drive. I’ve been drinking.”
I climb in behind the wheel and watch Ethan buckle his seat belt then dig his phone out of his pocket.
“What’s going on?”
“Ed needs us back at the office.” He nods at me to start the engine. “Armed men have taken the Federal Reserve Bank on Liberty.”
“Holy shit.”
That’s only a block from the magazine. I put the truck in gear and turn us around to head out of the driveway.
“Nothing yet on their identities or motives,” he says. “Ed’s bringing everyone in.”
As I pull onto the main road, Ethan dials his phone and puts it on speaker. It rings through the cab.
“Ethan,” the hushed male voice on the other end says, “now’s not a good—”
“Carter,” he says, “tell me what you know.”
“I’m about to head into a briefing. Give me…three, four hours. I’ll get you—”
“Not good enough. In two hours I’m going to be standing on your dick. Give me something to go on.”
“Jesus, Ethan. We’re still just gathering intelligence from—”
“‘Special Agent Carter Grant indicates the FBI has no information on the unknown number of armed assailants who have now seized the largest Federal Reserve Bank in the United States.’ That’s the lead, Carter, if you don’t give me something useful.”
I glance at Ethan, then snap my eyes back to the road. I like this side of him. Hungry. Ravenous, even. There’s tenacity in his voice and urgency in his eyes. What attracts me to this career field is perhaps what attracts me to people: drive, ambition, and never-ceasing curiosity. Put on a press badge, and you become the shark. You’re the dark figure in the water. We prey on the predators.
“Fuck you, Ash.”
“Hey, hey. Be nice and I’ll let you blow me.”
Out of the corner of my eye I see Ethan smirk. He’s enjoying this.
“Look, I’m about to walk into a briefing. Right now we suspect seven men. Caucasian. We’ve got a lead on a possible motive, but I can’t say anything until we’ve looked at it and determined the intel’s credible.”
“How’d they get in?”
“Based on CCTV footage, looks like they walked through the front door. Someone on the inside let them in. No shots fired, as far as we know.”
“Any hostages inside? Have you made contact?”
“That’s all I got. Two hours, and I’ll let you know.”
“You’re my favorite, Carter.”
“Yeah, die in a fire.”
Ethan picks up the phone to end the call, but before he can, there’s noise on the other end.
“Wait, Ethan?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m looking at something here. When was the last time you spoke to Patrick Turner Murphy?”
15
The Bait
Ethan and I race into the office just after midnight, breathless and sweating. We had to dump his truck three blocks away when we couldn’t get past the police barricades set up around the Federal Reserve building.
Stepping off the elevator, I’
m still trying to get my head around what’s happening. In a sudden vertigo, I feel like the ground is getting farther away but also somehow rushing up to meet me. It started with Carter’s question about my father.
When Ethan told him it’d been years since they’d spoken, Carter tried to hang up without telling us why he’d asked. Ethan pressed but was only able to get out of him that he was looking at a memo generated through the FBI’s Manhattan field office that no one had bothered to read until it became relevant. All we knew for certain: Patrick Turner Murphy was reaching out from the grave. Ethan’s gears were spinning before he ended the call.
While I drove, he worked the phones. First to track down the warden from Sing Sing to find out if anyone had claimed my father’s possessions. Then waking my father’s attorney to demand he gather any papers retrieved from the prison and messenger them to me at the magazine. The pieces were coming together, and it wasn’t a pretty picture.
“‘Unknown number of armed assailants gained entry to the Federal Reserve Bank on Liberty at 8:47 p.m.,’” Ethan reads aloud from his phone as we jog to our desks.
Everyone in the Farm is running around, ragged, shouting at each other across the room. I open up my laptop and bring up the Messenger app to send a text to Navid. It’s more efficient than trying to yell above the noise.
Avery Avalon
12:09 AM
What do you know about alt-right message boards on the deep web?
“No reports of shots fired.” Ethan pulls off his sports coat and tosses it on the back of his chair then searches through his desk drawers. “Off-duty NYPD officer called it in after witnessing several suspects entering the building through a side door. Described as males wearing military-style uniforms and bandannas over their faces, armed with assault rifles. CCTV footage shows someone inside opened a door to allow the suspects to enter. No communication with the on-duty security detail working in the building.”
My laptop chimes with a new message.
Navid Kirmani
12:09 AM
What do you need?
Avery Avalon
12:09 AM
Search for any mention of Patrick Turner Murphy.
“Here.” Ethan pulls a folder from his drawer. “Photocopies of everything Patrick gave me during our interviews. Pages from his book.”
“Navid’s looking into it,” I say, talking to Ethan over the wall of our cubes. “I’ll read through—”
That’s when Ed pops up like a vole from his burrow. The man must have an extensive tunnel system through the office, because I never see him until he’s right on top of us.
“What’ve you got?” He spares me only a brief glance before turning his attention to Ethan.
“My source at the FBI gave us the preliminary details,” Ethan answers. “We’ve been gathering some background on a possible lead.”
Ed shoves his hands into his skinny jeans, which crinkle loose around toothpick legs. If he’s pleased or at least satisfied, he doesn’t show it. The man’s face is a topography of permanent undulating hills and long, snaking valleys.
“Your source can confirm?” Ed asks.
“He will.”
I feel someone behind me, like the sun at my back, before I notice Ethan looking over my shoulder. Cara’s there in a T-shirt and jeans, hair tied up on top of her head. If I saw her on the street, I wouldn’t recognize her.
Phone to her ear, she says, “C.J. checked in from the scene. I’ve given her the Twitter feed and sent one of mine to get video. Hearing there still isn’t any word from inside the building. She’s trying to confirm if officials believe the target is the vault or—”
“It isn’t,” I say before I think better than to interject. “At least, we think we have a pretty good reason to assume it’s not.”
My laptop chimes again with a message from Navid. There’s a link and a file attachment, so I let Ethan explain while I check it.
“Thursday evening a memo was generated from the FBI’s Manhattan office warning about chatter it picked up from an alt-right message board. Specifically, it mentioned a series of posts where several members discussed staging a demonstration wherein they would seize a piece of federal property. One of the locations suggested was the Federal Reserve Bank.”
Looking through Ethan’s photocopies of my father’s book, I start comparing them to the pages Navid’s sent. It’s eerie, seeing my father’s handwriting, reading his words. I hear his voice in my head like he’s standing right behind me, whispering in my ear.
“You’re suggesting a link to domestic terrorists?” Ed asks.
“More like militia,” Ethan says. I catch his eye and give him a nod. We’ve found what we’re looking for. “They’re a far-right group of sovereign-citizen types who contest the legality of the federal government. The Federal Reserve is one of their favorite boogeymen.”
“Okay…” Ed scratches at the prickly white stubble along his sagging chin while he leans against the wall of an empty cubicle. “Get your source to confirm and find me evidence we can print—”
“There’s more,” Ethan says, turning to me. “Avery…”
Frantic heart beating against my ribs, I don’t think, just speak and hope it comes out in English. I’ve always hated the spotlight. Strange for a journalist, I know. But even Adele gets stage fright.
“While he was in prison, my father began writing a book. A manifesto.”
Ed and Cara share a glance. They stand up a little straighter, attentive.
“Sometime in the last two years, he managed to disseminate his writing outside the prison. Navid has found several references to Patrick and his writings on alt-right message boards. He’s also mentioned numerous times on a website for a group like the one described in the FBI memo: Juris Christian Constitutional Assembly.”
For more than a decade I’ve been running as fast as I can to get away from my father. Turns out I’ve been running in circles. I should have known better than to believe prison would silence him, or that he’d allow himself to fade into obscurity and become irrelevant. Legacy was always very important to him. Without a loyal child to carry on his message, he needed a new audience. Seems he found one.
“Put it together for me,” Ed says.
“It seems this group has adopted Patrick’s philosophy, if you will, into their anti-government agenda,” Ethan says. “Patrick wrote about the illegitimacy of the federal government, the illegality of federal taxes, and a vast and convoluted conspiracy theory concerning central banking. It seems the men who have taken the building are members of this group, and that this demonstration is in response to Patrick Turner Murphy’s death.”
“There are hundreds of posts,” I add, “on these message boards claiming my father’s death was carried out by the government in a secret plot to silence him. They’re using his death as a rallying cry to lure people to their cause.”
Cara shakes her head, rubbing her eyes. “So they’re insane, is what you’re getting at.”
“And armed,” I say. “However absurd their beliefs, they’re committed to them.”
It’s easy to dismiss people like these men, my father, as lunatics and ignore them. But I’ve seen one of them up close. They’re far more dangerous than just some schizophrenic shouting at a lamppost or muttering to himself on the subway. What people mock as tinfoil-hat-wearers are organized, militarized, and growing in number every day. In every corner of the country there are people like Patrick Turner Murphy cultivating their flocks, feeding them lies and paranoia. I know better than most what happens when that paranoia hits a tipping point.
Ed clears his throat and checks his smartwatch. “Ethan, I want you down there. See what your source is willing to confirm and get a statement on the record.”
“All right, here’s how this works,” Cara says to me. “C.J. and my guy can keep gathering updates from the scene. We’ll put the feed up on the front page of the website and supplement with any additional details that come in. Avery, if you’
re up to it…”
“Yes.” I asked for this. A chance at a real story. No way I’m backing down now. “I’m all over it.”
“You’re sending her?” Cyle appears behind Ed like the Ghost of Shitting in My Cereal.
“Problem?” Ethan’s still itching for a fight. Doesn’t matter who. Cyle’s as good a target as any right now.
“Yeah.” Cyle hacks his answer like he’s got a pepper flake stuck on the back of his throat. “She’s too green. Let me send one of my people.”
The insinuation being that, despite my assignment to the online section, I am not one of his people. I’m the enemy in the cold war between print and digital.
“I can handle it.” Looking Cara dead in her crisp blue eyes, I straighten my spine. “There’s no one more qualified to report this story than me.”
“Oh, come on.” Cyle all but stomps his feet. “This chick’s never covered something like this. She’ll get railroaded out there, and that’s only if she isn’t trampled first.”
“This chick ran three miles with a bullet in her leg.”
The words are out of my mouth and snap off the walls before I know I’ve spoken. Then it’s the absolute silence after a gunshot cracks through the air and everyone holds their breath and strains their ears. The phantom pain behind the scar on my leg throbs and burns as if it were still fresh.
“And the next time you call me a chick, you better be wearing a cup.”
In my peripheral vision, I think I catch Ed’s lips twitch.
“That settles it,” Cara says. When I check her face to gauge the fallout of my outburst, she looks almost proud. “Go with Ethan. I want a write-up for the website by five a.m.”
* * *
After the debate has ended and the others have dispersed, I go to the bathroom to change my outfit. I can’t run around in this dress, so I’ve got no choice but to change back into the clothes I’ve been wearing since Friday night. As I’m walking back to my desk, Ed gets my attention and calls me into his office, then shuts the door behind us.
“Are you sure you’re up to this?” he asks, standing in the center of the room.
