“Are the girls all right? I should call, but I can’t bring myself to do it.”
“It was a bit tricky back there for a little while, but everyone is fine. I should go. Your plane is waiting. Fly with the angels, Mummie.”
Myra felt something brush her cheek just as the car came to a stop. She looked through the dark glass to see the coppery-haired man getting ready to open the door for her. Her hand went to her cheek. It felt warm and soft. A kiss? A touch from her spirit daughter? It pleased her to think it was so. She smiled through her tears as she stepped out of the car.
There was a spring to Myra’s step as she followed the man, who was leading her to a special aircraft sitting all alone on a private runway. She could hear the sound of the jet engine as she climbed the steps. She didn’t know how she knew, but she knew she would be the only passenger on this particular flight.
Myra turned, hoping against hope that she would see Charles somewhere in the gloom. In the movies the man was always waiting in the wings, his eyes sad as he watched the love of his life fly away. There was nothing to be seen except the huge black car racing back across the tarmac.
Myra settled herself. The interior was beyond luxurious. The leather seats were soft and buttery. Seating arrangements. A shower and a bedroom were somewhere down the aisle. She wasn’t sure, but she rather thought this was the equivalent to one of the planes used as Air Force One back home. Suddenly she felt important.
A young woman with blond hair and a fashionable uniform asked if she would like anything until breakfast was served. Myra shook her head, but she did have a question. “Tell me when I can make a phone call.”
The young woman nodded as she made her way to her own seat to prepare for takeoff.
As the special plane rose in the sky, Myra leaned back and closed her eyes. Within seconds she was sound asleep, both her hands clasped around the treasured pearls at her neck.
When the pilot announced their cruising altitude, the flight attendant poured coffee and carried it forward to the lone passenger. She noticed the smile on the woman’s face and wondered if the mysterious passenger was dreaming of angels. She carried the coffee back to her own seat and drank it herself. Obviously breakfast was something her passenger could do without. She started to think about preparing her passenger’s lunch as she attacked the scrumptious breakfast so that it wouldn’t go to waste.
While Myra snoozed on the luxurious British plane, her fellow Sisters were running against the clock in Utah as the media started to broadcast from outside the gates of the HOE compound.
The Sisters clustered near the vehicles, far enough away from the HOE women, who had elected to stay behind, so that their conversation couldn’t be overheard.
“What’s the plan as of this moment?” Alexis queried as she rummaged in her Red Bag. Piles of clothing were heaped willy-nilly on the ground at her feet as she searched for the last items they would need to make a safe getaway.
“Has anyone heard from Bert?” Jack asked.
They all looked at Kathryn, who shook her head. “The last I heard was what you told me, Jack. He’s supposed to get here before it gets light out with some of the men from the local bureaus. He’ll be waiting for the federal warrant so he can enter the grounds. That’s it in a nutshell. There’s no way he can be tied to all of this, Jack.”
“He won’t be. It’s those crazy-ass media people out there we have to worry about. By now they have to know they can’t reach or locate the sheriff and his deputies, so they’re going to go to the state police. They’ll be here like fleas on a dog in—my best guess—about thirty minutes. So, let’s get out of here while the going is good,” Jack said.
“But what’s the plan?” Harry demanded.
Jack tried to see what the women were doing, but all he could see was a lot of movement. Suddenly he heard a lot of grumbling, then laughter and giggles. What the hell?
“What do you think?” Nikki demanded as she whirled and twirled for the boys to see. In spite of himself, Jack doubled over laughing.
“Well, damn!” was Ted’s contribution.
Espinosa was laughing so hard he had a hard time focusing his camera. At the very least, all this should get him a long paid weekend at some posh resort.
Harry clutched at Jack’s arm, his eyes frantic. “This can’t work!”
“Harry, these bonding sessions have to stop. Next thing you’ll be wanting to hold my hand. I can’t allow that. It will work. The girls never do anything that doesn’t work.”
Jack turned to Espinosa. “Hey, Joe, play your cards right, and I bet you can get a gig on Jerry Springer with what you’ve got going on there.”
“I hate these dresses,” Isabelle said as she looked down at the old-fashioned outfit she was wearing. “Who knew they wore petticoats under these god-awful things. The material in the dress alone must weigh ten pounds!”
“What color is this?” someone asked.
Someone else shouted, “Puce!”
“What? What? You want muddy green, puke green, or maroon? It wasn’t like I had a rainbow of colors to choose from,” Alexis said. “Now, hold still so I can give you a pompadour with all this damn hair we shaved off those women,” she demanded between fits of giggles.
“What’s the damn plan, Jack?” Harry asked menacingly.
“The plan is…The plan is…”
“Shut up, Jack, and let me glue this goatee on you. Here’s your Smokey Bear hat and the deputy’s shirt. Put it on,” Kathryn said. “You, too, Harry,” she said, slapping a beard onto Harry’s chin. Then, to his chagrin, she settled a Smokey Bear hat on Harry’s head as well.
Jack laughed like a lunatic. “You look like Fu Manchu, Harry, only shorter!” He danced away before Harry could take a shot at him.
Jack sobered almost immediately when he saw Harry raise his arm for silence. “I hear a siren somewhere. Five miles out, maybe seven.”
No one ever disputed Harry’s hearing.
Jack moved forward. “Okay, Ted, you drive one cruiser. Girls, pile in. Espinosa, you drive the other. Once you get through those gates, you drive like hell, for two, maybe three miles down the road. Harry and I will meet up with you there. Harry, you drive the SUV and park just outside the gates. Now, here’s the plan. Listen up. I’m going to drive the eighteen-wheeler full of pumpkins and block the road on this side of the gates. That means no one gets in here. The only way they’ll be able to move it is to blow it up. That’s the PLAN! Now move, people! Sirens, blue lights! The whole ball of wax.”
The people moved.
“What are you waiting for, Harry? You wanted a plan! I just gave you a plan! A sterling plan! A magnificent plan! Now, move your ass.”
“Sometimes you are so damn smart I can’t stand you. By God, I think it might work,” Harry said grudgingly. “See ya!”
Jack watched as the three vehicles—the cruisers, sirens blasting, blue lights flashing, Harry hot on their trail in the SUV—raced toward the gates.
Jack climbed into the cab of the eighteen-wheeler and took off, downshifting as he felt the power under the hood. Pumpkins. Who the hell knew from pumpkins? From that moment on, pumpkins were his favorite…fruit? Vegetable? Food.
It took a lot of fancy maneuvering on Jack’s part to bring the behemoth to a stop, then back it up, then turn it parallel to the gates; but somehow he did it. He hopped out and made it through the gates and into the SUV Harry was driving with an inch of space to spare. Pedal to the metal, Jack collapsed into the backseat, the door hanging open as Harry sped down the road. “Did the gates close?” Jack gasped.
“Yeah, before anyone knew what the hell happened. I hear sirens, Jack.”
“Ignore them and keep going,” Jack said as he untangled himself and bounded over to the front seat so he could better see what was happening. “Annie told me this is HOE property all the way to within two hundred feet of the main road. She downloaded a plat plan from the Provo building office or someplace like that. Technically, all those media people are t
respassing. Bet they don’t know that, either. Wonder if Bert knows. I think I’ll give him a call right now and tell him to get his ass out here right now. No sense waiting till dawn, with sirens coming this way. Do ya think the state police know this is private property?”
“How the hell would I know that, Jack? Shit! Here come some of the media. What do you want me to do?”
“What do you mean, what do I want you to do? I want you to speed up and get us to the girls before the media overtake us is what I want you to do. You’re screwing up the plan, Harry. I’m not going to forget this, either,” Jack said as Bert picked up.
“Bert! We’re out on the road. You need to get here right now. Where are you?”
“I was kissing Kathryn until you called me. I’m right in front of you, you schmuck. I’m one of those rare people who actually makes a plan and works off that plan. I’ve been sitting here for three hours waiting for all of you, and yeah, I know this is private property. How’d those implosions go, buddy?”
“Like clockwork. Did you get everything out of the cruiser trunk? Oops, here comes the media,” Jack said, as Harry ground to a stop.
“Got it all. The girls are ready. Stay in your truck, Jack. Whatever the hell you do, don’t say a word.”
“Got it!”
Jack and Harry watched in awe as the Sisters climbed out of the two police cruisers, followed by Ted Robinson and Joe Espinosa, who had their hands high in the air.
“Up against the cruiser, spread ’em, hands on the hood!” Annie bellowed as she waved a gun around. “That goes for you, too, Mr. FBI Director! You, the one with the camera, you can turn around and take a picture when I give the word. But you have to wait a minute while we take off your distributor caps. And shoot out your tires.”
Alexis walked over to the men and hooked them together with FlexiCuffs. “Joe will cut you loose when it’s time,” she whispered.
A breathless gaggle of media ground to a halt, then backed up when Annie shot off the gun, the bullet going skyward.
“Stay back!” she bellowed a second time.
“Hey, you with the camera!”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s me,” Espinosa said, his voice quivering with excitement.
The Sisters lined up in the headlights from the cruisers and the SUV.
A gasp went up from the horde of media. “It’s those women who live out here! You can tell by the hair and the dresses,” someone shouted.
“You have it all wrong,” Kathryn shouted. She lowered her voice, and said, “Okay, on the count of three, peel and dive into that SUV. One! Two! Three!”
The pompadours and the prairie dresses with the Velcro bindings that Alexis had attached earlier were suddenly flung skyward.
“It’s the vigilantes!”
Espinosa, knowing what to expect, clicked, and a nanosecond later the pictures were on their way to MSNBC, compliments of Maggie Spritzer of the Post in a special deal she’d arranged with the powers that be at the network. As the SUV raced out to the highway, the vigilantes were once more making news in real time.
“Where to, ladies?” Jack asked the giggling women in the back of the SUV.
Deadly quiet descended.
“Okay, okay, I was just having some fun. We’re going back to the Ellis farm, where the crop dusters should be waiting. They’ll take you as far as Salt Lake City, where you will board Annie’s Gulfstream.”
“Good plan, Jack,” Nikki said, leaning over the seat to plant a kiss on his cheek.
“Yeah, it was pretty good, wasn’t it? What do you think will happen to all those pumpkins?” he asked fretfully.
“Who cares?” Nikki asked, kissing his other cheek.
“Certainly not me,” Jack said, reveling in his moment of glory. “For sure not me,” he reiterated.
Epilogue
It was a magnificent late-fall day on Big Pine Mountain. Beautiful russet and gold leaves swirled in the late-afternoon wind that whispered among the stately pines as birds chittered in their nests high in the trees. No one other than the dogs seemed to appreciate the wonderful day as they raced after the falling leaves that were like an orange and gold carpet on the ground. None of the women had the urge to go out and play in the leaves the way they’d done the autumn before when Charles had issued his mandate to rake leaves or go without dinner.
Annie decided she didn’t like what she was seeing: glum faces and inertia. They’d been back not quite twenty-four hours—time for all of them to shower, change clothes, and take a nap. As yet they hadn’t had what Charles always called “the debriefing” after a mission was completed.
“I’ve had all I’m going to take from the lot of you!” Annie said, her voice stopping just short of being angry. “We need to focus here. We need to think about dinner. We need to debrief and fill out our reports, since…since there is no one else here to do it. And, that’s exactly what we’re going to do. We also need to take stock of our current situation, and by taking stock I mean we have to think about the coming months.
“We are virtually cut off from the world up here, as we all know. We all took for granted that the generators would always give us electricity, but none of us know where the gas is or how we get it. It’s just there because Charles took care of that. Our larder is not overflowing. What that means, ladies, is unless we replenish it, we will starve up here in the winter months. I do not relish having to hunt for my food with a bow and arrow. Do any of you know how that was done? No, you do not. Nor do I.
“So, what I suggest is that you all get off your asses and come inside so we can take care of business. Scratch that. ‘Suggest’ is too mild a word. I’m ordering you inside so we can take care of business.”
Murphy and Grady stopped their wild dash around the compound to sit on their hindquarters and stare at the women. Neither dog had ever heard such a tone of voice from Annie, who was usually all sweetness and light when it came to them. They waited to see what the outcome would be, sitting still as statues.
“I’ll meet you all in Charles’s lair as soon as I find something to put in the oven for dinner. No more glum faces. I mean it. Move it, ladies!”
It was an order they couldn’t quibble with, so the Sisters rose from where they were sitting on the steps and headed toward the main building.
The only word Murphy and Grady related to was “dinner.” They followed Annie, who was always good for a belly scratch and a treat or two.
When Annie joined her fellow Sisters, she announced, “Meat loaf for dinner, baked potatoes, and a salad. Charles already had a meat loaf made up in the freezer. He always prepared ahead, so we need to write that down on our list.”
Nikki pulled a yellow pad closer and wrote, “Prepare food ahead of time.”
By the time Annie took them through the domestic issues, Nikki’s pad was full of things that needed to be taken care of. They argued among themselves as to who was going to do what and finally came to an agreement about it all.
“What about Myra?” Isabelle asked. “Something must have happened. When she called the last time, she said she would be here by noon. It’s late afternoon and she isn’t here and she hasn’t called.”
Annie was worried, too, but she tried not to show it. “Just assign her some duties, and she and I can swap if she doesn’t like hers. I’m sure there was some kind of delay at the airport. She is a fugitive, so those people have to be careful not to blow her cover and get her here safely. Myra can take care of herself. Let’s move on now. Briskly, girls.”
Nikki took the floor. “The FBI has taken a big hit. Bert is playing it all just right by saying he couldn’t invade the compound until he had the federal warrant in his hands. Which, by the way, didn’t arrive until we were all in the air in those damn crop dusters. The women have been taken to a federal facility in Salt Lake City, and there is absolutely no press coverage on that other than what the FBI wants to give out. What that means to us is, the women are not talking. Period. He did say that the other compounds, or sects,
whatever you want to call them, are screaming about religious persecution. But the general public is in an uproar, so the FBI is kind of playing that down.”
Kathryn said Maggie told her earlier that the Post is up for some one-of-a-kind award for her print coverage, and they are commending her as EIC for sharing and getting the on-the-spot news to MSNBC, since she couldn’t get out a special edition on time. Win-win for Maggie and the Post. She said she’s going nuts with all the papers in Utah calling her and promising big things, yet thanking her for being so—as she put it—‘in everyone’s faces.’
“Maggie also said she gave Ted and Espinosa a week’s paid vacation. Espinosa went to see his family because his mother’s birthday is soon, and he asked Maggie to ask Annie if she wants him to name his firstborn after her. She said he cried. Maggie and Ted are going to Bermuda, or one of those islands, for five days and said, no matter what, we are not to call her. Oh, she also said Abner Tookus, her hacker/guru, wiped the HOE’s accounts clean, then burned everything to a cinder. All of Avery Snowden’s people have been paid to date as well as Snowden himself.”
Isabelle started to laugh as she got ready to offer her contribution. “Maggie made sure we made the half over the fold. According to the article, the vigilantes single-handedly blew up the entire HOE compound, leaving behind a gaggle of bald-headed women who were taken into federal custody and have refused to talk. Great detail was given to the picture/flag, whatever you want to call it, that was flying at half-mast when the FBI arrived. Bert confiscated it, saying it was evidence, but he was extremely fair to the media by first allowing them to take all the pictures they wanted.”
Kathryn simply glowed at Bert’s accomplishments.
Yoko took the floor, and said, “No one can figure out how we got in and out of the compound. They’re still trying to figure out the truck with the pumpkins. Some wiseass in the media said the only way they are going to catch us is to send in Delta Force, and even they are no match for us.”
Alexis was next. “Pearl, Nellie, and Elias are still in Nevada. Lizzie, too, but for how long I don’t know. They’re helping Cosmo, and, yes, Paula Woodley showed up and has things in hand. Marion Jennings has been reunited with her sister and her own children, as have the other young women that Lizzie met with. Annie, your friend Mr. Fish helped out a lot and asked Cosmo when he could expect to see you. Cosmo said he sounded excited at the prospect.” she said.
13. Under the Radar Page 19
