“I think that because Nick Journey called you personally, and the threat assessment came about from that phone call, that you’re internalizing a lot of this case. Díaz is far from my favorite person in the Bureau, but he’s right—we have no evidence that shows anything about your shooters. Getting a federal court order to go about accessing private bank records is not done without having overwhelming evidence that the records will produce an indication either of criminal activity or the intent of future criminal activity.”
“Rusty—”
Hudson stabbed a finger on his desktop. “I don’t like dealing with the Pentagon. They are out of our realm of responsibility. I’ve told you this before. I called them, as a courtesy to you, but there is nothing there.”
“Rusty—”
“That’s enough. I’m sorry the case is frustrating for you.” Hudson turned back to his computer. “By the way, you did very well in presenting at the threat assessment.”
Tolman left Hudson’s office without replying and fumed down the hall, kicking her own door closed behind her. Where cases go to die.
“Such a fucking bureaucrat,” she said out loud. Tolman tapped her foot, thinking of “Weeping Willow,” a Scott Joplin ragtime piece she’d been working on lately. Usually the thought of new music calmed her, but this time Joplin’s syncopations didn’t help. She rocked in her chair, moving papers around her desk.
“Shit,” she finally said.
“You are very, very good at your job,” Hudson had told her.
Patronizing bullshit, or honest evaluation? She tended toward the latter. Hudson was a bureaucrat, but he was also honest with her.
If he thinks I’m so good at my job, then I’m going to do my job.
With or without him.
CHAPTER
20
Journey somehow stumbled through a department meeting, though afterwards he couldn’t remember any of what was said. He tried for an hour to work on his overdue journal article, typing a grand total of seven words. His mind was churning, and he couldn’t seem to quiet it.
The Glory Warriors.
“Some kind of veterans’ group,” the engraver from New York had said.
This is no veterans’ group, Journey thought.
He left his office at two thirty. Three doors down, he leaned through the open door of Sandra’s office, but she wasn’t there. He felt vaguely embarrassed for having dragged her into this, for letting her peek into his life. When he saw her again, he would thank her and apologize for letting their professional relationship become muddled.
He paused for a moment at her door. A book sat on her desk next to her computer. Journey read the title: Profound Autism in the Pre-Adolescent. He’d read it a year ago himself. He looked at the book for a long moment, his feelings on unsure footing. Sandra had been very kind, and though she clearly didn’t understand Andrew—most people didn’t—neither did she seem put off by him.
Journey looked down at the book again. Sandra Kelly was smart, a good researcher, and by all accounts, very dynamic as a classroom lecturer. She was attractive and interesting, and Journey could not imagine that she was really interested in an out-of-shape, middle-aged man who had significant emotional baggage and a child with a severe developmental disability. That should set off all kinds of warnings for a younger, single woman, shouldn’t it?
Shouldn’t it? he thought, and for a few moments his mind wasn’t on the Glory Warriors and Pete Parsons and the man he had killed. He finally turned from Sandra’s doorway and walked away down the hall.
* * *
The Brekke Ranch was a small spread between Carpenter Center and Madill, which offered equestrian therapy for special needs children from across the region. Andrew rode two afternoons a week, and from the time Journey turned the minivan off Highway 70 onto the narrow, dusty gravel road that twisted a mile down to the ranch, the boy smiled. The twice-weekly rides were among very few things that Journey could say truly gave his son enjoyment.
In the larger of two arenas, horses made their way slowly around, each led by an adult and accompanied by a “side walker” on either side of the horse. On one horse sat a girl with muscular dystrophy. A boy from Ardmore, who also had autism, though not so profoundly as Andrew, sat on the other. The adults engaged the children during the ride, taking them through directions for the horse, playing games with large plastic rings and soft balls.
At Andrew’s turn, he mounted the horse from a wooden platform to the side of the riding ring, and ever so subtly rubbed the horse’s neck, the signal for the horse to move. Journey sighed. They were safe here. Andrew could actually engage in an activity he enjoyed under the September sun, with a hint of breeze from the south.
After the forty-five-minute ride, Andrew hooted and whistled happily as Journey buckled him into his seat. He drove up the winding path toward the highway, and as the blacktop came into view, he spotted a dark SUV parked on the far shoulder.
He’d seen it before. When he left Highway 70 and headed down the road to the ranch an hour earlier, it had turned off behind him, a few car lengths back, but had then stopped, executed a tricky turnaround, and headed back to the highway. He assumed the driver had simply taken a wrong turn.
The windows were tinted, but Journey could make out two forms in the front seats of the SUV. It had Texas plates. Journey stopped at the top of the ranch road, waiting a little too long to make his left turn onto 70. An eighteen-wheeler blew by, and then the highway was empty.
Journey sat still in his old minivan, gripping the steering wheel. Andrew whistled his three-note melody from the backseat.
Behind him, another car came from the direction of the ranch, a white four-door hatchback driven by a man of about his age with a salt-and-pepper beard and glasses. The man had three sons who came to the ranch with him each week, though only one of them actually rode.
Journey tapped the steering wheel three times.
He checked his rearview. The bearded man, whose name Journey could never remember, was peering through the windshield at him. One of the boys, a teenager with thick light brown hair and glasses like his father’s, was leaning out the window. They were both staring at the back of the van.
The SUV hadn’t moved.
The man in the white car tapped his horn once.
Journey slowly glanced into his mirror again. Andrew went on whistling.
The Glory Warriors.
So they weren’t hiding from him. They weren’t even trying to conceal themselves. They wanted him to know they were there.
He thought of the document, the startling yet ultimately inconclusive words of the page he’d been given at Fort Washita and that now rested in his backpack on the seat next to him.
“Dr. Journey! The document, now!”
The man in the hatchback leaned on his horn again, longer this time. One of the boys in the backseat—the youngest one, Journey thought—had lowered his window and yelled something.
He looked up at the SUV and its two shapeless forms in the front seat. He nudged his foot off the brake and onto the accelerator. He turned in a wide arc onto Highway 70, then pulled slowly to the far shoulder.
The man with the three boys in the white car also turned left. They all stared at Journey’s minivan as they drove past him.
Journey inched the old van forward, facing the wrong way on the shoulder, until he was nose-to-nose with the black SUV, their front grilles three feet apart. He put the van into park, lowered the window, and waited.
Andrew squirmed. He’d stopped whistling and was looking out the window, across the rolling green fields of Marshall County. In a moment, Journey heard a tapping—Andrew had found a straw and a pencil.
Journey thought he knew what the original Glory Warriors had done, stockpiling weapons for an armed rebellion in case the post–Civil War federal government was destabilized. But the details were presumably in the pages that had not yet been found. And why were the modern-day Glory Warriors trying to bring about the very des
tabilization their forebears feared?
He could just give them the document and be done with it. He and Andrew would be safe.
And maybe they’d just kill me anyway, once they had it in their hands.
Journey gripped the steering wheel, a muscle working in his jaw. Andrew hummed.
* * *
Dallas Three Gold sat behind the wheel of the SUV and stared as the professor’s old minivan pulled up facing him. “What the hell’s he think he’s doing?”
“He’s out of his fucking mind,” said Silver in the seat beside him.
Gold waited. “Maybe. But maybe not.”
He flipped open his cell phone and called Bronze, who was back in Carpenter Center. He explained the situation. “Call base and request orders,” he said. “Do we approach?”
“Roger that on the request,” Bronze said. The Bronze member of every team was the transportation and communications liaison, while Gold and Silver were field operatives. “Keep this line open.”
Gold looked out the tinted windshield. He could very clearly see Nick Journey, sitting there tapping his finger on the steering wheel. His son was in the seat behind him, his head moving in strange, jerky motions.
Bronze was back on the phone. “Do not approach. Stay alert, do not approach. He’s only trying to tell us that he knows we’re here. Remember that he is an amateur. That’s direct from Dallas Base.”
“Roger that,” Gold said, then closed the phone. “But amateurs are unpredictable.”
* * *
Journey sat still for two full minutes, staring through the windshield. A droplet of sweat formed and ran into his eye, making him blink.
Behind him, he heard Andrew fidgeting.
“Hang on, son,” he said.
Several cars came and went on Highway 70. A couple slowed as if to help—this was rural Oklahoma, after all, and that was what people did—but Journey waved them away.
Another minute passed.
Journey flexed and unflexed his hands. He blinked again. He’d detected vague movement from inside the big SUV, but nothing else.
Each of us knows the other is here. But they don’t know what to make of me right now. I’m just a college professor with high blood pressure, and they can’t tell whether I’m brave or just stupid.
Neither can I, he thought after another moment, but the grain of anger, hot and hard, hadn’t gone away.
Another minute. The interior of the van seemed stifling, as if he’d gone to a higher elevation with thinner air.
“Wait right here, Andrew,” he said; then Journey slowly opened the door of the van.
* * *
“What the fuck does he think he’s doing?” Silver said.
Gold shook his head without speaking and undid the clasp on the holster that held his H&K assault pistol.
* * *
Gravel crunched under Journey’s feet as he shuffled out of the van. He passed between the two vehicles, feeling the heat from his engine. He crossed to the driver’s side of the SUV, two steps away from the highway. A truck roared past, and Journey felt the blast of wind tugging at his clothes.
He stood at the driver’s door, motionless. Another drop of perspiration ran into his eye, but this time he didn’t blink.
There was a small electronic hum, and the window came down.
“May I help you?” the driver asked, as if he were a clerk in a store and Journey was a customer.
Journey said nothing, kicking at a stray piece of gravel. He settled his gaze on the driver, thinking of his baseball days, how he had stared down the hitters. He was never physically imposing, so he was always left to the mental game to gain an advantage. He’d been told he had quite a stare.
The silence stretched for a minute.
A breeze came up. A little piece of cardboard blew from one side of the highway to the other. Journey heard his son humming, even from within the van. Then Andrew suddenly loosed a scream.
The SUV driver’s head jerked as if he’d been poked in the face by a pencil.
“I know who you are,” Journey said.
The driver, looking confused from Andrew’s shriek, glanced back toward Journey, staring through the lenses of his mirrored sunglasses. His lips parted slightly, then closed again.
“Glory Warrior,” Journey said.
The man in the passenger’s seat said, “What do you think you—?”
The driver silenced him with a look, then turned back to face Journey.
“I guess you don’t wear your little pins on a T-shirt like that. No place to hide them. Where are they? In your pocket, maybe? I bet you have your pins on you somewhere.”
The driver said nothing. Andrew screamed again.
“I have to take care of my son,” Journey said, “but let me tell you one thing, and you can pass it on up the line. The document you want? I have it, and I’ve read it. It’s incomplete. There was only one page buried at Fort Washita.”
The driver’s head dipped an inch or two.
“That’s right. It’s not all there.” Journey leaned in. He could smell the leather of the SUV’s seats. “But I’m going to find it, and I’m the only person in the world right now who has a clue how to go about finding it. You see, the person who wrote the document left a little mystery to solve.”
The driver took off his sunglasses. His eyes were blue and cold.
Journey nodded. “You leave my son and me alone. If something happens to me, you’ll never see the rest of the pages.”
Journey turned around and shuffled back to his van. He slammed the door. He felt surprisingly calm, his fingers curling over the steering wheel. Andrew screamed, then hummed.
“Yes, we’re going soon,” he said. “It won’t be long.”
Thirty seconds later, he heard the SUV’s engine turn over. The big vehicle backed away from him and pulled onto Highway 70.
Journey sagged against the wheel. He wiped his sweaty forehead.
“All right,” he said. “All right, then.”
Halfway back to Carpenter Center, his cell phone rang. It was Sandra.
“Nick, I’m glad I caught you. Are you coming back to the office today?”
“No, I was headed home. But Sandra—” He remembered the book in her office, how this woman had been reading up on autism in an effort to … what? To find more of a connection with him? He shook his head—she was still the only person he’d talked to about all that had happened. “I found out who G.W. is. Can you meet me at my house in ten minutes?”
There was a moment’s silence. “Of course,” she said. “We have a lot to talk about, because I think I found the Poet’s Penn.”
CHAPTER
21
Washington Two exited the Beltway and headed west through the rolling Virginia countryside. At the town of Herndon, in the westernmost reaches of Fairfax County, he maneuvered the suburban streets to Spring Street Park. Passing towering evergreens, he left his car in the lot and continued on foot to a walking trail, winding deeper into the park. At a wide spot where a bench sat alongside the trail, he veered off and hiked into the trees. Thirty feet from the walkway, he bent down behind a tree and retrieved a manila envelope.
Two cell phones were in the envelope, one marked with a strip of red electrician’s tape on the back. Tucked in with the phones were two sheets of paper filled with computer printing. He read the instructions quickly, skimming the technical description of how the phone with the red strip had had its lithium-ion battery modified, and about the general instability of lithium-ion batteries and what could be expected from the resulting explosion.
Washington Two read the pages several times, then pulled out his own phone and called the Judge. “I have the phones and the briefing papers,” he said, then went silent.
“You didn’t call to tell me that,” the Judge said. “Speak up. If you have something else to say, get on with it.”
“I’ve been trying to think of a way to make it happen without losing a man.”
“What
do you mean? No other Glory Warriors should be anywhere nearby.”
“No, I don’t mean us. I mean … the chief justice’s driver. She has a driver. They work in shifts. I know all of them personally.”
“Casualties of war,” the Judge said. “You’ve been working your way to this position for nearly twenty years, to help bring us to this moment. You’re not telling me that you’re having second thoughts now, after all this time, are you? Just because of a driver whose name you happen to know?”
“No. I had just hoped there would be a different way.”
The Judge said nothing.
Washington Two cleared his throat. “I’ll handle it.”
“Good,” the Judge said. “It has to move quickly.”
“I know.”
He put the two phones and the papers back into the envelope; then Senior Inspector Brent Graves of the United States Marshals Service turned and headed back down the slope toward the trail.
* * *
Half an hour later, Graves pulled into the massive parking lot of the General Services Administration’s Fleet Management Center in Springfield. Graves showed his ID twice and was led to the garage where fleet cars scheduled for pickup waited. He spied two of his team members and was waved toward a black Town Car. Graves slipped the phone with the red strip into the pocket of his suit coat.
Senior Inspector Pickett, a tall black-haired woman who had taken part in the threat-assessment meeting, met Graves halfway across the garage. “We’re good to go,” she said. “Inspection is complete, and we just need to sign her out.”
Graves nodded. His grip tightened around the phone in his pocket. “Okay, you two go and finish the paperwork. I want to do a quick once-over myself.”
Pickett looked at him. “You really think this one’s any more serious than the garden-variety nutcases?”
“No, not really. But it’s just strange enough that I feel justified in sweeping the house, switching the car, and doing the extra detail.”
“Mmm, overtime.”
“Your tax dollars at work,” Graves said.
Pickett walked away, smiling, to meet up with Thornton, a tall young soft-spoken officer. Graves watched them go. I know them personally, he’d told the Judge. Them, and twenty others like them, part of the permanent detail for Supreme Court security. He worked with them every day. He knew their spouses and children. By contrast, he’d met the Judge face-to-face only a handful of times over the past twenty-plus years.
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