21

“They know,” Laura said. There wasn’t a quiver in her voice. It was as much a report as a question: What do we do now?

The only thing that surprised me was how long it had taken them to figure it out. We’d been on the road more than two hours. Anybody looking at us would simply have seen four people in two vehicles driving northwest on side roads at a casual pace. But the reality was a whole lot stranger than that. The first vehicle was a specially equipped van being driven by a man in a wheelchair carrying evidence that would reveal a massive government plot to seize unlimited power while a veteran Homeland Security agent sat duct-taped to the passenger seat. We were followed by a modified Chevy Caprice in which the entire law enforcement module had been installed, including a supercharged engine, a reinforced chassis, and a steel partition separating the front and rear seats. The car was being driven by a gun-toting attractive young woman, an actress who had appeared in several commercials and supporting roles at the National Theatre, while a fuming second Homeland Security agent was handcuffed in the secure back seat.

Laura had been monitoring the radio in the agent’s car. She had ignored the repeated radio calls to the car. But when she heard the all-hands alert, she had used her phone to call Cher. “They called it a code red plus. Then they gave your description and said you were armed and dangerous.”

Corbin was smirking. He turned his head, which was essentially the only part of his body he could move. “You’re fucked,” he said confidently.

I thought about that for several seconds. I had to admit he had a point. Then I responded, “You know, this reminds me of a story I once heard a comedian tell. He said he’d bought his son a chemistry set that came with all kinds of weird chemicals. After that, every time he tried to punish his son, the kid would hold a test tube filled with some liquid over his head and shout, ‘We’ll all go together!’ So if I were you, Dickie, I’d start rooting real hard for the home team.”

What I learned several days later was that Canadian immigration authorities also had heard the alert. They immediately shared it with leaders of the American Resistance Movement (Canada), Barack’s Battalions. Among those people who received printed copies was Colonel Martin Shaw, formerly Detroit PD, with whom I had worked in exposing the Detroit Massacre. Marty Shaw had driven across the border with his family soon after the introduction of the New American Pledge and helped organize the opposition.

The code red plus designation had puzzled him. Somebody was pushing the panic button. The plus meant the rules were suspended—get this guy whatever it took. Border patrol agents, area military, regional militia, and local law enforcement were ordered to join the search, to secure the border, guaranteed overtime. Personnel on the four bridges crossing into Canada were doubled and officers were told to inspect every vehicle approaching the control points. Look in every car. Ask questions. Officers were dispatched to the bus and train stations, as well as the airport. They were told Roland Stone was “wanted for participating in acts of terrorism against the American people.” I had to be stopped and nobody much cared how, “Subject is believed to be armed and should be considered highly dangerous. All necessary steps, including the use of force, should be taken to apprehend Stone and his accomplice or, if the situation does not permit that, to terminate this threat to national security by any means possible.”

Shaw knew that was total bullshit. He knew me. We’d sort of worked together; I’d established my bona fides with him. What he didn’t know was why? Why was the government so desperate to stop me that it had basically said, Go ahead and shoot him? Ten thousand resisters, more than that, had already swarmed across the border without attracting anywhere near this level of attention. Why me? What made me so different? So important? There was only one logical answer—it wasn’t me. It was what I had with me; I had some information or materials in my possession that the Wrightman government did not want made public. It had to be physical evidence, Shaw guessed, otherwise I could have called it in.

Whatever the reason, Shaw decided, bless his soul, that I was going to need assistance. Under his command ARM already had helped numerous people safely cross the border, but this one was going to be a lot more complex. They did not have a shred of information about when or where I was going to try to cross. That wasn’t so surprising, neither did I.

I didn’t have a clue how we were going to do this. Nor did I have any idea Shaw and his people were getting ready to help me. He had set up his headquarters in the banquet room of Arthur Lem’s Oriental Palace, a Chinese restaurant on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. He had sat down with his best people over General Tso’s and spring rolls and laid out the situation. My disability made it even more challenging. Given my limitations, I wasn’t going to attempt an off-road crossing. I wasn’t going to be strolling through the woods or over fields in my wheelchair. “What are we going to do to help this guy?” he’d asked. “Anybody got any suggestions?”

“Yeah, I got one,” one of his top aides, Saul Wolfe, responded. Shaw loved telling this story. Everybody looked hopefully at this guy, who suggested between bites, “Next meeting we should get some pork fried rice too.”

Had I been at that table I probably would have suggested extra sweet sauce. But I had more pressing problems, like the entire U.S. government mobilizing to stop me. Laura was monitoring the radio and the reports were growing increasingly ominous. The situation seemed surreal; the pursuit of the truth had made me a criminal in America. If I was careless or unlucky in the next few hours, I was going to end up locked away. Worse than Howie—it was going to be keep the key, throw Rollie away.

I cut off those thoughts. They weren’t doing me any good. Toss ’em in that safe. Focus, focus, focus. Be in the moment. I began making my mental list. One at a time, I reminded myself. Don’t try to do everything at once. Solve one problem at a time: Don’t kill the army, kill the soldier. First, we had to get rid of the Homeland Security vehicle. And quickly. Next we’d have to get rid of Van. I hated that thought, but they had its description, so there was no possible way we could drive it across the border. Then we had to get rid of the agents.

Where it was possible, we mixed into local traffic. Hiding in plain sight. As we approached Buffalo, it suddenly started pouring. The rain came out of a clear night sky and lasted only a few seconds, as if we had driven under a misplaced waterfall. I started to say something about it to Corbin but caught myself. Big rule: Don’t humanize your prisoners. I glanced at him. He was staring at his hand, testing how far he could flex his finger, then grimacing in pain. We passed a digital billboard, which announced in vibrant colors that Brad Paisley was in town, performing at the KeyBank Center. Two shows. I checked my watch, it was almost eight P.M. The first show was about half over. Brad Paisley was an unexpected bonus, Canadians would be driving back across the border after the concert, probably after eleven o’clock.

In the Intel classrooms at Benning we would game scenarios—the what-ifs. Dungeons & Dragons with tanks and missiles. This would have made a pretty interesting challenge: a clearly defined objective, identifiable good guys and bad guys, limited time and resources, extreme consequences. It would have been fascinating to see what we could have come up with, I mean if my life and freedom weren’t at stake here.

What would Bourne do? Or Reacher? Or even Bruce Willis’s John McClane? That’s a big problem with life; there’s never a good screenwriter around when you need one.

Although clearly Laura and I were outpersonned, we did have some factors in our favor. The feds had to cover four bridges, train and bus stations, and an international airport, so they would be stretched. They had no idea when we were going to try to cross, or even if we were still heading for Canada. The smart play would be to lay low for a few days, so they would have to keep juggling their resources to ensure they had fresh people on watch. The smart play? I chuckled. When did I start recycling noir talk? I tried to remember the attention curve we’d been taught, after how many hours did people start getting distracted? Seven or eight, I thought, but I wasn’t certain. Then the feds couldn’t be sure how many people I was traveling with; I certainly could have picked up some additional people, even some kids, to scramble their equation, so they had to search every vehicle. And maybe my biggest advantage, they would be looking for the average guy riding a normal chair; they had no concept of what me, Cher, and Mighty Chair were capable of doing.

For Christmas several decades ago, I’d bought my parents a clunky computer and set them up online. I wanted to be able to stay in contact with them wherever I was in the world. It worked out perfectly. I was able to maintain contact throughout all my tours and my mother became a champion Lexulous player. I have been paying for it ever since, literally, and it remains among the best investments I’ve ever made. After my father died in 2014, I refused to cancel his account. That seemed just too final for me. Instead I kept him alive in cyberspace. When I realized the marshals would be tracking my account, to avoid detection I had Cher log on to the net using my father’s account. I had no trouble remembering his password, because it was what he had always called me. Ironically, it was Sonny.

Cher took advantage of Sonny, providing all the necessary background information I needed. I got the details about the crossing points, what to expect at customs, anticipated traffic and wait times, currency restrictions, and local trivia. For example, seven people have gone over Horseshoe Falls (one of the three falls and the only one belonging to Canada!) in a barrel. Four of them lived, three died.

There were four bridges between the United States and Canada. The Lewiston-Queenston Bridge was three miles north of Niagara Falls. The Whirlpool Rapids Bridge probably was the quickest to get across, but using it required a NEXUS card; so it was mostly for residents commuting back and forth. My Homeland Security badge (Thank you, Dickie) might work, but I wasn’t sure it was a chance worth taking. The Rainbow Bridge was limited to noncommercial traffic and permitted pedestrians to walk across, while the main highway, I-190, led directly to the Peace Bridge.

Corbin had been quiet for quite a while. His head was pushed back against the headrest, his eyes were closed, and he had an amused smile on his face. “What’s so funny?”

He opened his eyes and looked at me. “I’m listening to what she’s saying and I’m wondering how you think you’re going to get across the border. By now it’s crawling with cops.”

I agreed, “I was just thinking that myself.” I smiled at him. “That’s when I started wondering if you can float.”

His smile disappeared.

I checked my mirror. Laura was right there, right in position where she was supposed to be. I wondered what was going on in her mind. At this point any woman not shaking in her ’Boutins would have to be a little crazy. She was doing an amazing job. When we met, she was a well-meaning supporting stage witch, and in only a few hours she’d become an accomplice in the kidnapping of two federal agents and stuck a loaded gun up a federal agent’s behind. She was currently driving a stolen government vehicle assisting a wanted fugitive attempting to escape to a foreign country with evidence that might overthrow a president.

And all of it with a minimum of makeup!

Well, whatever we were going to do, it was time to start doing it. We had to get the agents’ car off the road. I put on my signal light. One exit was the same as every other. Time to go. I’d recently heard a pop philosopher sum up contemporary American culture: “All roads lead to Mickey D’s!” In my experience that was pretty accurate; get on any main road and eventually you’ll end up at a McDonald’s. As promised, in less than ten minutes I was looking at those Golden Arches. Those signs once boasted how many millions, then billions of hamburgers had been served. They no longer included that information; I wondered if they’d run out of numbers.

This Mickey D’s was on the corner of a strip mall. The lineup of stores was typical for a middle-class residential neighborhood. In addition to the McDonald’s it included a stationery store; a Chase bank with two ATMs in front, which was right next to a Citibank, which also had two ATMs in front; a pizza shop; a children’s shoe store; one vacant storefront; and most important, a twenty-four-hour CVS. There were a few cars in the lot. Inside the Mickey D’s, a man was swabbing the floor. Two people were working the ATMs.

I parked at an angle in front of the empty storefront. I’d learned my lesson; if it did have active surveillance cameras, which I doubted, I didn’t want them reading our plates. I took two regular spaces rather than one handicapped spot—and felt great about it. Laura pulled in right next to me at a similar angle.

I watched Laura turn around and say something to Russell before getting out. I rolled down my window as she approached Van. “Nice parking job,” she said.

“Cher, play rap, please.” The rap bopping through Van’s speakers made it nearly impossible for Corbin to overhear our conversation. I didn’t especially like rap, but I figured it would irritate him, and that was good enough for me. “What were you saying to him?” I asked.

“I was just being honest with him. I told him I didn’t know how stable you were, so if he decided to make a fuss, he probably was putting his partner’s life in danger.” She leaned on the window frame and spoke-whispered. “You wouldn’t really shoot him, would you?”

I was pleased she’d made it a hypothetical question. That made it much easier to answer. “I’m not sure.” I lowered my voice too and told her exactly what I wanted her to do. Cher had provided the information I needed. She was nodding as I gave her the list. As she turned to go, I put a restraining hand on top of hers. She paused, with a question in her eyes. “ATMs all have cameras,” I reminded her, “so keep your head down. You don’t want to show up on the intel network.” I had no idea if those cameras were tied into a facial recognition system, but we had to assume they were.

Laura repeated my instructions, then started walking away but stopped and came right back. “What?”

She leaned inside my open window and kissed me. “We are gonna do this, aren’t we?”

I watched her walk away. “Cher,” I said, getting comfortable, “what’s the traffic doing?”

It was kind of a cool plan. All it had to do was work. While Laura was shopping, Cher skipped around to various news and talk stations. Most of the stories were still focusing on the executions. The networks supposedly proposed moving the next hangings to prime time. There also were rumors that cable stations were preparing to make a substantial offer for pay-per-view rights. There wasn’t a word mentioned about fugitives on the road.

She returned about fifteen minutes later with two large plastic bags filled with goodies, among them two prepaid phones. “That was all they had left,” she said. She had activated both of them and made the necessary phone call. “It’s done,” she told me. “About forty minutes, they said.”

We had a lot to do in that time. I drove Van around to the rear of the mall. It reminded me of the late-night patrols we used to make into Indian country. It was dark and lonely, and the shadows faded into deeper shadows. A bare bulb over the rear door of the McDonald’s illuminated a black and green plastic mountain of garbage. The covers of several dumpsters were open; a cat leaped out of one of them and disappeared into the night. I parked under a spreading willow, leaving myself enough room to lower the ramp with space to squeeze in one car between Van and a high white stucco rear wall. Laura squeezed the Chevy into that space. I could see her in the front seat, turning and pointing Russell’s gun right at him. Damn, I was proud of her. It was pretty obvious she wasn’t especially comfortable with the gun, but hey, it was a gun. You didn’t have to be comfortable to fire it and probably hit something. He hunched his shoulders and involuntarily raised both of his legs protectively as high as he could. I heard her warn him, “We’re getting out of this car. I’m going to open your door and you’re gonna get out and you’re gonna get right into that van. You understand that?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Then what?”

As cool as if she had spent her whole life waiting to say this one line, she told him, “Then I don’t have to shoot you.”

With a big smile on my face I said, “Cher, open the side panel, please.” Chair was still locked in the wheel well, but I was pointing my Glock at the Chevy’s back door. “Move,” I said. “Now.”

Laura opened the Chevy’s rear door and stepped back several feet, holding her gun in both hands. Van was shielding all this from anyone passing in front. She kept her weapon pointing at Russell’s chest as he wiggled out of the car and managed to get into Van’s cabin. He sat on the carpeted floor. “Now what?”

I told him, “Lay down on your stomach. Not a sound.”

Laura climbed in after him. I said, “Cher, close the door, please.”

Corbin asked as if he were a curious bystander, “What’s going on?”

Laura bound Francis’s legs together with the duct tape. He actually lifted his legs to help her, resigned to the situation. “Check his pockets,” I told her, tossing her a blue canvas duffel bag with a Nats logo I’d gotten at the 2019 World Series. “Put everything in this.”

She looked at Russell and said reassuringly, “I’ll be careful, I promise.” She took out his keys, wallet and badge case, some loose change, a plastic toothpick, several individually wrapped white Life Savers mints, and slips of paper on which he had written some notes. She dumped everything in the bag.

With both feds secured, Laura reached into her plastic bag and pulled out a family-sized bottle of CVS Health Maximum Strength Nighttime Sleep Aid and a bottle of water. “How many should I give them?”

“What does it say on the bottle?”

She read the instructions. “Take one before going to sleep.” She looked at me.

Corbin said firmly, “I’m not taking any of that shit.”

I ignored him. “I don’t know. Three? Four? Four should be okay.”

Laura opened the safety cap, cut through the foil cover, and fished out the ball of cotton. She tapped out three gel caps. “Let’s do three.” Russell was lying on his back in the cabin, hands cuffed, legs taped, but to his credit he was still holding on to the last remnants of defiance. He locked his mouth closed and began moving his head. She knelt down next to him. “Open.”

He continued rattling his head. “Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn…” he responded through gritted teeth.

She shrugged. “Your choice,” and reached down to grab hold of his balls.

“It’s open. It’s open!” he shouted, opening his mouth wider than SeaWorld dolphins at dinnertime.

Honestly, how could you not be impressed by a woman like that? “Thank you.” She dropped the three gels into his mouth and gave him enough water to wash them down. “Show me,” she said, as if talking to a child. He opened his mouth again. “Thank you. Good night.” Then she looked at me; her eyes were dancing with joy. She was finding places inside herself that she had never touched.

She duck-walked to the front and shook out three more gels. “How about you?” she asked Corbin.

He kept his mouth shut.

I poked him with the Glock.

Through his closed mouth, he mumbled something I could make out as “You gonna shoot me for not opening my mouth?”

I reached down and took hold of the index finger on his left hand.

He opened his mouth.

Laura repeated the process. Dickie washed them down. “Nighty-night,” she said. She turned to me. “How long?”

I shrugged. “Twenty minutes? Half hour?”

“Perfect.”

Things were humming in our own little world. People were racing around the region like pieces in speed chess. It probably was a good thing we didn’t know what was going on, as we might have changed our plans. They had positioned officers at highway entrances and exits. Then they began knocking on doors of every hotel, motel, and Airbnb between Lake Erie and the border. Additional officers were assigned to patrol the Peace Bridge, the closest crossing into Canada. As I later learned from an admittedly gleeful source, Rip McCord was so confident his people would find us that he told Vice President The Hun, “If he so much as farts, we’ll hear him.”

On the Canadian side of the border Barack’s Battalions also had been mobilized. Saul Wolfe actually had come up with a very crazy plan, but everyone agreed it was more effective than General Tso’s. Shaw had little confidence Operation Egg Roll, as they were calling it, would make any difference, but lacking anything more promising he went with it. Thanks primarily to Arthur Lem, who had agreed to provide free wonton soup, egg rolls, and barbecued ribs to all participants, they had recruited several dozen people.

In Van’s cabin, Corbin and Russell were fighting to stay awake. Corbin was screeching Maroon 5 songs in a dreadfully off-key screech, but as the pills kicked in, he was slowing down. He was at the Drunk Maroon 5 stage. Laura had duct-taped his legs together, moved the passenger seat as far back as it would slide and lowered the backrest so he was no longer visible through the side window. Russell was fading even faster, having been reduced to “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

As the agents faded into sleep, Laura dug into her CVS bag once again. She took out a spray can of Jerome Russell B Wild!!! Temporary Hair Color. She covered my shoulders with a cloth and sprayed my hair the same light brown as Corbin’s. As she worked, I asked her where she had learned to handle a gun like that.

“Did you hear me?” she asked, her enthusiasm bubbling over. She lowered her voice and practically growled as she repeated her tough-girl line: “Then I don’t have to shoot you.” She laughed with delight. “That was just so great.” She lowered her voice another octave into Darth Vader territory and said again, “Then I don’t have to shoot you.” The laughter slowed and she caught her breath. “I don’t know anything about guns. I hate guns. That’s the way Angie Dickinson does it in the reruns of Police Woman.”

Finally she finished and took a step back to admire her work, almost banging her head on Van’s roof. “Nice,” she decided. Moving back another few inches, she reassessed the result. “It’s okay.” Then, to convince herself, “Yeah.” Nodding. “Yeah, it’s a … okay.” In the daylight, if someone were looking carefully, it was an easily detectable paint job. But at night, under artificial lighting, if I wore a baseball cap, it probably was good enough. “Almost time,” she warned, checking her watch.

The parking lot was bordered on one side by a line of trees. I moved the van to the front of the lot, directly beneath the tree canopy, close to the main road. I figured a van left overnight in the rear of the lot would attract more interest than one parked right up front for everyone to see. Hide in plain sight. Laura drove the Caprice out of the lot down a long, quiet residential street and parked. She checked the street signs to make sure it would be legal for at least a day, then hurried back to the mall, being careful to stay out of the streetlights.

It was time to go. Russell was snoring loudly. Corbin’s head was resting on his shoulder; he’d definitely have a stiff neck in the morning. I took a long look around. There were a lot of memories stored in that van. I rolled down the ramp one final time. Then I sat there for a moment. “Thanks, Van,” I said, patting its side as Cher buttoned him up. “You’ve been great.” Then I turned Mighty Chair around.

Laura was waiting in front of the CVS. “They’re out cold,” I told her, then added with as much confidence as I could muster, “By the time they wake up, we’ll be eating maple syrup and saluting Mounties.”

We stood in the dim light of the twenty-four-hour just about everything store, waiting as calmly as possible. Two cars, one a local police cruiser, the other a white sedan with no markings, went racing past heading in opposite directions, their lights flashing, sirens whining.

Our ride was late. “It’ll be here soon,” I said, hoping I was right. Laura rested her left hand on my left shoulder and tapped nervously. I reached across with my right hand and took hold of it. A minute later she checked her watch again. She was dripping anxiety on me. But there wasn’t much we could do except wait.

Finally a black Ford F-150 pickup truck turned into the parking lot. “That’s it,” she said excitedly, pointing. “There it is.”

The pickup came to a stop almost directly in front of us. I looked inside. There was no one driving it. It had the aura of an alien spaceship; we just stood there, staring at it, not quite sure what to do. “You ever drive one of these?” I asked.

“Do they even call it driving?” she wondered.

Okay, I admit it, it spooked me. “How hard could it be, right? I mean, they definitely wouldn’t rent them if it was too complicated.”

“Right,” she agreed, bolstering her own confidence. “We’re two intelligent adults. We can figure this out.”

Let’s be honest, how many of you have not driven your own car? I had never been inside an autonomous vehicle. But the availability of self-driving SUVs and pickups had been big news within the disabled community. Arranging transportation has always been a major hassle for people with handicaps, and this was a vitally important step toward further independence. Among the many advantages offered by autonomous SUVs and small trucks is that they provide sufficient storage space for the necessary supportive equipment—in my case, Mighty Chair. We were lucky: Buffalo’s first It-Drives-U franchise had opened three months earlier and had an F-150 available. We’d used Corbin’s credit card, hoping Homeland Security hadn’t thought to put an alert on it. The pickup had been dispatched to the CVS to pick us up.

I was going to drive. Or whatever you call it. Law enforcement had to be looking for someone in a chair or riding as a passenger. Seeing me sitting behind the wheel of the pickup, my hands on the wheel, should provide cover for us. Laura opened the driver’s door for me and I muscled into the seat. I took a minute to look over the dashboard. I don’t know exactly what I expected to see, but this definitely wasn’t it. It looked pretty much like every other vehicle I’d ever driven. The dashboard was covered with quality faux leather and highly polished black plastic. The steering wheel was tightly wrapped with black leather, and all the necessary gauges and monitors were in front of me. The infotainment center, which controlled everything from performance to radio station, was in the middle. A gearshift was on the center console.

The media display made controlling the truck relatively easy. I worked my way through the options to Truck Bed Operations, then lowered the tailgate and extended the built-in ramp. The directions were so easy even an adult could understand them. While most wheelchairs are stored by pushing up the middle of the seat, bringing the two sides together, because of its technology Mighty Chair had been designed to close up from the top down. “Cher,” I told her, “fold up.” Within seconds the backrest lowered over the seat and pistons lowered it. As this was taking place, Cher was doing a passable Margaret Hamilton, crying, “I’m melting. I’m melting.” And as it lowered to the ground, I could see the resemblance to the Wicked Witch’s melting. Thanks, Y.

Fully compressed, Mighty Chair resembled a rectangular ottoman about two and a half feet high. Laura grasped the handle and wheeled it up the ramp into the truck bed, secured it with crisscrossing bungee cords, and covered it with the canvas sheet she had requested. The entire process took about ten minutes. A couple of people coming in and out of the CVS had glanced in our direction but didn’t seem to be paying any undue attention. There was nothing we could do about it anyway. This was hardly a perfect plan.

As I raised the rear gate, Laura got into the cab’s passenger seat. It seemed like just a decade or so earlier she was climbing into Van’s passenger seat and introducing herself. She looked at me, sitting behind the wheel as if I was actually driving this thing, and forced a wan smile. “Can o’ corn,” I said.

She scrunched her face into a question mark. “What?”

“It’s okay, it’s a saying.”

“Oh. Okay.” She reached into the CVS bag one more time, this time pulling out some cover makeup. “Lean over here.” I followed instructions and she began covering the visible bruises as best she could. When she was done, she handed me a pair of oval reading glasses in a black plastic frame and a baseball cap bearing a cartoon image of Abbott and Costello above the words: “Slowly, I turned … Niagara Falls, New York.”

The glasses and cap completed my nerd look. “Here we go,” I said, running my hands over the console like a pilot figuring out how to get this 757 off the ground. I pressed and pushed and turned until the GPS appeared. I didn’t have any specific location in Canada to plug in, so I went to my usual fallback position. Assuming every city has a Main Street, I said distinctly, “One Main Street, Niagara Falls, Ontario.” Then I added, “Take the Peace Bridge.” A female voice accurately repeated the address.

After considerable thought I finally had picked the Peace Bridge essentially because why not? It was the closest and busiest crossing. With 160,000 vehicles crossing every day, agents had little time to make thorough inspections. It also was the obvious choice, so I hoped Homeland Security would assume I was too smart to use it and instead was heading for one of the less traveled bridges. Reverse reverse reverse psychology!

The GPS gave me a choice between the fastest and shortest route or toll roads. I went for the quick. The system told me it would take thirty-eight minutes. I hit “approve guidance” and the truck slowly accelerated. I took my hands off the wheel and held them in midair, hovering enough to quickly grab the wheel if necessary, getting accustomed to the reality that I was not in control. “This is really weird,” I said, my tone somewhere between amazement and amusement. Sitting behind the wheel, watching it turn, created an odd sensation. As the truck picked up speed, I found myself instinctively reaching for Van’s hand controls, and only after realizing they weren’t there did I accept the reality that I wasn’t driving.

It still felt very uncomfortable, though.

The GPS guided the truck through several middle-class residential neighborhoods. Trees and front lawns, well-kept houses, a father and small daughter walking their dog. Squirrels dashing across the street. Everything appeared calm and normal, a warm summer night in suburban America. Then we turned onto a street being searched by the local militia. Who knows? Maybe they were looking for me. It was a block of one-family brick and wood homes built, I’d guess, in the 1950s. An old-fashioned suburban block lined with mature trees whose roots were pushing up the sidewalk. The houses had aged well; they were narrow and deep, with a four-step brick stoop climbing to a landing, windows on either side of the front door, a driveway on the left leading to a garage at the rear of the house. Many of these houses had covered entries; several of them had added wider windows and second-story dormers. Most of them had lined their front with bushes, and two or three also had window boxes, one of them filled brightly with red and yellow flowers. The driveways were gravel, asphalt, or cement. I could see basketball hoops on most of the garages.

I rested my hands on the steering wheel. A young man peered into the cab. He looked pleasant enough, except for the semiautomatic weapon on his shoulder. After deciding that we were normal Americans, not some traitor in a wheelchair, he smiled and gave us a one-finger salute as if tipping a nonexistent hat as we drove past. Laura smiled back and gave him a little wave in return.

Members of the militia, all of them dressed in black pants and black shirts and wearing red armbands, were standing in groups on the sidewalk or on landings. They carried flashlights, and several of them had rifles slung over the shoulder or hanging across the chest. At a glance they looked to be a wide span of ages. There were several women, some of them patrolling with children. One young boy was carrying a Little League–sized baseball bat.

Some front doors were open, but most were not. As we drove past a dark house, two men were attacking a closed door with a sledgehammer. A little farther down the block, the Blackshirts were beating a bloodied man, who was on his knees, shielding his head with his arms. An older woman walking a big dog was waiting patiently to get past, watching with obvious curiosity as she was held back.

With our windows up and the air-conditioning on, most of the sounds were drowned out, giving the scene a slightly apocalyptic feeling. An occasional muffled scream and the shattering of glass provided a terrifying reality. Laura and I avoided looking at anything with more than a cursory glance, no matter how compelling it was, being careful to avoid attracting attention. Just a guy and a gal in their pickup.

And then we were on the next block and the next block. We kept our voices very low when we discussed our plan, even though we were alone in the cab. Laura gathered the paperwork we’d need when we got to customs. The GPS indicated we were eleven minutes from the bridge. “I always wanted to see Niagara Falls,” she said.

Marty Shaw later filled me in. Just as we were getting ready to make our run, he received a text message reading: “Hi, Marty, the plan is in action. The turnout is stronger than we expected. Will keep you informed.” He replied with a question: How many? The answer was more than three hundred men, women, and some children, an incredible and unexpectedly large number given such brief notice in the middle of the night. Organizations had rallied their members who were racing, okay, progressing steadily, toward the border. They had not been given specifics, they were told they were needed, then told where to assemble.

“I couldn’t believe it really was happening,” Shaw told me. “It was pretty incredible.”

The F-150 carried us around a long bend, and as we reached the summit, the beautifully lit Peace Bridge appeared in front of us. It sat like a jewel against the black sky, its LED lights programmed to create a green and lavender necklace across the Niagara River. The river itself was relatively still, the reflection of the bridge rippled only slightly by a small boat easing gently upstream.

Laura took a deep calming breath, filling her cheeks, then slowly blowing out a long stream of air. The next few minutes were going to determine the next few years of our lives. At least. She took my hand and held it.

“We’re okay,” I said, staring straight ahead at our future. She could not hear me thinking, I hope.