FIRST DAY

 

 

The Bureau had called seventeen times in the night. When she saw the phone screen she used every swear word she never had, then tore out of the house without brushing her teeth, running the length of the nearly-deserted early morning sidewalk between her home and the office.

She had remembered this time to wear her sneakers.

The office was in chaos.

“Nora, where the fuck have you been?” Pete demanded. “I was about to come see if you were dead or something.”

“I’m so sorry, I never turn the phone off and I just…”

“Picked the night of our biggest case to do it?” His eyes were incredulous.

“Sheila’s pissed?” Nora asked tentatively, her stomach twisting into knots.

“Sheila’s too busy to be anything right now, but she will eventually remember she should be pissed at you.”

Anna was on her phone and talking to Maggie simultaneously. Every phone in the office seemed to be ringing. Nora felt lightheaded with a combination of regret and anger at herself. She immediately balled that anger up and transformed it into fury at Ben. Somehow this was going to be his fault.

“What happened?” she demanded.

“We got a claim of responsibility. And then a murder right on its heels.”

Nora laid a hand on the nearest desk. “No.”

Pete nodded. “It’s been insane.”

“Claim of responsibility from whom?”

“White supremacist patriot group, sent out a very scary webcast.” He typed on his keyboard and a face filled his screen. “Gabriel Baker. Who is apparently actually a truck driver. But he happens to be calling for Armageddon.”

Nora stared at the face of a middle-aged white man, pale blond hair, tanned skin, neatly-trimmed facial hair. “Demands?”

Pete shook his head. “So far he’s demanding we pay attention. Wants our illegitimate government to step down; wants to expel all foreigners and non-Christians from the country. He sent it to all the news stations and so half the night was spent trying to convince them not to air it and start a panic.”

“Who was the victim?” she asked Pete, her eyes scanning the room, trying to deduce information from the level of chaos.

Peter’s face was grim. “Judge Bernstein. Seventy-one years old. Federal judge. Drive-by shooting. He was returning to his house after a dinner out. Just got out of the car when he was nailed. Wife sustained no injuries.”

“Don’t tell me motorcycles.”

“Okay. Motorcycle. Eyewitness saw one guy driving, one guy shooting.”

“Semi-automatic assault rifle?”

Pete was nodding.

“Backpacks?”

“Good question but no. If it was the same crew, they’ve dropped them off somewhere.”

“Where was it? Close by?”

“West Sixth Street,” Pete said, pointing behind Nora’s head in a rather useless gesture.

In the neighborhood. Nora shook her head. The murder rate in Erie was assessed quarterly instead of daily. People often didn’t lock their cars or even their doors in some neighborhoods. Nora herself had taken to leaving a spare key behind a crumbling brick on her front porch so she could run unencumbered. No one had threatened her—not once. Not even any of the grizzled homeless men who occupied Perry Square at night. To gun down an elderly judge on Erie’s nicest block … She shook her head.

“Leads?”

“No! No leads.” Pete ran vexed fingers through his hair, a deep frown on his face. “They disappeared just like the others did. And I’ve spent the whole night trying to trace the IP address on the webcast and it was completely fucking impossible. All we can say for sure is that the Pennsylvania militia movement is alive and well and way more tech savvy than we previously assumed.”

“How long you been here, buddy?” Nora asked, forcing herself to be and sound very calm.

“All night, Nora. I was just getting into bed when the call came through.”

“Okay, then I’ll call it a stroke of good luck that one of us got some rest. Show me the reports and then go curl up in the Room of Requirement. And do not drink any more coffee. You look like you just walked out of a crack house.”

He looked at her askance.

“All wild-eyed. Got the crazy hair,” she added. As though to answer his unspoken accusation, she pointed to herself and said, “Philly PD. I’ve seen things, brother.”

He smiled despite himself, then showed her all the info on his laptop, printing up the most recent police and coroner’s reports. Then he went into the storage room, saying the words, “Ten minutes,” over his shoulder.

Pete had just vanished when Anna and Sheila both walked into the cubicle.

“Nice of you to join us, Nora,” Sheila practically spat at her. Looking up from Pete’s laptop screen, Nora could see the stress etched across her face, and it scared her slightly more than images of men on motorcycles.

She tried to convey how badly she felt without sounding melodramatic. “I’m so sorry—”

“Later, later,” Anna said quickly. “We have a new issue to deal with. Where’s Peter?”

“New issue?” Nora asked, rising.

“Yes, there’s been an abduction.”

Nora looked from one face to the other. “Really?”

Sheila looked furious. “Of course, really,” she hurled, as though Nora’s response were the stupidest possible thing anyone could have said. “April Lewis, the first black councilwoman Erie’s had.”

Nora blinked, thinking rapidly. “Details?”

“She didn’t come home last night,” Anna said. “The family got a call. They’re very wealthy, so they were tempted to pay the ransom right away without contacting us. But when they heard about the judge’s murder this morning, they finally called it in.”

“Who did they think they were going to pay?” Nora asked.

Anna checked her notes. “The call they got was very short. It said to leave 1.5 million dollars in unmarked bills in a couple of trash cans in Perry Square.”

“These things usually go into bank accounts—it’s a very old-school ransom request,” Sheila observed.

Anna shrugged. “I guess we’ve seen how they feel about banks.”

“Cell phone or landline?” Nora asked.

“Hmm?” Anna asked.

“The call came in to a cell phone or a landline?” she repeated.

“Oh, no, a landline. Where’s Pete?”

“Sheila!” Maggie’s voice somehow managed to clear the forest of other sounds in the office. “Sheila: TV.”

All three women swiveled their necks to see Vance Evans filling the screen, an air of gravitas infusing his carefully powdered features.

“Oh, no…” Anna murmured. “We begged him to hold off until we could determine if this group was legit.…”

“NBC News regrets to share with the general public the video, sent last night, detailing the agenda of a local militia—”

“I am going to fucking kill him. I am going to fucking kill that man!” Sheila’s shouting drowned out Vance Evans. “He’s going to set off a fucking city-wide panic—” Then, she interrupted herself to yell, “Maggie! Get me Washington on the line and call in the CIRG.…”

Sheila’s eyes shone with rage. She turned to the agents. “Conference room!”

*   *   *

“Wake up, Peter,” Nora said, crouching next to him.

He rolled over, squinting. “That cannot have been ten minutes,” he whined.

“Well, it was close. We need you.”

Cursing, he came to a sitting position on the vinyl loveseat. He rubbed desperately at his eyes, trying to make them focus, then followed her to the conference room where Anna had already called up the webcast.

Anna glanced at them and then back at the screen. As the conference room door was closing, Nora overheard Sheila shouting through the closed door of her office. Her voice was a full register higher than Nora had imagined it could go.

“You’re so fucking bored with broadcasting about Ox Roasts that you’re willing to terrify the public and publicize for terrorists?”

Pete looked a question at Nora.

“NBC went ahead and broadcast the webcast. ‘Breaking news.’”

“Fuck. Fucking idiots,” he said.

“That’s apparently Sheila’s take on it,” Nora said.

Anna nodded to Nora. “You didn’t hear this yet. I guess we’ll be getting to know this video inside and out.”

She pressed play on the remote in her hand.

They all remained standing around the conference table, waiting for Gabriel Baker’s words.

“The Jewish judiciary is strangling the vision of our president. If we wait any longer for real change, it will be too late. We thus declare open warfare against all enemies of traditional Aryan values. With the fourteen acts of violence that will come, we begin the task that we must accomplish. We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

Pete leaned against the wall then ran his fingers through his hair.

Nora felt her whole body slacken. She, too, found herself leaning against the wall for support.

“You recognize it?” he asked softly.

She nodded.

“Fourteen, huh?”

“Fourteen.”

“We have been growing, my brothers and sisters. And now it is time to act. We welcome our fellow militia members to join us. We open our hearts and our doors to like-minded preservers of tradition. The time for radical action is now. The time to banish fear is now.…”

Anna regarded Pete. “This bullshit is supposed to be regional. What’d you do, Pete, import it?”

“Oh, come on, Anna. There are more Confederate flags flying off of Girard pickup trucks than back in South Carolina,” he snapped.

Nora noted that when he was angry his Southern accent intensified exponentially.

Sheila burst in, slamming the conference room door behind her. Her chest was rising and falling rapidly and she was clutching her BlackBerry, her tablet, a legal pad, and three different pens. Taking her place at the head of the table, Sheila asked, “What’s the story with the number fourteen? Is there something important about that?”

Reluctantly, all three of them sank into seats around the table. Pete and Nora let Anna explain. “Fourteen is a white supremacist symbol, very current in alt-right discourse. There are fourteen words in that slogan, maybe the most popular slogan for the movement—the one about securing the future for white children.”

Sheila’s lips pursed hard against this news, her frown lines deepening. “Fourteen acts of violence…”

“Four down,” Anna said softly.

Pete frowned. “Four?”

Sheila said tersely, “There’s also been an abduction. City councilwoman. Black woman.”

“You think it’s important that she’s black?” asked Anna.

“Now I do,” said Sheila.

“The bank guard was black?” Pete asked.

There was a general nod of confirmation. Nora was starting to feel desperate for tea.

“Preliminary evening means what’s coming today can only be worse, right?” Pete asked.

Both Anna and Sheila looked at him. Sheila looked slightly queasy.

Pete seemed lost in thought, though. He was rapping his knuckles on the table, saying, “I didn’t think there was a significant armed militia presence in Pennsylvania. I knew Michigan, Ohio—”

Anna chimed in, ticking off on her fingers, “West Virginia, Washington State, even Minnesota…”

Pete said, “After Obama took office there was an eight-hundred-percent increase in anti-government patriot groups. With all the energy generated by the last election, there are well over three thousand out there now. Some three hundred of them classify as militia. They got on high alert, thinking they’d have to take back the country after a ‘rigged’ election. Money was rolling in to fundraising sites—a lot of it was through the Dark Web but a lot was pretty brazen, out in the open. The alt-right was suddenly awash in money and firepower. Hard to redirect.”

“What changed?” Nora said. “Why are they materializing now?

“Someone must have decided change wasn’t coming fast enough.”

“But Erie? Here?”

“Sure, why not? We had one of the biggest flips in history, right? Hold on to that anger, wait for something to get better. If nothing improves, well, Roar on the Shore, sister,” said Pete. “Noise, bikes, white folks doin’ their thing. At the very least, it’s good cover.”

Anna shook her head rapidly. “There’s never been a problem with Roar on the Shore before,” she said. “The worst that’s happened is public urination or a few bar fights. People come to shop and swap and show off.”

“And dance,” said Pete. “White Snake came last year.”

Sheila nodded, looking at Nora but not looking at her. “We need to identify the catalyst. Let’s look at this thing a minute together.”

“Can Maggie make a transcript for us so we can parse it bit by bit?” Anna asked.

Sheila hesitated. “I hate to lose time like that but let’s ask her.”

The let’s in this case meant that Anna needed to go do it if she wanted it done. Anna rose and went to talk to Maggie.

The TV meanwhile had gone back to the local “breaking news” newscast. Vance Evans was busily gathering public reaction.

The cameras had headed out into vendors’ alley along Perry Square. A heavily bearded man was standing outside one of the Harley-Davidson kiosks. The small amount of flesh visible on his face glowed pink with sunburn. A skull and crossbones bandanna crowned his head, pulled tightly across his forehead and knotted in the back.

“Nobody defiles Roar on the Shore, man,” he was saying.

Vance Evans asked him, “What is the mood among the festival-goers?”

“You mean the bike rally, right? It’s not a festival, man.”

“I mean those attending Roar on the Shore,” said Vance patiently, a look of patronizing interest cemented across his tanned features. Belatedly the screen ran the interviewee’s name: Jerry Walsh of Fredonia, New York.

“People are pissed, man. People look forward to the Roar all year round, man. This is a peaceful gathering of people who love to ride. I can’t see no bikers doing that. Blowin’ up a bank. The Roar is beautiful, man. Keep that terrorist shit outta here.”

The live broadcast couldn’t bleep out the expletive.

Evans asked him, “What do you think of the broadcast from the Pennsylvania Patriots? Does the message of revolution resonate with you?”

“I think that’s bullshit, man,” Walsh said. He gestured at the shiny bikes in the kiosk. “The Harley Revolution is the only revolution I’m interested in.”

Vance Evans walked to the next kiosk, where a woman with a shock of gray curls and, in Nora’s opinion, alarmingly tight blue jeans stood, pale blue eyes swimming with tears. She was unpacking her goods—dream catchers, hand-painted leather jackets, hair clips with attached eagle feathers, and a variety of knick-knacks—in preparation for the 11 A.M. opening time.

“By this time last year I’d made a thousand dollars. Now nothing! That madness happened right at opening! And now look, look at the streets—it’s like a wasteland.”

Vance Evans turned back to the camera. “And that’s the word from the street. Mr. Baker will have to work much harder to convince these frustrated bikers that the mission and message of the Pennsylvania Patriots warrant disrupting this all-important week with violence and bloodshed.”

Nora and Pete looked from the screen to each other.

“Play the video again while we’re waiting for the transcript,” Anna said, coming back in. “It’ll take a while.”

Gabriel Baker liked to clench his fist and hold it aloft. He also liked to use big words, although Nora, ever averse to big words, felt as though he occasionally stumbled over them.

“Most of the message is recycled, right?” Pete said, rubbing his hand over his beard. His laptop was open and he was tapping phrases into the Google taskbar to see if they had come from other sources.

“Yes and no,” murmured Nora. “The Order. Anti-government stuff. But there’s other stuff. Stuff I didn’t see in class.”

Sheila looked lost. Anna explained, “The Order is a white supremacist terrorist group. Guy named David Lane was its best articulator. Can you pause it, Pete?” she asked.

Baker had just said, “Diversity is code for white genocide.”

Anna nodded. “Yes, this is also classic Order stance.”

“Do we have a new David Lane on our hands?” Sheila was asking.

They each considered this.

“Lane was a thug,” said Pete, eyes riveted on his laptop screen. “I don’t have anything on Gabriel Baker; not yet, anyway. We can run an extensive search but I have nothing matching so far.”

In the background, Baker was still speaking.

We must disavow our liberal bedazzlements and relearn the meaning of fear. Only the stupid know no fear. Not fearing our enemies is the ultimate form of stupidity. Refusing to rise up and reclaim the future for our own white children is self-annulment. If these mud-peoples will not take the necessary step of deliverance through self-annihilation, then let us unburden them. If all of us rise, then no one can imprison us. If our ruler can not purge our material soil of foreigners, those who would unseat their masters and presume to rule, those who lack art, who lack history, whose gods are their own and who defile Nature as unpleasant freaks, wholly and forever disagreeably foreign, forever creatures of a sick twilit moral code … then we must extend the righteous hand of aid to this leader for whom we had had such high hopes. For even under his eye, those who would destroy us flourish.

Nora snapped her fingers, recognizing a catch phrase.

But Anna was already nodding.

“Mud-peoples—that’s straight out of the Christian Identity lexicon,” she said.

Sheila tapped her pen on the table, waiting.

“Christian Identity is a spinoff of British Israelism,” Anna supplied. “They incorporate very racist, very anti-Semitic interpretations of the Bible. Anyone not created when God created whites is lumped in with the beasts of the field, and so any non-white is a ‘mud person.’”

Nora suddenly perceived that each person in the room was carefully refusing to glance at her caramel-colored skin. She drummed her fingers on the tabletop, enjoying their discomfort.

“One of its early voices was Wesley Swift.”

Baker’s voice had grown louder, surer, as though settling into his role. Nora tilted her head to listen to him. She wondered if any television preachers would endorse such a message.

“What was that church Swift founded?” Nora asked. “Christian Christians or something?”

“Church of Jesus Christ-Christian,” said Anna.

Sheila asked, “Is he alive? Dead?”

“Oh, way dead,” Pete said. “Must have been the sixties.”

“1970,” Anna volunteered. “His disciple Richard Butler founded the Aryan Nations.”

“Who’ve been racists without a country for a while now—they lost big in a lawsuit. No more compound, no real leadership,” Pete said.

Emancipation from the yoke of Judaism was once the greatest of necessities … and now we add to this the yoke of the black, the Muslim, the Arab, the Asian, the African, and all the unwashed migrants swarming over our sovereign borders. What self-deception it is to pretend we do not hold a natural repugnance against all of these, instinctive as it is primal and born of self-preservation, preservation of a noble race.

“I don’t think ransom is going to help April Lewis,” Sheila murmured. “Not a federal government representative, true, but a government official. A black one.”

“Do we have proof of life yet?” Pete asked.

“No,” Sheila responded, shaking her head. “Chief Nichols and I are going to visit the family as soon as we’re finished here and discuss how to proceed. And listen, people. You are all representatives of the federal government. Which means we don’t set foot outside this office without Kevlar from now on.”

Pete glanced at her skeptically.

“Even just to go for coffee, Peter,” Sheila said, putting on the scary face. “Does each of you understand me?”

They all grunted assent. Anna was leaning forward, as was Pete. Nora, too, was riveted.

“He’s kinda hot,” Anna admitted. “Married, though. Nice ring…” Baker made yet another solidarity fist. As the camera zoomed in, the hammered silver band came into view. “Nice teeth. All in all they picked a good spokesman.”

Nora looked at her, a little repelled by her callousness.

Anna seemed self-assured though. “Well, look, they needed someone to bring together all these alt-right groups, didn’t they? Christian Identity and Patriots and whatnot … I mean did you ever see John Trochmann? It’s only logical that someone easier on the eye should step up this time.”

Baker had his fist up again, inciting his people.

An act of rebellion every day to take back our country once and for all; a purging of the country’s impurities. A replicable plan for those who know that only through revolution will we regain what has been lost; the lie of democracy is not enough.

Fourteen acts of violence will collectively work the deed that redeems the world.

Pay attention. Pay careful attention and repeat this formula over and over, in your towns, in your cities, in the furthest reaches of the globe.

Fourteen.

All four of them looked at each other.

Finally, Sheila said, “Pete, do you think your Starbucks friend could be convinced to deliver? It’s going to be a long week.”

*   *   *

The Critical Incident Response Group had taken rather more of Nora’s time at Quantico than she’d deemed necessary. She had not elected to tread a path that led to being part of CIRG, but it felt to her that, in response, the Bureau made her study the division and its organization even more, perhaps to cultivate the necessary level of awe. CIRG had emerged out of the post-Waco self-flagellations and remained as a sort of bloated beast, feeding off the Bureau’s fear of failure. Those training for either its Aviation and Surveillance or Tactical Operations sections tended to walk with a particular swagger, while the Behavioral Analysis people cultivated a mystique that fluctuated between brainiac and seductive psychotherapist. Those in the Critical Incident Intelligence Unit, meanwhile, spoke to no one but each other.

Nora knew that the CIRG sweeping into Erie would be transformative. Both the scope of the CIRG and the egos of those directing it were massive. Sheila would be eaten alive, and whatever limited sense of power the three special agents on staff had attained would vanish.

She looked at Pete and Anna, feeling like she needed to brace herself.

Anna said, “Anyone feeling nostalgic for pedophiles?”

“Ooh, me,” Pete said, immediately.

Pete was assigned the task of sorting out a source for the webcast link that had originally been emailed to them. Anna and Nora were to parse the text for any concrete indications of a plan, including any possible threats against local institutions. Sheila was busy calling in the cavalry and managing the councilwoman’s abduction, an issue that both the family and the FBI were desperate to keep from the media.

Anna’s reading glasses were perched on the tip of her nose as she made a grim list using her trademark incongruous purple felt tip pen. “Blacks, Jews, Muslims, Arabs, immigrants…”

“Mexicans … Latinos generally. Illegal immigrants generally. And then probably refugees, right?” said Nora. “The writer is complaining about the government letting people in, and you have a refugee population here.…”

Anna looked up as though remembering something. “We got a call, actually. Two or three days ago. Wait.”

She popped out of her seat and began rummaging about on the shelf over her desk, her orange hair looking particularly unkempt. Nora just had time to peek at her BlackBerry, the screen of which was now blank. Ben had given up trying to talk to her. By now, the field office in Philly would know about Gabriel Baker. She wondered if Ben were back at work after “taking care” of his ex-girlfriend in New York City.

“There was some graffiti,” Anna said, finally seizing a different legal pad than the one she’d been jotting notes on. “They called it in as a hate crime.”

“Who’s this?” Nora asked.

“You said refugees. I’m saying, the Office of Refugee Resettlement in DC has a local office here, and they called in some graffiti on their building on Monday.” Anna looked slightly guilty as she said this.

“I take it we didn’t get back to them?” Nora asked.

“Well, Monday and Tuesday we were knee-deep in Frank Burgess, right?” Anna replied, looking, it seemed to Nora, as though she were seeking absolution.

Nora gave her none. “What did the graffiti say?”

Anna checked her notes.

“Go back where you come from.”

“Unfriendly,” Nora observed.

“Nothing more unfriendly than a dangling participle,” Anna rejoined. “On the other side of the building they wrote Rabid dogs.”

“Better. I like to see good old campaign rhetoric take root.”

Anna gave a small shrug and seemed to be scanning the notes for anything else that might provide insight.

“Why would you come to Erie as a refugee?” Nora wondered aloud.

“Why do you go anywhere as a refugee?” Anna responded absently.

Nora shrugged, hesitant to admit she was a little vague on the process.

“Anyway,” she said, looking up from her notes, “since the natives are leaving the area in record numbers, the refugee population has boosted the city’s numbers.”

“Given Erie’s overall lack of diversity, should I assume the natives are leaving because the refugees are coming in?”

Anna tsked softly, shaking her head. “Nah. The natives are leaving because there are no good factory jobs and fewer white-collar positions. Same old story. Still, the cost of living here is easier on a new resident than, say, Philly or Pittsburgh. Getting by in Erie is more doable.”

Nora contemplated this. The rent on the French Street apartment was seven hundred dollars. In Philly, the same rent would have landed her in a roach-roiling death trap. She shivered. Her current home was more spacious than the apartment in which she grew up.

“Well, I guess that we have a pretty good idea where to start on our list, then.”

Anna nodded. “Let’s pay them a visit and see if we can’t suggest they get some emergency plans in place. Or maybe just shut down for the next couple of days until we sort this out.”

Nora had taken to wearing light cotton undershirts in case she needed to add the Kevlar vest to her outfit. The vest was hard to disguise under her Oxford shirt, but with the blazer it wasn’t too noticeable. The summer heat made the blazer seem like the accessory of an insane person, however. She and Anna exchanged knowing glances as they headed out into the July morning.

Nora liked the way Anna drove. She was calm, assertive, and never swore. She drove as though she expected the traffic to part for her, and as far as Nora could tell, it actually did. They took State Street all the way up to 26th. It was not a pretty drive. The sedan passed several abandoned factories, their many-paned windows broken or blackened. Small, weedy lots were occupied by used car dealerships and shuttered businesses. Turning onto 26th, they traveled past shabby row houses with limp aluminum siding and listing window air conditioners.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement’s International Institute inhabited a long, low building on East 26th. The two agents entered, their eyes adjusting with effort to the dim lighting after the fierce July sun. The mismatched chairs outside the office area held an array of people, and Nora regarded them curiously as Anna showed her badge to the intern.

The intern asked them to wait in the waiting area. Nora settled into a folding chair, listening carefully to the soft buzz of languages around her. The faces were drawn, tired, and used-to-waiting.

A tiny woman in a cream-colored headscarf spoke rapid Syrian Arabic to a gaunt teenaged boy with a thin layer of down on his upper lip. A little girl, no more than four, rotated between them, leaning against each set of knees, occasionally careening in her trajectory slightly beyond mother or brother and then skidding to a confused halt as she got too close to a stranger. With wide, blinking eyes, she would walk backwards and then begin again.

One object of the girl’s fascination seemed to be the towering magenta wrap perched atop the head of an elderly African woman. The woman did not even glance at the little girl, though, and instead sat regarding Nora steadily. Her wide black eyes, the whites laced with a web of red veins, conveyed a total lack of interest. Nora felt that the gaze had been there, long and heavy, and Nora had accidentally sat down in it. Two tall men sat to the woman’s left, talking softly in a language Nora couldn’t divine.

The heat in the room was intense, and Nora began to fidget. “What’s the name of the director?” She had just murmured these words to Anna when the intern tugged the sliding glass window aside and said, “Regina will see you now.”

They stood and were given access to the office. Regina’s office was small and crowded with towering stacks of paper. The bright light barreling through the window at Regina’s back made her hair seem to glow. She was herself thin and gaunt, her face pale. Her half-hearted stab at makeup seemed to accentuate her paleness: two dark streaks of eyeliner weighed heavily on her eyelids, a jarring contrast to her blond eyelashes and eyebrows. She wore an orangey shade of lipstick. Nora, who wore no makeup at all, suddenly wanted to lean across the desk and do something she’d never done: offer girly advice. That look is all wrong for you. Maybe in just the way she’d heard women do occasionally—in the hushed tones of professional women who want to maintain professionalism. You have lipstick on your teeth. There’s mascara in your bangs. Your tag’s sticking up in back.

Regina looked irritated.

As though sensing this, Anna led off. “We apologize for the delay in getting back to you. We’re grateful that you contacted us.”

Regina nodded gravely. “We’ve had an uptick lately in incidents. You know. It’s a different world now…”

“Incidents?” asked Nora.

“People come in. Kids. Bullied in school or walking home from the bus. Veiled women are getting yelled at more, headscarves being pulled off. But it’s a general xenophobia. My kids from the Congo are having a hard time. All it takes is an accent and even the other black kids go after them.”

Anna tilted her head. “You have many from the Congo?”

Regina nodded, her face pained. “Yeah. Often they’re kids who’ve been child soldiers, you know? So they get bullied like that, it’s like brushing off flies. Sometimes they’ll ask me, though … how much are they allowed to react.…”

Anna nodded. “But nothing serious, no threats?”

Regina looked at them with a steely gaze. “I think the graffiti is serious. And a threat. Which is why I called you for help.”

Nora appreciated the firm response. She realized this woman didn’t give a damn what Nora thought about her makeup.

“Has anything like this happened before?” Anna asked.

“Never. People are generally pretty welcoming. With the exception of the incidents I mentioned, I’d call Erie folks very giving, very tolerant. Proud they are a host city.”

Nora saw that Anna’s phone was vibrating with an incoming call. Anna glanced down. Sheila’s name filled the screen. Anna frowned, then stood up to walk to the hall. “Forgive me,” she said to Regina.

Anna walking out did not help Regina’s mood. She watched Anna leave, then let her eyes rest on Nora.

Nora shifted under her gaze, searching for something to say. “How many refugees are in Erie now?” she finally asked.

“Upwards of nine thousand. There are five thousand Bhutanese alone.”

Nora wasn’t going to confess she had no idea where Bhutan was.

Regina sighed impatiently. “Look, you clearly have no idea what goes on here. We are the ones who greet refugees at the airport. We set them up in apartments and make sure they understand how to use flushing toilets and gas stoves and—”

At Nora’s frown, Regina interrupted herself. “Look, not all of them are urban Europeans like the Bosnians. We get people from the Congo and remote areas of Sudan who’ve lived the last ten years under a tarp in a refugee camp where they had to dig their own latrines.”

Nora nodded, feeling ignorant, as Regina continued.

“We show them where the doctor is, get them plugged into English lessons, get them social security cards, get them jobs, help them fill out their tax forms, call their landlords to explain they have no hot water, teach them how to ride the city bus to get to work, enroll their kids in school.…”

“So the people in the waiting room there—”

“Have had their homes blown up, their daughters raped, their husbands shot, their brothers beaten. They’ve spent anywhere from two to twenty years in a filthy, over-crowded camp where you have to wait in line for clean water. They’ve spent years being lost. And we’re just trying to help them find their way.” Regina’s eyes were tired. Nora weighed the woman’s words in silence.

Anna pushed open the door, her face drawn and tense.

“Okay, so Regina, I do not want to rush through this, but I’m here to suggest that you get a solid emergency plan in place. More than this, I think it’s essential that you shut down for the next few days.”

“Shut down?” Regina asked. “You’re kidding, right? These people rely on us for services, for—”

“No, I’m afraid I’m not kidding. We have good reason to believe that this refugee community is a possible target of domestic terrorism.”

Regina blinked. “Domestic terrorism,” she repeated incredulously.

“There are patriot groups and white militia organizations all over the country,” Anna explained patiently. “We got a message from a local group that they have some issues with—”

“—Everyone,” Nora supplied.

“Well, with everyone not white,” Anna continued.

“And so we were hoping—”

But Regina was not listening. She had tilted her head slightly, narrowing her eyes as she listened to a near deafening roar coming from the street. The glass pane in the window trembled. Each woman rose to standing. Nora instinctively put her hand on the handle of her gun as she and Anna exchanged a look. Motorcycles. A lot of them.

And then the window exploded inward. The sound of rapid gunfire mingled with screaming filled the air. Regina tumbled forward over her desk as Anna yanked Nora to the ground; both women threw up their arms to avoid the shower of glass and bullets as they sheltered in front of Regina’s desk. The screaming in the lobby intensified, and the sound of gunfire grew even louder.

Anna tugged the unconscious Regina all the way over her desk and onto the floor. “No pulse!” she said to Nora.

Nora released the safety on her gun.

Anna placed a hand on her arm, her eyes wide. “Those are semi-automatic weapons, Nora.”

“And I’m a very good shot,” she said, shaking her off.

She cracked open the door to Regina’s office and felt Anna immediately at her back. The scene unfolding took her breath away. Two women in jeans and T-shirts stood firing into the waiting room and reception area. One had a long blonde braid, the other medium-length brown hair that swung with every discharge of her weapon.

“Hey!” Nora screamed, but she could not even hear her own voice over the thunderous sounds of the gunfire and the screaming. In horror she saw that the little Syrian girl was lying face down, her soft curls spilling onto the floor.

Nora took aim through the smoky air and fired two bullets into the back of the woman with the braid; she fell forward immediately. Her brown-haired companion whirled to face Nora, a look of fury on her face. Before she could open fire, Nora plowed three shots into her midsection.

The force of the bullets caused the woman to fly backwards and collapse onto the lap of one of the very tall Africans who was now slumped dead in his chair. The woman’s weapon spewed a few more bullets into the drop-ceiling before clattering onto the floor.

Nora flattened herself against the wall of the corridor and met Anna’s eyes as she emerged fully from Regina’s office. She looked the way that Nora felt. Her face was white, her eyes wide. Her gun hand shook.

Nora felt herself shaking as well, and she fought for breath amidst the swirls of smoke. But she had to see if anyone else was coming in. She peered around the corner and out through the gaping holes where the glass doors of the building had been. Three more women stood on the lawn, their guns at the ready.

A police siren could be heard in the sudden silence; a neighbor must have called 9-1-1, for Nora and Anna had had no time to do so. At the sound, the three women slung their weapons over their shoulders and mounted their motorcycles, gunning the engines.

“No!” Nora shouted. She tore through the lobby and leapt out through the shattered glass of the entryway, skidding onto the lawn as the bikers peeled away.

She raced into the middle of the street, planting her feet.

This time she did not aim for wheels. She shot directly at the closest woman, who crumpled.

The motorcycle wobbled out of control and plowed into a parked car with a crash that reverberated throughout the street. The approaching sirens drowned out the sound of the engines as the remaining motorcycles turned down State Street and disappeared.

No. Not again …

Nora galloped toward the squad car. The driver slammed on the brakes at the sight of her, and she hurriedly holstered her gun and pulled out her badge, holding it aloft.

“Follow those motorcycles!” she shouted as she ran up to the window. She was gesturing wildly at the place where last she had seen the women. “Call for backup! Do not let them get away!”

“I need to see your fucking credentials!” the policeman shouted back.

“I’m showing you my fucking badge,” Nora, outraged, screamed at him.

“You don’t just shove something in a cop’s face and expect him to chase off wherever you order him,” the cop shouted back.

Anna was on the lawn now, shouting. “Do what she says, goddammit, Mike!”

At a word from his partner, the driver of the car punched the accelerator and the car tires squealed as the car flew down the street, skirting the wreckage of the third biker.

Nora sank to the pavement in the middle of the street, overwhelmed. Anna ran to her side. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine. We need ambulances, Anna. Those people…”

“I called them.”

“That little girl…”

“I called them,” Anna said. She knelt on the ground next to Nora and clutched her shoulders. The late morning air was suddenly swollen with the sound of sirens.

*   *   *

Even as his PD colleagues were attempting to keep the television cameras at a reasonable distance from the crime scene, Mike Szymanowski was under attack from all sides and wasn’t going quietly. “What was I supposed to do? All of a sudden a black woman with a gun is running through the street and then telling me what to do—”

“What bothered you more?” Nora snarled. “That I’m black or that I’m a woman?”

Mike snapped, “That you had a gun, okay? It’s not an everyday occurrence in the streets of Erie.”

“We have a problem with vanishing bikers, Mike,” Sheila was saying. The forensic team borrowed from Erie PD had finished photographing the scene. Now, they were all standing in the middle of the street outside of the International Institute, as the ambulance and EMT workers began the work of carrying out the nineteen bodies from within. The third biker had been disentangled from her motorcycle and carried off to the intensive care.

“They can’t just have vanished,” he said petulantly.

Sheila looked at him fiercely. “They vanished. Again. Now, what are we going to do about it?”

“Well I imagine you are going to question the only perp that your agent didn’t kill and get her to tell you what’s going on.” The accusation of incompetence was explicit in both his tone and his words.

Nora’s anger burned dangerously hot. Anna saw the look in her eyes and jumped in. “I think we understand now the importance of cooperation. Now that you have met Special Agent Khalil, you will be able to work together in the future for a better outcome.”

“Yes, well, working together doesn’t mean bossing me around, either,” Szymanowski said.

“So it isn’t that I’m a black woman, it’s that I dared to give you an order?” Nora asked. “In the middle of a fucking firestorm?” She wasn’t usually one to swear. She particularly disliked the word fuck, but she found it was spilling comfortably off her lips, providing exactly the emphasis she needed to deal with Officer Szymanowski.

“Nora isn’t black, by the way, Mike,” Anna supplied.

Nora held up a hand. “It’s all the same to them,” she said, walking away.

“Them? Who’s them?” Mike shouted after her.

Various reporters overheard this and took up the cry, brandishing fat microphones. “Who’s ‘them’? Agent Dixon! Agent Dixon!” they called to Anna, who ignored them with a practiced air.

Nora strode into the International Institute, trying without much success to shake off her anger. The broken glass doors had been removed altogether to allow the teams to enter and exit more easily. She found she was hugging herself tightly as she walked through the lobby. She stopped to stare at the place where the little girl had lain.

An acrid smoky smell hung heavy in the air, but this was not what was making breathing difficult.

“Nora?” She turned to see Special Agent in Charge Joseph Schacht bending slightly to pass under the low doorframe.

She felt a rush of relief. A familiar face. Her SAC was famous for being florid of face, wearing ill-fitting shirts, and sporting the ugliest neckties in the Bureau.

He shook her hand hard, then grasped her elbow with his left hand, immobilizing her arm as he looked intently into her face. “You’re looking well,” he said, after a searching gaze in which he seemed to reassure himself she was alright. After a moment he smirked. “New position agreeing with you?”

Nora gave him a half-smile. “Well, if you’d asked me two days ago, I’d have said it was pretty boring.”

“You shot three violent criminals, Nora. You’re to be commended.”

“Shot them too late, sir. A massacre occurred while I was in the next room.”

“Under a hail of gunfire.”

Nora inhaled, swallowing. “You got here fast.”

“Every once in a while the good guys get to use the company jet.”

She nodded distractedly.

“We were just about to land when we heard the latest development.” Schacht surveyed the room and then said, “Let’s debrief a little in the car, shall we? Air conditioning.”

She followed him to a blue minivan, clearly a rental from the airport as the Erie agents had been unavailable to retrieve this Philadelphia delegation. Anna saw her following Schacht and gestured that they would meet back at the office. There were two other agents in the van. Nora remembered seeing their faces back in Philly, but she couldn’t recall their names. Schacht solved the mystery by introducing them as Special Agent Derek Ford and Special Agent Venkatram Chidambaram. They looked young and a little haughty. Ford had rugged good looks, but for an ugly scar that marred his right cheek and caused his right eye to slope a little. Chidambaram looked to be of South Asian origin, with skin darker than hers but soft, wavy black hair that framed his face. He was short and slim; his suit looked more expensive and a little tighter than necessary for a day at the office.

She figured the shock of having to travel to Erie, Pennsylvania, wasn’t sitting well with them.

Schacht and Nora settled into the middle row of seats as Agent Chidambaram plugged the office’s address into the GPS and began navigating through the crush of reporters and television cameras.

Nora said, “It’s just … just turn on State Street and go north. It’s not, you know, GPS-worthy.”

Schacht smiled at her. “Busy week?”

“I feel like the world just turned upside down. We had nothing to do except stalk the perverts. And now all of a sudden … we can’t keep up.”

“It’s very serious. They’ve been warning us about domestic terrorism for a long time now. We’ve been able to head a lot of things off at the pass. But rapid multi-pronged attacks, carefully planned, with several different teams … We are under-equipped to deal with it. We’re going to try, though, Nora.”

“Head things off like what, sir?”

Schacht shrugged. “Well, we had a bank robbery a few months back in Virginia. The express purpose was to rob the bank in order to get money to buy arms for a race war.”

“Race war?” Nora asked skeptically.

“That was the plan, Nora. Sounds nuts to you and me, but it was very real and very imminent for those involved. They had been training and needed more funds for their arms suppliers. Who were, absurdly, Mexican.”

“Pretending to be,” Agent Ford interjected.

“Yes, pretending to be. They were our guys. Actually Honduran and—where, Derek?”

“Honduran and Chilean. But those idiots couldn’t tell, of course.”

“Of course,” Nora said softly. “You think that’s what this bank robbery is about?”

Schacht shrugged. “Don’t know. Just saying there’s precedent. War costs money.”

She looked out of the window at the crumbling factories, then back at him. “What kind of arms?”

“Everything. Rocket launchers. Automatics, semi-automatics…”

“Bombs?”

“No bombs. Grenades, though.”

“You think these guys here can get rocket launchers and stuff?” she asked Schacht.

“We both know anyone can buy a rocket launcher off the Internet. Do they know how to use one? That’s different. They’ll need someone ex-military. And the way we treat our vets, it’s certainly not impossible to find disaffected ex-military.”

Nora shook her head.

“But why here?” she demanded. “Why target this backward little city that doesn’t even matter?”

Schacht looked at her as though she were a very poor student indeed. “Nora, it’s urban hubris to suggest that the rural areas don’t matter. Rural poverty is far more widespread than urban poverty. The latter just makes for better movies. There are more discontented country folk than there are city dwellers. Their opinions are deeply entrenched. The last election taught us that they’d felt unheard in all the previous ones. Their man promised them jobs, promised he’d get rid of the foreigners, promised they hadn’t suffered for nothing. But the system could only allow for so much. So … maybe they can get their views across with arms. Collectively, the gun owners of America have more firepower than the armed forces of certain countries.”

Nora took a deep breath but found she had no way of responding. It had taken her a very long time to overcome her distaste for her gun. She knew she needed it. She had saved lives with it. But still …

Schacht continued, “Many Americans are angry. Truly angry in a way that you can’t fathom. They see their way of life under assault. Language issues, religious issues, the way we teach kids in school, the way we interact with each other. For some people, multiculturalism means the death of tradition, and tradition links them to their fathers and grandfathers and their people.…”

“Keeping you mired in racism…”

Schacht tsked. “Loving your roots and wanting to preserve them isn’t wrong. This methodology is wrong, of course. But then again it’s the whole freedom fighter versus terrorist argument. Their cause is noble. Get back to … well, someone’s interpretation of what the world should look like. The guy they had hoped would lead them there showed them quickly enough that his own self-interest and gold potty were his real concerns. Even though he’s in office, they’re expected to pay taxes and tolerate foreigners diluting the gene pool.”

“So the logical response is shooting up women and children at a refugee center?”

Schacht shook his head sadly. “Tragic. But what a message! How many women engage in mass shootings?”

“One prior to this,” she said.

“And now five women. Five women on motorcycles. No helmets, no Kevlar. Just walking in and taking matters into their own hands. If the women aren’t worried about shooting other women and even children, then what does that say about the mission?”

“Urgent?” Nora ventured.

“Urgent and clear. Unambiguous and just. And finally … necessary. So women are called in from whatever other things the group envisions women should be doing. They’re called to fight. And they’re normalizing the fight for other women who might be watching.”

They fell silent.

Nora thought for a moment about her father and everything that he hated about her life and her choices. She wondered if she could boil it all down to a love of roots and tradition. She had always seen it simply as an effort to control her.

She dug deep into memory and found her mother’s voice reading to her in classical Arabic, making Nora read poetry aloud, making sure Nora did not lazily elide any letters that did not exist in English.

“These words are a living bridge to centuries of love and pain and joy and desire and loss,” she would say, tucking Nora’s unruly hair behind her ear. “Don’t ever forget how to walk across this bridge.”

Nora looked at the men in the front seat. “Do you have more reinforcements or did you just bring these two guys?” she asked Schacht.

Ford twisted in his seat to cast a scathing gaze upon her.

She would not be cowed by either the good looks or the scary scar. “What?” she demanded. “I’m not saying you’re not a genius, man. But we need bodies. Since yesterday we’ve had a heist, a bomb, a murder, an abduction, and a massacre. We don’t even have a forensics guy. Not one.” She realized part of this rant was a poorly-veiled complaint to Schacht for consenting to such an exile for her.

Schacht said, “Sheila wisely called in the CIRG, but it generally takes about four hours for them to get themselves together. These two are CIRG but based out of our office, so I brought them with me—my own private brain trust. We have press handlers coming from DC. Chid here is our behavioral analysis expert and Ford specializes in domestic terror groups and militia movements. Pittsburgh is sending a whole forensics team and their best hostage negotiator. It’s handled. You just have to show up for work.”

Nora scoffed, then leaned forward to direct Chid where to park. He glanced at her, then back at the road. “Khalil, is it? Arab?”

She pursed her lips at him. “Irish,” she said caustically. “Turn here into the parking garage.”

“Y’all validate parking?” he asked.

“Not for city slickers,” she declared.

*   *   *

When they walked into the office, the plasma screen was full of Vance Evans’s face.

“Public reaction to the shootings at the refugee center was strong and clear: this is not Erie.”

He was standing about a block from the building that Nora had just left in ruins. Around him, onlookers milled, awaiting their moment of fame on the camera.

The first to speak was a black woman whose eyes were red from weeping. “My neighbors. These people comin’ in here were my neighbors in my hometown. They weren’t foreigners. They were new Americans.…”

A biker was next. “I heard these women were on bikes. I’m here to tell you, that ain’t us. Bikers just wanna ride, you know? Disgustin’ what these people done. It’s disgustin’.”

The camera fell on a thin boy weeping on the curb. Evans explained that his family had been inside the center when the shooters entered. They had survived war in the Congo only to be separated permanently here.

With a grave voice, Evans peered into the camera.

“Just say, ‘Oh, the humanity!’ and get it over with,” snarled Sheila, muting the TV and stomping into the conference room.

After multiple introductions, and Maggie grumpily appearing with a tray full of tea and coffee, they all gathered around the conference room table.

Nora wasn’t keen to speak up first, but she had forgotten to ask Anna about the call she’d received while they were at the institute.

“It was Sheila,” she said. “This Baker fellow had made another announcement. Released it to Vance Evans.”

“What did he say?”

Pete called it up on the screen. Gabriel Baker looked fit; his blue eyes gleamed with energy.

He was handsome, Nora thought. He was handsome in a way that would attract people. It wouldn’t be easy to write him off as just some wild-eyed redneck.

Fellow patriots, all those who want to take back our country from the filthy parasites besieging it: now is the time to rise up and join our cause. Do not fear your strength—wield it! As to the rest of you: Welcome to the First Day. It will be stormy.

“First day?” Nora asked. “First day? How many days are we looking at?”

“Shit,” Special Agent Chidambaram said. He started to laugh. He shook his head, as though shaking it off, then burst out laughing again.

Silence descended on the room as the other agents stared at him.

Pete spoke for the group. “Dude.”

Special Agent Chidambaram shrugged. “The last piece just fell into place.”

There was some shifting in seats. Finally, Sheila, utterly exasperated, said, “You wanna be slightly less cryptic? We have no time here. None. The world is exploding all around us, Special Agent Chidambaram.”

“I go by Chid, if you don’t mind, ma’am. And actually there will probably be several more explosions,” he said. “There will be body counts that are way more than the ones we’ve had so far.”

Again, the agents around the table seemed on the verge of pummeling him.

Special Agent Chidambaram looked at the printout he had with him. “Look, the words ‘preliminary evening’ in and of themselves could have meant nothing. Coupling them with ‘first day’ might also have been nothing. But when you throw in the word, ‘stormy’…” His voice trailed off.

They continued to stare at him.

“No?”

Even Schacht was losing patience at this point. “Chid, you’d better just out with it.”

“Ring Cycle. Opera. Richard Wagner.”

It sounded to Nora like he’d said “Vogner,” but she saw Anna write “Wagner” on her yellow pad. They all exchanged glances. Sheila frowned rather menacingly.

Special Agent Chidambaram sighed dramatically. “So, Wagner wrote opera; well, he would have said he wrote dramas set to music. Major exponent of German culture generally and Aryan culture specifically. In addition to writing music he wrote essays. That first message of Baker’s swiped liberally from Wagner’s essay on Jews.”

Anna drew in her breath sharply. “Can you tell us about the essay?”

“Sure,” said Chid. “He was trying to say that Jews by their nature have no original thought—he was trying to win whatever competition there was to win between himself and a composer like Felix Mendelssohn. A Jew, if that’s not obvious. But mostly it was all about pointing out the ‘repugnance’ of their nature. Their inability to assimilate. That they’re physically repellant. He contended that the scars they had from years of persecution had colored—indeed damaged—their intellectual output. Meanwhile, the true guardians of the German intellectual heritage were most certainly white men like himself.”

Anna continued dutifully taking notes, but Pete and Nora and the rest were just watching Chid carefully.

“I mean, look, he was trying hard to become a thing, right? He was jealous of his contemporaries, especially the ones filling the great opera houses and theaters of the time. And so his project became at one point to discredit at least one group of his competitors in order to take more of the market share. He determined in the end that those Jews who did not willingly self-annul, or in another translation, ‘self-annihilate’ … well, they were deluded at best. Clinging to a cultural heritage not their own.”

Sheila leaned in, desperate. “What on earth is your point, Chid?”

He looked at her in surprise. “The Ring Cycle,” he answered, as though it were obvious. “Wagner’s masterpiece. The Ring.” He raised his hand, ticked off on four fingers: “Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung.” He lowered all four fingers, then ticked off again: “Preliminary Evening. First Day. Second Day. Third Day.”

He watched as Anna wrote all this down in purple ink.

“It’s both a celebration of German or Aryan—in this case, most specifically, Norse—culture and a promise of fire. Revolution. The deed that redeems the world. But the Nazis … well, the Nazis used Wagner for their own ends. There’s a phrase, a magic spell in the operas that invokes Nacht und Nebel, ‘Night and Fog’—Hitler devised the Night and Fog Decree in 1941. Anyone resisting Nazi rule could be disappeared into Night and Fog.”

These words were met with absolute silence.

“How many days?” asked Anna, her voice barely a whisper.

“Four days,” Chid confirmed.

Pete’s voice piped up from nowhere, it seemed. “Stormy.”

Chid looked a question at him.

“Why did he say ‘stormy’?” Pete asked.

“Stürmisch,” Chid answered quickly. “It’s German for stormy, but more importantly it’s a … well, it’s like a stage direction for the conductor. The music should be stormy. It’s, like, the first thing you see when you open the score for the Valkyries—Jesus!” He started laughing again, shaking his head.

“What?” Nora demanded fiercely.

“The attack this morning. Women. Women on motorcycles.” He looked around, then finally started to accept that no one was on the same page with him at all. “The Valkyries were women who decided who lived and died in battle. But they rode horses—they were pretty badass.…” Chid’s voice trailed off. “Anyway. If he’s keeping to the Ring for a framework, you’ve got four days. In the end, everything’s going to go up in flames. So. Yeah.”

Only Schacht could come up with something to say after that. “Maybe you could help us better understand Baker and his message.”

Chid sighed, looking at his notes. “Yeah, okay. Sure.” Having said that, he lapsed into silence.

“Now would be good,” said Sheila testily.

“Okay, of course, no … I was just, you know, gathering my thoughts.” He took a rather languid sip of his tea. “It’s a little problematic because Baker really … See, I was working on this on the plane, reading the transcript, you know, and, well, some parts of the profile fit and others don’t. I guess this part needs sorting out still. But someone who’s using this level of rhetoric is going to be a highly educated white male. Because even if it’s overblown, his prose is correct. Grammatically on point. And the sources he’s citing, well, some of them are very erudite. Who reads Wagner’s essays, anyway? Like, three musicologists and maybe four or five history nerds. But Baker’s a truck driver, is he not? Anyway, this rhetoric makes those Bundy guys sound like hillbillies in comparison, right?”

“Maybe,” said Pete. “What do you think he represents exactly? Are we talking more patriot movement than white supremacist, or a mix?”

Ford leaned forward to respond. “Well, that’s where it gets interesting. It’s a little unclear. I think he’s invoking various patriot and radical Christian groups in order to pander to their members, but it’s a mish-mash, really.” Chid was nodding even as he doodled on his legal pad, thinking as he wrote, not looking up at the agents around the table.

Anna asked, “Does he have to do this in order to issue this appeal he’s laid out to all militia members throughout the country?”

“Yeah, I’d say so,” Derek Ford answered. “Like a candidate for president. You have to appeal to everyone, bring the disparate groups together.”

Only the scratching of pens on legal pads broke the silence.

Anna looked up. “Why do you think he timed this with Roar on the Shore?”

Chid smiled. “Your motorcycle festival thing?”

“It’s not a festival,” Pete insisted with a surreptitious wink at Nora. “Celebration of biker culture.”

Chid shrugged. “Whatever the case. If he’s sending his army out on motorcycles for this phase of it, well, you can’t just stop everyone on motorcycles when you have an extra 80 thousand of them in the area. Plus, that’s about the whitest bit of white culture I can think of at the moment. So there’s that box ticked off.…”

Nora piped up. “Recruiting?”

The three Philadelphia agents nodded.

Derek Ford said, “Bikers are usually non-violent, but disaffected. And predominantly white. He may think he has a potential pool for expansion.”

Schacht said, “But we know that usually recruitment is going on online and at gun shows and…”

“Preparedness expos,” all three Philadelphia agents said at once.

Pete laughed. “The end is coming!”

Finally exasperated, Nora slapped the tabletop. “The end just came, people! Five bitches on motorcycles just slaughtered an old woman and a little girl and everyone in between,” she said furiously. “Now tell me how to fix it. Give me something doable.”

Silence descended quickly. Pete, looking chastened, said, “You’re right, Miss Nora. Chid—can we work with this number fourteen at all?

“What about it?” asked Chid.

“If Baker’s saying they’ll engage in fourteen acts of violence, and you seem to think there’s a framework of four days, can you help us with the breakdown?”

Anna added, “Are we going to be able to prevent any of them, or do we have to keep watching people get massacred?”

She and Nora held each other’s gaze. Nora realized she too was fighting intense surges of emotion after all they had seen that morning.

Nora looked down at the screen of her BlackBerry and found that Ben had indeed called and texted six or seven times. Her anger at him had vanished; she wanted to talk to him so badly. She needed to tell him what she had seen. She needed to tell him how she had failed to protect even one person in that center. She needed to tell him about the tiny body of the Syrian girl, and the soft curl of her hair.

And if today counted as but the first day … She shuddered involuntarily.

Chid was looking at her sympathetically. “Fourteen. Yes.” He scrawled something on his legal pad, then looked up triumphantly. “Yes. Super smart, actually.”

“How so?” asked Schacht.

“Fourteen. So, let’s think of Das Rheingold, which is really about a robbery, by the way, as having four acts. Technically it’s four scenes, but I think it’s fair to think of it as four acts for our purposes.” Chid paused dramatically to have another sip of tea. “Valkyrie, which is, for all intents and purposes, about biker chicks, is three acts. Siegfried, about the hero who learns to fear, is, what…” He wrinkled his brow, figuring, then said, “Yes. Three acts. Götterdämmerung, about vanquishing the gods and setting the world, aka the corrupt system, on fire, is three acts—BUT! There’s a prologue.” His voice was positively sing-songy.

Sheila was looking at him with a deeply impatient nerd-loathing etched across her features. “So?”

“So what is that?” he prodded, looking around expectantly.

“Fourteen?” Pete answered slowly.

Chid grinned. “Fourteen!”

Nora stared at him, trying to decide whether he was growing on her. He was simply too frustrating to watch in action. Yet somehow he reminded her of her mother. Her mother had had an almost infinite tolerance for finding pleasure in things that Nora had found utterly useless. She watched Chid shift in his chair, realizing they were a pretty tough crowd of exhausted agents.

“So in the end,” she said, making her voice as sarcasm-free as possible, “what are you telling us, Chid? Besides that this guy wants to set the world on fire.”

“That your perp is quirky. A lover of classical music—and really good classical music, mind you. Not, fucking, Pachelbel’s fucking canon. He’s probably pretty well-off. Super smart. I imagine he’s got a wine cellar and a fondness for risotto as well as a mind-blowing gun collection.”

They were all silent, digesting this.

Suddenly Chid added, “Oh, and he’s a mother-fucking racist.”

Nora tried to reconcile these quirky aspects with the images of Gabriel Baker they’d watched over and over that morning. It didn’t all seem to jibe.

Derek Ford had been sipping from his coffee mug as Chid spoke. As Chid fell silent, Derek placed his mug on the table with a slightly-too-loud thud. “Crucially,” he added, “he has the ability to motivate people to do his bidding.”

“Well, what’s the point if you can’t have minions?” asked Pete, then he looked over at Nora and seemed to bite his tongue.

“So how do we find him?” Anna asked.

Chid looked thoughtful. “It’s safe to bet he’s got a place in the country. Somewhere that people can train.”

Special Agent Ford nodded, affirming this.

“So basically anywhere around here,” said Sheila.

“Well, yes and no,” Chid said. He’s not going to be living in a trailer. So that’s going to narrow it down. You’re looking for a very nice house surrounded by at least twenty to fifty acres.”

“Aryan Nations had only twenty in Idaho,” Ford said.

“And you’ll have to have a barn,” added Chid. “At least one.”

Ford said, unnecessarily, “To store the weapons.”

Silence descended once more as the agents considered this. Then Nora said, “So our risotto-eating friend wants to launch a revolution. Why is he giving us hints? Doesn’t that mean he wants to get caught?”

Chid and Ford both shook their heads, but Ford was first to speak. “Look, when you’re a terrorist you’ve built an organization and you’ve spent a lot of time offering your people fame in exchange for their insignificant little lives. You have to do what you can to get attention for your cause, on the one hand, and to make your opponents look bad on the other.”

Schacht chimed in. “He’s convinced that he is very smart and that we representatives of the government, by virtue of being lemmings, being sheep, that we are deeply stupid. He’s got vision, we’ve got none. These acts of violence are to teach us a lesson. He may say it’s about revolution, but it’s mostly about him.”

“Which is in keeping with the Ring theme,” Chid said, excitement surging across his features again. “What does it mean to possess the Ring of Power? What shall we do with it? He’s saying, I can bend people to my will. And I can do it with an agenda that is totally opposite to yours. The agenda ultimately may not matter. The power does.”

Sheila was shaking her head. “But how can he think this is going to play out? Race war? Are people really going to rise up and join his cause?”

Schacht replied, “They were prepared for revolution, armed rebellion. Collectively they have the means. What’s been lacking is the right voice to assess when the new leader has failed. How much of a chance does he get? You need someone who appeals to all the disparate voices of discontent. If Baker can organize them and unite them, they will be a force.”

“Look, the media has, in the space of a few hours, made this man the stuff of legend,” Chid said. “He’s taken the darkest xenophobia, the deepest racist sentiments we harbor, and the filthiest remnants of campaign rhetoric and shown us what all that can look like made manifest. He’s done exactly what many have fantasized about. All the groups he appeals to will point to this for a long time and imitate it if they dare. So he’s already won. We may wipe out his army today or tomorrow, but the precedent is now in place for action.”

Chid had scarcely spoken these words when the Erie agents’ BlackBerries started buzzing on the tabletop. Each agent sprang up as though electrocuted.

Sheila threw open the door and dashed out of the conference room.

Anna addressed the visiting agents, her voice a whisper. “Abe from the bomb squad—they’re trying to defuse a bomb at the synagogue.”

Chid held her gaze, then said softly, “Fire.”

*   *   *

Anna’s usual veneer of calm while driving had evaporated completely. She blazed across the sun-baked pavement at top speed, shouting insults at anyone who dared impede the SUV’s path.

“I don’t get how they knew,” Pete said.

“Rabbi Potok showed up to give the summer Bar Mitzvah class and saw a U-Haul truck parked outside, still warm—she must have missed them by thirty seconds. She’s no dummy, not on a day when we’ve just had a mass shooting at the refugee center. She called the police immediately.” The wheels shrieked as Anna made a hard right turn.

“Were they waiting for the kids to arrive to detonate?” Pete asked.

Anna said, “What do you think? Why blow up an empty synagogue when you can blow up one that’s full of prepubescents?”

Schacht had insisted they should not use their sirens in order not to alert the press; it would be a tricky stunt to pull off, however. Nora knew that so few newsworthy stories happened in Erie that any congregating of emergency vehicles, particularly after what had occurred that morning, would draw attention.

Temple Beth Torah occupied the corner of 21st and Peach Streets. It was an innocuous enough tan brick building. It was squat and simple, if wide. A large stained-glass window, a kaleidoscope of bright colors, soared atop the northwest corner.

A firefighter was holding up his hand and staunchly refused to let Anna get any closer despite her threats. The three agents thus descended, all staring at the building from a block away.

The U-Haul truck sat in the designated handicapped space near the synagogue’s main entrance. The jet-black armored bomb squad van was there, and Nora spied Abe in his EOD suit along with the rest of his crew.

“Their initial report is that there’s as much ammonium nitrate as Oklahoma City,” Pete said softly.

“But there’s a remote trigger mechanism this time hooked to the—what did they say, dynamite?” questioned Nora.

“Yes, that’s what they’re trying to figure out, apparently.”

“Maybe they need you, Peter?” Nora said.

Anna had heard them. “I already volunteered him,” she said, without looking at either of them.

“What did Abe say?” Pete asked.

She shrugged. “I doubt he can text back effectively at this moment. But someone will have relayed the message.”

Schacht had kicked into high gear. He took Anna and Sheila and began doing the only possible thing in such a scenario. He began forging a Unified Command Center, drawing senior law enforcement and rescue people under one roof to coordinate decision-making. He was, Nora knew, a master coordinator, and Anna—unlike Sheila—had the connections and relationships with the various branches of law enforcement that they now desperately needed.

Agents Chidambaram and Ford joined Pete and Nora where they stood. Chid was looking at the scene like he might analyze a text. His black eyes were calm and clear, taking everything in at once. His face was grave. He had not spoken at all since they’d arrived.

It was only a few moments before Anna jogged over to the cluster now made by Ford, Chid, Nora, and Pete. “Sheila’s calling in evacuation notices to every mosque and black church and ethnic community center,” she said in a rush, panting. “This trigger mechanism is wired to the dynamite and apparently has a password—they think you have to log in from a device, iPad, iPhone, something like that … We pulled matching iPhones off the dead women this morning and the one you sent to the hospital in a coma, Nora, so the idea they have a network going might be valid.”

Nora was nodding, remembering watching Anna collect them from the scene.

She continued breathlessly, “Abe thinks they set it up that way in case something might go wrong and they need to abort along the way—it’s not just a small bomb they can shoot and run from; if it goes off we’re losing a whole city block. Abe’s trying to hack it now before the bomber connects with it and gives the okay.”

She looked directly at Chid and Pete. “They need you guys. We’ve got seconds.”

Abe was running toward them with a laptop, his helmet dangling from the back of the suit. Chid and Pete jumped into the back of Anna’s SUV, Abe handing off the MacBook to Pete, even as Anna helped disentangle him from the top half of the EOD suit. Nora and Ford stood on either side, peering through the open windows.

Abe sank into the backseat next to Chid while Pete stared at the screen.

Pete scanned what to Nora looked like a cascade of numbers. “You want me to try to remote into the device?” he was saying.

Abe nodded, sweat streaking his cheeks. “Can you?”

Pete allowed himself a bemused look. “A network-connected Apple device? Timmy Cook said no.”

“But you’re not trying to get into the Apple device, you’re hacking into the trigger mechanism, which is far simpler,” insisted Abe.

“He’s right…” Ford broke in, poking his face through the window. “If you can keep up a steady stream of interference, your attempt to connect with it will be enough to keep the bomber out.”

“Are you sure?” Chid asked.

“No, he’s right,” Pete said, his voice tense, fingers flying over the keyboard. “Someone’s trying to put in a code now.”

They watched tensely as a W appeared in one of the six spaces.

Pete immediately began filling the other spaces with the letter X. Each X was quickly erased but Pete backspaced in order to fill it up again; it immediately became a heated race. The first W was followed with another W as Pete rushed to fill in the remaining spaces and prevent the bomber from replacing them. His eyes were riveted on the screen; the index finger of his left hand remained pressing the X key, while his right thumb slid continuously over the laptop’s touchpad.

“Will it lock us out?” Anna asked worriedly.

“An Apple device would,” said Ford. “But this is not; plus the combination is clearly not simply digits. This could go on forever.”

The bomber had managed to insert a third letter, a V.

Chid frowned and leaned forward intently; Nora watched as calculations and considerations registered in his sharp eyes.

“But in the meantime, while the mechanism is distracted—” Abe began.

“You can cut the wire,” Ford finished for him.

Abe was already halfway out the car door, and both Nora and Ford started zipping him back into his suit. They had barely secured his helmet when he began running full speed for the van.

Pete had not moved from his vigil over the Xs. “Tell him to hurry,” he said through gritted teeth. “They have four out of six.”

Ford shouted at the top of his lungs, “Four out of six, Abe!”

Nora shifted desperately from foot to foot, wanting to run over to urge Abe on. She looked at the computer screen and saw that an 8 had taken the fourth space.

Sweat was dripping into Pete’s unblinking eyes. Nora tugged her sleeve down, then said softly, “Pete, I’m going to wipe your forehead, man.”

He did not acknowledge her but also did not flinch as she reached gently through the open window and dabbed at his forehead.

“Five out of six,” he whispered as a 6 appeared on the screen.

Ford relayed the message. Nora strained to see what was going on in the U-Haul.

“Come on Abe,” Pete said, and Nora realized she’d stopped breathing.

Chid said, “B.”

They watched in horror as the final space on the screen filled with a B and the entire screen went black. All of them swiveled their heads to look at the U-Haul.

A long breathless moment gave way to another and then another.

Abe emerged from the U-Haul tugging at his helmet. He held aloft the wire cutters and then made a mock salute in the direction of the SUV.

Pete’s shoulders sagged in relief and he flopped back against the seat.

Nora exhaled. She looked long and hard at Chid. “You knew the code,” she said.

“I figured out the code,” he answered. “That’s different.”

“What was—”

But she was interrupted by Schacht.

Schacht had appeared at the SUV window, his face flushed and grim. “Good work, Pete, people—don’t sit still though. Whoever it was has to be close by, watching. We need to find them. Now. You’re all wearing vests?”

Pete and Nora nodded. The other two were silent. Nora sensed that Chid would think a bulky vest would defile his carefully crafted look.

“There are extras in the car,” Anna said curtly. “Report in to me every ten minutes via text.”

Schacht said, “If we don’t hear back every ten minutes, we will overreact. To say the least.”

All four nodded. Nora saw that Anna had already spied the Chief of Police. Anna wove her way over to him and drew him over to the group Schacht was forming. All of them began conferring, their heads bent together, and Nora knew they’d be asking for police backup. It was essential to make a perimeter around the area so the would-be bomber couldn’t slip through their fingers.

Nora realized that Schacht’s assumption had to be true. Of course they’d be watching. Something this massive, a strike this profound … You don’t just run away after that. You watch the chaos unfold, you record it on video for later.… Nora began scanning the surrounding area, her eyes resting on each house.

She had memorized the figures from the bank video, the shape and size of the man on the back of the third motorcycle and his friend; the shade of their hair, the tone of their skin. But surely she wouldn’t just trip over them on the street. She studied the neighborhood. There was a sagging VFW outpost, and many rundown houses on the verge of collapse. Mixed in with these were a few stately old homes, many with cupolas and wide front porches.

She looked at Pete. “Can you access the office network and try to find out if any of the homes around the synagogue is uninhabited?”

He looked at her thoughtfully, his face more tired than she had ever seen it. “I think I can. But it’s going to take a minute. And more than that, I’m going to need a little air conditioning.”

Chid and Ford were wriggling into the vests they’d found in the back.

Nora looked at Chid as Pete availed himself of Abe’s laptop. “You going to tell me?” she asked. “About the code?”

Chid nodded. “Wagner-Werk-Verzeichnis,” he answered.

“Pardon?”

“Wagner-Werk-Verzeichnis,” he repeated. “It’s a way of cataloging Wagner’s musical output. WWV for short, and then you add whatever the number of the work you’re referring to.”

“So 86B is…”

“The Ring Cycle is collectively the 86th work, and B here is for the second opera, Die Walküre.”

Nora sighed, exasperated.

“Don’t shoot the messenger,” Chid snapped, looking irritated as he buckled the straps of his vest.

Nora stood over half a foot taller than he did, but he did not seem to find this disconcerting. He looked up at her, his keen eyes observing her with unabashed interest. “So you’re Arab, then?” he asked.

It was hardly the time for the categorization game. “Flemish,” Nora replied, and Derek Ford gave a little snort of laughter. Nora ignored him. “Chid, I want to know what’s in Act Three today. How can we prevent more of this?”

He raised a hand in protest. “Look, it would be silly to suggest he’s trying to mimic every act and scene of the Ring. On one level it’s just silly Norse myth.”

“What are the other levels?” Nora demanded.

“An analysis of power dynamics. George Bernard Shaw wrote a whole Marxist interpretation of it. Maybe it’s about empowering the underclass and putting an end to capitalism. The actual Ring goes back to the Rhine maidens in the end. The gods-slash-our-capitalist-masters fail to keep their immortality.”

Nora listened carefully, trying to understand.

“Edward Said saw Wagner as stuck in history. His characters can’t break free of being damned to fulfill dire predictions. Hopeless. Adorno saw his use of violence as a criticism of the obsession with myth even while he was glorifying the main character as a man of the sword.”

Peter made a gesture. “But how does it all apply here?”

Chid shrugged. “He’s going to put on it the spin he wants. He thinks he’s being clever. He’s evoking images in a particular framework that’s motivational for him. Wagner fancied himself a revolutionary, right? Had to flee after participating in the 1849 May Uprising. This guy … Baker … I doubt his people even know what he’s doing or understand this elaborate framework … or even care. They’re probably just feeling victimized and angry … disenfranchised … while on some level he has to provide for himself—and his legacy—a synthesis.”

Nora said impatiently, “Okay, then. What’s our next step? What can we expect from his particular brand of synthesis?”

Chid sighed. “My guess is he’s going to kill the black councilwoman. Probably pretty gruesomely.” He paused to consider, then continued, “His people are absolutely going to blow up a mosque and maybe a black church. Probably they’ll occupy a federal building at some point. Just for, you know, flourish.” He sighed, effectively dismissing her. “Let’s go, Derek,” he said, and the two of them started their walking tour.

Nora was left standing next to the SUV, the window still open, but the air conditioning blasting. “This day is fucking unbelievable,” Pete said, fingers flying across the keyboard. “If ever I needed a beer it would be in this actual moment right now.”

Nora watched Derek and Chid walking along the sidewalk. They passed the cluster of law enforcement agents and continued on, seemingly assessing and discussing each house as they passed.

Finally, Pete looked up at her. “2129 Peach Street,” he said finally.

“Let’s go,” Nora said. They walked, their direction opposite to the one Chid and Derek had taken. Despite the efforts at subtlety, onlookers had gathered to see what had drawn police and firetrucks to the area near the synagogue. Nora knew it did not take a genius to add up the presence of the bomb squad at the synagogue. The news crews would soon descend.

They found themselves in front of the house, and Nora looked desperately at Pete. They locked eyes instantly and both knew, wordlessly: back door. She joined him behind a towering, brambly hedge.

“What’s your plan?” he asked softly.

“Was I supposed to have a plan?”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Fine, no plan. We’re just checking it out.”

“Just checking it out,” she confirmed.

They began darting across the backyard, crouching low as they went.

Once they reached the back porch, they both drew their weapons. The wood was worm-eaten and creaked underfoot as they mounted the steps. The back door, paint peeling, held a wide pane of murky glass; a jagged section was missing from its lower half. Pete extended his free hand and tried the doorknob. It turned. He looked at Nora and she nodded.

He pushed the door open gently.

Nora, whose eyes had been scanning the street from which they’d come for anyone alert to their presence, inhaled, steeling herself, then followed Pete inside. It was darker than she expected, for the dirt-caked windows let in very little light. They found themselves in a dilapidated kitchen. Cabinet doors hung askew. A grease-covered stove crowned an oven with no door at all, and the fridge was blackened, its handle broken. The July heat had baked the mold and dust into a potent stench.

Nora squatted, looking at the floor under the light of her phone screen.

Pete watched her.

She looked up at him, nodding slightly, then said quietly, “Someone’s been here. Can’t say how recently.” The dust was disturbed. The tracks led in one direction up to the set of stairs that emptied out into the kitchen and in the other direction they dead-ended at a closed door. A basement, perhaps.

“We should go,” Pete whispered. “Let’s check in with Anna and come back.”

Nora looked at the stairs. She was so sure what they wanted was there.

“We have to look, Pete.”

He rubbed his beard, thinking. “Nora.” It was all he said, but she could see he was conflicted.

She took another step toward the stairs that led to the second floor, then said softly, “Haven’t we all failed already today?”

“That’s for damn sure,” came a voice behind them. Both whirled.

Pete and Nora leveled their guns at a man with graying hair and a goatee; in the dimness his eyes did not even register a color. He held an assault rifle, and it was leveled at their chests.

Neither agent had a chance to fire, however, as the floor beneath their feet suddenly gave way.

*   *   *

The fall was painful. Nora fell on top of Pete who immediately started clutching his right side, especially his ankle. Nora sprang up, her gun pointed into pitch blackness save for the square of light left by the trapdoor that still swung overhead, creaking.

Nora saw Pete reaching for his BlackBerry when the first kick barreled out of the darkness behind her. It landed on her wrist, sending her Glock flying. She bent double, clutching her wrist, and Pete began scrambling to rise and come to her aid when he was tackled. Nora watched him collapse to the floor, unable to fend off the huge shadowy form that pinned him to the ground.

In pure panic, Nora whipped around to try to see where her own attacker was. That was when her legs were kicked out from underneath her. She landed hard on the cement floor, and she inhaled a thick layer of dirt, then coughed, gasping for breath. Someone heavy with rough, calloused hands tugged her wrists behind her as a crushing weight settled on her back. The wrist that had been kicked sent shockwaves of pain through her entire body. A scrape on her cheek dripped blood into her mouth.

The trapdoor was suddenly pulled shut, plunging the basement into inky blackness. Almost as soon, however, the door at the top of the basement steps opened, casting a dim pool of light.

Nora tried to move her head so she could meet Pete’s eyes, but the man holding her down pressed her cheek hard against the floor. “Don’t move, bitch. If you know what’s good for you.”

Pete managed to call out, “Nora—you—?” before a hand crashed against his mouth with a sickening thud.

“I’m fine,” she choked out, but the man sitting on her yanked her hair hard and she was forced to end her attempt to reassure Pete with an unwilling yelp of pain.

They all heard footsteps descending into the basement. “They’ll be here soon,” came the man’s voice.

Nora could hear Pete’s BlackBerry vibrating angrily; no sooner did his stop than hers began to quiver in her pocket. The attacker felt it, and he patted her down and then extracted the phone and took it himself.

“What should we do with the phones?” came the voice of the man immobilizing Pete.

“Smash them,” said the man with the goatee. “Can’t risk anyone tracing them using a GPS. Just wait til we get to the tunnel. Otherwise they might find the pieces.”

“So we done here?” asked Nora’s attacker.

“Tracks all covered,” Goatee reassured him.

“Next step?”

“Get our new acquisitions out.”

“I think this one’s gonna have a hard time walking,” the man holding Pete said.

“He’ll walk,” Goatee spat. He pulled a flashlight out of his pocket and switched it on. He seemed to be searching for something on the floor, and then the light came to rest on Nora’s Glock. The man bent to retrieve and pocket it. Then he turned the light toward the group. Nora squinted as the bright light moved from Pete to focus on her, moving over her face and down the length of her body. “It’s a better haul than I’d hoped for.”

She flinched inwardly at the tone. That tone scared her more than the overt violence of the moments before.

“Bring them. Let’s go. Like I said, it won’t be long before someone’ll be coming.”

Nora and Pete were forced to stand, their wrists still cinched behind them, and both captors and prisoners followed the man with the bandanna. He led them deeper into the basement, then pulled aside a filthy Steelers banner to reveal a low wooden door. He inserted a key and then twisted it quickly, shoving hard against the door which groaned loudly as it swung open. He ducked, pushing through it, and the others followed. Nora was sure that Pete had broken his ankle from the way he was hobbling and leaning on his attacker.

Nora had eagerly been stealing glances at the other men’s faces as the flashlight darted across them. She was almost certain the one with the goatee had been one of the bank robbers. The other two were pale, both equally wide. The one with Pete had dark hair and the one holding her had sandy hair that somehow flourished on his face but not his head; he wore a thick, if trimmed, beard. Both were tall, over six feet, and she estimated the one holding her to be at least two hundred and thirty pounds. Like Nora herself, both had to bend down to pass through the small door.

Even as Nora’s phone vibrated again, her captor threw it to the ground and then stamped on it with a heavy boot. Pete’s captor handed over his phone for the same treatment. Nora’s eyes lingered on the boots; not summertime wear, surely. She winced as she stared at her phone. She hadn’t been without it for over a year.

The tunnel they entered was dank and musty. Nora found herself gagging slightly as they began to walk. She wanted to ask why such a tunnel existed beneath the city, but she knew it was no time for a guided tour. Still, she was fairly certain that Erie had never had a subway. The tracks they walked over were much smaller, not nearly as wide as would be necessary for a train of any kind. They reminded her of tracks erected for minecarts, but in all the movies she’d seen, no coal mine had been located in the center of a city.

She watched Pete’s progress with increasing fury; occasionally, and despite his best attempts at playing the stoic, he would cry out in pain. He needed the emergency room. She tried desperately to figure out what she could drop as a clue; surely there weren’t that many possibilities and their trail would be instantly obvious to anyone who half tried. She wondered where Ford and Chid were at that moment. Had they reached the same conclusion about the house? What sort of perimeter had the Unified Command established?

They walked endlessly. Rivulets of water snaked down the walls here and there; in other places, cars overhead shook silt down upon them. Her wrist ached so painfully she could barely tolerate it. She felt claustrophobic in a way that was making it hard to breathe. Don’t panic.

The tunnel was getting wetter the farther they progressed, and so it began to dawn on her that they were going north and getting closer to the lake. Goatee’s flashlight finally revealed a low door with a heavy lock. He worked patiently at the lock and then tugged on the door which opened reluctantly, cement grinding across cement. The lapping of water was loud, and Nora’s stomach twisted. They had emerged at a deserted dock just beyond the ornate Erie Water Works, a vast old art deco building. The low door to the tunnel was camouflaged perfectly behind vines and brush.

Nora looked left and right in desperation. They were fully exposed, in broad daylight, but there was simply no one around. The yacht club and the marina were all several hundred yards away. She weighed the idea of beginning to scream. She eyed the waiting speedboat with abject fear. Her heart began to race even faster. She had never been on a boat, and did not want to begin today, here, with these men.

“Get in,” Goatee said.

Pete was already being dragged bodily.

“His foot is broken,” she said to Goatee.

“Doctor Federal Agent, is it?” he said.

“Look at his foot, man. He needs medical attention.”

“Then maybe his employers will take our demands extra seriously.”

“And what asshole demands do you have?”

He eyed her. “Mind your manners, girl.”

Nora narrowed her eyes, but Pete gave her a warning glance.

Goatee looked away from her. He began tapping on the screen of his phone then realized she was still refusing to get into the boat. He waved the rifle at her.

“Oh, now you’re going to shoot me?” she demanded.

She saw his eyes harden. “You’re right.” And he pulled back his fist and slammed it against her cheek.

Nora reeled backward, collapsing against her captor. Pete shouted in protest. Her vision exploded with light and darkness at the same time; shooting pain coursed through her entire face. She pulled wildly at her wrists, trying to strike back, but this only resulted in her getting shoved even harder into the boat.

“Put them both in the berth.” And the men were suddenly shoving them into the cramped forward area of the boat.

Despite the confined atmosphere, Nora experienced a moment of relief. She could talk to Pete at last. Her relief faded immediately as the engine turned over, making a soft rumble as the boat began to move. She swallowed hard, trying to suppress her fear. “How’s your foot?” she whispered urgently.

“It’s okay, Nora, it’s not broken, it just hurts like fuck.”

“Who uses trapdoors?”

“Fuckin’ Scooby Doo villains, that’s who.”

“Or someone who is lying in wait to catch some federal officers. I guess we are Act Three.”

“Yeah, you know, if I didn’t fucking hate the opera before this I sure fucking hate it now.” She could tell he was straining at his wrist binders.

“What are we going to do, Peter? Where do you think they’re taking us?”

He was silent for a moment. “Schacht and Anna are going to be looking for us.”

“Looking where?”

“I guess we’re going back to their base as hostages. Now I guess it’s lakefront. But what kind of balls do they have taking us out of here when the city is going to be shut down?”

Nora nodded in the darkness. “Do you think the Unified Command or CIRG will have notified the coast guard?”

“I hope so,” Pete said. “And border patrol.”

“Pete. I’ve never been on a boat before.”

She heard him exhale in disbelief. “Never been to a bar. Never been on a boat. It’s one fucking adventure after another.”

She smiled, despite herself. “I’m just warning you because I have a feeling I’m gonna puke if we go much faster than this.”

Pete sighed audibly and seemed to be fighting to produce patient words. “On an open lake, they’ll be going very fast, and it’s going to be very choppy; the front part of the boat here is going to be rising and falling very rapidly.”

Nora gave a soft groan.

“So, like, puke the other way.”

“I’m sorry ahead of time.”

His accent flared up. “Not as sorry as I am, woman.”

They moved slowly at first, and Nora held out hope that they wouldn’t really go any faster, nor would the boat do what Pete had predicted. But she was wrong. She tried to press herself hard against the turf-covered floor of the boat in order to keep from bouncing. She and Pete ended up bouncing into each other.

Pete was becoming angrier with every mile they put between them and Erie. “I want a beer, and a huge sandwich. In fact, you should take me to Commodore Perry’s right now, Miss Nora Khalil.”

He had to practically shout to say this. She wondered, given the fact that he’d been up all night, how Pete was still functioning.

“You’re insane,” she called into the darkness.

“Yes, but I’m dying here. It’s been like a hundred thousand years since anyone gave me food.”

“I don’t know how you can think of food when all I’m trying to do is not throw up.”

“You will prevail!” Pete practically yelled. “You are going to receive a commendation, my friend! Now, what I really need is some ice for this ankle.”

“I’m so sorry about your ankle, Pete. I wish I could help you!”

“Beer would be good,” he responded. Having to talk so loudly made his request sound rather more desperate. “Three Eisernes Kreuz beers. Four. Four Eisernes Kreuz beers! And two giant cheeseburgers and a truckload of french fries and…”

“And an outrageously big pretzel, or whatever you call it.”

“Yesssss!” called Pete. “Now you’re catching on!”

They fell into silence, each listening to the drone of the boat’s motor.

Then Pete cried out, “I’m so fucking pissed at these people, though.”

Nora had been thinking that, too. “They’re just … uneducated, right? That’s what we’re going to tell ourselves about how this could happen?”

Pete didn’t seem to have an answer. Then he replied, “Or over-Web-educated. Instead of ever meeting an actual person, they just rely on the Web to tell them what’s what.”

The strain of trying to talk over the sound of the motor was intense.

She didn’t feel like continuing to try to talk, but suddenly Nora had formulated what she thought was a pressing question. “So, I don’t get it. I thought the government was replaced with government outsiders who would give them what they want. So now they’re against the government?”

“The country has a lot of angry people in it. Everyday people who were struggling had gasoline poured on their frustration fires during the election. To govern you have to compromise, though. And that means betraying the cause.”

They were both silent. Finally Pete got as close as he could to Nora’s ear, rather beyond her limits for personal space but she preferred it to the shouting.

“I grew up with a rifle in my hand, Nora. There are plenty of families where you can do that peaceably. But my family wasn’t one of them.”

“Are you some kind of militia dropout, Peter?”

“Very much so. Well, not me. My dad. When the Brady Bill was signed and then assault rifles were banned in the ’90s, people got angry. A lot of militias popped up. They thought normal guns were gonna be next. I was poor, I told you. I maybe didn’t say I was poor white trash. But that was it.”

Pete went awhile before saying anything else, and Nora thought maybe he was done speaking. But he continued. “When you’re poor, and no one listens, and you’re always on the margins … for people like that, the only real sense of power they have in their lives is in their gun cabinet. Any limitation on the ‘Second Amendment Right to Bear Arms’ is a death sentence.”

As she processed this, he added, “Three of my daddy’s friends went right off the grid. Took up arms and started hatching plots.”

Nora had nothing to say, but digested this as the boat thumped over the rough lake waters.

She adjusted her face so she could aim right for his ear. “What happened to them?”

“They’d pop up to beat their wives and go back to training.”

She wished she could see his eyes in the dark. She sensed that they had clouded over.

“What about your dad?”

He said nothing.

“Did he do that? Did he hit you, too?” she pressed.

“Maybe. He became one of the disappeared, anyway.” He said nothing for a long while, and Nora cast about wildly for something worth saying. She could think of nothing at all.

Several minutes passed before he placed his mouth close to her ear again. “Like Schacht said, it’s a storm that’s been threatening to burst for years. Public discourse gets amped up, people stop being scared to say all the bullshit they’re thinking, and then … other people end up getting hurt.”

“I have a bad feeling we’re some of the people that’re gonna get hurt,” said Nora, mustering a laugh.

“Not if we can help it, Miss Nora,” he called into the darkness. “I saw your shoes today. You wore the super sneakers!”

Nora smiled ruefully into the darkness. The Mizuno Wave Riders had been Nora’s last purchase from Philadelphia Runner, her favorite store on Walnut Street. “Just because grownup shoes go with your suit, doesn’t make them the right choice.”

“Sounds like a bumper sticker.”

She considered this. “Might need tweaking first.…” She listened to the motor for awhile, then turned to her partner. “Pete, your dad missed out on a lot by leaving you.”

“Hell yeah he did,” Pete answered immediately.

“I’m sorry.”

He was quiet, then said, “Me, too, Miss Nora. Me, too.”

*   *   *

She didn’t actually puke. But it was a very hard trip that took well over an hour.

They climbed out onto a temporary dock that stretched twenty feet into the lake. The dock shuddered and groaned and bounced under the onslaught of waves. A setting sun tinged everything around them deep magenta, such that the aluminum of the dock seemed aflame. Nora stumbled as they led her out of the boat; she fought hard to get her bearings, but her legs couldn’t seem to function. She wobbled, and her captor supported her, grumbling as he did so. Pete still limped painfully.

There was another long walk ahead of them. They tottered over a stretch of rocky beach and then began making their way up long wooden staircases built into the tall, forested bank. She saw no harbors or other collapsible docks and no signs of anything but rocky, deserted beach for as far as her eye could see.

At the top of the stairs they were forced to walk again. A path had been trampled and well-worn in the dewy weeds. Nora’s running shoes were instantly soaked through. A ramshackle old farmhouse had come into view as soon as they reached the top of the bank. The cylinder glass in the windows caught the sunset’s fuchsia flush across its wavy panes.

Their captors gave no indication that the house was their destination, however. They walked well beyond it, heading away from the lake, and soon came upon the first of three large barns. This first one had a huge silo alongside it.

Pete was trailing far behind her, so she could not share a look with him. Nora was at a loss, and merely walked, exhausted, sweating, and famished through the barn’s towering door. After Pete and his escort finally entered, Goatee slid the door shut with a bone-jarring thud. The barn was spacious, with two levels and innumerable stalls. It was rough-hewn in every aspect, as though it had been hastily constructed. Electric lightbulbs dangled nakedly from the ceiling. A few box fans noisily engaged in churning up the heat, but there was very little ventilation, so the air was heavy, close, and moist.

The rustic motif was disrupted only by the presence of plasma screen TVs placed equidistant from each other on each of the four walls. These conveyed a constant stream of images, a parade of people in camouflage carrying rifles and shotguns, Gabriel Baker appearing periodically to speak, fist clenched and raised. Both women and men flashed victory signs and proudly displayed their weaponry; Baker’s voice could be heard in the background. Nora could not make out the words, nor could she focus her attention on the images, because Goatee had begun speaking to them as soon as Pete entered.

“Welcome,” he said, without a hint of actual welcome. “You’ll be having your pictures taken. The rules are simple. If you’re good and quiet we will occasionally feed you. If you make problems we will beat you until you die. Understood?”

Pete and Nora exchanged glances, then nodded.

“Good.” He shoved them against the wall of the barn. Then he pulled out his smartphone and began taking their pictures. He posed their captors next to them as well.

“Make them hold up their badges,” he insisted.

Both agents had their pockets searched for their badges and then were forced to pose with them. “Smile,” Goatee said.

“What, you’re posting it on Facebook?” Nora fished.

He scoffed. “Facebook.” He only shook his head, plucked the badges out of their hands and pocketed them, then turned his back, saying to the other two over his shoulder, “Put them in with the nigger.”

As he walked away, however, he seemed to be studying the pictures he’d taken. He stopped. Then he turned to regard Nora carefully. “You black, too, girl?”

“Welsh,” she snapped.

“You fucking wish,” he said, and stalked away.

Pete was shaking his head, and Nora could see that he was laughing without sound. Poor Pete had been awake for something like forty hours now, and he looked like he was about to collapse.

They walked along the length of the barn. The stalls were either open entirely or had curtains strung up for doors. They saw a few people milling about, some wearing blue jeans and T-shirts, some wearing camouflage fatigues. Those who passed them seemed to smirk. Two different women clapped their captors on the back and told them they’d done well. Nora looked at them with open disgust, but they were supremely uninterested in her opinion.

They could finally hear the messages emanating from the TVs.

Building walls, my friends, is the only way. We must keep out the filth, the killers, the rapists. They’re hungry for what’s ours. And they’re bad.

It was a different cadence than Baker’s other speeches, and the words were far less tangled and clunky. It suited him better, Nora decided.

Our Constitution guarantees our right to defend ourselves, our way of life, our families, our freedom. To keep America pure, to keep America strong. We will build walls to protect our country. I will be the first to stand atop that wall with my gun and keep out the rabble and defend my true Christian, Caucasian, American family.

When they arrived at the last stall on the ground floor, they saw that it was the only one in the barn with a very solid looking door; it sported a heavy metal bolt. Outside of it, a burly man with raging biceps stood glowering. Upon seeing them he slid the bolt open, opened the door, and they were unceremoniously shoved inside.

They fell to the floor. Each breathed for a moment, trying to regain bearings.

“You okay, Peter?” Nora asked. She was grateful that a ribbon of light penetrated from the slim gap in the doorframe. She could just barely see Pete in the dimness, and she began to discern the contents of the room as her eyes adjusted. It looked like there were crudely fashioned bunkbeds with no sheets on the mattresses.

“I’m okay. How about you?”

“No, I’m fine, just fine.”

A voice cut through the silence. “Well, I’m not fine at all.”

Both turned to see a plump black woman sitting cross-legged on the floor.

“April Lewis?” Nora breathed.

She was eyeing them curiously. “If this is the rescue effort, I’m going to have to confess discontent.”

*   *   *

April Lewis looked to be in her mid-forties. A crown of innumerable braids framed a face of wide, open features; laugh lines emanated from her mocha eyes, and her high cheekbones made her look truly regal. She wore a rose-colored tunic that strained slightly to contain her expansive chest. The blouse was stained with sweat and dirt visible even in the dimness.

Had Nora’s wrists not been cinched behind her, she would almost certainly have hugged her. “I’m so relieved to see you,” she said, trying to keep her voice down.

“Did you think I was dead already?”

Pete didn’t hesitate to nod. “It never occurred to us that they would spare you, given the other things they’ve been doing.”

“Yes, it seems they’re still hoping for the ransom money,” she said. “What other things?”

“Mass shooting at the refugee center. Bomb at the temple. We defused it, but only barely.”

April Lewis shook her head. “In Erie.”

“Yes, in Erie. Seems to be some blueprint for race war,” Nora explained.

“Are you hurt?” Pete asked her.

“Nothing being brutally murdered won’t cure,” she remarked.

“We weren’t sent to rescue you,” Nora admitted.

April Lewis’s eyes were tired but kind. “I’m so relieved. You’re spectacularly bad at it.”

Pete and Nora exchanged wry smiles.

“What are you kids, FBI?”

They nodded and introduced themselves.

“We were abducted,” Nora said unnecessarily by way of explaining why they were bound.

April Lewis nodded, unsurprised. “I think having a councilwoman isn’t enough of a government representative. They’re gunning for the feds. Then again, I think I might just count because I’m ever so slightly black.”

April Lewis was a very unequivocal shade of black. Nora tilted her head, regarding the woman, carefully taking in her strong features, and finding herself smiling for the first time that day.

“And rich. Right?” Pete asked.

“Oh, hell yes. But not rich enough to have my own militia.”

“Well. We all need a five-year plan,” Pete said.

“Anyway, they don’t seem to be discriminating between minority populations,” Nora said.

“Well, they have a mission, right?” the councilwoman said.

“What have you figured out?” Nora asked.

“Nothing new,” she replied. “Just that the woods are full of angry ‘patriots’ who somehow believe that their patriotism gives them license to overthrow the government and take as many non-whites with them as possible.”

“No, it’s new, I’m sorry. They are killing mercilessly, indiscriminately. Kids, women. It’s mind-boggling. Unprecedented,” Nora insisted.

“Sorry, how is that different from shooting up black churches?” Lewis demanded. “Because it happened on the same day?”

“Well, yes…” Pete began.

Nora added, “And it’s all so brazen. They don’t care if you see their faces.”

“Yes,” April Lewis replied quietly. “They don’t care if you identify them and they aren’t afraid to die. Once it gets quiet in here at night you’ll be able to hear some of their propaganda; it’s coming out of the TVs they have around. It’s very deliberate and very scary. I’m starting to worry about the black threat and I’ve only been here a day.”

Pete looked around. “Do you have any idea about their numbers?”

She shook her head. “No. I think they really can’t do too many training drills; that kind of noise carries. I’m pretty sure they’ve got us out in vineyard country—it’s the only way they could keep this many people around in broad daylight. No neighbors, right? But still.”

Nora and Pete considered this.

April Lewis went on, “This barn seems to be like a bunk house, you know? A lot of people walking back and forth.” As though for emphasis, the ceiling overhead creaked loudly with footsteps. “I didn’t see anyone but the guards at the door. There was a rotation of three of them.”

“No clues about who’s behind all this?” Pete asked.

She shook her head. “You think there’s just one person?”

Pete shrugged. “There’s a man named Gabriel Baker. He’s been sending out webcasts. I think it’s his voice on the videos here.…”

Nora held up a hand, listening.

Today we are fighting for our lives, for our rights, for the rights of white children everywhere to grow up away from the onslaught of cultural assault. Fight against white genocide, fight with all that you possess! Together, we can make America great again.

“Definitely Baker,” she said.

“Our analysts think they have some clues about the person responsible. A certain profile, you know? But not typical racist redneck.”

“No, it couldn’t be, could it?” April Lewis mused.

“Seems to be trying to appeal to all possible constituencies in order to launch these massive efforts,” Pete offered.

“As a politician, I get that,” Lewis said. “Still, it doesn’t really bode well for us, does it?”

Nora was looking around their stall. “Not even a little,” she confirmed. “We have to figure out how to get out of here.”

April Lewis emitted a sigh. “I’ve been trying to think that through. It’s impossible.”

“Why impossible?” Pete asked.

“Well, there’s like fifty heavily armed, angry white folks outside. And we’re in the middle of fucking nowhere,” she retorted. “Just getting outside of this stall is impossible. It’s bolted from the outside and the giant man outside is holding a rifle.”

“What about going to the bathroom?” asked Nora, who was desperate to pee at this point.

The councilwoman gestured with her head toward the corner of the stall. “They leave a bucket. They don’t want to take any risks.”

Pete looked her over. “At least your arms aren’t cinched behind you. You can unzip your pants.”

She gave him a once-over. “I’ll unzip your pants for you, baby.” April Lewis grinned.

Nora smiled, grateful for the tension-reliever. “They know we’re a threat, Pete. Trained law enforcement.”

“Well. We are.” Pete rose with a soft groan and limped into the corner of the stall to look at the bucket. It was a large metal bucket, suitable for hauling ashes from a fireplace. Then he returned and bent over, peering closely at the flooring. The boards were about four inches wide. “What’s under here?”

April Lewis looked at him blankly. “What’s under the floor?”

“Have you seen light coming up from here, or heard any noises? Is it a basement or a crawlspace?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t heard any noise. Crickets maybe. Frog or two. No light.”

He squinted hard at the floor and then returned to the bucket. “Please come help me, Ms. Lewis.”

A disgusted frown contorted April Lewis’s features. “I’m pretty sure I explained what that bucket was for,” she said as a disclaimer.

“Yes, I heard you.” Pete’s face was impassive. “I want you to try to unhook this handle.”

She looked at him, then began attempting to do so. When she struggled, he gave his back to the bucket and clutched the sides with his hands, attempting to hold it tightly despite the cable tie cinching his wrists.

April Lewis pushed and wrangled, finally squeezing the arc of the handle until she could jimmy one end out of the bucket’s eye. Success on one side made the other side easier.

“Okay,” Pete said. “If you can, try to shove it down between these two floorboards and then we can work together to wedge one of them up.”

She looked at him skeptically.

He asked, “You got some other idea?”

She shrugged.

Pete crawled on his knees across the limited available space until he found the two boards separated by the widest gap. He indicated the gap with a nod of his head. “Here.”

April Lewis came to kneel next to him. Then she started attempting to shove the bucket handle down between the floorboards. The gap wasn’t big, but she could just slide the metal between the two boards.

“If we’re lucky,” Pete said, “the hooked end of the handle will catch on a nail and we can pull it up.”

April Lewis frowned, working intently.

After a few minutes, Pete began to grow nervous. Nora knew that neither of them could do this task with their wrists cinched behind them. Quietly she asked, “When was the last time someone came in?”

“Before you were shoved in here?” The councilwoman was grimacing as she concentrated. “I don’t know, twenty minutes maybe.”

“Did they feed you today?” she asked.

April Lewis nodded. “Yes, earlier.”

“Do they bring utensils? A knife maybe?” Pete asked.

She shook her head. “No need. Finger food. Nothing hard, metal, or jagged necessary.”

“Okay, then,” Pete said with resolve. “Then this is actually our only shot. So take all the time you need.”

She grew increasingly frustrated, and Nora, subjected to the drone of the television in the hall, became increasingly unnerved. After some fifteen minutes, in which even in the dimness Nora could see sweat streaming from April’s face with the effort, the hooked end of the handle caught on a nail from the underside of the floorboard.

“Okay, hold it for me and put it in my hands,” Pete said.

The councilwoman placed the wire in his hands and he closed them as tightly as he could and began to tug. The task was unwieldy. Pete refused, however, to accept defeat. He pulled, repositioning himself several times until the small gap began to widen.

It continued to widen, until April Lewis said, “Enough. Let me try.”

She inserted her fingers and pulled. The wood groaned slightly as it moved.

“Cough,” Pete instructed Nora, who obediently began to cough as April pulled harder on the board. After a few fits of pulling and coughing, the board popped free.

“Yesss,” April Lewis said. “Now what, FBI guy?”

“Now we use those nails to puncture these cable ties,” he said, indicating the underside of the board and the nails poking out of it.

“Who’s we?” Lewis demanded.

“You just have to keep us from impaling ourselves.”

Nora asked, “Then what, Pete?”

“You should go first, anyway. If we can pull up a couple more of those boards you can squeeze down there and crawl out.”

Nora eyed the five inches of inky blackness they had exposed. “And do what?”

“Umm, get help, obviously.”

“You did hear the councilwoman? Angry white folks. Weapons.”

“It’s dark. They won’t expect anyone to bust out so fast. Get to the beach and run west until you get to a phone. Get help.”

“Run west,” Nora repeated. “Peter, we rode in a boat for over an hour.”

“I didn’t say it would be easy,” Pete said. “But as previously noted, you are wearing your super shoes.”

Nora shook her head at him.

“Couldn’t she just steal the boat?” April Lewis asked.

Pete scoffed. “That boat will have to be under constant surveillance. Soon as it’s rough enough they will have to fold up that dock or lose it. They’ll have to send the boat back where it came, probably, no matter how rough it is. Their entrance off the main road will be too tightly guarded to get by, I guarantee it.” He looked long and hard at Nora. “Run along the beach til you’re well beyond all this. It’s the only choice.”

Nora sighed. “You scare me when you don’t get enough sleep, man.”

That was the assent he needed. He swiveled his head toward April. “Ms. Lewis. Can you help position that nail for Nora?”

She knelt behind Nora and looked doubtfully from the tip of the nail to the thin hard plastic of the cable tie. “I see tetanus in your future, honey,” she murmured.

“It’s okay,” Nora said. “I’m actually still wearing Kevlar under my blouse, so even if you ram me with it, I’ll be fine.”

“So your back is covered, great, but your pretty little wrists here…”

Pete said, and his anxiety was starting to color his tone, “Nora’s tough, don’t you worry. Time is short though.”

Ms. Lewis harrumphed. “Alright, but come over in this tiny bit of light. I don’t have my reading glasses, you know. I need all the help I can get.”

Nora complied, and the councilwoman had her lean backward over the board with its exposed nails. The work was slow going. Nora’s injured wrist blazed with pain as the cable tie was pulled more tightly while Ms. Lewis worked. The nail kept sliding across the slick plastic. The board was wide and difficult to work with. Getting punctured with a nail was less problematic than the splinters Nora was getting as the board slipped and slid over her wrists and arms. Ms. Lewis kept apologizing softly and Nora kept murmuring absolution. Pete said, “Scrape it up a little with the nail and it’ll be easier.”

So the councilwoman scraped at the plastic and then returned to attempting to puncture the cable tie. Finally she said, “There’s only a tiny bit to go. Can you twist your wrists and pull it apart?”

Nora did so and the cable tie broke at last. She rubbed at her wrists in relief, and then went ahead and hugged the woman. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you so much.”

“Just put that freedom to good use, baby.”

Nora nodded. “Let me get you, Pete,” she said.

“No way,” he answered. “There’s not enough time. Work with Ms. Lewis to get two more boards up and then get the hell out of here.”

The two complied. The sound was disconcertingly loud, but Nora realized that the propaganda spinning through the hallways was actually doing them tremendous favors. Her coughing didn’t hurt either.

At last she was looking at a big enough hole to shimmy down into the crawlspace. She tentatively stretched her leg to see how far down it went, but she quickly found the ground and that the hole was only thigh high.

“West, huh?”

Pete looked at her, his eyes full of concern. “I swear I would do it, Nora. I’m so pissed about my foot right now.”

“I believe you, Mr. Quarterback. Mr. Gallant Southern Quarterback guy.”

“Umm, Mr. Gallant Southern Quarterback…” Ms. Lewis began.

“Yes?” he asked.

“What if there’s no vent down there she can exit out of?”

Pete looked at Nora, and she could tell by the resolve in his gaze that he was refusing to accept that possibility. “Find the vent that lets in the outside air and you’ll be fine. If you can’t find it, come back. No harm, no foul.”

“What if I’m too big to get out of it?”

“You will think of something, Nora. Too much is riding on this.”

She nodded. The pressure felt enormous, stifling.

Pete continued, “You need to get Schacht to call in an airstrike on this place, do you hear me?” he said fiercely.

“Hey, I heard you and I didn’t like what I heard,” April Lewis interjected.

“You make sure Ms. Lewis is safe,” Nora replied, acknowledging and ignoring her in one swoop. “I’m going to do everything I can to get them back here by morning. Maybe we can head off the Second Day.”

“You better be a hell of a runner,” the councilwoman said.

Nora and Pete exchanged slow, tired smiles. “I’m alright,” Nora said.

Pete was nodding. “She’s alright.”

“Not so good with bugs, though,” Nora said, positioning herself over the crawlspace.

“Aren’t there scorpions and scarabs and shit in Egypt? This is nothing, girl,” Pete said.

“I’m from Philadelphia. I don’t do nature.”

Pete smiled reassuringly. “You’ll be fine. But Nora…” His expression became dead serious. “Every single person you encounter will be heavily armed. There’ll be surveillance cameras everywhere. Don’t use the beach stairs, they’ll be monitored—go over the bank on foot, even if you have to take an hour to make it down to the water.”

Nora listened intently, nodding as he spoke. She looked up at him, feeling desperately scared.

He held her eyes. “Go.”

April Lewis leaned over and kissed Nora’s cheek. “Be safe, baby,” she said.

Nora took a long breath, nodded again, and sank down through the floor and onto her knees.

“Nora,” Pete called softly as she started to move.

“Yes, Pete?”

“Tell the Starbucks wench I love her.”

“No you don’t, Peter. The crisis scenario is messing with your brain.”

He seemed to be considering this.

Then he said, “Well tell her I want her really bad, then.”

“Badly,” April Lewis corrected.

“I’m going to introduce you to my violinist neighbor Rachel,” Nora whispered.

“Is she hot?” Pete asked.

Nora sighed and looked at April Lewis.

“Get outta here,” Ms. Lewis said with a wink. “I’ll deal with this one.”

*   *   *

There were indeed bugs. Even before Pete and Ms. Lewis began tapping the floorboards back into place, Nora realized that she could see absolutely nothing and had to feel around with her hands in the dark to find the outer limits of the crawlspace. Each time she felt about with her hand, it seemed to her that she touched something crawling. The entirety of her self-discipline had to be summoned to prevent herself from screaming.

They hadn’t been too far from the north wall of the barn and so she headed that way and soon found the gritty cement wall.

Was there even a ventilation grill? She wished she’d brought one of the nails, anything sharp, anything reassuring. She hated feeling so powerless. Phoneless, gunless. Hungry as hell. And she had to pee so bad. Badly, she whispered to herself.

The floor overhead creaked as people walked over it. Nora felt like she could barely breathe in the hot, enclosed space and the pitch blackness. Her hands were patting along the side of the wall until she realized that a small pool of light was leaking in, just a few hundred feet down. The outside lighting at the barn’s entrance was making it into the crawlspace through what had to be the ventilation grill.

She reached it quickly and began feeling around its edges. It was just about as broad as her shoulders. Pete wouldn’t have made it through, even had his foot been in any shape to carry him. She crouched for perhaps far more moments than she had, peering out to see if anyone was passing by. She watched as the light from the big house’s windows fell across a small cluster of women. But they walked past it, continuing out of Nora’s line of vision.

She sighed and began trying to coax the grill out of the wall. The screws required more time than she felt she had, however, and she ended up with bleeding fingertips. When she had finally pulled the grill away, she attempted at first to scramble up and out. She immediately realized that the Kevlar was making her bulkier than normal.

She dropped back onto the ground and unbuttoned her blouse with trembling fingers, then shed the vest and dressed again. She looked at the vest for a moment.

I’m going to get shot at. I’m about to seriously get shot at.

She heard her father’s voice in her head, swearing in Arabic. “Zift.”

She sighed and shoved the vest through the opening and then followed it out. She lay on the ground for a moment, then slid the vest back on over her blouse. She watched as the vest rose and fell with her rapid breathing. Calm down, sister. Just take it easy. We have a long, long way to go yet. She thought about abandoning her navy blazer, but realized that her white shirtsleeves would be a liability if she were trying to fade into the darkness.

Just to the left, the barn door suddenly slid open, spilling a huge swath of light across the grass just beyond where she lay. Nora tensed and huddled into as small a ball as possible.

“… Baker said we have to do things in order, that’s all I’m saying.”

“People are starting to get restless, though,” came the response.

“Well, all I know is we don’t do anything not on the list.”

“Well, it should be on the list,” the other voice insisted grumpily.

Nora’s heart thumped in a way that struck her as perilously loud. Some sort of spider ambled over her hand and she had to resist shrieking. Just as quickly as the two men had emerged, though, the barn door slid back into place, the noise covering the remainder of their exchange.

Nora clenched her eyes tightly shut, and then opened them, trying to find some sort of courage. She began uncoiling herself, looking about for the best path across the morass of weeds to the bank beyond it and the beach below. She squatted, surveying the area, fighting to keep her breathing even and calm. More starlight than Nora had ever seen gleamed above and the air smelled impossibly sweet. A chorus of insects sang loudly, pulsing, one group responding to the other in a constant refrain.

The soft glow of a lit cigarette exposed a guard posted at the top of the beach stairs. This meant she couldn’t take a direct line through the tall weeds, for she would pass too close to him.

Surveillance cameras. Where would you be if you were a surveillance camera? She peered hard into the darkness.

Corners. She looked up at the top of the barn. The light perched above the sliding door cast everything behind it into what felt like deeper darkness, but Nora decided to simply assume there was a camera there and give it a wide berth. Still, there would be cameras around the edges of that house. How well would they pick up a dark-clad, dark woman sprinting in the dark?

Motion sensors? The group of women hadn’t triggered any by the farmhouse. She would have to run behind the farmhouse in order to stay as far from the beach stairs and the man stationed there as possible. Should she go for the shortest distance between two points or just dart in some crazy pattern?

She decided to trust her speed. She would aim for the furthest edge of overgrown land beyond the house, the point where the towering forest loomed darkly. Then she would follow the tree line north and finally duck into the trees at the top of the bank and make her way down. It was at least five hundred yards of exposed running. But maybe, maybe if the cameras thought she was an aberrant blur—at least at first—then she would get away with it.

She placed her left hand on the side of the barn to steady herself. Then she inhaled, exhaled, and shot away from the side of the barn. She immediately slipped on the dewy grass, but quickly regained her balance and gave it everything she had.

She expected to hear gunfire, but there was none. She pushed herself as hard as she could and cleared the house then barreled toward the lake, chest heaving. As fast as she was running she found that the night air felt cool and refreshing against her face. She felt sharp and in focus, aware of the way the weeds caught at her legs, and, on some level, frightened anew of ticks.

She swept past the farmhouse, now brightly lit in the dark. As she sprinted past she saw an imposing fireplace. The heads of some heavily antlered deer had been mounted on the wall above it. And then she had cleared the house and was almost to the trees. She veered toward the lake.

Easy. She had done it. She paused at the edge of the bank, looking back. The man with the cigarette was now some five hundred yards to her left. He had not moved. Chest heaving, she stared woozily at the edge of the bank. The descent seemed impossibly steep, and the trees swayed in front of her, black and ominous. Far below, the waves were thumping rhythmically against the shoreline. She tried to catch her breath, steeling herself for the next step and casting a quick glance backward at the barn where Pete and April Lewis remained captives. It looked still and benign.

Nora clutched a thin sapling and took a step over the edge of the bank.

That is when the floodlights set high in the trees sprang instantly to life, illuminating, it seemed to her, every contour of her body.

*   *   *

Nora froze.

The man at the top of the beach stairs swung about, the cigarette plummeting from his mouth. He stared at Nora in confusion for a moment, then aimed his rifle directly at her.

She plunged into the trees just as the spatter of gunfire punctured the stillness.

Immediately, she slid several feet. Branches scraped at her cheeks and hands, and she fought to find footing in the brambles along the ground. An eruption of shouting followed the gunfire and she heard what seemed to be a thousand voices, men and women, calling to each other, issuing directions. The voices seemed to be descending on her, and gunfire whizzed past her thudding into tree bark.

She charged headlong through the trees, scrabbling, sliding, tumbling down the side of the bank. It seemed that her pursuers were materializing out of nowhere; she realized that the beach itself must have had several people posted there who were now climbing up to cut her off. She darted toward the stairs, climbing upward again, and trying to take advantage of the dark shadows created by the floodlights. Then she scurried down again toward the lake, clinging to low-hanging branches to keep from toppling over. Several tore off in her hands, causing her to slide swiftly down the steep embankment. Others held and she continued running, zig-zagging. She could not duck when she heard the gunshots behind her. There was no way of telling if she were putting herself more directly in the path of the bullets or dodging them, and every instant was different as her feet could not find solid ground for more than a moment. Just ahead of her two men pounded up the wooden staircase, flashlights bobbing. She gasped, halting, wondering how to get over the stairs or around them. Then she realized that there was a big enough gap that she could pass between the stairs and the bank if she flattened herself. She listened, desperately trying to assess if anyone else were coming up or down the stairs. But the crashing behind her and the sound of the rifles spurred her on. A bullet barreled into the staircase just inches from her face, sending shards of wood flying, and she threw herself against the bank, feeling cool earth against her cheek. She shimmied under the staircase to reach the other side.

West, west, west, she repeated to herself. Fear now overwhelmed her, and all she could do was run and dart and untangle herself from groping branches. Shouts of men and women behind her seemed to electrify her feet while terrifying her brain so intensely that she could not process, could not plot a course, could only plunge ahead, fired by a mad hope of reaching the beach.

And then she was there, skidding down the last few feet to land on an unwieldy layer of flat rocks. She found herself just beyond the last yellow pool cast by the tree-suspended floodlights. She glanced back. The boat that brought her bobbed in the waves, the dock still groaning. She could see a shadowy figure not far from the boat, and as soon as she turned to run she felt the bullet slam into her back. She pitched forward from the force of it, the wind knocked out of her, more grateful for Kevlar than she had ever been. Her knee screamed in protest where she landed, heavily, on a sharp rock.

“She’s down!” called the man by the boat. His voice drew nearer. “She’s down, hurry!”

Nora did not stay down. She rolled back the few feet she had descended from the bank, and, grabbing the undergrowth, pulled herself into the cover of the trees again, fighting for breath. The pain in her back felt as though she had been sucker-punched. She heard footsteps clattering across the rock, and flashlight beams scanned the shoreline, even boring into the lake itself. Nora crawled some distance and then arose to continue running. Only when she had gotten beyond the range of the flashlights did she descend again and begin dashing along the beach.

The beach was so rocky. She tried to lighten her step, scared to put too much weight on one foot and ultimately twist an ankle. Her knee ached from the fall, though nothing like the roar of pain in her back. On the upside, she had fallen on her hurt wrist and seemed to have jammed it back into alignment, for its pain had subsided.

The shouting had just begun to abate and fall away when she heard the unmistakable sound of gunning engines.

She thought for a moment that they had brought motorcycles to the beach, but suddenly realized it was much worse. Four wheelers. Four wheelers with headlights were bearing down on her. Trees or water? she asked herself wildly. Trees or water?

No. She was not a strong enough swimmer, and the pulsing black waves terrified her. She knew there were massive rocks under the surface against which the waves could hurl her. More than this, she was certain that if they thought she had gone into the water, they would send the boat after her. She galloped back into the shelter of the trees, trying as hard as she could not to slow down. She had to keep running. She could not stop.

They were hunting. Cries of outrage had turned to whoops as the four-wheelers careened across the rocky beach. Each bore two riders, one with a rifle, the other driving. Nora climbed as fast as she could but kept heading west with every step. She did not look back, trying to play hide and seek the way she had as a child: surely if she did not look at her seeker he would not see her. She could not tell if the light that occasionally fell across her legs and back was enough to indicate her location, or if the four-wheelers were traveling too fast to really see her. Up, she whispered. Climb up. The lakefront portion of the compound had to end eventually. There had to be a limit as to where they could come down from and where they could ride.

Not that trespassing was going to be a law that impeded them. Idiot, she said to herself. These people aren’t going to stop out of deference to some border or boundary line. They would keep coming. They would hunt her all night if they had to. She paused, her chest hollowed out by pain and cramping. She clung to a sapling, listening to the engines and the laughing below.

She was sport.

She began to run again, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, she ran out of trees. Bank erosion had made for a bald mudslide of land. In the moonlight, it seemed to stretch for at least five hundred yards. She skidded to a halt and then fled back to the trees, praying they hadn’t spied her in the moment she had been exposed.

She was stuck. She couldn’t swim for it, and if she ran along the beach now, they would catch her easily.

What am I going to do?

Her chest heaved up and down as she looked all about her. The roar of their engines seemed to taunt her. They had arrived at the eroded stretch, and they too had circled back.

Well.

Well, they would not add her head to the group above the mantel of the farmhouse.

She didn’t have time for that.

She darted to the edges of the beach, skirting as best she could the bobbing of their lights, gathering the heaviest lakestones she found. Most were disc-shaped and she weighed them anxiously, wondering if she could propel them with sufficient force; her wrist felt better and yet not in peak form. Perhaps two-handed … yes. She made three piles behind three wide trees, engaging as she did so in a dance of feinting and falling back, dodging her hunters as they circled and swooped.

When she was ready, she picked two large rocks, each the length of her forearm and slightly heavier than she could carry comfortably. She cradled the first in the crook of her arm like a discus. Then she slipped down a few feet below the tree she’d chosen and crouched at the line where the beach met the bank. The first ATV was just making the edge of its circuit and heading back toward her, its headlight bobbing. She ducked behind some of the tallest brush, her chest heaving. As the four-wheeler approached, she saw that the driver was aiming his headlight on the woods behind and to the right of her.

She waited.

A hundred yards. Fifty. Ten. Now.

She popped up and slung the rock as hard as she could at the shadowy form in the driver’s position; without waiting to see if it had hit its mark, she crouched down, grabbed the other, and heaved it too before diving into the woods, rolling slightly. A shout went up and an explosion of gunfire ripped through the night.

The headlight now glanced about as the four-wheeler careened out of control. She had flattened herself against the tangled underbrush. She realized that the other rider must have subdued the ATV, for the engine was idling then, and only one of the four-wheelers was still making its circuit, its headlight scanning the trees. She began dragging herself with her elbows toward her next stockpile of rocks.

She heard a woman yell, fighting to be heard over the roaring engines, “He’s hurt. I need help.”

“Find her, dammit!” countered another voice.

Both machines idled now and their headlights were trained on the bank. One woman and two men on foot, equally spaced some fifty yards from each other, started into the trees.

Apparently I did not think this through.…

She clutched the next two stones and waited, struggling to control her breathing. Left flank. A man was drawing near. The four-wheeler’s headlight framed him in a hazy halo of light, and Nora could see that he carried a flashlight in his left hand, the rifle resting on his right hip. He was looking left and right, but his footsteps were steady.

She did not hesitate. She sprang up, slinging the heavy stone directly at his throat. There was a sickening thud and he fell backward. For once, the weapon did not discharge, exposing her, although the flashlight now lay in the underbrush. Nora pounced, grabbing and extinguishing the flashlight. Then she tugged the strap of the rifle down the man’s arm to disengage it. The ATV headlight showed his chest heaving up and down as he gasped for air. Blood dribbled out of his mouth. The lakestone had crushed his windpipe.

She pocketed the flashlight, shouldered his rifle and dashed toward the beach.

Afraid that one of her first two stones might have damaged the first ATV, she leapt astride the second one.

Be easy. Be easy to figure out.

She had never ridden a four-wheeler, of course. She could hear Pete’s voice in her head. No bars. No boats. No ATVs. What the hell, Nora?

Okay, Pete. Help me out.

It had brakes like a bicycle. Oh my God, she whispered, staring blankly at the machine. She clutched the handle bars.

Gear shift. It was idling, so it was on, so that was done. Gear shift? She punched at a backlit button with an up arrow, and saw a number light up on the dashboard. Okay. First gear. Gas? She looked at the handlebar grip and realized she had seen enough motorcycles in the movies to have an idea. She twisted the grip forward and the machine surged forward. Zift.

She clamped down on the brakes, then aimed her rifle at the other ATV and shot at its wheels.

Quickly, she turned the handlebars to maneuver out from behind the other ATV, aiming the headlight straight ahead as she did so. Shouts and gunfire poured down from the bank as she accelerated. The ATV started whining and she pushed the up arrow quickly. Nothing happened, so she released the gas and tried again, grateful that it sped forward even more quickly. It seemed to resist her and she struggled; all the muscles in her arms strained as she tried to control the handlebars. The rocks made it difficult, and there was a hail of gunfire coming from the beach behind her, but she continued accelerating, shifting the gears doggedly until she dared not go any faster. She kept closer to the edge of the water, fearing the piles of driftwood as much as the rocks.

She kept going for what seemed like miles, expecting all the time to be pursued via boat or four-wheeler or helicopter. She did not know the limitations of the group and its leader’s wealth and resources. How easily would they give up? She had injured one of them and probably killed another. It was as close as she’d gotten to killing with her bare hands. She remembered the man’s face as he choked on his own blood, unable to make a sound in the underbrush. The memory made her squeeze her eyes shut and the vehicle swerved, jolting her back to reality.

She drove on for over twenty minutes until she was forced to stop at a long low wall constructed of six-foot cement blocks jutting out into the water. There was no driving around it, and no way to get over it. Where this wall met the bank, she spied a wooden stairway threading its way upwards.

She needed a telephone. But she had no money, no ID.

Let it be just some mellow hipster couple living by a vineyard. Some Downton Abbey-watching couple. Cardigans. Let there be cardigans.

She soon found herself on a well-kept lawn; it was a modest two-story house, well-lit. No high ceilings. No dead deer. She ran to the deck and paused a moment. She stowed the rifle she’d swiped out of sight, then mounted the steps and knocked as calmly on the sliding glass door as she could muster.

A wide-eyed teenaged girl in a tank top and pajama bottoms came into sight in the living room. She stood gaping at Nora. Her bright blonde hair hung in two matching braids. She did not open the door.

Nora could only imagine how filthy she looked. She knew she had an ugly bruise from where Goatee had punched her. She waved, ridiculously, then said, “I’m Special Agent Nora Khalil with the FBI.…”

But the girl vanished from sight.

Nora suppressed a scream of frustration, and was about to take off running again when the girl came back into sight with a rifle cradled in her arms. She approached the deck doors with a slow and steady step.

Okay, at least she’s giving me a chance. I look scary. I get that. I’d want my gun, too.

Nora tried to introduce herself again. She engaged in a bit of pantomime as she did so, holding her thumb and pinky finger up to her ear like a receiver. “I desperately need a phone. If you have a cell phone you could just call the number for me and hold it up without letting me in. I can shout through the door or FaceTime them or something. Please?”

The girl stared at her, incredulous.

Nora tried again. “I understand how rough I must look right now. If your parents are around, please call them out here and have them supervise.”

“You got some ID?”

Smart girl.

Nora shook her head. “I was abducted by some bastards down the beach from you. I swear. Please just call the number for me. You have nothing to lose, I promise.” She held up her hands. “My hands are where you can see them. But lives are at stake. Please.”

She saw the girl thinking about this. Then she reached into the wide pocket of her pajama bottoms and pulled out an iPhone.

Relief flooded over Nora. “Thank you! Thank you so much. Dial 814-555-6218.”

The girl keyed in Anna’s number rather clumsily, for she was still holding the rifle in what was clearly her phone hand. She hit the speaker button and waited, eyes riveted on Nora.

“Please pick up,” Nora whispered against the glass. “Don’t let it go to voicemail.”

“Special Agent Anna Dixon speaking.” Anna’s voice could just barely be heard through the glass.

“Anna!” shouted Nora, her palm against the glass.

The girl was sufficiently convinced now. She cracked open the sliding door, just wide enough so that Nora could speak into the phone she still held. Her rifle stance relaxed somewhat.

“Oh my God, Nora. Where are you? We’ve moved heaven and earth looking for you—is Pete alright?”

“Yes, Anna, for the moment—they took us both—some kind of compound on the lake. We need … We need to move right now. They have April Lewis, they have Pete—his foot is hurt, he couldn’t get away. They have … weapons. People … I’m scared they’ll hurt them because I ran.…”

“Nora, you’ve got to calm down—Where are you?” came Anna’s voice.

Nora looked hopelessly around her, as though some sign might appear. “I have no idea, Anna.”

“Planer,” said the girl, her eyes even wider.

“Planer,” said Nora. “Can you trace this call? I ran to this house but these guys aren’t that far off—there’s, like, this compound, barns and stuff—They took our phones, our badges, guns.… Tell Schacht we need like … SWAT teams and … fighter jets.”

“We’re tracing you now, Nora. Don’t hang up. Stay where you are. We’ll send as many people as we can.”

Nora held the girl’s gaze. “Okay? Is that okay? Don’t hang up, okay?”

The girl nodded, mesmerized.

“I’m gonna just sit down a minute.” She slid down the door frame and sat on the wide slats of the deck.

The girl set the rifle on the floor and crouched down. She spoke to Nora through the opening she’d made with the door. “You … you, um, want a glass of water or anything?”

Nora turned her head to look at the girl. “I would sell my soul for a bathroom,” she said.

*   *   *

The girl’s name was Brianna Ellis, and she was sixteen. Nora had never felt more gratitude toward another human being than she did at the moment that Brianna pulled open the sliding door and ushered her into her home. The girl even disappeared upstairs for a moment and returned with a Taylor Swift T-shirt.

“Really?” Nora asked.

Brianna shrugged. “I used to love her, but I fucking hate her now.”

Nora nodded. “It happens.”

But as she emerged from the bathroom, face washed, chest emblazoned with the word “Red,” she realized she had probably endangered Brianna more than anyone ever had. I should have pushed that ATV into the lake, she thought.

Then again, a wall’s a wall. Any fool would have figured out where she’d gone.

“Brianna,” she said, accepting from her a glass of water. “There are some guys after me.”

The girl nodded, her green eyes held a knowing look. “You can call me Bree. And you pretty much just led them here.”

“Do you have a car?”

“Me personally? Not for another two months. It sucks so bad.…”

“No, I mean, is there a car here we can take? We need to leave.”

“Oh. No. My mom’s working nightshift. Dad’s at bowling.”

“Text them,” Nora said.

“Oh, believe me, I already did. But they just never pay attention to their phones…” she griped. “Why even have a phone?”

“Call her actual work. Call the bowling alley.”

“Call?” Bree looked disconcerted.

“Yes, the bowling alley. Tell them to tell your dad to come home right away and get you.”

Bree looked at her askance. Then she shrugged, began Googling the number. “It’s all the way in Erie though.”

“Oh, for…” Nora spluttered. “Neighbors?”

“What about them?”

“How close? I didn’t see any other houses or lights around.”

Bree shook her head. “Well, it’s not like walkable or anything. Well, I mean, it is for some people. But I’m not a big walker … and it’s totally dark.…”

Nora felt trapped all over again, then remembered the rifle she’d left leaning on the railing outside. She slipped out to get it, listening intently as she did for the sound of ATVs. Everything was, for the moment, quiet except for the sound of breaking waves. She locked the sliding glass door behind her.

“Nice AR-15,” Bree observed, twisting a braid around her index finger. “Yours or theirs?”

“I took it from…” Her voice trailed off, and she saw that Bree knew instantly she had had to kill for that rifle.

“You okay?” Bree asked softly.

Nora nodded.

“How many are you expecting?”

“Hmm?” Nora asked, trying to gauge how many rounds were left in the cartridge.

“How many bad guys are about to come over the bluff?”

Nora blinked. “I’m not sure, Bree.”

“You need more ammo?” she asked. “You look like you need more ammo.”

“You just happen to have ammo for a Bushmaster? Just … sitting around?”

“Not sitting around. In the den. Come on.” Bree headed into a thickly carpeted den.

Nora, casting a worried glance at the bluff, followed.

A gun rack occupied one wall of the wood-paneled den. On it, from smallest to heftiest, were a dozen rifles.

“Thirty round capacity, I’m guessing,” Bree said, assessing the weapon.

Nora watched, feeling appalled and appreciative simultaneously.

Bree yanked open a drawer to display tidily arranged boxes of ammunition for the various guns in the room. Nora noted that there was a rifle quite similar to the one she held; Bree pressed a hefty box into her hand, which Nora accepted. There was also a gap where Bree had pulled down the Luger she’d walked into the living room with when Nora first appeared.

Nora studied the guns and the ammunition displayed in front of her. She could not help but ask, “Do you have any handguns?”

Bree tugged at another drawer and showed her two different handguns lying prone in form-hugging Styrofoam insets. Nora seized the Glock with a sigh of relief, checking that its cartridge was full.

“Okay,” she was saying. “This is great. Now, look, Bree, you need to…”

But the girl was pocketing several rounds, apparently for the Luger.

“What are you doing?”

“Helping,” she answered, as she walked back into the living room to load up.

Nora flustered, followed her. “Look, we need to get these lights off, Bree, and then we should talk.”

The girl complied. Then, before Nora could direct her to go into her room, she plopped herself down on the floor, rifle on her lap, and began tapping on the screen of her phone.

“Wait, you left the line open for Anna to track us, right?”

“Of course—I was just about to Instagram this though—do you care?” she said.

Nora wasn’t sure she’d heard her. “Sorry?”

“Instagram us, you know, hanging out with our guns for the shootout. Selfie? I’ll use the flash. Real quick.”

Nora stared at her. “Bree. Some really bad guys may be coming up your beach stairs, like right now. I didn’t invite you to a shootout. Just, if you could lock yourself in your room with your weapon, I’d feel better. I can handle things down here.”

“I’ve gotten a hunting rifle every year for Christmas since I was twelve,” Bree said. “I can help you.”

Nora struggled to recalibrate what she knew about white people and Christmas celebrations. “Charming. Look, I believe you. Now go to your room.”

“You’re going to regret it.…”

“Why’s that?” Nora, patience exhausted, demanded.

“Because they have more guns than you do,” she said, nodding toward the lawn. “Here they come.”

Nora looked at her wildly. “Give me that phone.”

Bree passed it to her.

Nora picked up the Kevlar vest from the couch where she’d tossed it after changing into the Taylor Swift shirt. She walked over to Bree and, over her huffing protests, forcibly tucked her arms through the arm-holes, buckling it up for her. “Get to your room,” Nora hissed, putting on the scariest expression she could muster. She was relieved that Bree gave her a fierce frown in return but whirled and began ascending the stairs.

“Anna,” Nora whispered urgently. “Anna, six armed men just walked over the bluff.”

“We’re in the car, Nora,” came Anna’s response. “But we’re still about fifteen, twenty minutes away. Do you have to engage with them?”

“God, I hope not. There’s a teen in the house.”

“Get her out of there, Nora. It’d be better to take a car and go.”

“There’s no car. No neighbors. Nothing but grapevines and … white power.”

“Get her out of there, keep your vest on. CIRG has sent one of the SWAT teams. We’ll be there as fast as we can. Keep the line open.”

*   *   *

A plump, silvery moon illuminated the lawn in a way Nora hadn’t expected; she couldn’t decide if the added light would work in her favor or not. As soon as the figures hit the Ellises’ lawn, they split up to encircle the house. Nora didn’t know which one of them to track. She crouched by the couch, instructing herself to breathe in and out. Her fingers closed and opened around the handle of the Glock. She toted the Adaptive Combat Rifle over her shoulder, its magazine filled with thirty fresh rounds. Six people. Thirty rounds. She could miss four times on each.

Stop trying to do math, she whispered.

Anyway, her chances were better with the Glock. She had far more training with that.

She watched as one of the figures crouched low and mounted the three steps that led up to the deck. It was a woman. Her ponytail swung like a pendulum as she tugged at the sliding glass door, attempting to open it, then stood and took aim at the lock with her rifle.

Nora stared, still disbelieving what she was seeing. Even as she reluctantly aimed her Glock at the woman’s chest, she heard a crash and knew that the front door had been kicked in. Nora prioritized quickly, firing three bullets through the glass at the woman on the deck and then leaping over the back of the couch.

There were three of them. Nora was suddenly hyper-aware of time and motion. In the darkened room she could not see their faces, was only vaguely aware of their stances, the way their bodies curved around the rifles they carried, and the way they shouted at each other. Their words ran together and Nora could not divine them. She was suddenly beyond words; there was no way to contain in language the fear she felt or the level of overwhelming panic.

Sometimes you just go …

She was kneeling. She depressed the trigger on the Glock over and over, moving the gun’s barrel from one dark form to the other. Exposing her position drew their fire immediately and so she crouched, hoping she hit something, anything, and began firing up from the floor.

The angle proved effective for at least one, for she heard a shouted command interrupted by her last bullet.

Get out of there. Lead them away from Bree.…

She hurtled across the living room floor, praying her earlier shots had met their mark. She shouted incoherently as she ran, hoping to draw their attention, hoping to pull the remaining two out of the house and into the woods. She shouldered the shattered sliding door, pushing the rest of the glass out of it, then jumped over the body of the first militiawoman.

She hadn’t anticipated that one of them was crouching in wait for her in the shadow of the deck. As she ran down the steps from the deck, he tackled her with an animal grunt. Both of them went sprawling on the slick grass of the front lawn. Nora fought to find a way out from under him, but encountered only a thicket of arms and legs.

“Not so fast, bitch,” he hissed. He yanked the rifle from her hands and tossed it aside as he stood.

He grabbed her by her chignon and dragged her upwards until she was on her knees. His breaths were coming hard and fast, and Nora felt his knuckles grazing her neck. The skin was rough and hard. He pressed the tip of his rifle against her right temple.

Nora, panting already, took a deep, gasping breath, a breath that encompassed sky and lake and trees and stars.

She squeezed her eyes closed.

But the crack that came seemed to emanate from well behind her. Somehow it was the gunman who crumpled onto the lawn, and not Nora herself.

Nora whirled to see Bree holding up her rifle from the second-story window of her bedroom. “Told you you needed help!” she shouted.

Nora shook her head in disbelief as she let out a sigh of relief. She wanted to shout something up to Bree but found no words. Instead, she patted her own face and head, making sure she was still alive, still whole. She wanted to crush the girl to her in a hug or break into some sort of dance.

But she realized quickly there was one man left. She twisted left and right, scanning the moonlit lawn for movement. The sound of the waves was audible again, beating steadily against the rocky beach below, matching the sound of her own breathing. She sprang up to search for the rifle that had been tossed aside.

A smashing sound shattered the stillness.

Nora knew instantly that exactly what she had feared had happened. Bree’s scream confirmed this, although the girl seemed to have fired off a shot; an identical crack to the one that had felled Nora’s attacker shook the night. This was followed by more screaming.

Nora raced back into the living room, leaping over the prone forms in her path, and she bolted up the stairs, taking them three at a time. The landing at the top of the stairs revealed a hallway, but finding Bree’s room was no mystery. A figure in camouflage pants and a black T-shirt had pinned Bree’s arm behind her and had pushed her against the wall.

Nora hesitated, cursing herself for not having yanked a rifle off one of those lying dead in the living room. But she did not hesitate for long. She pounced, wrapping her right arm around the man’s neck and grasping her own wrist hard with her left hand. She pulled backwards with all her might, squeezing with everything she had; her left wrist, not unscathed from the fall in the basement, launched daggers of pain that emanated throughout her entire body.

His hands went from pinning Bree to groping at Nora’s arm which was vise-like but weakening fast. Bree, now released, reeled and fell onto her twin bed as she tried to get her bearings. Nora saw she was looking for her rifle which was nowhere in sight.

“Just run!” Nora gasped at her, but the girl could not get by them as the man staggered from side to side, Nora clinging to him.

She felt her arm beginning to give way and tried to redouble her efforts, but found to her horror that he was overcoming her.

She knew if she let him pull her off that he would throw her immediately. So she quickly yanked her arms away and slid down his back into a low crouch. As he whirled to face her she punched as hard as could at his groin, then whipped her right hand back, fingers arched to expose the palm. As he doubled over, she shoved the base of her palm upward with all of her might, catching the bottom of his nose and propelling it up into his skull.

The bones shattered, and blood began spurting out of his nose. Bree darted away, but could not escape a spattering of blood. The man fell facefirst onto her bed, gushing blood onto a comforter emblazoned with neon peace signs.

Nora and Bree both sank to the floor, looking at each other, chests heaving.

“Is he dead?” Bree asked.

“Maybe,” Nora answered. She looked around for his gun.

Bree saw her. “I shot it out of his hand. Didn’t mean to, actually—meant to kill the fuck. But I was just … surprised to have someone kicking in my door. It was new. And he was very close. It happened very fast.”

Surprised, Nora looked at the part of the wall where the impact from the man’s rifle had smashed a hole in the drywall. The weapon lay warped on her fuzzy pink carpeting; it had singed some of the pile around it. Nora tilted her head, getting a better glimpse of the man’s right arm, and found that it had a huge burn mark on it. “You did great, Bree. You did so great. Any other kid would have freaked out.”

“You saved me,” the girl said.

“You saved me,” Nora said.

Bree grinned at her. “We’re fucking amazing.”

Nora laughed. “Yes we are.”

Bree looked from Nora to the man sprawled on her bed. “So now can I Instagram it?”

The man groaned and Nora sprang up from the floor. “I need … well, do you have cable ties?” She so wanted to tie his hands as hers had been for hours.

Bree considered this. “Nah. What about my bathrobe belt?”

Nora sighed. “Is it pink?”

“What do I look like?” She went to the closet and extracted a turquoise, leopard-print robe with a matching belt. “Pink,” she scoffed.

As Nora tied the man’s hands tightly behind him, they heard several car doors slamming. “And there’s my team.” Nora patted along the length of the man’s body, making sure she hadn’t missed any weapons. She winked at Bree. “These guys are only, what? How late are they?”

“Like, a million hours late.”

“Yes,” Nora agreed. “A million hours late. Let’s go.” She draped her arm around Bree’s shoulders and gave her a quick squeeze, before releasing her to pass through her door. “We trashed your room, Bree.”

The girl twisted a braid around her index finger and said, “It was a little trashed before. I’m not gonna lie to you.”

Anna was the first one through the doorway, skirting the door that hung now from only one hinge, her gun at the ready.

Bree flicked the light switch as she began descending the stairs, bathing the foyer in light, and Anna turned quickly, then just as quickly lowered her gun when she saw them, exhaling with relief. “I didn’t know what to expect,” she said.

“I hope you expected dead bodies,” Nora answered. “Because I have no clue what to do with all these.”

Anna followed her gesture to take in the living room. She let out a small gasp despite herself. Agents Ford and Chidambaram had stepped in and were looking about.

Schacht followed. “Any risk that there are more coming?” he asked immediately.

Nora nodded. “Yes, there’s definitely a risk of that. These came up from the bluff there.” She pointed beyond the living room to the lawn and beach beyond.

Schacht turned and directed the rest of the group outside to form a perimeter around the house, concentrated by the stairs leading down the bank.

Anna froze, holding up a hand to Nora and Bree where they were on the stairs. “I’m glad you’re both okay. I’m going to ask that you sit right there on the stairs until we can take some notes and digitize this scene, okay?”

The male agents held their positions in the foyer, surveying the damage and murmuring to each other.

Bree frowned as she watched Anna leave. “Where’s she going?”

“Anna, in addition to being a super tough agent, is our photographer person. I’m thinking she went out to get her camera.”

“She doesn’t look super tough. She looks a little like a Strawberry Shortcake doll.”

Nora pursed her lips. “And you look a little like a Barbie doll. I’m trying not to hold it against you.”

Bree laughed. “NRA Barbie!”

Nora burst out laughing. “Home Invasion Barbie! Little miss crack-shot from the second floor.”

Schacht, Ford, and Chid looked up at them where they sat together laughing on the sixth stair.

“What’s so funny?” Schacht asked.

“Brianna Ellis, aged 16, meet Special Agent in Charge Schacht, Special Agent Ford, and Special Agent Chidambaram. Bree here used a Luger rifle to shoot a very bad guy in the head … from the window of her bedroom,” Nora said. “She saved my life.”

All three had the good sense to look suitably impressed.

Nora continued, “She needs some kind of Instagrammable commendation, SAC Schacht. Stat.”

“I promise,” he said very seriously, “that I will see to something that recognizes her action just as soon as we are not in the middle of a crisis.”

Bree smiled brilliantly.

“But you’re going to have to bear with us for a minute. Do you mind if we spend an hour or so sorting ourselves out here?”

She nodded enthusiastically.

“I’m going to need you to park your cell phone with us for a while, though. Okay, Brianna?”

She nodded much less enthusiastically at this, but managed to say, “Okay.”

Nora looked at Schacht gratefully, then gave a nod toward the group outside. “Glad to see we got some backup now.”

He nodded. “Yes. Our media liaison is still downtown, and I left several of the Pittsburgh agents onsite at the synagogue. The local bomb squad is a little irritated with us right now, got a little defensive over territory since I inflicted the DC crew on them.”

Nora said, “Abe seems pretty level-headed. He’ll recover.”

Schacht continued, “There’s another Philadelphia agent currently on his way, Nora. Just to … let you know.”

Nora flushed, understanding the import of Schacht’s words.

“Seemed to think that our ongoing war on drugs back home warranted his attention less than this madness.”

Nora shrugged. “They come for the madness, they stay for the…” Her voice trailed off, unable to fill in the blank.

Anna, who was by this time trolling through the room with her camera, supplied, “Sunsets. We have amazing sunsets here.”

“There ya go,” Nora said.

She saw that Ford was on the phone, presumably calling in the coroner. She leaned over the railing and mentioned there was another guy in bad shape upstairs who might require an ambulance. She refused to say it in a way that might suggest to Ford that he should rush that request.

Sheila finally appeared, haggard, her blazer exceedingly wrinkled and sweat-stained. She looked up at Nora and a small smile played across her lips. “Well, Special Agent Khalil. Looks like you made a lot of people sorry they chose to abduct you.”

*   *   *

“What the fuck is this?” Mr. Ellis, slightly balding, slightly paunchy, very flushed, stood clutching a bowling bag and staring at the mayhem in his living room.

Nora tried to look at the scene with his eyes. Front door scarred and unhinged. Four different windows adorned with spider-webbing from the passage of bullets. The sliding glass doors shattered. A long, near-contiguous red blood stain on the living room floor where three bodies had lain. The pseudo-suede sleeper sofa riddled with bullet holes. Six federal agents standing around the living room; eight out keeping watch on the lawn. His daughter Brianna, light of his eyes, in blood-spattered pajamas, cheerfully holding a coffee pot.

Bree was the first to respond. “Those assholes down the beach, Daddy. You were right about them. Total douches.”

Mr. Ellis fought for composure and words. He plunked his bowling bag on the floor and crossed to embrace his daughter. She held the coffee pot out wide so it wouldn’t spill.

“Are you hurt?” he asked gruffly. “Is that your blood?”

“No, Nora kicked a guy’s ass who was trying to kill me though. It was kind of awesome. So, yeah, his blood, not mine. I was gonna change but I figured I needed to take a picture of it first. Oh, and Daddy, I totally killed this guy who was about to shoot Nora in the head. I used the Luger! And then all these FBI guys were like, we have to launch an assault on the crazies down the beach, so I’m like, oh, I’ll make you coffee!”

Tears of relief were leaking out of Mr. Ellis’s eyes as he patted his daughter’s hair, hugging her, releasing her, then pulling her close again.

Nora knew what was coming though. She counted down to herself.

Mr. Ellis kissed his daughter’s head, then whirled on them.

“Are you people out of your goddam minds?”

Schacht crossed to him, offering his badge, and asked gently if they could sit in the den and discuss the matter. Nora thought she heard him mention compensation for any and all damage to his home and property as the two walked away.

She and Bree exchanged a look. “You want some coffee?” the girl asked with a grin.

Nora laughed. “Do you have tea?”

“Ooh, tea!” Chid perked up, then came to stand next to them, extending his hand to Bree, whom he’d been ignoring until then. “I’m Chid. Tea would make my day.”

Bree gave Nora a who’s the weirdo look, then went to track down a kettle.

“Nora, we need more details from you,” Sheila was saying. Her face looked positively gray. She had aged in the past two days.

“We’ve narrowed it down to two possibilities. There’s a fifty-acre tract of land about ten miles east of here that belongs to a Joseph Geyer. It’s zoned for a house and a barn, not three barns, like you said.”

Anna looked up from her laptop, and Nora could read the response tempting her tongue. Something about violating zoning ordinances through stockpiling weapons. Sheila saw her look, but directed her to work up a quick bio on Geyer.

“The other possibility is slightly further on, five miles beyond Geyer’s land, a property in the name of Emmett Mertens.”

“It’s always the Emmetts,” Ford said knowingly.

“Really?” Nora asked, interested.

“What about barns?” Anna asked.

“Horse farm, apparently. Two barns on this one,” Sheila replied, but Ford had his laptop open. “Google Earth?”

Nora shook her head as she peered at the horse farm. “This one’s all wrong. Not enough trees.” She waited while the camera moved west. She leaned forward. “That’s it. Barn with a silo, two more barns, house fronting the lake.”

“Surprised they didn’t cover it with camo.”

“Nothing surprises me about how brazen this whole thing is,” Nora said. “Are there beach stairs?” She leaned over Ford’s shoulder, realigning the Google Earth camera. “Yes. Okay,” she said, straightening. “That’s it. Let’s go? Can we go? Can we go now?” She said all this as she accepted a mug of tea from Bree.

Schacht had just emerged from the den with a significantly calmer Mr. Ellis. “There’s no we,” Schacht said. “This is where CIRG comes in.”

“Then what are you waiting for? Can’t you give them the go-ahead?”

“Of course, but you have to understand that this means they will be going in with their Hostage Rescue Team first and foremost. It could take a very long time. Force will be the very last thing on the list of strategies.”

Nora turned her back on him and walked away.

“This is serious, Nora, I’m sorry. This is much bigger than you realize,” Ford said. “We don’t want another Waco.”

“These people are armed to the teeth, Ford. I saw it with my own eyes. I’ve got the bruise from the round that hit me in the back,” she patted her lower back.

“And a pretty good shiner on your left eye,” Chid noted.

Nora pointed to her eye, having forgotten all about it. “Plus, April Lewis is being held hostage. A federal agent is being held hostage. What else do you need?”

“Negotiation. More intel. Are there kids on the compound? If so, where are they being held? We need a better sense of what we’re facing,” Ford said. “They won’t just launch an attack on American soil without the attorney general’s permission, and the attorney general will not give permission until every peaceful avenue has been exhausted.”

“You saw the videos, man!” Nora said, trying again to keep from shouting. “They declared war on the federal government!”

“We hear you, Nora. We all know this. We’ve seen what’s been going on. But we have got to find a peaceful resolution or it’s going to be a slaughter, and that slaughter is going to breed generations of haters who felt like we did the wrong thing.”

Nora wilted. “Come on, man. I think they’re going to kill Pete. April Lewis has money. Pete is just … Pete. Representative of the federal government. They killed a judge for as much, and he was a little old man.”

Ford leaned forward, as dispassionate as Nora was agitated. “It’s out of our hands.”

Nora looked to Anna for support. She was listening, frowning, her reading glasses perched on the end of her nose.

“CIRG does nothing but this, all day, every day,” Sheila said. “Trust them.”

Nora walked immediately over to Schacht. “We can’t just leave him there,” she implored.

“Nora, we can’t just bust in there when we don’t know what they have stockpiled,” Schacht answered. “With the amount of cash taken from the bank they could have bought several rocket launchers, innumerable M-16s, grenades … The U-Haul at the synagogue contained almost as much ammonium nitrate and nitromethane as Oklahoma. God only knows what could go off if the wrong rounds hit the wrong storage facility.”

She struggled to suppress a white-hot fury. “I promised him I’d be back for him,” she said, working hard not to shout.

Schacht’s calm had no calming effect on her as he replied, “And so you will, but there’s no point in getting you and all of us killed in the process—that would be to their benefit, I’m sure you agree.”

Nora leaned her head against the wall, trying hard not to curse at the Special Agent in Charge.

“More than this,” Schacht continued, “you have to be aware that they could be baiting us.”

Nora glared at Schacht. “What do you mean?” she demanded.

“Look,” he said. “Nothing did more for the white militia cause than what happened at Waco. To provoke a confrontation, to make us invade that property and fire on Americans, that is gold for this organization from an advertising standpoint. The corpses of the Waco children radicalized more people than anything else the government has ever done.”

“Hey, I studied Waco, alright? I’m not asking you to go in on the suspicions of some UPS man. These people hunted me like a dog. And we’ve seen the results of their weapons-stockpiling for the past two days. Assault rifles and bombs … the case for taking them down is airtight.”

Ford snapped, “Which is another reason to let CIRG do what it does best.”

“Easy, kids,” Schacht said. “As we were saying, Nora, it’s clear to us that they were lying in wait for you and Pete. It was inescapable that we would find that house and find that tunnel. There are only so many places on this shoreline that we can look, only so many places that are big enough and remote enough to support this sort of activity.”

“Why that house?” Nora asked suddenly. “Is there some connection?”

“None so far. It’s listed as being owned by the Benedictine nuns. It was a soup kitchen for a while and has stood empty for much longer,” Anna said. She had clearly already looked it up when they were initially deciding whether or not they needed a warrant to enter so they could search for Pete and Nora.

“Why is there a tunnel leading out of its basement?”

“Maybe it was part of the Underground Railroad,” said Anna. “Erie was a stopover on the way to Canada for a lot of runaway slaves.”

Chid blinked skeptically at this, then lapsed into contemplative silence.

“Whatever its original reason for having a tunnel,” said Schacht, “the point is, whoever picked the house, Nora, picked it for the tunnel, and probably even picked the synagogue as a target so they could use the tunnel. They wanted to abduct one or two agents, and we think they did so to bait us. Which is why we’re going to be extra cautious. End of story.”

Nora sank back onto the Ellises’ couch, feeling overwhelmed. “So you’re telling me that either way, whether I’d gotten out to tell you or not, they’d have been expecting you to find them and launch an attack?”

Schacht and Ford looked at each other, and Schacht nodded. “It’s reasonable, Nora.”

“Probably they were hoping for the Third Day, though,” Chid said. “In fact, I would bet everything on it.”

Nora regarded him, frowning. “Because everything goes up in flames in the fourth opera?”

“Valhalla burns,” said Chid simply.

Schacht asked, “Did they photograph you? Badge shot?”

Nora nodded, remembering.

“See, we didn’t get that yet,” Sheila confirmed. “They were holding on to it. I think this theory is sound.”

Nora looked at her colleagues and then at her hands.

Sheila walked over to her and squatted down. “We’re all worried about Pete, Nora. I swear. But for this moment there is nothing anyone can do. You’ve had a hell of a day and night. I’m giving you a direct order: You need to go home. You need to rest. We have to defer to CIRG on this one. They will let us know what we can do and when we can do it. Those of us who weren’t abducted and hunted down by a crazed militia will stay close to the compound. In the meantime you are to sleep, wake up, head to the office, and try to find solutions from there.”

Nora looked from her to Schacht.

“Listen to your SSRA,” said Schacht.

Nora sighed, feeling defeated.

Bree called out from the kitchen, “That’s bullshit, Nora. Take your little Glock and go rescue your friend!”

“Go to your room, Bree,” said her still ashen-faced father.

She gave him a devious grin. “Can’t, Daddy. There’s white supremacist blood, like, all over the place.”

*   *   *

It was approaching midnight when they left the Ellis home; it was truly much the worse for wear for her having been there. They left several of the Pittsburgh crew on the Ellises’ lawn. Anna, Schacht, and Sheila piled into Anna’s SUV and headed to rendezvous with the CIRG command team. Nora was glad to hear the sound of the SWAT helicopter splitting the still night sky as they stepped outside.

The air smelled sweet and moonlight spilled onto the lawn and the grapevines beyond. Bree stood on her front stoop and called to Nora as she started to get into Chid’s rental minivan.

“Nora!”

Nora turned back to meet Bree halfway. She had come out in her bare feet, clutching her newly reclaimed phone in one hand and Nora’s Kevlar vest in the other.

“Hey, if you need, like, a sorcerer’s apprentice or something, you could call me in,” she said.

Nora took the vest from her and gave her a quick hug. “You did great tonight. No talking about it on the Internet, though, okay? Lives are at stake.”

Bree nodded. “I get it. My dad sorted me out.”

“Okay,” Nora said, proffering a fist.

Bree bumped it. “Imma look you up at your office in town, okay? We can get some mani-pedis or something.”

Nora laughed. “That is exactly what Home Invasion Barbie does in her downtime!”

After hugging the girl once more, Nora got back into the van and gave Chid and Ford her address. Ford was still working on his laptop from the front seat of the car as they drove her back into town. Despite herself, she fell asleep in the backseat. She awoke with a start when they pulled up in front of her place.

“You gonna be alright, Nora?” Chid was asking.

She nodded sleepily. “Yeah, I’m good.”

“Alright, we’re gonna go back to the office and let Maggie know she can go home. You’ll come there when you get a little rest?”

“Yes, assuming all hell doesn’t break loose.”

“You remember orders: even if it does. Sleep.”

“Yes,” she answered. She was suddenly conflicted. She had never offered her place over to any man other than Ben. “Do you—do you need a place to sleep awhile?” she asked, hoping desperately they would say no.

“We’ve been told about the Room of Requirement,” answered Chid. “That’s all we need, right, Derek? Half an hour here or there and we’re good to go.”

“Philly boys. Tough as nails,” said Ford, in a monotone.

Nora nodded. “Alright, Philly boys. See you soon.”

She slid the heavy door of the minivan back into place, then walked up the front walk to her place.

Nora pulled the spare key from behind the crumbly brick and opened the door. She gave the van a completely unnoticed wave and shut the door once again behind her.

She knew instantly that something was wrong. The foyer’s inner door was slightly ajar.

She froze. Her hand flew to where a holster should be. She remembered instantly that she had no gun, no phone. She sighed, furious with herself, and cast futile glances out the door to where the van had been before it drove away. Finally she readied her fists as she pushed into the dim living room.

The floorboards of the hundred-year-old home did not welcome attempts at stealth. She walked as lightly as she could into the room, but the floor creaked with every footfall. Nora’s adrenaline had shot up again, coursing through her limbs, sharpening her brain.

How did they find me?

She scanned the living room and listened carefully. There was a sound coming from the back, near the bedroom. Footsteps like her own falling across a protesting floor.

They were coming toward her now, swift and steady.

She darted right, flattening herself against the living room wall, tensing. Then she arranged herself in guard stance, weight on her rear leg.

A figure emerged from the dining room, and Nora unleashed a roundhouse kick.

And suddenly Ben was lying on her floor.

“Ben!” she gasped, falling to her knees beside him.

“Jesus!” he coughed, doubling up, clutching his chest.

“Oh my God, Ben, I’m so sorry—”

He took a few moments to cough, then opened very green eyes to look up at her.

She bit her lip, patting him gently. “Sorry?” she said again.

He grumbled, “This isn’t the reunion I was hoping for.”

Nora curled her legs under her and helped pull him to a sitting position. “Messing around in my apartment, huh?”

“Um, you did give me a key.”

She smiled. “Of course I did. Took you long enough to use it.”

He shook his head, observing her. “You look like complete hell.” He winced as he ran his fingertips along the large bruise on her cheek where Goatee had struck her.

She patted her hair. “Yes, well, next time call and let me know you’re coming. I’ll pretty up.”

He adjusted his position and pulled a shiny new BlackBerry out of his blazer pocket, handing it to her. “You didn’t actually have a phone. Which is why the secretary lady gave me this to deliver.”

She leaned forward and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Thanks. Any chance she sent you my gun and badge with that?”

He gestured with a backwards nod of his head to the dining room table.

She peered up and saw a Glock in a new shoulder holster. Next to this were the requisite papers to sign checking it to her name. There was also a new set of credentials. “Okay. Three presents from Maggie. Where’s my present from you?”

“Brought you a pony,” he said earnestly. “It’s in the backyard.”

She smiled, despite herself.

“Maggie told me you’d also been burned in the downtown scene two days ago.” Frowning, he ran his hand along her arm to where the gauze was still wrapped. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.”

She shook her head at him, trying to convey without words how deeply his trip to visit his ex had upset her. In the apartment above them, Rachel had launched into a meditative piece that drifted down through the floor like a warming mist.

He leaned back, listening, and then brushed his fingertips along her cheek, looking into her eyes. “You still mad at me?”

She nodded. “But I had a bad day. Sheila and Schacht sent me home and wouldn’t let me go help Pete.”

“Pete’s gonna be okay, Nora.” He reached over and squeezed her hand.

“You don’t know that,” she said, shaking her head.

“CIRG is good, Nora. Let them do their thing. You’re no good to anyone if you’ve collapsed.… Rest.”

She returned his long look, feeling something unfurl within herself. Her breath suddenly came easier.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you, Nora. I was trying to do the right thing.”

Nora studied his features. The sandy hair and strong jaw, the soft lips. “I have zero interest in talking about this now, Ben,” she said quietly and without anger. “I’m just really, really tired. And I probably have a tick from having to hide facedown in the forest. Ten ticks. I probably have ten ticks.”

He carefully came to a standing position, groaning slightly and rubbing his chest, then extended a hand to her so she could join him. She took his hand and rose slowly. She tried not to moan with the effort; her whole body hurt in a way it simply never had. He gently tugged the elastic out of her hair and began running his fingers through it, touching her scalp each time.

“I don’t feel any ticks,” he said. “But you should probably wash this hair. This is not city-girl hair, for sure. There’s like, twigs and stuff stuck in it. Maybe a possum or something…”

She nodded reluctantly; showering sounded as if it’d be an inconceivably difficult task.

“I’m gonna tuck you in. And then I’m gonna go hang out with my buddies Ford and Chidambaram and let you get some sleep.”

“Make them get my partner back, Ben. He’s a … good egg.”

“I will,” he said. Then he wrapped his arms around her, kissing her lips very gently. “I heard you were a superhero out there,” he murmured.

She leaned her head on his shoulder. “I think my best moment was just now when I kicked your ass.”