SECOND DAY

 

 

Nora slept deeply and without dreaming. If Rachel played anything, she did not hear it.

She jolted awake, covered in sweat.

It took her a long time to sort out that she was not in the small apartment over her father’s Arch Street restaurant in Philadelphia. She rubbed her eyes and ran her fingers through her hair, finding it at odd angles. She was grateful Ben had made her take a shower before getting into bed, although she should have remembered to braid her wet hair before sleeping.

She sighed. Her stomach ached with hunger again, and she mentally began running through the contents of her pantry. There was a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, she knew. But was there milk…?

Suddenly she became fully awake. Pete.

I have to check in. The glowing hands of her wristwatch told her it was almost four in the morning. She went to find the new phone Ben had brought her.

It was lying on the dining room table where she’d left it next to the Glock and her credentials. The screen was just fading into darkness after having recently received a new text. She peered at it. It was from Ben.

No change. Hostage Rescue Team is still negotiating. A few of us are at your office. Come when you can.

Nora gathered her mass of bent and twisted curls into a tight knot at her neck, still slightly higher than usual to avoid the burnt skin. Then she slipped on a clean Oxford shirt and holstered her new gun. She hesitated, looking at the Israeli Kevlar, then remembered Sheila’s direct orders. They were targets now. She strapped on the vest, reluctant to submit again to its grim weight.

She grabbed a PowerBar and a slightly bruised banana out of her kitchen, slipped her feet into the purple Wave Riders, then headed out into the darkness.

Perry Square was well-lit for the pre-dawn hours. A bent man, his reddish beard as thick as it was unruly, was sitting on the low wall that rimmed the park. He watched her as she approached. “Strange times, lady.”

She nodded and continued her brisk pace without answering.

He raised his voice slightly, but his words were slow and clear. “Just because I’m a white man, don’t mean I support all this shit goin’ down.”

Nora paused to regard him. Then she handed him her banana and PowerBar. “Let’s hear it for assuming the best about each other,” she said.

He grinned, accepting the food, revealing a few precariously dangling teeth.

By the time she got to the office, she was ravenous. Ben greeted her in the foyer after she swiped in. She could tell he wanted to lean in to kiss her, but held himself back with an it’s the office sort of look. “You okay?” he asked as she unstrapped her bulletproof vest.

She nodded grimly but gave him a small smile. “A little sleep goes a long way. But I need, like, food. Anything at all. Anything not still walking around.”

“We ordered pizza from some sketchy all-night place,” he said. “Might be a little cold now though.…”

“Oh, Nick’s? Nick’s isn’t sketchy, it’s, like, perfect. Please tell me you got something without pepperoni. I’m beggin’ you.”

“I did. These guys were all, no, get all meat, and I was sure you’d pop up at some point so I insisted on a non-pork option.”

“My hero,” she said.

He grinned at her. “Say it again.”

“My hero,” she said, and for good measure she pecked him on the cheek. “Let’s eat!”

He led the way toward the conference room, but Nora stopped dead in her tracks.

“What happened to this place?”

“CIRG descended. Those who aren’t Enhanced SWAT needed somewhere to leave their stuff—there was no time to check into a hotel. Everyone had gone straight to survey the refugee center and then the would-be bombing site, and just as they were packing it in for the night, Schacht gave them the call that they needed to begin negotiating out at the compound. Those who could, dropped their things here and spooned some Folgers crystals into their mouths before heading out again.”

The office was strewn with carry-on luggage and abandoned suit jackets. In front of Maggie’s empty desk was a pile of plastic bags. She saw a pair of black high heels, and wondered if the woman they’d brought in to deal with the press had finally realized she wasn’t going to get to sit down anytime soon, said, Screw it, and found some sneakers.

“Alright then. Welcome,” Nora said to the room. Then she added softly, “I hope they know what they’re doing.” Her fear for Pete felt like hands tightening around her throat.

Ben saw the anxiety in her eyes.

“He’ll be alright, Nora. Those idiots have everything to gain by letting him go unharmed.”

Nora shook her head. “Ben, they don’t care if they live or die. Why would they care what happens to him?”

Ben gazed at her, and she saw him make a conscious decision not to give her false promises. “Well, maybe here in the quiet we can figure something out that will help him.”

Nora took a second to savor the sound of his voice. “I’m glad you’re here, Ben.”

“I’m glad I’m here, too. Philly’s so … boring,” he said, and they both laughed, recalling their phone conversation of three days ago where Nora had used that very word to excess.

Ben pushed open the conference room door. The long table was littered with more paper than she had ever seen. An extra-large pizza box sat in the center of the table, two-thirds of its contents having been consumed. Each of the agents was holding a slice of pizza and looking sleepy.

Ford waved to her; under the brightness of the halogen bulb, she found herself studying him, wondering again how he got the scar on his cheek.

Chid mustered a kind smile. “Nora! How are you?”

She was silent a moment, wondering how to frame the response. Desperately worried about Pete, shell-shocked from all she had seen in the last two days, and her body ached from a long list of burns and bruises.… Finally, she said, “I’m clean. That’s about all I got at this point.”

Even Ford cracked a smile. “Welcome to the war room.”

“How did you get out of standing vigil outside the compound?” she asked.

“The Hostage Rescue Team is very territorial,” he said. “It is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.”

“Washington boys,” Chid said with a shrug. “Lot of dick waving going on.”

Nora gave a knowing nod, although she was foggy, and felt it best to remain so, on the dynamics of dick waving.

“Anyway, we came to be Schacht’s brain trust,” said Chid. “So we are doing what we do best.”

“Eating pizza at 4 A.M.?” asked Nora.

“And rockin’ the laptops,” said Chid with a grin.

Nora walked to the middle of the table and seized a slice of pizza from the grease-splotched box. Ben had gotten her mushrooms and green peppers, her favorite, but it had apparently had few other takers.

“Oh,” she said. “That is so, so pretty.” She took a bite and chewed rapidly, then said, having not quite swallowed, “What are we working on?”

“Gabriel Baker,” answered Ben.

“He’s pretty, too,” Nora said. “Maybe a little too pretty.”

“Chid was saying the same thing.”

Nora looked at him and asked, “What were you saying, Chid, and why?”

“I was saying that he is spouting all kinds of rhetoric that doesn’t seem to mesh. I mean, look. He’s clearly a smart enough guy for a … what is he again?”

“He was a truck driver,” Ford supplied. “I don’t have any records for a while now. No employment, no health insurance, no taxes.”

“He’s never been out of the country. Joined the NRA at the age of sixteen, member of the local rifle club. Volunteer for the fire department when he was living in Lake City. He was on the roster of a church.…”

“What kind of church?” asked Nora.

Ford shuffled papers, looking. “Lake City Baptist Temple.”

“Extremist?” she pushed.

“It’s not on anyone’s list, if that’s what you mean,” Ford answered.

“Is it one of those scary mega-churches?”

Both men shook their heads.

Chid said, “This area really doesn’t have the population to sustain a mega-church.”

“Doesn’t rule out being extremist country though,” Ford said. “Most rural churches are preaching that immigration and the concomitant religious pluralism are the primary reasons for the country’s downfall.”

“Preachers and politicians,” Ben muttered.

“Well, yeah. Exactly. Like we said, the typical militiaman isn’t a big reader,” Ford said. “He opens his ears to the rhetoric of a good speaker, then asks himself the all-important question.”

“What’s the all-important question?” asked Nora.

“Are you a man of action?”

Nora nodded. “Except now women are asking it, too,” she pointed out, remembering the scene at the refugee center, and deciding against the second piece of pizza.

“Yes, now women as well,” Chid said quietly.

“Is Baker one of those ‘traditional values mean my woman’s traditionally in the kitchen’ kinda guys?” Ben asked.

“Hard to say,” Chid answered. “Calling on women to take up arms isn’t any indication that you’re convinced of their equality. It’s done when they’re needed. Manpower. The U.S. allowed women into the war efforts in World Wars I and II because of need, not desire. And most were sent back where they started when it was all over. The Israeli Defense Forces draft women because they need warm bodies.” Chid gave Nora a pointed look. “Even Yasir Arafat did it in Palestine … his so-called ‘Army of Roses,’ right? Not a feminist.”

“I’m not Palestinian,” she whispered loudly.

“I know,” he whispered back just as loudly. “I looked you up.”

Nora scoffed. “In the middle of, like, the apocalypse here, you were so irritated that you couldn’t figure out my heritage … that you researched it?”

Chid waved her off. “Solving puzzles is what I do. Do fish apologize for swimming?”

“And now that you know?” Nora pressed. “Have you figured me out?”

Ben perked up in his chair. “If so, can you tell me?”

Chid laughed cagily. “We were talking about Gabriel Baker.”

“What radicalized him?”

“Well, we can make some guesses,” Ford chimed in. “He’s not from here, for one thing.”

“More urban or more rural?” asked Ben.

“More rural—the town of Ulysses in north central Pennsylvania.”

“Ohhhh,” said Nora.

“You remember?” Ford asked, eyeing her with interest. “You must have been a pretty spectacular student.”

Nora could feel Chid observing her with that look he got. She shrugged. “I’m a nerd,” she said.

“That’s a lie!” Ben protested. “You’re the jock in our relationship.” He gestured at her as he looked to the others for help. “She’s the jock, I swear.”

Nora gave him a small smile. “Yes. Well. I guess I found myself at Quantico.”

“And! Empirically speaking, domestic terrorism is fascinating,” added Chid. “She couldn’t help herself.”

Nora said nothing.

“Come on, it’s a little fascinating,” he pushed.

Ben intervened. “Come on. What’s significant about Ulysses? You know, for those of us who are apparently not nerdy enough to retain information?”

Nora sighed. “There was an Aryan Nations World Congress there. 2002.”

“Oh, shit,” Ben said, swiveling in his chair, a frown etching into his features. “But no one takes that shit seriously … right?”

Ford looked up. “Baker didn’t leave Ulysses for the region up here until 2003.”

“Three hours away,” said Chid, goading. “Three hours away from all that delicious ideology. Edible, digestible, delicioussssssss…”

“You think he met Kreis?” Nora asked Ford, ignoring Chid.

“August Kreis? I can’t think why not,” Ford answered. “What could be going on in Ulysses PA that was more interesting than August Kreis training the Aryan Nations?”

Nora considered this. “I can’t think of anything, frankly,” she said.

“Exactly,” said Chid and Ford together.

“Oh, that August Kreis,” Ben said. “The one who declared his support for—”

“Yes, well,” Nora said curtly. “We can’t all be enlightened voters. Some of us need guidance from neo-Nazis. I still don’t get it though. How anything those guys could say would stick with anyone. Anyone!”

Chid took a deep breath, thinking. “For many different reasons, not all of them the same for each person who thinks this way. One is the sense that their language is losing ground, one might be that they can’t put the nativity scene out at schools and courthouses. Another problem comes up when schools can’t start their kids’ day with prayer—and all of a sudden they feel challenged. Everything they assume about the world is thrown into jeopardy. You start asking questions about God and that’s it!” He snapped his fingers. “Everything unravels.”

Nora frowned, listening carefully.

“Anyone who attacks God is fair game. It’s always been that way.”

“What do you mean, attacking God?” asked Nora.

“I mean suggesting that God,” he paused to make air-quotes around the spoken word, “has a chosen people beyond the borders of your tribe, or suggesting that he communicates in a language other than yours, or that he has more than one way of being worshiped—or, worst of all, that he has rules about living life that are less strict than the ones you follow. This diminishes his power, right? If he isn’t almighty and all-powerful—if his power isn’t absolute, then what power does he really have?”

Nora pondered this, feeling how the breath entered and left her body as she listened to Chid’s voice.

“Anyway,” he continued. “Looks like Baker doesn’t have to cope with how Pennsylvania schools handle God—if they’re schooled at all they’re homeschooled. No registry anywhere.”

“Tried and true coping strategy,” murmured Derek.

“Taxpayer?” Ben inquired.

Ford tapped the keyboard of his laptop and looked nonplussed. “He’s been off the grid for some time now.”

“Where? The compound?”

“Maybe. Quite possibly his family has been holed up there with him. Part of the problem with storming in is all the possible kids. We can’t forget Waco, right?” Derek said this, his tone affirming the fact that he was the one at the table who brought it up the most and was forgetting it the least.

Nora looked at him, then dropped her eyes to her laptop unseeingly. “What does he have planned next?” she asked finally.

Chid sighed. “I think if I were running this revolution I’d do what militia in other states have done but only inelegantly,” he said finally.

Nora, Ben, and Ford looked at him.

Chid spread his hands wide as though it were obvious. “Occupy something!”

“Inelegantly?” pressed Nora.

“Well, large groups of men usually get snacky midway through a good occupation. It gets ugly,” Chid said. He and Ford started chuckling.

“What?” asked Nora.

Ford shook his head and looked back down at the screen.

“What?” she asked again.

Chid said conspiratorially, “When they appealed for food and supplies, we joined the movement sending sex toys to the Oregon militia, care of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.”

Nora and Ben glanced at each other, processing this, then burst out laughing in unison. Ford actually blushed. In that instant, Nora adopted the theory that he and Chid were together. That would be twice in one week she’d uncovered a romance around the conference room table. She started sneaking glances at the two men as they chewed their pizza.

Ford, eyeing the last slice, said, “This would be so much better with beer.”

Nora saw that as an obvious attempt to change the subject.

Ben grinned, winking at her. “Nothing like beer at dawn…”

The beer references brought the specter of Pete to the table. Nora frowned, leaning forward. “So what do we really know about Gabriel Baker?”

“Pretty normal guy,” said Chid.

“For a racist psychopath,” said Ben.

Chid shrugged. “Those are usually the scariest. The ones you don’t expect because they seem so normal. But the thing is, he has to be a very … well, a very…”

“What?” Ben demanded.

“Some of his discourse is just…”

Ben gave Nora a look. She shook her head. “Chid does this. We are learning to cope.”

“Okay, look, listen to what I mean. Where’s that webcast of his…”

Chid pushed the remote. The plasma screen TV sprang to life. Chid started jumping from minute to minute through the webcasts Baker had sent the press. He frowned hard at the screen, as though chastising it for not rendering up that which he sought.

Finally, he leaned forward. “Oooh, yes, here…”

Gabriel Baker stood, his back to a copse of trees. He wore an olive green T-shirt. He was tanned, with a neatly trimmed beard and searing blue eyes.

Nora listened carefully.

“And now it’s time to reach out. Not just to the patriots as we have done, but to the larger populace. It’s time to make America great again. It’s time to reclaim this country for its Christian heritage, its Christian values, its foundational vision.”

“He’s reading from a teleprompter,” Ben said.

“Yes, it looks like it,” Nora agreed.

“Shhh,” Chid said.

They looked at the screen and back at Chid.

“What?” asked Nora.

“The thing he just said, just now!”

Annoyed, he waved the remote, sliding the cursor backwards. “We cannot shy away from antinomianism if the laws are themselves perfidious and base.”

“See?” Chid asked.

“What? What’s that, antinomianism?” asked Nora.

“Exactly,” said Chid, crossing his arms and looking satisfied.

“What?” she said again, irritated.

“Well, it means freeing oneself from the necessity of obeying the law because the law is perceived as unnecessary, but the point is he mispronounced it.”

Nora blinked. “So?”

“So, if you’re writing a speech to present your views to planet earth, you would probably pick words you know.” He was making little karate chops into the palm of his hand for emphasis as he spoke.

Nora looked at Chid warily. “Okay…”

Chid leaned forward, tapping the remote against the table, black eyes flashing. He gestured with the hand that still held a crust of pizza. “Unless you are presenting someone else’s words.”

“Someone else? Someone like who?” asked Nora.

“Well, that’s the trick, isn’t it?” asked Chid.

Nora raised her eyebrows. “Apparently?”

“Yes, apparently, yes, definitely. So, the question is, from whence all these references to nineteenth-century German cultural elitism and from whence the reference to Wagner’s essays and from whence—”

“Yes, we get the picture. What’s your theory?” asked Ben.

“He’s got a handler,” Chid said, polishing off the last of his pizza crust. “He’s … a lackey. A pretty face. Maybe even a fall guy.”

They sat around the table digesting this.

“Do you think there’s a connection with the owner of the property out on the lake?”

“Well, yes, but we can’t find a real-life existence for him, can we?” Chid sighed. “The phantom Joseph Geyer. I mean, there are Joseph Geyers aplenty, but there is no logical connection to anything going on here. He doesn’t seem to own any other property in the area. A man without history.”

Nora thought about this at length, then asked slowly, “You guys have, what, four motorcycles now. Do they match?”

Ford nodded vigorously. “Only in that they’re pretty cheap. Not something you’d ride to a biker festival.”

“It’s a rally, not a festival,” Nora said.

“Yeah, Derek,” added Chid. “No maypoles here, man.”

Ford laughed. “I stand corrected.”

Silence fell. Nora realized she too needed her laptop, and so went to get it from her desk. She took a moment to pace among the maze of desks, muttering the name, “Geyer,” over and over and sounding slightly unhinged even to herself.

When she hadn’t returned in five minutes, Ben emerged from the conference room, looking for her. They fell into step together, skirting the clutter, then ended up by the bank of windows overlooking State Street.

She turned to him, saying, “I think we should go. I can’t stand this waiting. I want to be there.”

“Schacht asked us to hold off, asked us to work behind the scenes. CIRG is all about this stuff. We need to do exactly what we’re doing,” Ben said.

“Technically CIRG is all about this stuff, too,” she pointed out. She set her laptop down on a now-cluttered desk.

“Well, it’s all hands on deck then. But the fast-roping out of helicopters thing is not in my skill set.”

Nora sighed at him. “I knew you were too good to be true.”

They stood for a while in silence, looking down at the just-stirring city. A city bus rumbled by, mostly deserted. A few people made their way along the sidewalks in the half-light. Nora wondered how to get it back, how to trust the person across the street not to shoot you.

Ben seemed to sense this. “This isn’t real, Nora.”

“How can you say that?” she demanded. “Of course it’s real.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head, and sitting down on the window ledge. He looked thoughtfully out over the street. “This isn’t the normal. They want you to think that this is some majority way of thinking about the world. But it isn’t. Normal people don’t want this. Normal people don’t want pain and conflict and won’t choose it. Life’s hard enough.”

Nora listened, wanting to believe him. “I had a pretty strong belief that people are basically good, you know? And then I watched a woman shoot a little girl. Just, shot her. For no reason except that…” She had not yet cried, and hot tears were suddenly spilling from her eyes.

Ben watched her, and she could see his concern. She had never cried in front of him before, and she saw him trying to decide if he should pull her into his arms. He finally extended his hand and she clutched it hard.

“She was shot because she looks like me, Ben,” Nora whispered.

“Nora, it happens every day. Every single day,” he answered. “We know this. And so the sane people have to call the crazies back from the brink.”

“I hate how I feel about these people,” she said in the same wet whisper. “It makes me doubt everything I know. About God, about the balance of good and evil, about everything.”

Now he pulled her toward him, cupping her chignon in his hand, then sliding his fingertips along the length of her jaw, then brushing away her tears with his thumbs.

“They can’t really have understood what they’re doing, Nora. Don’t you get it? The messages they’ve gotten have dehumanized all their victims. This onslaught of racist webcasts and gun-show rhetoric and campaign slogans and AM radio fear-mongering … So they don’t even think of them as real people, just foils for whatever is wrong in their lives.…”

Nora was nodding. “And it’s just a game. Some kind of Xbox deal.” Nora wiped the palms of her hands over her wet cheeks.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s a game. And the more they play, the more they have to play.”

She sagged against him and let him carry her for a moment.

“We should go back in,” she murmured.

“We should,” he agreed. “Just … give us another minute to stand like this. Just one.”

They stood, still, silent. She had missed his breath in her hair and the expanse of his chest. She leaned against him, feeling the warmth emanating from him, and she decided she could pick what was real.

She planted a soft kiss on his cheek as they pulled apart, then she grabbed her laptop and they walked hand-in-hand back to the conference room. They disentwined their fingers as Ben pulled the door open.

She steeled herself.

Chid and Ford were talking together intently.

Her hopes rose. “Any word?” she asked.

Chid said, impatiently, “You know they’ll call us if there’s any change, Nora.”

But Special Agent Ford held Nora’s eyes, then turned to Chid. “Easy, man.” He looked back at Nora, “Ask as many times as you want. It’s fine.”

Noting a change in the way he was talking to her, she looked a question at him.

Ford said, “I lost my partner two years ago. Trying to round up some neo-Nazis in Montana. They left me this,” he pointed at his cheek. “Stephen wasn’t so lucky.”

Nora’s eyes darted from Derek to Chid and she found that Chid’s expression was complex; he managed to look chastened and grave simultaneously. It seemed clear, too, from the way Derek had said “Stephen” that Stephen had predated Chid as both partner and partner.

“So anyone with a partner on the line gets special consideration. It’s an actual rule,” Ford said firmly.

Nora looked gratefully at him.

“Thanks, Derek,” she said.

“No problem, Nora,” he answered, and she knew that he knew she’d put the pieces together.

“We interrupted you when we came in,” Ben said. “What did we miss?”

Chid let out a long sigh. “We were complaining about not being able to track their communications. Even just a typical email account would help, but we really have nothing. The webcasts, as we’ve said, are coming from these dynamic IP addresses and we need time—so much more time than we have here.”

Nora nodded. It was no time for Pete to be absent.

Ford said, “Look, it’s the essential problem of dealing with any terrorist organization at this point. It’s just too easy to encrypt anything, and we’ll never have the manpower we need to break every encrypted site in order to monitor what they’re saying to each other. So, say we’re talking about Al-Qaeda or ISIS—first, get me enough Arabic speakers, and there are never enough, then get me my code-breakers, and there are never enough of those either. By the time we break into one site, they’ve abandoned it and started up another with a whole new encryption.”

Ben said, “Okay, but we’re talking about a bunch of rednecks in the backwoods of northwest Pennsylvania.”

Ford replied, “Well, yes and no. Our militia organizations are not quite as tech savvy as the overseas terror groups. But their deep-seated conviction that the tyrannical U.S. Government is watching their every move has made them willing to do what it takes to set up very opaque communications webs. Ironically, they end up using most of the same technologies as the foreign groups they make so much noise about.”

Ben grinned at Nora and began ticking off on his fingers. “Beards, check. Head-coverings, check. Love of wearing camouflage, check. Love of the semiautomatic rifle, check…”

She joined in, leaning forward in her chair, “Absolute conviction, check. Absolute lack of education, check.”

Ford added, “Willingness to master the tech to get new recruits and keep the group up to date on goings-on, check.”

Nora gave Ford points for trying.

“So what are we left with?” asked Chid.

Ben answered, “An impenetrable web of angry people.”

Ford was nodding. “Short of torturing a password out of one of them, you can’t gain access to the site unless you sort through the layers of encryption.”

They sat in silence, each one thinking. Nora weighed the word torture and found it had chilled her. She felt slightly nauseous, loathing the militia, Goatee … what would she do to him to get information to save Pete? Or any other person on his list of Fourteen Acts?

She didn’t want to think it through. Chid was staring into space, tapping his pen against the table, swiveling left and right, left and right in his chair. Ben and Ford both had their laptops open, and each one had gone back to tapping on the respective keyboards.

Nora started to boot up her own laptop, then looked down at her gleaming new BlackBerry. She picked it up, running her index fingertip along its smooth edges. Suddenly she said, “Hey, what are they toting?”

“Hmm?” asked Ford. “What kind of weaponry?”

She shook her head. “What kind of smartphone?”

He narrowed his eyes in thought. Nora saw Ben and Chid were paying full attention.

She said, “I shot two women at the refugee center yesterday. Another one ran off the road and they took her to the hospital. She had no ID, nothing on her, so they listed her as Jane Doe. I assume we still have all their stuff.”

Ford was nodding. “We logged three bottom of the line motorcycles, three AR-15 semi-automatics, and three iPhones into evidence. You want to look at their phones?”

“We can break into a smartphone, Nora, but it takes a very long time,” Chid reminded her. “That’s what Ford was saying—”

“Chid,” she rejoined sharply. “I was listening. Unlike the BlackBerry, iPhones have fingerprint pads. Jane Doe is just in a coma—”

Ben’s eyes widened. With a broad grin he finished for her, “—and so is still in possession of a warm thumb!”

“If the phone didn’t get turned off or run out of battery…” Nora was saying, knowing she had to add that caveat, knowing they both knew it anyway. Still, she felt lighter, suddenly hope-filled. “Where, Derek? Where would it be?”

Ford had already pushed back his chair. “The portable stuff got hauled back here, and then just left because—” Ford strode out of the conference room, saying over his shoulder: “I think there was a box, you know—one of those cardboard boxes with the lids.…”

All three followed him. He scanned the room, then started pawing through the clutter. Nora watched, then asked, “Was Maggie here when you brought it in? She didn’t receive it from you?”

Ford was nodding, “No, that’s right—she was here, and I set it in her cubicle.…” He hastened his step and then uttered a, “Ha!”

He bent over a medium-sized box of sturdy cardboard. He squatted, tugging at the lid, and then pointed at three iPhones in plastic baggies.

Chid peered over his shoulder. “I like the camo case.”

Nora looked, too. “Better than the one with the Confederate flag?”

“Glittery pink for me,” said Ben.

Ford stood, his eyes bright. “They’re all still charged, though it’s pretty low. We’ll take them and try each one. Hospital?”

“Six blocks down,” Nora said, and with that they gathered their phones and badges, tucking their laptops into carrying cases. After bundling themselves back into their Kevlar, they all headed out the door at a jog. Nora was deeply grateful for something to do. She hoped against hope that her idea wasn’t foolish.

Anyway, it’s all we’ve got right now.

Pete, hang in there, man.…

“We’ll take my car,” she said.

“No way,” Ben said. “Nora’s gonna drive?”

She gave him look. “Only in a crisis.” She headed for the dusty Chevy Malibu which the Bureau had provided her.

“They always seem to evaluate your personality and then give you a vehicle that is the complete opposite,” Ben observed.

“You picked up on that, too?” asked Nora. “I thought I was the only one.”

“Federal conspiracy number nine-thousand-and-twelve,” Chid quipped. “They actually gave me a pickup truck.”

Ford said, “I thought you said it was only six blocks. We could just walk.”

Nora nodded, pleased to hear someone else suggest walking for once. “I did. But in case we need to head out somewhere straight from there.” She pulled the driver’s door open and climbed in. She, like Ben, slid her laptop under the seat; then she started the car.

They showed their badges to be allowed admittance with their firearms into the hospital. Chid and Ford’s laptops were allowed to pass through without being scanned once they’d established their credentials. The woman at the information desk of the ER looked harried. Her gray curls framed features that seemed to have solidified into a frown. It had been a very busy two days at Hamot Hospital indeed. She gave the be-suited foursome a gaze that said, Now what?

They all pulled out their badges again. Ford said, “You have a Jane Doe in intensive care, brought in yesterday.…”

She narrowed her eyes.

Nora volunteered, “Motorcycle crash, came in in a coma. She’ll have had some broken bones.… Late thirties maybe, early forties?”

The woman flared her nostrils at them, then looked down at the keyboard. She tapped slowly, deliberately, unmoved by the agents’ apparent urgency. She then took each badge in turn and entered information into the computer.

Nora fought for calm.

“Room 216-B,” said the woman, handing them “Visitor” stickers.

They all took off walking, Ben and Derek Ford in the lead. Nora sighed as she peeled the sticker and pressed it against her chest, falling into step next to Chid.

“It would be so much better if they left room for creativity,” Chid sniped. “Visitor. It doesn’t leave room for the multitude of possibilities.”

“I think the category of people coming to borrow a mostly-dead woman’s thumb isn’t going to come up.”

“It will when I rule the world,” Chid said. “Just you wait, Nora Khalil.”

“I can wait,” she said.

“Yes.” His eyes twinkled. Then he said, “You Egyptians have that…” he brought together the tips of all the fingers of his right hand, then shook it up and down in the traditional gesture, “that patience. ‘Patience is beautiful.’”

She shook her head. “You don’t quit,” she said.

“So. Be honest. How is it being an Arab in the Bureau at a time like this? It has to be pretty satisfying, right, watching all these white terrorists running amok for a change?”

Nora stopped dead. “How dare you?” she demanded loudly, pulling herself to her full height and advancing on him.

She realized that Ben and Derek had stopped and turned to see what was going on.

Chid looked particularly small as he took a couple of steps backwards. “Hey, I didn’t mean—”

“How dare you?” she said again, more softly this time, but no less contemptuously. The words crowding her mouth were so many and each was so dangerously anger-swollen that she couldn’t speak at all. She walked away, brushing by Ben and Derek and taking as quick a pace as she could without breaking into a run.

Room 216-B mercifully appeared, a glass-walled intensive care room, filled to the brim with pulsing machinery. She stopped and stared at the prone woman. Her light brown hair was fanned out on the pillow. A rainbow of bruises decorated the right side of her face. She looked to be around forty. Rays of fine lines emanated out from her eyes. Nora took several deep breaths, determined to focus.

Seconds later, Ben and Derek entered, with Chid not far behind.

Derek was still carrying the plastic baggies containing the three iPhones.

“You think she’s a righty or a lefty?” he asked.

“Whichever hand’s got slightly thicker fingers, thicker wrist, right?” said Ben.

Nora palpated each of the woman’s hands. She expected to feel revulsion, touching her so intimately. But the comatose woman’s flesh felt benign, warm. Grasping her hands in turn, Nora stared distractedly at the ribbons of veins.

“I feel like she’s a lefty, but I’m not sure…” Nora said.

“Is she old enough to have one of those pencil calluses?” Ford asked.

Nora found it on the middle finger of the left hand. She held up the hand and waved it at them. “Let’s do this.”

Ford fanned out the phones. “Camo, Old Stars and Bars, or Girly Glitter?”

They all peered at their choices and then at Jane Doe’s face.

“Girly Glitter,” Chid declared.

Ford pulled out the phone and clicked it to life. “The charge is low, but there.”

“If it’s the right one we’ll find a charger,” Ben assured him.

“Nora? You wanna do the honors?” Ford handed her the phone.

Nora looked at the screen. The lock screen photo was of a toddler in a bubble-filled bathtub—no possible indication as to the identity of the phone’s owner.

Nora picked up the woman’s hand and pressed the thumb on the small circular pad of the home button.

Nothing happened. Try again, mocked the phone. She looked up, meeting each of her colleagues’ eyes in turn.

“Try it one more time, for good measure?” suggested Ben.

“Okay, but it’s going to lock me out,” Nora said.

“Just try.”

She wasn’t breathing, she realized, and she took a deep breath. Pressing Jane Doe’s thumb once more against the thumb pad immediately called up the keypad. She shook her head. “No luck,” she murmured, handing the phone back to Ford.

Ford tucked the phone back into the baggie and handed it to Chid.

“Next candidate?” Derek asked.

“Camo,” Nora said firmly.

This time there was no mistaking it. The lock screen image was of the woman herself, happy, laughing, a tall man outlining her body with his own, draping a heavy arm around her shoulders. Each wore camouflage pants and white T-shirt. Matching rifles were propped next to them.

Nora shook her head as she gazed at them, then seized the woman’s thumb and pressed it on the home button. The lock screen photo faded instantly away.

Nora’s sharp intake of breath was all the confirmation they needed. All three men took a step forward to peer at what had been revealed.

The Telegram app had been left open.

“She’d been taking pictures of the massacre at the refugee center,” whispered Nora, feeling as though something within her had withered. “And posting them for the group to see it as it was going down.”

“Okay, be very careful,” Ford was saying. “We don’t want anything to shut that app.”

“Can you hit Never Lock in Settings?” asked Ben.

Ford nodded. “Yes. Good.”

Nora handed the phone carefully to him, and he and Chid bent over it, talking quickly. It wasn’t possible for all four of them to take in the requisite information from the small screen, so Ben and Nora sat back to let them work.

It was at this point that one of the Intensive Care nurses entered the room, her ponytail swinging, the V-neck top of her lavender scrubs stretched tightly across her ample chest. “Two visitors at a time, maximum,” she said. Then she looked at them curiously, particularly at Nora who was still sitting on the edge of Jane Doe’s bed. “What’s going on in here?” she asked, attempting to sound authoritative. Her nametag read, “Lauren.”

Ben stood, showing his badge. “Lauren, hi, we’re with the FBI and we are helping this patient cooperate with a terror investigation.” He pulled a card-holder from his pocket and handed her one of Schacht’s. “If you have any issues with how we are running this investigation you may feel free to phone my supervisor at this number.” He gave her a charming smile, then tapped Schacht’s business card.

Lauren took the card and gave them each a stern frown. “I need to take her vitals.”

“If you could come back in half an hour, that would be ideal,” said Ben, kindly but leaving no doubt as to how serious he was.

“I’m going to speak to the resident about this,” she threatened, turning to leave.

“Do that, Lauren. And please bring us back an iPhone 6 charger immediately.”

Nora smiled at Ben. “We do need to preserve Jane Doe’s life at this point, right? So there’s no harm in the nurse doing her nursey stuff.”

He shrugged, gesturing to Ford and Chid. “These two need to focus.”

Chid was bent intently over the screen, eyebrows knit together in concentration, raking his fingers through his hair every few seconds. He flipped open his laptop and began tapping furiously, then went back to peering at Jane Doe’s screen. Ford swiped carefully through the app, pausing when Chid said to pause, tapping on links that appeared.

“There’s about a hundred and fifty in the app’s private group,” Ford supplied.

“That’s not many,” Nora said, looking around. Chid still did not look up. “That’s not many, right?”

Ford shook his head vigorously. “But the public site it’s linking to, the site where Gabriel Baker has been posting his webcasts, now has fifty thousand members and counting.”

“Can you trace the IP address?”

“I can try, but it’s dynamic, too. I want to see if I email the link to myself from this phone if it will show up differently. I need my laptop and for one of you to hold this.”

He had been cradling the phone in his palm like some delicate preemie. Ben came and sat close to him. Chid kept pouncing furiously on his laptop, fingers flying, becoming visibly more agitated but refusing to speak to them.

“Check on the charger, will you Nora?” asked Ford, a note of concern in his voice.

“Right,” she said. She entered the hall and spied the nurse’s station.

“We desperately need an iPhone 6 charger, does anyone have one?” she asked, holding up her badge.

It was a nurse’s station full of carbon copies of Lauren; each looked at Nora as though she had requested a kidney.

“iPhone charger?” Nora said again, miming plugging a cord into the heel of her hand. She finally reached into her pocket, pulling out a crisp bill. “Ten bucks? I will pay to borrow your cord.”

The nurses exchanged quizzical looks.

Nora said, “Look, we’re just here in room 216-B. Federal agents. Working for the public good.”

One of the young women finally reached over and pulled her charger out of the wall and handed it to Nora.

“Thank you,” said Nora, proffering the ten bucks.

“Keep it,” she said, peering back at Nora from out of heavily lined cat-eyes and clumpy black lashes. “You have enough to deal with.”

“Thank you. I think.” Nora walked away, unsure whether she had meant she had enough to deal with because she was a federal agent or because she was not Lauren-esque in features and skin tone.

She returned to room 216-B and stuck the charger in the wall, then proffered its head to Ben who plunged it into Jane Doe’s phone without a word of thanks.

Nora looked at Ben, then at the two men. She sank into the chair next to Ben.

“These guys gonna deliver?” she asked him in a stage whisper.

“They’re good, Nora. Philly’s finest,” he said in the same fashion. He held her eyes and she could tell he wanted to ask her what had happened with Chid, but now was not the time.

She checked her watch and found it was after seven thirty. Fear for Pete was threatening to choke her. “Guys, we need to know their next move. What are you seeing?”

“One second,” said Chid, without looking up. “I think I’ve almost sorted it out.”

Nora rubbed her hands over her eyes.

Suddenly both Ford and Chid uttered the words, “Oh, no.”

“What?” demanded Ben and Nora as one, both rising.

“We have to go right now,” whispered Chid, his eyes wide, showing them the screen. “Right. Now.”

*   *   *

Nora fought for breath, unable to tear her eyes from the screen, paralyzed as the Patriots’ intended goal sunk in. Her memory paused in the hallway of the barn, where the drone of the television sounded, surreal, repetitive.

Together we can make America great again.…

And then all four agents were running through the hallway of the Intensive Care Unit. Ben was shouting into his phone as he ran, requesting every possible squad car, state trooper, border patrol, and emergency services vehicle, and shouting over and over the address he’d spied on the small screen.

Chid was calling Schacht, and Derek Ford was speaking rapid-fire with the director of the CIRG.

Nora cursed her car. “You have to drive,” she called to Ben.

“Come on, Nora—seriously?”

She shook her head fiercely. “You come on, man. Assume I’m still injured or something!”

She pressed the key into his hand and beelined for the passenger seat, yanking out the siren and plunking it down onto the roof as she swung herself into the car.

“We’re going to have a long talk about your driving skills,” he said, swearing under his breath as he started the engine.

As they turned onto the Bayfront Parkway, Ford said, still holding Jane Doe’s phone in his hand, “We’re on an intercept path? In a Chevy Malibu?”

Nora ignored him and glanced over at Ben. “We’ll be able to intercept them, maybe even beat them there,” she insisted. “There are only three roads that travel west to east.”

All four agents tilted their heads, listening for the sound of police sirens. Chid said, “There?”

Nora listened. “Yes—yes. They’re heading out.” She allowed herself to exhale a little, then called Maggie to get open lines for the officers answering the call.

Ben’s eyes darted from rearview mirror to road to side mirrors as he pushed harder on the accelerator.

“Turn left at the light then right on Twelfth,” Nora said.

It was rush hour; the east-west streets were dense with morning commuters heading into Erie from its sleepy suburbs.

Ford settled deeper into his seat, his index finger sliding along the phone’s screen. Ford held the phone carefully. The nurse’s charger dangled like an umbilical cord running to the car’s USB port. “Here’s the thing. I think he’s set it up like a game. Like a … like a scavenger hunt or something.”

Nora whipped around in her seat, eyeing him.

He met her eyes, looking grim. “You can’t unlock the next activity until the one before it is finished. There’s like a countdown clock. It says, Eleven minutes until Act One.”

“Well, it’s good entertainment, right? It’ll keep the members glued to the screen,” Chid said.

“It’ll take us a solid fifteen minutes to get to Fairview from here.”

Ben shook his head. “Nah, the Malibu will deliver.” For emphasis, he pressed his foot against the pedal and Nora watched the needle creep higher on the speedometer’s dial.

A call came in from a number Nora didn’t recognize. “Hello?”

“Mike Szymanowski,” a voice said. “Your office said we could find out from you why we are speeding across the county on an intercept mission to Porter Farms in Fairview.”

Nora said, “We have reason to believe that this Patriot group intends to harm a group of migrant laborers there. They posted that they’re going to round them up and burn down the barn. It’s going to be a statement against giving work to illegal aliens.”

Mike Szymanowski was silent on the other end of the line.

“Mike?” she asked.

“What the fuck?” he said, finally.

“I know. The post said there will be five Patriots. So, unless they’ve changed tactics overnight, we’re looking for motorcycles—bikers carrying semiautomatic rifles and/or big saddle bags. Big enough for rifles and probably portable gasoline tanks—maybe another fertilizer bomb.”

Derek Ford leaned forward. “Maybe a sidecar kinda deal.”

Nora repeated this into the phone.

She heard Mike Szymanowski say, “We can shoot them on sight?”

She could tell he wasn’t joking, and, after yesterday, shooting them on sight was her most ardent desire. She took a jagged breath. “Let’s just make sure they don’t get to Porter Farms, and then hopefully they’ll resist arrest.”

Nora ended the call, hearing the distant sirens echoing the one on her car.

“Maybe the sirens will scare them off,” Ben said.

Nora shook her head. “I think they have to finish their mission, whatever the cost.”

“That’s really stupid.”

“It’s a production,” Chid said, not looking up. “Show must go on. They have viewers. Getting martyred or arrested will just stoke the flames.”

Ford said, “The whole app here is designed so that we can’t figure out what comes next until the last minute. Well, it looks like, from the previous ones, that it was somewhere between thirty and forty minutes prior.…”

Chid gave a bitter laugh. “It’s intermission. Thirty minutes. Maximum forty, so you can stretch your legs and then get some champagne.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Nora said, feeling queasy.

“But someone has to know, right?” Ben said. “Some elite group, some inner circle will have the whole plan.”

Ford was nodding. “If we assume that Jane Doe was one of the insiders, let’s see her last few calls.”

Ford carefully placed the phone on the seat, and Nora watched as each man brought one of his knees closer in order to hold the phone in place between them. Ford began tapping on his laptop’s keyboard, plugging in the numbers for the recent calls into the database. None of the numbers had been labeled with names.

Ford looked at Chid. “Call them or just look them up?”

“Ummm, no, you want to find who’s being billed. Follow the money,” Chid said.

At the risk of distracting them, Nora found herself asking, “Chid, you found something when you were at the hospital. You were concentrating hard as you looked through the app.” They all braced themselves as Ben swerved to avoid an oncoming car that had not been deterred by Nora’s siren.

“Yes,” he said. “We were right. Baker is the face of this operation. In the inner circle there are multiple posts by this Geyer guy.”

“Geyer, the phantom landowner. The one who doesn’t exist otherwise?”

“Exactly,” said Chid. “For example…” He leaned over the phone and carefully swiped into the app again, then read aloud:

The federal oppressors think they can stop us, further sullying their hands with our pure blood. They do not know that the movement has taken on a life of its own. The spirit of rebellion has spread. The call to action has been heeded. There is no stopping, there is no end in sight. Continue, brothers and sisters, with the agreed upon plan of action.

Fourteen Acts: the beginning of a global revolution.

Chid continued, “Baker also posts, clearly deferring to Geyer and his plans to prevent white genocide.”

“Diversity is white genocide,” murmured Nora, recalling the slogan.

“There’s a real inconsistency in tone, in vocabulary…” Chid was saying.

“Is this Geyer the missing piece then?” Ford was saying, looking up from his screen.

Chid nodded. “I think so. It just hasn’t made sense, you know?”

Nora was nodding, even as she cringed from another near miss Ben made. “I never felt like Gabriel Baker was quite right. Maybe for the brawn, but not the brain.”

“Well, finding a phantom villain doesn’t help us any more than having an unqualified villain,” Ben pointed out, skirting a cluster of three motorcyclists. All four agents peered at them, Ben almost running into the curb as he did so. Two men and a wiry woman all sat at ease on large black Harleys. They were thin, deeply tanned, and all pushing seventy. It seemed strange that they were up riding about so early, and so Nora continued to peer at them, craning her neck even after they’d passed.

“Too old?” Nora asked.

Ford noted, “And no weaponry. No saddlebags for rifles.”

“Right.” Nora ceased peering out of the windows. “So. Geyer?”

“Well, unless I’m mistaken, it’s just one more indication that we have a Wagner fan on our hands,” said Chid.

“He’s a character from one of the operas?”

Chid shook his head. “It was the name of Wagner’s stepfather. Richard himself went by the surname of Geyer until his teens.”

“Christ. Who’s got time for this much esoterica?” Ben demanded.

“Clearly whoever’s running this revolution, man,” Chid responded rather testily.

“So how do we find him?” Nora asked.

Chid was silent, shaking his head. “He may well be out at the compound, surrounded by helicopters and hostage negotiators.”

Nora considered the boat that had taken her to the compound. “Or on his way to Canada?”

“Maybe,” Chid admitted.

“Or … back up the tunnel and now just walking around the city. Do you think that tunnel was really for the Underground Railroad?”

Chid frowned and began tapping the keyboard. “Nope.”

“Why else would you need a tunnel under the city if you don’t have a subway?” asked Nora.

Chid looked up. “Tell me the cross streets again, where that house was with the tunnel?”

“Peach and Twenty-first,” Nora answered.

Thoughtfully, Chid tilted his head, scrolling down the screen. “You said there were tracks?”

“Small tracks, not big enough for a train or anything,” Nora supplied.

He nodded. “Prohibition,” he said at last.

Even Ford broke his pursuit of Jane Doe’s phone directory to look over at him questioningly. “Prohibition?” he asked.

“There’s an old brewery at State and Twenty-first,” he said. “Used to produce Eisernes Kreuz Beer. Iron Cross. Popular—I will give the populace the benefit of the doubt and assume they did not know the significance of the Iron Cross for fascist Germany.”

Nora nodded knowingly. “That’s Pete’s thing. Artisan beer. He’s all about unique local flavor. Fascism—not so much.”

“Well, they no longer produce it here at all. That label was acquired by Anheuser Busch.”

“But you said Prohibition,” prodded Ford.

“Back in the day, the Eisernes Kreuz folks didn’t agree with the government’s decision to help Americans curb their alcohol habit. So they continued to produce the beer clandestinely, and ship it out through the bay to like-minded consumers,” Chid said.

Ford winked at Nora. “Sometimes the government just makes bad decisions.…”

Nora tried in vain to formulate a defense of such relativism that wouldn’t render her existence as a law enforcement agent moot. Unable to do so, she stared at the landscape. They had left the city well behind. The car’s GPS showed they were a quarter mile from the farm, and the distance was being swallowed fast.

They all saw the cloud of dust hovering over the farm’s gravel driveway.

They had not intercepted the Patriots.

*   *   *

Nora was immediately calling Mike Szymanowski—“Bikers at the farm, Mike—we need immediate backup!”

The bikers had already descended and Nora watched in horror as they started walking and taking aim with the rifles in their hands. A handful of workers began to scatter at the sight, several of them running toward a large green barn set well back from Route 5.

Ben, fingers clenched on the wheel, accelerated into the turn, the car skidding over the gravel.

“Megaphone them—tell them to desist!” called Ford, pocketing the iPhone and then tucking his laptop into the seat pocket in front of him; Chid followed suit. Each pulled out his gun.

“There’s no megaphone, man—” Nora shouted.

Ford had already rolled down his window. “Federal agents!”

Nora whirled despite herself, impressed with the volume he mustered.

Two of the bikers leapt back onto their motorcycles, gunning the engines.

“You three, out, now, after the shooters—I’ll follow the bikes!” shouted Ben.

Nora, Ford, and Chid leapt from the car in a clatter of slamming doors and began racing across the wide gravel driveway. They followed the two men and one woman who, as they walked, peered through the sights of their rifles. Nora watched the woman advance, her long braid trailing down her back and swinging slowly as she walked. The men both wore black leather vests over T-shirts. Each of the three seemed to be utterly oblivious to the agents pursuing them.

Nora’s breath was coming hard and fast. She saw the man in point position of the trio taking aim at a slight woman in frayed blue jeans and a worn Pittsburgh Steelers T-shirt. The woman, her face flushed with fear, was running, and the barrel of the rifle seemed to follow her movements.

“Put the rifle down!” Nora cried, just as Derek Ford yelled again for all three to stop: “Federal Agents! Put your hands in the air!”

But these words just seemed to enhance the man’s focus. He did not look backwards, only paused in his striding. Nora saw him take careful aim.

“I’ve got the leader,” Chid said, his voice tense. All three agents were jogging in a brisk parallel formation and closing in carefully on the Patriots.

Chid depressed the trigger of his Glock, aiming for the man’s right shoulder. He fired twice in rapid succession and watched in satisfaction as the rifle fell to the ground, followed by the man himself.

Sirens announced two squad cars, but there was no time even to turn to look. The other two in the group had not stopped advancing on the barn and the scattering workers. Derek glanced over at Nora. “The more we shoot, the fewer we have to interrogate,” he said.

Nora nodded. Without further conversation, Derek and Nora launched themselves at the bikers. In a running slide, Nora careened into the woman’s legs, knocking them out from under her. The crack of the rifle she was holding resounded above the commotion as both women began flailing on the ground.

The woman’s face contorted in fury. She launched a punch at Nora, who averted her already bruised cheek and slammed the woman’s wrist to the ground. Nora maneuvered both her knees on top of the woman’s thighs and then slammed the other wrist to the ground; she was pinned, sprawled beneath her, but arching her back as she writhed, struggling.

“Rather indelicate position there,” Chid said, appearing with handcuffs and grinning at her. “But effective.”

“No one said it had to be pretty,” Nora said.

She looked over to where Derek, now aided by one of the cops who’d arrived on the scene, had flipped the large man he’d subdued onto his belly in the dirt. They exchanged a look and an exhalation. Derek surrendered his charge to the cop, then rose, dusting himself off.

“Ben?” she asked Chid.

“In pursuit,” he answered, and, as Derek joined them, they all looked together over the wide expanse of fields beyond the barn. Even the woman Nora pinned swiveled her neck to look.

Nora saw that her Chevy was bumping over the field, pursuing the other biker, a tall, thin man who was bent over his handlebars. Nora gave him credit for being able to control the bike on such uneven terrain; the furrows in the earth were deep and the bike seemed to be aloft rather more than its wheels were connecting with the ground. Their trajectory was bringing them back toward the barn. Perhaps the motorcyclist hoped to regain the pavement and flee on Route 5.

Seeing this, Derek Ford took off running toward them.

Nora, still immobilizing her squirming, cursing catch, watched carefully as Derek ran at an impressive speed toward Ben and the biker. As he ran, he raised his gun.

It was only a moment before she heard the crack of his Glock. He waited a long moment and then sent off two more bullets in rapid succession. The third bullet met its mark and suddenly the bike began to spin uncontrollably.

Its rider tumbled onto the ground and the bike, still spinning, at last came to rest, pinioning him beneath it.

Nora allowed the officers on the scene to take the now-handcuffed woman. She and Chid jogged over to Derek. “Hey, Speedy,” she said. “Nice shot.”

Derek shrugged, accepting an understated pat on the back from Chid and then leaning slightly against him as he caught his breath.

Nora grinned at them. “I’m going to go catch up with Ben.”

She picked her way across the field toward her car. Ben had emerged from the driver’s seat and gone to stand over the biker, his gun pointed at him.

The biker was alive. Nora, gun drawn, gave Ben a nod and then got as close as she could, so close that she could feel the heat still rising from the prone motorcycle.

She peered more closely. She was relatively certain that the weight of the motorcycle had already broken one or two of his ribs. But she made no move to alleviate the pressure. She stood over him, pointing the gun, staring at him.

The man looked up at Nora and Ben. His hard eyes were focused and clear. Nora looked at him curiously. “Did you really intend to kill all these people?”

The man only smirked at them. “I don’t gotta tell you nothin’,” he spewed, his contempt for them swimming in his eyes.

Ben said, “No, you certainly don’t.”

Nora spied a tattoo on the man’s neck below his left ear. It was a circle with a squat cross dissecting it. She remembered it as a white power symbol.

Ben and Nora holstered their weapons and then heaved the bike off of the man.

As soon as the bike hit the ground, both of them leapt on him, flipping him over, and cinching his thick wrists together. Ben cuffed him, patted him down, extracting his iPhone, and they rolled him onto his back again.

“Wallet? I.D.?” asked Nora.

Ben shook his head. “Neither.”

Nora bent over the man, eyes flashing. “What’s next? What are you planning next?”

“I have the right to remain silent,” he answered with narrowed eyes.

She could tell he was hurting but did not want to admit it. She walked the opposite direction, trying to calm herself. She laced her fingers behind her head. Nearer the barn, Szymanowski’s car had a gathering of officers about it. He and his partner had apparently stopped the other biker.

She watched, transfixed for a moment, then leaned against the passenger door of her car.

Ben crossed over to her. “You okay?”

She shrugged. “If okay means I’m glad we headed off a massacre, then yes.”

“You hurt?”

Nora considered. “Grateful for long sleeves or all that gravel would have messed me up. But I’m fine.”

Ben regarded her carefully, seeming to need visible proof she was indeed fine. “It’s been awhile since we made an arrest together, huh?”

Nora’s memory stretched back to a Philadelphia crack house and sprinting after Rita Ross and … she couldn’t remember the other name. “It’s prettier here,” she said.

Ben looked around at the wide expanses of strawberry plants and the blue lake beyond them. “That it is,” he confirmed. Several more squad cars were barreling along Route 5, scrambling belatedly into the parking lot.

Nora watched them come. She clutched at Ben’s forearm, slick with sweat, the sandy hair matted against the skin. She looked over at the man sprawled on the lawn. He wasn’t even attempting to come to a sitting position. “Ben, I’m starting to worry about how this is making me feel. I am so angry at that man there. I was really sorry Derek didn’t kill him. I’ve never wanted to kill someone out of anger. Since this whole thing started, it’s awakened something really ugly in me.”

She looked at him imploringly, as though hoping he had a quick cure to offer. He only shook his head. “Nora, this is probably not the worst thing you’re ever going to see with this job, amazingly enough. That you are worried about its effects on you is a million points in your favor. If you weren’t worried about it … then you should worry,” he said. He stretched his arm out and draped it across her shoulders. She allowed herself to rest against him for a few moments.

From where they stood it seemed that a representative from Porter Farms was deep in conversation with Chid and Ford. There was a lot of gesturing going on. Another wave of relief washed over Nora as she imagined how this morning could have ended. She felt so much gratitude to Jane Doe for having lent them her thumb.

Then her gaze fell on Mike Szymanowski’s squad car.

“I should check in with Mike,” she said.

“Yes. Thank him. I could never have chased them both down. They immediately diverged so I just picked this guy.” He nodded toward the biker who panted amidst mangled strawberry plants. “Tell him I said thanks.”

Nora kissed him quickly on the cheek. “I will. I’m glad you’re safe,” she said.

“I’m glad you’re safe,” he answered, with a crooked smile that made her wish they could take a few moments longer.

She walked toward Szymanowski’s squad car. “Mike!” she called.

Mike Szymanowski raised his head. She saw him steel himself for another confrontation with her.

“Hey. Good work,” she said.

“I hit her with the car,” he said. “Not. Actually. Good. Work.”

Mike’s partner walked over. His face was flushed from the pursuit; his chest heaved slightly. He looked at Nora rather defensively, as though perhaps expecting her to chastise them for running over a suspect. The embroidery on his chest spelled out Hegel.

“Thanks for your help on this,” she said to both of them. “We couldn’t have done it without you,” she added.

Mike Szymanowski gave her a rather leery stare, and then nodded. “Yeah, you too,” he said. “We’re not gonna be able to book them until we get them some medical care, though. I called EMS.”

She nodded to them. “We’re waiting, we understand,” Nora said.

Two police officers were walking alongside the woman with the braid; each held one of her arms. Her face was no less fierce or determined, it seemed to Nora, who took a long moment to stare at her. A long gash had opened on the woman’s forehead and was dripping blood down the left side of her face. Nora realized she herself had probably caused it while subduing the woman on the gravel driveway.

Chid motioned to her and she joined the small group by the barn. Derek Ford was deep in conversation with a worker, and Nora was surprised to hear him speaking fluent Spanish as he jotted things into his notebook. She tilted her head, watching him, impressed, and almost forgot that Chid was trying to introduce her.

“Frank Porter,” Chid was saying, gesturing to the tall man next to him. He had a shock of thick gray hair and sun-scorched features. Deep wrinkles traveled along his cheeks and creased about his eyes. He wore faded jeans and heavy boots. Chid finished the introduction: “Special Agent Khalil.”

Frank Porter extended his hand. Nora found the hand was lifetime-of-farming rough but also warm and strong. She felt steadied.

Porter said, “Seems like y’all prevented a crisis today. We’re grateful. My people here are grateful.”

By people she assumed he meant the group of migrant workers milling around the barn. Her eyes found the woman in the Steelers T-shirt. Their gazes locked for a long moment. Nora cursed herself for having been so dismissive of Spanish class in high school. She wanted to ask the woman about conditions on the farm and about her journey to Erie—of all places. What had made her leave her home.… And were her children waiting for her to return.…

She found she didn’t really know what to say to Frank Porter. She could only muster a tired smile. “We’re happy to have been able to help.” She looked at Chid and again at Derek. “I’m worried about Act Two,” she said under her breath to Chid.

He nodded. “I’ll extract Derek.”

Nora felt desperate for a place to sit down and found herself leaning on the nearest squad car. Chid and Ford soon joined her, the latter holding Jane Doe’s phone aloft.

Nora looked at the phone in concern. “It’s still open, working, after all the commotion?”

He nodded. “It’s going to need to charge soon. But it’s working.”

“What’s going on then?” She wished desperately that EMS would arrive and they could process the bikers. Until then they were mired there on the farm. Her thoughts went to Pete at the compound.

Ford looked at the screen and then back at them, his face grave. “I think we just poked a bear.”

“By not letting Act One go down as planned?” Nora asked.

Chid was nodding. “Of course. Of course this will make him crazy.”

“Crazier,” Derek said.

“What? What’s happening?” Nora demanded.

“You’re not going to like it,” Ford said grimly.

“Of course I’m not,” Nora retorted. “Go.”

“There will be a live webcast showing an execution.”

Nora snatched the phone out of his hand, making Derek Ford flinch. There was a PowerPoint slide that read, Second Day, Act Two, Execution of the Enemy.

“I guess that’s what they thought would get us there in force,” Chid was saying.

“What’s that mean?” she asked them.

Chid shook his head. “Is it one enemy or a collective use of the term enemy, so meaning both of them? Or all of us?”

Nora felt faint, and she returned the phone to Ford’s hand.

He added, “There’s an invitation to watch on live feed for all members of the group all across the country.”

“Enemy. Enemy … which enemy?” Nora asked. “Pete? April?”

Derek shook his head again. “Impossible to tell. It might be someone new.”

“Is it a reaction to what just happened or something new? Some new person taken hostage?”

Derek shook his head again. “Impossible to tell,” he repeated maddeningly.

“How much time? And don’t say impossible to tell.”

“No, that part’s clear.” Ford nodded at the small screen. “Twenty minutes.”

Nora gaped and actually turned around in a circle. Then she said, “Can you send the link to Anna?”

Ford nodded, tapping on the screen. “I’m doing it now; I also sent it to Sanchez—Hostage Rescue Team. But I still don’t think they can get access.”

Nora ran over to where Ben was still standing over Tattoo-Neck. “We have to streamline this. We have to go. We have to get to Pete and April,” she said, panting.

He looked a question at her and she filled him in.

“Call your boss,” he said simply.

“But—”

“Call her.”

Nora looked at him, her chest rising and falling, then she cast an angry glance at the handcuffed biker. Reluctantly, she punched in Sheila’s number.

“Sheila, you heard from Ford? Anna told you what’s going on?”

“Nora, finish processing the people you’ve just picked up. CIRG is on deck here, they’re doing everything they can.”

“Sheila, it really looks like the hostages are in mortal danger—”

“Nora, did you wrap things up out there? You know how the AUSA is about details.”

“But I think that—”

“I’ll expect a full report,” Sheila said. The line disconnected.

Nora looked at Ben despondently.

He shrugged. “Okay, then. You did your best. She isn’t hearing you.”

“But Pete—”

“Even if you drove like a bat out of hell, which is inconceivable for you, we would not get there before twenty minutes—or now, fifteen—is up. It’s not possible. We are spectators for this one, Nora, I’m sorry. Now, open your car door and start filling out the arrest forms for the lady with the braid. Explain why you kicked her legs out from under her so that your alternate viewpoint is there when she alleges police brutality.”

She groaned, feeling like a recalcitrant teenager, and yanked open the door to her car. She tugged her laptop out from under the seat and switched it on. “I hate this job so much,” she said.

“You do not,” Ben corrected. “You hate rules and paperwork. Which makes you one of the good guys.”

Nora considered this, darkly and grudgingly, as she called up the necessary forms. Occasionally she shot a glance over toward Chid and Derek who seemed to be pulling themselves away from the crowd at the barn little by little.

As she filled out the forms, she realized that Derek’s ability to take the stories of the migrant workers was an immeasurable service. None of them could really talk to a news crew without risking exposure. Maybe Derek’s small interviews would be their one chance to talk to someone in authority about the day the white folks came to kill them.

Nora tapped reluctantly on the keyboard.

“I need my computer,” Ford said, as both he and Chid entered the car. Soon enough they were bent over their keyboards, tapping furiously.

Nora soon had her report filled out and filed, then, anxiously, she got out of the car and paced next to Chid’s open door, watching the EMS techs confer with the police. There were now six squad cars in front of the barn and she saw that a press van was attempting to enter the driveway, only to be deterred by a police officer.

She listened to the tapping on the keyboard and tried to regulate her breathing. Each man would have a burst of activity and then thump the Enter key. Nora started using this as her cue to inhale deeply.

My brain is so foggy.…

“Make them wrap it up faster,” she said to Ben.

“I’ll see if I can hurry it along.” He walked over to speak to the officers. She saw him motioning to the man they had cuffed, asking them to take him into temporary custody until federal agents could do so. They could not afford to divert their one vehicle for that purpose at this point. Next, Ben engaged in conversation with the EMS techs. Again he gestured toward the man in the field.

The morning heat became intense. Nora felt sweat dripping all along her back and pooling under her arms. She wanted to wriggle out of the blazer and, more so, out of the Kevlar that was pressed against her skin. She sighed.

She paused in her pacing to look hard at Chid. “Okay. So.”

He turned his head to return her gaze.

“Yes, Nora?” He looked harried and rather like he didn’t want to talk to her at all.

“How many Acts today?” she asked.

His face was grave. “Siegfried. Three Acts.”

“Who’s Siegfried?” she asked.

“Eponymous hero of the third opera in the cycle,” Chid answered. “The boy too stupid to have fear. He learns fear when he learns to love.” Chid looked at Nora trying to assess her reception of this. “I can say more.…”

“Yeah, that’s plenty,” she said, irritated.

Chid demurred.

“Would executing Pete and April Lewis be one act or two?”

“I don’t know,” Chid answered, his eyes bleak.

“Well what is it in the opera?” demanded Nora.

“Look,” Chid said, barely masking impatience once again. “Wagner himself only barely paid homage to the Norse tales that shaped the Ring. For expediency’s sake, this guy is going to shape this story however he likes. He already has.”

She frowned at him, then looked away, frustrated. Finally she asked, “How does it end, Chid? I mean, you said this guy Wotan burned down the house of the gods. He was a god, right?”

Chid nodded. “Comic book fans might recognize him as Odin.”

“So he died, then? When Valhalla burned?”

Chid drew in a long breath and withdrew his fingers from the laptop. “It was all predicted, as any good tragedy is. So Wotan was originally content to die thinking that Siegfried would take over. Metaphorically…” He gestured loosely to the handcuffed Patriot and the barn beyond. “Perhaps we can look at all these legions as Siegfried. Though it would be more convenient to find Wotan a grandson. Baker, maybe? Siegfried was the product of an incestuous union.”

“White militias and incest. Shouldn’t be hard,” Ford chimed in. He had reconnected the iPhone to the nameless nurse’s charger.

“Again, though, you’re taking it too literally,” Chid insisted. “It’s a ridiculous story. Geyer’s not going to take it blow-by-blow. He’s using it as a vessel.”

“Ugh, then why bother?” Nora said, frustrated.

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out here,” retorted Chid, losing his cool and raising his voice. “It would really help if we could find the actual person who’s calling himself Geyer. I don’t think we can fully sort out his intent til then.”

“Just give us a second, Nora,” Derek Ford said softly. “There are a lot of posts coming in about the barn and not all of them are positive. There might be a break in the ranks going on.… I’m trying to monitor.…”

Chastened, Nora began texting Anna. Any word?

—CIRG asst dir has Enhanced SWAT at the ready. HRT continuing to try to talk to Baker.

Nora sighed and darkened the screen.

The waiting was almost more than she could bear.

Ben walked over. “I need counter-signatures, here, here, and here,” he said.

Nora shook her head, disgusted. “There’s just no time for this.…”

Ben was starting to lose patience. “Look, I get how worked up you are. I would be, too. But you can’t forget that if we don’t process these guys right, there’s a chance that they could walk away. We have to do it by the book, Nora. You know this. It’s all we’ve got to ensure that a little justice comes out of this.”

Nora listened and then signed without looking at him. Finally she turned her eyes on him. “I’m sorry, I’m being a brat, I know.”

“No, you’re just being a loyal friend. But at some point you have to realize that there’s productive and non-productive behavior. There are twenty people out at that compound, Nora. Trust them to handle it.”

Ford said, “Whether they are or not, the live feed just came on.”

They all clustered around the screen, Nora and Ben peering in from either open door of the car, squinting to discern the action.

Gabriel Baker appeared, and Nora instantly recognized the inside of the barn where she had been held. It was hard to divine from the camera angle how many people were in the room. The camera’s main focus was on Baker himself. Others who appeared had their backs toward the camera, faces turned toward their leader. Nora saw rifles on their shoulders and open-carry holsters at their sides. Some milled about, blurs of camouflage and cold gray metal.

Baker wore a pistol in a holster and a navy polo shirt, unbuttoned to expose the curl of his pale blond chest hair. Nora stared at the wedding ring on his finger and found herself wondering who the woman could be, and how they spoke to each other, and what it was like to interact with … defer to?… a man like Gabriel Baker. Did she live in fear of him? Did he live in fear, like Pete said, and the guns were the only sense of power he could retain?

Baker cleared his throat, then raised his hands for silence.

Friends, we are at a crossroads. I have issued a call, inviting my brothers and sisters in the militia movement to share with us in this moment, to share in our revolution, to go forward hand in hand.

Today our soldiers went to fight the cause of illegal immigration at the front, the cause that, more than any other, is dragging our country down into perdition. Our soldiers went to begin to reclaim our country for its citizens but they were thwarted by the forces of the federal government. Typical. Typical that the feds will protect illegals over our own people.

I say, there is no place for fear unless we are fearing the enemies at the gates, the enemies of our traditions and cultures.

No more.

We are forging ahead, setting up a model for action, definitive, sure, irreversible action in which citizens are no longer passive victims. No, this is a model for strong, independent citizens, lemmings no more, violated no longer by a system that caters only to the elite, to the New York liberals, to the Washington insiders, the compromisers, those who placate, those who surrender, and those who would take our guns in order to take our tomorrows.

Thunderous applause went up from the spectators.

The camera zoomed in on Baker who was smiling widely, exhibiting strong, even teeth.

I say—and please pay attention now—we have promised you Fourteen Acts that will shake this corrupt system to its foundations. We do this so that it can fall and then rise anew out of the ashes of sin, cleansed by fire. We have promised you Fourteen Acts that will shame this nation into realizing how far astray it has gone.

Now. We took this negro into custody.

The crowd shifted, murmuring, as April Lewis was led into the room. The same pink tunic Nora remembered was now far dirtier, and Nora was aghast to see blood stains on it. April’s face was battered. One eye was nearly swollen shut.

We have been helping her to find humility. She came to us pompous and cocky. She was presuming to rule over whites, forgetting her rightful place, forgetting the mud out of which she rose.

He turned his attention on her. You want to lead, girl? You want to wear this mass of dreadlocks into the halls of power? When you should be cooking my meals, working my fields? The man who propelled her from behind now was attempting to force her onto her knees. But April Lewis was not going quietly.

With shaking hands, Nora called Anna. “They’re in the barn, Anna—the furthest west of the three. Anna, they’ve got April Lewis, they’re going to kill her—tell Schacht, tell Sheila—you’ve got to send the SWAT in, you’ve got to!”

Despite the fact that April Lewis was not bowing before him, Baker attempted to continue his speech. His smile was slightly less assured, though, as he tried to keep the microphone from picking up on her furious comments.

Others fear you, Baker was saying. I do not. Others will defer to you. I will not. I know where I come from, and I know my role. And my role is to make sure that there are no more like you, rising from the mud to pretend to be other than what they are—

It was at that point that April Lewis spat directly into his face.

Without another word, Gabriel Baker wrenched the pistol from its holster, held it to her forehead, and fired.

*   *   *

Nora screamed, and Ben, Chid, and Ford shouted in protest. From among the strawberry plants, the tattoo-necked biker laughed derisively.

“He killed her, he killed her!” Nora screamed again, feeling a hair’s length from devolving into hysterics.

Ben came around behind the car and clutched her by the shoulders. “Easy, easy, you have to stop screaming! Breathe! Breathe!”

Nora looked desperately at him and then sank into him, sobbing. “We saw it. We didn’t stop it. We just watched. Ben, we just watched.…”

“There’s nothing we could have done, Nora. Nothing. There’s nothing we could have done, I swear.” Ben held her hard, the palm of his hand open fully around her head, pressing her head to his chest.

But Nora pulled her head away from him, unable to keep from looking at the screen despite the tears crowding her eyes.

She saw that the cameraman had chosen to zoom in on Baker. Nora wondered at the move, trying from a distant corner of her own fear to analyze it. Would the sight of April Lewis’s corpse gushing life onto the floor of the barn disgust and thus repel the viewers? Or would it incite Baker’s followers to engage in activities other than those he had so carefully planned out for them?

Chid seemed clearly to be thinking the same thing. He looked at Nora, his gaze heavy. “I think Pete, like it or not, will now be the day’s Act Three. It will need to be much more dramatic than originally intended. Baker inadvertently showed weakness. They will have to engineer his execution from a point of indisputable strength.”

“Do you think they’re cleaning up?” asked Ford.

Chid nodded. “Wouldn’t you? A little? Before staging the next one? Maybe there’ll be a change of venue even.”

Nora felt bile rise in her throat. Ben held her gaze, centering her.

Ford said, “For now, though, there doesn’t seem to be anything happening. They’re running a feed of PowerPoint slides of people training and, you know, these white power slogans.” He lowered the phone and they all moved back, taking some space.

She sank her fingers into the flesh of Ben’s arm. “Ben, we’ve got to wrap this up and get out of here.”

He nodded, his green eyes wide, and took the paperwork he had brought from EMS and started jogging it back to the ambulances.

Derek Ford watched her carefully. “Are you alright, Nora?”

Nora looked at him and at the cell phone in his hand. She thought of April Lewis, flirting with Pete and teasing them for being “spectacularly bad” at rescue efforts. She shook her head. “No. We have to go. Now.” She opened the door of her car and sank into the passenger seat, then gestured at Tattoo-Neck. “Derek, please, you and Chid get this.…” Words failed her. “Please just get him into the back of a squad car and let’s go.”

Both men exchanged glances and then stood up and complied with her request, Derek unplugging the iPhone and tucking it carefully into his pocket. She spied the glow of the screen through the navy material as he got out of the car.

Nora found herself texting Rachel. What do you know about Wagner?

As she waited for a response—and she truly had no idea what she thought Rachel could do for her—she stared at the endless emerald fields and the impossibly blue lake beyond them. It was, she thought grudgingly, one of the most beautiful places she had ever seen. Her memory drifted back to the desert-lined road that stretched between Cairo and Alexandria on the Mediterranean Sea. She recalled the long hoses that snaked along the parched earth, dripping precious water onto frail little fruit trees. Why is one person’s field lush and fertile and another’s barren and lifeless?

Rachel’s text came through: MMMMM. Bad boy. Gorgeous music. What’s up?

—What if I told you the white supremacist bad guys are using the Ring Cycle as a framework for all these acts of terror?

Huh?

—Sequencing acts of terror with acts of the opera. We’re on the second day now. Bracing for the third.

Shit. Lot of fire in the third …

—So I’ve been told. Was Wagner really this wicked?

The wait this time made Nora fidget as she watched the tiny ellipsis float across the screen to indicate that Rachel was typing.

He was a lover not a fighter. Really audacious love affairs. But he wouldn’t have shot a bunch of refugee women. Might have yelled at them for defiling German soil. But it would have been an intellectual protest: he thought he was a big martyr for his art, keen on preserving his culture, but he would have been too selfish to die for that stuff. Lot of silk shirts in his wardrobe. I imagine after verbally abusing some refugees he would probably have romanticized their plight and made one of them the heroine of his next opera.

—If you wanted to thwart a crazy bad guy who’s obsessed with opera, how would you do it?

The response was immediate. Play Bruno Mars at him.

The three other agents had returned. With a clatter, Ben opened the car door and dropped into the driver’s seat as Chid and Ford piled into the back.

“All set?” Nora asked.

“Yes. They’re squared away. We’ve documented what went down here and covered our asses,” said Chid.

“How much time do we have until they kill Pete?” Nora asked, trying to steel herself.

Ford answered, “Nothing’s shown up yet, Nora. I think they didn’t intend to move as early as they did on the last one, nor was it so supposed to end so soon, I assume. So they’re recalibrating, tweaking the schedule.”

“So maybe we have enough time to get there this time?” she asked.

Chid answered, “Maybe so.”

She looked at Ben, mustering a half-smile. “You’re going to really drive this time?”

He shook his head, tsking softly. “I find your lack of faith disturbing.” He shifted into Drive.

“Does your Egyptian girlfriend get your Star Wars references?” Chid asked from the backseat, already flipping open his laptop.

“Never. It’s actually quite painful,” Ben answered, as he tore across the field toward the gravel drive and to Route 5 beyond.

Nora knew better than to engage on that topic. Any mention of space movies being ridiculous seemed to open some sort of mortal wound in Ben’s heart.

“I had to study for that one,” Chid said to Nora. “You can get up to speed. In order to talk to white kids like these—” he indicated Ben and Derek with a sweep of his hand, “you have to study up. Don’t bother with the prequels. But you won’t get the keys to the kingdom until you can quote a droid. It’s not enough to speak English. You have to learn your man’s language!”

Nora pursed her lips at him. “Is that why you know all this stuff about operas. To really learn ‘the Man’s’ language?”

Chid smiled. “Touché. I learned pop culture for my man and high culture for the Man. But I lost nothing for it, you know?”

She considered this. “Benjamin and I learned really fast that the only show we had ever watched in common was Scooby Doo. I have never had time for space movies.”

Ben looked at her aghast. “Space movies?”

Chid held up a hand. “I daresay, Nora, it’s obvious that studying up on Star Wars will be central to the health of your relationship.”

Derek looked up from the laptop screen to add, “Don’t forget these are movies about revolution and throwing off oppression.… Fighting evil with your life. Resistance.”

“God, you white folks talk a lot about revolution,” she snapped. “None of you would know oppression if it walked up and bitch-slapped you.”

Chid was chuckling in the back. “Hear-hear!”

Ben gave her a long look and then focused on the road without speaking. He was trying to make it to the interstate, but was caught behind a John Deere combine harvester.

“But I’ll study up,” she added, making her tone gentler, and allowing herself to pat him on the knee. “Because learning your language is important to me. Just as I’m sure you’ll watch some classic Egyptian movies with me. Some Suad Hosny. A little Adil Imam?”

“Hey, I’m already a devoted Umm Kulthoum fan,” Ben rejoined, his crooked smile returning to his face. “Bring it on.”

Derek, holding the iPhone, coughed slightly.

Nora whirled. “What is it?”

“They’ve figured out that we are in their system. There was no warning this time. Act Three has begun.”

“What?” Panic infused her voice. “Pete…”

But he was shaking his head. “It isn’t Pete this time.”

“Then … what?”

He twisted the phone so she could look at the screen.

“Occupation.”

*   *   *

Nearly every flavor and brand of law enforcement had been either lurking outside the compound in Planer or out at the Potter farm in Fairview.

Thus when a panicked administrative assistant from the federal courthouse in downtown Erie had called 9-1-1 to say that the guards had been subdued and a stream of people in camouflage and leather were walking into the building, most carrying some sort of firearm, there was a massive delay in the response.

Chid was frowning at his screen. “They’re broadcasting an appeal for other militias to join them.”

“Of course they are,” Ben said acerbically.

The media outlets had picked up on Baker’s call to fellow militia organizations throughout the country. His right fist raised and clenched, he called for action.

They cannot kill us all. They cannot silence all of our voices. Revolution! Revolution! Revolution! A citizenry should not fear its government! The government should fear its citizenry!

Nora was immediately on the phone with Sheila who had found out only seconds before from the 9-1-1 call. “We’re on our way to you…” Nora dared to say.

But Sheila was practically screaming at her through the phone: “You will report to the federal courthouse immediately. Immediately! And wait for the team we’re sending from here!”

Nora hung up the phone and turned to Ben.

“We have to go downtown,” she said.

He shook his head grimly. “I heard.”

Nora’s lips were pursed, her expression angry. “How can she send the team from there? They have to stay in Planer!”

Chid said, “Look, Nora, there’s a method to this madness. If Pete wasn’t part of Act Two then he’s not going to be killed today. He just isn’t. This is Act Three. Occupation.”

“This is insane,” she said bitterly.

“Every part of it, yes,” Chid confirmed.

Ben had guided the Malibu out onto 12th Street and they were heading back toward town.

“What if they’re just trying to call off the SWAT teams by distracting them with the courthouse. And then they kill him?”

“To what end, though?” Chid asked. “Look, Nora. Remember what we talked about the first time this came up? If there’s a big finale then it’s planned for tomorrow. Valhalla doesn’t burn until the fourth opera, the ‘Third Day’—in the Twilight of the Gods, Götterdämmerung.”

“That’s a ridiculous word,” Nora said petulantly.

Chid said, “It is an awesome word, and German is awesome, and you should add German to your arsenal of languages, Special Agent Khalil. Some of the best Orientalist scholars were Germans. Wrote the best Arabic dictionaries by far.”

“Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind,” she snapped. “So besides Valhalla burning what do you think is left?”

“Well … They’ve struck a blow at the judiciary. They’ve struck a blow at municipal government and minorities therein. They’ve struck a blow at refugee policies and the federally insured banking system. They tried to get across their anger at the Jews and illegal aliens, but we messed with the plan. So. Yeah, I think they will try to kill Pete tomorrow because he symbolizes federal law enforcement. I think Baker’ll rely on our rage over that death to provoke the attack on the compound.”

“So maybe if we can keep them from killing Pete then there won’t be a need to have a giant firefight over the compound. And it’s all moot.”

Ben was nodding. “So we send in the SWAT teams tonight.”

Ford shook his head. “No good. Number one, we’ve seen what happens when the plan doesn’t work out. They get mad and keep moving. Two, they’ve got hostages now in the federal courthouse, man. Do we send SWAT teams for one guy or for fifty?”

“My God, why can’t we do both?”

“Because there are American lives involved,” Ford insisted. “And that’s the last thing the Commander-in-Chief is going to want to authorize. Americans firing on Americans.”

“These people are not Americans,” Nora said angrily.

“Funny how they’d say the same thing about you, Special Agent Khalil,” Ford pointed out.

They had arrived at the courthouse.

Nora stared at the scene. A few squad cars sat in the middle of the street, their lights flashing uselessly.

Nora’s car had been allowed in close because of the flashing light on her roof. They descended from the car, leaving it parked on State Street and made their way to the front door of the courthouse. She realized that Abe Berberovic seemed to be in charge, and this made it all the more clear that the police forces were stretched thinner than ever.

“What’s the story?” she asked, after introducing him to her colleagues.

“How’s Anna?” he asked, his eyes concerned.

Nora reassured him. “She’s hanging in there. Little sleep-deprived at this point, I imagine. But Anna’s tough.”

“Yes, yes she is. Sorry, okay, the story: a group entered from the front and back doors simultaneously and overcame the security guards—no fatalities reported though. They barricaded themselves in, and then started putting out this call for reinforcements from the public and from other militias. They hadn’t even taken a hostage yet, only a few people had seen what happened with the security guards, so all of a sudden when this stream of people started entering the building, no one knew what was going on. Some fifty people got inside before the employees realized it was an occupation.”

“Have they said anything about the hostages?” asked Ford. “What are their intentions toward them?”

Abe shook his head. “No, nothing.”

“Did they let anyone go?” he pressed.

“No.”

“Who are these people who got inside?” Ben asked, incredulous.

“By all accounts most of them were biker types.”

“Biker types?” Chid asked. “I thought the Patriots were putting on this whole biker conceit to blend in with the bikers and make it more difficult to be spotted. But most bikers aren’t…”

“Revolutionaries?” Nora asked.

“Blood-thirsty?” supplied Ben.

Chid considered both of these. “Exactly,” he said finally.

“Well, that’s what happened, and here we are.” Abe was clearly uninterested in abstractions.

“How long since they locked themselves in?”

“Just about fifteen minutes really,” said Abe, checking his wristwatch.

“Have they issued demands?”

Abe waved a printout at them. “Repeal of the Brady Bill, repeal of the assault weapons ban, ban on further immigration into the United States, deportation of all illegal immigrants, and a white homeland.”

All four agents started to laugh. Abe just stared at them. “I’m kinda missing what’s funny.”

Chid began, “The absurdity…”

“No,” Abe interjected, cutting him off, his eyes bright. “In my country, we all thought the Serbs were just being absurd when they made absurd demands. Then they began the ethnic cleansing. The absurd is no longer absurd when you have weapons and followers.”

The agents immediately sobered.

“What do we do now, Abe?” Nora asked gently.

“What precedent do we have here?” he responded, the edge having left his voice.

Chid shook his head. “Oregon?”

“Oregon was ridiculous. We aren’t going to ignore this,” Nora said.

“Well, we also aren’t going to storm the courthouse,” Ford said tersely.

It was at that time that the SWAT Bearcats came rumbling up State Street from the Bayfront Connector. Nora felt her stomach twisting anxiously.

“I guess that answers that,” Ben said. “CIRG to the rescue.”

Abe nodded. “They’re efficient anyway. Calm under pressure. My guys have been a little strained these past few days.”

“Can’t imagine why,” Nora said.

The SWAT vehicles rumbled to a stop. Two men descended from the cab of the first Bearcat. Derek Ford spoke to Nora and Ben as they watched them greet Abe. “That’s Evan Sanchez, director of the Hostage Rescue Team, and there’s Gray Rogers, SWAT leader. They’re good guys, a little intense. But their teams are excellent, actually, the best there are.”

“Then why haven’t they rescued my partner?” hissed Nora.

Derek gave her a sympathetic look, but she knew he had no response. Sanchez and Rogers spoke at length with Abe, getting the full story again. Then Sanchez asked that a call be put in to the main line of the federal courthouse, hoping to find someone in charge who would be able to negotiate with him.

“Can’t you just call Baker back? Haven’t you been negotiating with him all day at the compound?” Ben asked.

“No. Only underlings. They won’t give up his cell phone number. And there’s no record of him having a cell phone even though we’ve even seen it on him in the webcasts.”

“I think I have it,” Ford said. “It’s the most frequently called and received number from this phone.” He wrote it down for Sanchez and then allowed him to look at the phone in his hands.

“This is gold,” Sanchez said, his eyes wide. “How did you get this?”

“Long story,” Ford responded, giving Nora a quick grin.

Sanchez extended his hand to Nora and then Ben.

“You’re Special Agent Khalil, right?”

Nora nodded, eyeing him. He had a rather grizzled look to him. White hair frosted his temples and the stubble of his day-old beard, though most of his hair was coal black. His honey-colored eyes were underscored by deep circles.

“Anna had shared with us all the intel you gave them on the compound, the setup of the barns, the physical structure within; we figured out that the far western barn is not the arsenal and that probably it’s the middle of the three. The third might be more bunkhouses, possibly a mess hall. So. Thanks.”

Nora looked at him, waiting.

“Your escape is remarkable, you know. That doesn’t happen every day.”

She worked her jaw back and forth and gave Ben a What does this guy want look. Then she could not stop herself from saying, “The hostage you just let die is responsible for my escape.”

Sanchez nodded. “I understand your anger, Nora. If it were my decision alone…”

“Everyone keeps giving me that line!” she said, furious.

He continued in a level voice, “… things might have gone very differently. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know I get where you’re coming from. We want to explore every option. And the wild card is still, what’s in their arsenal? We have to manage this in a way that makes it very clear that we value human lives, theirs as well as those of our agents.”

Nora leaned forward. “How about you value the human lives lost so far by taking these people down?”

He nodded. “We’re doing our best, I promise you.” And then the conversation was over as he keyed in the number Ford had given him.

And so the negotiations began. And so began the wait.

Chid and Ford headed back toward Nora’s car. Ford had his laptop open again and actually climbed up on the hood.

Feeling panicky, Nora headed over to them. “Any change?”

Sweat was trickling down the sides of Ford’s face. He checked Jane Doe’s phone. “There’s nothing about Pete, Nora. Nothing at all. It’s all about this siege here.”

Chid looked at Nora and gestured to the hood of her car. “Come sit?” he asked, flipping his laptop open. Ford sat closest to the front of the hood.

Nora’s shoulders sagged. “Fine.” She clambered up on top of the hood next to Chid, closest to the windshield. The metal was hot, but it was better than sitting on the curb.

She sat very still, clutching her folded arms. “I thought we don’t negotiate with terrorists,” she said finally.

“Of course we do. And then we mess them up,” Chid said.

“Huh?”

“Come on, Nora. Everyone negotiates. Life is negotiation. Even not negotiating is a form of negotiation.”

She frowned at him.

“In the end we will storm in and win the day. But we have to look like we’re worried about the coming bloodbath. Plausible deniability.”

Nora stared at him. “What?”

“Look: Saying we learned lessons from Waco doesn’t make the agenda of the Branch Davidians any more palatable. They were still traitors who would have engaged in active warfare with the U.S. government at the drop of a hat. Not to mention being psychotic religious fanatics.”

“So … saying we feel badly doesn’t mean we didn’t want to exterminate them?”

“Or that they didn’t need exterminating,” said Chid. “Plain and simple.”

“So callous. I can’t…”

“If they could have, the Branch Davidians would have done everything that the Pennsylvania Patriots have done if not more. Was nipping their movement in the bud wrong?”

She shook her head. “I have no idea, anymore. Maybe. Surely, right? Because so many other movements have sprung up because of that?”

“Racist insurrectionists. Who would just as soon exterminate you and me because of the color of our skin.”

“And me,” chimed in Ford.

“And you,” added Chid. “Because you’re a devilishly handsome queer.”

Ford blushed, but managed to say, “Not to mention a counterrevolutionary sympathizer.”

They all laughed and then sat in silence for a moment as Chid and Ford tapped on their keyboards.

Then Chid said softly, without looking at Nora, “I’m sorry about the hospital. It was out of line.”

She patted his back. “I’m sorry. I overreacted. I think you were trying to joke with me on some level.”

“Yes, on some level,” Chid affirmed. “On some levels I was dead serious. But that doesn’t mean I should say everything I’m thinking. Sometimes I need to remind myself to invoke the filter.”

Nora smiled. “It’s a problem I have myself,” she admitted. “Do you think we’re all getting out of this alive?”

“Not a chance,” he answered swiftly.

“Filter?” Nora prodded.

“Oh yeah … Nah, not a chance.” Chid smiled. “Filtering doesn’t mean lying—especially not to an Egyptian. Y’all got the curse of Ra and the eye of Horus and whatnot.…”

Ben walked over to where they were sitting. “Ford, that phone number thing might have saved the day,” he said. “Sanchez seems to be making progress. Baker believes we’re closing in on him because we’ve figured out his phone number. He’s a little paranoid about it.”

Nora nodded in heavy silence.

He turned his green eyes on her, the concern there intense. “Are you okay, Nora? That scene with Sanchez wasn’t like you.”

She looked down at the marks still on her wrists from the cable ties. Where the skin wasn’t raw it was bruised. She held her wrists out to Ben.

“Without April Lewis, I would probably still be in the barn.”

Ben gave her the I want to hug you but we’re at work look again.

Chid said, “Strictures against workplace affection tend to slacken during an apocalypse. Hug your woman, Benjamin.”

Ben obediently wrapped an arm around Nora’s shoulder. “I’m glad April Lewis was there to help you,” he said seriously. “I’m sorry.”

Nora allowed herself to rest her head for a moment against Ben’s chest.

“Thing about this situation,” Chid said, “there really isn’t any time to process. We’re dealing in three days with more than some agents deal with in a lifetime.”

“Three days, four days,” said Nora thoughtfully. “If we mess with the schedule, will he adjust it or just stop?”

Chid regarded her. “Do you mean, if there were thirteen acts instead of fourteen, would the paradigm fail and all be rendered meaningless?”

She glared at him. “How do you even have time to put those words together? Jesus, that’s … yes, I’m pretty sure that’s what I just asked.”

“I don’t know,” he answered simply. “The synagogue bomb was defused and so was one act less, but then they kidnapped two federal agents. Technically, one might have sufficed to constitute an act. So I presume it balanced out.” He shrugged and looked apologetic, then said, “If Pete is part of the program and we save him, what will the contingency plan be? No idea.”

Three hours into the occupation, the sidewalks were crowded with people. Some stood with anti-hate placards raised high. Others held up pro-gun slogans and white power symbols adorning old campaign posters.

Ben watched them too. “It’s a new age,” he said. “Protest is the new brunch.”

Nora checked her watch, feeling useless, feeling trapped. The helicopters hanging overhead were fraying her nerves. At one point, a media helicopter got too close to the sleek gray CIRG chopper and a cry went up from the onlookers as the latter had to soar high into the sky to avoid an accident.

Police officers and Bureau agents alike kept trying to convince the onlookers to move back, to put enough distance between themselves and the courthouse that they would avoid injury in case of an explosion. Nora herself had been as assertive as she knew how to be without actually throat-punching citizens.

But to no avail. The scene was fascinating for people, and they would not be persuaded that their lives were in danger. Perhaps the memories of the last anti-government occupation were too deeply embedded as a laughable, sex-toy-steeped event.

To make matters worse, television cameras were stopping anyone and everyone and allowing them minutes of fame that aspiring actors the world over would never attain.

A man in a “Make America Great Again” T-shirt was railing into a microphone. “No one’s had the courage til now to truly take a stand. I think that Gabe Baker is the bravest man in America. American jobs should be for Americans. We need a white homeland just like he’s sayin’. There shouldn’t be all this race-mixin’. Ending up with a bunch of mutts. Ending up with no culture. No future. I salute him and his movement.”

Nora watched as the interviewer, a rail-thin blonde woman with orangey pancake makeup, pulled the microphone away. She looked ill.

Chid, Ford, and Ben had all given up and sought shelter in the air-conditioned car. They had in fact intended to go back to the office and camp out in the conference room, but Nora had insisted that being close to the scene would allow for more effective action should any be necessary. Each man had grudgingly agreed, although Ben insisted on getting sandwiches and sodas and forcing Nora to eat and hydrate. They all sat staring at their laptops; the two men in the back tapped away on their keyboards with rather more ferocity than Nora and Ben. The task of unraveling the iPhone’s mysteries was still key.

Nora sat in the front seat with her legs folded under her. She responded to some frantic text messages from her father and Ahmed and even from Rachel, all of whom wanted to make sure she was okay in the midst of all the nationally televised upheaval. She texted Anna and Sheila, hoping they would both relent and let them stand vigil out there, but both refused to back down. She sent a few text messages to Ben, who, sitting next to her in the front seat, would shake his head and smile each time one came through to his phone.

At last she sighed, frustrated, and dropped the phone in her lap. “Why is there no Stuck in a Chevy Malibu with Three Sweaty Guys emoji?”

Chid retorted, “Because a mere emoji, my dear girl, cannot express Nirvana.”

Occasionally she would lower the window in order to listen in on what was going on in the street.

Nora was sure that one of the women speaking to a CNN camera was the thin, gangly granny they’d seen that morning on their way to intercept the barn burners. She was only a few yards from Nora, but Nora could hear her clearly.

“My heart has never ached so much for my country as this week. This week! I look forward to this week all year long, every year! I came all the way from St. Louis to meet up with my friends. To ride by this beautiful lake. To drink a few beers … We’ve been robbed. We’ve all been robbed, haven’t we? Such ugly people. Stealing away our beautiful days.”

Nora watched her curiously for a long moment. This is what it takes to get your heart to ache for the country.

Not too far off, the woman they’d imported from Washington to speak in the name of the Bureau was holding court. Nora, noting that the woman’s high-heeled shoes were back on, asked Chid, “What’s her name, this spokesperson?”

“Lena Clark,” he said, glancing over at her and then back at his screen. “She’s smart. She has a master’s from Johns Hopkins.”

Representatives of the press were peppering her with questions.

“How many hostages are inside the courthouse?” a thick-haired man asked. Nora wondered if the position of his reading glasses was what gave him a particularly nasal tone of voice, or if his voice was simply that way.

“There are currently sixty-two hostages inside the building,” Lena Clark said. “Our expert hostage negotiators are in constant dialogue with those responsible.”

Nora looked over at Ben. “That’s stretching it, isn’t it? Is talking to Gabe Baker the same as talking to the actual captors?”

He shrugged.

“What’s the main demand of the occupiers?” someone called out.

Clark read them the list that Abe had provided earlier.

“Which of these demands is the U.S. Government willing to comply with?” demanded a red-faced man in the front as he dabbed at the sweat on the back of his neck.

“The attorney general has been very clear: none of these demands is acceptable. The United States worked very hard to pass the Brady Act, or the Brady Bill as some call it, to address the violence in our country, which seems only to be increasing, as you can see. There is no retrenchment. As we all know, as we can all acknowledge, the victims of gun violence are most commonly those least able to defend themselves. We at the Bureau are committed to defending American citizens. We at the Bureau are committed to defending the law.”

“Who’s going to defend us from the Bureau?” shouted a red-haired woman in the back, her skin riven with early wrinkles and her voice hoarse from years of smoking.

She was quickly shouted down, however. This portion of the crowd seemed crisis-weary and was giving no quarter to such views—no matter how great a story they made for the evening’s broadcasts.

“The situation is under control,” Lena Clark was insisting. “The Bureau is able to meet the challenge of domestic terrorism head-on. We will resolve this crisis expeditiously, rest assured.”

“How?” called a man in a baseball cap with the CBS logo emblazoned across it.

“Pardon?” she asked, and Nora could tell she was fishing for time.

“What steps are you going to take to get the so-called ‘Patriots’ out of the courthouse and into jail without killing the hostages?”

Lena Clark blinked, shifting her weight from one precariously high heel to the other, then said, “Now, if I shared that information with you, Mitch, I’d be sharing it with the terrorists themselves, wouldn’t I?”

Ford observed, “She’s got nothin’.”

Ben said, “Well, that’s no surprise, is it? Your PD friend is right. There’s no precedent. It’s one thing to bomb a federal building. Or a school. But to try to talk a bunch of willing martyrs out of their just cause…”

“Is like talkin’ bears outta shittin’ in the woods,” said Chid.

Ford frowned at him. “Is that your best Tamil redneck?”

“Best so far. The day is young.”

But the day was in fact receding, and the shadows that the federal courthouse cast across State Street were lengthening.

“Nothing from the live feed? They’re not broadcasting the occupation?” asked Nora.

Ford shook his head. “Nothing since they entered. They took a few pictures standing in a judge’s chambers and some of the hostages locked in a courtroom—no windows, right, so no problem. And that’s it. Since then it’s been that same PowerPoint feed selling the militia and calling for support from all the other militias in the country.”

There was a bit of commotion and the agents swiveled their heads.

“Oh, hooray—it’s the mayor,” deadpanned Nora.

Indeed Mayor Vaughn, thick-necked and red-faced and sporting a “Don’t Give Up the Ship” polo shirt, had appeared at the podium vacated by Lena Clark.

“What’s the story with that slogan on his shirt? I keep seeing it everywhere,” asked Ben.

“Something about Commodore Perry,” said Nora. “Battle of Lake Erie. Lot of … white people shooting cannons at each other from boats. There’s a museum about it over there.” She gestured down State Street to the bay. “Mostly Commodore Perry is famous for his bar now. They have outrageously good pretzels, although I haven’t tried one yet.”

Chid perked up. “Perry? Ah yes—the epic struggle for the borders of the newly independent United States. The most ridiculous war in American history, the War of 1812. Imagine invading Canada and getting your ass kicked.”

They all tried to imagine just that as the mayor began speaking. He looked utterly exhausted.

“The City of Erie has had a difficult week. We have had attacks on our people from all sides. No flood or fire or act of war has caused more loss of life for our city. I grieve for the families of those lost at the refugee center and the families of the PNC bank guard; I grieve for the family of Judge Bernstein, and most recently for councilwoman April Lewis. It is all egregious, all shocking. In addition to these acts, our courageous law enforcement officials have thwarted others and we are all indebted to them eternally.”

“That’s us!” said Nora, tugging on Ben’s shirt.

The mayor continued, “This is not who we are. We will rebuild. We will recover. We will continue to open our city to those who seek refuge here—we certainly now understand violence in a way that should inspire empathy for those coming from war zones. We will continue to celebrate diversity while affirming the traditions of every culture. There is no way forward except through understanding.”

His voice trailed off, and the reporters began shouting questions at him.

“Mr. Mayor, Mr. Mayor! Can you elaborate on the failed attempts you referred to?”

He shook his head. “Not at this time, no, I cannot.”

“Mr. Mayor! Couldn’t it be said that the Patriot group is demanding that they too be understood?”

Mayor Vaughn said, “There are ways of sending messages. Violence will never be one that is acceptable here. Not ever,” he said. “But these people need to know that our people are not stupid; our people can understand the difference between mindless, hate-filled propaganda and truth. Erie will survive. Erie is resilient. Erie will flourish again!”

“That’s a line for the ages,” observed Ben, rolling up Nora’s window whether she liked it or not.

“Since when have people been able to tell the difference between propaganda and truth?” Chid asked emptily.

“Yes!” Ford practically shouted, making them all jump.

“What?” all three asked him.

“I’ve been entering all the numbers that Jane Doe had called. All of them ultimately link back to one account holder—must have been some perk or punishment, but I guess he put his minions on a calling plan.”

“Baker?” asked Ben.

“Nooooo.”

“Who? A name!” demanded Chid.

“William S. Martin. I’ve got his name, date of birth, social security number.…”

“Any images?” Chid asked.

“Plenty. He’d been involved in litigation. Over beer. There’s a bunch of newspaper articles about him. Erie boy, apparently.”

“What does that mean, litigation over beer?” pressed Chid, leaning over Ford’s screen.

Ford was skimming rapidly and speaking as he read. “This beer … so the factory, sorry, the brewery closed down in 2008. But because Eisernes Kreuz Beer itself is still distributed, it looked like they’d just downsized or shifted brewery locations.”

Chid was now apparently skimming the same article. “There was some kind of court settlement involved. The company continued for a while after that but then apparently folded.”

“Lawsuit?” asked Ben.

“Mmm-hmm.” Chid nodded, picking up the narrative. “Anheuser-Busch claimed the original patent on the Eisernes Kreuz recipe. The settlement was so punishing that the board voted to remove Martin and gave his ninety-year-old mother controlling interest in the company.”

“Jesus,” said Derek.

Chid inhaled sharply.

Nora wanted to shake them both. “WHAT?” she almost shouted.

“Case was heard here in U.S. District Court. Judge Bernstein.”

Nora felt dizzy. “You can’t be serious.”

Chid whipped his laptop screen around to show her the article he was reading from.

She shook her head. “Then it isn’t just some … anti-government show where any old judge would have served the purpose. He had a plan!”

“You bet your ass he had a plan,” Chid said.

“Eisernes Kreuz had better marketing and labeling, so Anheuser-Busch retained the name even though they’d proved the original recipe. So it looks small-town and artisanal—limited distribution means they can charge big bucks,” Ford said.

Chid narrowed his eyes as he scanned the information. “Martin’s company had to declare bankruptcy. The settlement coupled with the financial downturn in 2008 was too much for them.”

“It looks like the one thing William walked away with was the brewery building,” Ford said. “His mother, Carole Martin, had disbursed the rest of the assets, leaving him emphatically out. She left most to the nuns—like the Peach Street house with its Prohibition tunnel … that connected to the brewery.…”

Nora nodded, thinking. “It wasn’t clear when we first found the tunnel that it still hooked up to the brewery, but there’s no other rational explanation. There must be some branch that Pete and I didn’t notice, didn’t know to look for, that links to the brewery. And it makes sense that that’s where the motorcycles have been disappearing.”

The others were nodding.

“But what’s he been doing since then?” asked Ben, looking thoughtful. “Old brewery like that. Probably had farmlands where they grew the hops and barley.…”

Nora met his eyes. “Yes. When did the imaginary Geyer buy it?”

Chid tapped on his keyboard. The silence stretched, and Nora felt like she was hyper-aware of the breathing of all three men. Finally Chid spoke: “Martin had sold off some assets before the court case. Before he lost to Anheuser-Busch and his mother gained controlling interest in the company and then disbursed most of the assets without him.”

“So perhaps he invented Geyer. He knew bankruptcy was coming,” Ben said.

“Perhaps…” Chid answered, deep in thought.

“Wait, there’s a breaking news thing…” Ford said, leaning in to his laptop screen. He began swiveling his head from laptop to Jane Doe’s iPhone. “Wait…” He frowned.

Nora looked. Various news crews started huddling around their monitors, all staring down intently. “What’s happening?” Nora demanded.

Ford plopped his laptop down, and all of them peered at it.

“What the hell?” asked Ben.

“Who’s that?!” demanded Chid.

They all turned to stare at the courthouse, emerging as they did so from Nora’s car, their eyes riveted on the building. Three windows had been flung open, and two bearded men appeared in faded T-shirts.

The SWAT team instantly aimed their rifles toward the windows, and the crowd made a collective gasp.

Then each bearded man began giving a dainty, regal wave to the crowd, until one tossed the other the end of a banner. As it unfurled, a cheer rose up from the majority of the onlookers.

Nora read the banner, then looked at Ben, then read it again to make sure she was seeing it correctly.

The gangly granny just down the curb from the car let out a whoop. “YES, dammit!” she began shouting. “Yes, goddammit! Preach it!”

The letters were crude, but the message was clear: Long Live Roar on the Shore.

*   *   *

“What the fuck just happened?” demanded Chid.

The breaking news had come from Vance Evans who’d gotten a call transferred to his cell phone. He’d answered it at his post at the other end of the block.

The telephone interview he was still conducting was with one Jerry Walsh of Fredonia, New York.

“It was simple, Mr. Evans. Nobody was angrier than us bikers over this whole thing. One, they’ve been making bikers look bad by sending these nuts out on bikes. Two, they’ve shut down our favorite event of the year. Three … lot of us bikers look a bit like these assholes and so everyone is lookin’ at us funny now. I reckon they call that racial profilin’ and it just ain’t fair. So when this Baker guy broadcast that he wanted more people to come take over the courthouse with him, we said, hell, let’s blend in and sneak in and see what happens. Maybe we can get this shit over with and get on with the Roar. Do you know they had to cancel Dokken for this shit?”

“That’s the word, yes,” Evans said gravely, making sure the cell phone speaker was positioned close enough to the microphone.

“So we walked in,” the disembodied voice of Jerry Walsh continued. “We hung out. We helped out. They weren’t killin’ hostages or nothin’, they just said they wanted to keep the eyes of the world on the movement. We said, ‘Hell yeah. We’re with you.’ They said, ‘Down with the government, any government not doin’ the will of the people should be overthrown,’ and whatnot. We said, ‘Hell yeah, sure, whatever.’ They said, ‘We’re gonna occupy this building for as long as it takes to get them to change the laws and stop banning the guns the Founding Fathers said everyone should have—you know, cuz the Founding Fathers used to have assault rifles. Oh yeah, and to keep all the foreigners out. We’re gonna send a message to all the foreigners not to even come here. They won’t even fuckin’ wanna come here once they see how serious we are.’ We said, ‘Go for it, man, we’re with you.’”

Vance Evans said, “What was the catalyst for revealing you didn’t share their goals?”

“Well, we’d agreed we’d give them a couple-three hours to get comfortable with us and trust us and then we’d just jump ’em. But my buddy Sam—say hi, Sam!”

A disembodied voice was heard in the background, “Hey there, America!”

“So Sam winked at me and he started a fight. He said, ‘Hey, man, you wanna occupy this shit but it doesn’t look like you brought any beer. How we gonna get beer, man?’ And so this Patriot fucker said, ‘This isn’t about the beer. We’re here to change history.’ And so my buddy Sam said, ‘Any dumb fuck who wants to change American history without a beer in his hand should get his ass handed to him.’ And then he hauled off and hit that guy so hard one of his teeth shot out of his mouth and skittered across the floor.”

“It skittered, really?”

Nora for once thought she was getting a kick out of Vance Evans.

“Hell yeah. Skittered. And then we just started beating the shit out of those assholes and taught them not to fuck with real bikers. And that was it. Some of our wives’d sent this banner along with us—they’d made it, you know, to protest. So Foxy and Jim there just hung it out. Good work men!”

“Good work indeed,” affirmed Evans.

“And here we are.” As she listened to his voice, Nora envisioned the man giving a humble shrug. “You’re welcome, America!”

America watched Vance Evans laugh so hard that he creased his pancake makeup.

“The only question is, what should we do with ’em now?”

The screen was filled with Evans mopping his eyes. At last he said, “I’m pretty sure you could start by opening the doors.…”

*   *   *

All told, there had only been ten of the Pennsylvania Patriots occupying the building. The group that had entered to help out had been almost entirely Fifth Columnists. CIRG and its SWAT team had a relatively easy task to take the militia members into custody, and then the processing was left to the agents on the ground once again.

Nora, Ben, Chid, and Ford worked side by side with a few of the up-from-Pittsburgh agents as day turned into evening in the chaotic, but mercifully air-conditioned, office on State Street. As they worked, they took turns envisioning the look on Gabe Baker’s face when he got word of how his occupation had failed.

They holed up in the conference room. Every once in a while, Nora would try to sort out if Evan Sanchez was talking to Baker yet about Pete—now that he had the right number to call.

A few times, indulging her, Ford would disappear for a while and then return, shaking his head.

“Well, are they heading back out there yet?”

“The action on the Patriots’ part won’t be until tomorrow, Nora,” Chid reassured her.

“But isn’t it like we said? If we keep them from killing Pete they won’t be able to provoke a confrontation? If we go and just snatch him…”

“They’re working on it, Nora,” was all anyone would tell her, before returning the room to the non-silence of tapping keyboards. Each one was merging the new information about William Martin into the story of Gabriel Baker and the still-unfolding drama.

It was pitch-black outside when Ford leaned forward again, studying the screen. “After the bankruptcy, Martin brought in a company to turn the brewery into some kind of shopping center,” he said. “They had some investors but needed the city to buy into it—they were attempting to win the grant that the city sets aside for revitalization projects. Martin himself didn’t have enough and his business’s credit by this time was bad; the bank wouldn’t loan him the money. The proposal was defeated by the city council.”

Chid tapped his own laptop screen, smirking a little. “Any guesses as to its most vocal opponent?”

The other three responded, “April Lewis.”

Nora asked, her heart beating in her ears, “I don’t suppose the bank that refused him was PNC, was it?”

Ford gave her a look expressing that that would be too much, but started hunting anyway. “Right again,” he finally confirmed.

They gave a collective sigh.

“So much for the crazed ideologue,” said Chid. “These were very calculated crimes seeking very specific results.”

Nora looked at him. “So what the hell, then?”

“So. High drama. He’s played every one of his followers, like a maestro,” Chid added, enjoying the metaphor. “He gets them to rob a bank, ostensibly to buy weapons. But I bet he also needed money. Even if he did buy more weapons for the stockpile, he probably kept plenty of cash for himself.”

“Well, hell, his bombs didn’t improve,” chimed in Ford. “It was still ammonium nitrate at the synagogue, give or take a new trigger mechanism. Even though he made off with all that cash.”

Chid nodded. “Then, he gets revenge on the judge who ruined his life, who happens to be Jewish. He gets revenge on the black city councilwoman who trashed his last attempt at a business project. He not only kidnaps her but tries to get some money out of her family. At the same time, he allows his followers to make mayhem, taking all the possible attention of law enforcement agencies off of him.”

They all exchanged glances.

Ben eventually asked Chid, “Look, we’ve sorted out who Martin is, his motivations, but it seems like he could have done all this with significantly less hassle.”

“Well, clearly,” said Chid. “But all this … it’s elaborate and erudite and he’s made a splash.”

“How do you think he hooked up with Baker?”

“That’s the question that’s making me crazy,” Chid said frankly.

“What do truck drivers and beer magnates have in common?” Ben asked.

Derek Ford walked out of the conference room and returned with a large sheaf of paper.

“What?” Chid asked.

“I’d printed up all the tax information, remember? And all the penalty information from the IRS? I just want to look at the employment history, see if there’s anything that could link him to Martin. Anything they had in common.” He riffled through the papers.

“When did we say he’d moved to Erie?” he asked absently.

“In 2003,” said Chid.

“He started working as a driver for the Erie Brewers in 2003,” said Ford, tugging a paper out of the pile.

“Is that…?” Ben asked.

But Chid was already nodding. “Martin’s Brewery. As we said, shut down in 2008.”

“And then all of a sudden Baker’s out of work. And stays out of work. No options.”

“I don’t see any other evidence of employment after that.”

“But somehow ex-boss and ex-worker hook up. Who radicalized whom?” Nora asked.

Chid ventured, “I would assume we have a symbiosis. Baker needed a visionary, someone to articulate and put a spin on his alt-right mayhem. Martin needed minions to enact his revenge.”

“But he was poor, right? He had lost everything,” Nora said.

“But he had kept enough land to train a militia,” Chid replied.

Ford added, “And starting in the 2010s, the alt-right is piling up funds, kicking into full swing starting in 2014. If Martin offered land and vision, Baker could have used the networks he had tapped into back in Ulysses, August Kreis and all those fellows, to arm and support them. In election season, positing Martin as the intellectual mastermind of a truly comprehensive movement might push the Pennsylvania Patriots into the top spot for recipients of the windfall.”

They rested a moment, each nodding slowly. It was a good theory, though still just a theory.

Nora, restless, tapped the screen of her laptop. “It looks like the Benedictine Sisters of Erie have another soup kitchen a block from here. By the baseball field.”

All three men looked at her. “So?”

“So soup kitchens don’t close for Armageddon. I’m going to walk over and see if anyone can help me understand the Martin family better.”

Chid and Ford cast a skeptical glance.

She frowned at each one in turn. “You got a better way to kill time until they kill Pete?” she demanded.

Ben shrugged. “I certainly don’t. Let’s go.”

They slipped out of the room and down the stairs, then out onto the street. The downtown was still crowded with people attempting to keep the “victory of the people” spirit alive and well since the failed occupation.

“What do you think we’ll find?”

Nora shook her head. “I have no idea, Ben.”

When they pushed open the door to the Ladles of Love Soup Kitchen, they were greeted by a plump elderly woman in a ratty yellow cardigan.

“Welcome!” she said.

Nora smiled at her.

The room they’d entered was painfully spare, though every wall was filled with pictures clearly drawn by small children and signed in uneven, wavery script. An open kitchen was visible beyond the dozen tables set up with folding chairs on all sides of them. The room smelled of slightly charred toast and chicken-noodle soup. About a dozen men and a few women and children sat scattered throughout the room.

“Are you hungry, children?”

It took a moment for Nora to comprehend that the “children” in question were herself and Ben. Nora was, in fact, starving. It always seemed to hit her when she least expected it. But she shook her head. “We’re with the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” she said in her least confrontational voice, as she and Ben discreetly showed their badges. “We would like to ask a few questions if we could.”

The sister was unfazed. “Of course, child. I’m Sister Mary Catherine, director here. What is it concerning?”

Nora didn’t know how to start.

Ben jumped in. “About ten years ago, Carole Martin left a house to your order. Designated as a soup kitchen? On Peach Street?”

But the sister was nodding. “Of course, yes. What about it?”

“We’re trying to get a few insights into Mrs. Martin’s decision. Is there anyone here who knew her?” Ben said.

“I knew her,” said Mary Catherine, frowning slightly. “What is the issue?”

“Is there somewhere we could talk?” Ben asked.

Mary Catherine nodded. “Of course.” She led them to the far table.

From out of the kitchen, a slightly younger woman crossed the room. Her mouse-brown hair was closely cropped. She wore an intent but curious smile. “Is everything okay, Mary Catherine?”

“Yes, Ann-Marie. These federal agents want to ask some questions. Could you find them some coffee?”

Ann-Marie nodded and went back to the kitchen.

“Sister Mary Catherine, why did William Martin’s mother leave more assets to your order than to her son?”

“Ah,” said the sister, her blue eyes clouding over. “Will,” she murmured. “They called him Will. She had wanted to name him Wilhem, you know, after her brother. But she worried about anti-German sentiment even then.”

Nora said, “She shared her thoughts with you?”

“She did. With very few in fact. But I happened to have been lucky enough to know Carole. She was … a gentle soul. Very kind.”

“What happened with her son to upset her?”

Mary Catherine shook her head sadly. “Oh, poor Carole. You know, she loved that boy madly, but he was always in trouble.”

“How so? We found no arrest records for him,” said Ben.

“No, no, nor will you. I meant in trouble with other children. Bullying him—he was a small child, a frightened little boy, you know? Very sickly as a boy. And then he was always weak as a youth. The children in school tortured him, you know?”

“What was wrong?”

“Well, honestly, the doctors could never agree. But he just had a weak constitution—poor immune system, I suppose they’d say now. And I suppose because Carole was scared he would be hurt, she kept him inside most of the time. She kept him by her side.”

“She didn’t work?”

“Carole? Of course not! Carole was an heiress! Carole was a musician, unparalleled really. But her father had forbidden her to sing on the stage. So she was trapped in her home with her music. She could play the piano beautifully, children. Truly beautifully. But her dream had been to sing.”

“Jazz?” Nora asked, by way of prodding, even though she and Ben both realized quickly what was coming.

“No, dear. Opera. She was … partial to Wagner, I’d say. I remember when I was visiting with her … she just stood up and sang the Liebestod aria from Tristan and Isolde—effortlessly, flawlessly. Rattled my teeth! I heard nothing to rival it until Jessye Norman sang it with Karajan in … oh, late in the ’80s, I suppose it was.”

Nora made a note to look up Jessie Norman and … Kariyan. She drew a few question marks onto the page.

“Then again, the sight of a black opera singer next to a former Nazi conductor was … well, that was something to behold.…”

At this point Sister Ann-Marie appeared with three Styrofoam cups of coffee. She deposited a small pile of plastic creamer pods and a few packets of sugar.

“What about her husband?”

“Her husband? Her husband worked at the brewery, though he stole from it, weakening it—crippling it. Drank himself to death, he did.” Sister Mary Catherine stirred creamer into her coffee. “It’s late for coffee,” she said. Her blue eyes twinkled as she added by way of confession, “But it helps me get through evening prayers.”

“Why did Carole Martin disown her son?” asked Nora. “Was it really because he had stolen the recipe for their most famous beer?”

Sister Mary Catherine shook her head vehemently. “Oh, no. This was certainly part of it, of course. She recognized his willingness to do anything for money, even if it meant dishonoring the family. But this last act, the thievery and the court case and the humiliation … this was the final straw in a lifetime of difficulties.”

The agents waited as patiently as they could, fighting the weariness they felt in expectation of some window into Will Martin’s life.

Sister Mary Catherine sighed deeply, then said, “Carole Martin’s son did what I’ve seen other children do. The bullied boy became a bully. But he did it with a level of cruelty I was surprised at. This is the problem with rich boys sometimes. They can afford to be particularly cruel.”

“Can you give us an example?”

Sister Mary Catherine sighed. “I think what disturbed his mother the most was that he was such a plotter. He would sit and brood and plan and devise and then an incident that all had considered forgotten would suddenly be avenged.”

She sipped at her coffee, contemplatively. “He was angry at an employee of the brewery. A grown man with a family, mind you! But this man had teased young Will, made some laughing comment about him resembling a girl because he was so delicate.”

Nora and Ben exchanged looks, waiting.

“Three months later there was an accident. He was a brewmeister, see? An expert. But somehow he fell into the vat itself. Drowned.”

Ben said, “Not an accident?”

She shook her head. “There were ugly, persistent rumors that the boy—only twelve at the time—had paid one of the employees to push him in.”

“Age twelve?”

“He knew the power of money over the poor,” said Sister Mary Catherine. “Sometimes a soul is just weak, easily gives itself over to darkness. Even in the music, he found darkness. Wagner wrote some of the most beautiful music in the world. But Will latched on to the … well, to these threads of cultural superiority.…”

“But wasn’t that Wagner’s point?” asked Nora, recalling Chid’s insights. “My colleague told me the Nazis used his music. Named efforts to round up and kill people after lines of his work. Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Oh, of course, to some extent. But his characters also sing of the power of love to restore and rejuvenate.” Sister Mary Catherine took a deep breath and looked about her, her limpid blue eyes taking in the forms bent over their meals and the artwork on the walls. At last she let her gaze fall on Nora again. The nun’s eyes shone. “Music … music is from the divine realm, child,” she said. “It is both prophecy and a testament to God’s grace, isn’t it? It can uplift like nothing else. It is a terrible disservice to art to suggest it should be limited by the borders of the artist’s flesh … or even his intent.”

Ben and Nora listened, waiting to see where she was going. Reluctantly, Nora sipped at the coffee. Then she dumped in as much sugar and creamer as she could, swiping Ben’s share as well.

“That boy broke his mother’s heart. And not because he was really … well, a rather poor, rather stiff musician.”

She took a long sip of her coffee, her brow furrowed, recalling. “Carole had thought that, well, if her own career could not be, because she was a woman, because she had to submit to the will of her father and then to her husband, she was sure that if she taught the boy all she knew, that he would flourish where she could not. Instead of taking the musical education she gave him as the gift that it was, he found it to be one more area where he had failed. He was terribly afraid to perform and fail, to sit on the concert stage and forget the notes or stumble. I attended what was to be his great debut recital, a beautiful program from Scarlatti to Chopin. His hands shook so badly he could not play. He finally left the stage in shame. His father mocked him mercilessly, the attendees could not help but laugh and shake their heads.… It became another cross to bear for him. Sickly, anxious, and then simply not good enough. He never recovered and never played again in public.”

Sister Mary Catherine’s face was riven with sadness now.

“He broke her heart,” she repeated. “Not because he could not perform. But because his relationship with music became so … toxic. It became a cultural icon that he would hold up as an impossible, unattainable standard. She herself, beautiful accomplished musician that she was, became … repugnant to him. He was horrible to her.”

Nora struggled to relate. For a moment she could feel again the weight of towering words teetering on her tongue. Her mother had been anxious to have Nora spout classical Arabic poetry even when she was little, even when the words were nonsense to her. Transplanted onto this soil, where poetry seemed scant and words weightless, Nora’s mother had insisted. She had needed Nora to hear how the words were woven into the weft of timeless meters born of an ancient pulse.

Still, Nora thought. I never got shaky over the idea of forgetting a line from Imru al-Qays. And even though he’s a thousand times more advanced than Shakespeare a thousand years earlier, I never lorded it over anyone.… And, her heart twisted at the memory, I was always gentle with my mother.

She glanced at Ben to find him watching her. She quickly focused on Sister Mary Catherine’s gentle voice.

“Carole Martin tried hard to redirect her son who seemed to be foundering on all fronts. She even made him come to me, to come volunteer, feeding the hungry. But he could only see as far as their skin color, and here in Erie—well, at that time, there were few hungry whites. These days hunger does not discriminate. Either way, I was unable to cultivate in him compassion because he could only view poverty and powerlessness as failure.”

“So Carole Martin gave up? Disowned him?”

“He disowned her, really. Walked out on her quite famously. Left Erie when she was most ill. When she made her bequests, she thought that increasing him in wealth might be dangerous.”

“Why did Mrs. Martin pick your order for her gift?” Ben asked.

“Well … Carole always regretted not being more assertive, not standing up for herself, not doing more … and we Benedictine sisters have a reputation for being feisty. I’ve been arrested four times, you know!” She said this as though it were a badge of honor.

“What was the reason, Sister?” Ben asked.

“Protesting the war in Iraq. Protesting street violence. Protesting gun violence. And most recently protesting a candidate for national office who had the audacity to try to spread fear in our city. We sisters don’t sit still too often.”

Ben and Nora smiled, both looking around. “How many people do you feed a day?”

“Now? With so many of the old factories closed? Over fifteen hundred. All colors and races and creeds. We are united in our need to eat, you know. Our dependence on God’s bounty. No matter who you are, or where you’re from, eventually you’re going to get hungry. We can’t feed them all, but we do our best every day. It’s all we can do.”

They thanked her and walked out into the darkness. It was, by this time, past 10 P.M.

“She’s amazing,” said Nora.

Ben nodded.

“You gonna come camp out at the compound with me?”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” he said, kissing her temple and then wrapping his arm around her shoulders as they walked.

“You’re kinda…” She wiggled, trying to find a position which wouldn’t push her gun holster into her flesh.

“Yeah, it’s not so easy. Switch sides.”

They adjusted and shifted about until they found a comfortable way to walk.

“Well, of all the things I just picked up, there’s one that stands out,” Nora said.

Ben brushed a loose strand of hair from her eyes. “What’s that?”

“I may have to give this Wagner guy a listen after all.”

*   *   *

They shared what they’d found with Chid and Ford.

“Well,” said Chid, “There’s nothing like a disgraced and disempowered rich guy to be brooding for a decade and then unleash hell.”

For their part, the two had been sharing their discoveries with Schacht. Something like a plan was being hatched. The Telegram app had exploded with the rage of the group at having been subverted during their occupation. Promises of the Third Day being grim abounded.

But the Third Day would be the Third Day. Sanchez had at least secured from Baker the promise that no actions would be taken until the next day.

“Is that a promise Baker will keep?”

“He’s been very deliberate so far,” Ford said. “Geyer-slash-Martin’s orders, perhaps, but they are obeyed to the T, not one bit more.”

As such, Schacht had issued orders to all the agents to sleep five hours and then come to the compound at dawn.

Ben and Nora walked back to her apartment.

“We could just run in there,” she said, pulling the key out from behind the brick.

“In where?” said Ben, yawning.

“Into that barn they’re holding him in. Just bust our way in and grab him and go.”

“Yes, Nora. We could,” he answered, tired. “Let’s do it first thing in the morning.”

“Well, Benjamin Calder. I never thought I’d see you run out of gas.”

“We’re all half dead, woman.” After they pulled off their holsters, they shed their clothes in a pile and fell into bed in their underwear and T-shirts. Nora shoved away her shyness about being so unclothed in front of him, finding some deep, distant place to store it. It was immaterial now, she knew. What was elemental was to lie curled next to Ben. She began thinking of what he’d said about losing patience with their agreement not to move to the next level.

But the still, dark room and the safety of his arm around her, her head on his shoulder and his almost immediate, even breathing, pulled her into a deep sleep that she realized she had never needed so much.

*   *   *

Even so, her sleep was brief. After only two hours, her eyes jerked open, and she found herself staring at the ceiling in the dimness. Soft strains of violin music seeped down from above. It sounded to Nora like a lament for the dead.

She carefully disentwined herself from Ben’s arms. He stirred, frowning, and peered at her. “What is it?” he whispered.

“It’s nothing. But I need to talk to my neighbor Rachel upstairs. I’ll be back. Sleep. I mean it.”

He squinted at her in the dimness. “I’ll come with you.”

“No. Sleep. I’ll be right back.”

She kissed him softly and then slid into her yoga pants. She was about to walk out barefoot, but then remembered her lesson about sneakers. Always. I will always wear my sneakers. Sneakers save lives.

She went outside into a warm, still night. Enough stars were visible overhead to convince her that growing up in Philadelphia had permanently destroyed her ability to understand what a night sky should look like. She pressed Rachel’s doorbell, then took the extra measure of texting her that it was she, Nora, who was attempting to intrude.

The footfalls on the wooden staircase were loud and rapid. Rachel pushed open her brand-new front door and threw her arms around Nora. “I’ve been so worried about you!” she declared.

Nora hugged her back. “Thanks, I’m okay. I’m sorry to bug you.”

“I woke you?” Rachel said, guilt clouding her eyes.

“No. Well, I’m not sure. Maybe. But I need to talk to you if you have a minute.”

Rachel nodded. “Of course. Come up?”

Nora followed her up the creaky staircase.

“Tea?” Rachel asked.

“No, nothing,” Nora said. “Just … can you talk to me a little about Wagner?”

Rachel raised her eyebrows and asked, “Wagner again?”

Nora nodded.

“What do you want to know?” Rachel asked, settling onto her soft red couch.

Nora folded a leg beneath herself and sat down at the opposite end. “I don’t know. What do you know about the Ring?”

“Alberich’s Ring? Like in the Ring Cycle?”

“Yep,” confirmed Nora.

Rachel thought a moment and then said, “I guess the key point is you have to forswear love to attain it. After that … well…” She ticked off on her fingers: “Don’t turn yourself into a toad if you want to keep it. Don’t bargain with giants for it. Don’t trick Amazons into giving it to you. It’s best left with the mermaids, frankly.”

Nora ran her fingers through her loose curls. “Why a ring?”

Rachel considered this. Just as Nora thought she had no answer to offer, she spoke, her voice very quiet, very slow. “I rather think it’s about taking a thing of beauty and using it in the wrong way for all the wrong reasons and ultimately destroying yourself. And a ring by definition has the convenient bonus of showing us the circularity of our habits in doing this.”

Nora turned Rachel’s words over, weighing them. “I really hate Wagner right now. I’m trying to sort out why I even have to know his name. A little old nun lady told me his music was divine. I want to understand from you, a musician, what the deal is.”

“Ah,” said Rachel, inhaling deeply. She flicked through the files on her phone and tapped one. The wireless speaker system glowed and sprang to life.

“The operas?”

“Dramas,” she corrected. “This is Das Rheingold.” They both listened a moment. Rachel studied Nora’s reaction. At length, she said, “Look, the music is … well, you’d have to be nuts to think it was bad. It’s exciting and stirring and unearthly and yet very real, very tightly constructed, very … sound. It’s hard to back up a claim that it’s outright bad, though some critics did at first.”

Nora, who was still deciding, tried to listen around these words.

Rachel pressed on. “I think your real problem is, Where does music start and the composer end?”

Nora said nothing.

“It’s the same with artists, too. I can name fifty horrendous people who produced some of the world’s most transcendent paintings.”

Nora tilted her head, considering. “Well, see, my grandfather would have said that is reason enough to discard their productions and listen to God’s birds instead of music or look at his sunsets instead of pictures.”

“Well, your grandfather would have missed out,” Rachel said simply.

They sat listening in silence.

Finally, Rachel said carefully, “Look, as a musician, I can tell you that some bastard trying to link these works with acts of terror is devastating to me … and a terrible affront. It is as devastating, surely, as it must be for some pious person who reads scripture in order to connect with God … only to realize that some other bastard is using the words of scripture to call for violence.”

Despite herself, Nora found tears pooling in her eyes as Rachel spoke.

“Whatever he was, or however the Nazis used him, or however this guy is using him, Wagner wasn’t about bloodshed. Unlike God … well, or maybe like God, he was just sort of a dick.”

Nora flinched.

“But still. He was all bluster and his music … well, someone like me would say its ability to endure might even absolve him, although some of my Jewish colleagues might argue that point. But ask Daniel Barenboim who dared have the Israeli Philharmonic play a bit from Tristan and Isolde, a passionate, tragic romantic opera. The audience itself debated it on the spot, invoking the Holocaust and concentration camps. They called Barenboim a fascist. But in the end … they gave him a standing ovation.”

Nora murmured, “Brave.”

Rachel shrugged. “If the musicians can’t come together there’s honestly no hope. It’s the only language we have that’s universal. Well, except math. But everyone hates math. It just can’t compare.”

Nora laughed.

“But, listen, Nora. I think he used racial arguments and cultural patriotism to argue for his own preeminence because they were convenient and because he was vain—he wanted to do whatever he could to convince people they should listen to him instead of the competition, which often happened to be Jewish. He was self-serving, you know? It was a means to an end.”

Nora fell still, listening to the ebb and flow of the orchestra and unearthly voices of women interwoven with the instruments. At last she said, “So. That such arguments still matter in our day…?”

“Means it’s not Wagner who’s the fuck-up. It’s us.”