GREEN-EYED MARY asked him to join her on a shopping trip into town—the closest town being Dayton, population 757, a half hour away. By then he’d been with them for a week and a half, and had even grown to enjoy the routine. People joined in anger were remarkably generous with one another. He mentioned this to Mary as she drove the house pickup down Highway 14.
“You’ve only been around a little while,” she told him with a smile. “Give it time. Radicals are as catty as anyone else. Worse, probably.”
“I saw that back in Frisco.”
“Longer,” she said, and winked.
“You’ve been with it a while, then?”
She didn’t answer, but Kevin knew that this was her way. Mary liked to let other people fill in the blank spaces in conversation.
So he said, “I’m wondering where this is all leading.” A field opened up to the left, bright under the blazing sun, full of grazing cows. “You’ve got these people hiding from the government. They’re talking and talking and shooting in their spare time—but you’ve got to see it, right? They can’t hit squat. Mary from Dallas and those two guys—St. Louis and Denver—they know how to aim. The rest?” He shook his head.
“You think you’re the only one complaining?” Mary asked. “Every day I get an earful. Some are like you, thinking we should be running strict obedience lessons, teach everyone how to massacre at will. Others—and you probably know who they are—are horrified they have to touch a gun. They pull me aside and demand to know if we’re building an army.”
“You’re not building an army.”
“Damned right,” she said. “We’re building a community.”
“Tell that to the George who brought me and Tracey to your place.”
“What about him?”
“He killed a woman he thought was following us. Shot her in her car.”
Mary went silent, chewed on her lower lip. “Why didn’t you mention this before?”
Why hadn’t he? “Because I thought you knew. I thought that was the way.”
“I didn’t get that memo,” she said, then fell back into silence as the landscape unrolled around them. After a year in San Francisco’s narrow streets, Kevin still found these open spaces exhilarating and terrifying.
He said, “When did you meet Martin?”
“After he came back from Berlin,” she said. “Back in Austin. He was trying to figure things out.”
“The Kommando Rosa Luxemburg.”
“They got a raw deal,” she said.
He waited for more, but she didn’t look like she was going to share, so he pressed: “From what I heard, they blew themselves up.”
“That’s what you would hear, isn’t it?” She shook her head. “False flag op, all the way. The Germans, maybe with a little help from us. The KRL had humiliated them with those email leaks, so they got them back.”
Kevin looked out the window. False flag: the Twin Towers, Waco, Charlie Hebdo, Sandy Hook … Pearl Harbor. He’d heard all the conspiracy theories, and every time someone said “false flag” his stomach seized up, because he knew he’d entered a space where rational thought was being thrown under the bus. Thankfully, Mary wasn’t interested in jumping further down that rabbit hole right now.
“Austin was fun, though. Full of possibility. We drank a lot.” She cleared her throat. “That was in late ’09, early ’10—before it got serious. A lot of us were taken in by Obama, before realizing he was more of the same.”
“Martin opened your eyes?”
She grinned. “My eyes were already open. Most people’s are. They just don’t know what to do next.”
“What’s next?”
“Really?” she asked. “You really need an answer?”
“What I need,” he said after a moment, “is a direction to point myself. It’s the way I’m built. We’re not making an army, you say. We’re building a community. Cool. But what’s the end point?”
“Men,” she said, sighing.
“What?”
“You can’t just take a drive, can you? Always need a destination.”
The cows had given way to sugar beets, and Mary told him about an article she’d read concerning the sharp rise of celiac disease in America, that rare gluten allergy that sent its victims to the toilet all day long. The article, she said, showed that the rise of celiac diagnoses directly paralleled the increased use of the toxic herbicide glyphosate just before wheat harvesting. The process yielded 30 percent more seeds but also left trace amounts of glyphosate in the wheat. She said, “Americans aren’t falling victim to celiac disease; they’re being poisoned in order to maximize profits.”
When they reached Dayton she didn’t slow down, not even when they passed the Corner Grocery. Once they crossed the Little Tongue River they were out of it. He said nothing, only watched the passing fields until after another ten minutes she turned down a long driveway beside a broken mailbox. The truck bounced where recent storms had dug ravines across the drive.
A part of him worried, as he had that first day, that the gig was up. Had he been marked for exclusion? Among these people, that could mean anything. He hadn’t made the cut, perhaps, or they’d decided in their myopic way that he was part of the other—an interloper, a spy.
They reached a farmhouse, one of thousands that had been abandoned across the United States in the past decade as small farms had gone under. This one was in serious disrepair. Slanted shutters, snapped porch planks, smashed windows. Paint cracked under the blazing sun. They parked in an empty, overgrown yard. He hadn’t asked a thing, and Mary hadn’t bothered to tell him. She only led him up the front steps, cautioning him to watch out for loose boards, and together they entered the house, which held some abandoned pieces of mildewed furniture. She said, “You ate breakfast, right?”
“Sure.”
She nodded, looking around the empty place. Was she nervous? He couldn’t tell. He said, “We’re waiting for someone?”
“You are,” she said. “I’ve got groceries to buy.” But she looked around the place a little more, lingering.
“Who am I meeting?” he asked.
A shrug.
“Are you picking me up after shopping?”
“I’ll be told one way or the other, okay? You need a bottle of water?”
“Depends on how long I’m standing around here.”
“I’ll get you one.”
He followed her back out to the truck, hot wind buffeting them, and accepted a Poland Spring. “Look,” he said, “if I’m in the doghouse you might want to tell me.”
She grinned, shaking her head. “Nothing like that. You’re fine. That’s why you’re here.” She got back into the truck and started it up. “I told them how fine you were.”
“Thank you,” he said.
She hesitated, then: “What happened on the road. George, and what he did. That’s not what Martin is about. I know this. That George—maybe he was stressed from driving so much. Paranoia, I don’t know. But that isn’t the kind of people we are.”
He watched her drive off, then went back inside. In the kitchen, he found a phone screwed to the wall, but it was dead. Carefully, he took the stairs to the attic floor and peered out windows, looking for signs of life: cities, houses, trailers. There was nothing, not even in the direction of Dayton, which meant that there was no place to go.
The warmth inside the house was worse than in the open field, so he went outside again and drank half the water, then took a leak around the back of the house. The day came and went, and by the time the sun first brushed the horizon he heard the engine. It came from the north, an SUV bouncing through difficult, untended terrain as it headed toward him. He considered going back inside but didn’t see the point. So he stood in front of the house, his hands loosely held together like a man considering prayer but not yet committed to the act.
When the dusty SUV pulled up, two men climbed out. One—a wiry Hispanic—he didn’t know, but the other one—big, with a wheat-colored beard and blue eyes—he recognized as Benjamin Mittag. Neither was smiling. Without introducing himself, Mittag walked past Kevin and entered the house. The other man approached Kevin and said, “Get inside.”
He didn’t like the sound of that, but there was nothing else for him, so he went back into the house to find Mittag sitting on the old coffee table. Beside him lay a Springfield 1911 semiautomatic pistol. The other man entered behind Kevin and closed the door.
“Tell me,” Mittag said.
“What?”
“Who you’re working for.”
Kevin didn’t answer immediately. He took a breath. “No one.”
Mittag laid the Springfield on his knee. “Look, Kevin Moore. We know you’re working for someone. FBI? Homeland Security? Fucking CIA?”
Kevin put some effort into controlling his expression but had zero idea how he really looked. “How do you know this?”
“Because we’re Massive. Because we’ve got an army of hackers on our side. There are no secrets anymore. Not from us. So let’s start with who you work for.”
“I don’t work for anyone,” Kevin said.
Mittag stood and raised the pistol so that it was two feet from Kevin’s forehead. Kevin closed his eyes, exhaled, then looked again at Mittag. He said, “Pull the trigger.”
“Is that what you want?”
Kevin frowned, shook his head. “You don’t trust me? Then pull the fucking trigger. But don’t waste my time with accusations.”
Benjamin Mittag didn’t move. He just stared into Kevin’s eyes over the barrel of the pistol. Then he lowered it and smiled. “All right, then.” He stepped forward, clapped a hand on Kevin’s shoulder, and said, “Let’s go fight the good fight.”
Then he and his partner were gone. Kevin took a moment, fighting an onrush of nausea, wrestling with his bladder. He inhaled and exhaled, then followed them outside.