IT WAS an M-40 just like the one he’d trained with on Black Mountain, but with a new Schmidt and Bender day scope with a Horus reticle. Beyond the lines and dots and numbers were people. Hundreds. So many little lives buried behind that grid, filling the street, ready to celebrate the Fourth of July.
When he blinked, he remembered that windshield in the Nevada desert. Spots of blood appearing like magic.
Kevin had a decision to make, but didn’t know if he could.
He’d spent three days trapped in a Toyota with Benjamin Mittag, and it had been a relief to finally arrive in Florida and emerge from that claustrophobic car, even though by then he knew why he’d been brought there.
“Where’s Martin?” Kevin asked between towns in Missouri, mountains in the distance.
“Couldn’t say.”
“Meaning, you don’t know?”
Mittag rocked his head, staring hard at the road. “This is a big country, man. And when you’re not using the internet you can’t direct people from one spot. Martin’s got his half of the country, I’ve got mine. He’s east, I’m west.”
“But we’re driving to the East Coast.”
“Yep,” Mittag said, as if there were no contradiction.
“So how do you talk?”
“We don’t. Not often.”
Kevin wondered how anything could get done if the two leaders couldn’t sit down on a regular basis and strategize. And, really, what were they supposed to be getting done? Were they really just hiding out to avoid detection, as some said? Or was there a master plan that Kevin had now become a part of?
“How do you know what to do, then? If you can’t talk to him.”
A flash of anger crossed Mittag’s face. “How does he know what to do if he can’t talk to me? That man does the talking because that’s what he’s good at. But without me, there would never be any action.”
Kevin let that sit a moment, then: “I heard you used to lecture, back in the beginning. What I heard was that you took the paint off the walls.”
The compliment relaxed Mittag, just a little. “Yeah, I didn’t mince words. But if I’d kept it up I’d have been thrown back inside long ago.”
“Inciting violence.”
“Inciting action.”
If everyone was his own special interest, Mittag was unique, for he seemed to hate every part of society. He’d spent much of his youth incarcerated and felt that this gave him a more realistic view of the world than the college-educated kids he now found himself allied with. The cops who’d put him away, the wardens, the politicians who made the laws, the shop owners he stole from, the mothers and fathers who twisted their kids into kleptomaniacs in the first place, the teachers who tried to mold children into good little consumers, and even the thieves like the one he’d been—everyone was lined up for ridicule. They would all be standing at the wall come the Revolution.
Unlike Bishop, who spoke as if hope were his engine, Mittag was motivated by the angry conviction that he had always been looked down on, and it was time to make America pay for its contempt. But this kind of motivation, Kevin reflected, is volatile. The desire to get back at the elites who scorned him could easily change if his comrades started to piss him off—what was to stop him from turning on his own people?
“Where’d you grow up?” Kevin asked somewhere in Tennessee.
“One of Pennsylvania’s many assholes.”
“And Martin? Why hook up with him?”
Mittag gave him a sidelong glance. “I saw an opportunity.”
“For what?”
“For change,” Mittag said, but the way he said it Kevin wasn’t sure if he meant change for the world or change for himself, for Benjamin Thomas Mittag—he suspected the latter. “And you’re the first step.”
“Me?”
“You, brother. But you won’t be alone. Don’t worry. You’ll never be alone anymore.”
That, perhaps, was the most frightening thing Benjamin Mittag said the entire drive.
Kevin sniffed, drawing his sight across the crowd, then raised it to the platform at the intersection of Crandon and Harbor, festooned with the colors of the flag and full of local dignitaries. Through speakers, Miley Cyrus sang “Party in the U.S.A.” Though blocks away, the music rose to his open window on the seventh floor of a condo building. He measured distances. He estimated wind resistance. The platform was partially obscured by palm trees, and when he turned slightly the oppressive sun flared across his lens. But he’d done this in worse conditions.
In small-town Georgia, Mittag used a pay phone while Kevin waited in the car. When he returned he was jubilant. “Six!”
“Six what?”
Mittag started the car, grinning. “Six fists into the face of the country. Six drops of blood to feed the vampire.”
A windshield under the glare—six spots scatter across it.
Time to go, kids!
So there were six of him. Six Kevins across the United States, sweating, clutching rifles or wiring explosives or poisoning meals—or any of the numerous ways there are to kill a person. Six operations, simultaneously.
Of course, knowing this made none of it easier. It did him no good. When they reached Liberty City, Holly was waiting for them. She took custody of Kevin and brought him to a suburban house with no phone line. A safe house for two. She was a pretty girl—twenty-two, sun-dappled blond. And she didn’t let Kevin out of her sight.
She had already drawn up the plans, which she unrolled on the dining room table. There was his building. That was the street. Here was the platform where the target would speak. A single road across the Bear Cut Bridge would take them to the place of assassination; a boat would take them away. Holly knew it all, knew how to get in and how to get out, and she would have been happy to pull the trigger herself. But like the Revolution itself she knew her limits.
What had happened? After two weeks among comrades whose primary concern was staying out of sight of the law—two weeks in the position of defense—Mittag had dragged him into the epicenter of an offense that he’d never even caught a whiff of. Whatever he’d thought he knew about the Massive Brigade, it turned out, hadn’t been much more than conjecture. And while green-eyed Mary hadn’t gotten the memo that killing people was part of the Brigade’s MO, she was still a gatekeeper—I told them how fine you were. Now, because of government-trained skills and dumb luck, he’d ended up at the sharp end of the revolutionary bayonet.
The music ended abruptly, followed by cheers and hoots and applause, and the mayor approached the mic, or someone who looked like a mayor. Kevin wasn’t sure. There was only one face he needed to watch out for, and she’d been sitting at the far edge of the stage, chatting and laughing with one of her aides. Now she was on her feet, still smiling, brushing her long skirt straight.
The mayor thanked everybody for coming out on this beautiful day, and thanked, with a wink, Miley Cyrus.
Hoots. Hollers.
Sun-dappled Holly had driven him across the bridge and into the key. She’d parked a block over from the condos, and as he started to get out, shouldering his bag, she’d told him to slow down. Take it easy. She walked with him the whole way; they were part of a growing crowd, enjoying the clean ocean air. Holly gave him the condo key and told him that she would be waiting for him right there once it was over. He told her to stay safe, and in reply she opened her light jacket. She was carrying a little Walther PPK “in case these Florida boys decide to get fresh,” she said, then kissed his cheek. “Good luck.”
There was no one in the lobby, just an empty desk. There was a phone in the seventh-floor apartment, but it had been disconnected. Stale furniture—he wondered how long Bishop, or Mittag, had held on to this place, waiting for today, and for someone like him. Then he walked to the window and unzipped his bag.
The mayor said her name, and she heard it. One last brush of the skirt, plaster on that smile, and step confidently forward into the bright sunlight, arm raised, waving. A congresswoman ready for the public. A shining example of modern democracy working so damned well.
He remembered: Crack, crack, crack.
The lines and dots and numbers lined up on her face. They added up. Everything was balanced.
Let’s get moving, right? We’ve got a long road ahead of us.
He had a decision to make, but wasn’t sure he could make it.