DESPITE HIS earnestness the previous week, pulling into her office and offering his historical perspective on Martin Bishop, then sitting in a corner to read through all available files, Owen Jakes soon made himself scarce. Rachel had verified with Lou Barnes that his Berlin story was legit, but not even Barnes knew much about him. Jakes had dutifully gone through the messages sent to the FBI’s tip line—since they hadn’t released a statement about the four hundred missing followers, and Schumer hadn’t yet broken his story about them, the leads were only a handful of unconfirmed sightings of Martin Bishop himself. When he called to update her, Jakes admitted that nothing had come of the tips. “But I’m running down old contacts.”
“For what?”
“Too soon to say.”
That irritated her—who was working for whom here? “Why don’t you tell me anyway?”
There was a brief silence on the line before he said, “With the internet, everything’s international. I’m working my European contacts. Arguably, that’s where Massive was born, and there’s a growing number of fans on the Continent. You should see the spray paint in Berlin.”
Given that they had four hundred people to track down, his brilliant idea sounded like busywork. But on the other hand, it would keep Owen Jakes out of the way. “Okay, then,” she said. “Keep me posted.”
She kept an open line to SAC Janet Fordham in New Orleans, who promised to keep Rachel in the loop if anything came back from her undercover agent. Fordham, though, wasn’t full of hope. “I’ve known OSWALD since he first went undercover in 2010. Twenty-two years old, fresh from Quantico. We chose him because he’d come from the streets. Funny thing—a year at the academy had made him softer. Cleaner. And five weeks later, when he showed up in the hospital with a knife stuck in his right lung, I tried to pull him out. But he wouldn’t have it. He asked me what I thought would happen if he suddenly disappeared. Shonda, the woman he’d used to infiltrate the gang, would be accused of working with him. She’d be mutilated, or killed. So he went back. Two years later we took down the whole operation, primarily as a result of his work.”
The story, to Rachel’s ears, was a testament to OSWALD’s formidable skills and level of devotion, but Fordham had been trying to say something else. “He cares too much, and that’s his weakness. New Orleans was beginner’s luck. Now he’s dropped off the face of the earth, and for two weeks we’ve heard nothing. I’m too old to believe that luck holds.”
She was thinking about that conversation on the morning of July 4, her first day off since the disappearances. She was drinking coffee in her mother’s living room in Croton-on-Hudson, reading the paperback of Gray Snow that Pierce had given her. It was better than she would have thought having met David Parker; in fact, she was hooked. One character, Irina, a starving concentration-camp survivor, had just been robbed of her tiny morsel of food after starving for three days straight. What the hell was going to become of Irina?
“Why don’t you go back to bed?” asked her mother, using a walker to move from the doorway to the comfy chair, her puffy green robe looking too big for her meager body. “You got in so late.”
That was true. Rachel had flown into Westchester Airport on a red-eye from Tennessee after a difficult reconnaissance with Hank Abernathy, who ran the regional office in Memphis. “I slept enough.”
“Don’t fight it, honey. Or you’ll end up like me.”
“Lack of sleep leads to arthritis?”
“Could be,” her mother said as she lowered herself into the chair. “Where’s the remote?”
Rachel found it between the sofa cushions and turned on the TV. She raised the volume so her mother could better hear the Food Network, then went to the kitchen to open up her laptop and go over the notes from Tennessee.
“Two whole weeks,” Abernathy had reminded her in his humid conference room. “You fly down here from DC like you got the light of God on your shoulder. You really think we’ve been sitting on our hands down here? Five kids vanished from Memphis, another nine from Nashville. Not a one of them has called his folks. Every single one left his phone and credit cards behind. Look, it means something when a young person abandons his computer these days. Leaves his phone behind. You know?”
Rachel knew, but Abernathy was trying to make another point that lay just beyond her. From the moment she’d entered his office, he’d been trying to make points. It wasn’t the first time she’d faced this kind of reception: Jackson and Detroit were high on her shit list. “So you have a working theory,” she said.
“Yes I do,” he said, then took a sip of his coffee, drawing it out, waiting for her mouth to water in anticipation. She decided not to oblige. He said, “They’re dead. All four hundred of them.”
Her first thought was instinctual: This is how you clear your workload; you kill it off. She said, “You’re telling me that Martin Bishop gathered four hundred people from around the country to have them … what? Drink poisoned Kool-Aid?”
He leaned forward, hands open. “Look, these kids—they abandoned the things they love most. Two whole weeks, none of their folks have heard from them. They’ve vanished. How’s that possible? How does one kid not give a call home, just to say he’s still alive? Here’s how: They’re not.”
“Why would Bishop do that?”
Abernathy dropped back in his chair and shrugged. “Who’s to say what Bishop is thinking? Maybe he wants a bunch of martyrs. I mean, that man’s insane. He’s running his own cult. Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Have you read any of his writings?”
“Should I?”
The agent who drove her back to the airport was sympathetic. “Memory,” he told her as Memphis International, adorned in red-white-and-blue posters celebrating the holiday, came into view. “If it’s not exploding in front of him, Abernathy’s going to forget it exists. Then he comes up with theories to justify what he doesn’t remember.”
Tragedy plus time isn’t comedy, thought Rachel. It’s amnesia. She’d seen the same thing in the report Philly had sent to her on Benjamin Mittag’s mother, Jenny, a trailer-park queen living on the outskirts of Waynesboro. “Yeah, he was trouble,” Jenny had said. “But all boys are. He had beliefs, though. You know he tried to become one of you?”
Me? asked the interviewer.
“A federal agent. Applied and everything. If you’d accepted him, everything would have been different.”
A note mentioned that the agent had verified the mother’s claim before arriving: Benjamin Mittag’s 2008 application had been swiftly rejected and filed away. The decision had been justified by Mittag’s spotty juvenile record.
“But he did try to convince his mom,” Jenny went on. “What I’m telling you. He had beliefs. Year or so later this guy comes to speak to him. They go off to have a beer. Ben comes back, he tells me that the FBI changed its mind. They want him.”
A note here stated that her claim could not be verified, and the agent explained this to Jenny: We have no record of that, ma’am.
“You think I’m an idiot?” she demanded. “Yes, I believed it at first. I’m a mother, for God’s sake. I should’ve remembered, but I chose not to. He was always a good liar, the best. He went south and I didn’t hear anything from him until his name came up with the Massive Brigade. A liar.”
“Ray!” she heard from the other room. Rachel found her mother holding her phone, which was lit up bright, vibrating. Doug was calling on his day off.
“You watching this?” he asked her.
“What?”
“Turn on your television.”
On the screen, a woman was instructing her mother on how to make turkey stuffing. “Yes, and?”
“The news, Rachel. Put on the news.”