THE GIRL—the one who’d opened the safe-house door—was crying. She’d entered the interview room erect and strong, but once they settled at the table and Rachel asked her name and age, the tears began, and fifteen minutes later they were still flowing.
She had expected tears, of course, but not so quickly. As they’d filed out of the house they’d all worn a similar kind of shell-shocked expression, as if the world outside their walls were an indecipherable puzzle. In one moment, they’d been safely cocooned in a universe where their ideologies had become flesh; in the next they were being led out into the cool, predawn gloom by armed men in black who shouted at them to lie facedown in the grass.
So, yes, she’d expected tears eventually. But before that she expected denial and anger and deal making, and was surprised to find so little of it. It was, she reflected, as if they’d been waiting for someone, anyone, to drag them out of that house.
“I didn’t know. None of us knew. I mean—what could we do?”
“Why did you leave?”
The girl showed her confusion with an expression that looked, with her wet cheeks, more like agonizing pain.
“Leave home,” Rachel said. “On June 18, you left everything behind and ran.”
“But … we had to.”
“Why did you have to?”
“Because you were coming. People like you. The government.”
By her own accounting, the girl was twenty-four, and her name was Mary. Rachel might have believed her, but this was the sixth Mary she’d spoken to in the crowded corridors of the Sheridan County Sheriff’s Office, and they all gave the same reason for June 18. Rachel leaned closer and said, “Listen to me, Mary. Are you listening?”
Her eyes were wet, but she nodded.
“No one was coming to get you. That’s a lie.”
Mary shook her head. “You came after Martin. You came after Ben. We were next.”
It wasn’t worth arguing the point, so she went on. “What did you expect to happen after you disappeared?”
“I expected a safe space.”
“Safe?”
“Where we could speak openly, without fear.”
“Is that what you got?”
Mary frowned, unwilling to judge what she had gotten.
“So you arrived here,” Rachel said. “You met up with your comrades. But you had a plan. And it wasn’t to sit around and talk forever. What was your plan?”
“Well, it wasn’t to shoot people!”
“Then why did we find a dozen rifles and handguns in the house?”
“We had to defend ourselves.”
Rachel tried not to let her irritation show, but after listening to these kids, each of who seemed to have had an entirely different idea of what going underground really meant, she’d come to the conclusion that the only thing they really shared was the conviction—misplaced, as it turned out—that Martin Bishop would show them the way. What happened, though, was that Bishop had never shown up at this particular outpost, and so they were left to stew in their paranoia and dream up plans for the overthrow of everything.
“We were gonna spread the word,” Mary told her.
“Word?”
“We were gonna disappear and then come back with the word.”
“You’re not making any sense, Mary.”
She sniffed, and Rachel offered her a tissue. Waited as she blew her nose. Mary shook her head. “It’s what I wanted, at least. We would figure it out on our own and then come back. And we were going to share what we had learned. We were going to educate ourselves and then educate our families.”
“Really?” Rachel couldn’t quite swallow this as a workable plan, but then again she hadn’t been trapped in a house in the countryside, suffering from a myopia that made every plan, no matter how pie-in-the-sky, seem workable.
Mary hesitated. “We had to make our own way, because no one was telling us what to do. But then they killed those politicians and…” She shook her head, still so confused.
Mary, who Rachel would later learn was actually named Louise Barker, was much like the others in that house. Though details changed, they were all variations on a theme. They had gathered in the week following June 18, and in lieu of specific orders they had focused on learning how to protect themselves while engaging in revolutionary conversation.
Later, Rachel asked one of the Georges about the shootings, and unlike Louise Barker, he didn’t recoil. He just shrugged. “Sometimes you have to let go of plans. Others, they freaked out. Thought everything must be falling apart. But, look: You have to be able to adjust based on the present situation. If Martin thought that killing those suits was necessary, then it probably was.”
“So you had no trouble with it.”
“I could deal.”
When her phone rang, she was taking a nap in a back room the sheriff had cleared out for her. It was David Parker; he sounded out of breath. “Tell me—is she there?”
“Is who where?”
“Ingrid. My wife. Is she one of the people you arrested?”
“No, David. She’s not. I’m sorry.”
Silence, as the hope David had felt faded away. “Well, you’re a star now. Special Agent Rachel Proulx led the raid, approaching the house at great danger to herself.”
“Who said that?”
“Sam Schumer.”
Rachel closed her eyes. Paulson had chosen to put her name in the press release; she wished he hadn’t. Then David said, “Oh, shit.”
“What, David?”
“Shit!” His volume rose. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Why didn’t you tell me he was dead?”
“Who?”
Though David told her, she didn’t believe it until she hung up and used her phone to reach the Schumer Says website. And there it was, a flashing red EXCLUSIVE BREAKING NEWS banner: “Martin Bishop, leader of the terrorist group Massive Brigade, shot dead by his partner-in-crime Benjamin Mittag.”
Even then, she couldn’t believe it, because it didn’t seem possible. On the day she’d made her first arrests, the leader of the Brigade was suddenly dead in a field outside Lebanon, Kansas? She called the Kansas City field office, which patched her through to agents still heading to the scene, and over speakerphone they gave her a rundown of what they knew: Forty-five minutes ago, there had been an anonymous call to the Lebanon police department, claiming that four people had been spotted at the intersection of 130 and Aa Road—three men and one woman, with two vehicles. As he drove past, the caller recognized one person as Benjamin Mittag, which was why he had called. By the time the police made it out there, they found one vehicle and one dead male, shot through the head. Maybe Bishop, but they couldn’t be sure. Then they called the Bureau.
“I don’t know what I’m going to find out there,” the agent told her, “but if what we’ve heard is legit, then I’m getting drunk tonight.”
“Not alone,” said his partner.
“You haven’t even verified it yet,” Rachel said. “Who leaked it to Sam Schumer?”
“Hell if I know.”
She was literally on the edge of her seat, the rest of the sheriff’s station a flurry of activity on the other side of her closed door, when the agents reached the intersection of 130 and Aa, found the body, and squatted to check its fingerprints. There was silence on the line.
“So?” Rachel said, trying not to shout. “Who is it?”