WHO HAD killed Martin Bishop? What did this mean for the Brigade? And how had Sam Schumer learned it before Rachel had? She was preparing to call him when her phone started ringing. Paulson wanted to know what the hell was going on. “Bishop dead? Are we looking at the light at the end of the tunnel?”
“We’re looking at something,” she admitted, but didn’t want to be more specific.
“You sound worried, Rachel.”
With the adrenaline coursing through her, she didn’t know what she felt. Then she did. “I’m feeling apprehensive, sir.”
“Tell me.”
She took a breath, but the cigarette stink of that back room in the sheriff’s office left a bad taste on her tongue. “I’ve spent the last several hours talking to these followers, and what I’m hearing doesn’t make sense. July 4 wasn’t what they were expecting, and in a way it wasn’t what I was expecting. Bishop’s spent the last eight years maintaining a balancing act. Talking about violence while never actually encouraging it. He’s been so careful … and now this?”
“People don’t make sense,” said Paulson. “Try spending an hour talking to my daughter.”
“That’s not it, sir,” she said, wanting to make herself clear. “By doing this, by killing politicians, Massive delegitimized itself. It’s the kind of act that either triggers spontaneous revolution, or it buries everything you’ve spent your life working toward. And look outside. There’s no revolution in the street.”
“They fucked up—I agree. What we have to do now is capitalize on it.”
It was, in Paulson’s opinion, a moment to celebrate while pushing forward with renewed vigor. She felt the same, but there were still too many questions to answer, and it hurt to know that she would never be able to put those questions to Bishop himself. The only person who could answer them was Mittag, and she didn’t know where he was.
She spent an hour videoconferencing with Ashley and Doug; Owen was in Chicago, checking on a source who claimed to have set up Bishop with five foreclosed houses. At the same time, interrogation reports from the second raid in Nephi were starting to come in, as were preliminary forensics from the murder site. Bishop had been killed with a 7.62 millimeter shot from a rifle. Long range. Sam Schumer’s story was that Mittag had committed the murder, but if he had he had used a sniper. “How do we think Schumer got his intelligence?” she asked Doug and Ashley.
“I don’t think you realize how popular Sam Schumer is,” Doug said. “He could start his own revolutionary organization in about two tweets.”
True enough, and the only way to get any further on it was to talk directly to the man. She stretched out on the sheriff’s leather sofa, one of many items the sheriff had pointed out proudly when she arrived, saying, “Asset forfeiture,” and made the call.
Schumer picked up quickly, and before she could speak he said, “You finally going to confirm a few things, Rachel?”
“I’ve called to find out how you talk to the Massive Brigade.”
A laugh from his side. “You think those guys speak to me?”
“How else did you learn about Martin Bishop’s murder before we did?”
“Rachel,” he said, turning to the professor’s voice that he sometimes used on his show, signifying that it was time to dumb things down. “I learned long ago not to tie myself to a single source in any government department. Particularly when my one source doesn’t like me anymore.”
“What makes you think I don’t like you, Sam?”
“I like you, too. But who do you think told me, back in March, that Martin Bishop’s merry band was preparing for terrorist action?”
She remembered Schumer’s anxious “exposé” on Bishop, which she’d always taken for a business move—his ratings had been on a downward slide. “I assumed you’d made that up.”
“I’m a journalist, Rachel. You don’t have to agree with my conclusions, but I don’t make these things up. And since you don’t talk to me anymore, I’ve had to lean on my ace in the hole.”
“Who is…?”
“Who is confidential. You know that.”
The conversation stalled because they both knew what they wanted but neither had come with anything to offer. When she hung up, it was dark outside, and the asset-forfeiture sofa was feeling extremely comfortable. She closed her eyes and didn’t open them when the phone rang again. She just brought it to her ear, saying, “Proulx.”
“He called,” said Janet Fordham.
Rachel’s eyes snapped open, and she sat up. “Does he know how Bishop died?”
Janet sounded flustered a moment. “A sniper. He doesn’t know if it was Mittag’s doing. But listen—”
“How does he not know?”
“Forget that,” Fordham snapped. “It’s not important. What’s important is that we know where Mittag is. And we have enough time to get him.”