Even as they turned off the rural road and onto the long, weed-lined driveway to the Chambers family farm, Podge Becket knew the Red Menace would not be needed.
Men in suits swarmed the front yard and overgrown fields. The doors were wide open in the rotted old barn, and Podge and Wainwright saw more agents picking around empty stalls. Despite the fact that the roof was half collapsed with a gaping hole in one side, they could see two agents through the open hay loft door.
The farmhouse itself was the main focus of attention, and the way the FBI agents were hustling in and out of the large two-story building, it was clear that anyone inside had been either captured or killed.
Podge flashed his MIC consultant’s ID to the FBI agents stationed in the drive, and he was waved through to the line of government sedans. He parked at the end of the line behind an unmarked panel truck.
A familiar face was inside the farmhouse to greet them when Podge and Wainwright entered the living room through the front door.
“Mr. Becket,” Special Agent Stanford Flask said. He acknowledged Wainwright with a nod. “They radioed you were coming. I’m afraid we were too late. Place was empty when we got here twenty minutes ago.”
To call the house a pig sty was an insult to pigs. Self-respecting swine would have begged to have their rectums and testicles turned into hotdogs rather than spend one day wallowing in the conditions the People’s Brigade found habitable.
Moldy paper plates covered in wriggling maggots rotted in every corner. The People’s Brigade thought nothing of wading through mounds of wadded up fast food refuse and all manner of discarded drug paraphernalia to get from room to room.
The downstairs toilet looked as if it had overflowed weeks ago. A plunger leaned in the corner behind it, but it remained untouched. The solution to the sewage dilemma had been to kick a hole in the floor with a boot heel to allow the overflowing ordure to sluice into the basement. There were neither towels nor toilet paper in the bathroom. Not that it mattered, since someone had ripped off the sink, towel racks and toilet paper dispenser and tossed them into the front yard.
From the foyer, Podge took it all in in an instant.
“Is this the ghost of glorious revolutions yet to be?” he asked. “Because if it is, I think I’m cooling on the whole worldwide socialism craze.”
“It’s always the way, Patrick,” Wainwright said. He touched a laundry mound near the door with a tentative toe. “At the start, they’re all chiefs and none want to be Indians, so no one takes out the garbage. But, of course, they claim great empathy for the plight of the common garbage man. And if and when they take power and all of them actually do finally become chiefs, they make sure someone other than them is forced to take out the garbage, for no pay and at gunpoint. And usually the garbage man is the same ignorant fool who was doing it in the first place, and who helped install in power his communist savior oppressors.”
Wainwright noted something in the laundry pile at his foot that seemed familiar. He was trying to think where he’d seen a similar garment when Special Agent Flask chimed in.
“A cup of coffee was still warm on the table when we got here. Some cigarettes were smoldering in ashtrays. They left in a hurry.”
“They get a tip you were coming?”
“Possibly,” Flask said. “I understand they had one friend in government. I don’t know if you heard, but there was apparently someone high up at the Internal Revenue Service who was in on this. I don’t know his name yet.”
“If you find out, do let us know,” Wainwright droned.
Podge was looking at pictures on the mantel. A copy of the photograph of Darlene Chambers that had sat on her proud father’s desk at the IRS building was the centerpiece. There were others of the girl at different ages. It was difficult for Podge to see in the little girl on the tricycle or in the birthday party hat any hint of the cold-blooded murderer she would grow up to be. There was one photo on the end of a woman holding a baby. Podge assumed it was the late Mrs. Chambers. He knew nothing of the woman — she may have been even more radical than her husband and daughter. But, knowing nothing, he was glad that the beaming mother in that old photograph had not lived to see the soulless monster she had loosed on the world.
Next to the picture of the late Mrs. Chambers was a cheap clay pot that held a dozen dusty plastic daisies. Podge noted that the same pot with the same flowers were in the background of the picture with mother and baby. The plastic daisy that the girl had been wearing in her hair in Illinois had been plucked from that very pot.
“You’ll want to see this, Mr. Becket,” Flask said.
The FBI agent led them up the creaky, narrow flight of stairs to the second floor.
The master bedroom was covered with filthy, tattered cloth. All the curtains that were missing from every window in the house had been torn down and tossed on the floor. Old tablecloths had been liberated from the dining room hutch, every sheet and towel from the linen closet, and the contents of every bureau and storage trunk in the house had been dragged up to the master bedroom.
The floor of the big room was dotted with a series of nests. Podge saw the nearest was made from a grimy old wedding gown and some tattered drapes.
“I’d estimate at least twenty people were living here,” Flask said. “There’s a smaller bedroom that’s more of the same. But that’s not what I wanted you to see.”
There were two small bedrooms at the end of the hall. FBI agents were swarming around the one on the right.
The second smaller bedroom was not used for sleeping. In the room was a table covered with photographs, maps and even postcards. Every photo, sketch and even some cartoon images were of the same iconic, Art Deco structure.
“They’re going after the Empire State Building,” Flask announced.
Podge and Wainwright glanced over the material. The People’s Brigade had managed to dig up old blueprints of New York’s most famous building. A snow globe of the Empire State Building held down the corner of a map. There was even a puzzle, half finished. The building and most of the border was complete, but whoever had pieced it together had difficulty with the sky. Most of the blue puzzle pieces were still in the box.
“God help us, Patrick, they are infants with dynamite,” Wainwright said.
“We’ve already warned New York,” Flask said. “The building’s being evacuated. We’re not sure if they might choose another target if they see they can’t hit the Empire State, so there might be evacuations of other landmarks. Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler Building, Carnegie Hall, etcetera.”
The agents were poring over every piece of paper in the room, hoping to glean from even the smallest scrap some information on the People’s Brigade.
Podge and Wainwright left Flask in the bedroom and went back into the hall.
“You think they’d leave it all laid out for us like this, doc?”
Wainwright shrugged. “Possibly. They started off mistaking Jefferson for Hamilton. They’re evil and stupid. You know, Patrick. Typical communists.”
Podge didn’t seem convinced. He strolled across the hall into the second of the two small bedrooms. The FBI was concentrating all its efforts on the room across the hall, leaving this one empty.
Both men realized at once that this had at one time been the bedroom of Darlene Chambers. The People’s Brigade members who had been living in this room had stripped out all of the girl’s old furniture except her mattress and box spring, which had been set up as twin beds side-by-side on the floor. The girl’s old adornments from high school still hung on the walls. There were Beatles and Rolling Stones posters fastened to the florid, faded wallpaper with straight pins. Green and yellow award ribbons hung from the corners of two of the posters.
“She was saner once,” Podge said, flipping one of the ribbons. It read “3rd Place,” but did not say for what Darlene Chambers had received her prize. “She had some kind of normal life at least. Kirk said Chambers gave up on the house when she finished high school. He must have commuted to D.C. until she went off to college.”
“It’s only a half-hour drive, for God’s sake,” Wainwright said. “If his fellow travelers were that lazy, those tanks would never have made it to Prague.”
The closet was open and someone had already taken a rapid inventory of the contents. Podge found an old yearbook in a box with one roller skate and a handful of jacks. He flipped through the book and found a younger Darlene Chambers. The photo was the same as the one on the mantle and in her father’s office.
“Get a load of this,” Podge said. “No one signed her book.”
He turned the senior yearbook and fanned the pages like a flipbook. There was not so much as a single “Have a great summer!” from one cover to the next. Except…
“Wait,” Wainwright said. “Go back to the L’s.”
One boy had signed the book. David Lyndstrom. His hair was long and parted in the middle, his skin ravaged by acne. Beside his photograph he had written, “Bring the war home! We’ll get the job done soon! See you at orientation! Dave L.!”
Lyndstrom had apparently been off to Sails-Bragstaff three years ago, too. He was probably the boyfriend Chambers had alluded to. Podge made a mental note of the boy’s name and placed the yearbook back in the closet.
There was one more room upstairs. Podge glanced in and saw it was a bathroom.
It looked as if someone had recently used the room to scrub out an oil drum. There were muddy handprints on virtually every surface. The tub itself was encased in black goo. In spots, the black tar-like substance ran like slow molasses, revealing ancient mildew. But there were shampoo bottles as well, and soap, razors, deodorants, combs and hairbrushes.
“Check this out, doc.”
Wainwright glanced around the doorframe. “Swine,” he said.
“Take a look at the sink. Does that look odd to you?”
Wainwright was not certain at first to what Podge was referring. It was difficult to get past the filth and the stench. When the doctor abruptly frowned, Podge knew that he was not the only one to notice something so completely out of place.
“It would appear that monkeys have taken a chilling Darwinian leap forward and have learned how to groom themselves,” Wainwright said.
The combs and brushes were filled with hair. The deodorants still had price tags and were not encrusted near the caps, so they had been bought and used recently. There were even whiskers glued to the crud in the sink, so someone had shaved. More than that, the whiskers were small, which indicated that not only was at least one of the men shaving, he had done so on a regular basis.
“You have a tweezers?” Podge asked.
Wainwright produced a pair from his pocket and Podge pulled a clump of hair from one of the combs. It was short, almost a military cut. And there were at least three different colors of hair pinched in the tweezers.
“The men have short hair,” Wainwright said. When Podge tried to return the tweezers, he recoiled. “For the love of God and all that’s holy, Patrick, I don’t want those back. Throw them out the window.”
Podge dropped the tweezers in a trash can in the corner of the bathroom — which was the only item in the house devoid of trash — and the two men went downstairs.
The FBI agents paid them no attention as they went from room to room.
On the kitchen table they found a pile of reading material. From amongst the comic books and Newsweeks, Wainwright picked up one fat book.
“Guy Fawkes?” he said, frowning at the biography. He thumbed through the book. “Ah, I see. There are pictures.” He tossed it to the table.
Podge was looking out the open back door. His brow suddenly furrowed and he marched with purpose out onto the porch. Wainwright hustled to catch up.
They strode across the yard to the barbecue pit. None of the government agents seemed interested in this lonely corner of the yard.
Podge squatted down to examine the ashes in the pit.
“They didn’t cook out here,” he mused aloud. “The grates haven’t been used in years.” The two grates were leaning against the side of the pit, rust fusing them together from years of exposure to the elements. “There’s no charcoal, and I don’t see anything around here to cook on even if there was any.”
There was a stick lying on the ground near the barbecue pit, burned on one end. Podge picked it up and poked around in the black ash .
“They were burning paper out here, doc. Why would they do that? Not to tidy up. They obviously didn’t clean anything else up in there. What was so important about whatever this was that they had to set it on fire?”
“Membership rolls? Evidence against Chambers? Who knows with this crowd?”
“Yeah, but why would they be worried about that stuff and not about everything in that room upstairs? I mean, why burn evidence if they’re going to leave a plan to blow up the Empire State Building out there for all the world to see?”
Wainwright tossed up his hands. “LSD?” he suggested.
“Or the Empire State Building isn’t the target and all of that upstairs is just a diversion,” Podge said. He dropped the stick and stood, dusting off his hands. “Their target isn’t New York, doc, it’s Washington.”