Angel wasn’t thrilled that he was leaving behind his only way to contact her—his phone—but they’d known it would happen this way, and she didn’t protest too much. “Just be careful,” she said, as he tossed his phone through the window of his rental SUV. “I’ll be watching,” she said, “but there’s not a lot I can do if things go bad, honey.”
“Understood,” he said, and took out his hands-free unit. That went in the SUV as well.
Andre the boy Nazi told him to walk ahead, down the path toward the compound. Andre kept pace with him, walking alongside, both of his weapons safely stowed. The pickup, with its unseen passenger, rolled along behind them, and Chapel knew there would be a rifle pointed at his head at all times. He tried not to think about it.
“I’m supposed to welcome you to Kendred, Colorado,” Andre told him, as they ambled down the path. “Though I can’t see welcome being the right word.”
“Nice place,” Chapel told him. As they got closer, he saw more signs of life among the white houses. There were children sitting out on porches, kids in T-shirts watching him with wide eyes. Occasionally, the curtains of a window would twitch back as someone inside a house peered out for a better look. “Not very exciting though, huh? I must be the most interesting thing to come along in a while.”
“You see these streets?” Andre said, pointing at the wide patches of dust between the houses, crisscrossed with old vehicle tracks that had baked to terra-cotta in the sun. “You see any litter there?”
“No,” Chapel admitted.
“You see any needles in the gutters, any of those little plastic bags they sell crack cocaine in? No, you don’t,” Andre said. “You don’t see any gambling going on, no dice games on those porches. No criminals hiding underneath.”
“No, I don’t see anything like that.”
Andre nodded. “I’ll take boring any day over the exciting life of a ghetto. I been to Denver,” he confided. “I know what a mixed town looks like.”
Mixed as in mixed race, of course. Chapel had been to Denver as well, and he wondered if Andre had seen the same city he had. Chapel had thought Denver was a pretty nice place—quiet and low-key. Though not nearly so quiet as Kendred. “So this is what separatism looks like,” he said.
“That’s right.”
Belcher’s group, the Separatist Allied Front, was not technically a white-supremacist or white-power group though the distinction was academic as far as Chapel was concerned. He’d read a little of the SAF’s literature, as much as he could stomach, and gleaned the basic philosophy. The SAF claimed it was not a hate group, that its members didn’t hate anyone. They just didn’t want to live near any minority or ethnic groups or anyone practicing a religion they didn’t agree with—basically anyone but other white separatists. They advocated for repeal of equal-opportunity laws, so they could build their supposed paradise out West: towns just like Kendred, where every face was white, and they didn’t have to see a black or a Jew or a Latino all day long.
“How do you get around the laws?” Chapel asked. “The law says you can’t discriminate on basis of skin color when you sell houses.”
“None of these were sold,” Andre explained. “Every parcel of land here was a gift, direct from Mr. Belcher. The community came together to build the houses out of materials he donated. No money changed hands.”
“Clever,” Chapel said. “And awfully generous of him, to just give you everything.”
“We work for it, don’t you mistake me,” Andre told him. “We work in the factories over there, every day, like men. Not like moochers.”
“Making machine parts, right,” Chapel said. “And I suppose there’s some way you get around hiring anybody who doesn’t live here?”
“We’re not employees,” Andre pointed out. “Every man here is a shareholder in the company. When you come here, and he accepts you, he gives you a certificate worth exactly one share.”
“So you own the means of production,” Chapel said, not able to repress a small smile. Belcher had built something dangerously close to a communist society out here. Karl Marx might have loved it. Well, except Marx wouldn’t have been welcome in Kendred since he was the grandson of a rabbi. “You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?”
“We will abide by the laws of the United States until such day those laws are abolished,” Andre said, and now he definitely sounded like he was quoting someone. “We pay our taxes. If there were a draft, we would serve gladly in the military. And we vote.”
“Oh, I bet you do,” Chapel said. “What’s that building?” he asked, pointing at a large, ranch-style building in the middle of town. It was the only large building this side of the factories and warehouses.
“That’s our clinic, where our doctors work,” Andre said. “Keeping us healthy. Delivering our babies. We’re healthy here. Not a single case of sickle-cell anemia or Tay- Sachs.” He stopped walking and turned to face Chapel, who stopped as well. “I bet you hate seeing this. You must be choking on your bitter tongue, to see us living so good, huh, Federal?”
Chapel couldn’t help but laugh. It was just too strange—Ygor Favorov had said something almost identical, on the patio of his multimillion-dollar home on Long Island. “No, no,” he said, because Andre looked like he was about to reach for his gun again, “please, I apologize. I’m not laughing at you.”
Andre shook his head in angry dismissal.
“Does Terry Belcher live in one of these houses?” Chapel asked.
“That’s right. Just like the rest of us.”
Chapel nodded. He’d expected as much.
“Wait a minute,” Andre said. “You trying to figure out which one? Yeah, I get it now. You came here to figure out where he lives.”
“Why would I do that?” Chapel asked.
“So when you know, you can signal your friends somehow, and they can dive-bomb the house with that drone of yours. Is that it?”
“The drone is unarmed. There are no bombs on it,” Chapel insisted.
“So it’ll just—it’ll ram the house, like a kamikaze,” Andre said. He had gone white—well, whiter—as if he’d suddenly realized that he’d become an accomplice in the murder of his leader.
“Andre,” someone called out, “don’t be a fool.”
Chapel turned and looked at the clinic building. Standing in its doorway was a man wearing a denim jacket and a broad-brimmed hat. He had a shotgun in the crook of his arm, cracked open to show it wasn’t loaded. “You don’t have anything like that planned for me, do you, Federal?”
“Jim Chapel.” He walked over and held out his right hand to shake. The man in the denim jacket—Terry Belcher—ignored it.
“Come inside, Agent Chapel,” Belcher said. “Get out of this heat a while.”