Chase showed up as they were reviewing Aline’s file. She was slightly disheveled—wrinkles in her usually perfect suit, a hank of hair out of place. “That little . . . person . . . really screwed us. What are you doing here?”
“Lucas found the ANM guy. We have a file on him,” Donald said.
“You’re joking.”
“That’s what Donald said, but I wasn’t.” Lucas took her through the sequence of events and filled her in on Aline. “What we need to do now is find out who he’s been talking to . . . who he’s been getting phone calls from.”
“That could be tough if he’s got a burner phone,” Chase said. “Which he probably does, if he’s security-conscious.”
“If there’s any way you could call him a national security threat, we could black-bag him,” Lucas suggested.
“Nope, that won’t work,” Chase said, shaking her head. “He’s basically a political operator working for a conservative political group. If we went for a warrant, the judge would laugh us out of the courthouse.”
Donald said, “Stingray.”
They both looked at him and he added, “Or a tower dump, if we know where he’s at in the evenings. When the PR lady talked to Lucas, she probably connected with Old John right away, or at least somebody high up in the ANM. They had to do some organization to make the approach to Lucas so quickly. They had to talk to Aline, and he had to get in touch with whoever photographed Gibson, the people looking for surveillance.”
Chase said to Lucas, “If he’s at home in the evenings, we can dump the nearest cell phone tower. There’ll be thousands of calls, but most of them will go to homeowners and we can get the associated addresses, which will leave a certain number of burners, but not a huge number. We’d look for a cluster of calls from a burner. It’s all computer-sorting . . .”
“You don’t need a warrant?”
“No. We can issue a subpoena on our own to the cell companies, get a dump,” Chase said.
“Or we could track him with a Stingray unit,” Donald said. “The Stingray’ll force all the nearby calls through the unit, so we can see who he’s calling. We can’t actually intercept the call, though.”
“Let me talk to some people,” Chase said. “We’ll explore the possibilities.”
“What happened with Audrey Coil?” Lucas asked.
“What you saw,” Chase said. “Her mother’s a little angry with her, but not too, because she’ll undoubtedly get a few invitations herself, from Fox or CNN or MSNBC, to talk about this. Audrey was insufferably cute, by the way. Insufferably sincere.”
“She won’t be cute if somebody shoots her in the face,” Lucas said.
They all thought about that, then Chase asked, “What’s next up? You got anything else going?”
“Not a thing,” Lucas said. “I’ve got nothing to work with. None of the alt-right people have given me anything useful. I could go interview the other kids who were photographed, and their parents, but you guys have already done that and I’ve read the transcripts. If nothing comes out of the Aline thing, I might as well go home.”
“Please don’t,” Chase said. “Let me get something going on Aline. Take the rest of the day off. Take tomorrow off. We could have something by the day after.”
* * *
—
INSTEAD OF TAKING THE DAY OFF, Lucas went back to the Watergate and called Charles Lang. Gibson answered and said Lang was shopping.
“I don’t need to talk to Charles,” Lucas said. “You’ll do fine, since you’re the researcher. Charles told me that the ANM had a training camp in Kentucky. I need to know where it was. Exactly.”
“We never looked into it,” Gibson said. “We didn’t want to . . . expose ourselves . . . to them.”
“Well, look now,” Lucas said. “You were snooping on me and that pisses me off, and it might even be a crime; and you do research, so do some research and call me back.”
* * *
—
WITH THAT UNDERWAY, Lucas changed into jeans and walked a mile or so to Dupont Circle, to a bookstore he’d visited the last time he was in DC. He spent a pleasant hour browsing, got a sandwich at the café, talked to Weather for ten minutes, and was strolling back to the Watergate with a Martha Grimes novel under his arm, when Charles Lang called back.
“Well, you scared Stephen, thank you very much. He gets upset when people snap at him.”
“Life in the big city,” Lucas said. “Did you find out where that training camp was?”
“I’ve emailed you what we found, along with a map and a satellite photo of the area. It’s in Kentucky, as I said, not far south of Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s a farm owned by a person named Milton Faye.”
Back at the hotel, Lucas booked a Delta flight to Cincinnati the next morning, leaving a little after nine o’clock, and another one back, in the evening, and reserved a Jeep at Hertz. He checked his email, found the incoming file from Lang. The place he was looking for was outside a Kentucky hamlet called Piner, and from the looks of things, was in the hills.
“Take a day off, my ass,” he muttered to himself, as he settled back with the Martha Grimes novel.
* * *
—
THE NEXT MORNING, after another fear-inflected but absolutely smooth flight to Cincinnati—the airport was actually across the Ohio River in Kentucky, where Lucas got a couple of bagels with cream cheese at a Bruegger’s—he picked up the Jeep and headed south. The town of Piner turned out to be a crossroads with a couple of dozen homes, a red-brick school, a red-brick church, and a convenience store where Lucas stopped for a Diet Coke and to check that he was on the right road.
He was. He headed south out of Piner, through heavily wooded hills and small farms, turned east on a narrower road and eventually found a mailbox that said “Faye” at the end of a gravel-and-dirt driveway that disappeared up a hill into heavy timber.
He went on by, eventually intersected with a larger highway, where he pulled over and checked his cell phone: he had three bars and called Chase.
“Nothing yet,” she said, when she picked up.
“I’m in Kentucky, checking out the farm where ANM supposedly did weapons training,” Lucas said. “It’s remote and spooky, but there’s good cell service.”
“Jesus, Lucas . . .”
“Could you check on a guy named Milton Faye, see if he has a cell phone? If he does, could you watch who he calls?”
“I can do that, but are you going to get shot?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Why don’t I call in the state cops to go with you?”
“No. I don’t want to make a deal about this. If I show up with a bunch of cops, I don’t think he’ll call anyone. He’ll hunker down. I want him to think that the only thing I’ve got going for me is an old newspaper clipping.”
“I don’t know . . .”
“Call me when you’re set up.”
“Might take more than an hour,” she said.
* * *
—
WHEN SHE CALLED BACK, an hour and a half later, Lucas was wandering through a Flying J Travel Center in the town of Walton, off I-75. He took his phone outside to the parking lot and asked, “What do you got?”
“Milton Faye and Barbara Faye have AT&T phones, plus Milton may have gotten sneaky and acquired a second phone from RurCon, which is an MNVO, which actually buys time through AT&T . . .”
“It’s a what?”
“MNVO—Mobile Network Virtual Operator. Since it buys time through AT&T, we only have to talk to one company to look for connections and we’re all set to do that. Our phone guy faxed a subpoena to AT&T a half hour ago and they’ve acknowledged it, so we’re all set. I bet if Mr. Faye calls Old John, he’ll do it on the RurCon phone. Sneaky-like.”
“Whatever. I’m going over there,” Lucas said.
“Lucas . . .”
“Watch the phones.”
* * *
—
LUCAS CRUISED THE FAYE place a second time. He couldn’t see a house or any other structure up the hill; there was a small cornfield that ran along the road, and an old rust-covered hay rake in one corner of the field, probably dumped there a few decades earlier.
He turned around, got out of the car, pulled his shirt out to cover the cross-drawn PPQ on his left hip, got back in the car, called Chase and said, “I’m going up there now.”
“We’re all set. Call when you leave.”
Lucas turned up the driveway past the “No Trespassing” sign. The Faye house, a metal barn, and a trailer home on blocks, were four hundred yards up the rutted driveway, where the hill flattened out into a long narrow crest. The house looked like it came out of a ’60s low-income suburb, a faded baby-blue ranch-style with asbestos shingle roof. A well-waxed black Ford F-150 was parked in the yard; a bumper sticker read, “I support U.S. Truckers.”
As Lucas parked, a heavyset bearded man stepped out on the stoop at the front door; he was dressed in crusty jeans and a flannel shirt, though the temperatures must have been in the upper seventies. An oversized black-and-tan Rottweiler came out behind the man, walked around him and down the three steps. He might have come all the way to Lucas, but the man spoke a single word, which Lucas couldn’t quite hear, and the dog stopped.
The dog would have looked more dangerous than the man, had the man not been carrying a shotgun. He didn’t point it, it just dangled from one hand, but it was there.
“Guess you didn’t see the ‘No Trespassing’ sign,” the man said.
Lucas wrinkled his nose—dog poop, he thought—and said, “I did, but I’m a U.S. Marshal working on a case and I came to see you, if you’re Mr. Faye.”
“I’m Faye. See me about what?”
“About a militia training camp here on your property a couple of years ago,” Lucas said. “I found an article about it in the Cincinnati paper.”
“Didn’t talk to the paper,” Faye said. “Told their reporter to get off my property.”
“You didn’t talk to them, but they identified you,” Lucas said.
“Nothing illegal about a training camp,” Faye said. “A bunch of guys came up to do some self-defense shooting.”
“I didn’t say there was anything illegal, unless it was done as part of a conspiracy—say, to shoot somebody,” Lucas said. “I need to talk to someone high up in the militia. I talked to one man who wasn’t, and he couldn’t give me the help I need. That’s why I’m here.”
“Can’t help you with that.” Faye switched the shotgun to his other hand, still dangling. “Gentleman come up here and said he knew I had a shooting range on the property. He asked if he could rent it for a few days for some friends of his to do firearms training. He give me nine hundred dollars in advance and some guys came up for four days—they stayed up in Cincinnati or somewhere, came down during the day—and that was about it. They shot up some ammo, got back in their cars, and went home.”
“Who arranged it? What was the guy’s name?”
“Ed,” Faye said. “Never did catch no last name.”
“Were all the guys from around here?”
“Listen, Marshal, I didn’t spend a lot of time talking to them,” Faye said. “Showed them the range, let them be.”
“You didn’t see their license plates?”
“Nope, guess I didn’t think to do that. And I got to tell you, I’m getting tired of being talked to on my own property.”
Lucas ignored that. “What kind of weapons were they using?”
“Rifles, some pistols, too, I guess. I could hear that difference, you know, rifles going bang bang, pistols going pop pop. That’s about all I got to say. Don’t know no more.”
“Mind if I look at the range?”
“I do mind. If you want to look, come back with a search warrant,” Faye said. “I done nothing wrong and I like my privacy. Now, I’m going inside to call my attorney. C’mon, Butch.”
The Rottweiler followed him inside and the door closed.
Lucas looked around, saw nothing that might give him reason to stay, got in the Jeep, turned around and headed back down the driveway. At the bottom of the hill, he called Chase and said, “I’m out.”
“I’ll call you back,” she said.
Three or four minutes later, she did: “He made a call to Cincinnati. They’re still on the phone.”
“You got a name and address?”
“Yes. One John Henry Oxford. I’ll text the address to you. I’m going out to the NCIS, right now, to see if we’ve got anything on him.”
“Call me.”
His phone beeped a moment later and he pulled over, found a text with John Oxford’s address, put it into his cell phone navigation app and continued north, following the app’s vocal instructions.
Kentucky looked not unlike Minnesota, as long as he was looking at the foliage piled up along the Interstate. As he got closer to Cincinnati, that changed, and the landscape began to look older, more eastern; more wrought iron, more like New Jersey, somehow, than the Midwest. He passed a tall cylindrical building and began picking up the buildings of downtown Cincinnati—again, they looked more eastern than midwestern, more like Philadelphia than Chicago—and he crossed a muddy brown Ohio River on the lower deck of an interstate, stayed to the right, and took I-71 into Cincinnati.
* * *
—
CHASE CALLED BACK: “Interesting stuff. Oxford has one arrest, for disorderly conduct as a member of the Weatherman faction of the Students for a Democratic Society, during some riots called the Days of Rage in 1969. I never heard of them before this, but I read the Wiki article on it. Days of Rage was a violent anti-government and anti-cop demonstration. Lot of people were hurt. After that, nothing.”
“So he was political when he was a kid, and then, what? Went underground?”
“Maybe he did politically, but not personally. He worked for the post office from 1970 to 2010, a letter carrier the whole time. Forty years. He’s been retired ever since. One interesting thing. Before he was with the Weatherman, he was in the Army, a draftee, for two years.”
He’d been sent to Korea as a clerk, Chase said, and was eventually promoted to Specialist E-4, equivalent to a corporal.
“Anyway, he had a bit of trouble and his company commander tried to give him what’s called an Article 15, which is like a traffic ticket for a minor infraction. But in the Army, you don’t have to accept an Article 15. He refused to take it and demanded a summary court-martial, which is a big risk, because with an Article 15 you might pay a small fine, but a court-martial can send you to jail.”
Chase said Oxford had been accused of negligence during a routine practice drill intended to put a fast-reaction squad in front of possible North Korean commandos. He claimed that he was in no way negligent, that his apparent negligence was in fact negligence on the part of the company commander, who had supposedly organized the fast-reaction squad.
When all was said and done, he was found not guilty by the military court and all charges were dismissed.
* * *
—
“I FIND THAT INTERESTING because he refused the easy way out and was willing to take on his own commanding officer. He’s a rigid guy. Even when he was young. He knows his rights and he won’t bend. Then he comes back home, goes to college at Wayne State, apparently gets radicalized by an anti-government group. And then . . . fades into the background.”
“I wonder how long he’s been doing the ANM thing?” Lucas asked. “Is this a retirement hobby or has he been at it longer than that?”
“Well, you saw what we have on them. They’ve been around at least since the early 2000s and maybe back into the nineties.”
“Huh. Then he could be anyth
ing. He could have an army of his own.”
“He could,” Chase said. “We’ve got an office in Cincinnati. I could scramble a couple of people to go to his house with you.”
“Let me think about that,” Lucas said. “I need a relatively friendly talk rather than an angry confrontation. Get him demanding a lawyer and we’re screwed.”
“Have him shoot you and you’re screwed.”
“I don’t see that happening,” Lucas said.
“Tell you what. I’ll line up a couple of agents, have them nearby when you go in,” Chase said. “Then, if there’s trouble, you hide behind the couch and we come crashing through the back door with guns blazing.”
“The thing most people don’t know about couches, is that they’re really good cover,” Lucas said. “In movie shootouts, you see people hide behind them all the time. Got those big bulletproof steel plates inside them.”
“Call me when you’re close,” Chase said. “Try not to get any davenports shot.”
“Wait. Was that a pun?”
But she was gone.
* * *
—
LUCAS TOOK A BAD off-ramp, got tangled up in some side streets that his phone nav didn’t seem to recognize, finally got reorganized and back on I-71 heading northeast into the suburbs. He got off I-71 and onto a back highway called Wilmington Road.
He called Chase, said he was about there; she said two agents had already spotted Oxford’s house and were parked a few hundred yards away. “Turn your phone on, call them, then stick your phone in your shirt pocket and leave it on. I’m texting you the number.”
“Okay.”
There were a variety of houses and businesses along the road, some older, some newer, some close together, some with expansive lawns and fields around them, mailboxes sitting on posts along the roadway. When the numbers on the mailboxes started getting close to Oxford’s, he pulled off the highway, called the feds, said he was going into Oxford’s house, and they said they’d be listening.
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