He pulled the van over to the side of the street, double-parking in the precise spot where he had for the past couple of scouting missions.
"Arrival."
Pause.
"Standby."
Pause.
"Ten minutes to action."
A minute later, in his rearview mirror, Black saw the Lincoln pull up about two car lengths behind him and double-park, filling him with a sense of relief. Everything was running according to plan.
"Getaway car has arrived," Black called out, keeping his guys informed, even if the intricacies were lost on them.
Now it was just a matter of waiting-waiting for the Wells Fargo armored truck to pull down the street, to park in front of the van, for the security men to get out, one of them to walk inside the bank branch and come back outside pushing a dolly with a duffel bag filled with money. They had a plan. They just needed to follow it, Black told himself.
Four minutes later, Black broke the tense silence again. "Put your earpieces in place," he said, and the three men in back reached into their pockets as one and inserted small wires into their ears. "Test them," Black said. Then he spoke very quietly into his cupped hands.
"Testing, one, two, three. Testing. Please acknowledge."
"Gotcha," Rocco responded.
"Fine," Cox said.
Stemple, the third man in the van, added, "With you."
Black said, "Car two, please hold up your hand if you can hear." He looked in his rearview mirror and received the signal he wanted.
Suddenly, a problem. In the mirror, Black's eye caught something he didn't expect. A meter maid-a man, actually-walking purposefully down the street with his ticket book in hand and a look of annoyance on his bearded face. A fucking meter maid.
"Stay down back there," Black said to the three men in the van. He cracked his window and watched in his side mirror as the man approached the getaway car behind him. He saw the meter man and his driver exchange words, then saw the meter man shrug, write out a ticket and carefully insert it under the windshield. Now the meter man was coming toward the van.
Black quickly processed this development through the calculator that was his criminal mind, and realized this wasn't necessarily harmful.
The van, as well as the car, had been stolen the previous week. A ticket, assuming that the meter man didn't call the vehicles in, would be meaningless. Of significant concern, though, was the fact that the meter man may have gotten a good look at his driver, Sanchez, and was about to get a good look at Black.
Approaching the van, the meter man said in a loud voice, "Move it along. Move along."
Black looked the other way and ignored him, hiding his face with his arm in as casual a way as he could. Even as he did this, the ramifications flashed through his mind. This meter man would place the robbers at the scene. He would be asked to help with composite drawings. Those drawings would eventually be published in the newspaper and broadcast on television.
Black refused to turn around.
The meter man stood at the cracked window. "What's your problem? Move your van."
Black still ignored him. So the meter man wrote out a ticket with a flourish, stuck it under the windshield wiper, and proclaimed loudly,
"That's fifty bucks right there, jerk." With that, he walked on.
Black looked out the window, his hand still over his face. All he saw was the man's back.
At that exact moment, he also saw the armored car slowly, awkwardly, fill his side mirror, then lumber in front of him. His mind raced. It needn't be complicated. He had two choices. Pull the plug on the operation-drive away and forget the whole deal, at least for now. Or he could go on as planned and hope that the composite sketches looked nothing like anything that would matter.
In front of him, the armored car was backing up now, toward the van.
Urgently, Black kept asking himself, Stay or go? Stay or go? The smart money told him to go, to pull up stakes, to just revamp his plan for another time and place. Why take a risk he didn't have to take?
Shouldn't he take this as some sort of signal of a doomed operation?
But what about the work that had already gone into this plan, the time and effort just to find a group of guys to carry it off, and then to train them?
Stay or go?
Did the meter man see anything he shouldn't have seen? Did he get a good look at faces? Would he remember them? Would he make for a good witness?
The driver's side door opened slowly on the armored car, as if it were opening a door into Black's own mind. He looked inside for an answer.
Stay or go? Stay or go?
Black said softly into his microphone: "Truck has arrived. Guard and driver getting out. Ski masks on. Four minutes to action."
nine
Present Day Monday, October 30
Everyone is waiting for something-waiting to graduate from school, waiting for a better job, waiting for the holidays to come or to pass, for vacations to arrive, waiting for true love, for wedding days or divorce hearings, waiting for injuries to heal or diseases to be cured, waiting and hoping for mercy in the dying days of life. Me, I was waiting too, though I wasn't exactly sure what for. After Katherine died, I virtually left home and jetted around the country with a laptop computer over my shoulder and an Eddie Bauer duffel bag in my hand. My life became a maze of distant, upscale hotel rooms, waiting for room service or for calls to be returned, with nowhere I had to be and nowhere else I really wanted to go. I looked neither at my past nor toward my future as I lived for a moment that I didn't actually want.
I lost myself in my work, hoping the pain would eventually pass, and waiting was the only way I knew how.
Which is why I like flying. There is no shame in sitting back and doing nothing but waiting. Even better, the wait always brings results, except for those poor bastards unlucky enough to be on the business end of an airplane crash. I like to doze in and out while reading a trashy novel. I like to stare out the window. I like to flip through the in-flight magazine, charting our course on the maps in the back, looking at the advertisements for hotels and restaurants in different cities. I especially like sitting in first class on long flights, when leggy stewardesses-I'm sorry, flight attendants-supply me with hot towels, newspapers, Milano cookies, a choice between salmon and filet mignon for dinner, chocolate sundaes served from a pushcart, and after-dinner drinks from those tiny bottles.
Monday morning found me in this precise situation, in the first-class cabin of a US Airways Boeing 757 destined for Seattle, where I would connect to Spokane. For breakfast, I ordered the omelette rather than the steak and eggs. Take my advice: always order the omelette. Beef isn't meant to be served to the masses 37,000 feet above the closest mesquite grill.
It struck me, somewhere between the Mississippi and the Dakotas, after breakfast was over and I had taken my usual stroll back through coach to gain a better appreciation for my lot in life, or at least for my expense account, that I had a particularly significant amount of waiting going on. There was the big picture waiting, as an editor might say-the wait for the emotional pain to pass and all that, and in some obscure way, I felt a little of that pain ebbing away now. I had begun to notice women again, even if I felt no particular desire to pursue any of them.
Perhaps more pertinent was the short-term waiting. I was waiting for a true break in this story, and I hoped that I might dig up some form of it on my trip to Idaho and the interview with the head of the Idaho Minutemen. What I needed was to write a story that would trigger my anonymous source to fill my ear with some better information on what had the potential to be the biggest story of my life. And all the while, I was waiting to arrive at some sort of decision on the White House press secretary's position, though I couldn't help but feel that the story itself might ultimately decide my career fate. All this, for now, was good, productive waiting, if more than a bit tense, and it made the wait on the more serious matters go by with a little more ease.
On the grou
nd at the Spokane airport, I rented a Pontiac Grand Am and headed west through Coeur d'Alene, then north up to Sand Falls. All the way, I traveled a near-barren two-lane highway, rimmed by towering pines and verdant hills-beauty that hides a land of inner desperation and the type of racism that is based on nothing more than raw ignorance. The boys up here, they'll rail against anything from the federal government to the blacks who steal the rightful jobs of the white men all across the country. Funny part is, most of the locals never vote, and I'd be willing to wager that a fair number of them have never met a black man in their lives. Their only enemy at work is their own laziness and incompetence.
Daniel Nathaniel was exactly this kind of guy. At forty-eight, he looked like a cross between the Pillsbury Doughboy and the Skipper on Gilligan's Island, minus their collective charisma and good cheer. He was a former undertaker who had lost his family funeral home to the IRS
for reasons that were suspect at best. The agents had harassed him, taunted him, and ultimately led him to bankruptcy, taking a guy with a latent distrust of the federal government and sending him over the edge. After a brief prison stint for tax evasion, he had hooked up with a group of militant farmers and ranchers in his small town and formed the core of the Idaho Minutemen. Within months, he ascended to the position of commander, inherited a farmhouse in the hills around Sand Falls from one of the other members, and surrounded himself with a team of bodyguards and a driver. In exchange, he served as a source of everlasting wisdom and strength for his growing legions in the eternal war against the federal government. Truth is, though, he just didn't look the part.
I arrived at the farmhouse on Freedom Lake at about 1:00 P.m." and was stopped at a rickety gatehouse by an almost deathly skinny high school underclassman with droopy eyes.
"Stop right there," he shouted, stepping out in front of my rental car.
I couldn't help but chuckle a bit to myself, knowing that once again I was about to step into an adult war fantasy of too many men with too much time. Trouble is, it really wasn't so funny, given the manifestation of all this hatred. One of their believers had blown up a federal building in Oklahoma City a few years back, and another just might be responsible for an assassination attempt on the president.
More serious, that would-be assassin could have killed me.
With this pencil-necked postadolescent playing the role of Patton, I couldn't really control my disdain. Rolling down my window, I said in my most dismissive tone, "Let Daniel Nathaniel know that Jack Flynn is here."
"Is the commander expecting you?" the kid asked, equally dismissive.
I didn't like that.
"I don't know what the commander is expecting. You'll have to ask him that when you call to tell him I'm here." I had decided to save all of my patience for someone who could actually help me, meaning Nathaniel, knowing that with him I'd probably need every ounce of it I could find.
The kid looked at me without moving. I wasn't quite sure whether he was unclear on what to do next or unwilling to honor my request, so I asked him, "That a new squirt gun in your Batman belt? It looks really neat."
"Fuck you," he said, putting his hand on the handle of some sort of high-powered weapon, the details of which would be lost on a novice like myself.
"The commander isn't going to like you talking to his close friend like that," I said. I saw the kid's eyes shift. He walked away to get his two-way radio, which was sitting in the guard shack. He pressed a button and spoke, then released it, and all these horrible sounds came out, like a goose being bludgeoned on a golf course. I saw that happen once, but no need to go into the details here.
"What did you say your name was again?" he asked me.
"Flynn, you dope."
This time he was too nervous to talk back. After a couple of minutes, he approached my car window. "You want to go straight along this dirt road-"
"Yeah, I've been here before," I said, dipping into my reservoir of aggravation to add more exasperation to my tone.
I drove off along a dusty dirt road about two miles, through groves of enormous pines that separated the narrow lane from burned-out farm fields tucked into the hills. At the dilapidated farmhouse, two men in what looked to be police uniforms came running down off the porch to meet my car.
As one of them opened my door, he said, "Welcome, Mr. Flynn.
Commander Nathaniel is expecting you." These guys were his bodyguards, and to that end, one of them frisked me through my clothes.
"You like having your hand on my crotch?" I asked as he worked his way down. He gazed at me with horror and what I sensed was a tinge of embarrassment, then continued silently down my thighs. Really, these guys were too easy.
"You're ready. We'll bring you in," the other one said.
They led me into the main room of the farmhouse. It was cold up here in the hills, and there was a fire burning in the fireplace. Nathaniel was sitting behind a large metal desk at the far end of the room. He stood up when I walked in and stretched his hand toward me.
"Welcome back," he said in a serious tone. "You here to enlist this time?"
What a card. I gave him a polite laugh. "You'd never take me," I said. "Flat feet. My father's black. Oh, and I'm gay."
He didn't laugh at my humor. Never has, come to think of it. And I saw his young bodyguards flash each other a look before scurrying from the room like a pair of rodents. Nathaniel's a rodent too, but he's a rodent in a position to help me out, so as we often do in the reporting business, I'd treat him with nothing but respect on this day. In journalism, this is called working toward the greater good.
"How's the fight going?" I asked as I settled into a plain wooden chair that sat atop the braided rug, which in turn covered ancient, scratched pine floors.
"We're going to win," he said, his voice flat, as if he were advising me that the waterproof coffin vault would make my family considerably more comfortable about my mother's burial. "The government is weak-weaker than you think. And one day, we will rise to conquer."
I observed him closely, again unable to tell if this mortician-turned-tax-evader- turned-ex-con-turned-freak actually believed some of these things he said, or whether it was all tongue-in-cheek, done in spite, as he looked for the best deal he could find coming out of prison, wifeless, jobless, homeless, and broke.
When I had met him the year before, I had been writing a three-part series on the burgeoning militia movement in America. Nathaniel, believe it or not, was one of the smarter ones, press savvy, and he allowed me into his enclave for a firsthand glimpse of the philosophies and activities of one of the more vibrant militias in the country.
That story, widely circulated among members of the movement, single-handedly caused Nathaniel to soar within the loose national structure of the militias. Other news organizations began quoting him regularly. Other state militias called on him for consultations.
Soon, he became a de facto national leader. And much as I hate to give him credit for anything, I must say that he has maintained some sense of modesty about it all, at least in his office, though perhaps that is due to nothing more than lack of money. Wall Street bankers and $400-an-hour attorneys don't normally join or bankroll their local militia, and that fact was readily apparent here.
I said, smiling, "Hopefully that day won't be today, because I was hoping you had a little time for me."
"All the time you need," he said, still flat.
He was fairly straightforward, I had learned, but like many potential sources of valuable information, he could lapse into spates of caginess, and often had to be asked just the right question to provide the knowledge I needed. I had nothing prepared on paper to ask. I never do. I've spent a career winging it, and I wasn't about to change that style now. I decided to start broadly.
I asked, "So, what do you know?"
"About what?" he replied. Okay, so I sensed he was in his cagey mood.
"What do you have?" I said in a conspiratorial tone, as if it were me and him against the world, t
wo partners with different views and from different walks of life, thrown together in this remarkable situation.
"Tell me what you need to know. I'll tell you if I have it. Then maybe I'll even tell you what I have," he said.
I rolled my eyes, but only to myself. He wanted to make a game over this, and I had no choice but to play along.
"You mind tape?" I asked, pulling a microcassette out of my jacket pocket.
He said, "My words are meant to last forever." I couldn't tell if he was joking. I don't think he was.
"Good. The president himself tells me that the FBI has evidence that the militia movement is behind the recent assassination attempt against him. I'm wondering what you know about this, whether you believe this to be true."
"Maybe," he said. Then he fell silent and gave me a look that said, Next question.
Maybe was an interesting answer, even as it occurred to me that I gave up time with my dog and flew across an entire continent so some goddamned jackass ex-undertaker with a camouflage jacket pressing against an enormous beer belly could play mind games with me. And perhaps play them successfully.
"What do you mean, maybe?" I said, trying to maintain patience.
"Maybe. Maybe means maybe. Possibly. Perhaps."
This was getting downright sophomoric, but I had to play along. Either that or I could start to slap him, but I quickly calculated that playing along might be better for my story, if not my health, given the information he might possess, as well as his phalanx of security goons at the ready.
"Help me out," I said. "I'm jet-lagged. I'm hungry. I'm stupid.
Walk me through this thing. I'm not precisely sure what you mean by maybe, even if I should be."
He sat silent, cowlike, though I'm not sure if cows ever sit. After a while he cast his eyes on my microcassette, which was sitting between us on his desk, slightly off to one side.
I said, "You want me to turn that off?"
He nodded. So much for his everlasting words.
"What do you know about this?" I asked, my anxiety easing, but only slightly, realizing we were getting down to the business of doing business.
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