by Jeff Nesbit
I honestly didn’t know how he managed to fit in as many clubs, red-carpet appearances, Broadway premieres, or celebrity sports-box events into his schedule. I mean, good grief, he was supposed to be going to law school at Stanford. But he traveled between both coasts constantly.
Even then, long before he actually became famous, Jude had started to appear on the arms of fairly well-known young actresses either already on the A-list in Hollywood and New York or about to be. Most of the photo captions simply referred to Jude as “wealthy, eligible bachelor” or something to that effect. The public, though, really had no idea who Jude was. Over time, that would change, but back then, his wealth, dark brown hair, green eyes, and lean-muscled physique were enough to attract stunningly beautiful young women. To Jude, it was a sport. He dated celebrities simply because he could.
At some point, he leased his own twelve-seat jet with two pilots on standby for spur-of-the-moment trips. Hardly what a law school student needed, but Jude wasn’t your typical law-school student to begin with. By the time he’d finished law school and moved on to his MBA back at Harvard, he had the whole go-to-school-and-jet-around-the-globe thing down to an art. He could seemingly be in three places at once and not miss a beat.
He included me on some of the trips, when I could either afford the time off or just felt like a long weekend. I didn’t have to work. But I wanted to do something productive, and I had no interest in the family business—whatever that actually was. Jude could manage the many companies that profited from with Professor Asher’s graphene metamaterial patents.
I knew Jude and his coterie of regents were rapidly expanding the family business, if only because my own accounts grew exponentially. At some point in those years after college, I simply stopped paying attention to the various bank accounts. I had enough money to do anything I wanted, anywhere, at any time. I could buy a house in every country of the world and pay cash. I could travel 365 days a year and stay in the best hotels on the planet, and it wouldn’t make a dent in my bank accounts.
But I had no interest in those sorts of things. I couldn’t say exactly what I wanted to do, but I knew aimless travel wasn’t it. So I took a job with The Herald-Sun in Durham after my years at Duke and became a reporter covering local and state politics. I didn’t mention to anyone at the paper about my inherited wealth and, quite curiously, hardly anyone asked me about it. Apparently few in Durham, North Carolina, were able to make the connection between the always-unnamed Jude Asher who regularly appeared in People and US Weekly and the guy who looked like him and worked as a reporter at a dying newspaper in a town built with tobacco money.
“Wouldn’t it be easier if you bought the paper?” Jude had once asked me. “For that matter, just buy one of the newspaper chains or a couple of the national magazines and make yourself publisher.”
“What would be the fun in that?” I’d shot back. “Where would the challenge be if I merely bought my way in?”
I wondered, every so often, if Jude had a goal in mind with his vastly accelerating wealth. Most likely. But, curiously, Jude had not succumbed to that old adage about the love of money being the root of all evil. Actually, Jude had very little use for money, and he certainly neither lusted after it nor loved it any demonstrative way.
No, he simply saw money and wealth—even vast, insane, mind-blowing wealth—as little more than a path. To what, I couldn’t say. But I was certain Jude paid only as much attention to the accumulation of wealth as was absolutely necessary. He left most of those details to his regents.
The regents, by the way, had very little to say to me. They tolerated me in a cold, unapproachable way. It was Jude they served slavishly. In those first few years after college, more of them showed up every time I journeyed with Jude somewhere, seemingly spawned and cloned from a place where finely tailored suits, polished leather shoes, and manly perfumes were freely available.
My first face-to-face encounter with one of them was strange. We were in Las Vegas for a world heavyweight title fight. Jude had sent the jet to fly me in for the fight that Saturday evening after I’d complained that I had a deadline to meet and couldn’t take a commercial flight out to Vegas at the last minute. The jet had waited at Raleigh-Durham airport for me while I’d finished writing my story and filed it.
But, before the fight, Jude had warned me, we were all going to a standup comedy show with Jerry Seinfeld at the MGM Grand that was almost certain to attract paparazzi. Seinfeld only did a few shows in Vegas, and the stars came out in droves when he did. Jude had lined up dates that evening—for both of us—with two actresses even I’d heard of who both had movies in theaters nationwide.
When Jude picked me up from the jet on the tarmac, a regent was with him. It wasn’t the same one I’d seen at the memorial service, but it may as well have been. I could barely tell the difference. He had that same distant, cold, unapproachable look. He shook my hand firmly, introduced himself to me as Jude’s business associate, and then turned his attention back to Jude almost immediately. They were discussing one of the companies in the portfolio of businesses he was clearly managing for Jude—and me, to a lesser extent—when we picked up the two actresses for the evening.
That’s when I first noticed it. I had to admit, it unnerved me a little. A group of photographers were smoking cigarettes and casually hanging out in front of the hotel as we pulled up in front with the limo. The regent hung back as Jude and I got out of the car. He let the photographers snap their pictures of us and emerged from the car only after the paparazzi scattered like mice when they’d realized no one famous would be emerging from the limo. The regent then walked by Jude’s side toward the hotel entrance.
Then, as the two actresses left the hotel, one after the other, I caught the regent moving effortlessly off to one side, flanking the paparazzi. He was behind the photographers as they snapped away madly. Now curious, I kept glancing at the regent as we walked from the hotel entrance back to the limo. He never appeared in a single shot the paparazzi took. I was fairly certain of it. The regent even waited until all four of us were safely inside the limo and the paparazzi had begun to tuck their cameras into their bags before rejoining us.
It was the same drill at the MGM Grand. Even more paparazzi were there, staking out the entrances as each star made his or her way inside for the Seinfeld show. The regent held back, vanished briefly off to one side, and then reappeared with us once we were safely inside and headed to our front-row seats. The regent sat apart from us, two rows up and well clear of even wide-angle photo shots.
And, after the show, as we made our way to the fight, the same sequence happened all over again. The regent was never in a single picture. By the end of the evening, I knew the regent was either extraordinarily camera shy, or he had a good reason to make sure he was never in the same shot as Jude. I couldn’t tell which.
Later that evening, more out of idle curiosity than anything else, I typed my brother’s name into Google Image search and scanned through hundreds of pictures. There were lots of them already, mostly because of the celebrities he was accompanying. But, as I’d suspected, there wasn’t a single picture of a regent in any of them.
It was as if the regents—those who surrounded my brother, at least—didn’t exist, at least not in a way that seemed entirely logical to me.
Chapter Fifteen
Frank Gore was certainly right about one thing. His lecture was boring. But it hardly mattered to me. It wasn’t like I was planning to go out and load up my BOV and pack up my BOB anytime soon.
But the flow of language from the audience members sitting and listening in rapt attention was interesting. Clearly, everyone here—with the possible exception of Frank and me—was waiting for one apocalypse or another to rain fire and brimstone on America and cause panic, mayhem, and violence to sweep through major urban cities.
Frank’s opening talk focused on the basic facts that everyone needed to pay
close attention to when looking for a retreat location as far off the grid as possible. A source of fresh water, of course, was essential. A spring would be ideal, but a well could work. Arable land so they could grow their own food once the stockpiles ran out was important. So was southern exposure for natural warmth and so the solar panels, needed to convert the sun’s radiation to electricity—photovoltaics—that they would bring along to satisfy their energy needs would get sun exposure.
There were other things I’d never even considered—like looking for someplace that wasn’t prone to flooding, tornados, or other natural disasters. And naturally, you wanted to steer clear of nuclear power plants and areas that real-estate developers might someday consider valuable pieces of property.
But the one that got me was the choice about whether to build one’s basic retreat on a hilltop with open fields below that constituted “defensible terrain,” or whether to hide the house away from the line of sight of any major road or highway.
“Guns or Gone,” is the way Frank put it. Either opt for the concept of holding the high ground with firearms and a field of fire clearly outlined below in case attackers stormed the retreat on the hilltop—that was the “Guns” part—or carefully conceal the retreat behind lines of trees well away from any line of sight from roads so no one could ever find it. That was the “Gone” part.
“Above all, get out West, in my opinion,” Frank concluded. “The East Coast will be choked by everyone fleeing from the big cities like New York where the folks who’ve been on the dole all their lives suddenly have to run when disaster strikes. Go find yourself someplace that has both farming and timber potential. Don’t go anywhere near the coasts. Too much risk of hurricanes and storm surge. And, by all means, stay as far away from the Mexican border as you can in case the civil war there sends even greater stream of illegals across the border.”
I didn’t think Frank was a racist. His occasional cracks about welfare queens and illegals were used to elicit knowing smiles and nodding. I figured he mostly just knew his customers. They were all blue-collar, middle-aged white folks who seemed to genuinely believe that all hell was about to break loose in America—either when the president declared martial law, China sent a deadly version of the bird flu across our borders, or God turned the bowls loose and sounded the various trumpets.
I couldn’t tell whether any of the retreaters, or preppers, had a particular disaster scenario at the ready. They mostly just felt a general uneasiness about the state of things in America and wanted to get as far away from big cities, bright lights, and the centers of civilization in the country as they could. And Frank was there to help them do just that, either through his workshop, his handbook, or his survival blog.
Honestly, I came to admire Frank by the end of the lecture and question-and-answer period. I couldn’t help it. I had a soft spot for true entrepreneurs, and Frank Gore had certainly found his niche. I wondered how much of what he talked about was actually what he believed—and how much was window dressing. Most likely a bit of each.
I also admired the way in which Frank took every question in stride, no matter the spin or direction.
“Can we grow our food without chemicals, please, or will we need to worry about fallout that might contaminate our food?” asked a woman who wore no bra; had her hair piled up and held together with not one but four wooden sticks; wore a lengthy, hand-stitched, all-cotton dress that dragged along the ground as she walked; and wore actual Birkenstocks.
This particular style of prepper, I later learned from Frank, was a relatively new style of retreater. More and more, he said, folks coming from the hard left and eco movements, who were genuinely worried about looming ecological disasters, were showing up at retreat workshops or paying for his monthly blog newsletter. They seemed interested in getting back to nature, much like those who had created communes a generation earlier.
“Well,” Frank answered slowly, “it all depends on where you are. If you’re well away from a nuclear power plant and major urban centers, then there’s much less chance of fallout or chemical contamination. That’s why I like the western part of the country—you can grow your food naturally and don’t have to worry about contamination of any sort.”
The woman, delighted, beamed at the answer.
“So should we stockpile as much generic ammunition as we can, in case we need to go to a straight barter system when cash becomes worthless, or are straight boxes of gold coins better?” asked a man. He looked like the type who had likely once purchased everything he could afford from the Harley-Davidson catalogue and rode around the countryside on the weekends. But now he had opted for a double-stitched wool shirt, a down jacket, all-weather boots, aviator sunglasses, and durable blue jeans that could accommodate both a handgun and a Buck knife.
“Excellent question, sir. Very perceptive.” Frank pointed knowingly in the questioner’s direction. “Truth is, you’re likely better off with the extra boxes of ammunition. Gold is fine, of course, but you might have to find someone who will accept it. Ammunition can either be used or traded for other goods you might need right on the spot. So I’d go with the stockpiles of extra ammunition.”
I almost raised my hand. I wanted to ask Frank, publicly, if any of this was really necessary; if maybe we weren’t all a little unsettled by an economic recession that threatened all sorts of blue-collar industries and jobs; if, perhaps, we weren’t simply fantasizing about a gentle, easygoing far-off place where incessant bills that had to be paid didn’t arrive in the mail each day and where we didn’t have to worry about getting mugged, robbed, beaten, or raped when we ventured out late at night in any number of big cities in America.
But I didn’t, of course, because that would have blown Frank’s cover. And, from what I could tell as I’d watched the workshop progress, Frank was the sane one who could provide a road map that might lead me to groups like the Christian Brigades burrowed deeply in the shadows of America’s new off-the-grid subcultures.
I waited patiently after the workshop ended as one well-wisher, truth-seeker, or hero-worshiper after another had a private word with Frank. Nearly every one of them had brought their cherished handbook—Off the Grid, by Frank Gore—with them. Most asked him to sign it. Frank’s signature work was, apparently, an extraordinarily popular piece of literature. No wonder he’d referred to himself as OTG when we’d met.
“That was quite a show,” I said when only the two of us were left in the lodge.
“Yeah, I aim to please,” Frank replied.
“What’s the old saying? ‘Always give them their money’s worth’?”
“Amen to that, brother.” He laughed.
I scanned the lodge and added up the number of chairs. There had been close to one hundred people here this evening. Frank watched me closely, trying to gauge my intentions. “So for a gig like this …?” I said.
“I clear about four grand for an evening workshop,” Frank said quickly and directly. “Hardly any overhead, and the marketing takes care of itself with my blog and newsletter and word of mouth. I assumed that was what you were about to ask?”
“Yeah, it was. Not that it’s any of my business. I mean, people pay money for all kinds of things.”
“So why not to learn how to survive the coming apocalypses?”
“Pretty much. It’s nice work, if you can get it.”
Frank got up from his chair with effort and eased toward the front porch. “Arthritis,” he explained as he walked along. “I’m up to a triple dose of ibuprofen a day. Doesn’t help much.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not your problem, and there are plenty of other ailments that could be worse. All in all, if this is the only chronic pain I have to deal with, I’m fine with that.”
The last of the cars were pulling away as we reached the porch. I could barely make out the red taillights as they winked through the trees at the edge of the clearin
g.
“So what is this place anyway?” I asked.
Frank laughed. “Used to be a KKK lodge.”
I glanced at him. He seemed to be serious. “Really?”
“Yeah, really. The KKK is long gone from these parts, though. I’ve used it a bunch of times over the years. It’s a great place for these workshops. Centrally located in this part of the country. Folks can drive here from Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky.”
I nodded. “I know. I spotted license plates from all those states when I pulled in.”
Frank slowly and deliberately cracked the arthritic knuckles on the fingers of both hands, then rolled his head from side to side in an effort to ease some of the pain he was clearly experiencing in his neck from the evening of lecturing. “So you gonna tell me why you’re really here, Thomas Asher? ’Cause it sure as shootin’ isn’t about the survivalist subculture or preppers or retreaters, is it?”
“No, Mr. Gore, it isn’t,” I said honestly, deciding that I needed to take the risk and see how far I could get.
“So what, then?” he said easily. “You figurin’ that maybe I know something about that guy who shot you in New York, maybe? That have something to do with it? You’re tryin’ to do your homework on that group, the Christian Brigades, and the connections they might have to some of the folks who sign up for my newsletter and handbook? Do I have that about right?”
I stared back at him, impressed. “You’re a smart man, Frank Gore. You aren’t all that you seem at first glance.”
“My momma didn’t raise no fool, as they say,” Frank said lightly.
“And if I had a momma, that might be true of me as well,” I replied. “Now, about the Christian Brigades. Can you help me?”