Silver Cross

by B. Kent Anderson

  One of the others shuffled his feet and cleared his throat.

  “No, lady,” Rayburn said. “I hate the fucking federal government. It’s got too much power, takes away our freedom.”

  “But there was no such thing as April 19 before you hit the GAO. Yet somehow you received a quarter of a million dollars a week before the hit.”

  “I played the lottery.” Rayburn smiled brokenly.

  “You pled guilty,” Tolman said. “Why?”

  “’Cause we did it. We hate the fucking government and we’re not afraid to say so. We’re martyrs for the cause.”

  “Ms. Tolman,” the warden said, “I need to take these prisoners out to the plane.”

  “She cut you loose, didn’t she?” Tolman said. “Gray hired you, paid you, probably told you that you’d be making a statement, told you what to say. Guaranteed that she’d hide you, that you’d get away with it. What do you owe her? She set you up—she probably called the FBI herself and sent them to arrest you before you’d even finished the hit.” Tolman tilted her head up, staring into the eyes of Jeremy Rayburn.

  “Hey, shit,” said one of the other three.

  “I’m in charge,” Rayburn said, and stared down at Tolman. “Everyone knows I’m the leader of April 19. Everyone in the fucking world knows Jeremy Rayburn’s name. I hate the fucking government, you know?”

  “She cut you loose, and hung you out to dry. You don’t owe her shit, Jeremy. You’re going to spend the rest of your life in prison, and she’s making money.”

  “But everyone knows who I am, and no one knows who she is. So what does it matter?”

  “No one’s coming for you. No one’s going to break you out. She made up April 19 to suit her own purposes. Those buildings that were blown up, those people who were killed? That’s not because of hatred of the government. That’s her, that’s Gray, making some kind of a point, isn’t it?”

  Rayburn smirked at her.

  “Isn’t it?” Tolman shouted.

  “Meg,” Journey said.

  One of the ASOs said, “We need to—”

  Tolman took another step toward Rayburn. “What are we supposed to see here? What does she want us to know?”

  “Don’t get too close,” said the ASO, stepping between them.

  “Get out of my way!” Tolman shouted, and the ASO looked at the warden.

  “Ms. Tolman, I’m putting a stop to this,” the warden said, behind her.

  “Tell me!” Tolman shouted in Rayburn’s face.

  “Tick-tock,” Rayburn said. “Time is a-fleeting.”

  “What? What does that mean?”

  “We all need a little extra time, don’t we?”

  “What did she tell you? She visited you, didn’t she? Recently, since all this started.”

  “They haven’t had any visitors while they’ve been at the FTC,” the warden said.

  “Check the logs from the last place they were housed,” Tolman said.

  “But—”

  “Find them, Warden. Please … it could be critical.”

  The warden scurried from the room and Tolman said, “Extra time for what?”

  “To do everything that needs to be done,” Rayburn said. His eyes had sharpened, and Tolman thought he’d dropped the façade of the slow-witted antigovernment militant. “But now I have nothing but time, see? You, maybe not so much.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Back off,” the ASO warned again.

  “Where is Gray?”

  Rayburn dropped his voice to a whisper and leaned down toward Tolman.

  “Hey,” said the ASO. “You don’t want to be doing that.”

  “Sixty-eight GTO,” Rayburn whispered, then straightened up. “Can we get going?” he said in full voice.

  “But—”

  “Jeremy Rayburn,” Rayburn said again. “I hate the fucking federal government, and everyone in the world knows it. Washington, D.C., steals our money and our liberty and they promise we’ll be safe. Well, we’re not safe. I fought back, and now everyone knows I fought back. Everyone in the world knows that Jeremy Rayburn stood up to their goddamn lies.”

  Then the guards led the four men out of the room and down the long hall. Tolman watched them enter the jetway and cross to the small plane. She held her breath, looking at the men with shotguns. The four murderers boarded the plane. The AEOs and ASOs followed. The lead AEO carried a Tazer stun gun on his hip. Within ten minutes, the plane was pulling away from the building.

  “Time to do everything that needs to be done.”

  Tolman felt like screaming. Her brain was on overload. The CIA, Ann Gray, Barry Cable …

  “Sending people in circles.”

  Who needed time to do everything that needed to be done?

  Gray? Rayburn? Tolman herself? What did Rayburn mean by that?

  “Sixty-eight GTO.”

  Tolman knew it should mean something to her, in context. But she couldn’t reach it. She didn’t know what it meant, what Gray—via Rayburn—was saying to her.

  The warden was at her elbow. “I talked to the assistant warden at Hazelton,” he said. “Rayburn had one visitor the day before he left there. Supposedly it was one of his lawyers. The name on the log was Kristin Leneski.”

  Tolman was staring in the direction the plane had gone. “Don’t tell me: tall, middle-aged, brown hair, average looking, right?”

  “That’s right,” the warden said.

  “Meg, what does it mean?” Journey said.

  She looked up at him. She’d almost forgotten he was there, this good man, this historian, this father.…

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “Dragging everyone else down into the mud. This started out personal, and now it’s turned into an international incident. But it’s going to end personal. That much I know.”

  She started moving in long strides down the hallway toward the office where Sandra, Andrew, and Sharp waited. Tolman asked Sharp to bring his Jeep around to the main entrance, then she stepped out into the sun and began making phone calls. She was on the phone with her assistant at RIO when the phone beeped with another call coming in. The caller ID said: “Duke.”

  She disconnected from the office and picked up Duke’s call. “I hope it’s good news, Duke.”

  “Uh, yeah … well, kind of.”

  “What does ‘kind of’ mean?”

  “I broke through and found the encryption key for the file. See, I was trying a brute force attack, using two machines to—”

  “Duke.”

  “Yeah, well, you don’t want to know how I did it. You just want results, right?”

  “You are right. Now tell me.”

  “So I found the key. I found it in a file Barry Cable e-mailed to himself, all sixty-four characters. But there’s a problem. It has a subpassword.”

  She heard Andrew screaming. One of the FTC officers walked past and stared. She thought she heard Journey singing to Andrew in an off-key baritone. “A subpassword,” she said.

  “Yeah, it’s like a shorter—”

  “I know what it means, Duke. Can you dig around some more?”

  “Already did. He didn’t keep a record of any five-character passwords that I could see.”

  “That’s just grand,” Tolman said, and started to say something else. Then the sound seemed to die all around her, as if someone had pressed a mute button. She saw Andrew dancing around, saw his mouth moving, heard nothing. Sharp was pulling up in his Jeep, but she heard no engine sounds. She saw a plane rising off the runway, but heard nothing.

  A five-character password.

  She thought of Jeremy Rayburn and his bad breath, stringy hair falling around his face.

  “Sixty-eight GTO.”

  And then she remembered: Barry Cable was into classic muscle cars. At the time of his murder, he’d been restoring a 1968 Pontiac GTO.

  But how could Rayburn have known? How could Ann Gray have known?

 
She shook it off. Answer the questions later, Meg.

  “Duke,” she said slowly, “type in the numbers six and eight, followed by the letters G, T, and O. All uppercase.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Enter it.”

  She heard Duke typing. She held her breath, still in a cocoon of silence.

  “That’s it,” Duke said. “We’re in.”

  Oh, Barry, Tolman thought. “Open the file,” she said.

  CHAPTER

  36

  The Berkshire Mountains shimmered in the midday sun as Terrence Landon sat in his office in the well-kept colonial on the outskirts of Hillsdale and watched his TV in horror. He felt physically ill, watching the coverage of an actual fistfight on the House floor between Delmas Mercer and a Pennsylvania congressman named Sherman, who had come to blows over Mercer’s resolution to retroactively recognize the Confederacy and give “treaty rights” to France. The video of Mercer’s press conference with Ambassador Daquin also played again and again. Mercer waved his map, proclaiming that he would be releasing copies of it to the media later in the day.

  All the coverage was interspersed with shots of the burning office buildings where nearly forty had died on Sunday night. The e-mail from “April 19” was splashed across every screen.

  “… the U.S. government and those who do business on its behalf…”

  But still, no one had made the connection between all of this mayhem shaking the country and The Associates. No one mentioned secret accounts flowing into the White House. The president appeared on TV, typically calm, saying he was dispatching Secretary of State Sean Boss to Paris for talks with the French foreign minister to smooth out the unfolding diplomatic crisis.

  All this, Landon thought, because Zale was too zealous in pursuing The Associates’ agenda.

  The irony was that The Associates had accomplished many of their goals with the latest project. The Silver Cross had been profitable beyond their wildest imaginations. Even after paying their legitimate employees at the mine and meeting all expenses, they made huge profits. Zale and Landon took their “fees,” and the rest, per The Associates’ mandate, quietly went into the off-book accounts managed by the White House. But it was all infinitely more complicated than funneling money into politics, and The Associates had existed long, long before he and Victor Zale were even born.

  And now he wanted out.

  The Silver Cross project was over, and he thought that Wade Roader was right. The Associates should quietly fade away. Close all the accounts, not only the one Barry Cable had found in the spring, which had started unraveling the whole thing. Then, Landon would get as far away from Zale as he could.

  Landon closed his office door, picked up his desk phone, and input the number.

  “Yes?” Ann Gray said.

  “Hello, Ann.”

  Gray was silent.

  “I’m not Victor,” Landon said. “Please don’t lump us together simply because we’ve run The Associates together.”

  “What do you want, Terrence?”

  “Victor is crazy, Ann. He will do anything to see you dead. All those buildings … you shouldn’t have done that.”

  “The Associates acted unprofessionally,” Gray said. Landon thought he heard wind blowing on her end of the call. “That renders any contract between us null and void. When you act in bad faith, I take action to see that it won’t happen again.”

  “You could destroy this country,” Landon said. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “No, national boundaries mean nothing to me. It’s interesting that you think so little of your country that you believe a few bombs and an international scandal would actually destroy it. Isn’t the United States bigger than that?”

  “Ann…” Landon was struggling. “Have you seen what’s been going on? I don’t know how much you paid that congressman from Louisiana, but is it worth it? Is it really worth it? Victor and I get the point. We understand. Don’t do anything else. Just leave, Ann. Walk away.”

  “You think Victor gets the point? You said he was crazy.”

  “He is crazy. But we understand. We disrespected you and we did some things that were unnecessary. It won’t happen again.”

  “No, it certainly won’t, will it?” Gray said.

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m surprised at you, Terrence. You don’t know? You haven’t figured it out?”

  “No, I … no. What do you mean?”

  “Why, I’m at the Silver Cross, Terrence. Right where I should be.”

  “Oh God, Ann, there’s nothing there for you to do now.”

  “Indeed,” Gray said. “It has a bit of the ghost town atmosphere to it.”

  “Why are you there? If Victor finds out you’re there … Ann, I’m trying to save your life. Victor’s gone off the deep end. He’s … oh, God help me, he’s reaching your people, the people you used for the bombings. He’s going after those protesters in Chicago and April 19 is going to be blamed for that, too. See what you’ve started?”

  There was a long silence on the line. “You cannot possibly be serious.”

  Landon nodded. “There are thousands of people there. He was going on about restoring civil order and beating you at your own game at the same time.”

  “April 19 is mine,” Gray said. “The people are mine.”

  “Yes, and you’re paying them money to do a job.”

  Another long pause. “He’s going to offer them more money?” Gray’s voice rose. “There will be thousands of people at that protest, and they have nothing to do with the Silver Cross. I was very careful in planning the April 19 bombings—”

  “Not careful enough! Where does this stop, Ann? God in heaven, where does it stop?”

  The phone clicked in his ear.

  Landon looked up and saw Zale standing in the doorway, pointing his Les Baer 1911 Boss .45 with its ivory handle at him.

  Landon jumped. “Victor—”

  “You think I’m crazy? Trying to save that bitch’s life, are you?”

  Landon started to get up. He saw Zale’s wild eyes and the fear began to grip him, cold and hard.

  “Sit down!” Zale said. “Have you seen what she’s done to this country?”

  “I know,” Landon said. “But in the end, Victor, maybe it’s not what she’s done. Maybe it’s what we’ve done.”

  “You weak-minded bastard. You’re a traitor,” Zale said, and squeezed the trigger three times.

  Zale bundled Landon’s body into a closet, locked up the colonial, and drove to the airport at Great Barrington. He fueled the Cirrus, consulted his aviation charts, and did a quick preflight inspection.

  He took off and set a course that would take him southwest.

  * * *

  Gray stood in the sweltering West Texas heat, Barrientos beside her as she tried ten different phone numbers. “I can’t reach them,” Gray said. “I can’t reach any of them. The April 19 people in the field … I can’t…” She shook her head, the words leaving her.

  “Ann, I don’t—”

  “How could he get to them? How could he turn them? Money? For money, Mark?”

  Barrientos nudged a stray piece of gravel with his shoe. “This has always been about money. Money, power … it’s all the same. It was never about anything else.”

  “They betrayed me,” Gray said. “Because he offered them a few more dollars. I hired them, I trained most of them myself, some of them nearly twenty years ago. Now they’re gone, just like that. And he’s going to use them to kill those protesters—college students and single mothers and laborers, and some of them will have their own children with them. It’s a protest movement, it’s freedom of speech. You prize your First Amendment so highly, and yet—”

  “I don’t see the point in all this,” Barrientos said. “In being here.”

  Gray withdrew a pair of needle-nosed wire cutters from the back of the rented van and took them to the gate of the mine.

  “What are you going
to do?” Barrientos asked.

  “I’m tending to business, as I’ve done from the start.”

  “Dammit, Ann! If Zale knows you’re here, he’s going to send people after you.”

  “He’ll do what he must,” Gray said. She gazed up the road past the guardhouse. “But if I know Victor, now he’ll come himself.”

  “And that’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s what you’ve wanted all along.”

  “Now I have more reason than ever.” Gray began to work the chain cutters on the gate.

  “What about all those people in Florida and Oregon and everywhere else? Those two little kids in New Hampshire? They were all a way to get to Zale so you could make him come after you? You’re talking about the protesters, but what about the people we killed? You’ve made this personal, Ann. You taught me that it’s never personal!”

  Gray threw the chain cutters on the ground and turned so quickly that Barrientos took a step back. “He made it personal!” she shouted. “When he left Alex Cable without a father, he made it personal.”

  “What?”

  “Jim Cable’s son! He’s just an eleven-year-old boy who likes to play chess. He … he could have been my son. And now he has to live the rest of his life thinking his father killed himself. And Dana Cable was a musician and a teacher. Neither of them could touch us—and now that boy has no father. I tried to stop it and didn’t … and now, Alex Cable has no father!”

  Barrientos stood there looking at her. He’d never heard her raise her voice or lose control before. “I think you’re losing your perspective.”

  Gray picked up the cutters and bent to the chain again. Droplets of sweat were running down her back. “Thank you for your good work, Mark, and for not betraying me like the rest of them.”

  “What the hell is the matter with you? You’re going to get yourself killed out here, and then those people in Chicago will still die and your son won’t have a mother. Have you thought of that? You should leave the country—that’s what I’m going to do. You have enough money to live, and you can’t stop this from happening. Just get your husband and your son and go! The Associates have resources—people just like us. You think you can stop anything Zale wants to do?”