“What did you just do?” Ventura asked.
“I’m hoping I just opened a window to let some light into this place,” I said.
We left the room and I rewired the entry lock. It wouldn’t pass close inspection, but if the Activity tech geniuses were as good as I remembered, the damage was already done.
As the elevator chimed for the main level, I leaned in to Ventura and whispered, “Straight out.”
The elevator doors opened and we walked briskly toward the glass doors to the courtyard. I walked two steps behind him as the guard I’d replaced had done. Ventura was exhausted and visibly disheveled. If anyone took a close look at him, I figured the game was up. There were four men sitting in the lounge area drinking coffee and talking football but they didn’t even look up as we walked past.
We strolled through the center of the courtyard and around the Spanish fountain at a relaxed pace. I nodded toward the dorm building.
“I want to see Harmon’s room.” Ventura altered our course without complaint.
Ventura tapped his ID on the lock in front of the dorms and the door clicked open. It was quiet in the middle of the afternoon. A cluster of maroon couches sat in front of beverage stations similar to those in the conference center across the courtyard in the lobby. The room was spotless and had the kind of sterile college dorm look that made it appear perpetually unused. We took the elevator to the third floor.
I used the pick I’d liberated from my waist, along with an improvised shim, to open the door to Anton Harmon’s room. There was a security camera at the end of the hall but I knew it was offline. The hall was as quiet as the lobby had been. When the door yielded, I stepped into a small apartment that had the same institutional feeling as the lobby. I took that to mean it had been furnished by the designers of the building rather than by Harmon himself. Nobody was home.
“How does this compare to your place?” I asked Ventura, who was looking around with an expression that told me he’d not been inside before.
“It’s bigger,” he replied. “I don’t have a separate bedroom.”
“What does Anton do in this organization?”
“I don’t know. He’s been gone a lot of the time I’ve been working here. I started about a year ago. Like I said, he’s in the inner circle. He has a lot of closed-door meetings with Price and that gang when he’s around.”
The apartment had a large tiled living room with a flat panel TV and a well-appointed en suite kitchen. The living room and bedroom shared a balcony that had a nice view of the mountains. With my nose pressed against the glass, I could just see the employee parking lot.
I walked into the bedroom with Ventura trailing behind me. He’d been as submissive as a puppy since we’d left the Room. I’d given him a few chances to jump me but he hadn’t taken the bait. The Semtex wrapped around his genitals had tamed him as completely as a full course of electro-shock therapy.
The bedroom was cozy, with just enough space for a queen-sized bed, a couple of nightstands and a long, low dresser. All the pieces were finished in a shiny white lacquered veneer that reminded me of Ikea. On the nightstand farthest from the window there was a picture of Anton and Heather. She was smiling, a genuine smile that started in her eyes. The photo was taken in the meadow where the Reclaim group had set up camp—I recognized the stream. It must have been some time in July or August; the light had that quality it gets when days extend far into the evening. I slid the picture from the frame, folded it and put it into my pants pocket.
I rifled through both nightstands. Her side had a couple of books, including a volume of Walt Whitman and a nonfiction book about food called The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I’d have bet it was the only copy on the National Front compound. A small polished walnut box held some braided bracelets, a few silver and turquoise necklaces and some modest silver earrings. On his side, there was lubricant, a folding knife and some change. That was it. The dresser was divided longitudinally between his and hers. Her side stocked a week’s worth of clean underwear—most of it sensible with the exception of a couple thongs—four pairs of jeans, some hiking pants and a couple of pairs of shorts. In another drawer I found a mix of tops, from tie-dye to some semi-dressy Ann Taylor stuff. The drawers on his side seemed a bit light. It fit with his absence. I stepped back into the hallway and found a sliding closet door concealing a washer and dryer. From his grunt of annoyance, I took it that Ventura didn’t have one in his unit. I opened the stacked units in turn, but both were empty.
I stepped into the bathroom and slid open the vanity. It confirmed what I suspected. Heather’s toiletries were inside but Anton’s shelf was half-empty and his razor was conspicuously missing.
I returned to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Divided again, with beer on one side and vegetable juice on the other. On the bottom row on her side, a line of self-injecting needles sat side by side in a precision rank. I pulled one out. They were once-a-day insulin shots for diabetics. Two weeks of injectors sat in the refrigerator, prescribed by a doctor in Beckley. I stepped back and my breath came out cold, in a rush.
23
“She was happy when they first arrived because they didn’t have much privacy at that eco-freak place. They were playing house here,” Ventura said.
“Did she know what this place was about? Really?”
“No, I don’t think she had any idea.” Ventura coughed, covering his mouth with the back of his hand. “Price is sort of a control freak. I don’t know where Anton met Heather, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to bring her here. Price went nuts when Anton showed up with her. He reamed Anton pretty good, but there was really nowhere for Heather to go so she stayed.”
“Why was Anton dating a Latina? What kind of supremacists are you guys anyway?”
“She’s not Hispanic. She wouldn’t have lasted here a day if she was. She was adopted. I mean, her mother was her mother, but her father wasn’t her father and her real dad was white. She found that out not too long ago and she was pissed. She kept saying ‘I can’t believe Papi lied to me.’” Ventura said ‘Papi’ with a cartoonish Latin accent. “Imagine thinking you had all that bad blood in you and then one day finding out you’d been lied to your entire life.”
I wanted to slap him. Didn’t. “Is that why she left home?”
“That’s what she told me.”
“You knew her? Aside from her being Anton’s girlfriend?”
“Anton was pretty busy when he got back. She didn’t know anybody here, so I ate lunches with her.” I translated that to mean he was hitting on the new girl when her boyfriend was tied up.
“How long did it take her to figure things out?”
Ventura laughed. “Longer than you’d think—maybe until the end of the first week. Anton got her a job working in the kitchen so she wasn’t really around the events. He avoided the evening programs too, and took her for walks and stuff. I guess it was romantic at first, but after a few nights she started to catch on.”
“And then what?”
“They started fighting. Pretty badly. I live on the next floor up, but I know security got called a couple of times. We have a pretty...traditional view of women’s roles here, but I think Anton was smacking Heather around and that wasn’t okay. Maybe that’s why he got sent out on another job.”
“So she’s been here alone?”
“Yeah for the last week or so.”
I saw something in his eyes that looked almost human, which made me hate him more for waterboarding me. “You like her, don’t you?”
He just sat there for a moment before he answered, like he was seeing her in the room. “Yeah, I like her. She’s...pure. Like nothing has touched her, even with what Anton’s done. She’s so gentle.”
I asked the question that had been digging at me for days. “Why did she take it? Why didn’t she just walk away?”
“Her biological dad walked out when she was two or three years old. She said she doesn’t give up like that. I think she figures th
at if someone hits you, it at least shows they care. It’s pretty fucked up what parents do to their kids.”
* * *
A stone-tiled walkway thirty yards long led to the employee parking lot, which housed over a hundred vehicles. The Harley I’d ridden in on was not one of them, but any thoughts I’d had of riding it out had disappeared in the secret room in the basement under the National Front’s conference center. I wasn’t getting out of this fortified compound on a cruiser and my best hope of getting out at all was walking three steps in front of me. Alarms could start going off any minute, and if they weren’t it was because most of the National Front’s security apparatus was tied up managing the music festival. I knew I’d pushed my luck by lingering to search Heather’s room, but as far as I was concerned, it was the one promise I’d come to honor. Even though I was leaving with more questions than I arrived with.
Ventura led me to his pickup truck, a full-sized Ford F-150. I felt in my pocket for the key I’d found on the smaller guard and traced the initials molded into the hard plastic. It’s always nice to have a backup plan.
In that instant, I almost missed an expression that passed over Ventura’s face like a rogue wave on the ocean. His eyes flicked over my shoulder as he faced me with his back to his pickup. I heard a click, the barest sound of a round being chambered in a semi-automatic pistol, and I ducked forward, grabbing Ventura’s wrist. I pulled him around in front of me just as three slugs that would have hit me tagged him instead. He wasn’t a big guy, and there was an instant where I froze, wondering if the slugs would still end up in my chest. But they were nine-millimeter rounds and probably hollow point at that. The damage they did to Ventura’s chest was horrific, but the slugs stayed inside him.
I drew the Sig and fired in one smooth motion, targeting a black-jacketed guard who was firing two-handed from about thirty yards. Three guards were within range and I counted another four approaching. The guy I shot first had the best angle on me and I guessed he’d put the rounds into Ventura. His stance also marked him as the most experienced shooter of the bunch. He was turned sideways to show me the narrowest profile, and much of that was hidden behind a Jeep Grand Cherokee. My first round took him clean in the forehead. I shot for the head because I assumed he was wearing body armor.
My human shield froze the other two guards within pistol range for a precious second. While they hesitated and weighed the risk of hitting a colleague, I fired first, hitting one man in the neck twice and the other in the forehead. The other guards had thrown themselves behind vehicles by that time and I stepped away from Ventura, letting him slide down against the rear tier of the F-150 as I sprinted past, ducking low. By the time I got around the rear fender, shots were plinking and whining past me, but the guards were moving more cautiously now, fanning out to try to flank me. A parking lot has a lot of good cover from small-caliber pistols, so it quickly became a chess game. A round smashed through the driver’s side window of a Jeep Wrangler three feet after I’d darted around it, and another punctured the tire of a big GMC Acadia as I passed. I stole a glance at the row of motorcycles at the back of the employee lot and spotted the one I was looking for, a bright orange Austrian dirt bike.
I was pinned down behind the Acadia when I realized that some of the guards were firing at me from behind Ventura’s pickup. They most certainly had checked him for signs of life, which they would not have found. Pulling down my sleeve, I pushed the two odd buttons on the Timex and prayed for a second, trying to recall whether the Activity armorer had told me the range limit for the remote detonator.
The explosion came in two heartbeats: a thump followed by a crash that knocked me down on my backside behind the Acadia. As I was struggling to get up, there was a much bigger blast as the fuel tank on the Ford exploded in sympathy. It knocked me back off my feet. I rolled over a few times just to keep moving then pushed myself up off the ground as my equilibrium returned. I clawed the motorcycle key out of my pocket as I ran unevenly toward it, hoping that nobody on my side of the wreck had recovered quicker than me.
I slid the key into the slot just under the right handlebar of the orange KTM dirt bike, swung my leg over and started it up. As I pushed the bike off of its polished aluminum kickstand, I heard the ping of a slug as it ricocheted off of a big Honda cruiser next to me. I revved the throttle and took off, leaning low over the handlebars as I jumped the curb. I ran the bike flat out for thirty yards until I reached the forest. The ground ran level for about fifty yards into the trees before I hit the edge of the holler and the terrain started to grade up swiftly. I heard the sound of four-stroke ATV engines starting up and the crack of a few more rounds shot in my direction but pushed the bike to keep climbing straight up the hill.
The holler enclosing the National Front compound was over a mile long going north and south, but less half as wide. As the grade increased to the point where my balance got fuzzy, I took a parallel path, heading further south. I saw the first of the ATVs enter the forest below me. It was a natural forest, not a pine stand, so it had to be rough going for the ATVs, which were wider than the dirt bike. But I wasn’t making great time, either, and there were too many leaves on the ground for me to see the terrain well. I needed to find a trail quickly before I hit a tree stump or slid the bike into a ditch. I visualized the satellite images of the compound. The property wasn’t fenced all the way around, as the 2500-foot-tall mountains served as a good barrier to intruders. I didn’t doubt that a paranoid group like the National Front might have motion detectors or infrared sensors along its perimeter, but that wasn’t much of a worry for me at the moment as long as they hadn’t set landmines. I needed to find a clear path out of the holler that would let me reach a road where I could take one hand off the bike long enough to use my cell phone to call for help.
After running the KTM cautiously for a hundred yards along the sloped, leafy bank on the side of a ridge, I found a dirt trail headed up the hill that switch-backed just enough to make the grade manageable. I powered up the grade, gaining speed and confidence as I went along. Then I heard engines straight down the hill and realized some of the guards must have taken the path from the bottom; I’d lost most of the lead I’d built up in the forest. I pushed the bike harder, and the small but torque-y 510cc engine responded, pulling me strongly up the hill. Some of the ATVs must have been sporting much larger motors, though, because I could hear the drone of their engines getting closer. I didn’t want to let myself slip back into shooting range.
I kept climbing, twisting and turning until I reached the top of the ridge. Then I saw a chest-high barbed wire fence blocking the trail. It was too frail and narrow to show up on the satellite images but sturdy enough to stop the bike, and me with it. I had barely enough time to drop the KTM almost parallel to the ground and slide the back tire out to avoid slamming into the wire. I swore as I heard the ATVs pursuing me draw yet closer. There was no question of cutting the fence; even if I had a wire-cutter, the National Front boys would be on me seconds after I stopped moving. Revving the throttle, I turned the bike south, running parallel to the fence. After sixty yards, I found what I was looking for—a downed tree trunk with its tip stuck in the dirt, rising up four feet toward its splintered stump. I powered the bike up the trunk and pulled on the throttle steadily. When the tree ended I had just enough air to jump the bike over the fence. I skidded in wet leaves when I hit the opposite side of the trail but regained my balance and headed downhill. I alternated between stretches straight down and darting south when the grade got too steep and I felt myself starting to pitch forward. After a half-mile or so I found another trail and started to descend in earnest. I still heard the ATV engines, but they were in the distance, and I relaxed a little, focusing on making the best time I could without losing control of the KTM on the steep, muddy trail.
24
For about three minutes I thought I’d lost them.
I’d followed the trail until it ended in the flats rather abruptly, smacking up against a
dirt road that headed south. I kept my bearings and cut across the road, heading due east, and up and over another, much shallower ridge. The trail ended in the backyard of a small farmhouse and I had to swerve as I came out of the woods almost directly into a chicken coop. I bypassed that and plowed through a pumpkin patch, threading through monster vines. The small dirt road running in front of the house looked like an interstate to me.
Then I hit an honest-to-God, asphalt-paved, two-lane road and, praying the map in my mind was still running true, I turned north. I got the little dirt bike up to highway speed for the better part of three miles before I ran into a small residential development. It was about a dozen or so small houses huddled around a church. I turned east at the first major junction, past a red farmhouse onto Beckwith Road, which I remembered was Route 16.
If I wasn’t mistaken, I was on the outskirts of Fayetteville. I ran down the road as fast as I dared while I dug a hand into my jacket and retrieved my phone. I cursed myself for not grabbing it earlier, knowing that every moment counted. The folks who were supposed to rescue me were on the wrong side of the compound and in this part of West Virginia, that distance would take an eternity to cross.
In a moment, I got through to the Activity op center.
“You’ve been busy, Orion.” It was Mongoose. He was putting in the same kind of hours as Alpha.
“You could say that. I’m not where I expected to be.”
“We have eyes on you now. We lost your beacon after you were detained in the National Front headquarters building. Glad you made it through. We sent video of the firefight in the parking lot to the FBI and they’re getting a warrant to enter the compound. That was an impressive explosion, by the way.”
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