by Jon Land
“I’m looking for a truck.”
“So try Rodriguez Auto Sales up the street.”
“I’m in the market for information, not a deal. Big conversion job. Think Bambi turned into Godzilla fit for a monster truck show, but street ready.”
Asuna stroked his cheek with a grubby finger, weighing Cort Wesley’s words. “Pretty rare vehicle.”
“I figure there can’t be too many shops in the whole state capable of a custom job like this. Thought maybe you could help me track them down.”
Asuna tossed the rag aside and swiped his hands along the sides of paint-splattered work overalls. “My bro always said he owed you, from that first time you saved him from gangbangers.”
“He gave me a pair of boots to thank me. Found out later they were stolen.”
Miguel Asuna grinned. “Yeah, I remember that score. Just happened to be in the back of a van we boosted. Real nice leather.” Asuna’s gaze drifted a bit, his eyes moistening in the semidarkness. “Tell you what, Masters. I got a friend, Mike Beardsley out of Laramie. Known for boosting showroom-clean cars for special orders and has also done plenty of custom work in his time. If anybody can come up with the places you’re looking for, it’s him. You got a cell number where I can reach you?”
53
WASHINGTON, D.C.; THE PRESENT
Jones drove to the FEMA Building on C Street and parked in a red zone.
“Not worried about it getting towed?” said Caitlin.
“We’re expected” was all he said in return.
The establishment of Homeland Security had come without a dedicated building to house the amalgamation of departments and bureaus that composed it. The bulk of the offices, Caitlin had heard during a two-week counterterrorism course at Quantico, were contained here at FEMA with the rest scattered where space was available.
A nondescript man, gaunt with his thinning hair tossed about in the wind, was waiting for them before the secured entrance. He wore a dark suit, blue tie, and white shirt, seemingly cut for a man of Kirkendale’s mold than Jones’s.
“Don’t let the outfit fool you,” Jones said, as if reading her mind. “Men like this make it possible for men like me to do my job.”
“Which is what exactly?”
“Same as it’s always been: keeping this country safe. It’s the source of the primary threats that have changed. Men like Mr. White are the ones who paint the bull’s-eyes on my targets’ backs.”
“White? You’re kidding, right?”
Jones looked as if he were fighting down bile again. “That’s his real name, Ranger.”
* * *
White hustled them through security and into an elevator that accessed only the floors of the building reserved for Homeland. More security awaited when the cab’s door slid open, a marine wielding a handheld scanner that somehow confirmed both Caitlin and Jones were exactly who they were supposed to be.
“This way,” White said, ushering them into a conference room.
It didn’t look as if it had always been a conference room, more like a pair of neighboring offices with the wall knocked out between them. The placement and sizing of the windows looked all wrong to her. The table too seemed out of place. Old, not even refurbished, probably trucked from another floor by movers with high-level government clearances. The table was empty and so were the walls, but wires spooled everywhere, some connected to machines and some in case others were brought in.
White didn’t bother offering Caitlin or Jones a chair; they just plopped down into them, as he tried to smooth his hair back into place. Everything about him reminded Caitlin of a robot, his motions mechanical and formless, his eyes looking more like they’d been raised from a black-and-white still shot until he began to speak, at which point they widened into bursts of intensity.
“Ever hear of Norm Renner?”
Caitlin wasn’t sure if she was supposed to answer, but she did. “No, sir.”
“Didn’t think you had. Renner’s from Alaska. Founded an outfit up there called the Alaska Citizen’s Militia, this after founding the Michigan Militia fifteen years ago when he lived in the lower forty-eight. That mean anything to you?”
“Michigan Militia was what Timothy McVeigh called home for a time before he blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City.”
“I see you’ve done your homework.”
“Just part of the job, sir. And right now that same job has me trying to figure why the army would want to kill a young Texas kid serving as a medic in Iraq over four billion in missing cash.”
“Because they couldn’t afford anyone finding out where that cash ended up,” White replied matter-of-factly.
“That’s why I’m back stateside, Ranger,” Jones picked up. “Because this is where the biggest threats to the nation’s security can be found these days.”
“Right-wing extremist groups,” Caitlin concluded. “The so-called patriot and militia movements.”
“Totally homegrown and extremely dangerous,” Jones elaborated. “Bursting at the seams, ever since Obama took office.”
“We got our share of them in Texas,” she told them both. “Nonviolent for the most part. Lots of bravado masquerading as intention.”
“The operative phrase being ‘for the most part.’ The problem is more and more of these groups are becoming radicalized, not only accepting violence into their ranks, but encouraging and rewarding it.”
“Like that abortion doctor.”
“That was just a warm-up,” Jones said. “Homeland estimates there are over twelve hundred so-called patriot groups now active in this country. They’re pretty much scattered all over the place, but, you’re right, Texas and California to a lesser degree can claim more than their share. They were all talk for a time but, make no mistake about it, the violence is real and it’s escalating. There’ve been over twenty incidents in the past year, including the murder of a judge in your fine city of Galveston just the other day. And with each incident we see a spike in membership across the board. We can’t accurately say how many have now joined up with the kind of extremist groups we’re talking about, but that number is estimated to be somewhere around two million. Pretty sizable army, I’m sure you’d agree.”
“But what does it have to do with Operation Rising Dawn from seven years ago?” Caitlin asked.
Jones glanced at White before replying. “Follow the money, Ranger.”
“You’re saying—”
“I’m saying,” Jones continued, “that the neo-cons, Cheney’s Idiots, count the militia and patriot movements as their most fervent supporters. Their own personal standing army. I’m saying that plenty in the military tend to think the same way.”
“Wait a minute,” Caitlin started, leaning forward until her torso touched the table, “are you telling me that somebody gave right-wing extremists four billion bucks?”
“Maybe not all four billion,” White told her, “but a sizable portion.”
“Meaning?”
“At least a billion,” Jones answered this time. “As much as two, funneled to the kind of people for whom the Civil War never really ended. Make no mistake about it, these people want to take over. They want to be in charge. They see Obama as a tyrant who wants to steal their country from them. They believe he was born either in a foreign country or distant planet. Plenty believe he’s the goddamn Antichrist, and I’m not exaggerating, not in the least.”
Caitlin let his comment settle. “So what are we looking at? Revolution? A second Civil War?”
“The first Civil War’s all the fashion again. Listen to these people describe it, those years weren’t much different from your typical reenactment weekend. Only their guns are very real and two billion dollars can buy you a hell of a lot of firepower.”
“Kirkendale back-traced the money as far as he could,” White picked up. “He could almost pin down the day and time piles went missing. But he couldn’t trace the parties responsible at the top of the military food chain.”
&n
bsp; “We are very good at what we do,” Jones added, lamenting the fact, “make no mistake about it.”
“So was Kirkendale,” said White, emotion peeking out of his voice for the first time. “He was getting close to the truth. That’s why they killed him.”
“So the perpetrators are still over there?”
“They wouldn’t have to be,” answered Jones. “Just their legacy.”
“And these militias carry plenty of ex-military men on their rolls,” White added.
Jones’s eyes took on their familiar flat, unblinking gaze, like he was zeroing in on a target through a scope’s crosshairs. “Two million set loose into the streets with two billion worth of bullets can do a hell of a lot of damage, Ranger.”
Caitlin moved her gaze between the two of them. “So where do I come in?”
“You said it yourself,” Jones told her. “Texas has more than its share of militia groups.”
“And you think the money…”
“Yes,” said Jones, “we do.”
White interlaced his fingers atop the dull wood of the conference table. “My team has spent two years tracking bulk arms sales all over the world. One prime common denominator we’ve been able to isolate is Mexico. Large shipments from dummy manufacturers of merchandise that never existed.”
“Don’t tell me, shipped to Mexican warehouses with similarly dummy addresses.”
“Can’t put anything over on you, Ranger,” Jones winked, “can we?”
“Been there, done that.”
She caught White exchange another furtive glance with Jones. “And that’s why you’re here,” he said.
“Because you think a few billion dollars’ worth of guns and ammo are hidden just south of the Texas border.”
“For starters.”
“Starters?”
“The Mexican stashes only account for about half the guns at most. We haven’t been able to find where the rest of them are coming from yet. But the chatter we’ve been able to latch on to indicates the top of the food chain resides in Texas, all distribution centered there.”
“You want my help, you’re gonna have to get more specific.”
“All right,” Jones started, leaning back with hands cupped behind his head. “What do you know about Malcolm Arno and the Patriot Sun?”
54
MIDLAND, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
The four girls who’d been held in the complex’s Intake Center were finally cleared by mid-afternoon. Found to be healthy, disease free, of good blood counts, proper height and weight on page one of the report, and something even more important on page two.
Arno had taken a long, slow walk across the grounds on his way to the Intake Center, passing the various one-, two-, and three-story structures that contained the Patriot Sun’s adult residences, which also included children up to the age of seven. After that, as had been the case at the Church of the Redeemer, children were segregated by gender in separate dormitory-style housing divided by age in two-year increments. Malcolm Arno agreed with his father that a communal living situation apart from their parents made it easier to indoctrinate children into the true ways of God and His plans for them. Contact with parents was regular but limited so as not to confuse or deter the instilling of values meant to return the country to its purified roots. Since the children enjoyed virtually no contact with the outside world as it was, no distractions were offered that could demean their training meant to build a love for country and community.
Arno lingered longer before the final outlying building. Its contents held the most important feature of the Patriot Sun’s future, left over from his father’s thinking but updated to appease a more modern sensibility. The world had judged the Church of the Redeemer through a prism of its own contradictory values and misplaced morals. The damn Texas Rangers storming the place like Nazi storm troopers, oppressors riding in under the guise of justice. They had stood in judgment of his father and his teachings to fight the increasing intrusions of government into every facet of life both private and personal.
What a visionary Maxwell Arno had been! He’d seen the erosions of freedom and the gradual growth of government long before others had jumped on a convenient bandwagon. It was sometimes hard to tell, even for his most ardent of followers, what the great man had done to make a point or make a world. Malcolm realizing just before the Rangers had come, that they were the very same thing.
Showered and wearing freshly laundered clothes, Arno finally entered the Intake Center to inspect the latest wares brought up from Mexico, now that they’d been cleared for what was to follow as part of his grand plan. Did that make him a sinner? A saint? More likely something in between, and Arno did not bother judging his own morality. He had become what God wanted in order to fulfill a grander purpose in a bigger scheme. That belief gave him comfort, even when his thoughts stirred up the old memories of growing up literally by his father’s side.…
* * *
Young Malcolm Arno could be invisible when he wanted, a sight so common in a suit and tie normally matching his father’s that those on the hallowed grounds of the Church of the Redeemer stopped even noticing him, save for an occasional smile or tousle of his hair. He had grown up motherless, reveling in his father’s majesty and wishing to share his every move and manner.
That proclivity had brought him to his father’s doorway on so many nights, drawn there by the cries of what he thought was an animal, a sick dog maybe. Malcolm would peer inside at the Reverend Maxwell Arno in bed with one of the young female members of his congregation, none more than sixteen. He would listen to his father’s moans and watch his gyrations. This grew into a nightly ritual Malcolm did not regret and, actually, came to look forward to.
One night his father twisted around from the bedcovers and caught Malcolm stroking himself, casting him the slightest of smiles.
“Your mother’s passing giving birth to you moved me to lay as I do,” the Reverend Maxwell Arno explained to his son the next day. “I felt her death was a sign for me to sow my seed with the younger, those pure and unspoiled so my touch might be the first they feel. Our urges are God’s plan for us and there is no shame in that.”
Malcolm took that as encouragement to capture more visions through doorways and closets in other bedrooms in the complex, learning that his father’s bedding of the young could indeed only be God’s work since all the men seemed to be doing it. What he couldn’t know then was how such nightly sojourns in both body and mind would adversely affect him later in the succession of foster homes that followed the death of his father.
“Freak!”
“Perv!”
“Faggot!”
“Weirdo!”
The taunts ran into each other, multiplying after his urges led to his forcing himself on a twelve-year-old girl, only to explode even before he got his pants down. He was moved to another home.
It happened again and, again, he was moved, ultimately for a stay in a residential psychiatric facility where a therapist who smelled of cheap aftershave spoke to Malcolm with his eyes on a clipboard all the time.
“Do you think there’s something wrong with you?”
No, Malcolm told him. Do you think there’s something wrong with you?
“Do you consider your behavior acceptable?”
Yes.
“Why?”
God.
“God?”
I’m doing God’s work.
“Really? How?”
Like this.
And he stabbed the therapist in the face with a pencil. That made him look up.
* * *
This is still God’s work, Arno thought as he entered the Intake Center. He could smell the unspoiled youth of the girls as he moved down the hall toward the rooms they occupied while waiting to be selected. Never did he feel closer to his father than the nights when they joined him.
Like the great Reverend Max Arno, Malcolm was a great admirer of the State of Israel, where the Messiah would someday return. In t
he wake of the Holocaust, the Jews who came to Israel knew the greatest weapon they could forge against their enemies was numbers. So they had built large families that, in turn, begot larger families, and so on.
On those nights when he lay alone, apart from a young woman blessed enough to be chosen, his mind turned again and again to how the Texas Rangers had emptied his father’s dream onto yellow school buses. The Church of the Redeemer’s children being stolen away in tears, while handcuffs were slapped on the adults at gunpoint.
Malcolm Arno understood at last why his father had seemed so content that day of reckoning in the parking lot of the Tackle and Gun. He’d smiled at the big, pistol-waving Texas Ranger because he knew his martyrdom was about to be made complete. His dream lost, only to be reborn if he sacrificed himself to a greater cause, thereby solidifying Malcolm’s own reckoning as the one chosen to succeed where his father had failed.
The last thing he recalled from that day was looking up and meeting the gaze of the Ranger’s daughter, so soft and sweet and even compassionate. But Malcolm didn’t want her pity, didn’t want anything from her besides the big pistol she’d dropped by her feet so he could gun down her father there and then.
He hadn’t, of course, and the hate he felt turned into a weapon. A nuclear bomb of emotions that bled away his youth in a painful, loathsome geyser. That girl, daughter of Jim Strong, had haunted his dreams as she grew up to become a Texas Ranger herself. But in his dreams Caitlin Strong was still just short of fourteen, a bit younger than the young women brought to him here in the world he had built, insulated from the likes of the Texas Rangers and the outside world in general. But it wasn’t good enough, because sooner or later they would come for him as they’d come for his father.
Unless he came for them first.
That day was coming, as it had come already in Galveston and elsewhere.
“You say something, Mal?”
Arno swung, not even realizing Jed Kean had come up beside him. “Just muttering to myself, Jed,” he said, clearing his throat. “Got a lot on my mind these days.”