“If you don’t mind me asking, Mr. Shetler... Mose... what were you doing at the bus station this morning? I saw that you dropped a young Amish man off.”
Mr. Shetler sighs, and I can see there is some personal pain reflected in his eyes. “That was my son. It appears that perhaps he is somewhat like you, Fred. He says he doesn’t want to stay with the Amish. With his family. He wants to go see what the world has to offer. His name is Elijah.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say, and for some reason I really am. “And yet you drove him to the station. That is uncommon among our people. Usually when someone like me wants to run off, we have to do it without any assistance from the family.”
“It’s true what you say,” Mose says. “But I prayed about it all night. I have prayed about it much lately. And my wife and I agreed that if this is what he wants... if he must try it out there among the Englischers, then we want him to know that we still love him and want the best for him. If we are kind to him now, perhaps he will, like you, choose to return to us before long.”
I take a deep breath, not knowing what I should say.
“I feel very blessed to have met you, Fred Bontrager,” Mose says, “and on this morning of all mornings. I feel God has sent you to us to give us faith and hope that our boy will come back to us.”
“Please call me Doc,” I say. “And I pray he does come home.”
“My wife will be very pleased to meet you, Doc,” Mose says. “I fear she has cried her eyes out all this morning. She will see you as a blessing from God sent to give us courage.”
We ride to the Shetler farm on Mose’s buckboard, Ben up on the bench and me riding in the bed. Ben and Mose chat away in their Amish tongue, so I just watch the beautiful Amish farms pass by with their neat yards, large houses, and perfect fences, and I think about what comes next, and what our enemies might be doing to find us.
When we arrive at the farm, we help Mose unload the bags, and he shows us into the house where we meet his wife, Sarah, and his young son, John. John is eleven, and he seems excited to have guests at the farm. Sarah is friendly and interested in our story, and when she hears that I am a prodigal, she tears up and smiles at me in a way that lets me know that we are truly welcome in their household.
“We have a dawdi haus,” Mose tells us. “It is attached to this one, but in the back. It was built for my parents when I bought the farm from them and before they passed on to glory. Sarah and I were to move into it when... well, after Elijah buys the farm from me, but now... that seems like a time very far off. Perhaps we will not live there until John is old enough to take over.”
“Elijah will come back,” I say, though I have no idea if he will or not, “and he’ll take over the farm and run it with John.”
“Have we a prophet among us?” Mose says with a smile.
“Not a prophet,” I say, “but I’m very hopeful.”
“I guess we shall see,” he says. “For now, you will make it your home. Get yourselves settled, and later, after lunch, we’ll have chores to do so you can earn your keep.” He leads the way to the dawdi haus, and as he walks he speaks to us over his shoulder. “And I will pay you good wages as well, so you can save up money and buy your own farm.”
CHAPTER 14
Jeremiah Bender cracks open his front door and sees steel blue eyes peering back at him through the narrow gap. He knows that this man on his porch and the friends he has with him are nothing but trouble.
Why are these Englischers here?
A knot of fear begins to tighten in his stomach.
The blue-eyed man pushes open the front door and walks in without an invitation. Several more burly men in black jackets crowd through the door behind him. They aren’t pointing guns, but Jeremiah knows there’s a gun behind everything these men do.
Behind Jeremiah, his family stands in the great room, afraid but silent, watching—with worry, and not a little contempt—the rude Englischers who’ve invaded their home. Jeremiah is getting old, and so is his wife; his children, all five that are still in the home, are all in their middle to late teens. The oldest daughter, Elizabeth, is twenty, but only barely.
“Good,” the blue-eyed intruder says, “the whole family’s here. So we can get right to business.”
“What is this?” Jeremiah says. “Why have you come to my home?”
The man smiles—a cold, deadly smile. “This is you telling me who took your buggy out for a spin yesterday. You tell me that—and how I can find the men who did it—and we’ll be on our way.”
Jeremiah looks to his wife and children, who stand quietly and watch.
“I don’t know,” he says, truthfully. “I don’t know who took it.”
“That’s not good enough, old man,” Blue Eyes says. “So I’m going to ask you one more time... and then I’m going to get angry.”
Jeremiah pauses before speaking again. The truth will not be good enough for this man. But it is all I know.
“The horse came back, with the buggy. Later that day. And it was empty. We do not know who took it, or where they went.”
The leader of the intruders grimaces and drops his chin to his chest. Then, without warning, his hand lashes out and he backhands Jeremiah hard across the face.
The old man takes a step back; his own hand comes up to his face. But he does not retaliate. Does not show anger.
Turn the other cheek. I will not give him the pleasure of my anger. I have done no wrong. If I suffer, I suffer for Christ’s sake.
“Who took the buggy?” the man asks again. Jeremiah notices that this time Blue Eyes is looking at Bethany, Jeremiah’s wife. The angry man’s gaze then moves to the children, probing each of them in turn.
One of Jeremiah’s sons takes a half step forward, then stops.
“We’re telling you truly, Mister,” Matthew Bender says. “We don’t know who took the buggy. We only discovered it was missing when the horse returned pulling the empty buggy.”
Blue Eyes moves again—faster this time. He punches Jeremiah Bender in the gut, doubling him over. He then raises his knee into the Amish man’s face, knocking him backward. Jeremiah crashes into a table and sprawls across the floor. His wife moves forward to help him, but her daughters restrain her.
He will kill me, Jeremiah thinks as he struggles for breath. He will not stop until I am dead.
He feels the blood gushing from his nose, and he’s disoriented, but he holds up a hand to his family to keep them back.
“Resist not the evil,” Jeremiah says, mostly to himself, but loud enough that his family—and his attacker—can hear.
Jeremiah feels the large intruder kneel down next to him, like the angel of death come to take his soul up to its maker. And then... the blows begin to fall like a hard rain.
At first there is pain. Jeremiah screams out, and tries to raise his hands to protect himself. But then...
Only dull thuds.
God is protecting me. Or he is carrying me painlessly through death, like in Martyr’s Mirror. He has taken away the pain.
The blows continue, thump after thump. But Jeremiah feels only the impacts, like he’s being tapped with a soft-bristled brush. Like when he and his brothers would wrestle and fight in the barn, and they would wrap themselves in horse blankets and pull their punches in order not to hurt one another.
But this cannot be. This man is not pulling his punches. I am not wrapped in a blanket.
He is killing me in front of my family.
There... just a shadow... or shadows. My family watches. Stay there, beloved ones. This is our test.
And then the punches slow... and stop.
There is silence, and Jeremiah feels the blue-eyed man stand. Hears the man’s labored breaths.
“I know that you Amish people all know each other,” the intruder says. “I know you know when there are strangers around, and where they are. If you know anything, you’ll really want to tell me.”
“We know nothing of any strangers around.”
It is Matthew who speaks. Jeremiah’s son.
Jeremiah hears the blue-eyed man approach his son, and he wants to react. Wants to jump to his feet. But he cannot. He would not even if he could.
God is our refuge and our shield.
“While you think on it, we’re going to search every structure and outbuilding here on your land,” the man says. “And if I find any evidence that the people we’re looking for have been here... I’m going to kill all of you. Your entire family. One at a time.”
Jeremiah hears a light footfall and then feels the thump of the toe of a boot against his arm.
“You,” the man says to Jeremiah, tapping him with his boot again, “will watch it all. And then I will kill you last.”
I am not already killed, then? Has God spared me?
Jeremiah hears the man’s footsteps move to the rear of the house and out the back door. And then there is the sound of the other men as they begin searching the bedrooms in the house.
After all the men are out of the room, Jeremiah’s wife and children help him up onto a wooden bench. He lies against the backrest while his wife dabs at the blood on his face with her apron. She’s crying, and the rest of the children are upset and trying to help.
Jeremiah makes this all out by the sounds.
One, a daughter, runs to the area of the sink.
On the bench, unable to see clearly but still able to move, Jeremiah Bender reaches over with his right hand. He knows the room. Knows what his hand searches for. There is a small table next to the bench. He pulls open a drawer and removes a small paper flyer. He looks at it, but his eyes will not focus.
He knows what it says. It advertises the coming Market Days in the nearby town of Drury Falls.
He found it in the buggy when the horse returned with it.
Jeremiah brings the flyer up to his bloody mouth and spits out a tooth that has been knocked loose. Then he bites into the paper, rips off a piece, and begins to chew it.
He feels the other children reach and rip off pieces of the flyer as well. He hears them as they put the pieces in their own mouths and begin to chew.
After a few minutes, Blue Eyes returns and his men file back in, having found nothing in the bedrooms. Now Jeremiah can see shadows. Outlines.
The intruder barks orders, sending his men to go search the barns. Then the shadow that is the blue-eyed man turns to Jeremiah and his family.
“We’re going to be... talking... to some other families in the area,” the man says. “And if we find out you’ve hidden anything from us—anything at all—I’ll be back here. And I’ll send each and every one of you to meet your God.”
This Englischer cannot know it, Jeremiah thinks, but what he has uttered is no threat to the Amish. It holds no power to cause fear in them. It is as if the blue-eyed man were a preacher, or a prophet... or the angel of death come to take them where they desire to be.
* * *
Carlos Luna glances nervously around the loft apartment. Something has him on edge, and he can’t quite put his finger on what it is. He yawns. Not because he’s tired, although he is—he hasn’t fully recovered from the six-hundred-mile drive to get here. But the yawn is more of a defense mechanism against the... whatever it is that’s chewing at him. Whatever the feeling is that makes him sense that something, somewhere, is wrong.
Over at a long formal dining table, Patrick, Paula, and three of Tim Lightfoot’s hackers work silently on laptops, only occasionally taking drinks from beers or bottles of sweet tea. And sitting around waiting for Tim—the informal head of the Atlanta branch of the Brazos de Dios—is not improving Carlos’s mood.
Carlos taps out some commands on his laptop. The brand new Marsware 19 overclocked octo-core machine responds almost instantly, bringing up a page that shows him updates on what Patrick and the others are doing. The system works using Tor—a software program that breaks up and encrypts data across a dozen cloud mainframes, all linked together as part of an anonymous global network. Each cloud entity performs only a tiny bit of a bigger function—innocuous when examined individually, and only effective as a secure mobile computing platform when put together. A special wireless LAN setup allows the BDD brethren to mirror one another’s systems and work together without storing any sensitive data on any of the individual laptops. Any data passing through the LAN, or otherwise at risk of being intercepted in the air, is encrypted with PGP and proprietary algorithms.
In the middle of the dining table is Tim Lightfoot’s hybrid EMP box, just like the one Carlos’s team used to fry and erase all the electronic devices back at the warehouse boiler room in Ohio. The “black box” as they call it, if activated, will not only render every electronic device in the apartment dead on arrival, it will also pulse an ultra-high-frequency code that, in the microseconds before the EMP cooks the machines, will permanently erase any data still stored on hard drives. The black box can be activated by any cell phone owned by anyone on the team. Even remotely, if necessary. Carlos has the kill button programmed to the hard camera button on his cell phone. That way he can press and hold the button, and without even booting up, the phone will present a digital kill button on the screen. A quick tap on that button and... bzzzzap. Dead equipment everywhere.
Carlos pulls up Paula’s screen. She’s working with Tim’s team using dozens of botnets that in turn utilize thousands of hijacked drone computers around the world to send false data and erroneous reports to the feds. The misinformation is designed to do two things: confuse those agencies who are most likely to be involved in the search for the doc and his robo-friend, and to flood them with so much information that they won’t know what’s true and what’s false. Right now she’s carpet-bombing the Internet and critical cell phone data junctions with hundreds of carefully selected keywords designed to set off the NSA’s snooping programs. Thanks to Paula, the names “Dr. Christopher Alexander,” “Frank Miller,” and thousands of other possible (and almost impossible) word combinations and search parameters are digitally popping up millions of times all over the world. Simultaneously, thousands of digital and analog tip lines are being seeded with concocted eyewitness reports that use a randomized search-and-replace feature to include specific geographical locations and sighting scenarios.
Looking up from his laptop, Carlos sees Patrick get up and head to the fridge.
“How’re we doing finding Doc and the tardbot?” Carlos asks.
Paula looks up from her work. “Seriously, Carlos?”
“I can’t help it,” he says. “I’m politically incorrect and socially insensitive.”
“Just incorrect and senseless,” Paula says with a roll of her eyes as she goes back to tapping the keys on her laptop.
“No joy,” Patrick says as he reaches into the refrigerator. “I’ve about decided that not only has the doc severed any access to the HADroid, but I think the boy himself is thwarting all my attempts to regain access.”
“Well,” Carlos says. “That’s both good and bad. Because if we can’t use his computers to find them, then no one else can either. But that means, mixaphorically speaking, that short of the dark side locating Butch and Sundance...” Carlos looks over at Paula. “Is that better?”
But she just shakes her head and keeps her eyes glued to the computer screen.
“... Anyway, short of finding Doc and the robot, there’s only one other way I can think of that the law could get any information on what the plan is or where our clients are.”
Patrick twists the cap off a bottle of beer and takes a swig. “And what would that be?”
“They could grab us,” Carlos says. “And that has me worried.”
“That’s one of the reasons we’re in Atlanta now, isn’t it?” Patrick says. “To keep moving and firing from different servers and systems, like snipers at Leningrad?”
Carlos’s eyes meet Patrick’s. “One of the reasons.”
Just then, Tim Lightfoot comes through the door with two bags of groceries and another twelve-pack of beer.
He kicks the door closed behind him and drops the groceries on a bench near the door.
“Jay and Heather,” Tim says to the group of hackers at the table, “can you two put up these groceries while Carlos and I chat?”
“Sure, Tim,” Jay says as he stands.
“There’s a few more bags down in the car,” Tim says to Jay and tosses him the keys.
Carlos follows Tim out through a sliding glass door. It leads to an extensive patio that looks out over a golden afternoon in downtown Atlanta. Once the glass slides closed behind them, Carlos and Tim walk to the railing and talk in low tones.
“Awesome view you got here,” Carlos says.
Tim smiles. “Yeah, this belongs to some muckety-muck banker who’s off on vacation in Venice for the week.”
“How’d you get it?”
“Heather hacked the maid service, got all the info we needed to snag the keys and turn off the alarm, and then gave the maid the week off.”
“Nice,” Carlos says. “And how’re things at the CDC?”
Tim’s eyes roll back a little and he cocks his head. “It’s work, as usual. No pandemics or viral outbreaks, at least of the biological kind, so they have me busy upgrading the servers.”
“Sounds like loads of fun,” Carlos says. “How’s Mom?”
Tim looks at Carlos and frowns.
“She misses you, bro, and she’s mad at me for not telling her where you are.”
The edges of Carlos’s lips turn up in a mixture of acknowledgement and mocking acceptance. “Can’t be helped, man. Even I don’t know where I am half the time. Tell her I love her and I’ll try to see her around Christmastime.”
“She doesn’t handle this black hat stuff very well, you know.”
“I know.”
“So how’re we doing with the thing you’re working on?” Tim asks.
Carlos moves a few feet down toward the corner of the twelfth-floor patio and stares out over downtown Atlanta. The distant honks and sounds of the city blend into a mellow rumble echoing from the caverns and canyons of the city streets below.
Brother, Frank Page 13