Stronghold | Book 1 | Minute Zero

by Jayne, Chris

  The number was staggering, considering she had a five-year-old who thought a trip to the grocery store was a long time to be in the car. “Simone can help me,” she said weakly.

  “I’m coming too?” Simone looked at Lori, her eyes wide. She’d obviously been taking everything in, but hadn’t said much.

  “I’m so sorry about this, Simi.” Lori reached over and took the au pair’s hand. “You don’t have to. You could try to hide somewhere here in Miami. But you cannot go back to the house to get your passport, so I don’t see how you can fly back to France. And if you use your card to get money, I’m afraid they’ll find you.”

  “No, I go with you.”

  Michelle still didn’t look convinced. “Maybe you should all come to my brother’s. He’s a fireman in a town outside of Atlanta. He knows people, cops...” Her voice trailed off.

  “I need to get as far away as fast as possible,” Lori repeated her earlier decision. “Whoever this is, they can cover up a senator’s death quickly enough so that they have the president of the United States on the news giving his condolences to the family within hours. Miami’s assistant chief of police was at that party last night. Whatever happened, we have to assume he’s in on it.” Lori took a deep breath. “We’re going to my sister’s, that’s final, and I think you guys should leave now.”

  “Okay.” Michelle stood up and Salvadore followed suit, but then she stopped and turned back to Lori, her eyes wide. “What if we don’t hear from you? What then?”

  It was a fair question. After a moment’s thought, Lori stood and got her agenda out of bag. Tearing off a piece of paper from the note pad, she quickly jotted down both her sister’s number and her father’s. “I will be in touch. But, if you don’t hear from me by next Monday, get a disposable phone, go away from your brother’s house, and call my sister.”

  Five minutes later, Lori stood in Sylvia’s kitchen, contemplating her next move. Michelle and Sal had gone, and Lori had moved Sylvia’s Escalade back inside the garage. The house again was buttoned up, looking as it should with Sylvia out of town. Maybe she was making a mistake, she considered as she looked around Sylvia’s large comfortable home. Maybe she was safe here. She and the kids could hunker down here for days - even the two weeks until Sylvia came back. She could go out now and stock up on enough food to last for a while; with that covered, they could sit here with the shades drawn and watch TV, play board games, and read. She could slip out the backdoor and walk Sasha in the yard a couple of times a day. It could work.

  Lori sighed as that line of thinking reached its conclusion. Then what? Sylvia would come home and what would be different? She was almost eighty years old, not exactly a force to be reckoned with, and Lori couldn’t see any practical way Sylvia could actually help her once she got back. Lori would still be in Miami, not able to trust anyone local. Sure, something could change in that time. Some “truth” about Senator Michael’s death could be revealed in the media that would corroborate Lori’s story and she could come forward, but even then, she wouldn’t be sure whom to approach. That seemed like a long shot anyway, and if that didn’t happen, she and the children would still be in danger. The only difference would be that Sylvia would be added to the list.

  And that was ignoring the possibility that someone might be able to see her on the cameras that had undoubtedly been in the McDonald’s parking lot. The fast food restaurant was close enough to the school that those videos might eventually be reviewed for clues. If someone saw her and Simone’s Toyota, they’d have Sylvia’s car’s license in an instant.

  She took a quick glance into the family room. Simone was sitting with the two kids, watching a movie and eating the pizza that had been delivered while Lori was on the phone with Louise, so they were occupied. She got her hobo bag and took out her agenda book and her computer, then sank down at the table in the breakfast nook.

  Lori was a planner. She could never have been successful in her catering career without meticulous lists and timetables for every party, often laid out down to the minute when dishes needed to be removed from the oven, served, and then the table cleared for the next course. As much as it was tempting to just jump in the car and start driving, she knew she had to take a few moments and think things through. This was the most critical plan she’d ever have to put together, and if she were going to be successful, she couldn’t rush.

  Lori eyed the computer wishing she could look things up, look at maps, have access to her calculator. She hesitated. Could they track a computer? She knew cell phones could be located; that was why she’d ordered everyone to turn theirs off as soon as she had gotten back to Sylvia’s. She thought that if she emailed someone or bought tickets, somehow the authorities could figure where the computer was when that happened, but if she just looked up information she was nearly certain that it was safe. She opened her laptop, grateful that, in the past, she’d had a couple of occasions where she needed to check something on her computer at Sylvia’s, so the code for the WiFi was already stored.

  First, she needed to decide how to actually get to Montana. She knew they couldn’t fly; buying tickets would require credit cards, and if there was one thing she knew she couldn’t do, starting right now, was use cards. There were trains and busses, but even if she could buy those tickets with cash somehow, any form of public transportation would deny her something critical: the ability to choose a different path if she needed to in a hurry.

  In every “escape” movie she’d ever seen, at some point the pictures of the people on the run showed up on the news, always accused of something terrible that inevitably made anyone who saw them rush to call the police. Without a car, if something like that happened, she’d have no options. The last thing she wanted was to be stuck in a bus station with her face on CNN, accused of… what? Then it hit her like a bucket of ice. She knew exactly what she could be accused of. She was one of the last people to see Senator Michaels alive. All they would have to say was that she was… What was the phrase they always used? A “person of interest” in his death.

  It seemed crazy to think that could be fabricated somehow, but, she reminded herself, while the senator was still been alive, someone had engineered the president of the United States into giving a statement of sympathy to his family. Whoever these people were, Lori knew she’d be crazy to underestimate them. On top of everything, she had Sasha. Unless it really came down to a life and death choice between the dog and her children, she was not leaving the dog behind.

  All things considered, her best option was to drive and, once that decision was made, that left few choices. Both the Range Rover and Simone’s Toyota were registered to her. How long would it take for the police to be looking for those two vehicles aggressively? She knew the answer: if the police had shown up at the school, they were also already looking for the cars.

  That left Sylvia’s Escalade. She reconsidered her earlier assumption that there was no easy way to connect her to Sylvia and could think of nothing that changed that conclusion. A few of her friends might be aware that she had an elderly relative in Miami that she saw occasionally, but Lori doubted any of them knew Sylvia’s first name, to say nothing of her last name. She could drive Sylvia’s car for a while before anyone connected it with her.

  With transportation covered, that left the real area of concern: money. Getting four people from southern Florida to the middle of Montana would not be cheap. Salvadore had said that it was nearly 2,500 miles. What kind of mileage did a gas-guzzler like the Escalade get? Lori had no idea, but it couldn’t be good. She did some simple math in her head and winced at the answer. If the Escalade ran ten miles a gallon that was 250 gallons of gas, and that alone would run hundreds of dollars.

  And gas was just the beginning. Lori had never gone on a long car trip in her life. When she and Jack had traveled, they’d always flown. Now, with the catering company, “real” vacations were a thing of the past. If she had a slow week, she’d try to slip away to Orlando for a few days, stay in a h
otel and take the kids to one of the theme parks or go down to Key West and stay on the beach. The four-hour drives from Miami to Orlando or Key West had always seemed overwhelming with the kids, inevitably involving at least one stop and sometimes more.

  That absolutely faded in comparison to this. Lori did some more math in her head. If they could average 50 miles an hour, it would take fifty hours to drive 2,500 miles.

  Fifty hours.

  So staggered was Lori by that number that she brought up the calculator on her computer and double-checked the numbers. Yup, 2,500 miles at 50 miles an hour was fifty hours. Ten hours a day for five days. If Simone drove some of the time, could they drive twelve hours a day? Lori couldn’t even imagine it with the kids.

  That meant at least three nights on the road, and that was if they could leave today, and drive well into the night. Realistically, four nights on the road was far more plausible. They would need food and… Lori stopped as something else hit her. They literally had nothing. Not one shred of clothing other than what was on their backs. Not even a toothbrush.

  Her breath went ragged with panic as the reality hit her. She would be leaving everything behind. All of her family photos, the baby things she’d saved from Brandon and Grace. Jack had not been an ideal husband in many ways, but her wedding albums were there. And all the things she had left from her mother, who had died when Lori was only nine – younger than Grace was now – and who, on some days now, Lori could barely remember.

  A wave of utter despair flowed over Lori. Barely three hours ago she’d been sitting at the vet with Sasha, thinking about what she’d recommend to Meredith Wilson for her upcoming dinner party, and now she was figuring out how to keep her children alive. The hysteria that had bubbled over earlier threatened to rise up again, but with brutal force Lori controlled herself.

  Now was not the time to be thinking about possessions. She saw a man being tortured to death less than three hours ago. If Saldata, or whatever his real name was, caught her, he’d want to know whom she’d talked to, what she said, who knew, and Lori had no illusions that she could survive torture in any way, shape or form. He’d find out what he wanted to know and then he’d kill her. Then, what would happen to her kids? Even if he just killed her, her children would be orphans. And the fact is there was no reason to leave anyone alive. Orphans raised questions. Three bodies dumped ten miles offshore solved the problem forever.

  She needed to go into Mama Bear mode, and she had to do it now.

  Chapter 10

  Deacon

  Monday

  11:00 AM Mountain Time

  Bozeman Yellowstone Airport, Bozeman, Montana

  * * *

  Deacon Hale tapped a quick message to his brother Roger into his mobile phone as the jet engine outside the window spun down to silence. “Landed, see you in a few.” He spared a moment to take in the scenery. The Bozeman Montana Airport, flat as a pancake with stunning snow-capped mountains in the distance, was certainly a different view than the one in Norfolk, Virginia he’d left eight hours earlier.

  Within seconds, a message flashed back. “Waiting in baggage claim, meet you there.”

  For a moment, Deacon’s tendency to not want others to inconvenience themselves for him, honed by nearly seventeen years in the military, rebelled, but then he realized that at this small airport, it probably was not too great of an inconvenience to park your car and come in. The next text on his phone confirmed that his brother, Roger, was not suffering. “Got myself a coffee,” it read. “Want one?”

  “Sure,” Deacon typed back, then rose from his aisle seat. He’d checked his duffle, so the only thing he had to retrieve from the overhead bin was his computer case. After helping the elderly couple sitting across the aisle from him get their overstuffed suitcases down, Deacon made his way down the narrow aisle, never an easy task with his six foot four body. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said to the flight attendant, whom, he noted with reluctant interest, blushed when he spoke to her. He really wished he did not have that effect on women, but, he supposed, it was better than having them run away screaming. His mouth twitching in a small smile, he headed up the jet way.

  October notwithstanding, it had still been over seventy degrees at 6:00 AM in Norfolk, Virginia when he left this morning; the cool Montana air in the unheated jet way came as a shock. In some of the higher elevations it was probably already snowing here. He hadn’t brought a heavier coat, but no matter, Roger would have something he could borrow.

  Five minutes later, he stepped up to the baggage claim carousel and effortlessly snagged his standard issue duffle, appreciating another advantage of a smaller airport: your bags beat you to baggage claim.

  “Bro!” a voice sounded behind him, and Deacon turned to see the smiling - and now bearded - face of his older brother. Roger scrutinized him, then fixed on Deacon’s computer case. “Is that a man-purse?”

  Aware of the women, children, and old people around him, Deacon mouthed, “Fuck you,” and then said, “No, it’s a computer case.”

  “I don’t know, Deke. Looks like a man-purse to me. What are they teaching you in the Navy these days?”

  Deacon eyed his brother’s beard. “How to shave.”

  Roger snorted. “I used to have a face like yours. Then I grew up.”

  Deacon was not going to be outdone. “That helpin’ you get laid?”

  “Every night, my man. Every night.” He paused. “Twice on Sundays.”

  Deacon laughed at that one, a full-throated chuckle. “Well, I’ll give you that. It’s more than I can say.”

  “No girlfriend, huh?”

  “Nope. You know the old saying. ‘If the Navy wanted you to have a wife, they’d issue you one.’” Deacon hefted his bag onto his shoulder and took the paper coffee cup that Roger held out, the coffee’s aroma wafting in the air.

  “You want to get something to eat?” Roger asked. “It’s a two hour drive back up to the farm.”

  Deacon shook his head. “I got a sandwich in Denver.”

  “That’ll work out fine, then. I know Lou’s got a big welcome dinner planned for you.” Roger held the door open for Deacon, and Deacon’s earlier impression, that the airport was very small, was confirmed as it was barely a three-minute walk to the short-term lot where Roger had parked his car. It was only after Deacon threw his duffle and computer case into the back of the SUV and Roger placed his coffee onto the roof of the car that Roger enfolded his brother into a big, full-muscled bear hug. “God, it’s good to see you, brother.”

  Deacon returned the hug. “You too, Rog.” He paused briefly as they held the embrace. Then, Deacon pulled back. “What, you couldn’t do that inside?”

  Roger broke away and slapped Deacon on the back. “Nope. This is Montana. Men don’t hug.” Laughing, they both got into the truck.

  For the first few minutes of their two-hour drive back to Roger’s ranch, the two brothers made idle small talk, mostly Deacon giving vague details about his latest deployment. He couldn’t be very specific because of his security clearances, but that was the status quo, and he knew Roger wouldn’t ask. Then, silence descended into the car. Finally, after forty-five minutes, as they flew down a nearly deserted two lane highway, Roger broke the silence. “I’m really glad you’re here, Deke. Things have been tough for me and Lou the last couple months. I hate to say it, but I don’t know how much leave you’re going to get on your leave, because I really need some help.”

  “What with?”

  “Fences, the barn roof, unfortunately, everything. Our new place is pretty much a dump, to be perfectly honest.”

  Deacon’s voice was low and serious. “Roger, what happened? You and Lou were so happy in that commune place.” Deacon, trained at reading people’s most minuscule body language, sensed rather than saw his brother’s hands tightening on the steering wheel and his jaw clench.

  “It wasn’t a commune,” Roger retorted, an edge to his voice. “It was an intentional community.”

  �
��Well, pardon me.” Deacon snorted. “Whatever the hell it was, you’re not living there anymore, so something must have happened.”

  After a pause, Roger spoke softly. “Sorry. Yeah, something happened.”

  “You were so excited about finding this place.” Deacon’s voice trailed off.

  “Yes, we were. We thought it was exactly what we were looking for. And it wasn’t a commune,” he repeated. “About fifteen years ago, a rich guy named Bill Bowen bought up nearly 20,000 acres near Lewiston, intending to start an intentional community. His goal was to build a place where families that wanted to live and raise their kids a bit more traditionally could feel at home. It was supposed to be a place where families felt safe, with an economy in place so moms could stay home with their babies, and kids could ride their bikes to a friend’s house. His goal was eventually to have roughly 800 families.”

  Deacon nodded. “I’ve heard all this before. What happened?”

  “At first, honestly it was great. There was a cooperative grocery store, so food was really cheap. Everyone had gardens, chickens. There was a private elementary school for the kids that only cost $1000 per kid per year. You cooked out with your neighbors. Kids had game nights and teenagers didn’t have cell phones. Men played softball. There was the ranch, and the greenhouses. Bowen developed the largest floral hothouse on the west coast, so there were good jobs for a lot of people. Some, like me, had other jobs in the community. Because I have an MBA, I was hired to be one of the financial managers of the whole thing. But other people who lived there didn’t work for the community at all. My neighbor was a stockbroker - a personal wealth manager - and he managed his clients’ money from his house, and flew to his office in Chicago once a month for a week. We knew another family and both the husband and wife were writers.”

  “You could do that?”

  “Yes, you could do that.” Roger swiveled to throw a quick look at his brother. “It wasn’t a prison, Deke. As long as you made your mortgage payment every month and paid your community fee, and what you were doing wasn’t illegal, no one cared what you did for a job. A few men even commuted to jobs in Bozeman or Billings on Monday mornings and came home on Friday nights.” He sighed. “But the goal was always that most people who lived in Bowenville would work in some way either for the community or in some kind of home-based business.” He paused. “But then things started to change. The community had grown to over 3,000 people, almost 700 families.”