The Overton Window

  The silence was broken by the sound of a diesel engine turning over and starting. Danny watched Kearns limping toward the back of the truck, then grabbing on and hoisting himself up into the open compartment.

  As the truck dropped into gear and started to roll Danny got to his feet and ran for it. The faster he ran the faster it went, and it had nearly accelerated to the point of no return when he caught up to the tailgate, stumbled forward to get a grasp on to Stuart Kearns’ extended hand, and felt himself pulled up and in.

  CHAPTER 42

  Noah had shaken his one remaining pill out of the prescription bottle halfway through the flight, and now as the last of the medicine was wearing off, a nasty withdrawal was setting in with a vengeance. By the time they reached the car rental counter he could feel himself starting to fade. Headache, chills, dizziness, a general sickening malaise—it was already bad, and he could tell it was going to get much worse over the next few hours.

  Molly was driving, since he clearly wasn’t fit to sit behind the wheel, and to put it delicately, she drove with a purpose. If he’d been feeling good and in the right sort of daredevil mood her driving might have been easier to take in stride. As it was, though, between his worsening physical condition and being jostled around the front seat by all the surging and braking and swerving through traffic, he wasn’t having any fun at all.

  Plus, she wasn’t talking. Since they’d started out in the car all he was getting were one-word answers, along with clear unspoken signals that there was nothing so important that it needed to be discussed at the moment.

  They’d left the city limits of Las Vegas over half an hour ago, so his hope of a good night’s recovery in a five-star bed was more than thirty miles behind them and fading fast. According to the speedometer, wherever she was taking them she was trying to get there in way too much of a hurry.

  “We’re going to get stopped,” Noah said.

  She didn’t answer, and she didn’t slow down.

  “Where are we going, Molly?”

  “To help a friend,” she said curtly. “Now would you please just let me drive?”

  “Fine.”

  “Thank you.”

  Before long they’d left the main highway and were barreling down some narrow desert road that was only a thin single line on the GPS screen. Before they’d gotten started she’d spent quite a bit of time and frustration entering their destination into the device. It was hard, she’d said, because it wasn’t a street address that she’d been given, only a latitude and longitude.

  The sheet of paper from which she’d read those coordinates was still tucked into one of the cup holders.

  Okay, then.

  If she didn’t want to take a few seconds to tell him what was going on, he could damn well figure it out for himself. Before she could stop him Noah picked up the sheet and opened it up, tapped on the overhead map light, and held the paper near his eyes.

  What was printed there appeared to be two cut-and-pasted text messages or e-mails, he couldn’t tell which. Maybe it was because his mind was working only at half capacity, but he had to read it all over twice. The first time through he couldn’t accept what he was seeing.

  molly -

  spread the word --- stay away from las vegas monday

  FBI sting op --> * exigent *

  be safe

  xoxo

  db

  * FYI ONLY DO NOT FORWARD DELETE AFTER READING *

  Big mtg today, Monday PM, southern

  Nevada. If you don’t hear from me by

  Wednesday I’m probably dead*, and this is

  where to hunt for the body:

  Lat 37°39’54.35”N Long 116°56’31.48”W

  > S T A Y A W A Y from Nevada TFN
  db

  * I wish I was kidding

  “Unbelievable.”

  She glanced over at him, but only for a second before she got her eyes back on the road. When he looked down he found he’d crumpled the paper in his hand so hard that it might never come unfolded.

  “I can’t believe it,” Noah said. “You people got me again.”

  CHAPTER 43

  “Nine-one-one, this call is recorded, what’s your emergency?”

  Wherever they were going, the ride was awfully rough. Danny was holding on tight to a cargo strap near the open door at the rear of the moving truck, the only place in the metal compartment with a signal solid enough to make a call on Kearns’s satellite phone.

  “My name is Danny Bailey, I’m out in the desert somewhere northwest of Las Vegas, and I’m with FBI Special Agent Stuart Kearns. I’m in the back of a truck that’s on the move, and this truck belongs to a terrorist organization that might have their hands on a nuclear weapon.”

  “What’s your location, sir?”

  “Listen, I know what you people can do. You already know where I am better than I do, you know whose phone I’m calling from, you know the route I’m on, and in about ten seconds you’ll be sure who I am because you’ll have verified my voiceprint, so stop wasting my time.”

  Some odd noise broke onto the line for a time; not interference, but a series of electronic clicks, tones, and dropouts.

  “Okay, good deal, is everybody on now? Everybody listening? This is about an operation code-named Exigent. Did you get that? Exigent. So now you know who I am, who I’m with, why I’m here, and where to send the cavalry, and you’d by-God better know this is real. Just follow this signal down and get here, understand?”

  He left the phone switched on and placed it in a niche on the bed of the cargo compartment.

  Kearns was near the front wall, kneeling next to the tarp-wrapped bundle they’d both seen earlier, before the shooting had started.

  It was a body, of course, and the face of the dead man had been uncovered. When Kearns turned to look at him, Danny didn’t have to ask who it was that was lying there. He’d already known who it would be.

  Agent Kearns had said that after these last few years of working this operation undercover—all the while doing his best to appear to be a raving militant agitator who’d turned against his government and was openly calling for a violent revolution—he really had only one remaining contact in the FBI. His frightening online persona was well-known to tens of thousands of fringe-group wackos and law enforcement personnel alike, but only one person alive could have credibly testified that Stuart Kearns was actually a loyal American doing his duty to protect and defend the United States. And here was that person, dead.

  “Did you call 911?” Kearns asked.

  “Yeah, I did. And now they’ll either come or they won’t.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Danny touched the metal gantry next to him, the frame that held the thing that at first glance he’d thought might be a torpedo. “Take a look at this thing with me, and tell me what you think.”

  As Kearns moved to stand, he winced and leaned his head back against the corrugated wall of the compartment. Below the knee his right pants leg was stained with blood.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’ll be fine. Just help me up.”

  They stood on either side of the framework, bracing themselves on its crossbars as the truck moved over the rough road they were traveling.

  “This looks like an old Mark 8 atomic bomb,” Kearns said, “from the early 1950s.” He pulled the light down closer and ran his hands over the surface, stopping at a series of seals and stickers that carried dates and the initials of inspectors. “It’s been maintained all these years.”

  “So this is a live one, then?”

  “Sure looks that way to me.” A line of heavy metal conduit ran from the rear of the thing and Kearns followed it with a finger, pointing. The tubing went across the floor and through the wall to the driver’s compartment. “And it looks like they’ve jury-rigged it to be set off from the front seat.”

  “So your guy over there on the floor: he brought them this one, and you brought yours. You both got managed so you did
n’t know what the other was doing, and we all got set up at once.”

  “But why,” Kearns said. He wasn’t really asking; he was thinking it through.

  “It’s like I told you before. Whoever’s behind this needed a patsy for a false-flag domestic attack, Stuart, and that’s you. And they needed to make my people the enemy, and that’s why I’m here.”

  “Based on your file, they could have had you picked up anytime they wanted, but they picked you up Friday night, to make you a part of this. And me, they’ve just kept me in cold storage—”

  “Waiting for the right time, when they needed a couple of fall guys,” Danny said. “The crazy Internet conspiracy theorist who incited these thugs into violence, and the lone nut ex-FBI man who helped them pull it off.”

  “Well, whoever’s behind this, we’ve screwed up their plans for now.”

  “But not for too much longer. This guy’s driving somewhere like he means to get where he’s going, but if he calms down long enough to stop and come back here to check his load, we’re toast. We’re unarmed, and he’ll just stand back and shoot us like fish in a barrel. Then he’ll go on to Vegas tonight and do what he’s going to do. We can’t wait for him to do that.”

  Kearns looked up at him. “So what do we do?”

  The truck slowed briefly, made a turn onto what felt like a much smoother roadway, and then began to pick up speed again.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Danny said, “but I don’t know if you’ll like it.”

  He walked toward the tailgate, where the package they’d brought was strapped against the side of the compartment, and motioned for his partner to follow. When Kearns had sat and situated his injured leg, Danny crouched down and pulled off the tarp that was covering the device. He peeled off the keys that were taped near the arming panel and handed them to Kearns.

  If one of these bombs was real, then it stood to reason that they both were real. And there was really only one way to find out.

  “Here we go,” Kearns said.

  He inserted the two keys into the control panel, twisted them a quarter-turn, and pressed the button labeled ARM. The line of yellow bulbs illuminated, winked to green one by one as the soft whine from the charging electronics ascended up the scale.

  Once the device had gotten its bearings, it was simple enough to reset the final destination on the touchscreen of the GPS detonator. It wasn’t an address they selected, of course, just an empty point on the deserted road they were traveling, a little less than three miles ahead and counting down.

  The older man lit up a cigarette, and he shook another one up from the pack and offered it across.

  “Nah, I told you,” Danny said. “I quit five years ago.”

  “Aw, come on. Special occasion.”

  “I took an oath to an old friend, Stuart, and if you met this woman, you’d know why I can’t break it.”

  “When you put it that way, I guess I see what you mean.” Kearns winced and straightened his leg, leaned his head back against the corrugated wall of the compartment, eyes closed.

  “Hey,” Danny said, and he waited until his partner looked over. “The other night when you were telling me about your career with the FBI, you said that after all they’d put you through, you wondered sometimes why you stuck it out.”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is why, man. Tonight is why you stayed on. What was it they had you say, when you put your hand on the Bible and they swore you in?”

  “It’s been so long, let’s see if I even remember …‘I do solemnly swear,’” Kearns said quietly, “ ‘that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.’”

  “Damn right.”

  “And how about you?”

  “Me? Oh, this is the perfect way for me to go out, really. The more I think about it, the more I realize I must have outstayed my welcome in my own movement. I take that back; it’s not even mine anymore. If guys like these can agree with anything I say, then I’ve been saying something wrong. And you know what, Stuart? A long time ago I pledged my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor to this country, and now I get to give all three of them at once.”

  Kearns took a last drag and stubbed out his smoke on the metal floor. “Does it matter that nobody will ever know what we did out here?”

  “Oh, somebody’ll figure it out. Somebody like me. Not that anybody else will ever believe them.”

  The device next to them issued a loud tone. A bright red light illuminated on the panel, under the word Proximity.

  “Nice working with you, kid,” Kearns said.

  He reached out a hand and Danny Bailey took it in a firm clasp of solidarity, and just a moment later, they were gone.

  CHAPTER 44

  We got you?” Molly shouted. “We got you? Are you really selfcentered enough to believe that any of this is about you?”

  “It’s only about me because you keep putting me in the middle of it,” Noah said. “You people could have killed me, for God’s sake, so maybe you can forgive me for taking this personally.”

  “Hollis stayed with you every minute until they came for you; he made sure you were okay. I’m so sorry you’ve got a headache now, but nobody tried to kill you.”

  “That’s just great to hear. You know, you people are really incredible. My father told me this morning that something is going to happen that’s going to change everything, and I’m thinking, okay, a big stock market correction, or another war going hot in South Asia or the Middle East, or a couple of planes crashing into buildings like the last time everything changed forever. And your mother asked me to help you get away to somewhere safe”—he held up the paper in his hand—“and idiot that I am, I let you lead me right to the last place on earth we should go.”

  “I’m here to stop this thing if I can.”

  “Well, you can’t!” he shouted over her. “Open your eyes, for God’s sake. They’ve got everything, and you’ve got nothing. All you’re going to do is get us both arrested or killed or put into an unmarked hole in the middle of the desert.”

  “I have to try.”

  “You don’t have to try. I told you, we can both ride this thing out. I can’t believe I’m hearing myself say this, but I still want to help you, Molly. That cabin in the woods that you talked about, wherever you want to go until this blows over, I can still make that happen.”

  “How dare you dangle that in front of me again! What do you think, that I don’t want it? That I don’t want you? Don’t you think I’m scared, and I dream some nights about getting away and never having another worry about the people like your father and what they’re trying to turn this world into?”

  “As bad as it would be to let me take care of you, it’s better than dying for nothing, isn’t it?”

  Molly’s expression changed. She took a deep breath and then spoke in a much more measured tone. “Before we got off the plane you told me that you got it; you said you finally understood what I was about.”

  “I do.”

  “No, you don’t, Noah. You have no idea. You think knowing the truth is enough? A lot of people know the truth, and nothing changes. So today, after twenty-eight years of drifting through life and taking everything from this country and never giving anything back, today you tell me you’ve finally seen the light and that’s supposed to mean something to me?”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “Once you know the truth,” Molly said, “then you’ve got to live it. That’s all I’m trying to do.”

  He saw her look up at the rearview mirror, and something froze in her.

  Noah turned to look through the back window. The visibility must have stretched for miles and miles, and way back at the edge of what the eye could see, a tiny line of strobing police lights had appeared.

  She was driving as hard and fast as she had before, but there was something in her face, in her eyes, that he hadn’t seen before. Molly w
as afraid. And he knew then that she wasn’t afraid of the police, or of going to prison; she wasn’t afraid of getting killed in her cause; she wasn’t even afraid of Arthur Gardner. She was afraid only that her fight was over.

  There’d been turning points in his life that he’d seen coming months away, but this one appeared in an instant. He was safely on one side of it a second before, just being who he’d always thought he was, and then he blinked and he was on the other, waking up to realize who he was going to be.

  Up ahead he could see that the road narrowed onto a short bridge over a shallow chasm, which ran across the terrain for several hundred yards.

  You see the truth, and then you have to live it, she’d said. It was too late, maybe, and too little, but he knew what he needed to do.

  “Slow down,” Noah said. “I’m getting out.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t stop, just let me out.” He cracked the door and the wind whipped inside, and she let her foot off the gas and braked until the car had slowed to the point where he might just survive if he stepped out onto the road whizzing by under them. There was no way to be sure if she understood what he was doing; no time to explain. Maybe he’d never know, but like she’d said, none of this was really about Noah Gardner.

  He took a last look at Molly. There were tears in her eyes but she kept them firmly fixed on the way ahead.

  “Good-bye,” Noah said.

  She answered, but so quietly and privately that the words clearly weren’t intended to reach him. If they were never to see each other again, it seemed, this was just something that she must have wanted read into the record. Wishful thinking, maybe, but he felt he knew in his heart exactly what she’d said.

  I love you, too.

  He opened the door and dropped to the pavement, rolling and bouncing and banging along for what seemed like the length of a soccer field. At last he stopped, and he watched for a few seconds as the car he’d left picked up speed again and began to recede toward the horizon.

  He tried to stand but the pain prevented it, so he crawled to the center line and knelt there in the middle of the narrow bridge, hands up and out so he’d be more visible, watching the line of cars with flashing lights fast approaching.