“Sorry about what?”
She frowned. “Hasn’t anyone told you?”
He shook his head, having no idea of her meaning.
“Noah,” Ellen said, taking his hands in hers. “This afternoon, your father passed away.”
Chapter 37
In a frigid side room of the Douglas County Morgue, Virginia Ward sat with her notes in the midst of eight bagged-and-tagged bodies and a mounting collection of conflicting and unexplained evidence.
Since their first meeting she’d had no further interaction with Warren Landers, the man who’d originally engaged her in the matter of Molly Ross. He’d neither called for status updates nor replied to her routine contacts; ultimately she’d stopped trying. It was as though he’d changed his mind about involving her; perhaps he and his higher-ups had decided it would be safer to simply decide the outcome on their own and then turn over their verdict directly to the media.
That was already happening, in fact. The alleged details of Molly’s agenda, her network of accomplices, and her criminal activities were becoming more and more public each day. Now it seemed that every reporter knew her name, and the obedient press was already drawing comparisons to Timothy McVeigh and the lead-up to the destruction of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The anniversary of that attack was fast approaching—on the same day that also marked the disastrous end of the Waco siege—and so speculation ran high that a copycat operation might be in the works.
These mounting fears were due to much more than just talk. A wave of violent hate crimes, random shootings, and bomb scares continued to spread across the country. These were all quickly linked and labeled as acts of domestic terrorism, and the heightening alert level had led many cities and towns to take severe measures that ranged from enforced curfews, roadside checkpoints, and house-to-house searches to airport-level screenings at malls, workplaces, schools, and any arena events that hadn’t already been canceled for safety reasons.
Since she could no longer expect any help from the elusive Mr. Landers, some of Virginia’s other powerful contacts had arranged for the highly unusual assembly of physical evidence that was currently on display at the morgue. She’d had no time to travel to each separate location, so it was all flown in from the other jurisdictions to meet her in Nebraska. An Omaha medical examiner had taken her through his own findings and answered her questions on some subtleties that lay beyond her own expertise.
The group of bodies in the room comprised six men and two women, each from a different scene along the terror route. All the males had been killed in the act of committing one of the aforementioned crimes—or right-wing terrorist attacks, as the news was characterizing them. Though DNA and fingerprint results were still pending, Virginia was satisfied that none of these dead people was Thom Hollis or Molly Ross. She was sure they were still at large, but that’s where her certainty ended.
One of these dead men was suspected to have started a number of wildfires out west, a few of which were still spreading out of control. The local cops had determined that he must have misjudged the wind in committing his arson; the blaze he set had turned and overtaken him as he’d tried to run away. Beneath the scorched body they’d found a plastic pouch of literature with some of the pieces preserved undamaged. The surviving pamphlets and flyers were a mix of materials, most from the Founders’ Keepers, and some assorted racist and seditious screeds from the United Aryan Nations. More like these had been found blowing around near the origin points of the other fires.
Fingerprints had been lifted from these materials and they all matched the index finger of Thom Hollis. “Matched” was an understatement, however; not only were they identical to the print from his military records, they were also virtually indistinguishable from one another. No other prints or partials were found, just those perfect copies from a single finger. It was as though they’d been lab-produced and then hand-applied, but too carefully, for the sole purpose of ensuring they’d be found. Such technology existed, of course, but it required facilities beyond the reach of all but the most well-equipped intelligence agencies.
After the recent murders committed by high-powered rifle, ballistics evidence indicated that nearly every fatal shot had been fired from the same weapon. That weapon was now on the table beside Virginia, having been left behind in a sniper’s nest in downtown Chicago. There again, Thom Hollis’s single pristine fingerprint was found on the rifle and the bullet casings and elsewhere around the scene. Upon disassembling the weapon, though, a more diverse set of his other prints and even a dried fleck or two of his blood had been recovered from the interior parts.
The two young women here, both street prostitutes according to the authorities, had died in separate cities. Each had been shot from behind, execution-style, and then hastily buried near the locations of a pair of seemingly random sniper killings.
The clothes worn by one of them appeared to be the same as those in the surveillance still that Virginia had shown to Noah Gardner. He’d said then that the woman in the picture wasn’t Molly, and it seems he’d been right about that. But there was a passing resemblance to her in the mug shots of both of the dead women, and it seemed likely that they’d been chosen to create a reasonable facsimile for eyewitnesses to recall after the fact.
No doubt there were more like these two still out there waiting to be found.
Another of the dead men had drawn a pistol in the Chicago riot and wounded a policeman before being killed himself by responding officers. Like the others he hadn’t yet been identified, but he did have a peculiar distinguishing mark on the inside of his left wrist: a line of five small yellow diamonds, faint enough against his lifeless skin that they’d been left out of the coroner’s inventory.
There were a lot of tattoos on these guys and this one hadn’t really stood out until she found similar ink on one of the other male bodies, and then another, and then on all the rest. A quick image search on her tablet found many matches to the pattern, but as she narrowed the results she happened upon something rather obscure that provided the first real break in the case.
This exact array of diamond shapes appeared in the coat of arms of the British House of Percy. The black sheep of this old, renowned clan, Thomas Percy, had helped plan the Gunpowder Plot with Guy Fawkes in the early 1600s. Despite the clueless use today of his grinning image on a mask as a symbol of freewheeling anarchy, Guy Fawkes had in fact been a violent advocate for the return of hard-line Catholic theocracy to the throne of England. In any case, when the plot failed Fawkes was hanged and quartered and Thomas Percy’s liberated head ended up on display outside Parliament.
The Percy name was altered by some of its members when they later emigrated to America. Percy had been changed to Pierce.
Sure enough, there on his many ugly websites, George Lincoln Rockwell Pierce proudly traced his family tree back to those treasonous roots overseas, and the Percy coat of arms was displayed at the corner of every page.
In all the available writings and videos of Molly Ross and her deceased mother before her, Virginia Ward had found nothing that would indicate she would ever fall in with a man such as George Pierce, and much less would she sanction the kind of violence now being attributed to her.
She would have a great deal of explaining to do upon her capture, to be sure, but as of that moment Virginia had no reason to believe that Ms. Ross was anything more than an outspoken patriot and the focus of an elaborate setup.
But why, and by whom?
Thom Hollis, on the other hand, was still an unknown quantity. For now, she would consider him armed and dangerous until he proved himself otherwise, if he ever got that chance.
That last name, Merrick, had begun to come up again and again in the fringe-media coverage of the building threats and their alleged sources. Though it hadn’t been specified publicly, Virginia had discovered the location of the particular Merrick family to which these rumors most likely referred. Several members of this family were politically activ
e and the nature of their past support seemed compatible with the libertarian views of Molly Ross and her people. By all reports they seemed to be model citizens, the salt of the earth, but that too would remain to be seen.
Now it seemed that Virginia Ward was officially running off the leash. But if the men who’d brought her in thought their sudden withdrawal would stop her search for the truth, they were dead wrong.
The Merrick ranch in Wyoming, then, would be the very next waypoint in Virginia’s journey toward the truth. It was a lot to hope for, but perhaps the answers to all her questions were there.
Chapter 38
By and large, the men George Pierce had lost already were of very little concern to him.
Nor did he fret about the fate of those who would surely die in the bloody weeks ahead. This terror and turmoil he was helping create would soon transition to the war that he’d always wanted—a bloody battle against the tyranny of the elitists, their heathen puppets, and the one-worlders. At last the day of reckoning was coming, and all those who would give their lives in this final showdown, civilians and soldiers alike, could not have dreamed of a higher endeavor in which to make that sacrifice.
There would be a bleak period of adjustment, no doubt, a time of cleansing, reconstruction, and reeducation. Sadly, there were some so-called Americans who simply wouldn’t be a part of this future. Twenty-five million or so was the conservative estimate his strategists had given him. But so be it; many more had been lost in the name of far less noble goals.
The end was near, and only a few tasks remained in the menial part he was currently playing. He’d gone along and done as he was told, biding his time and preparing to return to his own agenda when the time was right. And there was still one burning need in him, admittedly a personal vendetta, and he would have it satisfied before the night was done.
He didn’t consider himself to be a man whose wrath was easily kindled, but if George Pierce had a flaw it was this: once he was wronged and his sense of justice was awakened, it wouldn’t rest again until the books had been brought back into balance.
Warren Landers had recently made contact and ordered him to be ready if the need arose to move against Molly Ross and her people, wherever they were hiding. It might not be necessary at all, he’d said. The Founders’ Keepers were to be implicated in the planning of a massive domestic attack of some sort, as if such high-and-mighty weaklings would ever be capable of doing such a thing. But that story wouldn’t play if they continued to cower somewhere in a safe house, so Pierce’s role would be to flush them out of hiding if they wouldn’t come out on their own.
Landers was not a trusting man. He’d still insisted on keeping her location a secret. In the course of this conversation, though, he’d inadvertently said too much and let slip some important information.
Wherever she was hiding, Molly Ross was within a two-hour drive from the spot where George Pierce was currently standing in his war room. Two hours away over land: that was the time frame he’d been given in which to execute his role if called upon. With that knowledge he’d measured and drawn a small, scaled circle on the terrain map, with his compound at its center point.
Other scattered details further narrowed the possible locations. The place was rural and remote, far from the nearest town, he’d been told, and its two dozen or so able-bodied residents might be well prepared to mount an armed defense. Their large dwelling was in the midst of a great deal of private land, and that meant that if they managed to call for help it would be a long time in arriving. They were under surveillance from eyes in the sky, so it was known that Molly Ross and her people were still hunkered down in the same place they’d run to when they’d made their escape two weeks before.
Now the other puzzle pieces could be laid aside. Their unexpected nearness and the fact that a drone was orbiting above them: those two bits of information would be her undoing.
Pierce had used some of the money he’d been paid to buy an assortment of black-market radio gear and a set of classified schematics that had been on his wish list for a long time. With these items his technical men had built a home-brewed transceiver. This rig had actually first been invented by al-Qaeda engineers almost ten years before, back when American drones had first begun to play an increasingly publicized role in finding and killing their leadership. Later versions of this setup were rumored to be capable of disrupting or even taking control of the aircraft, but those weren’t the capabilities he needed right now. All George Pierce required was to hack in and see what those airborne cameras were seeing, and to be able to ask that drone exactly where it was.
The men had brought in a folding table, set up the rig, and run the proper line to an antenna array outside. His most skilled communications specialists sat before the snowy display screen, tuning and tweaking the dials with a safecracker’s touch, searching along the narrow spectrum for a faint encrypted signal somewhere out there, just within range.
Those Talion people Landers had hired to do his bidding were very well trained and equipped. Their gear, however, wasn’t the latest tech available to the legitimate U.S. military. They had weaponry, helicopters, tanks, APCs, and even jets, but it was all years old, the type of equipment often sold to second-rate allies overseas.
Their drones were yesterday’s news as well, and the secrets of this particular class of craft had been studied and ultimately cracked by the very terrorist forces they’d been deployed to watch and harass along the Afghan–Pakistan border. A UAV maintains a constant data link with its controllers, and that signal can be captured if a man knows where to find it.
At last the picture swam and hissed and then stabilized. An image appeared, the same one he’d seen for only a second when Landers had shown it before: a large house, outbuildings and corrals, and sprawling open land surrounding it all. With a tapping on the keyboard an electronic inquiry was sent and back streamed a screen full of telemetry data, including the coordinates of the target residence.
The men let out a triumphant yell, one of them turned up the lights, and another called out the key data to be copied down. George Pierce bent over the large map on his table, traced the coordinates with his fingers, and quickly found the place.
“Feed those numbers into a GPS,” he said, “then get all the men together, get everybody, but do it quiet.” He was thinking of the skeleton crew of Talion mercenaries that Landers had left with him, camped in the field outside. Without any doubt part of their job was to keep watch over their hosts and report any hints of revolt.
But a time comes when every leader must face the Rubicon and make his choice to cross it or deny his destiny. This was a turning point, and although it had come sooner than he’d expected, he would not shy away.
“No,” Pierce said. “We’re not going to slink off our own land and sneak away to do what’s right. Now listen up. Keep the man out there in the radio tent alive, and we’ll persuade him to keep his boss informed that we’re all still doing what we’re told. As for the others, I want you boys to go now and kill everyone outside that ain’t one of us. Take them all at once, and I don’t want to hear any alarms go off, you understand? Make it quick and quiet and clean.”
The men nodded, and a few of them smiled.
Then Pierce thumped the X he’d drawn on the map in front of him.
“And then you go there,” he said, “all of you. Drive down to that ranch and murder everything moving. Man, woman, or child, it makes no difference to me. Kill them all and we’ll let God sort ’em out. Burn the place to the ground, but you save one thing for me.” He raised his voice so all could hear. “I’ll give ten thousand in gold to the man who brings that Molly Ross back here alive to face the music.”
Chapter 39
The Wyoming sky had become overcast and Hollis knew that sundown was only a couple of hours away. It had already been another hard day of preparations for the trip north to safety and there would be a long night of final tasks ahead.
A waist-high table was lined
with a dozen open grab-and-go kits that he’d been putting together with the aid of his young helper. This job had mostly consisted of him telling Tyler Merrick what to fetch. Now the boy was late in coming back, and with just a few vital provisions still needed to fill up the survival bags, Hollis, after a few more minutes of waiting, got up to go and get what he needed himself.
As he set out for the distant pantry, along the way he confirmed something that Tyler had told him earlier: the local sheriff’s squad car was in the driveway in front. To avoid being seen Hollis made his way toward the garage through paths outside and back halls that eventually took him past his own suite.
He paused at Molly’s room and looked inside through the half-open door. It seemed she hadn’t moved since the last time he’d checked in. The curtains were drawn and her dinner tray was on the side table, still untouched. She appeared to be sleeping, but then for the most part she’d appeared that same way for several days.
Together the two of them had soldiered through a lot of difficult times, but it had never been like this; he’d never seen her adrift this long with all the wind taken out of her sails. They say that time heals all wounds. He could only hope that would begin to prove out once they’d left this latest losing battle far behind.
Hollis considered stopping in to give her some recent news and then he thought better of it. He’d received an e-mail message, supposedly from Noah Gardner, via one of her older private addresses. The message offered Molly his help, whatever that might mean. Most likely it was some attempt at subterfuge, and whoever knew enough about their relationship to fake that note also knew enough to be a real threat. Even if it was actually Gardner who’d written it, though, it could be just as dangerous. Real or not, encouragement from a message like that was the last thing Molly needed to receive at the moment.