Sara didn’t believe she’d get an honest answer, but she asked, “What’s the point of this place?”
“Ah,” he said, as if she was speaking a different language that only he could decipher. “You want to know how we got here, yes?”
Sara shrugged, because he was going to say what he was going to say.
“We’ve been on the mountain for over a decade. Our way of life is simple. We take care of our own. The family units remain whole. We respect the land. We don’t take more than we need and we give back when we can. Our blood is in this soil.”
Dash paused, as if he expected Sara to key into the familiar white nationalist chant of blood and soil.
When Sara did not oblige, Dash said, “We were led here by Gwen’s father, a righteous believer in the Constitution and American sovereignty.”
Sara kept waiting.
“Our leader has been taken away from us, but we’ll continue the mission without him.” Dash explained, “That’s the beauty of the system. We don’t need a leader so much as believers in the world that we’re trying to return to. A world of law and order, where people know their place and understand where they belong in the system. Every wheel needs a cog if it’s going to turn properly. Our beliefs guide us in this crusade, not any particular leader. When one man falls, another man stands up to replace him.”
“And the leader always happens to be a man?”
He smiled. “That’s the natural order of things. Men lead. Women follow.”
Sara ignored the reductive bullshit. “Are you part of some religious group, or—”
“There are some true believers among us. I can’t count myself among those, much to my wife’s chagrin. Most of us are pragmatists. That’s our religion. We are all Americans. That unites us.”
“Michelle is an American, too.”
“Michelle is a lesbian who gave birth to a mixed-race mongrel child.”
Sara was momentarily stunned. It wasn’t so much what he’d said about Michelle’s daughter, it was the way the mask had slipped from his face. His expression was angry, ugly. This was the true Dash, the one who set off explosives and murdered indiscriminately.
Just as quickly, the mask slid back up.
Dash adjusted the sling around his neck. He smiled. He told Sara, “Dr. Earnshaw, you’re clearly a good woman. I respect that you chose to come here to help us with our children.” He gave her a wink, as if to let her know that he was in on the joke. “As I said yesterday, as soon as our little ones are tended to, you’ll be free to go.”
She held on to his vile words about Michelle’s daughter. That was who he really was, not the overly mannered caricature he showed the world. “You’re a terrorist. I watched you shoot a man in cold blood. I’m supposed to take you at your word?”
His composure held fast. “Vale was executed for war crimes. We are soldiers, not animals. We operate under the Geneva Convention.”
War.
The word kept coming up, first from Gwen and now from Dash. “Who are you fighting against?”
“We are not fighting against, Dr. Earnshaw. We are fighting for.” His smile was smug, but then men like Dash were always smug in the knowledge that the rest of the world was wrong and they alone knew the truth. “I know you missed breakfast because you were with your patients. Lunch is being put on the tables. I hope you’ll join us.”
The thought of sitting with him, having a normal meal, was more revolting than the idea of putting food in her mouth, but she had to keep herself strong. Sara could not give into despair. She would not end up beaten down like Michelle.
“This way, please.” He indicated the path, waiting.
Sara walked through the woods toward the clearing. Her hands were still shaking. Her stomach was filled with bile. Her clothes were disgusting. Everything about her felt disgusting. She combed her fingers through her wet hair. Steam rose from her scalp. The sun was high above the ridgeline. She was momentarily blinded by a flash of light. The sun had hit a pane of glass. She stumbled on a rock.
She righted herself before Dash could.
Sara kept walking, her head pointed straight, her eyes looking to the side.
There was a greenhouse just beyond the trees.
She had missed the glass enclosure on her way to the stream. The roof was peaked in the center. Skylights vented heat. The building was narrow, roughly the size of a mobile home. The roof and walls were glass, but a tent had been erected inside the structure. The material was reflective, the color of aluminum foil.
Electrical cords ran outside to a wooden shed. She saw a towable generator with a muffler. More solar panels. Her ears picked up a soft hum of machinery behind the glass walls. Inside the tent. Metal scraping metal. Items being moved around. The occasional murmur of a voice.
Sara heard the industrious sound of people working long after she had lost sight of the building.
The Camp.
Women and sick children. Boys playing GI Joe. A compound hidden amongst the trees. A glass greenhouse with a reflective thermal tent that would prevent a helicopter or plane with a heat-seeking camera from peering inside.
When Sara had questioned Gwen about her husband, she had quoted Isiah—
I form the light and bring darkness. I make peace and bring evil.
Fifteen people had been murdered at Emory. One of their own team had been killed during their escape. Dash had murdered a delivery man and one of his mercenaries right in front of Sara’s eyes.
What other evil was he planning to bring?
10
Monday, August 5, 6:10 a.m.
Will sat across from Amanda’s desk at the GBI’s Panthersville Road headquarters. The clock on the wall said it was ten after six in the morning. He watched her read through the overnight reports. Autopsies on the man Will had shot at the car accident and the two men found dead at the motel. Forensic results from the abandoned potato chip van, Sara’s BMW, the motel room.
Beau. Bar. Dash. Thinks. Hurley’s. Dead. Spivey. Me. OK. 4. Now.
Will gripped his hands together. The knuckles were swollen and bruised. His headache was tapping on the back of his eyeballs like a ball-peen hammer. His thoughts had turned into Velcro, sticking to inconvenient parts of his brain. The pain in his belly had spread into his kidneys. He was sitting on the edge of his seat because it hurt too much to lean back.
He told Amanda, “Sara wrote that she was okay for now. The voice text was sent at four fifty-four yesterday. That’s basically thirteen hours ago—sixteen hours since she was taken.”
Amanda glanced at him over her reading glasses.
He said, “Whatever you’re reading in those pages, it won’t change the fact that three men from the car accident are dead and a fourth is in custody. No one knows what I look like, or that I was even there. Put me undercover. The IPA is four men down. They need somebody with skills for whatever they’re planning next. I need to be in there so we can figure out how to stop them.”
Amanda was silent for a moment longer, giving him the impression that she might be considering his request. “The FBI’s confidential informant was your way into the IPA. Unfortunately, he’s currently in a refrigerator drawer.”
Adam Humphrey Carter couldn’t be the only way in. “I know you, Amanda. You wouldn’t send me in with someone else’s CI. You’ve got another guy on the inside who can vouch for me.”
She didn’t disagree with him. “Are you forgetting that there were five men at the car accident? You can’t be sure that Dwight didn’t see you.”
“He was unconscious the entire time.”
“What about Michelle?”
Will couldn’t answer that. He didn’t know what would happen if Michelle Spivey recognized him. She was defiant one second, then terrified the next.
“Wilbur—”
“What about Sara’s message?” he asked. “The first word she wrote on the ceiling was Beau. Sara’s second word was bar. Maybe she overheard Beau talking to Dwight. Or they went to the bar. I know that you—”
“Here’s what I know.” Amanda threw one of the stapled reports at him. “Charlie’s findings at the motel.”
Will stared at the pages. His head was hurting too much to try to decipher the words. He wasn’t going to use a ruler to pin down each letter like a first grader, especially not in front of Amanda.
He settled on a belligerent, “So?”
She snatched the report out of his hands. “Michelle Spivey stabbed Carter to death. Her fingerprints were on the headboard. The evidence suggests that she jumped on him, straddled his legs, braced her right hand by his shoulder, then stabbed him seventeen times in the neck, chest and belly.”
Will tried to frame the killing frenzy into a positive. “She’s fighting back. She could be an ally.”
“She’s dangerous and unpredictable, and I can’t risk her nutting up around you. At worst, she could stab you to death. At best, she could tell her captors exactly how she knows you.”