"The Cake Lady," Bonar read it aloud like a sigh, and they were both silent for a time.
"Probably stopped at the cafe for a bite on her way to the wedding," Halloran said. "That Gretchen, she loved her donuts."
Bonar was looking across the field at nothing in particular. "Ernie's going to take this hard."
"Yes, he is."
"So what kind of a world are we living in, Mike, where people put nerve gas in milk trucks and set out to kill a lot of other people they never even met?"
Halloran thought about that for a minute. "Same old world, Bonar. Same old hate. Different weapons."
IT TOOK A FULL seven hours for Agent Knudsen and the ominous black-suited men that came from the ominous black helicopter to debrief Grace, Sharon, and Annie. TheMatrix look-alikes were well-mannered, soft-spoken, and absolutely unused to interviewing anyone with a mangy mutt at her side. Not one of them thought to ask the dog to leave. There wasn't a precedent for such a thing.
"You want to debrief them, fine," Magozzi had said. "But it'll be right here in this field, this RV, or that building. We go from here to home, and that's the only choice you have."
One fool had tried to exert a little nonexistent authority, citing all sorts of statutes and policies that mandated an FBI debriefing at an FBI office with all the prerequisite equipment and witnesses. Agent Knudsen had silenced him with a single gesture. The kid, Halloran thought, had a lot more influence than any of them had realized.
When it was all over, Agent Knudsen personally escorted the three women back to the RV. By that time, the sun was setting on the chaotic day, and most of the choppers and vehicles had already left. Magozzi met them at the door. He was wearing a dishtowel apron and a stern expression that didn't go with it. He looked at Knudsen, then at Grace. "Do we feed him or eat him?"
Charlie had made some decisions about Agent Knudsen in the past few hours. He walked over to the agent, sat down next to his leg, and lifted his head to be patted. Knudsen hated dogs. Always had, always would. Except for this one. He laid a hand on Charlie's head, and Charlie's stump of a tail wiggled.
"Feed him," Grace said.
They should have fed him sooner, Magozzi thought a few hours later, because all the fat and carbs and protein that Harley and Bonar had managed to whip up in a cooking frenzy had done little to mitigate the three glasses of Bordeaux Agent Knudsen had slammed before the meal, and they sure as hell weren't affecting the glass he was drinking now.
Grace, Sharon, and Annie had all been frighteningly quiet during the meal, and everyone else had been quiet, too, mentally tiptoeing around them as if they were recently returned combat vets, which, in a way, they were. The women were pressed close together on one side of the table, the men crowded on the other. Magozzi felt a chasm running right down the middle, and wondered how hard it was going to be to cross it. The only thing that gave him hope was when the women excused themselves and went to the back of the RV to crash on the hidden beds that pulled down from the office walls. Grace hadn't actually smiled at him, but she'd trailed her fingers lightly across his hand as she passed.
Just before Annie disappeared down the broad aisle, she paused at the doorway with a pink flounce of the chiffon-and-marabou dressing gown she'd donned after her shower. It showed a lot of cleavage and a lot of plump, delicious leg when she moved, and Gino had been wondering ever since he dropped his jaw at the first sight of it how the hell the FBI had managed to debrief a woman who looked like that.
"Not so long ago," she said, "this body was neck-deep in a scummy lake, butting up against a dead cow."
Every man in the front of the RV smiled at her. Of the three women, Annie was truly the ultimate survivor, the only one who could live through hell, then immediately let it go. Magozzi wondered what it was in her past that made her able to do that-besides knifing a man to death when she was seventeen, of course.
Agent Knudsen, who was already four or five sheets to the wind, brandished an off-center smile. He held up his glass to her. "Not so long ago, dear lady, you were neck-deep in a scummy lake next to a truck filled with nerve gas." His glass wobbled, and a dribble of wine fell to the table.
Annie gave him a quick curtsy and disappeared down the aisle.
"What truck? What lake? What the fuck are you people talking about?" Gino demanded. He looked a little blurry-eyed and aggressive.
"Have you called Angela?" Magozzi asked him.
"About twenty thousand times." He rolled his eyes toward Harley. "I sure as hell hope you get free minutes on your sat phone." He moved his head back toward Knudsen. "So what's all this lake shit?"
Knudsen was making the mistake a lot of nondrinkers make when they have a little too much. He was gesturing with his glass, and Roadrunner was frantically blotting up spills as they happened. "There were three trucks originally-three targets. The first one had some kind of accident and crashed in Four Corners. They shoved it into the lake the women ended up hiding in. It's a really long story."
Harley was immediately alarmed. "Are you shitting me? They were really exposed to that gas?"
Knudsen stuck his lips out. "No worries. You would not believe how fast sarin hydrolyzes, and there probably wasn't a whole lot left in the truck anyway." He dropped his chin and raised his eyebrows almost up to his hairline. "Now, if it had been VX, that would have been a whole different story. Big trouble. Big problem." He grinned foolishly, inappropriately, a lot like Charlie.
Up to this point, Roadrunner had been pretty quiet for a man who had literally saved the day. "What were the targets?" he asked Knudsen. His voice was polite, almost deferential. He was asking about the people he'd saved.
The question sobered everyone. Even Knudsen put down his glass, and his gaze seemed to sharpen. "I really can't tell you that."
Gino bristled a little. "You can't tell the man who saved your ass? Who has a better right to know?"
Knudsen fiddled with the stem of his glass for a minute, then laid his gaze on Roadrunner, right where it belonged. "One of the trucks was parked at a mosque outside Detroit-one of the biggest in the country, by the way. The other was at an Immigration Services field office in a Chicago suburb."
No one said a word.
Magozzi looked down at his hands on the table, thinking how accomplished they were in some things, how versatile, and ultimately, how helpless. "They were sending a message."
Knudsen nodded. He looked one hundred percent sober. "That's what it looks like. They were very careful with the target sites. The mosque and the immigration office were both quite isolated, which makes the targets pretty specific." He dug in his pocket, pulled out a wrinkled business card, and smoothed it flat on the table. "We found about a thousand of these in Hemmer's desk at the dairy."
All the men leaned over to read it. There was no name on it, no address, no logo of any sort-just a simple quote:
". . it is their right, it is their duty . . , to provide new Guards for their future security."
"Sounds familiar," Halloran murmured.
"It should," Bonar replied. "It's from the Declaration of Independence. What the forefathers said you had to do when the government wasn't doing enough to protect you."
Knudsen nodded sadly.
And this, Magozzi thought, was the dreaded black place. The desperate place where people always went when anger and fear couldn't find any other answer, the place that obliterated logic and compassion and reason and all the other higher functions of the human mind that civilization had fostered.