“Are you assassins?” Dawn asked.
Jonathan was tempted ask her if that would be a problem. “No, ma’am. While I can’t tell you exactly who or what we are, I can tell you with absolute certainty that we’re the good guys. We’re on the side of the angels.”
“Then how come you don’t have cops with you?” Georgie asked.
Boxers took that one. “Because they’re not always on the same side as us.”
The conversation was meandering, and Jonathan wanted to bring it back on track. “Tell me about your concerns with the Excalibur plant across the street.”
LeBron and Dawn exchanged glances, and Dawn nodded. “That plant’s been empty for almost three years,” LeBron said. “Tore this place up when they left. Took two hundred jobs away because the politicians were too busy putting money in their own damn pockets to pay any attention to the little guy. I used to work there. So did Dawn. Terrible, terrible thing when it closed.”
Jonathan heard Boxers stir and prayed that he would keep his mouth shut. So far, nothing LeBron had said was relevant to anything they wanted to know, but it was a mistake to push people who had just started talking.
“So, it just sat there, you know what I’m sayin’? Just sat there like it was mocking us. They put up that big fence with the warning signs, and then it just sat there.”
“Until about two months ago,” Dawn said. “We started to see all kinds of traffic coming in and out, but none of it looked official.”
“Bunch of damn Arabs, I think,” Georgie said. “Lots of Muslim hats and shit.”
“We called the anonymous FBI hotline, but they didn’t do nothin’,” LeBron said. “Asshole on the phone tried to make me the crazy one. Even called me paranoid.”
“What do you think they’re doing in there?” Jonathan asked.
“I don’t have any idea, but I know it ain’t right. I never thought about kidnapping, but why not? They could be making crystal meth for all I know.”
“And that would be a problem?” Boxers said with too much of a smile in his voice.
“Yeah, Hagrid, that would be a problem,” LeBron said.
Boxers swelled in his seat. He did not like being teased about his size.
LeBron wasn’t done. “Just because I’m black and just because I live in a damn slum don’t mean that I’m stoned out on drugs. I grew up here, asshole. This is my home. You think I want some outsider coming in here and stealing the minds out of all the neighborhood babies?”
“Look,” Jonathan said. “I’m sure Big Guy didn’t—”
“You shut up,” LeBron snapped. “Don’t make excuses for him. He want to make excuses, let him make his own damn excuses.”
“I’m sorry,” Boxers said.
Jonathan almost fell to the floor. He wasn’t sure he’d ever heard Big Guy say those words before.
“I was wrong and I’m sorry.”
LeBron seemed surprised, too. Sort of deflated.
Boxers pointed a forefinger at Jonathan. “And like he said, you shut up.”
“So, the bottom line,” Jonathan said, “is that those folks have been squatting where they don’t belong.”
“Tell ’em about the guns,” Georgie said.
Jonathan arched his eyebrows. Guns were always a relevant topic.
“Those guys don’t bother nobody,” LeBron said. “I got to be honest with you about that. I mean they don’t get in my grill, and I leave them alone, too.”
Jonathan waited for the rest.
“But I watch them,” LeBron went on. “I mean there’s a lot of bad shit goin’ down in this neighborhood, so I watch a lot.”
“Like you were watching us,” Jonathan said.
“Right. Exactly like that.”
“Except you use binoculars for them,” Dawn prompted.
LeBron seemed embarrassed. “Well, yeah. ’Cept I use binoculars to watch them.”
“And you’ve seen guns?” Jonathan asked.
“Lots of guns. Rifles, missile launchers, all kinds of crap like that.”
Boxers leaned forward in his seat. “What did the FBI say when you told them about those?”
“To hell with the FBI. They don’t want to talk with me, they don’t want to talk with me. I ain’t callin’ back to beg.”
Jonathan understood the feeling, and at one level, he admired it. It never ceased to amaze him how shocked bureaucrats became when the public at large spontaneously developed ways to work around their bullshit.
“What do they do with the guns?” Boxers asked.
LeBron looked to Georgie and got a shrug. “Nothing, really. I mean they don’t come to the road or anything. But when they’re down there at their space, they’ve always got guns.”
“You said they had missile launchers,” Jonathan said. “What makes you think they’re missile launchers?”
“Because I watch the Military Channel,” LeBron said. He seemed insulted at such an elementary question.
Jonathan looked to Boxers. “What do you think?”
Big Guy shrugged. “He watches the Military Channel. Not a lot else looks like a missile launcher.”
Jonathan didn’t bother to ask for a hypothesis of why they would want that kind of weapon. While not all portable weapons systems were created equal, they all shared the common purpose of blowing shit up. They were equally useful as offensive or defensive weapons, provided the operators had adequate training. And what else did they have to do while sitting around an abandoned meatpacking plant but train?
This was all bad news, though none of it particularly surprising. In a perfect world, 0300 missions were executed against sleeping unarmed hostage takers. Alas, it so rarely turned out that way.
“How many of them do you think there are?” Jonathan asked.
“What do think, Georgie? Fifteen? Twenty?”
“I’d say at least twenty,” Georgie said. “It’s hard to tell because they come and go all the time. Sometimes new faces, sometimes old ones. Always dudes, by the way. I haven’t seen a single woman go in there.”
“But the rag heads are like that, right?” LeBron asked. “They don’t let women do nothin’.”
Jonathan determined in two seconds that nothing good could come from a discussion launched by that statement. He figured it was the way of the world that everybody needed to call names at someone else.
“So, let’s call it twenty-five people,” Jonathan said.
“We’ve faced worse odds,” Boxers said. His face showed not the slightest trace of concern.
“Only with better intel,” Jonathan said. “I think we should launch the Raven.”
At the mention of the word, Boxers’ eyes darted to the others in the room. He hated sharing operational details.
“It’s declassified now, I promise,” Jonathan said. “It’s public domain.”
Big Guy hesitated for just long enough to demonstrate his displeasure, then he stood and walked back out to the Expedition.
As Boxers exited, Jonathan addressed the others in the room. “I’d like to ask you a favor,” he said. “I’d like to use your lovely home as a kind of command post. Just for a little while. I promise we’ll be careful with your stuff.”
“No,” Dawn said. “The babies are upstairs.”
“I swear to you that we will not draw fire to this location. We just need a spot—”
“Will not draw fire?” Dawn said. “Who talks like that?”
“I think they’re like the Army,” LeBron said.
“You should see the shit they’ve got in their truck,” Georgie said. “It’s like a fort or—”
Dawn turned on LeBron next. “Is that why you’re doing this? Is this about your dream to be a soldier?”
“Excuse me,” Jonathan said to defuse what sounded like it could devolve into a long-standing, oft-repeated argument. “Remember what’s at stake here tonight. We believe that the men you describe have kidnapped a young boy after murdering his parents. There’s a young lady involved, too. We don’t know if she is dead or alive.”