He could tell that Rogers wondered where he was going with this.
“Murdered Americans,” Reeder said almost offhandedly, “including an assassinated cabinet member... you’ll be executed.”
The color left Morris’s face again. “Try to scare me all you like... I can’t give you any names. That’s the only thing keeping me alive.”
“You think the CIA can’t get those names out of you, if I turn you over? They’ll waterboard your ass from here to Tuesday, and then drop you into a hole so black you’ll never see sunshine again.”
“You... you won’t do that.”
“Won’t I? I think the boys and girls at the Company would love to have some time with one of the conspirators in the deaths of five of their people.”
Morris stiffened. “I’m an American citizen. You kidnapped me. When that comes out—”
Rogers said, “Who says it will come out? Anyway, you’re an enemy combatant we apprehended. Under the Patriot Act, we can make you disappear.”
“I was just... all I want is to be a good American. A patriot.”
“Well, Lawrence,” Reeder said cheerfully, “you screwed up.”
“Sounds like... either way I’m dead.”
Rogers said, “We can protect you.”
Morris began to laugh.
He laughed until tears began to run and Reeder and the two FBI agents did not bother to hide their surprise and discomfort.
Finally Morris, jerking against his duct-tape bonds, said, “You have no idea!”
“No idea what, Lawrence?” Reeder asked quietly.
Morris, laughing near hysteria, was shaking his head. “What you’re up against!”
Rogers said, “Enlighten us.”
Only his head leaned forward now. “They’re bigger than you can imagine. Branches intertwining, growing, flowing. The Alliance is everywhere.”
“Conspiracies on that level,” Rogers said, “are the stuff of madmen and pulp fiction.”
Reeder nodded and said, “The late Carlos Marcello had a sign over his door that said, ‘Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.’”
Morris had stopped laughing, although he came up with one last, “Ha! Wasn’t he in on the Kennedy assassination? Those who didn’t die kept as quiet as the ones who did.”
Rogers said, “It eventually came out.”
“Decades later. Special Agent Rogers, that’s the kind of thinking the Alliance depends on. You think they don’t, they couldn’t, exist — so they don’t exist. In fact, the Alliance teaches its recruits that if someone accuses them, simply laugh it off, using your line of conspiracies-are-nonsense logic.”
Reeder could see Rogers still wasn’t buying it, and he said to her, quietly, “Nonsense, not necessarily. Skull and Bones, the Bilderberg Group, the Freemasons, the Ku Klux Klan — secret societies, one and all.”
She gave Reeder a hint of a smirk. “What next — the Illuminati?”
“Perhaps,” he said. “You’ve heard about these secret societies, you might even think you know something about them... but can you name a single member? Tell me their goals? Explain their infrastructure? We guess, but we don’t know, because... they’re secret. The Alliance could be the same kind of thing.”
Rogers was frowning. “In this day and age?”
Their prisoner joined in the conversation again. “The Alliance began as a response to the Cuban Revolution in 1959.”
That surprised even Reeder.
Morris said, “Recall your history, and the Bay of Pigs? Run in part by the budding Alliance. Kennedy took all the heat when it went south, but that was the first action taken by the American Patriots Alliance.”
Reeder said, “To what end?”
Looking at Reeder as if that were a question more worthy of a child, Morris said, “To keep America free of Communism, back in the day. Now? Now, the goal is to restore America’s greatness. To put the power back in the hands of the people who know how to properly run things.”
Frowning, Wade said, “You mean white people?”
Reeder was shaking his head. “Your loyalty, Lawrence, is to an Alliance playing very dangerous games with Russia. You really think a third world war, in the nuclear age, will make America great again? And if the Russians get all the portillium out of Azbekistan, they’ll have weapon-making capabilities beyond the imagination.”
The accountant’s expression revealed doubt breaking through the rote history lesson drilled into him by his masters.
Rogers asked, “Who is on the board, Lawrence?”
“Even if I gave you the handful of names I do know, it wouldn’t do you any good. They are too well entrenched, with their followers spread throughout every level of government. The Alliance is everywhere. You think you can protect me when you can’t even protect yourselves. Already they have one of yours.”
“Who you will help us get back.”
“In exchange for what — protective custody? I wouldn’t last an hour. Hand me over to your FBI friends or the CIA to get information out of me, and see how long it takes for you to get the phone call that I had a heart attack in the earliest stages of interrogation.”
Reeder said, “Your people will trade for you.”
“Will they? Or, once they know I’ve been captured, will they just kill me, too? I’ll be tainted, understand? Sacrifice, remember? You, Agent Rogers, and your whole team, will be eliminated. Mr. Reeder, you’ll merely have your life destroyed, your family dead and yourself possibly in prison. That suicide you encouraged last year could easily become a murder.”
Rogers looked at Reeder in alarm.
Reeder, coldly, said to their prisoner, “Then maybe it’s in our best interest for you just to disappear into that hole in the ground.”
“If you kill me, they will find you, all of you, and kill you.”
“Big talk from such a small cog.”
His upper lip peeled back over his teeth in a rictus smile. “You think you’re up against a small cadre of the powerful, but in reality there are thousands of us in government — department heads, middle management, worker bees — a grass roots army working to save America from itself.”
“Okay,” Reeder said, “then just give us that handful of names you do know, and we’ll release you. No one the wiser. You can’t betray us without betraying yourself, right?”
“Those names, those few names, are my only leverage. I give them to you, maybe I do wind up in the forest. But... if you let me go, I will — as you say — have to keep my mouth shut to save my own skin. And if you people just drop all this, and go about your business, it will all be over in a matter of days.”
Morris meant that the country would either be at war or not.
“If we go head-to-head with Russia,” Reeder said, “we might all be over.”
Morris said, “I’m sure the President will have done the right thing by then.”
That gave Reeder a sudden chill — did Morris know some big-picture thing that they didn’t? Did the cog know where the wheel planned to roll?
Miggie, who’d been working at DeMarcus’s desk in the office area, caught Reeder’s attention with a wave.
“Give him something to drink,” Reeder told Wade, standing, nodding toward the captive. “If he needs a bathroom break, walk him down there.”
“I’ll have to untie him,” Wade said. “He could piss in a bottle or something.”
Reeder shook his head. “We’ve got plenty of duct tape.”