Eighteen months ago he never would have imagined buying a Federal-style home in Alexandria, Virginia. But that was before a group of terrorists allegedly led by Gideon’s brother, Tillman, had seized Kate’s oil rig, the Obelisk, a state-of-the-art platform in the South China Sea. If not for Gideon’s intervention, the terrorists would certainly have destroyed the rig and, with it, the truth of Tillman’s innocence. Coming home to the United States, however, had proved more complicated for both Gideon and Tillman. Because Tillman’s long service as a covert operative had involved some rule bending, coupled with maintaining the plausible deniability of his superiors, he had worked without a net. For his efforts to keep America secure, he was prosecuted for “providing material assistance to enemies of the state” and sentenced to serve twenty years at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. As far as Gideon was concerned, his brother was taking the fall for a group of spineless bureaucrats. Gideon lobbied fiercely for his release and successfully petitioned the departing president to pardon Tillman. The pardon, however, ignited a firestorm of criticism, and the incoming president, Erik Wade, forced Gideon to resign from the State Department.
As bitter as he felt about the Obelisk affair, it was behind him now. Plus, he had come away from it with the woman who stood by his side during the ordeal and with whom he planned to spend the rest of his life. Kate Murphy was the loveliest woman Gideon had ever met, with auburn hair and hazel eyes that sometimes looked gray, sometimes green, depending on her mood. After nearly a decade of international troubleshooting, Gideon was ready to settle down. It was his good fortune that Kate agreed to have him.
When he pulled into the parking space reserved for him near the school, however, he wasn’t thinking about the Obelisk. Instead he was wondering about the lime-green Impala that he had noticed in his mirror, and that was now sticking to his rear. Maybe it was just paranoia, but the car seemed to slow when he did and made every turn behind him when they came off the bridge together.
He locked the Land Rover and walked down Thirty-seventh Street. At an alley he used as a shortcut to get to the school, he turned right. In his peripheral vision he could feel someone tracking his movement. He walked calmly, without rushing, until he came to the rear door of a deli where he usually bought his lunch. He ducked into the doorway and waited.
Within twenty seconds a wiry white guy approached carrying a small paper cup. His head swiveled constantly, as if scanning the area for an ambush. He wore a khaki photographer’s vest, khaki cargo pants that flapped around his emaciated legs, a black T-shirt and wraparound shades that gave him a vaguely military look. Gideon recognized the telltale signs of his addiction: methamphetamine. His gaunt face was ravaged, with a large angry sore festering on one cheekbone. As he passed, Gideon spotted the lump under his left arm. It had to be a pretty large piece—a .357 or maybe even a .44.
Gideon stepped from his hiding place and put the guy in a guillotine headlock. He regretted his actions immetheဆdiately. A sour smell came off the man’s body, like some kind of chemistry experiment gone wrong, and the tobacco-stained saliva in the Dixie cup spilled onto Gideon’s shoe.
“What the fuck,” the man spewed.
Gideon quickly disarmed the man of the gun—a .357, he noted—unloaded it, then stuffed it back in the man’s shoulder holster. “What the fuck yourself,” he said. “Why are you following me?”
“I just want to talk to you.”
The man wriggled in Gideon’s grip like a hooked fish. Gideon released him, and the man skittered backward and nearly tumbled into a passing student.
“I’m not an idiot,” said the man. “I know I don’t look right, but I’ve got information worth a lot to somebody.”
Gideon looked at his watch. His class started in ten minutes. “Information about what?”
When the man didn’t answer right away, Gideon shook his head and started past him.
“An attack on US soil. A high-value target.”
Gideon blinked, absorbing the tweaker’s claim. Then he turned around and faced the man.
“The people I’m dealing with? They’re talking mass casualties and they do not fool around. But before I tell you anything else, I want a hundred thousand dollars, cash American.”
“You’ve got the wrong guy,” said Gideon. “I don’t make deals in alleys with tweakers. If you’ve got that kind of information, talk to the FBI.”
“The FBI,” the man said disdainfully. “Bunch of backstabbing bureaucrats. I can’t trust them.”
“But you can trust me?”
“You think it’s an accident I’m coming to you?” A sneer of arrogance curled his lip. “You’re the Man of Peace shithead.”
As special envoy to former President Alton Diggs, Gideon had sometimes been referred to in the media as the Man of Peace, a moniker he had grown to hate.
“I can’t speak to the shithead part—”
“I read on the Internet you terminated twenty hostiles during that oil-rig operation. Man of Peace. There’s some real irony for you, don’t you think?”
Although the man’s words oozed bravado, his body language betrayed fear. The trembling hands, the constant scanning of the horizon, the nervous twitch in his cheek. He was definitely a meth tweaker, and paranoia was a symptom of his addiction.
“I still don’t understand why you’re coming to me,” Gideon said.
“Your politics may be misguided, but you seem like someone I can trust to do the right thing. After the way the government treated you, you could’ve gone underground, but you’re here, preaching the gospel to our youth. You are a true patriot.”
The way the man said it, it didn’t sound like a goem"ဆod thing. But it was true that even though the president had abruptly dismissed him from public service, Gideon remained dedicated to his country. Maybe he was naïve, but he believed certain principles were worth fighting for: truth, justice, democracy. The country had its problems, but he was not one to sit idly by and watch them fester.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Ervin Mixon.” He cleared his throat and spat yellow phlegm on the pavement. “I like to think of myself as a freelance constitutionalist. Not some geek in an ivory tower, I mean hands-on. Second Amendment says ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged.’ Simple phrase. Doesn’t say ‘the right of the people to keep and bear revolvers shall not be abridged.’ Doesn’t say ‘the right of the people to keep and bear guns-that-only-shoot-once-when-you-pull-the-trigger shall not be abridged.’ Plain, simple English words. An individual wants to protect his home and hearth with a suppressed full-auto MP-5 submachine gun, that’s his constitutional right. I back up my beliefs by supplying like-minded individuals with specialty items that you can’t procure at your local gun shop.
“One of my customers is a guy named Verhoven—Colonel Jim Verhoven. Lives off the grid on a big piece of land way up in West Virginia.” Gideon was somewhat familiar with the area; it was where his brother Tillman had settled since his release from prison. Mixon continued, “Verhoven’s got a handful of followers in his militia, some of them bivouac on his property in trailers or campers. Most of these militia guys and Nazis and whatnot talk a lot of smack, but at the end of the day they’re not interested in getting downrange in any serious capacity. But one night I was there about a month ago, and I overheard Verhoven’s side of a phone conversation . . .”
He hesitated for a moment—his eyes sliding reflexively to his left. In his work as a negotiator, Gideon had become fairly expert at assessing whether people were lying to him and to one another. One of the simplest indicators or “tells” was the direction a person’s eyes went after making a statement. A look to their right generally means someone is constructing an image or a sound—in other words, lying—while a look to their left generally means they are remembering something that actually happened. Of course, it wasn’t foolproof, and for left-handed people, the direction was sometimes reversed. But Mixon’s gun was holstered for a right-handed person, and he had looked left before he resumed his story. “I’m not talking about the usual saber-rattling bullshit. He sounded serious.”