Adrenaline surged through her as she grabbed the phone and touched the top button. Drake,” she announced.
“Idaho,” said the voice. “It’s going to make Ruby Ridge looked like a picnic. Bull Run, way up on the Canadian border. You better get there.”
“What happened?” she asked, grabbing a pencil and a piece of paper.
“The FBI had the bright idea that they were taking down a master criminal. Only it turns out he was a nobody. In the process, the guy gets shot and his wife and kids trapped in a burning house. There’s some speculation that the fire was set to cover up the lack of evidence. A. J. Bratton was there.”
Bratton! Holy shit. Why was the CIA involved in a domestic operation? “Were you there?” she asked, her fingers moving automatically to jot down notes.
There was a long silence. She tried again. “Come on, now — that’s not a tough question.”
Still no answer.
“We’re off the record, you know. As far off as we can go,” she reassured her caller.
“We’re talking about Idaho,” the voice said finally. “That’s inside the United States.”
“I know that,” she said. “And I also know—”
“No,” the voice said, cutting her off. “Not on this line.”
“OK, then. What else?”
“Nothing. You’ll have to get the rest of it somewhere else. I’m just paying back a favor.” The line went dead.
Drake swore quietly as she touched the top button and slipped the phone back in its battery charger. Sure, she understood his reluctance to say anything on an open line. Cell phone frequencies were easy to monitor, and there were too many new government programs that searched for key words and phrases in every conversation that floated across the atmosphere.
Without her informant admitting that he was there, the report was suspect. But if there were anything to it, it would be breaking soon. Drake had no illusions about how much of a head start she had.
She stared at the phone for a moment, her gut telling her that this was something big. Regardless of how intra-agency cooperation was touted as a good thing, there was no way that any Congressional oversight committee would ever countenance the CIA conducting operations inside the continental U.S.
So it had to be an FBI operation. Mentally, she ran through her list of contacts there, selected one, and dialed the number from memory.
Five minutes later, Drake had all the confirmation she needed. Her two best sources at the FBI weren’t talking. Indeed, they weren’t even taking her calls. Even the prearranged code name she’d used, the one that signaled that it really was in their best interest to get on the telephone and talk to her to prevent the release of certain sordid details she knew about their past, even that had not worked.
Something big is going down. I can feel it — I know it.
She punched in the number of her boss at ACN, tapping impatiently on her breakfast room table as she waited. The last vestige of jet lag had been gone for several minutes now, and she felt like her old self. The nuclear furnace was burning in the pit of her stomach again, every newshound instinct screaming at her to move, get off her ass, and beat the competition.
When her boss finally answered, she said, “I’m going to Idaho. Fly the camera crew to the capital, whatever the hell it is.” She tried to remember. She could name the capital of every obscure nation in the world, but it had been so long since she’d reported a domestic story that she found herself groping to even localize Idaho on a map.
“Butte,” Harbaugh said. “What have you got?”
“I’ve got a confirmed report that an FBI action in Bull Run, Idaho, went down and went down hard. Four civilians, including two kids, are dead, and my sources tell me that the Feebies got the wrong people. Have a camera crew and tech support meet me at Dulles with my tickets. I’ll call you when I know something.”
She clicked off, knowing that every rudeness or lack of manners would be forgiven in the chase for the story. And regardless of how much he might dislike her high-handed manner, her boss would feel the same way. There would be a camera crew waiting for her, and probably an entire backup team from the local affiliate as well. And somewhere along the way, there would be a low-level eager national reporter to stand by her side and feed her trivial details. Starting with what the hell the capital of the state really was.
NINE
As Abraham Carter listened to the voice on the other end of the phone call, he felt his blood pressure start to go up. Gus Anderson, a farmer in Bull Run who’d contacted him the week before about Free American Now, was claiming there’d been an abortion of an FBI raid on a neighbor’s farm. No one had seen the family since then, and smoke still stained the air from the vicinity of the Smart homestead. All the roads leading to or near the Smart farm were blockaded by civilians — if that’s what they really were. A neighbor in the National Guard had been ordered to report to the armory with gear packed for a two-week “exercise,” but according to Anderson, there’d been none of the normal pre-exercise preparation there.
“Jackson,” Abraham shouted. “Get your ass in here and pick up the extension. Now Gus, you were right to call me. I want you to start over again from the beginning.”
His son, Jackson, ambled into the room from the kitchen and flopped down on a couch. Without comment, he picked up the other phone and listened to Anderson retell the story. His face remained impassive, even when Anderson’s voice choked as he described the Smarts’ children. After Anderson hung up, reassured by the senior Carter that they’d get to the bottom of it, Jackson rolled into a sitting position.
“Feds killing people again,” his father muttered, his gaze staring off in the distance. “I told you, boy. It’s coming to a head real soon.”
“And about time,” Jackson said, his voice soft and deadly.
As outraged as he was, Abraham was disturbed by something in Jackson’s tone. He glanced over at his son, wondering again what combination of genes between him and Nellie had produced such an enigma.
Physically, Jackson resembled his father more than his mother. He was tall, almost an inch taller than his father at six feet two inches, and built along the same lanky, rambling lines. His beard and hair were a shade darker than his father’s, picking up an almost blue-black sheen that he’d inherited from his mother. His eyes were all Nellie, though. Ice-green, flat, and unreadable, unlike his father’s own dark brown ones that burned with passion.
But even if you could trace out the source of his son’s physical characteristics that wasn’t what bothered Abraham. It was the boy’s mind. Not that he was dumb — far from it. If anything, he had more sheer raw mental ability than either his father or his mother, and Abraham was no slouch in the brains department himself. Formerly employed as a chemical engineer for a large household products company, Abraham had excelled at analytical chemistry and synthesis. He was particularly keen on coming up with new ways to combine existing products to create another one that did pretty much the same stuff but could be relabeled as a new product.
Abraham had survived for ten years in the corporate world, and had had a fairly good career for a Ph.D. He had been headed for a slot as manager of his own product line, and he and Nellie had been living the good life. Jackson had been just a little tyke, no more than six or seven years old, when Abraham’s world collapsed.
Nellie got sick, and nobody could figure out what was wrong with her. What started abruptly transitioned into a long, lingering illness during which she gradually went downhill as one by one her bodily functions shut down. Finally, she was little more than a husk of flesh, barely aware of where she was or anybody around her. Abraham had been frantic for a diagnosis, anything. If they knew what it was, he had the feeling he could bring his analytical chemistry abilities to bear on the problem and single-handedly save her.