THEN A FEW WEEKS LATER After the mark had given up hope that such a dream gig would come through, Allen would put in the call. “Could you deliver some shit to the company’s storage locker over in [Insert Small Town Here]? We’ll reimburse you for the materials, plus gas, plus $500 for the day’s work? Here, write this down: rotary cutter blades, a timing belt for a box scraper, a rake, four fifty-pound bags of fertilizer, and blasting caps for removing stubborn tree stumps. Yeah, drop it all off at this locker—write the lock combo down—and I’ll come pick it up in a couple days. Thanks, man, you’re really saving our asses. Just can’t afford to have the IRS penalizing us for a fiftieth employee.” For the guy trying to feed a wife and three kids, it was too good to be true, which meant they never questioned it. All the materials remained two steps removed from Murdock.
He gave her work gloves, and they went about unloading the van. Shane had to swallow her sandpaper throat just to touch the two fifty-pound bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer or the fifty-five-gallon plastic barrels the color of a cloudless sky. Even disassembled, the materials felt terrifying, holy. When she reached for a bundle secured with brown paper and duct tape, Kel took the package from her.
“Tovex sausage,” he said. “But probably we don’t wanna grill it.”
She tried to sound casual as she retracted her hand and let him take it. “How fucked would I have been if I got stopped with all this?”
“Pretty good and fucked. Just think about my ass. I gotta drive three vans of this shit to the drop site in Kentucky.”
She hauled a bag of fertilizer down the stairs into Kel’s office. Lit by a single overhead fluorescent, the workspace was dense with blue drums, fertilizer, Tovex bundles, and plastic jugs of nitromethane. Tools lay scattered on a workbench: wire, pliers, grinders, gloves, safety goggles, pink prills, detonating cord, boxes of little sticks she knew to be blasting caps. She’d never seen the ingredients like this—just the results, which always seemed weak and ineffectual through the scrim of the news networks. It was why the media still referred to them as “student terrorists.”
Her hip grazed one of the empty plastic barrels, and she jerked away as if her touch might set off the room. “So don’t light a match down here,” she said.
“Light all the matches you want. Motherfuckers’ll see it from space.”
“How are you on this stuff?”
“Slow-going. Straw buyers are mostly working out. One guy got sent up six months for forging a check, so he’s out. But Kai is right about one thing: You send someone to buy two hundred pounds of fertilizer, and he ain’t from the fucking Mid-Tennessee Farming Co-op, you’re raising red flags. Same for all this shit.”
MURDOCK Trusted Shane and Kai but did not always appreciate the contortions they built into every operation. You left keys under passenger-side doors, and some unknown kid from Atlanta picked up the vehicle two days later. It was a lot for his brain to keep straight. Still, he’d told Shane and himself: “I’m along for this ride as far as it takes me.” Whenever he briefly forgot what the others looked like, he’d review a note he’d written to himself that he kept in a junk drawer at home. Probably not great to have around if the ATF ever descended but it kept him straight when he got their coded messages and couldn’t remember who they were from or what he was doing.
THE NOTE Kai = Black maybe some Oriental in him nice-guy shtick thinks he’s in charge. Allen = all bald wizened kinda light in the loafers really good cook. Quinn = prissy stuck-up rich-bitch computer gal probably doesn’t give head fired her own boyfriend once at computer job. Shane = IVAW, remember? Mexi hottie boombalottie don’t be weird w/ her.
“But now we have all the vans.”
“Sure.” He snatched up the pliers. “I’ll probably get all the materials by February. Maybe March. That ain’t the issue so much. We still got what you might call reconnaissance problems. How to approach the targets.”
“We’re working on it.”
“Well,” he picked at the skin of his thumb with the pliers, as if digging for a splinter, “work harder.”
Shane’s eyes wandered to the shelves behind the workbench: a water purifier, a machete, boxes of ammo, a med pack, a flashlight radio, and two handguns with full clips lying beside them. A Tyvek suit with masks, gloves, booties, and dozens of jugs of bleach to wipe down materials and vehicles. Their own DNA was perpetually trying to snitch. There was only so much their data scientist, Quinn, could do with her backdoors into the FBI’s Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center.
“You’re going full survivalist on me, Kel.”
“Y’all keep telling me the world’s coming to an end.” He rubbed a hand over his paunch. “You and me could be real cozy in this place is all I’m saying.”
She tried to return his smile but couldn’t take her attention from the full clips lying beside each weapon. “C’mon. Cook me dinner with your nuclear bunker food.”
Disappearing meant something different for each of them. Murdock had been to antiwar rallies, but he could retrench into his stereotype: posting to Facebook the hyper-conservative screeds of a revanchist rural white male. His digital trail consisted of ranting about Joanna Hogan and the Democrats, extolling the virtues of the Trump era, and sharing obnoxious Russ Mackowski bromides. If you were, say, the NSA and scrutinizing these bread crumbs, you’d find a lonely bachelor, an engineer, and the veteran of a war no one wanted to remember, who thought Randall was a socialist, who celebrated the anniversary of the Henderson-Rua fight as the greatest of all time. You’d see a man with a mortgage on a humble one-story in suburban Nashville, who drank too much beer, had put on a considerable amount of weight since his army days, and had a spartan Match.com profile. If you were taking a serious look, you’d find that back in 2014, he’d broken digital ties with one Luciana Alvarez of New Orleans on multiple platforms.
They’d underestimated what they were taking on. Shane’s activism had taken her from post-Katrina New Orleans to Bolivia, Venezuela, Colombia, and back to the post–Deepwater Horizon Gulf. This surely made her a target for the security state’s algorithms.
“We have to assume we’ve all been red-flagged for our personalities and politics,” Quinn explained to them in their first meeting together at the cabin in Wisconsin. “We have to assume EOD techs are all under soft surveillance due to their skill sets.” This was Shane’s first time meeting the woman and her first wake-up call about what they were actually embarking upon, launching her down this endless road of passion, loneliness, paranoia, and fear. You could read about corporate and government tracking capabilities, you could study the unchecked organism with roots in the CIA, FBI, NSA, DHS, and the Pentagon, but the average citizen could not wrap their head around its true scope. “And so much of it is our own fault,” Quinn had said coldly, her chin propped on her knuckles, firelight on her pretty but severe face. “We all gladly and willingly herded ourselves into this state of technofascism.”