“Yes, well, they’re still human beings who had free lives and now they won’t. They didn’t accept the risk we assigned them.” Allen had opened champagne to celebrate the successful coal plant operations, only to take one sip and abandon the flute on the nicked surface of the table. Murdock huffed and rolled his eyes. Shane thought of the DNA they would leave everywhere.
“I agree with Kel,” said Shane. “Spilled milk. Clean it up as best we can, and let’s move on.”
“Agreed,” said Quinn.
“I more meant what message do we get to the lawyers?” said Kai. “Carrots and sticks to keep them quiet and doing their time.”
“Seems to me they don’t know enough to get to us. The guy with the closest link, according to you,” Murdock looked to Allen, “is Gerald in Ohio, and all he knows is some drug dealer sent him out to look at a fence? Lasso his ass with a decent threat and carrot him with the promise that his family will get taken care of while he’s away.” Murdock downed his beer and shrugged his shoulders. “Simple pie.”
“They have nothing on Gerald anyway,” said Quinn. “Not enough proof for material support of terrorism, so the FBI’s trying to make a case for felony trespassing, vandalism, attempted burglary—it’s a joke. He has no idea who Allen is, and he has no connection whatsoever to Clay.”
“That’s right,” added Shane. “According to my source, Gerald wouldn’t roll, and they know their charges are over the top. They’re puffing out their chest in the media, trying to shake people out of the trees by saying it’s all unraveling, but that’s bullshit. They’re nowhere near any midlevel operative, just running in circles chasing ghosts.”
“We need new recruits,” said Kai. “We’ve asked so much of Clay these last few years. He has kids.”
Shane thought about pointing out the obvious, but instead decided to familiarize herself with each knot in the wood of the rustic dining room table. She already knew the contours of the entire argument that would follow.
CLAY RO Was their man in Ohio, a plumber who ran his own business and had an econ degree from Ohio University. Kai had recruited him as an undergraduate, steering him into a humdrum cover. The driver and detonator of the bomb that took down Tuscarawas, Clay also had two pipelines and one gas pad under his belt. Kai feared for him, though, as they all feared for the people they’d brought in. Maybe Clay Ro’s brother had once sent his DNA into an ancestry company because he was curious about how much Scottish or Korean he had in him. All it would take, in the end, was spit from a soda can or a random hair found at the scene of a bombing, and Clay would be sweating it out in a hole. He was a heroic kid.
JOHN GERALD Instead of Clay’s, the FBI lifted the DNA of some hapless grocery store clerk from a Fritos bag, so they tried to threaten him with a terrorism enhancement. Kai scrambled to arrange a lawyer, who appeared out of the blue to work pro bono. Gerald weighed on Kai’s conscience more than the others. Gerald hadn’t sold them vans like Tabitha (who thought they’d be used to run heroin) or nitromethane from a construction site like Newman. Gerald was just a dupe who’d gotten roped in by circumstance more than anything.
“We’ve already expanded,” said Allen. “If you own a business, you know the death knell can be growing too fast.”
“Insurgencies have to keep growing,” Murdock replied. “They live and die on new recruits. For those of us who’ve fought real insurgents.”
Ever since the first meeting in this cabin, they’d disagreed on how many operatives they should be adding. Allen always argued against new recruits, especially after their profile began to rise. He worried about potential defectors or, even worse, infiltrators. He’d demanded a moratorium after they activated the Second Cell. Allen had done so much of the initial scut work of recruiting with the cover of his handcrafted furniture business, which he used as a front to travel the country. He delivered his rustic tables, built out of reclaimed wood, anywhere east of the Mississippi. Over the years the Benefactor had purchased a good deal of these tables, which ended up being dropped off at Goodwill stores wherever Allen went to recruit. Beneath their own cell, they had thirty-seven active, in-the-know operatives muling supplies, moving cars, buying and selling safe houses, and of course planting bombs, and that, in Shane’s opinion, was not nearly enough. Everything took too much time.
“Jansi had a few minor slipups, sure,” said Quinn, “but they took out the Kentucky plant. And now Second is building a third cell?” She looked to Shane, and Shane nodded. “We should do the same.”
Allen stretched his arms to place his chapped hands in the center of the table like he was setting down a Christmas ham. “The more people we bring in, the more complexity we add. Every new recruit—”
Murdock dropped his head back and snored loudly. “Boring! We’ve heard this before.”
It was so juvenile that Allen began to scold him, and Quinn tried to interrupt with her ideas about new propaganda, and the argument spilled in three different directions at once.
Finally, Kai muttered through his hand, “Vote?” They all looked to him.
They voted four to one to add five new recruits in 2031 and elevate five operatives into a new cell.
The next morning, Shane rose early to get Lali fed and situate her upstairs with her VR, leaving her with only the educational cartridge. Allen made a breakfast of scrambled eggs, pancakes, fresh fruit, and bacon. Murdock doused his whole dish with hot sauce, stewed it together, and practically licked a hole in the china. They talked for five hours about copycats. The energy from the night before repeated itself, as they quagmired into the same frustrating, circular murk.
“Question is,” said Murdock, “we took a few of the dirtiest power plants in the country off-line, maybe two thousand pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour—something like that—but what of it?”
“What do you mean, ‘What of it?’ ” asked Kai. “We blew a hole in OVP’s share price.”
“Yeah, but they’re moving a lot of that generation to natural gas,” said Quinn. “Not much better.”
When they’d bankrupted Envige two years ago, they’d met at this same cabin, popping champagne, Mission Accomplished and all that. But what happened, one finds out, is that after a meticulous campaign to destroy crucial infrastructure and topple a carbon producer, the big fish turns out to be a little fish, and some oil and gas multinational just comes along and buys up their reserves and keeps digging, drilling, and fracking that carbon straight into the overloaded atmosphere. They didn’t just need more operatives, they needed more followers. As Quinn was saying, “We need to get people off the message boards and into the game.”
Shane, for her part, was bored by this line of debate. They had only two days. With the amount of deception it took to bring the five of them together from distant corners of the country, the bevy of lies they’d deployed to their friends, families, bosses—all of it riding on the specious premise that they’d forgotten, lost, or had their cellular devices, laptops, tablets, watches, smart clothes, pens, rings, and other techno-fashion and trackable gear stolen—they couldn’t waste a moment. She only wanted to hear one word: escalation.