“Invigorating,” said Murdock, blowing smoke skyward. “Our benefactor’s got good taste.”
“She’s about seven steps removed from actually making our real estate choices, Murdock,” said Shane.
“Too bad—” Murdock stumbled over a hidden root, breathed a quick cuss, and sprang back up. “Speaking of! I’d be just delighted to know who she is.”
“Get in line,” said Allen.
They came to a fallen limb, and Murdock lifted one fat leg over it and then the other, gingerly, as if his kneecap might explode from the torque. He was huffing severely from just the short trip, his ruined body no secret to them.
“Whoever she is, she’s gotta be crazy,” he said.
“Why’s that?” asked Shane.
Murdock jerked a thumb back toward the cabin.
“You seen Kai, that handsome devil? How could anyone trust a bright, shiny smile like that?”
The path angled downward and the trees opened up further. The bed of red pine needles spread before them like a shag carpet. Greater volumes of white exhaust collected before Shane’s face as her breathing picked up. Used to be she had to hike a mountain to get this kind of winded. Age took all kinds of things from you. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken a walk for pleasure. Once she was off her feet after work, it was all she could do not to lock her brain into garbage television and finish an entire bag of chips.
ALLEN’S SECRET The Benefactor made all this possible with what seemed like bottomless funds. Part hawala, part two-bit money laundering, her system utilized fake online businesses to create a slush fund for their operations. Yet it was Shane who’d really created this. Allen met her when he quit academia after failing to get tenure for the last time. They were living off his wife’s family’s money when he decided to find some use for himself by joining a social justice campaign during the BP crisis in the Gulf. As he and Shane got to know each other (usually while sharing some bad reefer), he’d been impressed, engaged, activated. She spun radical fantasies of resistance, but it wasn’t like he hadn’t had his own dreams along these lines back in his youth. Hell, it was why he’d made a career of studying those radical movements in the first place. Over the long years of crafting and executing their plans, she’d taken up space in his head like she was actually his oldest daughter. It pained him that they had to stay so far away, that their communication had to be so circumspect and infrequent. When he saw her face wrench in worry, over Lali or their cause, he wanted nothing more than to take her hand and tell her everything would be all right.
As the night crept closer, the lake came into view. A liquid keepsake of the Last Glacial Maximum. The pines surrounded this rippling black jewel, and the distant shores looked like a towering fortress wall. Crisp winds swayed the branches. Murdock lit one of his smokes and then handed one to Allen. The two men’s faces drew together as Allen lit his off the ember of Murdock’s.
“I don’t know why Lali’s still wetting herself.” Shane hated that she felt compelled to apologize again, but she couldn’t help it. “I thought I was done with that.”
“My youngest, Perry, was peeing himself until he was seven,” said Allen. He waved his cigarette hand around his be-hatted dome. “We thought it was because of the alopecia. It started in patches on my head and chest. He’d cry when he saw me until I finally just gave up and shaved everything, even my eyebrows. He got over it.” He sighed his smoke out through his nose, and it drifted into the clear sheen of his hairless brow. “Then again, the boy is nearly twenty and still lives with us, so what do I know.”
They were quiet for a moment, just enjoying the lake and the glow of the purple-gray sky while they trusted the ignorance of those who might watch from the heavens.
Shane finally said, “We need to talk about targets.”
“Patience, Shane,” Allen cautioned. “We’ll get there.”
She exhaled in frustration. “Now PRIRA is law, and it’s proof the political process vomits up nothing—or worse than nothing. We have the chance to be who people turn to.”
“I agree,” said Murdock.
“You two,” said Allen, “are running way ahead of yourselves.”
She couldn’t help but laugh. “We’re running out of road to get ahead of ourselves on, Allen!”
Murdock meandered toward the crest of the lake where water lapped against stones, and she and Allen followed, polar darkness creeping east. Murdock stared out over the water. She watched the blue smoke whispering out of his lips.
“In Iraq, when we were near Fallujah, one of the things the insurgents liked to do was get you to go through a door, and then they’d have it wired to blow. For a while, it seemed like they were wiring bombs to every goddamn door in the city. But then there were civilians, women and little kids, running around everywhere. And none of ’em ever got blown up. Or hardly any. We couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. Even if these civilians were in on it, how was the information getting disseminated about every single door in an area with hundreds of thousands of people and nearly as many doors?” He picked up a rock and tried to skip it across the lake. It hit the water twice and then sank with a sound between a splat and a plop. “Then this guy I was EOD with, name of Kieran Slade, goes to our captain, this crazy weird fucker Ta’amu. He says, ‘Captain, it’s the house numbers.’ See, the house numbers were always messed up, like falling off or upside down. What they were doing was, if the house was wired to blow, an odd number would be missing or turned upside down or painted over or scratched up. If it was an even—like Forty-Two Allahu Akbar Road—it would have a new odd number added to it. Like an upside-down five. Pretty simple. Sorta like our code with the books. You don’t need nothing fancy because the other guy doesn’t know what to look for.”
MURDOCK Figured himself unlucky enough to be born in an era of murderous bipartisan military overreach. During Jo Hogan’s term, it tickled him the way she conjoined feminism and militarism so seamlessly, her embrace of Brandy Squires’s revelations and the Pentagon cover-up simultaneous. It was an open secret the military could be a real rape factory. Now the Dumbocrats ran vets at every level, and you could almost see in real time the wars coming home. He and his peers had cut their teeth on corralling, hunting, and monitoring brown people overseas. Now these veterans suddenly staffed every level of government. They brought skills and attitudes honed on the streets of Kabul and Fallujah and became cops and prison guards and senators and consultants to the defense industry. They chose their routes of right-wing extremism or intersectional patriotism. So when a Jo Hogan or Mary Randall or Vic Love inveighed against the threat of terrorism, almost no one blinked. In his time overseas, Murdock had gotten a sneak peek at what was gestating in the body politic, and the civvies would soon learn just how casual violence could be.
A startled heron burst from the nearby shore and soared across the lake, its tucked feet skimming a line in the placid water.