Keep it together, Sean, she thought. He’d taken cabs from The Village to Edmond twice already, trying to see Daryn. She or the marshals had met him at the door and kept him from setting foot in the house. Only after Faith threatened to actually have him arrested and thrown in a federal holding cell did he seem to get it. She left strict instructions with both teams of deputies that Sean Kelly was under no circumstances to be admitted to the house.
“By God, Kelly, but you’re a hard-ass,” Deputy Marshal Hunnicutt of the night shift had told her.
So she drove to Manhattan, Kansas. Since Simon had been babysitting Bankston for over a week, she gave him a break and let Bankston ride with her in the Miata for the six-hour drive. Bankston chattered most of the way about what a model citizen he was going to be, asking if he could join the Y and swim at their pool, how long until he was allowed to go to bars and pick up women…Faith understood Simon’s frustration. After an hour in the car with Bankston, she wanted to shoot him just to shut him up.
Faith stayed in Kansas for two days, getting Bankston into his apartment, going over last-minute details. As was the usual procedure, field officer Simon stayed behind. He would live undercover near the new recruit for anywhere from two weeks to six months, depending on how well Bankston did in his transition to Williams.
“At least I don’t have to live with him,” Simon said to Faith as she drove away. “Thank God for small favors.”
Faith drove south from Manhattan on a Friday morning under blue skies with only a few puffy cumulus clouds floating overhead. She took a back road, State Highway 177, winding lazily through the Flint Hills. The day was cool for late spring, but it felt good. She drove with the windows down, letting the clean air wash over her like waves.
She took several detours, crossing back into Oklahoma at Newkirk and passing through the historic oil town of Ponca City before finally picking up Interstate 35 for the last leg south.
She’d avoided thinking about Daryn McDermott and Sean and Franklin Sanborn and the Coalition for Social Justice for most of the trip. Dealing with a high-maintenance individual like Leon Bankston tended to crowd out everything else. But now, with the prairieland of northern Oklahoma sliding by at seventy-five miles an hour, and only Lee Ritenour’s guitar on the CD player as company, she couldn’t help going back to the case.
A week had gone by. The date had passed for the Coalition’s alleged attack on the National Bank of Commerce in downtown Memphis. Nothing happened. Yorkton had called her to say there was no sign of any communal radical group anywhere near the place where Daryn had said they would be.
So who was fooling whom?
Had Franklin Sanborn, phantom extraordinaire, fooled everyone? Had he angered Daryn by going against her wishes and saying he was going to use violence to achieve the Coalition’s stated goals? Was it a gotcha on the senator’s daughter? If so, was Sanborn’s sole purpose to embarrass Daryn? Had he just faded into the ether?
Or was this part of Daryn’s grand design anyway? She was a spoiled political princess, to be sure, but one who had a radical, revolutionary agenda of her own. Had she engineered the scheme just to escape her father’s tyranny and his politics forever? To get a free ride from Department Thirty?
But there was a problem with that scenario. Department Thirty wasn’t public knowledge. Most of the general public had heard of the Marshals Service’s WITSEC, but not Thirty. There were even government officials, highly placed ones, who didn’t know of the department’s existence.
Sean.
She kept coming back to her brother. How long had he known she worked for the department? Had he really blundered into the whole situation, like he said? Or was there something deeper and darker about her brother’s involvement?
Faith sighed, clutching the steering wheel hard. This is what she and Sean had become. She didn’t trust her own brother.
There were too many questions, and she was getting a headache.
I’ll fit right in, then, she thought. Sean was always hung over, and Daryn had her migraines.
Driving south, lulled by the mindless interstate travel, she almost missed the sign, lost as she was in her own questions.
MULHALL-ORLANDO ROAD, 1 MILE.
She’d spent nearly an hour musing on the whole situation. She’d passed the two exits for the town of Perry and hadn’t even noticed them. She was around forty miles from Oklahoma City.
MULHALL-ORLANDO ROAD, 1 MILE.
Mulhall.
According to Daryn, that was where it had all started. The jumping-off point for the Coalition’s nationwide activities.
But there hadn’t been any nationwide activities.
The only activity had been in downtown Oklahoma City. Faith thought it said something about what American society had become when “only” six deaths were treated as a reason to be grateful.
And according to both Daryn and Sean, it had originated right here.
She punched in Sean’s cell number on her phone. When he answered, she said, “Are you sober?”
“Faith?”
“I said, are you sober?”
“Well, I walked to that liquor store down the street, and they had-”
“Goddammit, Sean, are you sober enough to give me directions to that house where you said you stayed?”
There was a silence. “You mean in Mulhall?”
“Yes, in Mulhall!”
“What are you going to do?”
“Directions. Now.”
MULHALL-ORLANDO ROAD. An arrow, an exit sign.
Faith left the highway and pointed the Miata toward Mulhall.
She got turned around twice. Quite an accomplishment, considering the size of Mulhall, Oklahoma, Faith thought. But Sean’s directions had been from the south, and her approach was from the east.
She finally righted the Miata, heading north on U.S. 77. At the north end of town was a sign made of white brick, with black letters that read YA’LL COME BACK SOON. Faith slowed the car, looking for the gravel road Sean had mentioned.
She didn’t let herself think. She’d become a more instinctive person in the last few years, as opposed to someone who used to think only in terms of facts and evidence. Department Thirty had changed her that way, and it had been so subtle that she hadn’t even realized it was happening.
Doing things by the book would dictate that she call the Marshals Service for backup before going into a potentially unfriendly situation. Technically, the Mulhall house could be considered a terrorist staging area. People with an extreme, revolutionary, and ultimately violent agenda had made this house their headquarters.
Let’s just take a look, Faith thought, ignoring the voices that told her to follow the book. Department Thirty had no book. Department Thirty was its own book.
Stay safe and don’t let any of your cases be compromised. That was Department Thirty protocol, as Yorkton had told her many times. The rest was up to the individual officer.
She found the rutted driveway and turned left. Orienting herself, Faith realized she’d turned south, back in the direction of town. Sean had told her the house sat about a hundred yards back from the road. When she estimated she’d gone about fifty yards, she pulled the car off the driveway into the grass.
She reached into the glove compartment, took out her new SIG Sauer, and double-checked its load. Then Faith got out of the car and began to move slowly forward.
She couldn’t see the house yet. Sean had said it sat at the top of a small rise. For the moment she thought it worked to her advantage. Her car would be out of sight of anyone who might conceivably be in the house.