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CHAPTER SEVEN Washington State

Griff looked over the map he had drawn. It showed places on the property where they had seen children playing or people walking. Little x’s peppered the paper, safe places and paths to the houses, the barn, just in case. He drew lines, boundaries.

The children tended to stay away from the barn.

Everybody stayed away from the barn.

Only a crazy man would mine or booby trap the yard where his own children and grandchildren were playing, right?

After all the years Griff had been tracking the Patriarch, he still could not say, with certainty, that they could rule out that possibility.

They had been ready to move out when edicts had come down simultaneously from FBI headquarters and the Attorney General—no big raid, no massive force maneuver, on any date that anyone by any stretch of the imagination could say was Good Friday. If something had gone wrong—or even if they had done their jobs perfectly, and nobody had died—then the headlines could wreak havoc with federal law enforcement in general. The whole country was on edge. It had been on edge for over thirty years, worried and challenged and bitten from without and within. America was half-crazy with suppressed rage.

They didn’t have much time. The Patriarch would surely find out something in the next couple of days, and there were any number of ways he could slip out of the farm and get clean away.

A small white bus drove onto the farm during the midmorning. While Griff notified the incursion team at the trailhead, Rebecca counted the women and children boarding the vehicle, parked just yards from the main house’s front porch—two middle-aged women in long dresses and six younger children dressed in their best church clothes. The children boarded the bus with cheery energy.

Griff played back the digital video record and counted heads again, to be sure.

Cap Benson, Charles Sprockett of the ATFE, and SAC John Keller, Griff’s Seattle boss, climbed into the tower at ten thirty and looked over the evidence. They conferred briefly.

‘Are we sure that’s all the dependents down there?’ Sprockett asked.

‘No,’ Griff said. ‘Jacob thinks there might be two young adult males, and so do I, based on those bank robberies. They’re not on the bus. There might be two more kids, and we’ve been talking over the possibility that the males have girlfriends or wives. We haven’t seen the kids all together to count them, but—’

‘There’s a redheaded girl, and maybe a white-blond boy of five or six. We did not see them get on the bus,’ Rebecca said. ‘Younger than the others. They may be the Patriarch’s grandchildren. They may all be living in the rear house.’

‘Why wouldn’t they go to Easter services?’ SAC Keller asked.

Levine shrugged. ‘Some sort of sharing of familial power. Training his sons to be heads of households. Or, they’re just figments of the light and our imagination.’

‘Well, his two sons are certainly not on that bus,’ Keller said.

‘What if they start firing back? The kids, I mean,’ Levine said.

‘You think they’d do that?’ Sprockett asked. ‘You think he’s trained them all to fight?’

Levine rubbed his forehead with two close-spaced fingers. ‘Chambers is hard core. The Big Time’s coming, and a White Christ out of the north is going to scourge the ungodly and drive the Mud People into their graves, from which they will be resurrected as the zombie slaves of true Aryans everywhere. Anybody who doesn’t defend themselves will be raped and eaten alive by the Mud People.’

‘No shit,’ Cap Benson said.

‘He’s off the main sequence, philosophically speaking.’

Keller said, ‘Griff, you’ve tracked him for two decades. This may be the best opportunity we’ve got. We can’t afford to lose him to old age…or let him bomb a few more clinics, if he’s so inclined.’

‘Or worse,’ Rebecca said.

‘Are your seriously thinking there’s a bioterror operation going on down there?’ Levine asked. ‘I have to say, that just isn’t the Patriarch’s style. He’s classic. He loves to blow stuff up.’

Rebecca smiled sweetly. Keller said, ‘Washington doesn’t want a raid. They’re afraid we’ll hurt some kids down there.’

Griff rubbed his cheek stubble. ‘Obviously, I’m going to have to go in alone and reconnoiter.’

‘The hell you say,’ Keller commented dryly.

‘It’s worth a shot. We’ve never actually met. He let the deputy go in and out—offered him coffee and biscuits. I think I could go in and take a closer look, ask some questions, and come out alive.’

‘On what pretext?’ Keller asked.

‘I’d have a better chance,’ Rebecca said. ‘A social worker. Census-taker. I look less like FBI than any of you.’

‘The Patriarch hates social workers,’ Griff said.

‘She might try for the harem,’ Sprockett said. No one seemed to think that was a good idea.

‘Can you make me look like an aging yardbird?’ Griff said. ‘I already have a few tats.’

Sprockett and Keller stared at him.

‘Time’s short,’ Griff said.

‘Shit,’ Sprockett said.

Keller got on his cell phone to issue instructions. Sprockett and Rebecca, working different phones, told the agents in town to let them know when the bus arrived.

Griff took a deep breath. He hated wearing body armor—especially the new reactive stuff. It was thin but it wriggled whenever you walked. Made him feel like he was in a living straitjacket.

‘You are what you eat,’ Rebecca told him as she followed Griff down the steps to the first landing. ‘What’d you have for breakfast this morning?’

‘Flakes,’ Griff said, grinning back at her. He then paused to look through the trees. His eyes were wide and he had difficulty taking a cleansing breath. What would it be like after they suited him up?

Over the next few hours, they procured a beat-up Ford pickup, a pair of denim dungarees, a T-shirt, and three quick forearm tattoos, on top of the two he already had, courtesy of one of Cap Benson’s backup team who moonlighted as a makeup artist. Benson called up Monroe to find out the latest trends in jailhouse art. Ten minutes later, they sent him some scans. Skulls, ripped hearts, Jesus on the cross, scorpions, and chains were still big. For some reason, fat seated Buddhas were having a good run—wearing berets and cradling Tommy guns in their ample laps.

As a last touch, Rebecca shaved Griff’s head down to a stubble.

‘You look like someone I’d boot out of town,’ Benson said.

Rebecca was less sanguine. ‘Twenty to one he’ll still peg you as FBI.’

‘All right,’ Griff said. ‘Tell me what I should look for.’

Rebecca pulled a lab catalog from her travel bag.

The mile down the dirt road in the noonday sun was long and bumpy. The trip would have been pleasant, but there was no way he could know what waited at the end.

Fresh to the FBI, he had carried a folded file card he would read whenever he ventured into a dangerous situation. On that card he had printed his own little set of mantras:

You can relax and trust your training. You know you’re good.

You can count on coming out of anything alive, you’re so damned good.

Say it to yourself: I will live and prosper, and the bad guys will rue the day.

He had lost that card on the day his team had encountered the Israeli gunbot, but he knew the mantras by heart. They still had juju.

Griff steered a slow curve around a big cedar stump, found the less bouncy part of the road, slowed, then glanced down at a black lapel button, a small camera that would feed video to the team forming at the main road and the smaller team working their way through the woods from the fire tower.

Hidden in the bagginess of the dungarees was his SIG, strapped to his waist and available through a large side pocket. Someone hadn’t positioned the Velcro fasteners properly. One of them was chafing.

‘SIG’s nothing,’ he reminded himself. ‘SIG’s a peashooter.’

The gunbot…

A team of fifty agents from the FBI and the Secret Service had stormed the Muncrow Building in downtown Portland two years before, preparing to arrest ten Serbian counterfeiters. They had been met by seven guys and two women in body armor, expecting no mercy and wielding a savage array of automatic weapons—but what lay hidden in the corrugated steel shed that blocked their only exit route—what had brought down nearly all of the team within twenty seconds, cutting them into bloody gobbets—had been an Israeli Sholem-Schmidt D-7, a self-directed, insect-carriage automated cannon. None of them had never seen one outside of Popular Science magazine.

Before it had run into a brick wall, jammed, and blown its super-heated barrels into shrapnel, the D-7 had all by itself killed forty-three agents. Griff had come out of the Muncrow Building alive, not a scratch. He had had nightmares for weeks.

Still did.

And in the mess, he had lost his file card.

The last U.S. President had privately threatened to bomb the Sholem-Schmidt factory outside Haifa. That had put a strain on relations for a few months, until Israeli intelligence had discovered D-7s being exported to Iran. Mossad had finally done the job themselves, arresting the owners and workers and dismantling the factory.

Wicked old world.

The barn came into view and then the farmhouse. The farmhouse was unpainted. Griff guessed that both had been assembled from the local trees. The exterior boards had warped slightly under the weather and the cedar roof shingles were rough along their windward edges like the scales on an old lizard. The trees that had once covered the farm had been probably been downed with cross-cut handsaws. He tried to picture the long old trailer-mounted sawmill hauled in by a stoop-shouldered truck and smell the freshcut wood and hear the wik-wik-wik of the boards being planed by hand and fastened together with mortise and tenon and square blacksmithed nails.

Rustic, independent, living off the land.

He drove by one end of the apple orchard, peering under the windshield visor at the thin forest of two-by-four studs arranged through the dead-looking trees and around the barn and house. The studs were newer than other wood around the property. Between the studs, someone—presumably the Patriarch and his sons—had strung a high checkerboard of wires at a uniform height of about six feet, sometimes in parallel, sometimes wrapped around each other, like someone’s crazy idea of a network of clothes lines.

Through his side window, he saw the spring leaves on a few of the apple trees. They were streaked with pale dust. There hadn’t been more than a drizzle of rain in a couple of weeks—perhaps the leaves had been coated with fine dirt from the road. The pines around the barn and the trees all around the old farmstead had all been lightly and uniformly powdered.

Griffin pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose. The dust might be tree pollen. He kept an eye out for any sign of surveillance within the house. The truck made a few last bumps, and then he pulled up in the middle of a dirt parking area marked by a line of four creosoted railroad ties. Griff glanced at his watch. It was eleven. The truck’s noise hadn’t brought anyone to the front door or the porch but he saw a shade flicker in a window.

The old man had structured his life to a fare-thee-well, and no doubt he had prepared for a moment like this. But for a few minutes, at least, Griff was pretty certain he could convince Chambers he was just a wayward visitor.

It was a myth that crooks could always tell when somebody was a cop. Donnie Brasco—Joe Piscone—had been an excellent example and there were plenty of others. Criminals were not the shiniest apples in the barrel when it came to understanding human nature. If they were they’d be CEOs and they’d be making a lot more money, with fewer chances of landing in jail.

As he reached to pull on the emergency brake, he wondered how William was doing back in Quantico. Third generation. He had never wanted that even before the divorce, even before they had been reduced to seeing each other only once or twice a year.

He straightened and opened the truck door, pushing everything out of his mind but his story, his act. As he stepped down from the truck, he consulted a map and then turned, squinting at the house and the trees and hills.

His arm hair prickled when his back was to the house.

When he finished turning, he saw the old man on the front porch, standing with a slight stoop, hands by his sides. Up close he did not look so good. He had long thick white hair, leonine might be the description, but his mustache was darker, almost black. He might have been wearing a wig but where he would get that sort of wig, Griff did not know. A Halloween store, maybe. The old man’s eyes were wide, bright and observant and his face was neither friendly nor concerned. He did not look like he wanted company but he did not look terribly unhappy about it, either.

‘Hallo!’ Griff called out. ‘Is this the Tyee farm? I hope I’ve come to the right place.’

Someone had parked a jug of sun tea on the edge of the porch, away from the steps. It was a big glass jug with a cap and yellow flowers painted on one side.

‘This homestead used to be known by that name,’ Chambers said. ‘What’s your beef?’

‘I’ve been looking for a place to stay, maybe get work, and some folks in town said you might be able to help me. I’m a traveler in a dry land, friend.’

Chambers remained on the top step of the porch but his lips twitched. ‘You’re probably in the wrong place.’

‘Well, I see the trees are dusty,’ Griff said, trying for a joke. ‘They look dry.’

The old man’s face settled into concrete. ‘Have to spray all the time, kill the damned insects. Let me know your intentions or move on.’

Griff tried to look unnerved. ‘What I’m saying is, I hear there’s a church around here and some people I could sympathize with. It’s kind of lonely for that sort of company where I live.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘Multnomah County.’

Chambers grimaced. ‘Queer place. Liberals and queers. Just right for each other.’

‘Exactly,’ Griff said. ‘Don’t know why I ever moved there. Niggers and Kikes. Crawl right up your pants leg. Have to squash them or they’ll nip you in the jewels.’ He slapped his pants and shook one foot. Levine had coached Griff on this dialog.

‘You’re somewhat of a clown, aren’t you?’ Chambers asked. His eyes had wandered casually to the truck, then to the barn, and finally to the northern hills, and his lids drooped for a moment along with his shoulders. ‘Show-offs and clowns always bring trouble.’

‘I apologize. I sure could use some good old-fashioned preaching, whatever you can offer, sir,’ Griff said, hoping for the right amount of awkwardness, out-of-stepness. Chambers was the brightest and most experienced of a sorry lot. He had instincts born of fifty hard, ambitious years. Margaret Thatcher’s loo. Griff could hardly believe it. Right here in Snohomish County.

‘You been in prison until recently?’ Chambers asked.

‘Yes, sir, Monroe. I did not want to let on right away.’

‘Did they tell you about Tyee at Monroe?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Who told you?’

‘We’ll need to get better acquainted, sir, before I reveal that.’

‘Well, come closer, let me get a look at you.’

Griff took a few steps forward.

‘My God, boy, you have arms like pig thighs. Pumping iron?’

‘Yes, sir. Weights kept me sane.’

‘Some almighty tats. Come on up here. Where you from before Monroe?’

‘Boise.’

‘Why don’t you tell me some names.’

‘Jeff Downey, he used to be a friend. Haven’t seen him in ten years. Don’t know if he’s still alive.’

‘He isn’t,’ Chambers said, and sniffed. ‘Which is convenient.’

‘Mark Lindgren. His wife, Suzelle.’ Again he was working from Jacob Levine’s script.

‘You talk with Lindgren recently?’

‘Nosir, but he knows me.’

‘Mind if I do some checking up on you?’

‘Nosir. But right now I’m very thirsty.’

‘For word or deed?’

‘Beg pardon?’

‘Will my words quench your thirst, or are you here for deeds? Because I’m not much in the way of deeds these days. Kind of staying quiet out here, like those volcanoes you can see from the road.’

Griff nodded. ‘I understand, sir. Just wanted to make your acquaintance and get some preaching. Find a church where I can feel comfortable.’

‘Well, that’s all right. What’s your experience with weapons?’

‘Knives kept me alive once or twice. Know guns pretty well. Used to collect shotguns. The wife sold my whole gun rack on e-Bay. Ex-wife.’ He jammed a load of masculine resentment into that. ‘Nigh on fifty thousand dollars’ worth, some my granddaddy had back in North Carolina. Frenchmade, German, beautiful things. She just…sold them.’ He waved his hands helplessly, and tightened his throat muscles to make sure his face was red.

Chambers said, ‘We all lose earthly things. Time comes when we make others lose earthly things, that’s the balance.’ Chambers liked this display of anger, the red face. ‘I’ve got sun tea out there on the porch and ice in the kitchen. Want a glass?’

‘Nothing harder?’ Griff asked, twitching his right eye into a wink.

‘I do not allow alcohol. I do excuse that request, coming as it does from a Monroe man. Still, you could have been worse off. You could have done your time in Walla Walla.’

Griff grinned and shook out his hands. ‘Yessir.’

They sat on the steps of the porch and drank tall glasses of sun tea sweetened with honey. Chambers was surprisingly limber and got down on the front step with barely a wince. His legs were long and skinny within the faded dungarees. His bony ankles stuck up from oversize and well-worn brown leather Oxfords. The sun was high over the farm and the dusty trees cast real shadows. It was the sort of bright day rarely seen up in these foothills at any time of the year and there had been many more of them recently—a long dry spell. They chatted for a few minutes about global warming and what it might mean.

‘Fuck, we’ll all get suntans,’ Griff said. ‘Then we’ll be closer to the Mud People. Might even marry one of them.’

Chambers chortled deep in his beard. ‘I do wish you would clean up that prison language. I have kids here. They’re off celebrating Easter. Good Friday.’

‘That’s not till next week,’ Griff said.

‘We worship to God’s calendar,’ Chambers said. ‘All the world’s calendar brings is grief and worse luck.’ A little bit of old East Coast had crept into Chamber’s tone. ‘It cannot keep going on the way it is.’

Griff peered at the Patriarch, respectful, even worshipful, nodding his head. Taking it all in.