Sean turned back toward the Jeep, and for a moment his mind wavered.
He blinked. Daryn. Daryn McDermott. Kat Hall. He was trying to immerse himself in her world, and he’d been slowly descending into it, as Michael Sullivan. And now, twice since he’d met her, there had been an attack. Tobias Owens hadn’t told him this part, back in the Sasabe cantina.
Who was after her? Were they after Daryn, the senator’s daughter and radical? Or were they after Kat, the mysterious professional escort? The political princess or the call girl?
Sean took a step toward the highway, then stopped again. He couldn’t just leave Daryn and Britt here unprotected. What if the guys from the SUV circled back around? What if they had another team approaching from the other direction?
But there might be answers out there in the brush by the river.
Sean’s mind clouded again.
He shook his head. He jogged back to the Jeep. Daryn and Britt were both staring at him, Daryn in terror, Britt with a strange curiosity on her face.
“Do you know how to use a gun?” Sean asked Daryn.
Daryn’s eyes grew impossibly wide. She shook her head slowly. “I never-”
“I do,” Britt said.
Sean looked at her slowly. Something passed between them, a subtle understanding, a
“Michael-” Daryn said.
“I’ll be back,” Sean said.
He ran across the road. The SUV was totally empty, both the driver’s and passenger’s doors standing open. He looked back toward the river. A barbed wire fence snaked away toward the west. The ground-green grass and red dirt-sloped downward to the south, toward the Cimarron River itself. Sean saw movement below, a flash of blue, underneath one of the bridge supports.
Every fiber of his training rebelled-he was going into an unknown situation, unarmed, with no real backup.
But this wasn’t about training anymore. He wasn’t an ICE agent now. He was a civilian, an ordinary woodworker, and this was about the woman he knew as both Kat and Daryn.
His head pounding, Sean took a step toward the river, then another. He stepped into the tall grass. The ground sloped sharply away ahead of him. He saw the movement again, an outline of a man moving behind the bridge support.
Sean took another step. His foot came down on loose red dirt, and the ground sloughed away under him. He went down, tumbling through grass and dirt and rocks before coming to rest on concrete, at least fifty feet below where he had been, lying on his side with his cheek scraping gravel.
At first he heard, saw, felt nothing, though he tasted grass in his mouth. Then there was sound-the river, birds, a car going by on the bridge above his head. Finally, his vision cleared. He saw graffiti scrawled on the bridge-
The man stood over him. A few years older than he, tall, sandy hair, a few days’ growth of beard, blue jeans and a denim shirt, cowboy boots.
Sean coughed grass out of his mouth. “What…” He spat. “What do you want with her?”
“Who the hell are you?” the man said. “Why do you care about her?”
“She’s…do you know who she is?” Sean said.
Sean started to sit up, then the man’s boot connected with his ribs. Sean grunted and rolled over, and the man kicked him again. Before he landed a third kick, Sean tried to grab his leg, but the man backed off.
He heard another voice, not the booted man:
The booted man grunted in reply, but sent one more sharp kick to Sean’s abdomen. Then he moved away quickly, footsteps receding toward the river. Sean rolled over and retched into the grass, tasting all the whiskey he’d drunk.
He lay there for a long time, listening to the river and all the damned birds singing on all sides of him. He heard a car door slam, an engine start.
He raised himself up, his ribs stinging. He felt up and down his chest. Probably bruised but not broken. He took a few deep breaths-hard, but not too painful. Encouraging.
Sean slowly got to his feet, remembering the man’s words.
What the hell did that mean? What kind of game were these people playing?
By that time, they hadn’t seemed interested in Daryn. They’d been dealing with him, with Sean.
Slowly, painfully, Sean began the climb back up toward the highway.
15
THE TOWN OF MULHALL, OKLAHOMA, EMBODIED history in a rougher, harder-edged way than Guthrie. If Guthrie was a shining example of urban renewal, Mulhall was a slice of rural America at its most real. Poverty coexisted with strong community ties; resilience took a seat right next to the despair that pervaded so many of America’s small towns. Not all of Mulhall’s history was over a century old, either-on May 3, 1999, most of the town had been wiped out by one of the more than sixty tornadoes that struck the state in a single day.
Now, more than half a decade later, Daryn could still see evidence of what had happened here-dead trees and mangled brush by the side of the road. She’d only been to the Coalition house once before, and Franklin Sanborn, who was a history buff, had explained Mulhall’s history to her. It was part of the reason he’d chosen Mulhall as the place to give birth to the Coalition.
The irony wasn’t lost on Daryn. In order to get at what was real, to get the ruling classes-people like her father-to pay attention, they’d had to construct a series of elaborate lies. Daryn had read once that the road to truth was paved with lies. She’d learned the lesson many times over by now.
“Real,” she muttered, without realizing she’d spoken aloud.
“What?” Sean said, half-turning to her.
Daryn shook her head. “Nothing.”
“It sounded like you said ‘real.’ Real was those guys back at the bridge. That’s twice in a very short time.”
Daryn swallowed. “They’re threatened. We’re pushing the envelope of society, and someone up the line is threatened by that.”
Sean said no more, grimacing behind the wheel. She looked at the scratches on his face. She’d already seen the bruises the man’s boots had left on his abdomen. Daryn closed her eyes, trying to shut it all out.
Britt squeezed her hand inquiringly. Daryn gave her what she hoped was a reassuring glance, then turned toward the front again.
Very little moved in the streets of Mulhall. There were a couple of brick Victorian-style buildings, including an old bank that had most recently housed a restaurant, now shuttered. There were a few frame houses along the main drag. Up the hill to the right was a gleaming new school, seeming so out of place that it looked like it had been placed here by mistake. But it was part of the history, having been rebuilt after the deadly tornado.
It took all of two minutes to travel the entire length of the town. Then Daryn pointed to a gravel road just north of the city limits. Sean turned left and drove another half mile between barbed wire fences. Daryn pointed again, and Sean made another left onto a driveway that was simply two deep ruts split by a line of grass. A hundred yards back from the road was a small, unremarkable white two-story frame house. It was neither well kept nor in noticeable disrepair. There was greenery around it, but not much. A chain-link fence surrounded it. Two pickup trucks and a dark four-door-with Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico plates, respectively-were parked in the clearing outside the fence.
Two men appeared at the door to the house-big, burly men in jeans, boots, and button-down shirts. They flanked the door and then Franklin Sanborn strode out onto the small porch.
Daryn almost laughed, despite the tension of what had happened a few miles back down the road. Sanborn himself was almost as forgettable in appearance as the house, as the black sedan he drove: his hair that held just a few gray threads; his eyes a light chocolate brown; his complexion was medium. He was right around six feet tall, weight proportionate, not a hard body but not flabby. Sometimes he wore glasses. Sometimes he didn’t. He was no one to be remembered.
That was part of the reason Daryn believed in him. He wasn’t some messianic egomaniac like David Koresh, or an introverted, antisocial genius like Ted Kaczynski. He wasn’t some deprived little boy trying to get the world’s attention. He had a true social and political agenda, and a genius for planning.
Daryn and Britt got out of the Jeep, and Britt immediately reached for Daryn’s hand again as soon as they were outside. Sean got out more slowly, gingerly feeling his ribs. He looked around, then took out his duffel bag, which held his clothes and the extras he’d bought for Daryn.
Sanborn stepped forward. “Welcome,” he said. “Glad you made it out here.”
Even his voice was unremarkable. No discernible accent or regionalism. His English was so perfect that Daryn had often wondered if it might not be his first language, but he’d studied it and mastered general American dialect to perfection. He was fairly soft-spoken, and Daryn had never heard him raise his voice. He’d never needed to.
The two burly men stayed where they were, but Sanborn stepped off the porch and came out to the gate. He swung it open. “Come on in.”
Daryn leaned up to peck his cheek as she passed him. “Franklin, you remember my friend Britt.”
“Of course I do.” Sanborn turned and gave Britt his full attention. “Britt is part of the reason we exist.”
Britt nodded, casting her eyes down as if unworthy. She held even more tightly to Daryn’s hand.
“And this is my new friend Michael,” Daryn said.
Sanborn moved toward Sean, his hand extended. They shook. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Michael,” Sanborn said. “Welcome to the home of the Coalition. I’m Franklin Sanborn. I help to sort of facilitate things around here.”
“He’s much too modest,” Daryn said, looking over her shoulder at Sean. “He leads us.”
“We have different leaders for different things,” Sanborn said with a shrug. “Kat herself is our spiritual leader, if you will, the one who always brings us back to the Cause. I focus on plans and details. Don and CJ back there are our operational leaders. They figure out how to put plans into action. We all lead each other. Unlike the ruling classes, we don’t have to have anointed leaders with titles.”
