“I’ll be damned,” I said. “That has to be it.”
“Excuse me?”
I looked up, and there was the nurse. Julie and Emmit were already standing, but I had been so lost in thought that I was oblivious.
“Nothing,” I said. “Sorry.”
“You can see Mr. Somers now,” she said.
“You guys go ahead,” said Emmit. “I’ll wait here.”
Julie and I followed the nurse through the double doors, and down a corridor to the intensive-care area. She led us to a room, and opened the door for us. “Just for a few minutes,” she said, and we went in.
Bryan was lying in bed, tubes leading into his arm, looking better than I would have guessed. He had his eyes open, but didn’t seem to acknowledge us in any way. I reached him first, and gently bent down to give him a slight hug.
“Hey, Brother, it is damn good to see you,” I said.
I pulled back slightly, and thought I detected a slight smile, though I couldn’t be sure. I looked at him, and then Julie, and felt a tightening in my throat. Humans I have spoken to who are in touch with their emotions have told me that’s a precursor to crying, but I can’t speak from personal experience. I certainly wasn’t going to hang around there and find out.
Fortunately, I had something else to do. “I gotta go to work,” I said, and turned and left.
“We have fought the good fight,” Edward Holland said as media cameras rolled,
“and we are still fighting. We are not going to let the water our children drink, the very air that they breathe, become instruments of harm. Not on my watch.”
They cheered him, all eight thousand of them. It was by far the largest crowd ever assembled in Brayton, and Holland had them eating out of his hand. But he knew that was about to change and the cameras would capture that as well.
“But we are going to do it the right way, the Brayton way. Yes, we have lost the battle in the courts, but there are many more to be waged, and we will win more than our share. That I promise you.”
The cheers became louder, raining down on him. Alex Hutchinson stood behind him on the podium, smiling and nodding in agreement, though she had no idea what was going to happen next. Holland had debated whether to tell her in advance, but decided she might choose to sabotage it.
“There has been far too much violence, and our side is being blamed for much of it. I know they are false accusations, and you know it as well. But perception is reality, and we must not do anything that feeds that perception.
“I am also concerned for your safety. No, change that. I am
Holland looked towards the outskirts of the crowd, and saw Chief Brus and his men standing there, waiting. They seemed ludicrously undermanned to get this crowd to do anything, and Holland silently cursed the decision of the Governor not to send in the state police, and the courts to delay issuing the evacuation order.
“We must be law-abiding. We must not trespass on someone else’s land, just as we must prevent them from polluting our air and water. We will get our justice, but we will do so lawfully, and safely.”
There was a murmuring at that, as the crowd was not sure where he was going but concerned by what they heard.
“To that end, I am directing Chief Tony Brus to help you conduct an organized and peaceful evacuation of this property.”
In an instant, the cheers had turned to grumbling and booing. Alex, surprised by what she had heard, was shaking her head no.
“I ask your cooperation in doing this.” He motioned to the media cameras. “Let’s show the world what Brayton is all about.”
Brus and his men slowly advanced into the crowd. They were not wearing riot gear, nor carrying weapons. There would be time to regroup and get all that later, if the situation called for it.
It didn’t take long for them to feel the pulse of the crowd, and know that much stronger measures were going to be required.
Holland had lost them, and all hell was going to break loose.
The drive to Brayton should take an hour and a half,
so I told Emmit he needed to make it in an hour. Along the way I tried to reach Alex Hutchinson, Edward Holland, and the Brayton Chief of Police, to no avail. They were all at the rally on the disputed land.
If I was right, it was Ground Zero.
When I finally gave up on the phone, Emmit asked, “You want to tell me what the hell is going on?”
“The truth? I don’t know, not for sure. But I know what I’m afraid of.”
“What’s that?”
“The explosives and timers that Gallagher did not find in Rhodes’s room. According to Gallagher, it was way more than Rhodes could have needed for blowing up guesthouses or cars.
“And I think there’s a good chance that the detonations are going to be tonight. Rhodes was supposed to be on a plane out of here at nine o’clock. I’m thinking that he was waiting to make sure that everything went the way it was supposed to and then he’d leave.”
“Then what’s the target?”
“The land where the drilling was going to take place.”
“Why there?”
“I don’t know that, but I do know that there are a hell of a lot of people on that land right now.”
Emmit thought for a few moments and shook his head. “It doesn’t ring true for me,” he said. “What would the companies gain by killing a lot of people? They just want the natural gas.”
I nodded. “You’re right about that, but just because we don’t see the reason doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Very little of this has made sense from the start.”
“Then why do you think that’s the target?”
“Well, I couldn’t understand why Rhodes would have diagrams of the land; there seemed no reason for him to need them. But do you remember when we showed the diagrams to Frank Lassenger?”
“Yeah. What about it?”
“He knew exactly what he was looking at, but one thing didn’t seem right. There were markings on the map to show where the drilling should take place, and Lassenger thought they were in the wrong place. That he would never drill where those markings were.”
“Damn…,” Emmit said, realizing.
“Exactly. If I’m right, those markings weren’t showing anyone where to drill. They were showing Rhodes where to place the explosives.”
Emmit stepped harder on the gas, and we went faster than I would have thought possible.
As evacuations go, this one was a loser.
With Alex Hutchinson exhorting the people from the podium to disregard Holland’s plea, and to resist the police efforts, Brus was having no success in getting the bulk of the people to leave.
After twenty minutes of cajoling by the police, perhaps eighty percent of the crowd remained, and showed no inclination to depart. Most of those who did leave were parents with children, uncomfortable about the turn things had taken.
Holland directed Brus to take stronger measures, but Brus was trying to talk him out of it. “These people are not being violent,” he said. “You want me to teargas them?”
“I want you to do whatever is necessary. Once they see we’re serious, they’ll leave.”
“These are not the LA riots, Mayor. We don’t have a court order, and there is no reason to risk injury, to the people or to my officers.”
“That is your opinion, but mine is the one that matters. I am giving you a direct order,” Holland said.
