Stay or go? Stay or go?
Black said softly into his microphone: 'Truck has arrived. Guard and driver getting out. Ski masks on. Four minutes to action.'
nine
Present Day Monday, October 30
Everyone is waiting for something-waiting to graduate from school, waiting for a better job, waiting for the holidays to come or to pass, for vacations to arrive, waiting for true love, for wedding days or divorce hearings, waiting for injuries to heal or diseases to be cured, waiting and hoping for mercy in the dying days of life. Me, I was waiting too, though I wasn't exactly sure what for. After Katherine died, I virtually left home and jetted around the country with a laptop computer over my shoulder and an Eddie Bauer duffel bag in my hand. My life became a maze of distant, upscale hotel rooms, waiting for room service or for calls to be returned, with nowhere I had to be and nowhere else I really wanted to go. I looked neither at my past nor toward my future as I lived for a moment that I didn't actually want.
I lost myself in my work, hoping the pain would eventually pass, and waiting was the only way I knew how.
Which is why I like flying. There is no shame in sitting back and doing nothing but waiting. Even better, the wait always brings results, except for those poor bastards unlucky enough to be on the business end of an airplane crash. I like to doze in and out while reading a trashy novel. I like to stare out the window. I like to flip through the in-flight magazine, charting our course on the maps in the back, looking at the advertisements for hotels and restaurants in different cities. I especially like sitting in first class on long flights, when leggy stewardesses-I'm sorry, flight attendants-supply me with hot towels, newspapers, Milano cookies, a choice between salmon and filet mignon for dinner, chocolate sundaes served from a pushcart, and after-dinner drinks from those tiny bottles.
Monday morning found me in this precise situation, in the first-class cabin of a US Airways Boeing 757 destined for Seattle, where I would connect to Spokane. For breakfast, I ordered the omelette rather than the steak and eggs. Take my advice: always order the omelette. Beef isn't meant to be served to the masses 37,000 feet above the closest mesquite grill.
It struck me, somewhere between the Mississippi and the Dakotas, after breakfast was over and I had taken my usual stroll back through coach to gain a better appreciation for my lot in life, or at least for my expense account, that I had a particularly significant amount of waiting going on. There was the big picture waiting, as an editor might say-the wait for the emotional pain to pass and all that, and in some obscure way, I felt a little of that pain ebbing away now. I had begun to notice women again, even if I felt no particular desire to pursue any of them.
Perhaps more pertinent was the short-term waiting. I was waiting for a true break in this story, and I hoped that I might dig up some form of it on my trip to Idaho and the interview with the head of the Idaho Minutemen. What I needed was to write a story that would trigger my anonymous source to fill my ear with some better information on what had the potential to be the biggest story of my life. And all the while, I was waiting to arrive at some sort of decision on the White House press secretary's position, though I couldn't help but feel that the story itself might ultimately decide my career fate. All this, for now, was good, productive waiting, if more than a bit tense, and it made the wait on the more serious matters go by with a little more ease.
On the ground at the Spokane airport, I rented a Pontiac Grand Am and headed west through Coeur d'Alene, then north up to Sand Falls. All the way, I traveled a near-barren two-lane highway, rimmed by towering pines and verdant hills-beauty that hides a land of inner desperation and the type of racism that is based on nothing more than raw ignorance. The boys up here, they'll rail against anything from the federal government to the blacks who steal the rightful jobs of the white men all across the country. Funny part is, most of the locals never vote, and I'd be willing to wager that a fair number of them have never met a black man in their lives. Their only enemy at work is their own laziness and incompetence.
Daniel Nathaniel was exactly this kind of guy. At forty-eight, he looked like a cross between the Pillsbury Doughboy and the Skipper on Gilligan's Island, minus their collective charisma and good cheer. He was a former undertaker who had lost his family funeral home to the IRS
for reasons that were suspect at best. The agents had harassed him, taunted him, and ultimately led him to bankruptcy, taking a guy with a latent distrust of the federal government and sending him over the edge. After a brief prison stint for tax evasion, he had hooked up with a group of militant farmers and ranchers in his small town and formed the core of the Idaho Minutemen. Within months, he ascended to the position of commander, inherited a farmhouse in the hills around Sand Falls from one of the other members, and surrounded himself with a team of bodyguards and a driver. In exchange, he served as a source of everlasting wisdom and strength for his growing legions in the eternal war against the federal government. Truth is, though, he just didn't look the part.
I arrived at the farmhouse on Freedom Lake at about 1:00 P.m.' and was stopped at a rickety gatehouse by an almost deathly skinny high school underclassman with droopy eyes.
'Stop right there,' he shouted, stepping out in front of my rental car.
I couldn't help but chuckle a bit to myself, knowing that once again I was about to step into an adult war fantasy of too many men with too much time. Trouble is, it really wasn't so funny, given the manifestation of all this hatred. One of their believers had blown up a federal building in Oklahoma City a few years back, and another just might be responsible for an assassination attempt on the president.
More serious, that would-be assassin could have killed me.
With this pencil-necked postadolescent playing the role of Patton, I couldn't really control my disdain. Rolling down my window, I said in my most dismissive tone, 'Let Daniel Nathaniel know that Jack Flynn is here.'
'Is the commander expecting you?' the kid asked, equally dismissive.
I didn't like that.
'I don't know what the commander is expecting. You'll have to ask him that when you call to tell him I'm here.' I had decided to save all of my patience for someone who could actually help me, meaning Nathaniel, knowing that with him I'd probably need every ounce of it I could find.
The kid looked at me without moving. I wasn't quite sure whether he was unclear on what to do next or unwilling to honor my request, so I asked him, 'That a new squirt gun in your Batman belt? It looks really neat.'
'Fuck you,' he said, putting his hand on the handle of some sort of high-powered weapon, the details of which would be lost on a novice like myself.
'The commander isn't going to like you talking to his close friend like that,' I said. I saw the kid's eyes shift. He walked away to get his two-way radio, which was sitting in the guard shack. He pressed a button and spoke, then released it, and all these horrible sounds came out, like a goose being bludgeoned on a golf course. I saw that happen once, but no need to go into the details here.
'What did you say your name was again?' he asked me.
'Flynn, you dope.'
This time he was too nervous to talk back. After a couple of minutes, he approached my car window. 'You want to go straight along this dirt road-'
'Yeah, I've been here before,' I said, dipping into my reservoir of aggravation to add more exasperation to my tone.
I drove off along a dusty dirt road about two miles, through groves of enormous pines that separated the narrow lane from burned-out farm fields tucked into the hills. At the dilapidated farmhouse, two men in what looked to be police uniforms came running down off the porch to meet my car.
As one of them opened my door, he said, 'Welcome, Mr. Flynn.
Commander Nathaniel is expecting you.' These guys were his bodyguards, and to that end, one of them frisked me through my clothes.
