outspoken and troublesome. But, heaven knows, stranger things have happened.
In these times, the tug-of-war between national security and personal freedom was becoming a losing battle for civil libertarians. It had happened bit by bit, with each slight loss of liberty or privacy sounding like a reasonable protection when viewed on its own. The effect was cumulative, however. Today even the most liberal of politicians were openly floating the idea of preventive detention for terrorism suspects: basically, indefinite incarceration without charges or trial, all for what sometimes amounted to little more than thought crimes.
The presumption of innocence was an admirable doctrine in simpler days, though at best it had always been unevenly applied in practice- more an ideal to strive toward than a true and present cornerstone of American justice. In recent years an increasingly frightened public had approved of that hallowed concept being systematically replaced with another, especially when it came to certain groups and offenses: When in doubt, lock them up.
Clipped to the file was an eight-by-ten photo taken of his man only last night, when he’d appeared at a far- right-wing protest rally of some kind. He’d run afoul of the cops, and that’s when Stuart’s midnight call had come; a necessary piece of an important puzzle was about to drop into his lap. The hope was that this fellow would be interested in helping his country, but in case he wasn’t, the fallback was to make sure he’d be pretty desperate to help himself.
Three corrections officers approached the open door with a heavily shackled prisoner in their charge. He could barely walk on his own, either from the effects of heavy fatigue, the abuse he’d obviously taken from his cellmates overnight, or both.
They brought him in, sat him down across the desk, cuffed him to the chair, dropped a Baggie of belongings on the filing cabinet, and with a nod and a signature from his new custodian, left without a word being spoken.
The guy’s head was hanging, chin to his chest. Without the arms of the chair holding him upright he’d probably have slumped right to the floor.
“Daniel Carroll Bailey?”
He flinched at the sound of his name like he’d been roused cold from a nightmare. The chain at his wrist snapped taut; he squinted and hunched down as though expecting another boot to the side of the head. He looked pretty bad, but with some cleaning up maybe not unable to travel, and that was good for the schedule. Beyond the cuts and bruises, if lack of sleep was his main problem then they were in good shape; he could rest on the plane.
“Are you my lawyer?” Bailey asked.
His words were weak and not formed very well. Swollen jaw, eyes trying hard to focus, one ear freshly torn ragged at the lobe from an earring theft, or maybe a bite. Before they’d brought him in someone had done a half- assed job of swabbing the blood that had dried around his nose and mouth, but a bit of real doctoring might be needed before they could get on the road for the airport.
“No, I’m not a lawyer.”
“I want my phone call, they won’t let me have my phone call-”
“You can make your call now if you want, and line up an attorney. That’s your right. But if you decide to go that route I want to warn you. This is from a high authority, the highest; in fact with your past record, your charges from last night, and especially”-he patted the folder in front of him-“the evidence from an ongoing federal investigation, the best any lawyer’s going to get you is fifteen to twenty years in a place much worse than this. That’s a fact. But it doesn’t have to be like that, Danny.”
Slowly, the other man seemed to be recovering his wits, or at least enough of them to understand what he was facing.
“Who are you?”
Stuart Kearns showed his ID, then took out his card and slid it across to the very edge of the desk.
“I’ve got nine words for you that I’ll bet you never thought you’d be so glad to hear,” he said. “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
CHAPTER 17
Over the intercom came an announcement that they’d just reached cruising altitude at 44,000 feet, and to punctuate that bit of news the no smoking light went off with a quiet ting.
It was a nice touch, but on a jet this size the copilot could just as easily have leaned around his seat and shouted down the aisle to update his two lone passengers on the progress of the flight.
Stuart Kearns took a pack of Dunhills from one jacket pocket, his lighter from another, then reclined his seat a notch and lit up. He inhaled deeply, then blew a thin white ring of smoke and watched it drift up toward the rounded cabin ceiling.
“What are you doing?”
Danny Bailey had awakened from his nap and was staring at the lit cigarette across the narrow aisle as though he were watching a bank robbery in progress.
“You can still smoke on a charter. On this one, anyway.” Kearns extended the pack to him, shook a filter tip halfway out. “Come on, you know you want to.”
“I quit five years ago.”
“Last chance. It’s not every day you get a free pass to break the rules.” Bailey didn’t budge, so Kearns returned the cigarettes to his pocket. “Hey, remind me, how old are you?”
“I’m thirty-four.”
“In the decade you were born a man could still smoke a cigar on any flight across this country. Can you believe that?”
“Listen,” Bailey said, “what’s your name again?”
“Kearns. Stuart Kearns.”
“That’s right-Special Agent Kearns. Well listen, Stuart, I’m glad to be out of jail, but it doesn’t exactly feel like I’m free.”
He nodded. “That’s right.”
“Right. So no offense, but there’s no reason to strain yourself pretending you’re my friend. Let’s stick to business. What do you say you just enjoy your smoke and then tell me what the hell I need to do to go home.”
It wasn’t an elaborate scheme; it couldn’t be when success relied on the performance of an informant under duress. In undercover work, if anything can go wrong it generally does. The more straightforward the plan, the better. Keep it simple, and you keep it safe.
The targets for the operation were low-level militia types with a desire to graduate to a full-blown act of domestic terrorism. They were in the market for funding, logistical support, and some serious weapons. If all went well then the only thing they’d be getting at the final handoff was arrested.
Danny Bailey would be brought along to the first in-person meet-up, to lend a crowning bit of credibility to the proceedings; he was currently the closest thing the Patriot underground had to a national spokesperson. In essence, Bailey would play the Oprah to Kearns’s Dr. Phil.
The operation itself would be quick, in and out, but the lead-up to it had required a long and careful preparation.
A few years earlier a website had been set up by the IT guys at the Bureau: www.stuartkearns.com. The backstory on the site went like this: A former federal agent had been run out of his job when he’d tried to blow the whistle on some dangerous truths. After repeated death threats, this ousted agent had gotten angry and gone public on the Web in an effort to protect himself from retribution, and to continue his crusade to expose the dark forces intent on causing a global financial collapse and ushering in a one-world government.
The global villains named on the site were a grab bag pulled from the latest full-color catalog of extremist paranoia: the Zionists, the Royals, the IMF and World Bankers, the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, the Bilderbergers, the Masons, the Grovers, the Vatican, you name it. It was a big tent, and that was the point. Search engines had soon begun to present Stuart’s site as a top-twenty destination for all manner of curious like-minded wackos, and traffic became fairly brisk.
It was evident from the home page that this wasn’t a place for the no-guts armchair militiaman. The rants, posts, links, videos, documents, and forums hosted by this fictional ex-fed-turned-Patriot made it pretty clear that
