of the Aline thing, I might as well go home.”
“Please don’t,” Chase said. “Let me get something going on Aline. Take the rest of the day off. Take tomorrow off. We could have something by the day after.”
* * *
—
INSTEAD OF TAKING THE DAY OFF, Lucas went back to the Watergate and called Charles Lang. Gibson answered and said Lang was shopping.
“I don’t need to talk to Charles,” Lucas said. “You’ll do fine, since you’re the researcher. Charles told me that the ANM had a training camp in Kentucky. I need to know where it was. Exactly.”
“We never looked into it,” Gibson said. “We didn’t want to . . . expose ourselves . . . to them.”
“Well, look now,” Lucas said. “You were snooping on me and that pisses me off, and it might even be a crime; and you do research, so do some research and call me back.”
* * *
—
WITH THAT UNDERWAY, Lucas changed into jeans and walked a mile or so to Dupont Circle, to a bookstore he’d visited the last time he was in DC. He spent a pleasant hour browsing, got a sandwich at the café, talked to Weather for ten minutes, and was strolling back to the Watergate with a Martha Grimes novel under his arm, when Charles Lang called back.
“Well, you scared Stephen, thank you very much. He gets upset when people snap at him.”
“Life in the big city,” Lucas said. “Did you find out where that training camp was?”
“I’ve emailed you what we found, along with a map and a satellite photo of the area. It’s in Kentucky, as I said, not far south of Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s a farm owned by a person named Milton Faye.”
Back at the hotel, Lucas booked a Delta flight to Cincinnati the next morning, leaving a little after nine o’clock, and another one back, in the evening, and reserved a Jeep at Hertz. He checked his email, found the incoming file from Lang. The place he was looking for was outside a Kentucky hamlet called Piner, and from the looks of things, was in the hills.
“Take a day off, my ass,” he muttered to himself, as he settled back with the Martha Grimes novel.
* * *
—
THE NEXT MORNING, after another fear-inflected but absolutely smooth flight to Cincinnati—the airport was actually across the Ohio River in Kentucky, where Lucas got a couple of bagels with cream cheese at a Bruegger’s—he picked up the Jeep and headed south. The town of Piner turned out to be a crossroads with a couple of dozen homes, a red-brick school, a red-brick church, and a convenience store where Lucas stopped for a Diet Coke and to check that he was on the right road.
He was. He headed south out of Piner, through heavily wooded hills and small farms, turned east on a narrower road and eventually found a mailbox that said “Faye” at the end of a gravel-and-dirt driveway that disappeared up a hill into heavy timber.
He went on by, eventually intersected with a larger highway, where he pulled over and checked his cell phone: he had three bars and called Chase.
“Nothing yet,” she said, when she picked up.
“I’m in Kentucky, checking out the farm where ANM supposedly did weapons training,” Lucas said. “It’s remote and spooky, but there’s good cell service.”
“Jesus, Lucas . . .”
“Could you check on a guy named Milton Faye, see if he has a cell phone? If he does, could you watch who he calls?”
“I can do that, but are you going to get shot?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Why don’t I call in the state cops to go with you?”
“No. I don’t want to make a deal about this. If I show up with a bunch of cops, I don’t think he’ll call anyone. He’ll hunker down. I want him to think that the only thing I’ve got going for me is an old newspaper clipping.”
“I don’t know . . .”
“Call me when you’re set up.”
“Might take more than an hour,” she said.
* * *
—
WHEN SHE CALLED BACK, an hour and a half later, Lucas was wandering through a Flying J Travel Center in the town of Walton, off I-75. He took his phone outside to the parking lot and asked, “What do you got?”
“Milton Faye and Barbara Faye have AT&T phones, plus Milton may have gotten sneaky and acquired a second phone from RurCon, which is an MNVO, which actually buys time through AT&T . . .”
“It’s a what?”
“MNVO—Mobile Network Virtual Operator. Since it