of ANM that he’d been compromised and his cell has now pulled out of ANM. No other cells will remain in touch with him. He’s out.”
“Fascinating,” Lang said. “If you could give me his real name . . .”
“I can’t do that. I could call him and ask if he’d call you. I have no problem doing that, and I think he might be interested in talking about his ideas . . . in a general way.”
“I will wait by my phone.”
* * *
—
LUCAS WENT DOWN to the restaurant for breakfast, and when he’d returned to his room and brought up his laptop, he found another group of encrypted files from Jane Chase. He opened them and found a note from her, along with files on each of the groups named by Aline.
In the note, Chase said that Controlled Burn, a prison-linked group, had been run by a man named Sawyer Loan, who was currently locked up in a hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He and another member of the group had gone into a Chattanooga liquor store with guns and got all shot up themselves. Loan was hit four times, and his partner, Daniel McCutcheon, had been killed.
In her note, she said that McCutcheon had been shot seven times, three times while he was already lying on the floor, wounded, because the liquor store employees “wanted to make a point,” which they had. Loan, she said, probably wouldn’t stand trial in Tennessee, since he was out on parole and liquor store holdups were not an approved parolee activity. He’d be going back to a federal prison for at least another six years.
She added that Loan had not been so much a leader, as a phone number for the other members of the group. The Virginia state police believed his replacement was his girlfriend, Tabitha Calvin, who lived in a place called Goochland, Virginia.
Lucas looked up Goochland on Google Maps, and found it to be a bit more than a hundred miles and a couple of hours by car from Washington.
* * *
—
HE LOOKED THROUGH THE OTHER FILES. All six of the other groups, and their leaders, were closer than Goochland, and seemed to be bigger threats. Goochland, on the other hand, was out a ways, but he could be there and back before Bob and Rae got to Washington. If the Virginia state police were correct, he only had to deal with a girlfriend.
He checked his watch: 9:30. If he hurried, he could be in Goochland by noon, back before five. He hurried.
* * *
—
GETTING OUT OF WASHINGTON was a hassle, twenty minutes to the Potomac after he got stuck behind a moving van that was jammed up in a corner, but once on I-95, he began to roll. The landscape was like neither Minnesota nor the Cincinnati area—it was green, but if it wasn’t industrial or commercial, it was forested, with relatively few farms visible from the highway. The route took him almost into Richmond, then swerved west on I-64, and from there cross-country into Goochland.
Goochland was an odd small town, because it was small, but it also apparently was the county seat. Lucas hadn’t done any research on the place, having simply poked Tabitha Calvin’s address into his phone’s navigation app.
Once in town, he spotted a clutch of red-brick buildings with cop cars in the parking lot. He slowed and turned in and found he was at the Goochland County Sheriff’s Office. A deputy was walking out to his car and Lucas grabbed him, showed him his ID. The deputy frowned at the Cadillac, and said, “Marshals are living high on the hog, huh?”
“I’m paying for it myself,” Lucas lied. “I got shot a few months back and I need the cushion of a big car.”
“Yeah? C’mon, I’ll introduce you to the sheriff, he’s having lunch,” the deputy said. “Where’d you get shot?”
“Los Angeles.”
“No, I mean, where on your body?”
Lucas tapped his chest: “Right here. .223 full metal jacket, thank God. A hollow point, I’d of been dead.”
“Kind of dumb, using a full metal jacket,” the deputy said, holding the door into the sheriff’s department.
“I’m told they were using them in case they had to fight cops with bulletproof vests,” Lucas said, over his shoulder. “FMJs are the redneck equivalent of armor-piercing bullets.”
“Didn’t think of that,” the deputy said. “Bet it hurt.”
“It did.”
* * *
—
THE SHERIFF WAS A BEANPOLE, a tall, slender, friendly man, thick glasses giving a yellow cast to his blue eyes. His name was Preston