walked. And walked. He didn’t try to hurry, but ambled along, for twenty-five minutes, when he could see what appeared to be the end of the street. The Washington Monument was obscured by overhanging trees, but when he could see it, he knew it wasn’t far away, and there was a sprawling park around it. That’s where he’d be picked up, he decided.
He crossed the last small street before he’d come to a much larger one, and started past the small triangular green space on the other side. He passed a bronze statue where a man stood reading the legend beneath it, and as he passed, the man turned and said, “Marshal Davenport.”
Lucas looked back.
The man was as tall as Lucas, thin, but not hungry-looking, maybe a runner, perhaps thirty-five years old; brown hair sprinkled with white, conservatively cut. He had a tanned oval face, brown eyes, narrow nose and lips. He had an ex-military or ex-LEO feel. He was dressed almost as Lucas was, running shoes and jeans, but with a black T-shirt under the sport coat, instead of a golf shirt.
“You’re my guy?” Lucas asked.
“Yes. I am,” the man said. “If you arrest me, I won’t resist, but I won’t say a word except ‘lawyer’ and by-and-by, you’ll be in desperate legal trouble for arresting me, since you have no cause. You also won’t get any help from us. Agreed?”
“I’m not here to arrest you or even hassle you,” Lucas said. “I followed your instructions. You aren’t Old John, I take it?”
“No, I’m not. We were fairly sure you would follow the instructions, but not positive,” the man said, mildly enough. “You are being followed, though. Doesn’t look like federal people, to us.”
“Blue RAV4?”
“He was in a blue RAV4, but he ditched it after a while—found a lucky parking place—and now he’s on foot,” the man said. “He’s on Virginia, a block or two behind us.”
“Goddamnit. I’d really like to know who it is,” Lucas said. “He was back there yesterday. I think he’s trying to figure out who I’m meeting.”
“We’ve taken a couple of pictures of him. We’ll send them to your phone. An email address would be useful, too.”
Lucas took out his ID case, extracted a business card with his official email address, and handed it across. The man dropped it in his jacket pocket.
Lucas: “Now . . . I wanted to talk to you because Charlie Lang thinks you’re a large well-organized group with good contacts among the alt-right. We need to track down this 1919 group as quickly as we can. If a kid gets hit, the FBI will tear up everybody in sight and that includes you. We need you to put out feelers to all your cells: anything will help.”
“I don’t think we have that many people in the District, or around it,” the man said. “I’ll talk to my friends and see what they want to do. See what they can do. We’ll get back to you by telephone, the number we called this morning.”
“You don’t know how many members you have? What’s your position with the ANM?” Lucas asked.
The man smiled. “I’m a trusted member. We don’t have officers, as such. Even Old John is more of a coordinator than an officer—he can’t order people around, because, well, that’s the kind of thing we’re against.”
“You can’t really promise me anything? Make any commitments?”
“No. I’ll get in touch with Old John if I can and he’ll trickle the information around, and maybe something will trickle back up. That’s all I can tell you.”
“You know, from the outside, you sound like this 1919 group,” Lucas said. “They don’t identify themselves, they don’t ask for anything specific, they apparently are trying to recruit people they don’t know and who don’t know them . . . and from the looks of the website, they’re fond of guns and we know you guys are.”
The guy rolled up his hands in a “what can I say?” gesture. “They want to shoot kids, they’re nuts. Our basic philosophy is that the country is going to hell in a handbasket. We don’t want to overthrow it, we just