THE OVERTON WINDOW (24 page)

“And these dudes we’re going to see, the boys who want to buy this thing, why would they ever believe that a private citizen could get his hands on a working nuclear weapon?”

“Okay, good, we should talk about this. Do you remember about a year ago, there was a story in the news about a live cruise missile that went missing?”

“Of course I do. The Barksdale thing—I did a whole week of shows on that. Somebody screwed up and loaded real warheads instead of dummies onto a B-52 in North Dakota. Six nukes left the base, but only five showed up in Louisiana.”

“Right,” Kearns said. “Now we both know that something like that can’t just happen, not as an accident anyway. It’s like the Secret Service accidentally putting the president into the wrong car and then nobody missing him until noon the next day. It’s impossible; there are way too many safeguards in place. Unless, of course, it was an inside job.

“So my online personality is a guy with tons of deep connections from my years with the FBI. About seven years ago I finally got disgusted with the whole crooked government, slipped off the reservation, and
disappeared into my own version of the Witness Protection Program. My cover story was that, to get this bomb, I made friends with the right two people on those munitions crews through my website, one at Minot Air Force Base and one at the destination. They fudged the orders and arranged that flight, then helped me get the guts of one of those warheads onto a truck and on its way out of Barksdale half a day before anybody even knew it was missing.”

“So you’re not trying to claim you built this from scratch, like in your backyard workshop.”

“No, hell no, of course not. Just the mount and the housing, and I hooked up some of the electronics; that’s all I had to put together here. The warhead itself was intact.”

Danny leaned forward and ran a fingertip along one of the smoother welds. “I’ve gotta hand it to you. It looks pretty bad-ass.”

“Yeah, it does,” Kearns said, as he stowed the Geiger counter in a gym bag next to the couch, “if I do say so myself.”

“And how much of that’s actually true?”

“How much of what is actually true?”

“What you just said. That whole Barksdale story.”

Kearns didn’t answer right away. He zipped up the bag on the floor and then sat back in his chair, frowning. “What is this,
60 Minutes
all of a sudden?”

“No, man, we’re just talking—”

“I’m not here to fill in the blanks for your next conspiracy video.”

“I’m just trying to get our story straight.”

“Okay,” Kearns said. “But what’s true or not true about what I just said isn’t part of the story you’ve got to get straight.”

“Fine, okay, sorry. It just sounded so believable. This is all pretty new to me, you know, and I’m still a little groggy this morning. I haven’t slept for twelve hours like that in twenty years.”

The other man continued to study him, as if he felt he might have
made a slip and was still assessing its severity. But after a few seconds he nodded, seemed to ease down a bit, and pulled the reluctant, rumpled cat a little closer and rubbed its head.

“Yeah, okay,” Kearns said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to get my dander up. Maybe I’m getting a little paranoid in my old age. I’ve been told in the past I’ve got some issues.”

“Hey, pal, who doesn’t, right?”

“You said it.”

The microwave in the other room beeped at the end of its heating cycle.

“So,” Danny said, rubbing his hands together, “what’s to eat?”

Agent Kearns brought in some toast and a crusty tub of margarine along with some scrambled eggs and ham from a can. The meat was spongy and slick and the eggs tasted like survival food, but with enough salt and pepper it all became passable enough.

“I only asked what I asked before,” Danny said, “because I would have thought you guys had all kinds of labs and engineers back at headquarters that would have built a model like this for an undercover operation. You know, so someone like you wouldn’t have to bother with any of it yourself.”

“Yeah, they do, but these last few years I’ve gotten accustomed to working alone. The less contact you make when you’re undercover, the safer it is. Hell, I’ve been out in the cold so long on this one, as far as I know only one guy inside even knows I’m still on the payroll.”

“Wow, you must really trust that guy.”

Kearns bent and slipped a snubnose revolver from his ankle holster, matter-of-factly, as if it had been just a pebble stuck in his shoe. He swung out the cylinder and spun it with the flat of his hand, flicked it back into place, laid the gun on his side of the table, and then picked up his plate to resume his breakfast. You’d almost think all this had nothing to do with the subject at hand.

“Sure, kid,” Kearns said. “I trust everybody.”

CHAPTER 23
 

Sunday afternoon was spent with each of them going over the other’s public background. If they were to appear to be old acquaintances, they couldn’t hesitate on some obvious detail that might come up in the conversation. Then, before loading up the van, they’d made a telephone call to finalize the evening’s meet-up with the targets of the sting operation.

Kearns had used a hacker gizmo called an orange box to fake the caller ID display the recipients would see. It would appear to them as though the call had come directly from Danny Bailey’s private number; his actual cell phone was apparently still stuck in the bowels of some evidence warehouse back in New York.

The man who’d answered had been suitably impressed to be talking to one of his longtime media heroes in the war against tyranny. The time and address of the meeting were confirmed and Stuart Kearns was heartily endorsed as a verified patriot who could absolutely deliver the goods. Before sign-off, the man on the other end had handed the phone around so everyone could have a moment to speak with their celebrity caller.

Under Kearns’s watchful eye, Danny had played along with it all
quite easily, but something began to nag at him after they’d hung up. The troubling thing was that, though each of those men had laid claim to being his biggest fan, and had seen every video he’d ever produced and read every word he’d ever posted online, they’d all apparently seen and heard and read things that Danny Bailey was pretty sure he’d never actually said:

That the only way left to rally the people was to rip aside the curtain and force the enemy out into the light of day.

That the globalist oligarchs and their puppets in Washington had been spoiling for a fight for sixty years, and now they were going to get the war that was coming to them.

That the souls of the Founders were crying out for true patriots to step up and set things right with the Republic.

And that the time had finally come for a twenty-first-century shot heard ’round the world, the final trumpet to signal the start of the second American Revolution.

But even if not in precisely those words, those sentiments did sound awfully familiar. Maybe he had said those things, and it was only the current context that put them into such a stark new light. After all, things can sound different when echoed back by men who’ve decided to deliver their message with a fifteen-kiloton city killer instead of with a bullhorn.

CHAPTER 24
 

They’d been rolling down a desolate, moonless stretch of Interstate 80 for a number of miles. The road was so dark that the world out front seemed to end at the reach of the headlights, and there was nothing to see at all out the window behind.

“Hey, Stuart?”

“Yeah.”

“I wouldn’t be doing this if I agreed with these hoodlums, even one percent. I’m not a terrorist, and I’m not a turncoat.”

“I didn’t think you were,” Kearns said, his eyes on the road.

“Like I said before, these aren’t my people, and what they want to do isn’t the way to change things, and I’ve never said it was.”

“I believe you.”

For once a little mindless conversation would have been welcome, but since no chitchat was forthcoming from the driver’s seat Danny had to occupy himself with his own thoughts, listening to the sound of the road beneath the wheels.

“What kind of a phone is that?” Danny asked. He’d noticed the device before, held in its charger near the center console. It was too big
to be a cell phone; it looked more like a smaller, thinner version of a walkie-talkie, but with a standard keypad.

“Satellite phone,” Kearns said. “Works anywhere. Cell phone coverage in a place like this is pretty spotty.”

“I guess it would be.”

After a while Kearns let his foot off the gas, and the van began to coast and slow down as he reached forward and shut off the headlights.

“What are you doing?”

“Roll down your window, stick out your head, and look up,” Kearns said.

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Just trust me. I want you to see something. You live in the city, right?”

“Yeah, downtown Chicago,” Danny said. “Just about all my life.” He cranked the glass down, leaned his head out into the cold wind, and looked up as he’d been directed.

“Well, there’s only about three things to see out here in the middle of nowhere,” Kearns said, “but this is one of them.”

“Oh. My. God.”

The air was perfectly clear, it seemed, from the barren ground all the way out to the edge of space. From horizon to horizon there was no man-made light to obscure the view up above. Thousands of stars, maybe tens of thousands of them, were shining up there like backlit jewels in a dark velvet dome. Sprays of tiny pinpoints in subtle colors, blazing white suns in orderly constellations arrayed across the heavens, ageless by the measure of a human lifetime, all light-years away but seeming to be almost near enough to reach out and touch.

Danny pulled his head back in, sat back, and rolled up the window as Kearns flipped the headlights back on and turned up the heater to warm up the van again.

“Thanks, man, really. I was sitting over here in dire need of some perspective.”

“Sort of puts a guy in his place, doesn’t it?” Kearns said. “That’s where we all came from, out there, and someday that’s where we’re all going back.”

“You know? I saw it on your business card, but now I understand why they call you a special agent.”

“Well, son, whether you want me to or not, I’m going to take that as a compliment.”

A few miles farther on Kearns exited and soon after turned onto a dirt road. The road meandered for a mile or so between barbed-wire fences on either side until they came to an even narrower gravel path. Halfway down that driveway they saw the yellowish lights of a ranch house.

“This is it,” Kearns said. “You all set?”

Danny took in a deep breath, and let it relax the tension out of him as he exhaled.

“Yeah. Let’s do this thing.”

The garage door was up, and from their parking spot Danny could clearly see the men seated around a couple of card tables, surrounded by stacks of stored junk, auto parts, and red tool cases. They’d all turned when the headlights swung across the wide-open doorway and upon recognizing the vehicle they motioned for their guests to come on in.

Kearns stayed in the van as Danny got out and walked up the paved incline toward the house, his hands clearly open at his sides in an effort to let everyone know that he wasn’t armed. Evidently these guys had no such concern. They met him halfway up the sidewalk to the garage and greeted him like he was a long-lost friend.

There was only one thing amiss. He and Kearns had come expecting to see all five men at this meeting, and one of them wasn’t there.

CHAPTER 25