This is a waste of time. Ethan was about to leave when John Deere grabbed the officer’s arm.
Oh, don’t do that, that’s a very bad—
The floodlights seemed to flare in the officer’s eyes. His aide stepped forward and snapped the butt of his assault rifle into the trucker’s face.
The sound was an egg thrown against concrete. The man collapsed.
Ethan saw motion behind the two soldiers, on the Humvee.
The .50 caliber machine gun swiveled over to aim at them. Maybe twenty feet away, and even from this distance the barrel seemed a hole big enough to crawl into.
Ethan stared past it, to the man pointing it. He was good-looking in that blond sort of way, cheeks ruddy beneath his helmet, gloved hands on the weapon, finger on the trigger. He looked all of nineteen years old, and scared.
What was happening? How and when had things slipped into this strange new place? A world where the grocery store didn’t have groceries, where the power vanished, where terrorism wasn’t something happening to someone else. A world where the line between this moment and utter disaster was so slender as to be defined by the fear in the heart of a nineteen-year-old boy.
The other civilians seemed frozen. On the ground, the trucker made a wet sound.
Slowly, Ethan raised his hands. Keeping his eyes locked on the soldier behind the gun, he began to back away. One step, and then another, and then he was apart from the group, and then he was turning around and walking back to the CRV where his wife and daughter waited. He opened the door and got in.
“Any luck?” Amy looked over at him, read his expression, and he could see it mirroring on her face. “What? What happened?”
“Nothing,” he said, and started the SUV. “We’re going home.”
Here’s the thing about freedom: Freedom is not a couch.
It’s not a television, or a car, or a house.
It’s not an item you can possess. You cannot put freedom on layaway; you cannot refinance freedom.
Freedom is something you need to fight for, not once, but every single day. The nature of freedom is that it is fluid; like water in a leaking bucket, the tendency is for it to drain away.
Left untended, the holes through which freedom escapes widen. When politicians restrict our rights in order to “protect us,” freedom is lost. When the military refuses to disclose basic facts, freedom is lost. Worst of all, when fear becomes a part of our lives, we willingly surrender freedom for a promise of safety, as if freedom weren’t the very basis of safety.
There’s a famous poem written about the complacency of the German people under Nazi rule; today, it might read:
CHAPTER 12
It didn’t look like much from the outside. But in Shannon’s experience, the truly scary places never did.
The first thing she saw was a low granite wall bearing the words DEPARTMENT OF ANALYSIS AND RESPONSE. Beyond that, a dense line of trees screened the compound from view. She signaled, waited for an opening in traffic, and then steered the sedan up to a security gatehouse. It was a bright fall day, and the two men in black body armor looked alien against the cloudless blue. They moved well, one of them splitting off to circle the car while the other approached the driver’s side. Both had submachine guns slung across their bodies.
Shannon rolled down the window and reached in her purse. The ID, scuffed and faded, identified her as a senior analyst; the picture looked like it was a few years old. “Afternoon,” she said, polite and bored at once.
“Good afternoon, ma’am.” The guard took the ID, his eyes flicking between it and her face. He swiped it against a device on his belt, which beeped. He handed it back to her. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”
“One of the last,” she said. “S’posed to be colder next week.” She didn’t look behind her, didn’t check the mirror for the armed man examining the back of her car.
The guard glanced over the car roof at his partner, then nodded at her. “Have a good day.”
“You too.” She put the ID in her purse. The metal gate parted, and she drove through.
And into the lion’s cage we go.
No, that wasn’t really it. This was more like walking into the lion’s cage, strutting up to the beast, and jamming her head between its jaws.
The thought sent a shiver of adrenaline. She smiled, drove steadily.
The DAR grounds were nice enough, in a lethal sort of way. The road meandered in curves that seemed senseless, but would keep a car bomber from gaining speed. Every fifty yards or so she felt her tires hum over retracted spike strips. The landscape was green lawns and carefully pruned trees, but tall towers were dotted amidst them. No doubt snipers were tracking her progress.
The building itself was bland and sprawling, looking more like a Fortune 100 office than the nation’s largest spy agency. At the west end, a construction crew worked on a five-story addition, welders on the beams sending showers of sparks. Apparently business was good at the DAR.
Shannon found an empty parking place about halfway down a lane, turned the car off, and flipped down the visor to look in the mirror. She could never get used to herself as a blonde. Odd how many women dyed their hair that color. In her experience, being a brunette hadn’t turned men away.
It was a good wig, though, the highlights layered well to blend with a hint of root. The makeup was heavier than she preferred, but that was the point. She put on a pair of plastic-framed designer eyeglasses. An affectation in this era of easy surgery, but that was what made them fashionable.
“Okay,” she said, then shouldered her purse and left the car.
It really was a beautiful day, the air cool and tasting of fallen leaves. One of the things she loved about being on a job, it heightened her awareness of everything. Every taste sweeter, every touch electric. On the walk in, she could just make out the tips of antiaircraft batteries mounted on the roof of the building.
The lobby was marble floors and tall ceilings and armed guards. One line broke into several, each leading through a metal detector. Cameras stared unblinking from every corner. She joined the queue, looked at her nails, and thought about John.
When he had first proposed this little adventure, her response had been, “You want me to go where?”
“I know.” John Smith wore a gray suit and a clean shave, and he seemed taller than she remembered. Healthier. The benefits of not being on the run, she supposed, not having that 24/7 paranoia pressing down. “It sounds crazy.”
“Crazy I’m okay with. This sounds like suicide. Besides, I’m tasked out. All my attention is focused on West Virginia. I’ve got sins to make up for.”
“I understand,” he’d said, with that smile of his. A good smile, he was a handsome guy, though not her type. Too conventional, like a real estate agent. “But I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t worth it.”