“You’re not in any trouble,” Gant said, raising his hand as if it was even possible to calm the fury in this woman’s eyes.
“I know I’m not,” Camille Thibodaux said. “Because I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Be that as it may.” Gant shrugged. “We need to talk to you about a person of interest named Veronica Garcia. Sometimes goes by Ronnie. She a friend of yours?”
“Never heard of her,” Camille Thibodaux said.
“I see,” Benavides sighed. “You know, people like Ronnie Garcia tend to have a short shelf life. And you know what they say about one bad apple. I think it’d be a shame if her problems spilled over into your problems.…”
“I don’t really give a damn about what you think.” Her baby began to squall and she took a moment to reach down and pat him on the head. “It’s okay, sugar. These men just made Mama use a Bible word.” The door swung open a hair farther, allowing Benavides to get his foot inside.
“Here’s how this is going to—” He stopped in mid-sentence, staring at a large family photo that hung on the wall beside a framed black-and-white photo of some Marines from another war. Along with an ungodly number of kids, the studio portrait showed Camille holding the arm of a mountainous USMC gunnery sergeant. The crew cut and black eye patch filled Benavides with immediate dread. This was one of two men who’d bashed out his teeth and blackmailed him into cooperating to help with the escape of the traitor and former director of the CIA, Virginia Ross. He’d never given Benavides his name.
“Thibodaux…” Joey B mused under his breath. So that was his name. It made sense. He fought the growing urge to crow. This Marine Corps shithead had spoken his bullying threats with a Cajun accent. And now he’d gone and gotten himself deployed with no one to look after his sexy little wifey.
“So,” Benavides said, smiling sweetly. He removed his foot from the doorway. “You’ve never heard of Ms. Garcia?”
“I have not,” Camille Thibodaux said, her lips clenched in an obvious lie.
“Okay then.” Benavides shrugged, looking at a baffled Gant. “Someone must have gotten their wires crossed back at HQ. We’ll just be on our way.”
Mrs. Thibodaux slammed the door, leaving the two men standing on her porch.
“What the hell was that all about?” Gant asked.
“This bitch knows something,” Benavides said as they walked back to the Jeep. “But she isn’t going to crack with the direct approach. Trust me on this one, bud. I want to try something with more of a personal touch.”
Chapter 16
Veronica “Ronnie” Garcia sat with six others around a long plastic table, all watching a small flat-screen monitor mounted on the wall at the far end of the bunker. She felt herself tense as the image of two state police helicopters passed across the screen, picked up by the skyward cameras over the wooded compound. The group was deep underground and the earth outside the thick concrete cooled the piped air, forcing each of those in attendance to wear a Windbreaker or light jacket. Ronnie, without thinking, had slipped into a tight, long-sleeved cardigan. It was one of Jericho’s favorites, but the reasons he liked it were the same reasons that would bring her so much grief from their host, the owner of the bunker.
“These overflights are becoming more frequent,” Winfield Palmer said to Garcia from across the table. Garcia and Jericho’s former boss, he’d served as the National Security Advisor before the President and Vice President had been assassinated. Even now, as a fugitive with a terrible head cold, he still carried himself like a man who was completely in charge of the room. It was troubling to Garcia that something like a common cold could find its way past Win Palmer’s concrete persona. He’d been the President’s confidant and advisor, the power behind the power for as long as she’d known him — ever robust and full of confidence-inspiring vigor. He was still strong, despite his illness, but the stress of this life was chipping away at his base. When the coughing subsided, he turned to the elderly man in faded Carhartts who stood slightly behind him against the back wall of the cellar. “Have you heard any chatter around town?”
“Everybody round here knows I hate the G,” the man against the wall said, abbreviating “government” as if he couldn’t bear for the word to cross his lips. His name was Sam Hawthorne and he owned nearly three square miles of the Pennsylvania woodland where Garcia and the others had holed up. At seventy-one, he still stood ramrod straight with big, farmer’s hands that matched a husky, six-foot build. “No one in their right mind would think I’d hide the likes of you. Hell, if you’d told me a year ago that Sam Hawthorne would be aiding and abetting a bunch of DC spies turned Sons of Liberty, I’d said you were full of shit.”
“Sam!” Wilma Hawthorne chided, looking up from where she sat in the corner working over a hooped cross-stitch project. “Watch your mouth. We have guests.” She was an apple-shaped woman with silver hair and a quiet smile.
“Spies from the G,” Sam said under his breath. “Guests my ass.”
A self-proclaimed doomsday prepper, Hawthorne had been suspicious of the federal government during every one of the eleven presidential administrations since he was old enough to make it to a ballot box. The current occupant of the White House validated all his years of ranting, curtailing freedom of the press and tightening the grip on personal freedoms in the name of greater security. When President Drake had issued the executive order creating the Internal Defense Task Force, even the normally pensive and peace-loving Wilma Hawthorne had seen the new secret police force for what it was — an American Gestapo. She had stood up from the television and found her way to the gun safe to strap on her favorite Makarov pistol and was rarely seen without it.
The Hawthornes had spent the last forty-six years building up the rural property Wilma had inherited from her mother. Years spent raising three sons and living a life that was what Sam called “on/off ” the grid — having just enough connectivity to keep from raising suspicion with authorities, but with plenty of safe rooms, underground bunkers, and escape tunnels to keep an intrusive G guessing if they did ever decided to raid the place and take away all his guns. Palmer’s consistent comparison of their movement to the Revolutionary War’s Sons of Liberty seemed to appeal to Hawthorne’s notion of a patriotic fight against the G.
“Likely just a routine flight,” Melissa Ryan, the former Secretary of State, said from the chair on the other side of Garcia. “But I’d suggest a couple of us stay in the rooms below at any given time so we’re all not captured should we get raided.” In her early fifties, Ryan still looked like a cover girl in her formfitting jeans and signature silk blouse under her red Mountain Hard-wear Windbreaker. It was no secret that she and Palmer had been an item for several years. It had broken the hearts of many an eligible bachelor when DC Magazine had named them one of the top most influential couples in the country. In addition to being beautiful, Melissa Ryan was also one of the brightest minds on the planet. If they were going to do anything to bring down the present administration they needed all the brainpower they could cobble together. It was Ryan’s connections that had made the introductions to the Hawthornes, and her particular diplomatic skills that made Hawthorne, if only grudgingly, agree to aid and abet former bureaucrats from the G.
“I agree,” the former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency said. Virginia Ross stood against the concrete wall near the Hawthornes, hands behind her back, listening. “These people are evil, but they are not stupid.” Ross said little but when she did, it carried a lot of weight. A fugitive now, she’d been arrested on trumped-up charges by an IDTF agent named Walter, stripped of her clothing and tortured in an attempt to find Palmer and the others deemed to be a threat to the administration. Garcia and Thibodaux had masterminded her escape. She was now not only on the run, but a celebrity in the underground movement to topple President Hartman Drake and his regime. Ronnie had been part of her rescue, had seen firsthand the effects of the inhuman treatment the poor woman had received at the hands of Agent Walter. The cruelty had only managed to bolster Ross’s resolve to fight.