She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and visualized a box. She placed each word inside the box, shut the lid, turned a giant key, and locked it tight.
Then she opened her eyes, pulled out her phone, and typed a quick text message to Mike Rodriguez, her old boss.
Just checking in ... anything new on Hawkeye Slaughter?
A few minutes went by; then the response came back.Call me.
Her heart dropped. This couldn’t be good.
She punched in the number, and he picked up on the first ring.
“Here’s the deal.” Mike always cut right to the chase. She took a deep breath and steeled herself for whatever he was about to say. “Hawkeye is gone.”
“What do you mean, he’sgone?” The question came out an octave too high, shrill and laced with panic.
“He disappeared. He was last seen at an urban prepper expo two weeks ago in Virginia, taking selfies with his many YouTube fans. He said something about going dark to prepare for the ‘Great Unraveling.’ No one has seen him since.”
“So we have no idea where he is?”
Mike sighed. “We think he purchased a property in the Shenandoah Valley, but he did it through an LLC, so it’s harder to trace. He’s much smarter than your average doomsday prophet slash posse comitatus nutjob.”
“Great.” She rubbed her hand across the back of her neck. “In a world filled with psychotic conspiracy theorists, I manage to piss off the smart one.”
“He’s well funded too. Don’t forget that. He sold his check-cashing business right before his wife died, and he now has millions to play with.”
“This is really disturbing, Mike.”
“I know ...” Mike admitted. “But maybe he’s—”
“Taken up yoga and joined an ashram?” she offered hopefully.
“It’s possible.”
“But not probable,” she said, her heart sinking.
“We do have one lead ...”
She heard the pause in his voice, and it made her heart stop. “Yes?”
“Well, we think he may have joined forces with an antitechnology militia with ties to a violent domestic terror group. They just tried to burn a 5G cell phone tower near Richmond.”
“What?” She stared up at the pen marks one of her children had somehow managed to scribble on the ceiling of her SUV. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah. I know. It’s not good,” Mike admitted. “We think this extremist group is running a training camp on the property he purchased. Based on some of the people he follows on Twitter—I mean X—and some of the things he’s posted ... well, we think he may have invited these groups to join him physically this time, not just ideologically.”
She rubbed her temple, an ineffective attempt to ward off the early pricking of a massive stress-induced headache. “What kind of militia?”
“Oh, you know, garden-variety insanity. Anti–law enforcement. Anti–federal government. Anti-technology. Preparing for the coming revolution. That kind of thing.”
“But I still don’t understand why—”
“He lost his wife,” Mike said gently. “They were married for twenty-eight years. Six months before she died, he lost his only child in a car accident. The kid was texting while driving. And as far as we can tell, those losses kind of ... put him over the edge. Now he’s an angry, violent man with a lot of money and nothing left to lose. And he blames technology for his son’s death. He’s started threatening tech-company CEOs. And he blames you for the loss of his wife.”
“But I didn’t—”
“Kill anyone?” he interrupted. “Of course you didn’t. But you work for the federal government, and he needs a target for his rage. His wife could have had that heart attack sitting in her driveway. Instead she had it while sitting in the traffic jam we created by shutting down the Fourteenth Street Bridge.”
“The traffic jamIcreated,” she said bitterly.
