She wasn’t wrong to worry. Both sieges had not only been public relations disasters for the FBI, they had reportedly inspired countless acts of violence, from the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building and the Boston Marathon to perhaps even the Columbine High School Massacre.

Then again, the FBI had mishandled tip-offs about the Parkland Shooter, Larry Nassar, the Pulse Night Club Shooter, the Texas Terrorist Attack and countless red flags around Russia’s involvement in various misdeeds. Not to mention one of their own informants had just helped a bunch of his buddies set off two bombs at a major urban hospital.

Van seemed to read her mind. “These multi-pronged investigations take money and patience. We’re hoping this latest display will shake more resources out of DC. Novak robbed all of those banks for a reason. They’re sitting on a ton of cash. The chatter points to something big happening.”

“Novak is not necessarily connected to any of it.” Murphy kept tempering Van’s words. You didn’t climb that high in the FBI without being a political animal. “The IPA cannot at this time be definitively linked to anyone but Carter. Yes, we have chatter, but it’s called chatter for a reason. It could be nothing. We don’t leap to conclusions in the Bureau. We build solid cases based upon actionable evidence. Your partner was supposed to go undercover and gather that evidence, but that’s impossible now that they know what he looks like.”

Faith felt a question niggling in the back of her mind. “Why is an agent from the GBI going undercover if this is an FBI investigation?”

Murphy’s eyebrow went up. She was either surprised or impressed.

Van said, “We can’t get the resources. The current climate at the Bureau dictates that white Christian males can’t be terrorists.”

“Aiden.” Murphy’s voice was a warning.

He held up his hands in a shrug. “My grandmother and great grandmother walked out of a Nazi death camp. I tend to take these things a bit more seriously.”

Murphy stood up. “In the hall, please.”

Faith didn’t wait for the door to close behind them. Nor did she try to eavesdrop on the dressing down. She started paging through the files.

The Invisible Patriot Army.

Black-and-white photos showed groups of young white men dressed in tactical gear. Some of them were marching in procession. Others were practicing drills in a boot-camp course with climbing walls and razor wire. Every last one of them was armed with some kind of weapon. Most had two or three. Their belts were strapped with holsters and knife sheaths. AR-15s were slung over their shoulders.

She found the photo of Michelle Spivey in Puerto Rico. The woman had devoted her life to saving people, vaccinating children, stopping pandemics in the most inhospitable parts of the world.

There was another photo pinned to the documents. A selfie showed Michelle with her wife and daughter. The eleven-year-old was ebullient. A Christmas tree was behind them. Newly opened presents were strewn across the couch. The Michelle in the photo had roughly six more months before life as she knew it was over.

Which begged the question—

What did a well-funded, well-trained paramilitary organization want with a woman who specialized in the spread of infectious diseases?

7

Sunday, August 4, 2:26 p.m.

Sara closed her eyes against the darkness. She could feel the vibrations of the road shaking through her body. They were in the back of a box truck now, the sort of thing you rented to move an apartment. Michelle and Sara were handcuffed to rails on opposite sides. Both of them were gagged so they couldn’t communicate with each other or call for help. As if their voices would carry over the truck’s diesel engine and the rumble of endless roads they traveled down.

What this meant in the immediate was that Sara’s Walkie message to Faith about the white van was useless. Two men had met them at a closed gas station off of 285. They were muscle-bound and young, sporting the sort of square-jawed looks that you saw on Army recruitment posters. One drove off in the white van. The other followed him in a nondescript car.

Sara didn’t have to be told that they were going to abandon the van as far away from their true destination as possible. Nor did she have to be told it was a very bad sign that neither man had bothered to conceal his face.

Sara knew too much, and what she didn’t know, she was quickly figuring out.

Dash never raised his voice, but the effect of his words was like a general on the battlefield. Sara had overheard him relaying softly worded instructions into a burner phone as she was being led to the truck. She’d caught some names—Wilkins, Peterson, O’Leary—before Dash had broken the phone in two and tossed it into the woods. Every man that Sara had laid eyes on so far had the bearing of a soldier. Shoulders back. Eyes forward. Hands clenched. They were organized into a command structure. They had committed an act of domestic terrorism against a hospital.

Militia. Freemen. Weathermen. Guerillas. Eco-terrorists. Antifa.

The groups went by different names, but they were all aligned by the same purpose: using violence to bend the rest of America to their will.

Did it matter?

Sara’s world had shrunk to the four walls in which she was trapped. She had no idea how much time had passed since the gas station, but she’d been captive long enough for her thoughts to keep spinning in the same cramped circle.

She worried about Will. She worried that Cathy would not take care of him. She worried about the pain in her wrists from the handcuffs. The sweltering heat depleting fluid from her body. The darkness making her lose track of direction and time. She worried about Will.

Only occasionally did she drop the barrier that kept her thoughts so tightly wound and worry about herself.

Sara knew what was coming next.

Michelle Spivey had been raped and drugged into submission. Even if Carter was waylaid by his injury, there would be others like him, comrades in arms.

There were numbers to the organization.

In the squalid heat of the truck, arms handcuffed above her head, Sara tried to resign herself to the inevitable.

She had survived it once before.

Hadn’t she?

Back in college, Sara had been lucky in her rape.

It felt strange to frame it that way, but Sara was not considering the physical violation. That act had been the most devastating moment of her life until the death of her husband.

The luck came after.

She was a young, educated white woman. She came from a solidly middle-class family. She had at that point in her life only had one sexual partner, her boyfriend from high school. She was more likely to dress in sweatpants than a miniskirt. She seldom wore make-up. She didn’t really drink. She had tried pot once in high school, only to prove to her sister that she could. Most of Sara’s life had been spent with her head in a textbook or her butt in a desk chair.

In other words, there wasn’t a lot of material for the defense lawyer to use in his quest to turn the blame on to Sara.

The attack had happened inside a women’s toilet stall at Grady Hospital. Sara had been handcuffed. Vaginally raped. Stabbed in the side with a serrated hunting knife. She had yelled “no” once before her mouth was duct-taped shut. There was no argument to be made for consent. She couldn’t recall many of the details before or after—that was the nature of trauma—but she could to this day clearly summon the face of the man who had raped her.

The crystal blue eyes.

The long, stringy hair.

The rough beard that smelled of cigarettes and fried food.

The clamminess of his pale skin when he thrust against her.

And still, Sara was lucky that her attacker had been found guilty of rape. That he wasn’t offered a plea deal on a lesser charge. That she was given the opportunity to have her voice heard in court. That the judge wasn’t lenient in his sentencing. That there were other women her attacker had raped, so there was not just one lone woman accusing him but several.

Which mattered so much more than it should.

After the trial, Sara was very lucky that her parents had forced her to move back home. She’d already dropped out of her hard-won neo-natal surgical fellowship. Fallen behind on her bills. Stopped going outside. Stopped eating. Stopped breathing the same, sleeping the same, seeing the world the same as she had before.

Because nothing was the same as before.

When Sara had left for college, she had vowed that she would never live in Grant County again, but she’d found herself grateful for the familiarity. She knew almost everyone in town. Her mother and sister were there to hold her when she was wracked by uncontrollable sobbing. Her father slept on the floor of her bedroom until Sara felt safe enough to be on her own.