Liberty's Last Stand (58 page)

“He's a monster,” Molina whispered. “He loathes white people. He wants to rule a nonwhite America. He's willing to ignite a race war, burn America, and rule in the ashes.”

“And you didn't think it would work.” That wasn't a question, but a statement.

“I didn't,” Molina said.

“You argued, unsuccessfully, and only managed to convince him you were disloyal and a danger, so he sent you to the gulag.”

Grafton leaned back in his seat, his eyes fixed on Molina. “You were lucky that sadist Sluggo Sweatt decided to have his fun with me before he got to you, because Soetoro wanted you dead. But Soetoro gave Sweatt his priorities. First the scapegoat, then the traitor.”

“You don't know that,” Sal Molina whispered.

“I deduce it. I thought it was a stroke of luck that FEMA brought me to the concentration camp here at Dawson, because that is where we—my friends and I—agreed to rendezvous two weeks after Soetoro declared martial law. Then Sweatt began his program of forcing a confession. The irony is, I was and am guilty of a conspiracy to remove the president of the United States from power, which was Sweatt's accusation. I thought it likely he would beat me to death.

“Not that my death would have made any difference. If I weren't here, the others still would be. There are two thousand five hundred men and women here at Camp Dawson, and they are committed to the hilt. It's victory or death for them. If they don't kill Soetoro, he will kill them. They understand that.”

Grafton smacked the table again. “Yocke accused me of being ruthless. I
am
. The life of the United States is at stake. If I had thought it could be done, I would have shot Soetoro myself.” He pointed his finger at Molina. “If I thought your death would move Soetoro one inch away from the White House, make an iota of difference, I would shoot you myself, here and now. Do you understand?”

Molina bit his lip.

Grafton smacked the table again, and the map fell off the blackboard. “Answer me!” he roared.

“Yes.”

“Consider yourself a prisoner. If you try to escape, you will be shot.” He turned to Travis. “Lock him in one of those cells in the concentration camp. See that he is guarded twenty-four hours a day and arrange to have him fed.”

“Yes, sir.” Travis Clay grabbed Molina's arm, hoisting him from the chair in which he sat. I pulled out my .45.

“Get rid of the web belt,” I told Molina. “Take it off.” He was wearing a pistol.

He reached down, released the buckle, and let the belt fall on the floor.

“Your leather belt too,” Grafton said. “We'll save you for a firing squad.”

The belt came off and went onto the floor.

Molina could barely walk, so Travis almost dragged him.

THIRTY-ONE

“Y
ou could have confided in me,” I told Grafton.

He looked surprised. “I told Sarah to tell you about the eavesdropping scheme. Did she tell you?”

“Well, yes, but not about all this other stuff.”

“Tommy, you have a good brain between those ears and you had better start using it.”

You would think that after all these years around Grafton I would know how to keep my mouth shut. One of these days I am going to get that trick down.

“The local radio station is back on the air,” Sarah told the boss. That female could read minds. “I don't know if the power is on or if they are using a generator.”

“Okay,” Grafton said. “Tommy, take Sarah over there. She is going to put some of that stuff from the White House on the air. She has winnowed it down to about sixty hours. Convince the radio staff to do it, and then set up an ambush around the station and transmission tower. Use Travis and Willis Coffee. Take whatever weapons you need. If the military is still in the game, they'll take the tower out with a Hellfire or commandos. If it's FEMA or Homeland, expect a few truckloads of thugs. Don't take any prisoners—we don't have anywhere to keep them. The beds in the concentration camp are being used as barracks.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sarah, you know what to do.”

“This will set off an explosion in the White House,” she said flatly.

“I hope. Infuriated, frightened men don't think very well. Go.”

Sarah repacked her computer and we left, with Willis Coffee trailing along behind. We picked up Travis ten minutes later and took my stolen FEMA pickup truck.

Downtown Kingwood was a typical American small town, in my opinion. A Walmart on the edge of town had pretty much turned the old downtown into a wasteland of vacant stores interspersed with insurance agencies, lawyers' offices, gift and craft shops. All of them looked closed, and there were no parked cars.

The radio station's offices were in one of the old storefronts on the east side of the street in the middle of the block. The transmission tower was obviously offsite, probably on a nearby hill. I parked right in front, and Sarah and I strolled in while Willis and Travis, each with an M4 in their hands, walked to the adjacent corners.

The lady at the front desk was still on the right side of forty and had a cute hairdo and a ready smile. She even had on a plastic name tag: “Sue.”

“Good afternoon,” she said brightly. The studio was right behind her, visible through a double-pane window. A woman was in there talking into a boom mike, and a young guy in a ponytail was fielding telephone calls. We could hear the station feed over a hidden loudspeaker system, background noise. Above the window was a large clock with a sweep second hand.

“Are you with the government?”

“Not anymore. We were federal employees and left under a cloud.” I smiled.

“Really!” she said, her eyes widening.

I confided in a low voice, “I stole our truck.” Then I introduced Sarah and myself.

The desk lady stared. I continued smoothly, as if stealing a government vehicle needs no explanation. “How long has the power been back on?”

“Since yesterday morning. We got back on the air as quickly as we could.”

“Don't you have an emergency generator?”

“We ran out of gas for it. The station manager is down waiting in line at the filling station to fill some cans now.” With only a little prompting from us, she chattered on. The station was licensed at one thousand watts, sunrise to sunset. The transmitter was outside town on Mount Morgan, named after a local farmer who leased the site to the station. “He's such a nice gentleman,” she added.

“We should probably wait for the manager,” Sarah said, glancing at me. “When do you expect him back?”

“In a little while, certainly, unless the line is too long or the filling station runs out of gasoline. We close the office here at five.” It was ten till. “And go off the air at . . .” she glanced at her calendar. “. . . seven thirty-two.”

There was a hallway that looked as if it went all the way through the building, and a door at the end of it. The door opened and a portly man of medium height with a fringe of gray hair around a white pate came bustling through it. He opened the door to the studio and went in. In less than a minute, he came out. He addressed Sue. “I got the last of the gas at Plunkett's. I just told Jan. She'll put it on the air immediately.”

“These folks want to talk to you,” Sue told him. She said his name, Howard Shinaberry. He glanced at us, at our web belts and holsters, and waited.

“Sarah Houston,” I said, nodding at my companion, “and I'm Tommy Carmellini. Sarah wants to talk to you in your office.”

He shrugged and led the way down the hall to another door. Sarah followed with her computer case.

I smiled at Sue, then walked down the hallway and went out back. There was an alley and a parking lot. Three cars and an old Chevy pickup were parked there. I surveyed the alley. All I could see was a cat wandering around and a bunch of garbage cans. The gas cans were in the back of the truck, so I unloaded them and put them in the hallway.

I closed the alley door and waited by the front desk with Sue. “Does Mr. Shinaberry own the station?”

“Oh, no. He's just the manager. Three doctors own it.”

“Local doctors?”

“They live in Maryland, Bethesda I think.”

Sue chattered on. She was a local and had worked at the station for five years come November. She liked it. She met such interesting people. “Do you have an ad you want us to air?”

“Something like that,” I replied.

She got busy locking the cash register and putting things away. Five o'clock came and went.

“If you want to go home, that's all right,” I said. “I'll tell Mr. Shinaberry.”

“I'll just wait, in case he has something else for me to do.” She was obviously getting nervous. I didn't blame her. I gave her my best innocent smile that had melted a thousand hearts.

At nine after five, Mr. Shinaberry and Sarah came from the office out to the front desk. She paused beside me and said, “He doesn't want to do it.”

“Our license is up for renewal in three months,” Shinaberry explained. “That stuff on that computer is dynamite. The FCC—”

I went out the front door to the sidewalk and gave Travis Clay the Hi sign. He came walking back, his M4 cradled in his arms. We went back into the radio station together.

Shinaberry was explaining to Sarah why the owners would fire him if the file on the computer were put out on the air. “I know the president's voice, and it certainly sounds like him, but if the file is fake, airing it would be libel, and if it's real I can't imagine how that recording was obtained legally—”

“You know about the rebels down at Camp Dawson?” I asked as I rubbed my sore neck. I realized I was doing it and stopped.

“The general in charge—at least he said he was a general—was in here and asked us not to mention all the people there over the air. And we haven't. Haven't said a peep about Camp Dawson. I gave our staff strict instructions.”

“This gentleman is Travis Clay. Travis, take Mr. Shinaberry over to Dawson and let him talk to Jake Grafton. Use Mr. Shinaberry's truck. It's out back.”

“Now, see here—” Shinaberry protested.

Travis put his hand on the guy's shoulder and smiled. “Don't be difficult,” he said. “You can drive.”

After they left, I suggested to Sue that it was time for her to go home. “We'll lock up when we leave, after Mr. Shinaberry gets back.”

She was obviously relieved. She grabbed her purse without saying good-bye, trotted down the hallway, and closed the alley door behind her.

“It's all yours,” I said to Sarah. “Send Jan out and get that guy in the ponytail to show you how the equipment works.”

Sarah took her computer and went into the studio. After ten minutes the announcer lady came out, frowned at me, and left via the alley door too. Ponytail was busy with a thumb drive Sarah had given him. Then Sarah got on the mike.

“We are going to air segments of a recording that was made at the White House over the previous six months. Not all of it, but segments. The voices you will hear are those of President Soetoro, his staff, and other public officials. There are about sixty hours of recorded material, a small fraction of the whole, and this station will be on the air day and night until the entire sixty hours has played, then we will run it again. Josh, let it rip.”

And he did.

Barry Soetoro's voice came over the loudspeaker. Three minutes later the telephone rang. I answered it with the station's call letters.

A man's voice: “Where in the hell did you guys get that tape?”

“How does it sound?” I asked.

“Holy shit! President Soetoro said that?”

“He did.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“He didn't have anything to do with it,” I told him and put the phone back in its cradle. It rang again. I figured that we were going to get a lot of calls, so I unplugged the phone. I looked into the studio and saw that Sarah was doing the same thing to the phone in there. I could hear the phone ringing in the manager's office, so I walked down and unplugged that one too.

Tobe Baha, the Secret Service sniper, was having dinner that evening at his hotel on Congress Avenue in Austin. It was a nice hotel, perfect for expense-account executives and rich oilmen bringing their wives or girlfriends to see the bright lights of the big city. Tobe thought his odd hours would bring less notice here and he would have to answer fewer well-meaning questions than he would have at some cheap motel on the interstate where guests rarely stayed more than a night or two.

So he was studying the menu and contemplating ordering a steak when three men entered the dining room, looked around, and seeing him, walked purposefully toward his table. They were in civilian clothes wearing sports coats, and from the slight bulges he could see that they were packing pistols in their armpits. After years in the Secret Service, he could spot an armed man at fifty yards.

The man in front seated himself on Tobe's left and put an iPad on the table. The other two took the remaining chairs.

“Good evening, Mr. Baha,” the man on his left said. He was the older of the three, in his mid-fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair getting thin on top. “I'm Colonel Frank Tenney. I'm the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety. These gentlemen are colleagues of mine.”

Tobe tried to hide his surprise, and did fairly well, he thought. He was registered at this hotel under a false name, so the use of his real name put him on notice.

“Are you carrying this evening?” Tenney asked, just making conversation.

Tobe tried to look surprised. “Of course not.”

Tenney just nodded. The waitress came over, delivered Tobe's Scotch on the rocks, passed out menus to the new arrivals, and inquired about drinks. The lawmen all ordered iced tea.