“What? I don’t hear you.”
The grumbles were louder this time.
“This is a rally and a march, boys. It’s not a street fight. If the slopes make it a fight, okay. Defend yourselves and each other. Throw the little commies through a brick wall for all I care. Just know that when the cops come and they find you armed, that’s a felony. We have lawyers on speed dial, ready to go, but if you get busted for possession of a weapon, you are not getting out tonight, and maybe not for a long time. I need to hear you on this. I don’t want to see anybody put away. It’s bad for you, and it’s a bad look for the organization. Got it? Come on!”
“Got it!” someone shouted.
“Yo!”
“We got it, man.”
Kyle smiled. “Good. Now let’s go kick some ass.”
The signs were piled in the back. Most of them said America Is Ours! One of them said Chinks Go Home! That was Kyle’s sign. If his men were the sharpened point, he was the drop of poison at the very tip.
He was twenty-nine years old, and had been an organizer with Gathering Storm for just over two years. It was his dream job. Where did he find his recruits? Weight rooms, almost exclusively. Gold’s Gym. Planet Fitness. YMCA. Places where big strong guys hung out, guys who’d had just about enough. Enough censorship. Enough of the thought police. Enough of the good jobs going overseas. Enough of the race mixing.
Enough of the religion of multiculturalism being rammed down their throats.
If someone had told Kyle five years ago that he was going to pull together groups of men – the best, the toughest, the most aggressive young white men he could find – and that they were going to put the fear of the Lord into the people dragging this country down… that they were going to restore America to greatness… and that he was going to get paid to do this? Well, Kyle would have said that person was an idiot.
Yet here he was.
And here were his boys.
And their man had just been elected President of the United States.
There was nothing but daylight up ahead, and they were going to run a long, long way. And anybody who got in front of them, who tried to stop them or even slow them down – anybody like that was going to get mowed under. That’s just how it was.
The rear doors of the van opened, and the boys jumped out, grabbing their signs as they went. Kyle was the last one. He stepped onto the street, the night seeming to glow around him. It was cold out – even snowing a little – but Kyle was too ramped to feel it. The street was narrow, with four-story tenements crowding it on either side. All of the neon storefront signs were in Chinese, tangles of meaningless gibberish – impossible to read, impossible to understand.
Was this still America? You bet it was. And people spoke English here.
The vans were parked in a line. Big damn white boys in black shirts were everywhere, a bouncing, writhing mass of them. They were an invasion force, like Vikings on a coastal raid. They wielded their signs like battle-axes. Their blood was up.
A crowd of tiny, startled Asians looked on in… what?
Shock? Horror? Fear?
Oh yes, all of these.
The first chant began, a little tame for Kyle’s taste, but it would do for a start.
“America… is ours!”
The boys found their voices and the volume jumped a notch.
“AMERICA… IS OURS!”
Kyle flexed his arms. He flexed his upper back, and his round shoulders, and his legs. This was a rally, all right, and that’s what he had told his men. But he hoped it became more than that. He’d been holding his anger back for what felt like a long time.
Rallies were good, but he really just wanted to crack some heads.
Within two minutes, he got his wish. As the line of marchers moved down the street, maybe fifty feet ahead of him, some shoving started.
A Stormer took a Chinese man by both shoulders and pushed him into a display of pocketbooks. The Chinese man fell across the display, which collapsed instantly. Two more Chinese men jumped on the Stormer. Suddenly Kyle was running. He dropped his sign and burst through the crowd.
He punched a Chinese to the ground, then waded into a group of them, swinging hard. His fists crunched bone.
And there was only more, he knew, to come.
CHAPTER NINE
9:15 p.m.
Ocean City, Maryland
“Not looking too good there,” Luke said.
The elevator was all carpeting and glass walls. A long double line of buttons ran along a metal panel. He caught sight of his reflection in the concave security mirror in an upper corner. It was a strange, distorted, funhouse view of him, totally at odds with the reflection on the glass walls. The normal glass showed a tall man in early middle-age, very fit, deep crow’s feet around the eyes and the beginnings of gray in his short blond hair. His eyes seemed ancient.
Staring into them, he could suddenly see himself as an old, old man, lonely and afraid. He was alone in this world – more alone than he had ever been. It had somehow taken him two full years to realize that. His wife was dead. His parents were long gone. His boy was hardened against him. There was no one in his life.
A little while ago, in the car, just before he stepped into this elevator, he had dug out Gunner’s old cell phone number. He felt certain that Gunner still had that number. The boy would have kept the same number even after moving in with grandparents, even after getting the best new iPhone available. Luke felt sure of it – Gunner kept his old number because he wanted more than anything to hear from his father.
Luke had sent a simple text message to the old number.
Gunner, I love you.
Then he had waited. And waited. Nothing. The message had gone into the void, and nothing had returned. Luke didn’t even know if it was the right number.
How had it come to this?
He didn’t have time to ponder the answer. The elevator opened directly into the foyer of the apartment. There was no hallway. There were no other doors except the double doors in front of him.
The doors opened and Mark Swann stood there.
Luke soaked in the sight of him. Tall and thin, with long sandy hair and round John Lennon glasses. His hair was pulled into a ponytail. He had aged in two years. He was heavier than before, mostly around the midsection. His face and neck seemed thicker. His T-shirt had the words SEX PISTOLS across the front in letters that could have been used to write a ransom note. He wore blue jeans, with yellow-and-black checkerboard Converse All-Star sneakers on his feet.
Swann smiled, but Luke could easily see the strain in it. Swann wasn’t happy to see him. He looked like he had eaten a bad fish.
“Luke Stone,” he said. “Come on in.”
Luke remembered the apartment. It was big and hyper-modern. There were two floors, open concept, with a ceiling twenty feet above their heads. A steel and cable staircase went up to the second floor, where it connected with a catwalk. There was a living room here with a large white sectional couch. There had been an abstract painting behind the couch last time – crazy, angry red and black splotches five feet across – Luke couldn’t quite remember what it looked like. In any event, it was gone now.
The two men shook hands, then hugged awkwardly.
“Albert Helu?” Luke said, using the name of the Swann alias who owned the apartment.
Swann shrugged. “If you like. You can call me Al. That’s what everyone around here calls me. Can I get you a beer?”
“Sure. Thank you.”
Swann disappeared through a