Shoreline Read online

  Schacht turned and directed the rest of the group outside to form a perimeter around the house, concentrated by the stairs leading down the bank.

  Anna froze, holding up a hand to Nora and Bree where they were on the stairs. “I’m glad you’re both okay. I’m going to ask that you sit right there on the stairs until we can take some notes and digitize this scene, okay?”

  The male agents held their positions in the foyer, surveying the damage and murmuring to each other.

  Bree frowned as she watched Anna leave. “Where’s she going?”

  “Anna, in addition to being a super tough agent, is our photographer person. I’m thinking she went out to get her camera.”

  “She doesn’t look super tough. She looks a little like a Strawberry Shortcake doll.”

  Nora pursed her lips. “And you look a little like a Barbie doll. I’m trying not to hold it against you.”

  Bree laughed. “NRA Barbie!”

  Nora burst out laughing. “Home Invasion Barbie! Little miss crack-shot from the second floor.”

  Schacht, Ford, and Chid looked up at them where they sat together laughing on the sixth stair.

  “What’s so funny?” Schacht asked.

  “Brianna Ellis, aged 16, meet Special Agent in Charge Schacht, Special Agent Ford, and Special Agent Chidambaram. Bree here used a Luger rifle to shoot a very bad guy in the head … from the window of her bedroom,” Nora said. “She saved my life.”

  All three had the good sense to look suitably impressed.

  Nora continued, “She needs some kind of Instagrammable commendation, SAC Schacht. Stat.”

  “I promise,” he said very seriously, “that I will see to something that recognizes her action just as soon as we are not in the middle of a crisis.”

  Bree smiled brilliantly.

  “But you’re going to have to bear with us for a minute. Do you mind if we spend an hour or so sorting ourselves out here?”

  She nodded enthusiastically.

  “I’m going to need you to park your cell phone with us for a while, though. Okay, Brianna?”

  She nodded much less enthusiastically at this, but managed to say, “Okay.”

  Nora looked at Schacht gratefully, then gave a nod toward the group outside. “Glad to see we got some backup now.”

  He nodded. “Yes. Our media liaison is still downtown, and I left several of the Pittsburgh agents onsite at the synagogue. The local bomb squad is a little irritated with us right now, got a little defensive over territory since I inflicted the DC crew on them.”

  Nora said, “Abe seems pretty level-headed. He’ll recover.”

  Schacht continued, “There’s another Philadelphia agent currently on his way, Nora. Just to … let you know.”

  Nora flushed, understanding the import of Schacht’s words.

  “Seemed to think that our ongoing war on drugs back home warranted his attention less than this madness.”

  Nora shrugged. “They come for the madness, they stay for the…” Her voice trailed off, unable to fill in the blank.

  Anna, who was by this time trolling through the room with her camera, supplied, “Sunsets. We have amazing sunsets here.”

  “There ya go,” Nora said.

  She saw that Ford was on the phone, presumably calling in the coroner. She leaned over the railing and mentioned there was another guy in bad shape upstairs who might require an ambulance. She refused to say it in a way that might suggest to Ford that he should rush that request.

  Sheila finally appeared, haggard, her blazer exceedingly wrinkled and sweat-stained. She looked up at Nora and a small smile played across her lips. “Well, Special Agent Khalil. Looks like you made a lot of people sorry they chose to abduct you.”

  * * *

  “What the fuck is this?” Mr. Ellis, slightly balding, slightly paunchy, very flushed, stood clutching a bowling bag and staring at the mayhem in his living room.

  Nora tried to look at the scene with his eyes. Front door scarred and unhinged. Four different windows adorned with spider-webbing from the passage of bullets. The sliding glass doors shattered. A long, near-contiguous red blood stain on the living room floor where three bodies had lain. The pseudo-suede sleeper sofa riddled with bullet holes. Six federal agents standing around the living room; eight out keeping watch on the lawn. His daughter Brianna, light of his eyes, in blood-spattered pajamas, cheerfully holding a coffee pot.

  Bree was the first to respond. “Those assholes down the beach, Daddy. You were right about them. Total douches.”

  Mr. Ellis fought for composure and words. He plunked his bowling bag on the floor and crossed to embrace his daughter. She held the coffee pot out wide so it wouldn’t spill.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked gruffly. “Is that your blood?”

  “No, Nora kicked a guy’s ass who was trying to kill me though. It was kind of awesome. So, yeah, his blood, not mine. I was gonna change but I figured I needed to take a picture of it first. Oh, and Daddy, I totally killed this guy who was about to shoot Nora in the head. I used the Luger! And then all these FBI guys were like, we have to launch an assault on the crazies down the beach, so I’m like, oh, I’ll make you coffee!”

  Tears of relief were leaking out of Mr. Ellis’s eyes as he patted his daughter’s hair, hugging her, releasing her, then pulling her close again.

  Nora knew what was coming though. She counted down to herself.

  Mr. Ellis kissed his daughter’s head, then whirled on them.

  “Are you people out of your goddam minds?”

  Schacht crossed to him, offering his badge, and asked gently if they could sit in the den and discuss the matter. Nora thought she heard him mention compensation for any and all damage to his home and property as the two walked away.

  She and Bree exchanged a look. “You want some coffee?” the girl asked with a grin.

  Nora laughed. “Do you have tea?”

  “Ooh, tea!” Chid perked up, then came to stand next to them, extending his hand to Bree, whom he’d been ignoring until then. “I’m Chid. Tea would make my day.”

  Bree gave Nora a who’s the weirdo look, then went to track down a kettle.

  “Nora, we need more details from you,” Sheila was saying. Her face looked positively gray. She had aged in the past two days.

  “We’ve narrowed it down to two possibilities. There’s a fifty-acre tract of land about ten miles east of here that belongs to a Joseph Geyer. It’s zoned for a house and a barn, not three barns, like you said.”

  Anna looked up from her laptop, and Nora could read the response tempting her tongue. Something about violating zoning ordinances through stockpiling weapons. Sheila saw her look, but directed her to work up a quick bio on Geyer.

  “The other possibility is slightly further on, five miles beyond Geyer’s land, a property in the name of Emmett Mertens.”

  “It’s always the Emmetts,” Ford said knowingly.

  “Really?” Nora asked, interested.

  “What about barns?” Anna asked.

  “Horse farm, apparently. Two barns on this one,” Sheila replied, but Ford had his laptop open. “Google Earth?”

  Nora shook her head as she peered at the horse farm. “This one’s all wrong. Not enough trees.” She waited while the camera moved west. She leaned forward. “That’s it. Barn with a silo, two more barns, house fronting the lake.”

  “Surprised they didn’t cover it with camo.”

  “Nothing surprises me about how brazen this whole thing is,” Nora said. “Are there beach stairs?” She leaned over Ford’s shoulder, realigning the Google Earth camera. “Yes. Okay,” she said, straightening. “That’s it. Let’s go? Can we go? Can we go now?” She said all this as she accepted a mug of tea from Bree.

  Schacht had just emerged from the den with a significantly calmer Mr. Ellis. “There’s no we,” Schacht said. “This is where CIRG comes in.”

  “Then what are you waiting for? Can’t you give them the go-ahead?”

&
nbsp; “Of course, but you have to understand that this means they will be going in with their Hostage Rescue Team first and foremost. It could take a very long time. Force will be the very last thing on the list of strategies.”

  Nora turned her back on him and walked away.

  “This is serious, Nora, I’m sorry. This is much bigger than you realize,” Ford said. “We don’t want another Waco.”

  “These people are armed to the teeth, Ford. I saw it with my own eyes. I’ve got the bruise from the round that hit me in the back,” she patted her lower back.

  “And a pretty good shiner on your left eye,” Chid noted.

  Nora pointed to her eye, having forgotten all about it. “Plus, April Lewis is being held hostage. A federal agent is being held hostage. What else do you need?”

  “Negotiation. More intel. Are there kids on the compound? If so, where are they being held? We need a better sense of what we’re facing,” Ford said. “They won’t just launch an attack on American soil without the attorney general’s permission, and the attorney general will not give permission until every peaceful avenue has been exhausted.”

  “You saw the videos, man!” Nora said, trying again to keep from shouting. “They declared war on the federal government!”

  “We hear you, Nora. We all know this. We’ve seen what’s been going on. But we have got to find a peaceful resolution or it’s going to be a slaughter, and that slaughter is going to breed generations of haters who felt like we did the wrong thing.”

  Nora wilted. “Come on, man. I think they’re going to kill Pete. April Lewis has money. Pete is just … Pete. Representative of the federal government. They killed a judge for as much, and he was a little old man.”

  Ford leaned forward, as dispassionate as Nora was agitated. “It’s out of our hands.”

  Nora looked to Anna for support. She was listening, frowning, her reading glasses perched on the end of her nose.

  “CIRG does nothing but this, all day, every day,” Sheila said. “Trust them.”

  Nora walked immediately over to Schacht. “We can’t just leave him there,” she implored.

  “Nora, we can’t just bust in there when we don’t know what they have stockpiled,” Schacht answered. “With the amount of cash taken from the bank they could have bought several rocket launchers, innumerable M-16s, grenades … The U-Haul at the synagogue contained almost as much ammonium nitrate and nitromethane as Oklahoma. God only knows what could go off if the wrong rounds hit the wrong storage facility.”

  She struggled to suppress a white-hot fury. “I promised him I’d be back for him,” she said, working hard not to shout.

  Schacht’s calm had no calming effect on her as he replied, “And so you will, but there’s no point in getting you and all of us killed in the process—that would be to their benefit, I’m sure you agree.”

  Nora leaned her head against the wall, trying hard not to curse at the Special Agent in Charge.

  “More than this,” Schacht continued, “you have to be aware that they could be baiting us.”

  Nora glared at Schacht. “What do you mean?” she demanded.

  “Look,” he said. “Nothing did more for the white militia cause than what happened at Waco. To provoke a confrontation, to make us invade that property and fire on Americans, that is gold for this organization from an advertising standpoint. The corpses of the Waco children radicalized more people than anything else the government has ever done.”

  “Hey, I studied Waco, alright? I’m not asking you to go in on the suspicions of some UPS man. These people hunted me like a dog. And we’ve seen the results of their weapons-stockpiling for the past two days. Assault rifles and bombs … the case for taking them down is airtight.”

  Ford snapped, “Which is another reason to let CIRG do what it does best.”

  “Easy, kids,” Schacht said. “As we were saying, Nora, it’s clear to us that they were lying in wait for you and Pete. It was inescapable that we would find that house and find that tunnel. There are only so many places on this shoreline that we can look, only so many places that are big enough and remote enough to support this sort of activity.”

  “Why that house?” Nora asked suddenly. “Is there some connection?”

  “None so far. It’s listed as being owned by the Benedictine nuns. It was a soup kitchen for a while and has stood empty for much longer,” Anna said. She had clearly already looked it up when they were initially deciding whether or not they needed a warrant to enter so they could search for Pete and Nora.

  “Why is there a tunnel leading out of its basement?”

  “Maybe it was part of the Underground Railroad,” said Anna. “Erie was a stopover on the way to Canada for a lot of runaway slaves.”

  Chid blinked skeptically at this, then lapsed into contemplative silence.

  “Whatever its original reason for having a tunnel,” said Schacht, “the point is, whoever picked the house, Nora, picked it for the tunnel, and probably even picked the synagogue as a target so they could use the tunnel. They wanted to abduct one or two agents, and we think they did so to bait us. Which is why we’re going to be extra cautious. End of story.”

  Nora sank back onto the Ellises’ couch, feeling overwhelmed. “So you’re telling me that either way, whether I’d gotten out to tell you or not, they’d have been expecting you to find them and launch an attack?”

  Schacht and Ford looked at each other, and Schacht nodded. “It’s reasonable, Nora.”

  “Probably they were hoping for the Third Day, though,” Chid said. “In fact, I would bet everything on it.”

  Nora regarded him, frowning. “Because everything goes up in flames in the fourth opera?”

  “Valhalla burns,” said Chid simply.

  Schacht asked, “Did they photograph you? Badge shot?”

  Nora nodded, remembering.

  “See, we didn’t get that yet,” Sheila confirmed. “They were holding on to it. I think this theory is sound.”

  Nora looked at her colleagues and then at her hands.

  Sheila walked over to her and squatted down. “We’re all worried about Pete, Nora. I swear. But for this moment there is nothing anyone can do. You’ve had a hell of a day and night. I’m giving you a direct order: You need to go home. You need to rest. We have to defer to CIRG on this one. They will let us know what we can do and when we can do it. Those of us who weren’t abducted and hunted down by a crazed militia will stay close to the compound. In the meantime you are to sleep, wake up, head to the office, and try to find solutions from there.”

  Nora looked from her to Schacht.

  “Listen to your SSRA,” said Schacht.

  Nora sighed, feeling defeated.

  Bree called out from the kitchen, “That’s bullshit, Nora. Take your little Glock and go rescue your friend!”

  “Go to your room, Bree,” said her still ashen-faced father.

  She gave him a devious grin. “Can’t, Daddy. There’s white supremacist blood, like, all over the place.”

  * * *

  It was approaching midnight when they left the Ellis home; it was truly much the worse for wear for her having been there. They left several of the Pittsburgh crew on the Ellises’ lawn. Anna, Schacht, and Sheila piled into Anna’s SUV and headed to rendezvous with the CIRG command team. Nora was glad to hear the sound of the SWAT helicopter splitting the still night sky as they stepped outside.

  The air smelled sweet and moonlight spilled onto the lawn and the grapevines beyond. Bree stood on her front stoop and called to Nora as she started to get into Chid’s rental minivan.

  “Nora!”

  Nora turned back to meet Bree halfway. She had come out in her bare feet, clutching her newly reclaimed phone in one hand and Nora’s Kevlar vest in the other.

  “Hey, if you need, like, a sorcerer’s apprentice or something, you could call me in,” she said.

  Nora took the vest from her and gave her a quick hug. “You did great tonight. No talking abou
t it on the Internet, though, okay? Lives are at stake.”

  Bree nodded. “I get it. My dad sorted me out.”

  “Okay,” Nora said, proffering a fist.

  Bree bumped it. “Imma look you up at your office in town, okay? We can get some mani-pedis or something.”

  Nora laughed. “That is exactly what Home Invasion Barbie does in her downtime!”

  After hugging the girl once more, Nora got back into the van and gave Chid and Ford her address. Ford was still working on his laptop from the front seat of the car as they drove her back into town. Despite herself, she fell asleep in the backseat. She awoke with a start when they pulled up in front of her place.

  “You gonna be alright, Nora?” Chid was asking.

  She nodded sleepily. “Yeah, I’m good.”

  “Alright, we’re gonna go back to the office and let Maggie know she can go home. You’ll come there when you get a little rest?”

  “Yes, assuming all hell doesn’t break loose.”

  “You remember orders: even if it does. Sleep.”

  “Yes,” she answered. She was suddenly conflicted. She had never offered her place over to any man other than Ben. “Do you—do you need a place to sleep awhile?” she asked, hoping desperately they would say no.

  “We’ve been told about the Room of Requirement,” answered Chid. “That’s all we need, right, Derek? Half an hour here or there and we’re good to go.”

  “Philly boys. Tough as nails,” said Ford, in a monotone.

  Nora nodded. “Alright, Philly boys. See you soon.”

  She slid the heavy door of the minivan back into place, then walked up the front walk to her place.

  Nora pulled the spare key from behind the crumbly brick and opened the door. She gave the van a completely unnoticed wave and shut the door once again behind her.

  She knew instantly that something was wrong. The foyer’s inner door was slightly ajar.

  She froze. Her hand flew to where a holster should be. She remembered instantly that she had no gun, no phone. She sighed, furious with herself, and cast futile glances out the door to where the van had been before it drove away. Finally she readied her fists as she pushed into the dim living room.