Their host was Lee Wolf. Paul Duquesne had chosen him for transfer to Weldonville prison to be one of the organizers of the July 19 breakout because Wolf was a leader of a coalition of white supremacist prison organizations. He had been convicted of the federal crimes of manufacture of explosives, arson, and conspiracy to commit murder. He had also been charged with simple murder, but the U.S. attorney had dropped that one because it wasn’t clear that he had pulled the trigger, and a weak charge might taint the other charges. The sentences for what they could prove would make him over 150 years old before his release date.

Lee Wolf was not especially unhappy about the deaths of the five men who had been in the concrete house in California. He had been a rival and an enemy of Martin Ortega’s, because he didn’t like Hispanic people of any sort, but particularly not Mexican prison gangs. At Weldonville, both men had seen the practicality of a temporary cessation of hostilities until after July 19. This had ensured a majority of violent prison organizations would participate.

Lee Wolf had been living in the new compound of the Swift Sword congregation at Ararat for the two years since the prison break. The original compound had been in Oklahoma, but the explosions, fires, and other activities that had ended in the conviction of Lee Wolf and a few others had prompted the survivors to disband and then reappear in the Ozarks, where there were lakes, mountains, forests, and a number of old towns where they could send foragers to buy supplies without attracting too much attention.

At Ararat, Lee Wolf was often called Pastor Lee, or sometimes just the Pastor. When he described the compound at Ararat and his place in it to his fellow escapees, the others all agreed to travel there to talk. One by one, the other five arrived by car, all of their license plates from other states. They were Timothy McKinney, Edison Leonard, Joseph Lambert, Lonny Mann, and James Holliman.

After they had been installed in a building that was used for storage but had been outfitted with bunks, they went to a smaller, simple wooden building and sat around Lee Wolf’s table. They talked about how good it had been to have two years of freedom. They all implied that they were thriving but didn’t say enough about their new operations to make them vulnerable. None of them forgot that the other five were, after all, some of the most dishonest and vicious men they had ever met.

The one who opened the serious part of the conversation was Ed Leonard. “With the exception of Lee, we’ve each come a very long way to get here. We wouldn’t have come if we didn’t believe what Reggie Varga was saying. So what do you think is going on?”