He used the free time to activate his deck and check in on the two stringers he had working right now. David Allenby was up in Addison today, taking a Californian documentary crew on a tour of an SDF training facility. He’d messaged Manny to let him know they’d gotten through the checkpoints without any issue. Oscar Martinez didn’t have any journalists with him. He was embedded with a Republic of Texas police unit, getting footage from inside a neighborhood that had recently been “liberated” from the Heavenly Kingdom.

There were no new messages from Oscar. His last check-in had been the night before. It was probably nothing, but it concerned Manny nonetheless. What if Oscar got a better offer for his footage? He’d always been loyal before, but if that fuck from the Guardian had gotten to him…

“I’m interested in the Abrams Road bombing,” Reggie told the Colonel, and Manny’s attention swung back to his reporter. That’s an odd thing to ask about. The bombing had occurred two weeks back. It’d been big news for a couple of hours. Manny had paid one of his contacts in Raza Front for a video of a walkthrough of the wreckage. It had brought in about three grand, profit.

“The Abrams Road bombing was not a Martyrdom Operation,” Colonel Milgram sounded almost angry.

“Terribly sorry,” Reggie said, “you’re right of course. There was no driver, so no Martyr. Right?”

“Right,” DeShawn Clark said. He pulled a folded piece of white paper out of his pocket, opened it up, and smoothed it out on the table. It was a map of the DFW area, color coded to show the positions of the various militias in the region. “We operate eight checkpoints on that part of the Richardson Line,” DeShawn said as he pointed to each one. “Five of them border Republic-controlled territory. The traffic from there is mostly autonomous, and those vehicles slave themselves to our traffic management system before they can enter our territory. The other three checkpoints border territory controlled by the ­Martyrs. They don’t see much traffic, and they’re all heavily manned.”

Reggie was quiet for a few seconds. Manny could almost hear the gears turning in the journalist’s head as he struggled to find the words for his next question.

“Would it be fair to say the autonomous checkpoints are less secure, then?”

DeShawn smiled a thin, quiet smile. Hamid grimaced. Colonel ­Milgram responded in a terse voice, “The autonomous checkpoints have fewer defenders. But they border Republic territory. The Martyrs haven’t pulled off an attack on one in quite some time.”

“Was Abrams Road not one such attack?” Reggie looked eager now, like a hound following a scent.

“We don’t know who bombed Abrams Road,” Colonel Milgram said. “No one’s taken credit, but we doubt it was the Martyrs.”