Peach squirmed through the window and threw herself outside.

She was free, she was falling. Her body twisted in mid-air. The Gulf dune roared up to meet her face.

9

I’m back. Miss me?

Cab unfolded a copy of the newspaper photograph that Caprice had given him, with the warning scrawled in the thick ink of a red Sharpie. He held the paper so that Hamilton Brock, the leader of the Liberty Empire Alliance, could see it. The two men sat in uncomfortable plastic chairs six feet apart. A video camera watched them from a corner of the ceiling.

‘Who sent this?’ Cab asked.

Brock’s dark eyes flicked to the page and studied the ten-year-old photograph, but he said nothing. His face was devoid of expression.

‘Bring back memories, does it?’ Cab went on. ‘Kind of like Springsteen, right? “Glory Days”?’

Brock’s eyes refocused on Cab with barely veiled contempt, but he remained silent. So far, he hadn’t said a word since Cab introduced himself. The hour-long drive north on I-75 to the Coleman Federal Correction Complex, which was located in Middle-of-Nowhere, Florida, in flatlands across from grazing cattle, felt like a waste of time. Brock had no interest in talking.

Cab had expected a hardened skinhead, but Hamilton Brock looked more like a suburban soccer dad. He was a high school football quarterback, ex-army, auto mechanic, father of four. At thirty-nine years old, he had neat black hair, no tattoos, and a physique that looked prison-lean, but not ripped. His face was carefully shaved. He sat with his hands folded in his lap and his long legs pressed together. His posture was perfect.

Ten years ago, Brock had been an all-American Wally World shopper with a 2,200-square-foot house in Bartow. His wife home-schooled their kids. They had annual passes to Disney World. At night, he’d recruited converts in the basement of a Lakeland church to a volunteer militia whose website advocated mass deportation of illegal aliens, an electrified fence on the Mexican border, a ban on Muslim immigration, defiance of the Internal Revenue Service, and – among blog posts Cab had reviewed – forced sterilization of welfare mothers who gave birth to a third child. The Liberty Empire Alliance had also stockpiled dozens of assault weapons, handguns, ammunition, plastic explosives, barbed wire, copper, canned goods, bottled water, and doses of the anthrax antibiotic Cipro in a U-Stor facility raided by the FBI in Fort Meade.

You never could tell.

Cab tapped a long finger on the newspaper article again. ‘The Orlando reporter who wrote this? Rufus Twill. He wrote a lot about you and your group back then. Somebody repaid him by beating him within an inch of his life. Is that how you deal with people who don’t see the world the way you do?’