The room was silent except for the rustle of the paper and the ticking of a decades-old clock high on the wall. Brock’s mouth twitched. His head tilted a fraction, and he looked toward the floor and shook his head with disdain.

‘Right, I don’t get you, you’re misunderstood,’ Cab said. He waited until Brock met his eyes again, and he added: ‘I know about your father, Mr Brock. Thirty-one years with the same company, and then his job was outsourced to India. He spent three years looking for another job and didn’t find one. He shot himself when you were seventeen. You found the body.’

There was no emotion in Brock’s face. The man had channeled his emotions into hatred long ago. He also had smart eyes, as penetrating as a snake’s stare. Hatred and intelligence were a dangerous combination.

‘Chuck Warren says you’re innocent,’ Cab went on. ‘He called you a political prisoner.’

Brock showed the barest flicker of interest at the mention of the Republican’s name. ‘Mr Warren is correct. That’s exactly what I am.’

‘Oh, so you can talk,’ Cab said. ‘Good. Actually, I knew you could talk, because you’ve been on Warren’s show. I was able to dig up the archives online. Here’s one of my favorite quotes: “People accuse us of hoarding weapons because we want to overthrow the government. Not true. We need to be armed for when the government comes to overthrow us.”’

The man’s eyebrows arched with irony, and he cast his gaze around the prison visiting room.

Cab smiled. ‘I get it. They really did come for you.’

‘Yes, they did.’

‘The jack-booted thugs of the FBI?’

Brock exhaled with a loud sigh. He leaned forward and spoke in an unusually quiet voice. ‘You make jokes, Detective Bolton, but did you know that government officials with automatic weapons raided my home and the homes of half a dozen other patriots and kidnapped our children at gunpoint? Nineteen children hauled away and stripped from their parents. The oldest was eleven years old.’

‘They wanted to make sure you didn’t use the children as hostages. Human shields. It’s been done before by extremist groups.’

Brock shook his head. He was talking now. He wanted to talk.

‘The government was the one using children as hostages. Not us. This is the same government that waged a legal battle to have our children permanently taken from our custody and relocated under different identities so we could never find them again. Is that the America you serve, Detective?’

‘The feds lost that fight,’ Cab said, ‘thanks to another branch of government called the American judiciary.’