Once Corbin started talking, he wouldn’t shut up. Maybe it made him forget the pain of his broken finger. Eventually he came back to the starting line. “So c’mon, what’d you do to rate priority handling? Which one of those assholes did you piss off?”

I brushed him off. He didn’t need an answer. “I told you,” I said, “I fought for America.”

“Yeah, I got that. That’s what you said.”

I looked straight ahead, into the past. “That was then. This is now.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I know,” I said, finally glancing at him, “that’s the problem.”

21

“They know,” Laura said. There wasn’t a quiver in her voice. It was as much a report as a question: What do we do now?

The only thing that surprised me was how long it had taken them to figure it out. We’d been on the road more than two hours. Anybody looking at us would simply have seen four people in two vehicles driving northwest on side roads at a casual pace. But the reality was a whole lot stranger than that. The first vehicle was a specially equipped van being driven by a man in a wheelchair carrying evidence that would reveal a massive government plot to seize unlimited power while a veteran Homeland Security agent sat duct-taped to the passenger seat. We were followed by a modified Chevy Caprice in which the entire law enforcement module had been installed, including a supercharged engine, a reinforced chassis, and a steel partition separating the front and rear seats. The car was being driven by a gun-toting attractive young woman, an actress who had appeared in several commercials and supporting roles at the National Theatre, while a fuming second Homeland Security agent was handcuffed in the secure back seat.

Laura had been monitoring the radio in the agent’s car. She had ignored the repeated radio calls to the car. But when she heard the all-hands alert, she had used her phone to call Cher. “They called it a code red plus. Then they gave your description and said you were armed and dangerous.”

Corbin was smirking. He turned his head, which was essentially the only part of his body he could move. “You’re fucked,” he said confidently.

I thought about that for several seconds. I had to admit he had a point. Then I responded, “You know, this reminds me of a story I once heard a comedian tell. He said he’d bought his son a chemistry set that came with all kinds of weird chemicals. After that, every time he tried to punish his son, the kid would hold a test tube filled with some liquid over his head and shout, ‘We’ll all go together!’ So if I were you, Dickie, I’d start rooting real hard for the home team.”

What I learned several days later was that Canadian immigration authorities also had heard the alert. They immediately shared it with leaders of the American Resistance Movement (Canada), Barack’s Battalions. Among those people who received printed copies was Colonel Martin Shaw, formerly Detroit PD, with whom I had worked in exposing the Detroit Massacre. Marty Shaw had driven across the border with his family soon after the introduction of the New American Pledge and helped organize the opposition.