Pam thought of screaming but she was sure he’d beat the crap out of her if she tried. Besides, there was no one else in the building. One unit was empty and the other tenants were on a cruise.

He was speaking to her absently. ‘We’ll have to go deep underground for a while. My aunt and uncle won’t give me up. But my cousin, Joshua? It’s just a matter of time until he gets tricked into telling them everything he knows. Me included. We can’t go back to Southern Illinois. Your friend Lincoln will have the FBI picking up all the senior people at the AFFC now. And he’ll suspect the Larchwood crowd again, so Missouri’s out. We’ll have to go someplace else. Maybe the Patriot Assembly in upstate New York. They’re pretty much off the grid.’ He turned to her. ‘Or Texas. There’re people there who remember my parents as martyred freedom fighters. We could live with them.’

‘But, Seth—’

‘We’ll lie low for a few years. Call me “Seth” again and I’ll hurt you. I can do tattooing work for cash. You can teach Sunday school. Little by little we can reemerge. New identities. The AFFC’s over now, but maybe it’s just as well – we’ll move on. Start a new movement. And do a hell of a better job. We’ll do it the right way. We’ll place our women into schools – and I don’t just mean church schools. I mean public and private. Get the kids young. Break them in. We men will run for office, low level, cities and counties – at first. We’ll start local and then move up. Oh, it’s going to be a whole new world. You don’t think that way now. But you’ll be proud to be part of it.’

He lifted the machine off her leg, looked over the work and returned to inking her.

‘My uncle was backward in a lot of ways. But he had one moment of genius. He came up with the Rule of Skin. He’d lecture about it all over the country – at other militias, at revival meetings, at churches, at hunting camps.’ Billy’s eyes shone. ‘The Rule of Skin … It’s brilliant. Think about it: Skin tells us about our physical health, right? It’s flushed or pale. Glowing or dull. Shrunken or swollen. Broken out or clear … And it tells us our spiritual development too. And intellectual. And emotional. White is good and smart and noble. Black and brown and yellow are subversive and dangerous.’

‘You can’t be serious!’

He made a fist and Pam cringed and fell silent.