The Gatekeeper, page 13
“Going up there by yourself would be stupid,” Alonzo says in Spanish. “Even by your standards.”
Dez surprises the young man by throwing a hug around his torso. He steps back and ruffles Alonzo’s hair. “Jaysus, and you’ve got balls. Coulda used a dozen of you in my crew.”
Alonzo looks a little shocked by the hug. And the compliment. “Well … so, yeah, am I going?”
“You are hell!” Dez throws his duffel in the back of the pickup. “I’m looking to rile up some racist arseholes. You’re a gay Latino. I’m not exactly gonna blend in, but you’d be a fecking disaster!”
Alonzo tries not to look relieved.
Dez opens the passenger door of the pickup, then the glove box. He removes a faded red oilcloth, places it in his upturned hand. He returns to Alonzo and unfolds the cloth, peeling it back in layers, revealing a Smith & Wesson .45 ACP he unknowingly stole when he stole the pickup. After Dez realized it was in there, he took it into the bathroom of the guest cottage, broke it down, and cleaned it thoroughly.
“Know how to use this?”
Alonzo says, “I know how to use YouTube, so, in theory…”
“That is, as herself would say, suboptimal. But beggars and all.” He rewraps the massive hand cannon and sets it in Alonzo’s hands.
Alonzo blanches at the weight of it.
“You keep Petra safe, yeah?”
“Been doing that long before you got here.”
Dez offers a hand and the shake turns into a chest bump. “That you have, bruv.”
Dez climbs into the pickup, throws it in gear, and leaves Malibu Colony Beach behind.
CHAPTER 36
It’s an easy enough drive. Dez heads straight north on Interstate 5, through Santa Clarita, through the lush Los Padres National Forest. He cuts over to the 46 at Lost Hills, moving westward now. He passes through Blackwells Corner and Kecks Corner and connects to the 41, which becomes the 46 again for reasons Dez does not understand. Noon on Saturday, and traffic picks up as Dez hits the edge of Boca Serpiente County, one of the flattest and most arid parts in Central California. From time to time, he can spot the Pacific Ocean and, for the last ten minutes, the cooling tower of the Boca Serpiente Valley Nuclear Power Station.
He notices lots of TV microwave trucks heading into the county. Lots of good ol’ boys heading in. And lots of families heading out.
He spots a pickup with a Confederate flag on the bumper and a gun rack in the cab. The pickup pulls into a gas station and an adjacent bar, and Dez quickly follows suit.
Three guys get out: one to pump gas and the other two heading over to the bar. Dez parks behind the bar.
He’s been living in the States for months now and has mastered an ironclad American accent that can fool anyone. The value of living his adult life around people from every part of the world; it’s given him an unerring ear for dialect. The two guys go directly to the bar and order three Coors from a fortysomething blond waitress attempting to rock cowboy boots and booty shorts and a knotted-off shirt. Dez joins the guys and orders a draft beer with his perfect American accent.
The waitress smiles at him. “Cute accent. Where’re you from?”
Dez thinks he might have to reevaluate his perfect American accent.
“Australia.”
Both guys wear ball caps with Confederate flags. Both are open carrying. One of the guys says, “Didn’t you people ban all guns?”
“That’s New Zealand, them bastards.”
The drinks arrive, along with their buddy from the truck, and everyone gets talking about Boca Serpiente.
“The Ryersons are for real, man,” one guy says around a wad of chew. “They got it going on! Fucking cannot wait to wade into that shit.”
They fist-bump. Dez, too.
“Can’t hold out for long, can they?” Dez sips the absolutely horrible beer.
“Lantree says different.”
Lantree? Dez nods. “Well, that’s that, then. How many you figure coming to help?”
The tallest guy says, “Don’t know. Lots. We’re joining the fourth. We was in Iraq. We figure we can use what we know in the fourth.”
“Soldiers, you?” He signals the waitress. “I’m buying this round. We’ve got soldiers here!”
The guys get even more talkative after that. Dez nurses his bottle of horse piss. Thirty minutes later, his newfound friends pile in their truck and keep on heading north.
Dez returns to his F-250 and boots up his tablet. He surfs for Boca Serpiente and Lantree.
Oliver Lantree, founder and CEO of Patriot Media, has made the standoff in Boca Serpiente County the only news story of the month. It’s covered twenty-four seven by the media giant’s cable franchise, its radio network and its website, its email newsletters, blogs, vlogs, and podcasts.
Lantree is from Virginia. He’s fifty, matinee-idol handsome with a deep baritone voice. Dez learns that he’s the new face of the radical right, and quickly becoming one of the most influential people in media today.
Also, that he’s barking mad. Dez watches ten minutes of Lantree’s screeds on YouTube, and realizes the rich bastard is as crazy as a cat sandwich. But he’s a hell of an orator.
Dez googles Boca Serpiente and The Fourth.
Seems as if someone in the town of Sloatville is organizing all of the militia types that are pouring in. They’ve created five brigades to protect the town, the Ryerson Ranch, the coastline, Highway 1, and the nuclear power plant.
They’re guarding the power plant, he learns from Patriot Media, because everybody knows the U.S. Army has been hiding a secret military base in there, ready to back up martial law in California when the United Nations, New World Order, and the Jews take over America. Everybody knows a lot of horseshit, but this isn’t news to Dez. True the world ’round.
Dez had spotted another bar, three miles back, so he revs up the Ford and reverses course. The second joint isn’t overly clean but at least it’s humid. The waitress in the Dukes of Hazzard cosplay kit is nearly identical to the waitress in the bar he just left. He orders another bad beer. Had he known this investigation would involve drinking American beers, he definitely would have let them kidnap Petra.
He starts chatting up four guys who look like Hollywood Central Casting version of badass bikers with his now newly perfected American accent.
The waitress says, “Where you from?”
Damn it. “New Zealand.”
A biker in a long, droopy Fu Manchu says, “Didn’t you people ban all guns?”
“That’s Australia, them bastards.”
“You heading in, dude?”
“Course! Thinking of joining the Fourth.”
“We’re Third Brigade,” a flabby man in leathers says.
“So how the hell did they organize brigades so damn fast?” Dez asks.
One of the guys reaches for a bowl of pretzels. “We first heard about it three weeks ago. Was waiting on Jake. He was doing four at Victorville.”
Dez knows that that’s a California state prison and he cobbles together the meaning of the rest of the sentence. “Three weeks ago? I just heard about it last week,” he says, then hastily adds, “Some fellas and me done a job outside of Oakland. Was laying low. You know.”
“Word.” The bikers nod knowingly.
They talk and Dez learns from the bikers that this is a wave of West Coast and Southwest white pride types heading in; that a bigger wave is behind them; guys coming from all across the United States, egged on by Oliver Lantree and Patriot Media. They’re coming from Appalachia and from Florida and Idaho; from everywhere, really.
Back at his pickup, Dez begins googling again. He learns that Oliver Lantree has relocated his Patriot Media World Headquarters to Sloatville, to be in the midst of this, the Second Great American Revolution.
This whole thing was kicked off by the standoff at the Ryerson Ranch. That was about thirty days ago. Dez learns that the media giant has been in town for about thirty-five days.
He starts reconsidering his notions of cause and effect here.
Someone foresaw this whole clusterfuck before it happened.
Or caused it to happen.
CHAPTER 37
Dez checks his messages, texts, emails, voice mail. Nothing from Captain Cardona or Detective Swanson.
He texts Petra Alexandris: How going?
She texts back almost immediately: Homicide ensues.
He knows she’s been in meetings with her father and the chief financial and technical officers of Triton Expediters. She’s about to throttle one or more of them. He grins, thinking about how much he’d give for a tub of popcorn, and to be sitting ringside watching her pistol-whip the lot of them.
Highway 1 runs parallel to the ocean and it cuts between Joint Base McKinzie-Clark to the east, and the Boca Serpiente Valley Nuclear Power Station to the west. The same off-ramp serves both, and the town of Sloatville, a bit to the north.
Outside town, he stops at a convenience store and buys a map published by the Greater Sloatville Chamber of Commerce. It’s a single piece of paper, the size of a placemat, and it’s a cartoon-drawn map, showing five restaurants, both motels, the historical society, the two-block-long shopping district, the access points to the beach. Dez buys a sandwich and a bottled water and, in the cab of his stolen pickup, compares the chamber’s map to the Google Map on his tablet. He finds a ballpoint pen with teeth marks and no cap in the glove box and marks an X on a large, single-story building way to the north, at the very outskirts of Sloatville. It’s the size of a warehouse but with little parking.
It’s the server farm for Triton Expediters. A massive mess of mainframes with a skeleton crew. A thing like that creates a lot of heat. It uses an excessive amount of electricity and tons of water for cooling. To the west is an ocean, thank you very much.
To the southeast is a nuclear power plant. An aging one, to be sure. Built in the late 1960s and opened in 1971, Dez has learned, and nearing the end of its productive life.
Much like Joint Base McKinzie-Clark, farther to the arid east, although the base dates back to a couple of weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Another relic of a place, pretty much forgotten by the Pentagon brass.
A good place to hide an army in plain sight.
* * *
It’s about ninety degrees in Boca Serpiente County. If Dez were law enforcement, he’d have blockaded the exit off Highway 1 and kept everyone out of the town of Sloatville. That hasn’t happened.
There’s an ENTERING SLOATVILLE sign and, right behind it, a gas station/convenience store with Christmas decorations in the window. Christmas was five months ago. The reader board outside reads, GATER’S GAS ’N’ GRUB. SEASON GREETINGS: AMMO.
He spots fairgrounds a little outside of the city limits with a sign that reads TIME TO BUCK! BOCA SERPIENTE COUNTY FAIR AND RODEO! But no fair and rodeo this year. The fairgrounds have been turned into a bivouac for arriving men, who have set up a tent camp, or parked RVs, or are sleeping in the beds of their pickups. Dez slows to a crawl and counts scores and scores of vehicles. Well over a hundred.
There’s an air of excitement over the tent village. He sees guys laughing and drinking beer and high-fiving. He sees big dogs—shepherds, pit bulls, others—romping about. He sees a lot of family units: moms and little kids but few dads. A long row of porta-potties lines a softball field. How long would it take for a town of two thousand people to arrange for thirty, forty porta-potties? he wonders. Then again, they do host a county fair and rodeo. Maybe the town owns them. Or maybe someone was stockpiling materiel prior to the militias’ arrival.
He sees TV helicopters circling the city, but he’s been seeing those ever since he hit the county border. He sees news crews and microwave transmitter trucks a couple of blocks away. The revolution will be televised.
The cooling tower is visible in the distance.
Dez parks amid other pickups in the fairgrounds.
He takes the next ninety minutes to stroll about and engage people in conversation. He doesn’t lead with questions. It’s a slow way to learn anything, but it also rouses fewer suspicions. He’s pretty sure he’s honed his American accent to a thing of beauty, but the first two people he chats up ask him where he’s from, so he throws out the damn accent entirely.
He finds a keg and a massive pile of red plastic cups, and queues up with a dozen other guys. “Where you from, bro?” says a guy with stringy, shoulder-length hair pulled back into a ponytail. Dez hasn’t even opened his mouth yet. What is it with Americans and their radar?
“Tasmania. Is it true Oliver Lantree is broadcasting from here in town?”
The guy uses a rubber hose to pour thin, foamy beer into Dez’s cup. “Sure as shit, bro. Patriot Media set up in town. Got reporters, photographers, the whole shebang. See that one?”
The guy points to a specific media helicopter hovering out near the ocean. “That’s theirs.”
“Well, thank God for them, then.”
The guy holds out his own Solo cup and taps it against Dez’s. “Last honest voice in the fucking media, bro.”
“You know where they’re set up? I want to see for meself.”
The guy shrugs. “Dunno. In town somewhere. Hey, you just get here?”
Dez nods. He holds the cup to his lips and tries not to swallow the truly craptacular brew.
“You picked a brigade yet?”
“Na. I’ll serve where they need me.”
“Well…” The guy gestures toward Dez’s physique. “You got the whole Hulk Smash thing going on. Whatever you pick, bro, they’ll take you. Brigade One’s gonna protect the town when ZOG shows up.”
Dez shakes his head in wonder. “Fecking Zog.” He’s not certain, but he thinks Zog might’ve been one of the villains in the Superman comics, though likely that’s not who this guy’s referring to. “Brigade One for me, then.”
“Right on, bro. Fight the good fight.”
And Dez realizes that, for them, it is.
The good fight.
Everyone’s the hero in their own story.
CHAPTER 38
The people in Sloatville accept Dez’s presence, and he quickly figures out why. He’s white. He himself never knew if he was of Irish, Scottish, Welsh, or English parentage, but one thing’s for certain: He’s a fair-skinned guy and he’s in a town with absolutely nothing but other white people.
If he started singing in Berber or Arabic, half the heads in this fairgrounds would explode. He’s tempted to try.
He checks his phone. No messages.
He leaves the truck where it is and wanders into town. It doesn’t take him long to find signs nailed to power poles and fences, welcoming the militia and urging all able-bodied Americans to sign up for a brigade: first for the town; second for the Ryerson Ranch; third to watch the coast; fourth to guard the road leading to the highway; fifth for the power station.
Dez doesn’t know, but he suspects the Ryerson Ranch is just the spark to draw people here. It’s a diversion. It’s not where the real action’s going to take place. Too isolated, of too little strategic value.
Guarding the coast? From what, the Spanish Armada?
Same for the road to and from the highway. Dez saw those guys as he drove in and they looked fairly bored.
That leaves the power station and the town.
He knows, for certain, that the nuclear power plant plays a role here, but he thinks it’s mostly as a deterrent. The U.S. military won’t wade into Boca Serpiente County if they fear the plant has been compromised. But that’s right of Boom. Like he told Petra and Alonzo, they’re all still left of Boom, the likely assassination of Admiral Lighthouse notwithstanding. That was bad. But it wasn’t the big show.
So until Boom, the power plant’s just a diversion. Till then, the plant isn’t important.
That leaves the town of Sloatville itself.
Well, that and Joint Base McKinzie-Clark, but no militia brigade is assigned to that and Dez hasn’t figured out a way to wrangle an invitation there yet. So Sloatville it is.
The town has seen better days, although that might be optimistic. It might never have seen good days at all. Dez suspects the economy here tanked well before the Great Recession and the pandemic, and never truly recovered. It’s a town in the center of California with no high tech, no agriculture, no Hollywood, no wine, and no banking. Sloatville is a lactose-intolerant diabetic in the land of milk and honey.
Several hundred white guys open-carrying assault rifles have staged up in this town. Dez spots only a few folks who appear to be residents. Dez brought along his lockbox, with his breaching equipment, his 290-millimeter fixed-blade knife, and the folding Raptor blade clipped to his belt. But he doesn’t yet have a gun and he’s a little concerned that will look conspicuous.
Towns like this in the Southwestern United States, a largish portion of the population likely would be Hispanic. That may have been true a month or so ago, but if so, they’ve long since fled or are hiding in their homes.
Dez doesn’t spot any actual military types in town, and that’s good. He’s tangled with a few of them now, and he’s not ready to be recognized.
He sees several TV journalists doing what’s called stand-ups, holding mics, speaking directly into the cameras perched on the shoulders of cameramen. Other journalists are interviewing people in town. He avoids eye contact with reporters. Then again, who doesn’t?
The streets of the urban center of Sloatville—all four of them—are jammed with pickups and Humvees and Jeeps and off-road three-and four-wheel ATVs. People are jovial, grinning, slightly manic. It’s all familiar and it takes Dez a moment to realize why: It reminds him of the scene in every American cowboy movie of the Old West town just before the bandits ride in, six-shooters blasting away, bandannas over their mouths, gut-shot stuntmen doubling over and slow-rolling off roofs.
Festive but with a pending air of violence.
Boom is coming.
Dez spots city hall, which includes a municipal building and a police station. A county fire department serves the town, he guesses. The building is one story, bland as oatmeal, and looks like it was built in the 1980s, making it the most modern building he’s seen so far by about four decades. It should be closed, this being a weekend. It’s not.
