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  Megan had joined the USMC a year after high school and was away at Parris “Paradise” Island for boot camp when their mother was killed in a head-on collision with a drunk driver on her way back from a prayer meeting at church. Malorie was only fourteen years old and although no one can ever be prepared for that, she had a lot of growing up to do in a big hurry. Her father, who was always as tough as nails and the quintessential north woods logger, wept bitterly over Beatrice’s death. The other loggers said that when he got the news that she was killed, he set down his saw and was never the same again. Cedric and Beatrice had been junior high school sweethearts and he had never known any other woman. When she died, he transferred his love to the bottle and drank heavily. Megan came home on emergency leave to mourn her mother’s death.

  Five years later Malorie was at the Bridgeport mill checking her part drawing for the proper tolerance, carefully aligning the cutter for tapping a through hole on a structural flange mount, when she heard her name being called from the front office. “Malorie, phone is for you.”

  “Phone? Whoever calls me at work?” Malorie asked herself.

  It was Megan on the other end. “Malorie, Eric divorced me. J’ai besoin de toi! En ce moment.”

  “Okay, I will pack up tonight and be there late tomorrow evening.”

  10

  VOLUNTARY DISPLACEMENT

  Slap some bacon on a biscuit and let’s go! We’re burnin’ daylight!

  —John Wayne as Wil Andersen, in The Cowboys (1972)

  NSA-W Headquarters—October, the First Year

  Joshua watched the news while having breakfast in OPS1 cafeteria, but in the spirit of fairness the powers that be had decided to put Fox News on only one day per week and to give more time to MSNBC and CNN. This morning the CNN headlines were all bad.

  “If it wasn’t for the fact that they make you watch CNN in an airport, who would voluntarily watch the Communist News Network, anyway?” Joshua mumbled to himself. The ticker rolled by with the following text:

  “U.S. Dollar Declared ‘Trash’ by Foreign Investors.”

  “National Gasoline Price Average Now Over $6.13 per Gallon, $10 a Gallon in Sight.”

  “Boston, Houston, and Fresno Pawn Brokers Are Asking for Police Protection.”

  “CDC Reporting Preliminary Concerns of a Resistant Strain of Influenza Virus Seen in Charlotte, NC.”

  “CBO Score for New Budget Proposal Is ‘Untenable with Current Revenue.’”

  “President to Meet with Minority Opposition Leadership on New Security Measures.”

  Joshua took in the news and methodically processed it as he finished his oatmeal. His mind was already racing from his conversation with Dustin over the phone last night, and the onslaught of bad news was only briefly interrupted by the camera crew going on location to a Humane Society rally in Lansing, Michigan. After a few commercials, the cheery news anchor was back to cover the president’s meeting this morning with a joint session of Congress.

  “The president is in an emergency session of Congress and pleaded with them to pass the Omnibus Patriot Safety and Security Act this morning. [Audio cuts to president.] ‘I have asked Congress to pull together and do the right thing for America. The debate has been robust, and we have heard from both sides of the aisle. I have listened to all the concerns and now is the time to act to secure America in this new age of multifaceted threats.’ Watchdog groups on Capitol Hill are saying that this is an overreach, and while no comment has come from the president himself, his press secretary had this to say last Tuesday: ‘This is only a temporary measure granting certain powers to the president—it has a thirty-day sunset clause—unless we are unable to resolve the present crisis.’ The eighteen-hundred-page bill is likely to see a vote before the close of business today.”

  “Yeah, right, that ‘unless’ is a pretty big gamble to take with the Constitution! We’ve all seen their record on not reading two-thousand-page-long bills. Don’t these clowns work for us?” Joshua asked himself.

  On his way to the office, Joshua walked past the murals of law enforcement personnel doing their mission on the NSA campus adorned with the words, “Train, Defend, Protect, Deter, Authenticate and Respond.” He was on his way to the Security Operations Control Center (SOCC) to check in to his shift, fifteen minutes early, as always. Joshua drew his weapon and attended the shift change brief. Afterward he logged on to a high-side terminal to quickly check e-mail, and he was glad to see among the usual all-users “no reply” e-mail that there was actually a message from Megan waiting for him:

  Subject: Parler Affairs

  Unclassified: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

  Joshua,

  Please stop by when you are able.

  C’est avoir de très l’importance.

  M.

  Unclassified: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

  • • •

  The day was far from business as usual, the buzz in the news feeds translated into heightened national security posture. As an implementation of additional security measures, NSA-W was conducting random vehicle checks even for blue- and green-badge personnel and 100 percent vehicle checks for all visitors. This effort required extra officers to be dispatched to the VCPs, and Joshua found himself assigned for the late-morning shift. Around 1300 he was able to come to Megan’s office, but only for a brief moment.

  Almost as soon as Joshua knocked on the door, Megan was ready for him and suggested they go down the hall to speak in private.

  “Joshua, I’m really worried,” Megan began.

  “About?”

  “Where have you been? You haven’t heard?”

  “Let’s just say that I got your e-mail this morning, then responded to a ‘hey you’ tasking to go and acquaint myself with the greater central Maryland area’s glove compartment contents.”

  “Fair enough. Well, you know how they recently blocked DrudgeReport .com from the NSA unclass web servers. Well, I checked a personal e-mail account late this morning. It was a message from Malorie about what we had discussed last night.”

  “Which was what? Megan, I can’t stay very long here.”

  “The president dismissed four conservative Supreme Court justices this morning.”

  “What? How?” Joshua was truly perplexed.

  “By executive order. Evidently, that new Omnibus Patriot Safety and Security Act gives the president the power to do pretty much whatever he wants—and they haven’t even passed it yet. Those judges were all that stood in the way of a judicial challenge to these emergency presidential powers. Did you see that they’re recalling all close-air-support aircraft from Saudi and ‘redeploying’ them to CONUS? Officially the secretary of the Air Force is just calling it a ‘contingency.’ I read that in a SADCOM report this morning.”

  “That is likely classified and we can’t speak that way out here. Besides, this whole situation is nuts! Have you seen the financial reports? ‘Whither do we go?’”

  Megan, quick on the uptake, said, “Yes, I know. Nietzsche would have been very proud of our positive-law-strewn, failed Republic.”

  Joshua replied, “This morning I asked a colleague about having to take all that extra online training for security of classified information. He didn’t seem the least bit put out by having to change all of the passwords to every account we have access to. It just didn’t faze him that the same people that dole out our paychecks don’t seem to be spying on the North Koreans, but are monitoring my SMS traffic instead!”

  Joshua continued, “How far down the rabbit hole does this go anyway? Data can always be historically analyzed and made to say anything.”

  Megan smoothed the wrinkles on her skirt and said, “It would seem that there are a lot less libertarian patriots and a lot more sheeple collecting a paycheck from Uncle Sam in this big glass house. If they couldn’t see the shackles forming around the feet of their fellow citizens now, when would they ever notice?”

  Joshua let out a breath loudly, almost whistling, and then said: “I don’t
know. Four justices? Who knows what other powers were granted to the president in the new law? Outlaw homeschooling? Ban firearms? Make us a one-world-government subject to the UN?”

  “So do you want to stick around and see what happens?”

  “What are you talking about?” Joshua reached out to grasp her hand.

  “All I need to do is to go back in that office, send one e-mail to tender my resignation, grab my satchel, and I’m out the door.” Megan was completely serious.

  “I e-mailed you this morning because I already discussed it with Malorie last night,” Megan continued.

  “What you’re talking about here is pretty radical. I like you, Megan. I really like you. I find you fascinating. You let me meet your sister and your boys, which is something special, to be sure—but what you’re saying has huge consequences for me.”

  Megan focused her piercingly blue eyes on him and said, “Look, I used to think of myself as trapped by Eric. When he called and broke the news to me about his escapade I knew that there was no way I could pay for the house without his salary, so for about thirty seconds I was willing to overlook his indiscretion while I lay on the kitchen floor crying with the phone in my hand. The very next moment, Leo crawled in, and I decided that I would not let him ever see me crying over their father. I told Eric to move on and that I would have his trash packed when he got back to the East Coast. I was not going to be trapped by a man. I was a woman given a charge by God to raise those boys and with His providence I was going to do exactly that. I started putting my money into tangibles, preparations, and the livestock that I knew we would need to raise for food. I called Malorie, and the rest you pretty much know.”

  “You know that I feel a strong connection to you and your boys—even your sister. But what are you proposing?”

  “Five minutes, I’m in that door and back out again pour toujours. I can call Malorie on the ride home, and we can be ready to get out of Dodge by tomorrow morning.”

  “Go where?” Joshua’s passion had given way to the onset of anger. “Your native Maine is a thousand miles at least from here and your Accord is not ideal transportation. What family do you still have there anyway? Winter is coming, and if the power went out you would not be in a position to cut enough firewood to survive. Once you were there, I’m sure that you could find some pocket of backwoods Maine where you speak the local dialect and blend in; heck, you may even get across the border to Canada. But it’s the getting there that is your biggest hurdle. You’d have to get through Baltimore, Philadelphia, northern New Jersey, New York City, and then Boston—in case you haven’t heard, law and order is not in vogue there anymore.”

  Megan smoothed her brown curly hair back and said, “You’re right. I hadn’t thought of the urban deathtraps en route. You’ve seen what it’s like leaving this area on a holiday weekend with the traffic; the situation now is ten times more hopeless.”

  “Maybe not, because I’m actually one step ahead of you on this one.”

  “How so?”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Sure, we could ask the Honorable Clarence Thomas to perform the ceremony, I hear that he has a lot more free time these days.”

  “Look, I knew that you were marriage material ever since we met for lunch after the morning I busted you in the Friedman Auditorium. Moreover, I’m a serious Christian looking for a godly woman. I’m also smitten with your boys. Maybe it’s my upbringing in the orphanage, but I don’t want them to be without a father—I’ve seen what that can do to a boy trying to figure out how to become a man.”

  “How long do I have to think about it?”

  “Probably about as long as it takes for me to go turn in my weapon and come up with a convincing excuse why I need to leave early today. We could beat traffic if we left now.”

  “And for the ring?”

  Joshua pulled out a zip cuff and handed it to her. “I wasn’t sure what size you were, but this is adjustable.”

  • • •

  Megan walked up to the turnstile and swiped her badge across the reader, and the green light lit up with the accompanying audible relay click allowing her to pass. The sun seemed to shine especially warm that early autumn afternoon and the air seemed to be that much more refreshing knowing that she had picked the day and time when she left—rather than stick around and hope for the best. She envisioned an ostrich with its head in the sand getting shot in the butt and giggled nervously as she realized the magnitude of what had just happened.

  Joshua pulled up to PG-165 with the Jeep passenger door facing her; the small act of chivalry was not lost on her. She handed him her green badge without saying a word, and he knew it was destined for the box holding the rest of the visitors’ badges. “Uncle Sam will want his ID back,” she said to herself.

  “Ready to go?”

  “Not without my effects.”

  “What?”

  “I need you to go over to the visitors’ overflow parking lot, by the static guardrail display, which is where our commuter van is parked. Chuck did not want to wait in the long vehicle line this morning, so he parked over there and we simply walked across Canine Road through the visitors’ center gate. I have some things in there that I don’t want to do without.”

  Megan reached into her satchel and found a spare key to the van. She pulled out a scrap of paper and scribbled a note to the van pool saying that she had a family emergency and would be taking some unexpected time off. Next, Megan went around to the rear of the van and opened up the two doors. There in the back was a wooden crate with some stenciled Chinese characters that Joshua could not recognize next to the words “Snew Chain Made in China.” Megan reached for the tire iron to break the metal bands securing the wooden crate closed. Inside the crate Joshua was pleasantly shocked to see Megan discreetly pull out a rough cotton cloth bag that she briefly opened to give him a peek at the collapsed AR-7 inside. Taking up the rest of the space in the wooden crate was one hundred rounds of carefully packed .22LR ammunition and a small cleaning kit. She put the contents in her satchel as she commented, “One of my friends from B Detachment was a Chi-ling”—Chinese linguist. “She works in one of the shops that deals with tracking new Chinese communications technology or something like that. Anyway, I had her print out the Mandarin characters for ‘snow chains’ and then I made the stencil misspelling to hopefully give the box enough credibility to not be opened should we have a random vehicle inspection like you were doing this morning. Since they usually cancel work when it snows, I thought it would be good cover with low probability of ever having someone who wants to open it. The rest of the van pool thought that I was just being overly cautious. This van is the only thing that keeps me going home nightly to my boys, so I prepare accordingly.”

  Also in the back of the truck was a .50-caliber ammo can with one of those tamper-evident serialized metal one-time-use bands that was used to seal the door on a cargo truck. Written in a black marker across the top was BREAKDOWN BOX. Megan just smiled and said, “A girl has got to be prepared, you know.”

  “So, as an NSA cop . . .”

  “Former NSA cop—you just quit, didn’t you?” Megan quipped.

  “Not formally; if the SOCC knew what I was doing right now, I would likely need that zip cuff back for my own wrists. But as I was saying, you can’t bring firearms onto the NSA campus. Should I even ask what is in the ammo can, Miss LaCroix?”

  “You are not read on to that compartment. Just kidding. It’s a fuel pump from a junkyard for the same year as this Ford Econoline van, along with a forty-five-foot roll of wire with alligator-clip terminals and thirty-five feet of three-eighth-inch tubing. Malorie fabricated it all for me, soldering the connections, and then mounted it to a piece of plywood cut the same size as the side wall of the can to give extra static electricity protection if I had to use it. The fuel pump is for extracting fuel out of a tank if ever needed and there was no grid power. I also keep a can of Slime fix-a-flat, a tire plug patch kit, a spare serpentine
belt for this van, multitip screwdriver, pliers, a ‘shifting spanner,’ as our Brit friends say”—she held up an adjustable wrench—“a tube of RTV silicone, a small LED Maglite, a road flare, nonemergency contacts for every county sheriff’s department between here and home, and a small box of blade fuses.”

  “Megan, I have certainly grown to love you, but after seeing you produce a gun that was hidden in plain sight this whole time, I love you all the more.”

  “I think it was God’s providence that brought us together. Let’s saddle up; we’re burning daylight here, cowboy.”

  Unceremoniously, Joshua’s Jeep pulled out of the overflow parking lot and turned right onto Canine Road, and then headed toward Columbia on 32.

  “I don’t take it lightly that you trust me; I want you to know that I’m committing myself to the success of you and your boys. I’ve done my growing up and lived life. Leo and Jean are likely going to grow up in some austere times ahead—you know it and I know it. To that end, I wanted to tell you what my plan is.

  “You remember me telling you about my buddy Ken Layton, from the Catholic summer camp that I went to years ago? Well, he and his wife, Terry, have been hooked up with this guy named Todd from Idaho. He said that if things ever went really bad, that he and Terry were going to drive out West to ‘bug out.’ He’s been trying to tell me for years about the survival retreat, but I just thought that was all Chicken Little–type stuff. I mean we made it through two World Wars and the wheels have not fallen off of the bus yet, so what was he talking about? As it turns out, he has been texting me these past few days in one last attempt to reach out to me. Ken, Dustin, and I have always loved each other like brothers, so I don’t discount Ken’s sincerity and his fervor to try and win me over to his point of view.”