“Call me Joe,” Joseph Ray said.
Reacher forced the smile again. The ice was broken. Like conducting
an interrogation. Reacher had done it a thousand times. But never
from this side of the desk. Never when he was the one wearing the
cuffs.
“Joe, you’re going to have to help me out a little,” he said. “I need
some background here. I don’t know where I am, or why, or who all you
guys are. Can you fill me in on some basic information?”
Ray was looking at him like he was maybe having difficulty knowing
where to start. Then he was glancing around the room like maybe he was
wondering whether he was allowed to start at all.
“Where exactly are we?” Reacher asked him. “You can tell me that,
right?”
“Montana,” Ray said.
Reacher nodded.
“OK,” he said. “Where in Montana?”
“Near a town called Yorke,” Ray said. “An old mining town, just about
abandoned.”
Readier nodded again.
“OK,” he said. “What are you guys doing here?”
“We’re building a bastion,” Ray said. “A place of our own.”
“What for?” Readier asked him.
Ray shrugged. An inarticulate guy. At first, he said nothing. Then
he sat forward and launched into what seemed to Reacher like a mantra,
like something the guy had rehearsed many times. Or like something the
guy had been told many times.
“We came up here to escape the tyranny of America,” he said. “We have
to draw up our borders and say, it’s going to be different inside
here.”
“Different how?” Reacher asked him.
“We have to take America back, piece by piece,” Ray said. “We have to
build a place where the white man can live free, unmolested, in peace,
with proper freedoms and proper laws.”
“You think you can do that?” Reacher said.
“It happened before,” Ray said. “It happened in 1776. People said
enough is enough. They said we want a better country than this. Now
we’re saying it again. We’re saying we want our country back. And
we’re going to get it back. Because now we’re acting together. There
were a dozen militias up here. They all wanted the same things. But
they were all acting alone. Beau’s mission was to put people together.
Now we’re unified and we’re going to take our country back. We’re
starting here. We’re starting now.”
Reacher nodded. Glanced to his right and down at the dark stain where
Loder’s nose had bled onto the floor.
“Like this?” he said. “What about voting and democracy? All that
kind of stuff? You should vote people out and vote new people in,
right?”
Ray smiled sadly and shook his head.
“We’ve been voting for two hundred and twenty years,” he said. “Gets
worse all the time. Government’s not interested in how we vote.
They’ve taken all the power away from us. Given our country away. You
know where the government of this country really is?”
Reacher shrugged.
“DC, right?” he said.
“Wrong,” Ray said. “It’s in New York. The United Nations building.
Ever asked yourself why the UN is so near Wall Street? Because that’s
the government. The United Nations and the banks. They
run the world. America’s just a small part of it. The president is
just one voice on a damn committee. That’s why voting is no damn good.
You think the United Nations and the world banks care what we vote?”
“You sure about all this?” Reacher asked.
Ray nodded, vigorously.
“Sure I’m sure,” he said. “I’ve seen it at work. Why do you think we
send billions of dollars to the Russians when we got poverty here in
America? You think that’s the free choice of an American government?
We send it because the world government tells us to send it. You know
we got camps here? Hundreds of camps all over the country? Most of
them are for United Nations troops. Foreign troops, waiting to move in
when we start any trouble. But forty-three of them are concentration
camps. That’s where they’re going to put us when we start speaking
out.”
“You sure?” Reacher said again.
“Sure I’m sure,” Ray said again. “Beau’s got the documents. We’ve got
the proof. There are things going on you wouldn’t believe. You know