Everett didn’t mention that either. He’d learned not to disagree openly with Marius on anything to do with religion. In other matters, he could and did level with the governor—selectively. He and Marius Cook had been boyhood friends, himself the elder. Later they’d overlapped for two years at the U. of A., from which Everett Miller had graduated in public management with honors, and a minor in political science. Marius had squeaked through in law, and by dint of hard work—he’d always been good at that—had passed the bar exam on his third try, which was respectable.
They’d worked together politically beginning with Marius’s first run for the legislature. Everett Miller had always known that his friend had flaws of character, not all of them trivial, but they’d been friends since second grade, and Everett Miller stood by his friends. Especially he stood by Marius Cook. And politically, if Marius said he’d do something, he at least gave it an honest try. That made up for a lot.
The flaw that had gotten him into this situation—Everett Miller was confident it was a situation—was that Marius could not abide what he considered heresy.
And Marius had become somewhat erratic after an attempt on his life that spring. He’d have been killed if it weren’t for a misfire—that and the pistol in his desk drawer. He’d gotten it out and fired back, while the would-be assassin was trying to unjam his weapon. Afterward Marius had given the credit to the Lord, “who has a purpose in mind for me,” he’d said, “a task for me to fulfill.”
Still, “in these lawless times with their Godless men,” Marius had not left it all in God’s hands. Not only had he added additional security personnel to the mansion staff, he’d acquired “a real Uzi”—actually an Iraqi-made copy—which he kept in a capacious lower desk drawer, loaded. He’d even practiced with it several times, early on, on the capitol police’s underground firing range.
More recently he’d pretty much forgotten about it, which didn’t surprise his old friend. Marius had always tended to enthusiasms, and to getting over them in a week or a month. The “Church of the Divine Exhortation” was the most conspicuous exception to that.
* * *
Senior Sergeant Carl Lavender knelt on the bus’s rear seat, looking out the back window. They’d left the interstate, exiting unnoticed onto a county road. Unnoticed because road blocks had prevented interstate entry both ahead and behind, to keep the media from knowing where the bus was.
Going up front again, he sat next to Lor Lu, diagonally across from the trooper driving. A mile and a half farther on, they turned off the narrow blacktop into a county road department equipment yard. It wasn’t much—a large semi-cylindrical Butler shed where equipment was worked on, and a yard with a couple of dump trucks, a grader, bulldozer, front-end loader, semitractor with flatbed trailer, a big pile of crushed rock, and a bigger pile of gravel. All of it surrounded on three sides by thick-trunked cottonwoods, and on all four sides by a high chain-link fence topped with razor wire. It was Saturday, and no one was there except them.
“Pull in behind the shed, Loy,” Lavender told the driver, “so’s we can’t be seen from the road. But under the trees; otherwise we’ll have to keep the motor running so’s the sun don’t cook us.” He turned to his captive passengers. “All right, folks, you can get out five at a time and stretch your legs if you want. Just stay close. I definitely don’t want to handcuff anyone, but if I need to, I will.”
“Excuse me, Sergeant,” Art Knowles said, “but we haven’t been shown any warrant for our arrest.”
“That’s right sir. You’re not under arrest. Like I said before, you’re in protective custody. Though I suppose it doesn’t make that much difference just now, from your point of view. Just keep in mind that martial law’s been in effect since midnight. Y’all been drawing awfully big crowds with not much security, and the amount of traffic following you . . . Yesterday you had more than a hundred vehicles chasing along behind. The Tennessee Highway Patrol called it the worst traffic situation they’d seen since their big ice storm of ’94.”