The Dark River

“After your men burned down our house, Gabe and I kept this fantasy going. We convinced each other that our father had survived and was looking for us as we drove around the country. When I got older, I realized that my father wasn’t going to help me at all. I was on my own.”

“So you decided he was dead?”

“Wherever my father went, he was never coming back. He might as well have been dead.”

“Who knows? Maybe we can arrange a family reunion.”

Michael wanted to slam Nash against the wall and slap the smile off his face. But he turned away from the older man and regained his composure. He was still a prisoner, but there were ways around that. He had to assert himself and guide the Brethren in a certain direction.

“You killed everyone at New Harmony. Correct?”

Nash seemed annoyed by Michael’s blunt language. “Boone’s team achieved its objectives.”

“Do the police know what happened? Has it become news?”

“Why should you be concerned with that?”

“I’m telling you how to find Gabriel. If the media doesn’t know about this, then Boone should make sure they find out.”

Nash nodded. “That’s definitely part of the plan.”

“I know my brother. Gabriel visited New Harmony and met the people who lived there. This event is really going to affect him. He’ll have to react, do something on impulse. We need to be ready.”

2

G abriel and his friends were living in New York City. A minister from Vicki’s church named Oscar Hernandez had arranged for them to stay in an empty industrial loft in Chinatown. The grocery store on the ground floor took sports bets, so the store had five phone lines-all registered in different names-plus a fax machine, a scanner, and a high-speed Internet connection. For a small payment, the grocer allowed them to use these electronic resources to substantiate their new identities. Chinatown was a good place for these transactions because all the shopkeepers preferred cash to the credit cards and ATM cards that were monitored by the Vast Machine.

The rest of the building was occupied by different businesses that used undocumented immigrants as workers. A garment sweatshop was on the first floor, and the man on the second floor manufactured pirated DVDs. Strangers walked in and out of the building during the daytime, but at night everyone was gone.

The fourth-floor loft was a long, narrow room with a polished wood floor and windows at both ends. It had once been used as a factory for fake designer handbags, and an industrial sewing machine was still bolted to the floor near the bathroom. A few days after they arrived, Vicki hung painter’s tarps on clotheslines, creating a men’s bedroom for Gabriel and Hollis, and a women’s bedroom for herself and Maya.

Maya had been wounded during the attack on the Evergreen Research Center, and her recovery was a series of small victories. Gabriel could still remember the first night she was able to sit up in a chair to eat dinner, and the first morning she took a shower without Vicki’s help. Two months after they arrived, Maya was able to leave the building with the others, limping up Mosco Street to the Hong Kong Cake Company. She waited outside the street stall-wobbly, but determined to stand on her own-while an elderly Chinese woman made cookies like crepes on a black iron griddle.

Money wasn’t a problem; they had already received two shipments of hundred-dollar bills sent by Linden, a Harlequin who lived in Paris. Following Maya’s instructions, they created false identities that included birth certificates, passports, driver’s licenses, and credit cards. Hollis and Vicki found a backup apartment in Brooklyn and rented mail drops and postal boxes. When everyone in the group had the necessary documents for two false identities, they would leave New York and travel to a safe house in Canada or Europe.

Sometimes Hollis would laugh and call their group “the four fugitives,” and Gabriel felt as if they had become friends. On some nights, the four residents of the loft each cooked a dish for one big meal, then sat around the table playing cards and joking about who was going to wash the dishes. Even Maya smiled occasionally and became part of the group. Gabriel could lose his self-consciousness during those moments, forget that he was a Traveler and that Maya was a Harlequin-and that his ordinary life was gone forever.

ON WEDNESDAY NIGHT, everything changed. The group had spent two hours at a jazz club in the West Village. As they strolled back to Chinatown, a truck driver tossed bound stacks of a tabloid newspaper onto the sidewalk. Gabriel glanced down at the headline and stopped moving.

THEY KILLED THEIR KIDS!

67 Die in Arizona Cult Suicide

The front-page article was about New Harmony, where Gabriel had gone only a few months earlier to visit the Pathfinder Sophia Briggs.