“Everybody okay?” she asked. “Anybody have to pee? Anybody need water or food?”
“What are you going to do with us?” one of the women asked.
“Well, we’re gonna have a trial, a little later today.”
One of the men stood up, gripped the cell bars. “For what?”
“Treason,” she said. “If anyone needs to use the bathroom or needs food, water, or medicine, just call out.”
“You can’t put us on trial . . .”
The sound of his voice trailed off as she closed the door and walked down the hill toward the border station. Low had another big speech coming up. Rodriguez and his camerawoman—Not Cherry, Hawkes thought now, but maybe Cameron?—were working remotely, linked back to the truck electronically. Some of the locals were beginning to gather around them, where they might get on camera.
Hawkes flashed back to her job at Fleet & Ranch. Lifting batteries, for Christ’s sakes. Not a woman that anyone would think about for one solitary minute; another human robot lifting seventy-pound deep-cycle batteries for nine dollars an hour.
No more, by God. Before the hour was out, maybe a hundred million people in the United States and Mexico would have seen her masked face, flashing across the screens at Fox, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, Telemundo, Univision, and all the others.
Gonna work, she thought. And then, less certainly, Has to work.
TWENTY-TWO
Letty walked around the whole town, up and down every street. For a while, she watched a militia team that was stapling leaflets to the front doors of every house. The town had been heavily scouted before the invasion, she realized, because the team made no mistakes, knew how many people needed to go down each street, to get every house, with nobody standing around waiting, nobody returning for more leaflets.
Whenever she could, she joined townspeople who were mixing with militiamen, listening.
The leaflet crew was called the information team. Another, much larger, well-armed group was called the fast-reaction team. Because the town was built on a slope, virtually all the houses and businesses had a downhill side with a concrete foundation wall two or three feet tall. The fast-reaction team had begun taking positions behind those walls, with weapons facing uphill. Other teams blocked the bridge and the highway.
She lingered in the crowd that gathered to watch Hawkes’s television press conference, checked the number of men and women blocking the bridge as she did that—there were twenty of them and they all wore armored vests and helmets and sunglasses and bandannas, with tactical pants and boots. They all carried AR-15s, and, to Letty, seemed disciplined. There were thirty-five more on the fast-reaction team. She could see two other, smaller teams working around the bridge, maybe fifteen people total. Another team set up checkpoints on the highways, and the main intersecting streets; they stopped all cars to check them, but let people walk through.
They were threatening, she thought, by their very heavily armed presence, without issuing any specific threats. She heard a woman on the bridge team call out to the Mexicans on the other side, in fluent Spanish, and the Mexicans called back, and then both sides laughed.
She wasn’t close enough to hear what they actually said, but she thought, Very organized and well thought out.
Senator Colles called her twice, Greet twice more, and she ignored the calls, her phone on vibrate, with the ring silenced. When she’d walked the full town, she called Kaiser: “Where are you?”
“On the way back,” Kaiser said. “I talked to the militia at the roadblock, and I’m kinda impressed. They know what they’re doing.”
“Same here. I’ll be at the motel. It’s after eleven o’clock now and we need to talk. I want to go down to the town meeting at noon.”
“See you back there.”