Backside of an old brick-and-stucco building on the edge of downtown Tallahassee, Florida, ten o'clock on a muggy evening in early September, a couple weeks before the autumn equinox. The cleaning crew had left, rattling their equipment carts and trash bins across the blacktop to their vans. A few people remained in the building; two cars sat in the parking lot, and there were lighted offices on the second and third floors.

The target office had been vacant since six o'clock. The young woman turned left, to the fire stairs and ran rapidly upwards on silent, soft-cushioned athletic soles. At the fifth and top floor, she listened for a moment behind the fire door, then opened the door and checked the hallway. The only light came from street-side windows. She hurried down the hall to 504, removed her jacket and took the battery-powered lock-rake from her pack.

The young woman left the building at six-thirty in the morning, now wearing her jacket red-side out, the dawn light filtering through the plum trees as she walked beneath them. Her rental car was a half-block away. She put the backpack in the trunk and transferred the lock-rake, switchblade and a short steel crowbar, which she hadn't needed, to a Fed-Ex box already labeled and paid for. The pack still held the file folder of printer paper that she'd taken out of the office. She drove carefully to a Fed-Ex curb-side station and dropped in the box of burglary tools. It would arrive back at her Arlington, Virginia apartment in three days, when she would be there to accept it.

That afternoon, she parked a block from Annette Hart's house, and waited. At five-thirty, Roscoe Anthem pulled up to the curb. He honked once and Hart trotted out of the house, smiling, piled into the car, gave Anthem a peck on the cheek and they rolled out to I-10, then three-and-half hours west to Mobile, Alabama.

Monday morning, the Washington D.C. office of Senator Christopher Colles (R-Florida), door closed. Colles and his much-hated executive assistant, Claudia Welp, perched on visitor's chairs, looking across a coffee table at the young woman. Welp pitched her voice down: "Wait: you broke into the office?"

Letty worked in what its denizens called the bullpen, an open room of low-ranking senatorial assistants and researchers, each with his or her own desk and filing cabinet, surrounded by a hip-high fabric cubical wall. Most of the staffers were either recent Ivy League graduates or smart state-school grads, getting close to power.

When Letty finished briefing Colles and Welp on the Tallahassee situation, she left them studying the purloined spreadsheets, dropped her letter of resignation on Welp's desk — two weeks' notice — and walked down to the bullpen. An hour later, Welp called and said, "Get up here. Senator Colles wants to speak with you."

With the change in her assignment, neither Colles or Welp had anything more for her to do that day, except give her the key to the basement closet she'd use as an office. She went down to check it out, and while it was bigger than an ordinary closet, it wasn't bigger than, say, a luxury California closet. The concrete walls were painted a vague pearl-like color, in paint that had begun to flake. The room contained a metal government desk that might have been left over from World War II, a two-drawer locking file cabinet with keys in the top drawer, a broken-down three-wheel chair that squeaked when she pushed it, and a safe buried in a concrete wall. The safe stood open, with nothing in it but a sheet of paper that contained the combination for the old-fashioned mechanical dial. The room did smell faintly of body odor, so Colles may have been correct about the previous occupant.

When she finished her survey of her new office, she rode the Metro under the Potomac to Arlington. The day had started out gloomy and cool, and by the time she got home, a light mist had moved in, just enough to freshen her face as she walked to her apartment complex.

Two days later:

The shooting range was out in the Virginia countryside, in a low, unpainted concrete-block building, the back of the building dug into a hillside. They got out, Letty carrying her briefcase, her purse over her shoulder. Kaiser led the way to the building, politely held the steel door for her, and they went inside to a narrow room that stretched across the width of the building. The place was the exact opposite of chic: concrete floor, unpainted walls, shelves of shooting accessories on the outer floor, with two locked racks of rifles and shotguns, mostly black.

Walls shifted his shooters into booths one, three and five, and put Letty and Kaiser in the ten booth. He clipped a target onto a shooting frame and cranked it fifteen yards down range. As he did that, Letty was digging in her briefcase and Kaiser said, "Wait, wait, wait. Before you start messin' with a gun, I want to know that you know what you're doing."

Letty put on her shooting glasses and electronic earmuffs as Walls set up a timer. She kept her hand at her side until Walls asked "Ready?" and she said, "Ready," and then the timer beeped!

In the truck, Kaiser squirmed around in the driver's seat, getting his butt settled in, then said, "I'd kill for that fuckin' Staccato."

Kaiser dropped Letty at her apartment, with her briefcase and purse. After a microwave risotto, she watched the top of the news on CNN at seven o'clock, then cleared off her kitchen table, got her gun-cleaning equipment from a closet and cleaned and lubricated the Staccato and the Sig 938. When she was sure they were right, she returned to the closet and took out her Colt .45 Gold cup and Walther PPQ and checked them. Back to the closet for a Daniel Defense AR-10-style semi-automatic rifle.

Jane Jael Hawkes walked out of her house ten minutes before one o'clock in the afternoon, carrying her backpack which contained two bottles of water, her wallet and her 9mm Glock semi-automatic pistol. The day was hot — 100F — but not unnaturally so for El Paso, Texas. Rand Low was at the curb in his Ford F150 crew cab and she popped the passenger door and climbed in.

The U.S. Army hadn't been what Hawkes thought it would be. When she signed up, she was thinking Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria; armored-up combat patrols on dusty mountain roads or desert tracks where you could see forever. She was thinking adventure, she was thinking movies: 13 Hours, Jarhead, Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty.

Out on I-10, Low put the cruise control at ninety miles an hour and Hawkes told him to back it off to eighty-five. "You get a DPS trooper with an itch and he stops us, we'll be on record as heading out toward Midland."

At Fort Polk, Hawkes met other walking examples of white, black and Hispanic trash. She had seven hasty sexual relationships over her four-year enlistment, men she left behind by her own choice; they would have chosen to stay with her, but she had other plans.

Hawkes was honorably discharged from the Army as a Specialist E4 and took advantage of the Forever GI Bill to enroll at the University of Texas El Paso, working parttime in a Fleet & Ranch store, once again lifting batteries. She quit university after two years, when a grad student explained to her that the job market for a woman with a BA degree in history was non-existent.

Headed southeast out of El Paso, I-10 tracked the agricultural land a mile or so to the south, the ribbon of green fed by the Rio Grande. Fifty miles out of town, the highway jogged to the east, away from the river, and into harder, drier country, running between heavily eroded low red mountains, past isolated small towns until they got to I-20 and turned north, toward the oil patch.

Then there was Rand Low, who was driving, another piece of white trash.

Low had turned his head toward the back seat as he laughed, and Hawkes slapped her hand on the dashboard and barked, "Watch it!"

As a young man, Rand Low had looked... Texan. Large, rawboned, he was permanently angry. He was born in Odessa, Texas, where his father worked as a short-order cook and his mother was a waitress. His parents wanted him to learn a trade. They thought the Army might train him in heavy equipment operation, because heavy equipment operators made good money in the oil patch. But the Army recruiter had conned him and he landed in the infantry, carrying a rifle. He saw distant combat — he could hear it, but not see it — and got away uninjured, angered by the restraint imposed on the troops by their officers.

When she was twenty-nine, Hawkes had used her Army computer skills and her reading of American history to start her own website, ResistUS. She chose the name because of the slight pun at the end: US for United States, and US for... us. The view was to the political right and pushed further to the right over the years. One of her Army lovers had been black and two had been Hispanic, so she hadn't started with any particular problem with other races. And she never really developed a problem with them — she had a problem with immigrants, the people that she, and her trashy friends, had to compete against.

"You're a smart guy," she'd told Low, over rum Cokes. "You think you're here by mistake? Hauling pipe for some rich fuckin' oil company? You think BP gives a wide shit about you? We're the modern slaves. Sure, they tell us we're free people, but free to do what? Earn forty grand a year breakin' your fuckin' back? Can you afford a house? Fuck no. Or if you can, it's a shack..."

Hawkes learned a curious thing about Low, who had little interest in intellectual matters, in history or economics. He could talk. Feed him the words and he could turn them into rage. And he told her something else, one night sitting at the bar:

Low had the intensity and anger and military background needed to pull people in. He had the right experience, he even had the right appearance. He just didn't know what to say — but she could help him with that.

Four men sifted out of the collection of veterans and enthusiasts who called themselves Jael-birds, the hardest of the hard-core. In addition to Low, they were Max Sawyer, their armorer and gun enthusiast; Terrill T. Duran, the oldest of the group, a former Air Force sergeant, who had done ten years in a Texas prison for bank robbery and had met Low who was serving a short stretch for driving a stolen car. And Victor Crain, a recovered meth freak and sometime car thief, who, like Low, had spent time in Afghanistan and who, everyone agreed, was a little nuts. In a good way. He'd been the one to introduce Low to the stolen car business, but hadn't been arrested when Low was.

The four men didn't talk about it, they all told each other, but somehow, other members of the militia knew, or suspected. A week after the shooting, Hawkes cornered Low and asked him directly.

A week later, Low stopped over at Hawkes' house with a militia girlfriend, and sitting at her kitchen table, drinking beer, Hawkes told them, "I read this book about President Lyndon Johnson."

Time passed, months. The patrols continued. Then a man named Roscoe Winks, an oil wildcatter, so he said, wandered into the Ironsides bar where she worked parttime. He was taking a break from the oil patch, he said, a little vacation in the El Paso area. Did she know where a man might find a little... uh... action? He didn't mean a poker game.

Duran was right: Low and Duran went into the bank on a payday Friday morning, Sawyer drove the stolen car. They got $47,000. Seed money, for the good of the USA. They burned the stolen car in a pasture outside Lawton and were back in El Paso by midnight.

Winks had a broken-down tank truck. The money from the bank robbery rehabbed the truck's diesel engine and the transmission, gave the tractor unit a fresh coat of fire-engine red paint, bought some decent recaps for it. A thousand bucks spent on a sandblaster cleaned up the tank. Red paint and careful drawing by one of the militiamen converted the truck into a replica of the vehicles run by the biggest oil-service company in the Permian Basin.

Somewhat to Hawkes' surprise, Winks' scheme actually worked — small sips of oil from the major oil companies turned into hundreds of thousands of dollars over the two years they were working at it.

Then, almost at the last minute:

Low watched Boxie Blackburn over a half-dozen weekdays, learning his routine. Although he was a manager, Blackburn was out in the field every day, usually making it home at six o'clock after a late-day stop at his office. He'd be at home for an hour or so, probably cleaning up, and between six-thirty and seven, he'd be out the door with his wife, twice to the Midland Country Club, other times to steak houses.

After a gas-and-snacks stop on I-20, they made it into Midland at 5:40 on a hot blue-sky afternoon that would have been insufferable if not for the truck's air conditioning. They pulled into an empty church parking lot on Midland Drive, a block from Cardinal Lane, and waited.

Low swung the truck into Blackburn's driveway, and Hawkes said, "Oh, my Lord, oh my..."

Hawkes sat in the truck as the men all went inside the house. She cupped her hands over her cheeks and eyes, rocked back and forth in the truck. The men were in there killing them, killing the husband and wife who she'd never met, about whom she knew almost nothing except that the husband had made a phone call to Roscoe Winks, panicking him.