Jude Read online

  “I see. So he’s gone?”

  “Yes, he had affairs to attend to and others to counsel.”

  “So he’s an advisor?”

  “Yes, among other things.”

  “Is he your advisor?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.

  “Yes, I asked to meet with him. Now that we’re entering a new phase, I wanted … more direct influence and discussion. I was tired of the guesswork.”

  “A new phase?”

  “Our inheritance, Thomas,” my brother said straightforwardly, as if explaining the obvious. “Once we turn twenty-one, we inherit the family fortune. We, you and I, will be quite wealthy. There are plans to be made, paths to be charted. We have a big transition in front of us now, with all that we’re inheriting. We’re no longer just college kids with trust funds.”

  “Oh, that. So he’ll advise on that transition?”

  “Among other things.”

  There was always so much I wanted to ask my brother. “So how should I think of him?” I asked instead. “As a … what? A trusted advisor to you on our affairs of state and inheritance?”

  “Think of him like a regent. You know what that means, right?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yes, Jude. I’m the political science major, remember?”

  “Good. So you know what he stands for.”

  “And will there be others like him?”

  “There are many others like him, I would suspect.”

  “I meant around you—around us and our lives.”

  “They are always around us, Thomas, whether you wish it or not,” my brother said. “But, yes, I daresay there will be other regents, other advisors from time to time. Our inheritance is rather large, you know—in the billions of dollars. Our dear departed dad’s patents were awfully central to a great many companies and industries, it turns out. More than I’d first imagined. Sorting through them will be complicated and take some time and getting used to.”

  “So the need for your regent?”

  “Yes, and the fact I wanted a certain directness in our relationship as we enter our next phase. It is a vast world now, with many opportunities before us.” Jude’s gaze appeared unfocused, far off. I could only guess what my brother was wondering about.

  I broke into his thoughts. “So what will you do after you graduate from Harvard?”

  He blinked. “Whatever I’d like, I suspect. But I’m in no particular hurry. I believe I’ll just get my law degree from Stanford so I can see what the West Coast is like, and then I’ll add my MBA on top of that. No reason not to finish off my college résumé. What about you?”

  “I have no particular plans after college,” I said truthfully.

  “Well, find some. Because the world belongs to us now. Might as well take advantage of it.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The survivalist retreat workshop was a good four-hour drive from the family farm in Charlottesville that Jude and I had maintained for years. We’d thought about putting the farm up for sale after our adoptive parents had died so suddenly, but Jude had quickly realized that it was, in fact, a great place to hold off-the-grid meetings with regents, moguls, or financiers that he didn’t particularly care to be seen with in public.

  The survivalist workshop had seemed like a good place to start on my research for the new book. There was a feeling of both impending doom and exhilarating liberation to simply walk away from the daily cares of the working world to explore whatever the day might bring. I had no idea what I was walking into, but I didn’t care. For the first time in a long time, I was happy to simply exist with no plan or care for the future. I could almost see Sandy smiling somewhere at the notion.

  I’d signed up for the retreat workshop on a whim after a skim through one of several wildly popular survival blogs. There were some tenuous connections—it wasn’t like the Christian Brigades advertised for its recruits in handbooks that one could buy on Amazon—but I was fairly certain I’d trip across one or two potential candidates or actual members at such a retreat workshop.

  Jude had simply laughed at me when I’d told him of my plans. “You’re wasting your time,” he’d said. “Those folks are all crazy.”

  “Maybe, but one of those crazy folks tried to kill you,” I’d said while at his Senate campaign headquarters in midtown before heading to JFK for the flight down to Dulles. I’d decided to at least let Jude know of my plans.

  “You do realize,” he added, “that probably half of the people attending that retreat workshop you’re going to are almost certainly informants or undercover agents from the FBI, ATF, DHS, or some other federal agency using it to spot troublemakers? Good luck trying to find anything real.”

  The Senate campaign was exploding with activity. The traditional bunting, in bright blue and white, flew everywhere. An enormous Asher for Senate sign was centrally located in the sprawling campaign office that took up an entire floor of the building we owned outright. Massive security ringed the office. Curiously, they were feds, not private security.

  “I tried to keep them away,” Jude told me. He’d built just one office for himself at the center of the campaign headquarters, with three open windows that faced out onto the floor, which was jammed with campaign workers. I felt a bit like a creature at a zoo in the office, but Jude didn’t seem to mind. “I told the Homeland Security types that I didn’t need the protection. An incident like that won’t happen again. You and I both know that, but it’s not like I can tell the federal authorities that.”

  “How can you be so sure it won’t happen again?” I asked him.

  “I’m sure,” Jude replied. “It won’t happen again. There’s no good reason for you to go off hunting after those types either.”

  “It’s something I want to do,” I insisted.

  “Whatever,” Jude said dismissively. “But you’re wasting your time, like all of this security around me here.”

  I peered out over the office. I could tell, right off, that none of the regents were there. The place bustled with activity, but none of the people appeared to be the kind I’d grown accustomed to seeing around Jude.

  “It seems pretty chaotic,” I said. “What are they all doing anyway?”

  Jude shrugged. “Not sure, precisely. My campaign manager seems to have it well in hand. They have the ability to microtarget potential supporters down to the neighborhood and house now, so I’m sure they’re identifying all of those types.”

  “And your unseen friends?”

  “Not immediately here in this office,” Jude said. “But don’t worry. I’m safe. You go do your thing with your research, if you insist. But you’re completely wasting your time. There’s no actual rhyme or reason behind that phenomenon. It’s built on fear of an uncertain future and not much else.”

  I deconstructed some of Jude’s words as I drove along Highway 29 from the farm, the foothills of the Appalachians to either side of me. It was a peaceful, if uneventful, drive to the southwest of Virginia. Plenty of time to sort through priorities and questions that had been swirling since the shooting.

  As I drove farther into the rural part of the state, I noticed that the towns got progressively less interesting as I made my way into the heart of coal country. Southwest Virginia was so far removed from the northern Virginia suburbs that I wondered how they were even remotely connected to the same state. No wonder that statewide candidates basically ran two separate campaigns—one for the northern Virginia suburbs, and a second for the parts of the state where workers clung to jobs in dying industries like coal and rural farming.

  I was a bit depressed by the time I arrived in the county that housed the retreat workshop center. Not surprisingly, Google maps on my cell phone had been spectacularly unsuccessful at locating the lodge, which was deep in the heart of the woods off an old logging road. The Google car had not, apparently, bothered to make its way down
these roads in coal country that existed somewhere between southwest Virginia and eastern Kentucky. I’d been forced to get out of my car at a rural gas station with pumps that still clicked and whirred when you filled the car with gas after it became apparent that my GPS wasn’t cutting it.

  “Yeah, you gotta turn behind the big, red barn with the chew tin on the side. Can’t miss it. They just painted the barn,” the gas-station attendant told me. “Take a left when you get to a fork, and then a right after that. You’ll come out of a bunch of trees then, and it’ll be up on top of the hill.”

  “Thanks much,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

  The gas-station attendant gave me a curious look. “So you’re one of those from the city who paid for the prepper stuff?”

  “Prepper?”

  “Yeah, you know, prep. Gettin’ ready for disasters.”

  “Oh, well, yes,” I said uneasily. “That’s what I signed up for. It’s a workshop.”

  He cocked his head to one side. “So what’d you spend on it? A few hundred bucks?”

  “Yeah, something like that. Maybe five hundred dollars. I don’t remember exactly.”

  The station attendant whistled. “Man, I’d love to get some of that, for sure. A good business, I’ll bet, teachin’ people how to prep for those backdoor nukes that North Korea’s gonna drop on us one of these days, settin’ all those welfare queens off against each other in the city once they can’t live high off the hog no longer.”

  I studied the guy. He seemed to know an awful lot of the “prepper” language I’d seen sprinkled through some of the comment sections on survival blogs.

  “You really believe that?” I asked him.

  “What?”

  “You know—about North Korea dropping a nuclear bomb on the United States and setting off a chain of disasters?”

  The station attendant shrugged. “They got nukes, and they got missiles. They don’t like America much, so, sure, I guess it’s possible.”

  I wanted to tell the young gas-station attendant that, in fact, no, it wasn’t possible. North Korea did, in fact, have nuclear weapons. So did Iran. But neither country was even remotely close to being able to mount a small warhead on an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the continental United States. There would be no “backdoor nukes” dropping on the US from Iran or North Korea anytime soon.

  “North Korea doesn’t like us much, do they?” I said instead.

  “Nah, they don’t.” He glanced at my newest car, the latest in a long line of BMWs, which I’d grown accustomed to over the years. “So you got four-wheel on that car?”

  “No, why?”

  The attendant smiled. “Ah, just askin’. Good luck to you. Pray it don’t rain while you’re there, is all. You might need a tow for that thing if it does.”

  I returned the smile. “I’m sure I’ll be fine. But thanks for letting me know.”

  “Anytime. Just bein’ neighborly, is all.”

  As I drove away from the station, I wondered if, perhaps, the young gas-station attendant hadn’t been playing with the big-city guy a bit. But he’d been right about a couple of things. It did seem silly, in retrospect, to drive to a survivalist workshop in a BMW. And, while five hundred dollars meant nothing to me and my deep checkbook, it did seem like those who taught about prepping—or retreating or whatever the survivalist language of the day was—were the true winners in this race to save humanity from disaster.

  I found the big red barn. It had just been painted, and it would have been hard to miss. Curiously, the fading image of a tin of chewing tobacco had been left on the side, and the rest of the barn had been repainted around it. I wondered if they received advertising revenue for displaying the tin of chewing tobacco or whether the farmer just happened to like that particular brand and wanted the world to know.

  The station attendant was right. As I wound along the old logging road, navigating my BMW up into the hills and around ruts on either side, it became increasingly clear that I would, indeed, be toast if it rained. There was no chance I’d make my way out of these hills. A four-wheel was a necessity back here.

  His directions also had been spot on. The smallish wooden lodge was up at the top of a ridge, overlooking the valley. I wondered if the house had been specifically built for a purpose or if the owners merely liked the view.

  I chuckled to myself as I parked my BMW on the grass three rows back from the other cars already gathered for the workshop. I spotted at least a half-dozen old Chevy Tahoes, another dozen or so F-150s and a smattering of Explorers, Jeeps, and Mountaineers. They were all four-wheels of one sort or another. Mine was the only exception.

  I glanced at the license plates as I locked the car. Most were from Virginia, but quite a few hailed from neighboring states like North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. This wasn’t a local gathering. These folks were genuinely interested in the concept of moving off the grid to a retreat.

  “Now that’s an awfully funny-lookin’ BOV, if I’ve ever seen one,” a voice boomed out to me as I walked between cars toward the front porch of the lodge.

  I looked up at a rather large man with a faded, red-and-black plaid shirt, black jeans, and a raggedy baseball cap pushed halfway back on his balding head. He was leaning against the railing, watching me closely.

  “A what? BOV?” I called back.

  The guy moved around the railing to greet me as I came up the steps. He held out a welcoming hand. “You are new at this, I see. This your first workshop?”

  I took his hand and nodded. “Yes, it is. I guess it’s a bit obvious, isn’t it?”

  “Just a bit,” said the man.

  “So … BOV. What’s that again?”

  “Bug-out vehicle,” the man said with a warm smile. “Generally an older four-wheel car with no fancy computer electronics that can get zapped by EMPs. And don’t forget your BOB in the back.”

  I thought for a moment. “EMPs? Not sure what those are.”

  “Electromagnetic pulses. You know, when the Russians set off nukes in the upper atmosphere, knocking out all the electronics down below.”

  “I see.” I did vaguely recall that the military had once been quite concerned about EMPs. It had never occurred to me that this same concept had managed to make its way into survivalist lore as well. “And the BOB? That would be … maybe a bug-out bag with the stuff you’ll need as you make your getaway?”

  “There you go!” he said, his voice unusually loud and clear in such a quiet place. “You’ll get the hang of the prepper business in no time at all.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe,” I muttered. “This is all pretty new to me.”

  “So what brings you out here in the middle of God’s country, friend? And the name’s Frank Gore, by the way. Or OTG Gore, as some of these folks like to call me.”

  “OTG?”

  “Off the grid,” he said. “It’s the name of my blog and my handbook.”

  The light bulb went off. “You’re teaching the workshop,” I murmured. “Sorry. I didn’t make the connection right away.”

  “No worries, friend. I’d hardly expect you to if you’re not a regular reader of my blog.” He folded his arms and waited.

  It took me a moment to catch on. “Oh, sorry again,” I said quickly. “My name is Thomas Asher. I’m from New York.”

  Frank Gore surveyed me closely. He didn’t say anything right away. I could see that my name meant something to him. I couldn’t tell if he was curious or repelled by the knowledge of who I was and where I’d come from.

  “Yeah, I know who you are,” he said finally. “But you’re also from around these parts, up the road a bit in Charlottesville, if I remember correctly. You inherited that guy’s estate?”

  “The Ashers. Yeah, that’s me,” I said wearily. I’d long ago grown tired of trying to explain myself and my family history.
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  Gore tilted his head back a bit. “You’re worth a lot of money, if I recall. What brings you out here to these parts, if I can ask? You’re not exactly prepper material.”

  I decided to wade right in, though carefully. Sometimes, as a reporter, you had to make a calculated guess, an intuitive leap, to see if a source would play ball with you. If I guessed wrong, I’d blow up whatever chances I might have of extracting any meaningful information at this workshop. But if I guessed right, then I’d have a guide in this strange, new world I’d wandered into.

  “I’m doing research for a book.” I stared hard at Gore. “I’m a reporter for The New York Times, and I’m on sabbatical to write a book. I’m generally interested in the survivalist culture. So, no, I’m not exactly prepper material. But I’m awfully interested—and I’m hoping you can help me out and teach me the ropes.”

  Frank “Off the Grid” Gore started nodding, mostly to himself. I could see he was weighing his options. In the end, it appeared I’d guessed right. “I might be able to help out a bit,” he said thoughtfully. “But we’d need some ground rules, of course. I have a reputation and a livelihood to protect.”

  “I can imagine,” I offered. “I’m sure these workshops help the bottom line and pay some of the bills.”

  “You have no idea.” Gore smiled. “It more than pays the bills, but that’s a story for another day, perhaps. For now, I’d like to set the rules a bit. I’ll help you out, show you the ropes, give you a bit of the history. In return, you leave me out of whatever you write. Sound like a deal?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But what do you get out of it?”

  Gore chuckled. “Oh, you never know. I’m a friendly sort. And I like to talk. Maybe just leave it at that for the time being.”

  “Fine by me. So where do we start?”

  Gore turned and led the way into the lodge. “You listen to my boring lecture, for starters. And we’ll see how much of it you retain.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The years immediately following the untimely demise—or fortuitous death, depending on one’s perspective, I supposed—of our adoptive parents were some of the most productive of Jude’s life. He was like a man who’d suddenly been released from prison. No excess was too much. No material thing was seemingly out of grasp. No woman, regardless of stature or celebrity, was out of reach.