"Deal."
They hung up.
Ivy sat there for a moment, staring at the name on her notepad.
Volkov.
Somewhere in the building, a door closed with a distant thump.
She pulled the notepad closer and started making a list, writing quickly, her mind already organizing the work ahead.
Ivy knew she could use the Treasury mainframe to check customs records, import/export databases, any financial transactions tied to the name.
She also had a friend in the Directorate of Operations who owed her a favor from a case last year. Ivy would see if the name Volkov meant anything to him.
It wouldn’t be a bad idea to check gun dealer records, explosives permits, anything tied to weapons trafficking. If Volkov was a type of weapon, there might be a paper trail, ideally, a flagged transaction.
The long shot was Interpol, but it might be worth a call. If Volkov, whatever it might turn out to be, existed in Europe, it wouldn’t be a total waste of time.
She looked at the clock again. It was too late to call most people tonight, but she could start with the Treasury databases. The mainframe didn't sleep. It ran twenty-four hours a day, processing transactions, storing records, waiting for queries.
And she had access.
Ivy turned to her terminal and typed in her login credentials, her fingers moving quickly over the heavy keys. The screen flickered, the amber text glowing against the black background, then displayed the main menu—a list of databases and systems she could access. Customs. IRS. Financial Management Service. Secret Service records. She'd been using these systems for three years now, and she knew them inside and out.
She selected the customs database and waited while the system processed her request. The cursor blinked. The hard drive in the terminal housing whirred softly. Then the search screen appeared.
She typed: VOLKOV.
The system churned for a moment, processing the query, searching through millions of records—every import, every export, every person who'd crossed a U.S. border with declared goods in the past decade.
Ivy leaned forward, reading carefully, her eyes scanning the amber text.
This was going to be a long night.
12
The hotel had a bar attached to the main office.
It was a dim room with six tables, a jukebox that didn't work, and a bartender with plenty of idle time.
Joe took a table in the corner with a bottle of Budweiser and spread the briefing folder open.
Task Force materials. Background on the militia movement. He'd skimmed it in DC, but now he had time to actually read.
The history went back further than he'd thought. Pre-World War II, even. Groups like the Silver Shirt Legion in the 1930s. The Christian Front. Homegrown extremists who'd faded after Pearl Harbor but never completely disappeared.
The Cold War brought a new wave. The California Rangers. The Minutemen of the early 1960s who were armed anti-communist militants who stockpiled weapons and trained for guerrilla warfare against a Soviet invasion that never came. They'd been small, scattered, mostly ineffective. But they'd established a template.
Joe took a pull from the bottle. The beer was cold, at least.
The modern movement started in 1969 with something called the Posse Comitatus in Portland, Oregon.
Posse Comitatus. Latin for "power of the county."
The ideology was simple, the briefing said. Radical. The county was the highest legitimate level of government. The county sheriff was the supreme law enforcement authority. Anything above that, including state and federal government—was illegitimate and tyrannical. Part of a conspiracy to enslave free Americans.
If a sheriff refused to uphold "constitutional law" as the Posse defined it, citizens had the right to form a posse and remove him. By force if necessary. One Posse document described hanging the offending sheriff "at high noon at the most populated intersection, the body remaining until sundown as an example."
