4. Black Car

We walked a couple of blocks to where Agent Katz had parked her Bureau fleet car near the parish hall. A forlorn place it looked, busted door criss-crossed with police tape, poppies motionless in the hot June sun.

The short walk gave me a better look at Katz. She was slim and trim and walked lightly, like a runner. In quality, her blue-gray suit was more IBM than FBI. Where would she keep her gun, wearing that? Probably in the soft leather messenger bag she carried instead of a handbag. She wore practical shoes. She looked smart. She cut a neat figure. But words like ‘pretty’ wouldn’t fit right. No, she was interesting. She was that distant cousin who, whenever you meet her, makes you regret you hadn’t known her better.

I was a head taller. Beside her, I felt clumsy and … big in an ill-defined way. Covid had made me lazy about shaving, and Katz’s neatness made me conscious of the stubble. My plum-colored summer suit, edgy in Manhattan, would better fit a crack dealer here in North Philly.

“Agent Katz, did you come to check the parish hall? Wasn’t it picked clean by the Philadelphia PD?”

“I came to talk to the first responders, but—” She pulled an oblong device from a jacket pocket, clicked a button and made a bright red dot skitter along the sidewalk. It was a laser measuring gadget. “—also to measure the hall. I wanted to see if Lohman’s floor plan was right.”

“Was it?”

“Nope. The toilets and coat room are larger than in the plan, adjacent rooms smaller, like dividing walls were moved. Dating the plan might help identify the source.”

We’d reached her Bureau car—a maroon-colored crossover. I’d come by train and car service, so she’d offered to drive me into town. I wanted to speak to Lohman, who was being held at the Philadelphia PD headquarters, a block from the FBI field office.

North Broad was a long, straight run, with enough traffic lights that we’d have plenty of time to talk. As we drove, I gave her the rundown on me.

“You’re with ‘Agency’?” she asked, turning to peer at me quizzically. “Not something Agency?”

“Just Agency. It’s a tongue-in-cheek name, a play on words. I think you’ll understand once you know the background. We started as cult-busters.”

“Huh. Like Ghostbusters?”

“Just so.”

“Okay.” She drawled out the ‘ay’.

I’d met that reaction often enough that I’d developed an efficient patter. “A California industrialist founded Agency in the early seventies after he lost his wife to a cult.”

“Lost? As in …”

“She died of a drug overdose, along with thirteen other women.”

“Like a miniature Jonestown?”

“Just so. Agency’s original mission was to help families extract victims from predatory cults. The methods were clever, but sometimes as false as the prophets. After the cult panic in the 80s, Agency had its own moral crisis, and nearly dissolved.”

We stopped at a light. Katz looked at me. Her face conveyed skepticism, curiosity, and amusement all at once. “Wasn’t that the height of the anti-cult movement, and like, a golden age for cult-busters?”

Refreshing to meet someone her age whose knowledge of the 80s wasn’t entirely from Stranger Things. “That’s right. Though few knew it, Agency was responsible.”

“Oh … covert opinion engineering? Like the CIA. Cool.”

I frowned. “Anyway, the cult panic was mostly bullshit, fueled by moral entrepreneurs and media opportunists. It did more harm than the cults themselves.”

The light changed. We rolled on past strip malls.

Katz mused, “Yeah, one person’s cult is another’s church. And how do you tell the difference between indoctrination and free choice?”

“Just the questions that bothered Agency’s original members. They moved on to other things.”

“Like The Watchmen. Disillusioned heroes. But you’re still around. And seriously, you don’t look that old.”

I wasn’t used to having my patter interrupted. “I was a grad student in California in 2000 when a professor told me about Agency. It was moribund then. A surge in conspiracy thinking after 9/11 gave it a shot in the arm. We got new blood and fresh ideas. Developed a scientific approach. Now, the focus is on shared delusions and toxic beliefs that spread virally. Ones that lead to—”

“—massacres and murdered priests,” said Katz.

I nodded. “The founder called Agency’s members ‘free agents’. Some had been cut loose from cults, you see. It was doubly tongue-in-cheek, because the foundation trust earns only enough to pay administrative costs. Free agents are volunteers.”

Katz glanced at me, her expression hard to read. “Hmm. A kind of secret society, then.”

“Not exactly secret …”

“With a name like ‘Agency’, a Web search would never find you. And I bet you don’t advertise.”

“True.” We didn’t even have a website.

“So, you’re a ‘free agent’?”

“I am. You could say it’s a professional hobby. We help people—and sometimes police forces and Government agencies—understand and interfere with cancerous bits of culture. A more up-to-date description would be ‘meme-busters.’”

“Like Pythia,” said Katz. She was silent as we cruised past a monotonous procession of franchise stores—Pizza Hut, Wendys, Taco Bell. It was early afternoon, so the traffic was light.

“Hey,” she said, after a bit. “I think we have a tail.”

That was so unexpected it took me a second to get what she meant.

“That black SUV a block behind us,” she added. “It was parked near the parish hall. I think it drove past the diner, too.”

I glanced back. The car looked more like the movie version of a Bureau car than Katz’s did. I remembered then the car I’d seen through the diner window—maybe more than once, like it was circling. That made my scalp tingle.

“Just heading the same way?” I suggested. “It’s the straightest way into town.”

“Let’s find out.” Katz eased off the gas.

The black SUV drifted closer in the same lane.

Katz slipped right, politely making space for the other car to pass. Then, with neat timing, she braked to a stop just as the light at the intersection ahead turned yellow. The black SUV’s brake lights flickered as it passed, but the driver thought better of it and continued across the intersection. We waited, both watching the receding rear end of the vehicle. A block ahead, it pulled into the parking lane.

When the light changed and we drove past, I tried to get a glimpse of the driver, but his car windows were tinted. After we’d left the SUV a block behind, it pulled out into traffic, looming over the smaller cars between it and ours.

“He’s tailing us,” said Katz, glancing at me. “But he’s no good at it. If he was, I wouldn’t spot him. I haven’t had much practice.”

That made two of us.

She poked a button on the dash. There was a chirrup. “Central dispatch,” said a cool, baritone voice.

“Central, this is Special Agent Esther Katz of the Washington Bureau, visiting. I’m heading South on North Broad St. and I think I’m being followed. I have a civilian passenger. May I send you a plate picture, please?”

I liked that she said ‘please.’ They don’t do that on TV.

“Of course, Special Agent Katz.”

She clicked another button, and there on the dashboard screen was a photograph of the back end of the black SUV, taken as it crossed the intersection.

“Received,” said the dispatcher’s voice. “Will advise. There are no other Bureau cars in the vicinity. Shall I request assistance from the PD, Agent Katz?”

“Not at this time, thank you.”

The radio gave a little closing ‘boop.’

We cruised, running the greens. Dunkin Donuts. Texaco. Taco Bell. The black SUV cruised behind us, but I resisted the urge to look back.

The radio chirruped. “Nothing on that Virginia plate in Bureau or Pennsylvania state records, Agent Katz. Waiting for the Virginia state system to respond.” The voice booped off.

We entered a stretch with a central median reserved for cars making left turns. Katz rolled into the median without indicating. Uncommitted. Behind, the black SUV swerved into the right-hand traffic lane, accelerated past slower cars on the left, then swerved back into the left traffic lane. It swept up beside us, giving me a broadside view. And this time, the driver’s side window was down.

What I saw, mottled by shadow and tinted sunlight coming through the car’s sunroof: a Hawaiian shirt, a thick, tattooed forearm, a thick, tattooed neck, a fleshy, bearded face under a camouflage baseball cap, dark eyes looking back at me. And the expression: jaw clenched, muscles rigid, sweat glinting on the brow. Focused. Intent.

I snapped my head around to Katz and said, loud and urgent: “He’s dangerous. Don’t stop.”