Chapter 12
It would have been nice to take Clary to a real romantic dinner at the restaurant, and Thomas vowed that one day soon, he would do just that.
It would be just the two of them, and they wouldn’t discuss sinister plots.
They could talk about other things, things that were important to them, like their future.
However, this Friday evening was all about the intrigue.
Sitting at their various tables so that anyone looking in through the windows would see a normal setting, the couples pretended not to be talking to each other. As Anita and Kevin brought out dishes of food and filled their glasses with cider, beer, or wine, the conversation rolled around the room.
“Anyway, I exonerated Thomas,” Robert said as he finished his meal and his explanation of Thomas’s predicament.
Andrew sighed. “Okay then. Thomas, I’m sorry you’ve landed in this position, but I think it’s actually worse than we thought.”
“What do you mean?” Warren asked.
“It’s the letter from El Aguila,” Michael said. “Andrew and I have kept it under wraps because it’s just so …”
“It’s a demand; let’s call it what it is,” Michael said angrily. “He’s insisting that we leave our town and everything we’ve built, or he’s threatening to force us out.”
A stunned silence filled the room. Even the sounds of folks eating were stilled.
“He wants us out?” Thomas asked. “Why? I thought he was getting a portion of our copper as payment for him leaving us alone.”
Andrew and Michael shared a look.
“We stopped that a while ago,” Andrew said.
“It was too much,” Micheal said. “And El Aguila has never kept his word, not once. So, we thought it was like throwing money into a big black hole that we would never get any kind of return from.”
Thomas nodded. He thought of everything they had endured and what his brother and family had to be going through now. It wasn’t pleasant.
Clary took one of his hands in hers and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “There’s a lot at stake, between the note in Thomas’s locker and the bandit-delivered letter.”
“Yes, but El Aguila can’t really expect us to leave, can he?” Dorothy asked. “Everyone here has worked far too hard to be here. Does he think that we would really pack up and walk out if things got a little challenging?”
“What else does the letter say?” Thomas asked. “There has to be more. It can’t be that simple, can it?”
Andrew shrugged. “The letter only threatens more violence if we don’t comply. That’s all.”
“Mmm,” Lucy said, tapping her lips with her fingers. “You know, I think we’re looking at this from the wrong point of view.”
“What do you mean?” Robert asked, sipping his beer. “What other point of view is there?”
“His,” she said simply. “We’re looking at what he’s saying but not at his motive. The thing we should be asking ourselves is, what does El Aguila stand to gain if everything goes his way?”
“Well, if Thomas disables the elevator, then the mine begins to crawl while we use up money and resources to rebuild it,” Lizzy said.
“Exactly.” Lucy turned in her seat to smile at Lizzy. “How long would it take to fix the elevator?”
“I don’t know; it would depend on what he did to disable it,” Lizzy said. “The worse the damage, the longer the repair time.”
“I would do the bare minimum,” Thomas said.
“No, you would do something that would look proper to the spy,” Troy countered.
“If you only did enough to stop it for a day or two, El Aguila might take it as you being rebellious and then he would harm your family anyway. So, being a smart man, Thomas, you would do enough to put it out of commission for a week or two.”
“Okay,” Thomas said. “Hypothetically speaking, of course.”
“Sure,” Troy agreed.
“And in that time the town loses its major industry. Folks begin to suffer. Then, if the bandits come and there are more losses, we could be looking at a very volatile situation,” Diane said, working through the steps in her head.
“Exactly,” Julie agreed with a nod.
“It would be chaos in a matter of weeks,” Dorothy said, “if we couldn’t get the mine back up and running.”
“And I’ll bet that’s what he’s waiting for,” Michael said. “Remember your town, Lizzy. Isn’t that what he had his bandits do there?”
Lizzy nodded. “That’s true. He ran through us like we were nothing. He just took whatever he wanted. We had no hope of defeating him and his hordes of men.”
“You didn’t, but we might,” Andrew said with a determined look on his face.
“Okay, so we understand what El Aguila is looking for and what he’s hoping to get out of all of this,” Lucy said. “Now we can work out the best way to defeat him. We need a short-term and a long-term plan with contingencies.”
Robert smiled at her. “I knew you were amazing, but this goes way beyond that!” He kissed her cheek and Lucy smiled.
“We have to start with Thomas,” Clary said. “El Aguila still has his brother, and I’ll bet time is running out. The only way to fix that situation is going to be to let him sabotage the elevator.”
“Yes, but we can use that,” Lucy continued.
“Ah, I see where this is going,” Robert said excitedly. “We use the elevator situation to flush out the spy.”
“Yes, and then we question him or her,” Dorothy said. “I like that idea.”
“No, then we go to Thomas’s brother’s farm and make sure they’re okay,” Clary said.
“We do it quickly so that El Aguila doesn’t kill them anyway when he hears the sabotage went well.
Some madmen do that sort of thing. They just leave bodies in their wake, and we can’t take the chance. There are children involved.”
There was a murmur of agreement, and Thomas squeezed Clary’s hand gratefully.
“Great. Perhaps we can start hashing out our plans over dessert,” Lucy suggested.
Anita and Kevin stepped into the room. “You can count us in for whatever you need,” Anita said.
“We’d love to help save our home and Thomas’s family,” Kevin said.
The tight, heavy feeling in Thomas’s gut, which had lodged there when he got the note, finally seemed to be dissolving. He wasn’t alone in this mess.
It was all going to be fine.
It was all going to go wrong.
The plan was a nightmare for Thomas. He honestly wasn’t built for sneaking around, and he felt terrible.
It was his upbringing, he thought. His parents had been very particular about him or Luke telling lies, sneaking around, or taking things that didn’t belong to them.
“Thou shalt not” was a common phrase used in his folks’ house.
And if ever he and Luke decided to test those words, they had felt their father’s disapproval many times when they were children.
Then he and Luke had been forced to read Romans 12:21. “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Their father insisted they write it out over and over again. Thomas was certain he would never forget it.
And yet here he was, about to do something that he felt in his heart was inherently evil.
He was only glad that Clary was with him.
As they walked across the bridge, arm in arm like lovers seemingly taking an evening stroll, she kept whispering to him that it was all right. They were going to be fine. He wondered if it was for her sake or his.
It was late enough that there were almost no other people around, but not so late that their crossing the bridge would cause comment.
The stone construction was lit all night with lamps and was a common spot for courting couples to go to.
They would lean on the railing and kiss or go for a stroll through the remnants of the old tent town that were still standing on the mine side of the town.
The communal campfire was still there, and sometimes the inhabitants still held their celebrations there, just as they had when Unity was in its infancy.
Clary smiled up at him. “We’re almost across the bridge. We should head to the campfire, so that no one thinks anything strange about us being there.”
“There are some tents,” he said. “We could …”
“Yes,” Clary said. “That would make hiding our things easier.” She kissed his cheek. He smiled wanly.
They set off for the campfire. On the way they passed another couple, Ben and Sarah, heading back from the campfire.
“Oh great, now they’ll know we were here,” Thomas said. “We should turn around.”
“No, we should do what we came to do,” Clary insisted.
Thomas sighed. “Right. For Luke.”
“For his wife and children.”
They carried on in silence.
Some lessons were hard to unlearn, and the one about always being upstanding and honest had stuck and was proving terribly difficult to dislodge. As Thomas got closer to his goal, he could almost hear his father saying over and over, “No dishonesty. No underhandedness. God sees everything you do.”
This meant that Thomas kept hesitating, expecting one of the patrolmen to find them. It wouldn’t be too much of a problem so long as they were in the old town. The moment they crossed into the mine territory, well, then things could get far more dangerous.
The campfire was deserted. Clary took a quick look around and then darted into one of the remaining tents, dragging Thomas after her. Andrew and Michael had decided to leave them standing as a reminder of how far they had come as a community.
Inside the tent there was no moonlight to see by except what came in through the flap. Clary stripped off her skirt. Under it she had on a pair of men’s trousers. She looked like a short man with her hair in a bun under a peaked cap.
Thomas was dressed in dark colors anyway, and he fidgeted while waiting for her to be ready to go. The sooner they did this, the sooner it could be over.
It was actually kind of funny in a totally unfunny way that the person El Aguila had chosen to do this was so averse to it. Perhaps, if he had known about Thomas’s strict upbringing, he would have picked a better candidate for his saboteur.
“Okay, I’m ready,” Clary said.
“You have your bag with the tools?” Thomas asked.