Page 116 of The Oligarch's Daughter

“If you think we’re going to protect you without knowing what you did, you’re hallucinating.”

“Protect me?”

“Hal and Leon locked you in a maintenance shack; that wasn’t protecting you?”

“But whoareyou guys? Why are you doing this?”

“You first tell me why you’re running from the feds.”

Paul exhaled, a long sigh. “I don’t exactly know, okay? I’ve been living under someone else’s identity, for one thing.”

“And the feds caught up with you.”

“Right.”

“What’d you do?”

“What’d I do?”

“Why you in hiding?”

Paul heaved another sigh. “I’m on the run from a goddamned Russian oligarch.”

The Deacon chuckled dryly. “You rip off some Russian billionaire?”

“Well, I took something that I think belonged to him, yeah.”

“You don’t know for sure?”

Paul shook his head.

“The feebees coming after you for ripping off a Russki?”

Paul thought for a minute. “Maybe for using someone else’s Social Security number.”

“So you’re trying to keep yourself safe, but all the federal government cares about is that you broke one of their ridiculous rules.”

“About right.”

“What is government but a protection racket? Organized crime. No different from the mobster in the neighborhood who’s extorting money from you by saying your candy store needs protection. You don’t pay up, you have an unfortunate fire, burns down the place. Same with the government: You give up your rights to the government in exchange for protection. They make war to protect you, they say, and they tax you to pay for it.”

“Right,” Paul said, recognizing the rhetoric.

“There’s no ‘consent of the governed,’” the Deacon continued. “It’s submission of the frightened.”

“War made the state, and the state made war,” Paul said, suddenly remembering something his father used to say.

“Exactly. Violence is legit if the government does it, whether it’s the electric chair or the war in Iraq. What most people call organized crime is just less successful and smaller in scale than governments.”

“The government has a monopoly on legitimate violence,” Paul said, repeating yet another of his father’s mantras. He knew all the rhetoric, from his father, and wanted to make nice.

“You got it.”

“You guys live in the woods?” he asked, pointing at the two men who had brought him there. These men didn’t look like hikers or campers.

The two men said nothing. They looked at him warily.

The man they called the Deacon said, “You can hide in here.” He pointed to the drift of dead leaves. Paul furrowed his brow.