Free Against All Enemies by John Gilstrap

answer.
    Until the orders he received tilted away from the lawful and reasonable. Once that line was crossed, Ian’s duty to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, trumped the orders of the day.
    As the rules changed around him over the five decades he’d walked the planet, Ian was reminded of the old story of the boiled frog. Put a frog in boiling water, and he’ll jump out to save his life. Put him in cool water, however, and heat it around him, and he will allow himself to be boiled to death. So it was with the American people, who continued to sit passively as their God-given rights were stripped away by ambitious politicians.
    Ian hated the thoughts and the feelings that had come to dominate his days. He hated the perpetual anger and the pervasive sense of helplessness as he watched with the rest of the silent masses as day after day evil triumphed over good. He knew there was a better way, and he knew that he was the one to spearhead it.
    His plan was a simple one, requiring only a small band of loyal followers with very specific skills. He needed muscle, and he needed brains, but most of all he needed anonymity for everyone. His plan involved no invasions and no shoot-outs in city streets. Shots would need to be fired for sure, but if things went as he envisioned them, those shots would be fired one at a time, and a single box of ammo could accomplish everything that needed to be done.
    The Uprising message boards had been his recruitment tool. By laying out red meat for people who were as frustrated as he, he’d baited a trap that would snare the kind of talent he was looking for. But he had to sift through the trolls and the nutjobs to single out those who truly were what they claimed to be.
    The Uprising didn’t need an army. It needed a team, a handful of maybe one hundred operators who could, in coordinated surgical attacks, eliminate the structural barriers that kept voters from having the voice they earned. It wouldn’t be that hard, not with the right cadre of professionals. On Ian’s side was the fact that the Department of Homeland Security was a muddled, bureaucratic mess, and the US military—one of the last bastions of sensible organization, albeit impossibly fat and inefficient in its own right—was forbidden by posse comitatus to do battle on American soil.
    Among the delicate balancing challenges Ian had had to manage was how to share enough of the plan to attract good recruits, yet keep it secret enough that no one operator would ever have adequate information to betray him, the Uprising, or its other members. It had been a stressful few months feeling his way through new territory where the tolerance for a mistake was exactly zero. His efforts toward strict operational security had left no traceable bread crumbs—he was sure of that—but with each new human being in the mix, with their own personalities and weaknesses, bread crumbs began to form and multiply. Thus far, while he knew the true identities of the recruits he’d signed, none of them yet knew the identities of each other, but as their numbers swelled, that anonymity would become unsustainable.
    And that was why the third sighting of the man on the Metro was so disturbing. In their first encounter—in a Starbucks—the man had attracted Ian’s attention with a loud sneeze, and then had made a point of steadfastly avoiding eye contact as he read his newspaper upside down. Their second meeting played itself out in a CVS Pharmacy where Ian was picking up some nasal spray as a hedge against his summer allergies. There, the stranger hovered over the candy selection while Ian checked out, and then he followed him out of the store, only to peel off and go the other way once they were on the sidewalk.
    And now this. The man stared with a malevolence that was intended to intimidate, and it was having its desired effect. Ian tried to appear disengaged, unconcerned, but as the