Murder in Foggy Bottom (14 page)

She realized she might shed tears, which she would not do, not in anyone’s presence.

“Excuse me,” she said, forcing a smile. “Time for dinner, and this secretary of state is hungry. Thanks for all your insight.”

While Hoctor, Shulman, and McQuaid joined the Secretary’s staff and security people in the press center for dinner served by Air Force personnel, Secretary Rock retired to her private quarters to take dinner alone, which included a glass of Rombauer chardonnay, her favorite, which was flown in from the boutique California vineyard especially for her, and was always on hand when she traveled.

Later, as the plane continued its flight over the Atlantic Ocean, the Secretary and Tom Hoctor sat in the conference room. Hoctor, a small, wiry man with a quick, wide smile, bald pate, narrow face, and a right eye that drooped slightly at the outside corner, filled Secretary Rock in on what initiative was under way in Moscow to identify the source of the SAM missiles that had downed the three U.S. commuter planes. Her request to be briefed about this had been debated at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Hoctor’s boss was against it for security reasons, but he was overruled by the CIA director, who instructed Hoctor to inform the Secretary before arrival in Moscow. Rock and the CIA director had forged a good working relationship, something that could not be said for the previous Secretary and director. Establishing rapport with the heads of other agencies was one of Secretary Rock’s strong suits, an attribute President Ashmead appreciated.

“I’ve met Mr. Pauling,” she said.

“So he told me,” Hoctor said.

“Yes, an awards ceremony. We got to talk a little afterwards. An impressive man.”

Hoctor saw what he thought might be a mischievous glint in the Secretary’s green eyes, and smiled.

“I appreciate being brought up to speed,” Rock said, ending their meeting. “I think I’ll try to catch a nap before we arrive.”

“Good idea, Madam Secretary.”

“If a nightcap will help you sleep, ask one of the cabin attendants.”

“I appreciate the hospitality.”

A few minutes later, a snifter of cognac in his hand, Tom Hoctor leaned his head back and smiled. That damn Pauling, he thought, able to generate a gleam in even the sixty-four-year-old eyes of a female secretary of state.

17

The Next Morning
Blaine, Washington

The main house on the Jasper ranch in Blaine, Washington, was large and sprawling. The central portion, constructed of twelve-inch-thick concrete blocks, had once been a stable. Over the fourteen years since Zachary Jasper had purchased the spread from its previous owner, he’d extended the basic structure through a series of haphazard additions, giving the house a modular look, boxes tacked on to other boxes without apparent concern for architectural niceties. Outbuildings had been constructed, too, seven in all—a barn; a new stable for the ranch’s half-dozen horses; a woodworking shop; a bunkhouse accommodating a dozen people; a cabana of sorts next to an in-ground concrete pool Jasper had poured himself; a one-story clapboard building in which the ranch’s arsenal of weapons was stored, maintained, and secured; and the most recent project, a two-story log building containing eight apartments, four up and four down.

The number of people living at the ranch fluctuated from month to month. Three women had resided there with Jasper over the fourteen years; the most recent, June, who at twenty-four was half his age, had been with him for three years. Her predecessor, a teenager, had borne him a son, and had taken him with her when she left five years earlier. The first “Mrs. Jasper” had been legally married to him when he moved the family to Blaine. They’d had four children together, three daughters and a son, Zachary Junior, who’d returned to live with his father when turning eighteen.

As of this morning, there were thirty-one residents of the ranch, many of them families that had responded to Jasper’s marketing of the ranch as a bastion of white Christian values, with future plans to expand into the neighboring states of Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming: “We will be the ten percent solution,” Jasper said in his brochures. “One day, one tenth of the United States will be free of the mud people, the Jews and the blacks and the other minorities who are destroying our precious United States of America.”

Jasper’s stated goal of establishing a white Christian homeland in the Pacific Northwest was not limited to printed material. He held daily meetings with those who’d responded to his message, at which he slipped into the role of preacher, quoting the Bible to substantiate his beliefs and demanding adherence to his philosophy. This morning, over a big breakfast cooked by the women in the commune, he pontificated to others at the large, round kitchen table, including a young couple who’d arrived a week earlier with their eleven-year-old son, and who were staying in one of the apartments in the log house.

“. . . and you’ve taken the first important step to creating a proper environment to bring up your youngster,” he said, patting the boy’s arm. “The way this country is bein’ run into the ground by the Niggrows and Jews and other non-Americans, there won’t be much left for your son by the time he’s grown up and startin’ his own family. The Zionist Occupation Government has this country in a greedy stranglehold, make no mistake about it. The antiwhite federal government and the mongrels won’t let decent young white men like your son be heard. See, it’s like this—and listen close to what I’m saying— Eve was seduced by the serpent and bore a son by him, Cain, who slew his brother, Abel. After that, Adam, the first white man, passed on his seed to another son, Seth, who became the father of the white race, God’s chosen people. Cain’s descendants are the Jews, who come from the seed of Satan. You read the book of Genesis while you’re here, see that I’m right.”

The boy turned to his father and said he wanted to go swimming.

“You listen to what Mr. Jasper has to say,” his father said sternly. “You heed his words. And there’s plenty of chores to do before you think about swimming.”

The mother shifted in her chair, avoiding Jasper’s eyes. She hadn’t wanted to leave their trailer home in Southern California, pick up what roots they had to come to live in this place, with these people. But her husband hadn’t asked her opinion or their son’s. He’d been fired from a job as an automobile mechanic for initiating a fight with a black mechanic whom he perceived to be receiving preferential treatment. Two days later they were on the road, heading to, as he told his wife and son, “a place where the damn niggers don’t matter and don’t get special treatment.”

“You go on out and take your swim,” Jasper said to the boy, who eagerly left the table and disappeared through the screen door. “Make no mistake about it,” he told the parents, “we’re in a war, and we’re getting ready for it. Luke 22:36 says, ‘He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.’ ”

Two other men sat at the table during Jasper’s speech to the newly arrived couple. One was Jasper’s son, Zach, a surprisingly thin young fellow, considering his father’s girth. The other, Billy Baumann, was a squarely built man of approximately forty, bare-chested, with sculptured pectorals and abdominals, and hard arms. He wore camouflage fatigue pants with flap pockets, and high black lace-up boots.

“You see,” Baumann said to the couple, “Zachary is doing a remarkable thing in the interest of bringing Jesus Christ back into our lives and breaking the hold the Zionists and minorities have on this country. We’re affiliated with dozens of groups across the country, good, God-fearing white people like us who are tired of laying down like beaten puppy dogs. We’re getting ready for the grand fight, which will come. You can count on that and be a part of it.”

“Another book I’ll be giving you to read is
Essays of a
Klansman
by Louis Bream,” Jasper said. “He’s got a point system in there for Aryan warriors like yourself, points for doing certain acts. Give you an example. A man will achieve special status in the eyes of the white God when he earns himself one point. You kill a Jew, that’s a sixth of a point, same with a nigger, and so on. Kill that lily-livered president we got, and you get your whole point right away.”

“Excuse me,” the wife said, quickly leaving the table and the house.

Jasper laughed. “Sometimes it’s hard for the women to get comfortable with what their men are fixing to do in the name of Jesus Christ. But she’ll soon enough come around when she realizes you’re doing what a good father should do, pull this country out of the gutter and get it away from the mud people.”

“She wants to leave,” the husband said, avoiding Jasper’s eyes. “Wants to go back to California.”

“Well, then, you tell her as the man of your household that she’ll be doin’ no such thing.”

Billy Baumann stood and slipped into a green T-shirt that had been hanging over the back of his chair. “I’d better make the run into town,” he said. “We’re running low on things.”

“Yeah, you do that, Billy,” Jasper said. “On your way, swing by that house owned by that connivin’ bastard, Howard. He still owes us for the help we gave him clearing that field. You tell him I want what he promised.”

“That’s twenty minutes out of my way,” Baumann said. “I wanted to get to town and—”

“Just do what I say, Billy.”

“Okay.”

When Baumann was gone, Jasper said to the young husband, “Billy’s the sort of man we’re recruiting in every state, every day. You go on now and join up with your pretty little wife. Sit down and read the Scriptures together, and some of the other literature in your apartment.
The Turner Diaries
is one fine book, and tonight’s movie after dinner is
Birth of a Nation
, one of the greatest motion pictures ever made. Ever see it?”

“No.”

“Mr. D. W. Griffith, who made that fine movie, had it right all the way back in nineteen hundred and fifteen, how the Ku Klux Klan, no matter what others say, were the avenging angels of the white race.”

“I’ll look forward to seeing it, Zachary.”

“And be sure your wife and boy are here to see it, too.”

“Yes, sir, they will be.”

Jasper went to where the women were finishing up the cleaning of breakfast dishes and complimented them on a fine breakfast. He kissed his wife on the cheek, slapped the back of his large hand against her buttocks, and stepped outside onto the porch that ran the length of the main house. The compound was busy with men handling chores, with some of the youngsters pitching in. It was a fine morning, Jasper thought, as he looked up into a pristine blue sky and drew a deep breath. He planned to spend it doing an inventory of the arsenal of weapons housed in the building dedicated to their storage, an enjoyable job. Jasper loved guns, had since he was a small boy growing up in rural Missouri. Later that day, he was scheduled to survey property a few miles away as a possible site for a satellite ranch to house others who’d communicated with him over the Internet in response to material he’d sent them. Two other smaller ranches had been established over the past fourteen years, and Jasper was proud of the expansion he’d managed to bring about.

The sound of a pickup truck caused him to turn. Billy Baumann waved as he slowed down to allow two mixed-breed dogs to cross in front of him, then gunned it and headed his red truck in the direction of the ranch’s main entrance, waving to Jasper on his way. Jasper returned the gesture, stepped down off the porch, and took long strides to the weapons building, where two men dressed in jeans, blue denim shirts, and wide-brimmed hats leaned against it. Jasper pulled a ring of keys from his pocket, undid a large padlock, and swung open the doors. The men disappeared inside, reappearing a minute later. One carried a thirty-thirty-caliber rifle with a telescopic sight. His colleague held a Heckler & Koch Model 94 assault rifle, a nine-millimeter semiautomatic carbine whose sixteen-inch barrel had been sawed off to just under a foot in length. Jasper watched them climb into a tan ten-year-old Mercedes four-door sedan parked at the side of the building, and kick up dust as they left the compound. As Billy Baumann headed down the road leading to the ranch, he passed a gray sedan parked on the shoulder, facing the main gate. Two men in suits occupied the front seats. Billy slowed as he approached, laughed, extended a middle finger, then accelerated past them. The driver of the car laughed and waved. They were FBI agents, one of two teams assigned to twelve-hour shifts to monitor traffic to and from the Jasper ranch since the three commuter airliners were attacked. The agent in the passenger seat held a camera with a long lens and a spiral-bound notebook. He hadn’t bothered photographing the truck because they already had a half-dozen pictures of it, and of Baumann driving it. He noted the day and time in the notebook, leaned his head back, and closed his eyes. The boredom of such surveillance assignments was fatiguing. He opened his eyes and checked his watch; nine hours to go until they could return to their spartan motel room in Blaine and resume the game of chess they’d started the night before.

Five minutes later, the tan Mercedes approached. This vehicle, too, had been photographed on other occasions, but the agent squeezed off another shot to document the car’s two occupants. “Making the beer run into Blaine?” he muttered to his partner.

“Probably. Not much other reason to go there.” Baumann continued for eight miles until turning off on a narrow, rutted dirt road running alongside a fast-moving stream. He drove slowly. Puddles dotted the road from rain the night before, and vegetation was thick on both sides, growing up and over the country lane like a canopy. He checked his watch. He was running late, which was why he hadn’t wanted to make the detour to the small farm owned by Howard, last name unknown. He’d met the farmer once when he and a dozen other men from the Jasper ranch spent a day clearing a field. Jasper had said it was a neighborly thing to do: “Got to be good to our neighbors, Billy Boy,” he’d said. “The man seems like a decent, God-fearin’ man, like us. We give him a hand, he’ll do something for us. We’ve got to stick together as white men, like the niggers and Jews do.”

As far as Baumann was concerned, Howard was a crazy old man with only half his teeth, and lips and beard stained from the chewing tobacco that caused one cheek to perpetually bulge, like a growth. But he wasn’t about to disobey Jasper’s order, get on his bad side. Jasper came off like a friendly patriarch, always talking about caring for his flock and making sure his values were heeded. But Baumann had seen the other side of him when he severely beat a man for getting drunk in town and saying bad things about the ranch’s founder.

The road narrowed even more as Baumann approached Howard’s small, ramshackle farmhouse. It looked like a set from
The Grapes of Wrath.
An overweight black Lab raised its head on the porch, barked once, and resumed its supine position. Baumann stopped the red truck by the porch. Two dilapidated floral love seats stood in the midst of pieces of rusted farm equipment, automobile tires, and two discarded floor lamps without shades.

Baumann rolled down his window and shouted, “Howard?”

No response came from the house.

“Damn,” Baumann muttered as he prepared to leave the truck and go to the screen door in search of the farm’s owner. But he glanced in his rearview and saw the tan Mercedes slowly moving along the dirt road in his direction. At first, he wondered why Jasper would have sent others from the ranch to remind Howard he owed a favor for having his field cleared. But that question was immediately replaced by the realization that the two men in the car were not coming for that purpose.

Baumann didn’t hesitate. He rammed his left foot down on the clutch, slapped the gearshift into reverse, backed in a tight circle, and kicked up gravel and dirt as he headed down the road past Howard’s farm, eyes darting between the mirror and the constricted road in front of him. The Mercedes had stopped; Baumann saw the two men talking with animation. Then, they began to follow.

Baumann knew the road would soon become a flat, relatively straight stretch before twisting up through a hill that, once navigated, would bring him back to the stream and eventually to the main road he’d turned off. He ran through the gears, gaining speed and keeping a watch on the Mercedes, which seemed to have trouble keeping up. Good, he thought as the road leveled out and he could accelerate even faster.