Covenant

by Jeff Gulvin

  ‘Is that how it is?’ Logan pushed back her chair. ‘Well, this stable’s empty.’

  She and Swann went down to the bar and ordered a couple of whiskies. Smylie followed them and took the stool next to Swann.

  ‘Piss off, Carl.’

  Smylie wagged a finger at him. ‘Mr Swann,’ he said. ‘This is the USA. In this country, we have what’s called the First Amendment. The First Amendment says I can sit pretty much where I like.’ He looked at Logan. ‘Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? I hear a whole bunch of patriots have claimed the bombings.’ He sat back then, with his arms folded. ‘But to me, that doesn’t make sense. Nobody in the patriot movement, as far as I remember, ever bothered to warn you guys about a bomb before.’ He looked at Swann. ‘That was the sole domain of the Irish freedom-fighters, wasn’t it?’

  Swann did not say anything.

  ‘Ah, that British reserve I’ve heard so much about. Refreshingly on the fence.’ He looked back at Logan. ‘I’m right, though, aren’t I, Logan? They don’t warn you about their bombs, they just set them off. Whoever planted those three today managed to destroy a lot of government property without killing anyone.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Of course, it could be a new tack on behalf of some of the Second Amendment groups. They pissed people off when McVeigh killed all those babies in Oklahoma. Maybe they’ve learned something.’

  Detective Andrew Cameron of the Oregon state police parked his car outside the church hall in Hope Heights and sat for a moment. Not only the parking lot, but the whole street running up and down the hill was chock-full of cars, trucks and vans. He could see at least three of the sheriff’s vehicles, including the 4 x 4 truck that Riggins himself used. He did not like Riggins, and certainly didn’t trust either him or Maplethorpe, his deputy. He got out of his car and took his windbreaker from the back seat and slung it over one shoulder. His pistol was clipped to his belt and he rested the heel of a palm against it. Perhaps he should not have come here alone. Perhaps he shouldn’t have come at all. Since Billy Bob Lafitte died, the people in this town were as paranoid as any he had seen, and more and more out-of-state vehicles seemed to be arriving. Even now, as he walked slowly up the hill, he could see plates from Idaho and Montana, Washington and Nevada. The thing with Tommy Anderson had not helped. For years, the right-wing basket cases had been ranting on about G-men and the United Nations sending black helicopters and Hong Kong troops to round up the people and take their weapons. He thought they were all crazy, most regular people did; but now, well, who could argue with the facts? Three Asians had been seen in Hope Heights and Lafitte had his brake lines cut. Three more were seen in Nevada, and Anderson turns up dead after being abducted. Cameron paused by Sheriff Riggins’s vehicle and pondered. New World Order: a phrase used by George Bush after the Gulf War.

  At the door of the meeting hall, he had to stop. There was no room and no way to get past the hordes of people that had filled every seat, every available standing place, right up to the doors and the edge of the sidewalk outside. He could see the raised stage, however, occupied by Millicent Lafitte and her two sons. Next to them were a couple of men he did not recognise, and at another table sat Riggins and Maplethorpe.

  Millicent was tapping a thin finger against the formica tabletop. ‘My husband is dead,’ she was saying. ‘It’s still hard to take in. I wake up in the morning and roll over, but he’s not there.’

  Cameron watched her force down tears and he felt for her. This was his investigation, a murder in a town where there had never been a murder, and he was no closer to solving it than he had been when he first got the call.

  ‘Nobody can argue with the facts,’ Millicent went on. ‘How long was Bob saying this? How many years did he stand up for his rights? He only had his driver’s licence under duress, and you all laughed at him. You didn’t listen when he argued that a driver’s licence changed his constitutional right to travel. You all laughed when he said they were coming to take our guns, that a concentration camp was being prepared in Jerome, Idaho. Well, I’ve been to Jerome, Idaho, and I’ve seen it for myself. An old Second World War intern’ camp for the Japanese. It’s being refurbished. Now, what would anyone wanna go refurbish an intern’ camp for, if not for more interns.’ She broke off as a murmur of acknowledgement rippled through the audience.

  Cameron leaned against the doorjamb and listened as she talked about her husband’s belief that somebody was going to take his guns. One of her sons leaned towards her and nodded in Cameron’s direction. The table was still for a moment, then a murmur started up again and Cameron realised that the Lafitte boy was pointing at him.

  ‘Detective Cameron.’ He jumped when Millicent spoke his name. ‘I can see you at the back there. What is it—have you come to spy on us? Is the government gonna take the First Amendment from us as well now?’

  Every eye was on him then and Cameron was suddenly nervous. ‘Not that I’m aware of, mam.’ He tried to lighten the atmosphere but failed. The mood was ugly. He looked to Sheriff Riggins for support, but he just sat with his arms across his chest and looked on with the others.

  ‘You wanna explain to the good people of Oregon why the state police haven’t solved my husband’s murder yet?’ Millicent was on her feet now. ‘You wanna come up here and do that, Detective?’

  Cameron stood where he was and the crowd moved as one. His mouth dried and his hand crept towards his trouser pocket just below his gun. ‘Well, mam,’ he began, but his voice cracked and now he knew he should have stayed away.

  ‘Go on, Detective.’ Millicent’s eyes bored into him from the stage, and Cameron moved away from the doorjamb as the young men nearest to him began to shift uneasily.

  ‘We’re working on every lead, Mrs Lafitte. You’ve seen me yourself. Right here in town.’

  ‘I’ve seen you sitting there in your government-owned trailer in the parking lot, Mr Cameron. Funny how you should do that, instead of taking some space in the sheriff’s office.’

  ‘Mam, there is no space in the …’

  ‘Maybe it’s because he’s an elected county official and nothing to do with your masters.’ Her voice was splintered now, broken like straining wood, and both she and her sons were on their feet. Cameron watched the crowd and took a pace backwards and, as he did, he bumped into somebody standing behind him.

  ‘There is only one lead, Detective,’ Millicent was saying. ‘The three Hong Kong troopers who showed up in their government-sponsored vehicle. No wonder you can’t find them. You work for the same people.’ She looked round at the crowd then—men, women, children, all of them with their gaze fixed on the detective. The two men standing closest to him took a pace forward and Cameron lifted a hand.

  ‘Now take it easy,’ he said. ‘I work for the state. I’m one of you people. You all know me.’ He could hear the panic in his voice and, as he turned, he realised that the crowd was now behind him as well as in front. They advanced on him as one and then he pulled his gun.

  Somebody screamed—a child, a woman, he did not know which. He felt something chop down on his arm and the gun was on the ground. Then they were on him, one mass of people. He was on his knees in seconds; blow after blow on his head and body, from fists and boots. He felt his collarbone snap, then his right wrist, and then he was doubled up in agony as a boot flashed into his groin. He tried to cry out, tried to call for help and to scrabble for his fallen gun. But the blows kept coming, and then he couldn’t feel them any more and he opened his eyes one last time and thought of his wife. He thought he saw her holding their baby in the crowd, but it was not her, it was somebody else and she was holding the baby in one hand and beating at his head with the other.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ Logan tore off the paper print-out from the Strategic Intelligence Operations Center.

  ‘What is it?’ Swann looked up from where he was studying the information he had received from London. ‘Harada?’

  ‘No.’ Logan’s eyes were onyx orbs in her face. ‘Detective Camer
on was beaten to death at a public meeting last night.’

  ‘What?’ Swann stared at her.

  ‘The state cop investigating the death of Billy Bob Lafitte. Apparently, he showed up at a meeting in Hope Heights and they beat him to a pulp. Killed him. The sheriff’s put in a report saying that Cameron pulled his gun on the crowd.’

  They sat in silence for a moment and then Logan looked at Swann. ‘We met him, Jack. Carmen and me, when we flew out there.’

  ‘They must have a suspect.’

  She shook her head. ‘Riggins says he saw nothing conclusive, just a mass of heaving people. Nobody else is talking and Riggins says Cameron was gonna shoot people.’

  ‘That’s bullshit, Chey,’ McKensie said from the doorway. ‘Cameron was a decent guy.’

  ‘Of course it is.’ Logan was on her feet. ‘Where’s Kovalski?’

  ‘He’s being grilled by the Director and the national security adviser over at the puzzle palace. The President’s pissed about his town being bombed.’

  ‘Well, there’s a thing,’ Logan said. ‘I’m going up there. Are you coming, Jack?’

  Swann followed her down to the car park and they drove up to the street. At the corner, she had to wait for traffic and somebody rapped on the window. Swann looked round and rolled down the window. Carl Smylie’s smug-looking face was gawping at them.

  ‘Told you, Logan. The people are pissed off. You wanna know how many folks were at that meeting? Twice the town’s population. There’s one tonight in Elko, Nevada, and another in Kilgore, Texas. They’ll be happening all over the country. The ordinary God-fearing American is suddenly pissed off.’

  ‘And you’re happy about it?’ Logan shook her head at him. ‘Go crawl back under your stone.’ She revved the engine and pulled out on to the street.

  They parked underneath the Hoover building and then had to go round the front to get Swann cleared to go in. Kovalski was in conference with the FBI Director and Logan insisted they go right in. She apologised to the Director, who looked up and smiled at her. ‘Nothing like a zealous brick agent, Logan. I used to be one myself.’

  Logan told them what had happened and passed the SIOC print-out to Kovalski. His eyes darkened and he looked across the desk at both the Director and the President’s national security adviser. ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘I think you should get the President on television. He’s got to talk to the people about this.’

  ‘Don’t you think that’s a bit of an overreaction, Mr Kovalski?’

  Kovalski stared at him. ‘No, I fucking don’t. Goddammit, I’ve warned you people about these groups since before Ruby Ridge. This is mob rule. It’s mob murder of a police officer.’

  The national security adviser took the paper from him. ‘It says here he drew his gun. That’s come straight from the sheriff.’

  ‘Sir,’ Logan put in. ‘The sheriff is one of Jack McClamb’s Operation Vampire Killer converts.’

  The national security adviser looked puzzled. ‘Come again?’

  ‘It’s an organisation set up to educate law-enforcement officers about the New World Order. Some people have claimed that the vampires to be killed are cops who follow the law.’

  ‘Logan’s right,’ Kovalski went on. ‘We’ve left these groups alone for too long. If they were the Black Panthers, we wouldn’t.’ He stood up. ‘You need to get the President to talk to his people, sir. And you need to do it now.’

  Back at the field office, Logan spoke to the special agent in charge at Portland and got an update on what was happening. The state police and the FBI were swarming all over Hope Heights, but nobody would admit to being at the meeting, and the sheriff could not identify any of those who were closest to Detective Cameron when he drew his gun. His attitude was that whoever they were, they were just defending themselves, anyhow.

  Logan then took Swann over to headquarters again, where they sat down with the domestic terrorism analytical unit, who were now monitoring the more notorious militia websites. The main difficulty faced by the FBI was the ever-increasingly sophisticated methods of e-mail encryption that were being used. Today, though, the militia groups themselves were not the problem. The problem was the ordinary members of the public making hits on websites normally reserved for psychos.

  ‘It’s worrying,’ the analyst monitoring the Missouri Breakmen was saying. ‘Since Pataki bought it, the website activity has gone up fifty-fold. We’ve calculated the same with the Oregon situation and we reckon it’ll be the same in Nevada.’ He looked round at Swann. ‘All these groups have websites.’ Then to Logan, ‘The busiest by far right now, though, is the West Montana Minutemen.’

  When they got back to the field office again, Kovalski was talking to Special Agent Mallory from the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program at Quantico. She was a behavioural scientist, with a master’s in psychology, and she was talking about Harada. Swann scooped up the papers he had received from London and sat down at the table.

  ‘Terrorists are hard to quantify,’ Mallory was saying. ‘There’s no distinct psychological pattern. They’re indoctrinated by a group or a cause or some sense of religious fundamentalism, which does not necessarily produce predictable patterns of behaviour.’

  ‘Harada issued a challenge to the FBI in the manner of an ancient samurai warrior,’ Swann interrupted. ‘Fundamentally, the samurai were dealers in honour. Honour came above everything else—friends, family, warlords, even the emperor.’ He offered his hand when Mallory looked a little puzzled. ‘Jack Swann,’ he said. ‘Detective Inspector, UK Antiterrorist Branch.’

  ‘Jack’s been lecturing in Louisiana on the State Department’s antiterrorism assistance programme,’ Kovalski explained.

  ‘Samurai.’ Mallory chewed on the word. ‘And his demand is the release of Shikomoto?’

  Logan nodded. ‘We don’t know why, or what their connection was, other than the JRA.’

  ‘There was a second player in Jakarta in 1986,’ Kovalski said, ‘but we never found out who it was.’

  ‘You think the other player might be Harada?’ Mallory said.

  ‘We think it’s pretty likely.’

  ‘Harada was in North Korea,’ Swann told her, ‘then he went back to Japan, joined the yakuza and became part of the sokaiya, the white-collar brigade.’

  ‘That would make sense. The yakuza allegedly hold fast to some of the samurai values.’ Mallory sat forward. ‘What we need to know about is Harada himself.’

  ‘We’re already doing some digging,’ Logan said. ‘When he issued the challenge, he did it in the formal samurai way, naming his father and his grandfather, where they came from and what the family business was.’

  ‘I spoke to the Japanese police liaison in London this morning,’ Swann said. ‘He told me something that I thought was. interesting.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Kovalski asked him.

  ‘The word samurai means to serve.’

  15

  WEBB AND FRANK WEIR were back in Kibibi Simpson’s flat in Paddington. They had traced the landlord and he had confirmed to them that she had paid the rent each month in cash: £850. Webb sat on the couch with one leg crossed over his knee and looked at the stacked CD system, the Sony television set and the polished mahogany coffee table. Weir was in the kitchen and Webb could hear him poking around.

  ‘What’re you looking for?’ he said, as he went through.

  Weir stood up and his knees cracked. ‘Showing my age again.’ He held a bottle of Veuve Cliquot in his hand. ‘This was in the fridge,’ he said, ‘and have you clocked the wine rack?’

  Webb followed his gaze and noticed that the rack, which formed part of the main kitchen cabinets, was very well stacked. Weir slid out a bottle with a label Webb did not recognise. ‘This isn’t your average Hungarian Bull’s Blood,’ he said. ‘We’re talking expensive taste here.’

  Webb leaned on the kitchen cabinet. ‘Eight hundred and fifty quid every month in cash. Who pays their rent in cash in this day and age? It’s not as if she didn�
��t have a bank account.’

  Back at the embassy, Dan Farrow was waiting for them. The FBI had sent a delegation of observers over from Washington, together with one investigating officer from the State Department. They tagged along with Weir and Webb, and attended the daily briefings back at the Paddington offices of the murder squad.

  ‘The ambassador has actioned your request for everybody who knew Simpson to come forward,’ he said. ‘He’s issued a negative response notice, so we’ll have an answer one way or the other from everyone.’

  ‘Good.’ Weir unwrapped a piece of chewing gum. ‘I’d like to get the interviewing underway as soon as possible.’ He glanced at Webb. ‘There’s a couple of things troubling us, Dan,’ he went on. ‘Number one, she rented that flat six months ago and it’s always been paid for in cash.’

  Farrow stared at him. ‘That’s kind of odd.’

  ‘It is in this day and age.’ Weir sat down on the edge of the desk. ‘The other thing is the flat itself. We found champagne in the fridge, good-quality red wine in the rack and a lot of designer labels in the wardrobe. How much exactly does a gunnery sergeant earn?’

  ‘I’ll find out. You can have access to all her financial records.’

  Weir nodded. ‘In the meantime, we’re going to try and figure out what her last movements were. The pathologist gave her time of death as circa three in the morning, on Sunday the tenth.’ He took a selection of photographs from his case, copies of those taken at the crime scene, and spread them on the desk. ‘So far, the scenes of crime boys haven’t thrown up anything we can get DNA from, but we’re still hopeful.’ He sat back again. ‘She was wearing a nice dress and the neighbour has confirmed that she went out the previous evening around seven o’clock. We don’t know how she travelled. She may have called a taxi or taken the tube. It’s a bit of walk to Paddington tube station and she was wearing high heels, so we think she took a cab at least that far.’ He paused and looked at Webb. ‘With a bottle of bubbly in the fridge and the wine and everything, we don’t think she was short of money. I’d bet my pension she didn’t walk anywhere.’