The Last Widow: The latest new 2019 crime thriller from the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author

by Karin Slaughter

  Van took his cell phone out of his pocket and placed it inside one of the lockers.

  Faith opened her messenger bag. She had more than a cell phone. Her laptop and iPad had to be stored, because no electronic devices or anything that could record any information was allowed inside of a SCIF.

  “I always forget my watch,” Van said, taking off his Garmin.

  Faith unbuckled her Apple Watch. She felt nervous, because it was starting to sink in that she was inside one of the most secure facilities in the country and now Van was taking her into an even more secure location.

  Michelle Spivey had top-secret clearance. Faith had to think that somehow, Amanda had managed to get Faith a read-in on whatever project the scientist had been working on before she was abducted.

  The IPA didn’t snatch Michelle out of a parking lot because she studied whooping cough.

  “Ready?” Van pressed a green button on the wall.

  There was a loud buzz, then the door opened. They went inside. The thunk from the door closing was like a vault sealing shut. Another buzz cracked the air. A red light over the door started to roll like the light on top of a police cruiser.

  Faith took a deep breath. The air felt weirdly muffled. The room was bare bones, just six chairs around a conference table and a clock on the wall.

  A young woman sat at the head of the table. She was wearing a Navy Service Khaki uniform with no name tag and colorful bars that Faith could not identify. Her glasses were thick. Her dark hair was cut short. She was the worst kind of young—the type of young that made Faith feel old. She was clearly so damn happy to be here, as eager and wide-eyed as Baby Jack-Jack. She had several folders stacked in front of her. She grinned at Van. Lipstick was smeared on her teeth.

  Van rubbed his own teeth to let her know, which was incredibly decent of him.

  He told Faith, “This is Miranda. Miranda, this is the agent I told you about.”

  Faith assumed that was it for introductions. She sat down at the table.

  Van took the chair beside her.

  Miranda said, “Okay, so what factor or factors have historically led to upticks in membership in white supremacist groups?”

  Faith was immediately lost. She tried to make a connection to Michelle. The woman was married to an Asian-American doctor. They had chosen to have a child that reflected their heritage. “She was targeted because of her family?”

  Miranda gave Van a confused look. “I’m sorry, who was targeted?”

  Van shook his head. “Different topic for a different day. Keep going.”

  “Okay.” Miranda took a moment to adjust. “Okay. So, the popular wisdom is that more people join white supremacist groups in response to a sudden influx of immigration, or economic downturns, right? The harsh monetary reparations in the Treaty of Versailles. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Operation—excuse me—Wetback.”

  “Hold on.” Faith needed a moment, too. She was having a hard time following the shift in direction. This meeting wasn’t about Michelle Spivey. It was about the Invisible Patriot Army.

  A white supremacist group.

  “Let’s back up.” Faith had to talk it out so her brain could understand. “You’re saying that membership in these racist groups surges because the economy goes into the toilet, jobs are scarce, people look around for someone to blame and—”

  “Not so fast.” Miranda opened one of her folders. She placed a black-and-white photograph in front of Faith. A guy in a dark suit was leaning on a desk with a Sherlock Holmes pipe in his mouth. His hair was bouffanted into a classic Clark Kent. The photo was clearly from the 1950s.

  Miranda said, “George Lincoln Rockwell. Founder of the American Nazi Party.” She put down another photo of another white guy “Richard Girnt Butler, founder of the Aryan Nations.” She kept dealing out photos. “Thomas Metzger, leader of the White Aryan Resistance. Frazier Glenn Miller, White Patriot Party leader. Eric Rudolph, linked to the Army of God and Christian Identity Movement.”

  Faith was still lost, but at least she knew enough to say, “Rudolph is the Centennial Olympic Park Bomber.”

  “Right. He also targeted abortion clinics and a lesbian nightclub.” Miranda added a photo of Timothy McVeigh. “Oklahoma City Bomber.” The next photo came down. “Terry Nichols, McVeigh’s accomplice. What do all of these men have in common?”

  Faith was too confused for the Socratic Method, so she narrowed it down to one man. “I know about Eric Rudolph because most of his attacks were in Georgia. He confessed to four bombings. He pled guilty to murdering a police officer. He worked as a carpenter. He was anti-government, anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-abortion. He denies any association with the Christian Identity Movement, though he lived on a compound with his mother when he was a teenager. After Rudolph was put on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list, his brother videotaped himself cutting off his own hand with a radial saw to send a message to the FBI.”

  “Seriously?” Miranda was thrown by the last piece of information. “What happened to his hand?”

  Van said, “Went to voicemail. FBI didn’t get the message.”

  Faith realized something. “Rudolph was in the Army, right? He went through Fort Benning. They discharged him for smoking weed. And—” Faith pointed to McVeigh. “He was in the Army. He was awarded the Bronze Star during the Gulf War. He washed out of Special Forces.” She tapped Terry Nichols’ photo. “The Army gave him a hardship discharge after a few months. He couldn’t hack it.”

  “Yep-yep-yep.” Miranda excitedly slid the images around. “Rockwell was a naval commander in World War Two and Korea. Butler was in the Army Air Corps. Miller was in Vietnam.” She had more photos—men in white hoods, men with swastika armbands, men with their hands raised in a Nazi salute. “Helicopter gunner in Vietnam. Retired Army lieutenant colonel. Air Force staff sergeant. Coast Guard Reserves.”

  “Wait a minute.” Faith had to stop this. “My brother’s been in the Air Force for the last twenty years. He can be an asshole, but he’s not a fucking Nazi.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Miranda said. “Look, I’m not bashing the military. My family has been at the tip of the spear since the Spanish American War. I’m Navy, but I’m also a statistician, and I can assure you that mathematically, these men are outliers. You have to consider the numbers. In any large group, there are going to be a certain number of bad actors. Teachers, doctors, scientists, police officers, dog catchers. There are always bad seeds. So, extrapolate that to the military. Between active and Reserve, there are almost two million service members. If you take even half a percent, that’s—”

  “Ten thousand people.” Faith gripped the edge of the table. She wanted to stand up and leave the room. “You need to draw some hard lines between these dots for me. I don’t like any of these implications.”

  “Neither did Congress,” Van said. “A team at the Department of Homeland Security generated a paper on the white supremacist movement inside the military and they not only lost their funding, they were forced to retract their findings.”

  Faith had to stand up, but not to leave. She needed to push oxygen into her lungs. The room felt like a prison. She leaned against the wall. She crossed her arms over her chest. She waited.

  Miranda said, “Let’s go back to the beginning. I asked you what causes historical upticks in membership in white supremacist groups. You said immigration and the economy, but actually, it’s war. War is the common thread for all of these men. They went off to fight, they came home, and nothing felt the same. To their thinking, the government abandoned them. Their women had moved on or grown more independent. Their kids were strangers. They didn’t know how to make sense of the world going on without them, and they needed someone to blame.”

  Van said, “I blame the Jews myself.”

  Faith wasn’t up for his weird humor right now. “Two of Hurley’s men—Sebastian James Monroe and Oliver Reginald Vale. They were discharged out of the Army.”

  Van said, “Robert Jac
ob Hurley was an Air Force munitions officer.”

  Faith asked, “What does this have to do with the Invisible Patriot Army?”

  “Ah.” Miranda shuffled through her folders. “So, these guys are what we’re calling New Nazis. They’re not skinheads. They don’t shave their heads and get tattoos and dress the part. Their point is to blend in. Dockers and polos. Nice, clean-cut guys.”

  Faith remembered the protesters carrying tiki torches in Charlottesville. The young men had all looked so normal until they’d started chanting about blood and soil and screaming Jews will not replace us.

  Faith said, “The Unite the Right Rally—”

  “That’s why they’re careful online,” Van said. “After Charlottesville, the internet turned against them. People identified them from the videos. ‘Hey, that’s my delivery guy. What’s he doing kicking a black woman in the face?’ They got fired from their jobs, cast out from their families, lost their security clearances, got dishonorably discharged. So, they learned to be careful. When the camera starts rolling, they cover their faces or wear masks.”

  Miranda took over. “Charlottesville was a watershed moment. Groups came from thirty-five different states. This wasn’t a spontaneous get-together. They’d been staging smaller rallies all over the country, mostly in California, but usually twenty people showed up, maybe a handful of Antifa looking to bust heads and some hippie-wannabes looking to throw around flowers, but the media pretty much ignored them. After Charlottesville, their entire world changed. They got validation from the top down. Those guys went home energized, organized, ready to take action. Their membership soared.”

  She showed Faith another photo. This one was a color mugshot of a young man. “Brandon Russell, Florida National Guard. Also a member of Atomwaffen Division. Atomwaffen is German for atomic weapons. They had a big presence in Charlottesville. May of 2017, the month before the rally, Russell was found with a bomb-making lab in his garage, swastikas all over his apartment and a photograph of Timothy McVeigh in his bedroom.”

  Van said, “They found HMTD in Russell’s garage. It’s a highly explosive organic compound. It’s also the same material that was used in the two bombs that were set off in the Emory parking deck yesterday.”

  Faith’s mind brought up the image of the smoking crater she had seen from the helicopter yesterday afternoon. They were still combing through the debris this morning. Another body had been found in the last hour.

  She nodded for Miranda to continue.

  “As far as the big groups, there’s Atomwaffen, RAM, which stands for the Rise Above Movement, Hammerskins, Totenkampf. The list goes on. Sometimes it’s ten guys, sometimes it’s fifty. What we’re seeing take place is the incarnation of the leaderless resistance. An attack on the level of 9/11 or 7/7 takes coordination, discipline and money. None of these groups really have those resources. What happens is one guy says to himself, ‘Hey, I’m sick of talking about this. I’m going to do something about it.’ Dylann Roof, Robert Gregory Bowers, Nicholas Giampa, Brandon Russell—they were heavily involved in white nationalism, but there was no master plan. They acted on their own.”

  Faith said, “Like suicide bombers.”

  “Not even that sophisticated. It can literally be a twenty-year-old with a lot of guns lying around who decides one morning to grab them all up and go to a synagogue.”

  Van said, “These guys are big-time into hero-worship. It’s not just McVeigh they revere. Lone-wolf shooters are turned into gods. Check online the next time one of these attacks takes place. Within minutes, there’s fan pages, fan-fiction, contact info. If the fucker lives, they post his inmate number so people can fill his commissary, and the jail address for fan mail.”

  Faith didn’t bother asking what the hell was wrong with people. “The shooter’s motivation is fame?”

  “In some ways, yes,” Miranda said. “They’re incredibly disaffected. They feel marginalized, powerless, misunderstood. We’ve heard a lot of chatter lately about the Great Replacement.”

  Van explained, “I’m sure you’ve heard it all before. White women aren’t giving birth at the same rate as minorities. Feminism is ruining the Western world. White men are being turned into cuckolds.”

  Miranda said, “Which brings us back to the military. The men in these groups crave the discipline, the masculine affirmation of a military structure. We’ve noticed a concerted effort to recruit veterans, active duty and reserve. Primarily, they want these men for their combat skills and the validation of their military service. From the other side, it’s very attractive for a soldier whose fighting days are behind him to relive those moments. There are Hate Camps all over the country where ex-soldiers run kids through drills and exercises. Clearing rooms, target practice, ordnance training. One of the larger camps is in Devil’s Hole in Death Valley.”

  Faith remembered the photographs in Kate Murphy’s IPA files. They showed young men running around in camouflage. “Devil’s Hole is where Charles Manson was going to hide after Helter Skelter brought on a race war.”

  “Exactly.” Miranda seemed impressed. “While Manson was in prison, he corresponded with a man named James Mason. Big white supremacist. He also wrote a book called Siege, where he advocated strongly for the leaderless resistance. You could call it the bible for the modern white supremacy movement.”

  Faith asked, “So what does this bible tell them to do?”

  “The same things that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda do. They produce highly sophisticated recruitment videos. They create online forums where hate is not only accepted, it’s encouraged. They target angry young men and tell them that they’re part of a greater cause, that they need to fight to regain their white power and that women will flock around them when they do.”

  Van said, “A lot of those guys like Hurley, Vale and Monroe served over in Iraq and Afghanistan. They paid attention to what the other side was doing. They saw the damage that an improvised explosive device can do. How one guy infiltrating the police force or a battalion could kill dozens of people. They learned from the insurgency, and they brought it back to America.”

  “The insurgency.” Faith nodded to the stack of unopened folders. She still needed to know how Dash fit into all of this. “Tell me about the IPA.”

  Miranda took a breath. “Okay, so they’re smart, which is what makes us nervous. They don’t talk about themselves online. There’s stray chatter where other groups say things—mostly about how the IPA is planning something big, how they’re going to bring on a second American Revolution. That’s how these guys talk so it’s hard to separate the boasting from what could actually be the truth.” She paused for another breath. “We think the IPA are survivalist. The reason I gave you this long preamble about how these groups operate is because that’s how we think the IPA operates. A small cell, advocating the leaderless resistance, possibly training so-called soldiers to embed in law enforcement or military and bring about holy war.”

  Faith’s mouth had gone dry. “If they’re so quiet, how did you find out about them?”

  “That was me,” Van said. “It’s kind of my field to monitor these groups. There are hundreds of them, and just as many lone wolves sitting in their trailers spewing crap about killing all the blacks and raping feminazis. I started to pick up stray mentions of the IPA a few years ago. It felt different the way they were talked about. I sent out a bulletin asking for information. I got back a memo from Valdosta State Prison that they had an inmate whose recorded phone calls contained heavy mentions of the IPA.”

  “Adam Humphrey Carter.” Faith finally felt like some of her questions were being answered. “You got him early release off his rape charge so he could serve as your informant.”

  Van nodded. “You’ve got to understand there’s a pattern to these groups. They usually burn themselves out. There are constant power struggles. One guy isn’t racist enough. Another guy gets caught looking at gay porn. The internal squabbling leads to disbandment, splintering. They’re basically fuc
k-ups and losers. There’s a reason the only thing they’re holding on to is the color of their skin.” He leaned across the table. “The IPA felt highly organized. Very focused. The way Carter talked about Dash was the same way these guys talk about McVeigh. And we had nothing on him. No photos. No files. No nothing.”

  Faith had hit the same dead ends last night, and Van had spent a hell of a lot more time on it.

  Miranda said, “You might think it’s good that Dash and the IPA are not in the system, but it’s really, really bad. In our experience, the more these guys talk, the more full of shit they are. It’s the quiet ones who do the most damage.”

  Van added, “It’s only through Carter that we found out what little we know about the IPA. Dash didn’t start the group, but he’s the one who gave it direction. He has them radio silent. They keep their names and affiliation out of the chat groups. There’s an aura of mystery about them that the other white power guys really key into. We’re one day out from the bombing and the online groups are already saying the IPA is responsible. Half of Totenkampf is already on their way to Atlanta to take advantage of the chaos. We’ve got a Polish white nationalist we were able to turn back at the Canadian border. A group from Arizona tried to hire a private plane so they could transport their weapons.”

  “Arizona.” Faith had read about a citizens border patrol from the state just a few short hours ago. “Who started the IPA? Was it Martin Novak?”

  Van shrugged. “It doesn’t matter who placed the fuse. Dash is the match that’s about to light it up.”

  “He’s right.” Miranda’s demeanor had turned deadly serious. “If you asked me what keeps me up at night, it’s knowing that Dash is out there planning something, and we have no idea what it is.”

  Faith asked the obvious question. “If you’re so worried about him, why isn’t there a task force or—”

  “The FBI can’t fund hunches,” Van said. “There are plenty more bad guys out in the open they can go after. I had to get on my knees and beg my bosses to let me turn Carter into an informant. Like I said, he gave us a lot of high-value information on other groups. We were able to crack open a lot of cases. But as far as the IPA, Carter was always very tight-lipped. What I got from him is that they’re planning something big and there’s one guy at the top calling the shots.”