Covenant

by Jeff Gulvin

  He watched the screen and then replayed the interview given by Carl Smylie. He furrowed his brow, rewound the tape and played it through again. Then he thought for a moment, got up and put another tape in the machine. He wound this one forward until he got to the section at Arlington Cemetery and stopped. Another interview with Carl Smylie. This was the freelance reporter he had seen on national television in Oregon, Missouri and Nevada. This was indeed a unique country—a gross free-for-all, where moderation and manners no longer existed. No wonder the master had been so aggrieved by the 1969 American treaties. He recalled his words now, and then a thought struck him. The Tatenokai: one hundred chosen men to protect what must be protected. Freezing the frame on the television, he moved to his computer and his encrypted e-mail. He sat for a long time and considered the weapons hide where he collected the government C-4 that had absolutely been insisted on. He paused and thought about somebody else’s words, words that had been whispered softly to him, while still back in Japan: ‘Listen to us you people of America, if you hold worth in your lives, in the lives of your children and your children’s children, then change your way in the world …’

  He sat for a long moment considering the irony and then he summoned the website he wanted, encrypted the source and sent the message on. He switched the computer off and unfolded the copy of the map he had on the wall of the self-storage unit. He had it marked exactly as the other one: red, blue and yellow dots, with road junctions and possible rendezvous points circled in black. He looked again at the blank computer screen and the fresh videotape set to the CNN news channel, then he went out to his grey sedan. Pressure: little by little, gently increasing pressure.

  The INS agent attached to the task force was briefing Logan at the Washington field office. They had been scouring the immigration records going back the last six months, but so far had come up with nothing. That morning, the agent had been back at his headquarters instigating a fresh computer scan, with every various possible connection added into the equation. ‘It’s a helluva task,’ he said. ‘And even if we locate a possible, I don’t see what good it’ll do.’

  ‘We have to cover the bases,’ Logan told him, irritated. ‘You know we have to cover the bases. We never know what they’re going to lead to.’ She went over to where Swann was finishing a phone call to London.

  ‘I’ve got some stuff on Harada and Shikomoto,’ he told her.

  Kovalski looked up at him from behind his desk. ‘Shoot, Jack. We need all the leads we can get.’

  Swann spread the scribbled notes before him. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘We know they were in the JRA together. In fact, they joined at the same time. They both attended Meiji University, which is effectively where Fusako Shigenobu founded the organisation in the first place, although that was 1971 and both Harada and Shikomoto would have been only about sixteen then. It seems these two guys were pretty inseparable, both during their time in the Bekaa Valley getting trained and while they were operational. According to MI5, they worked as a two-man unit on more than one occasion—in France with Carlos, and later when Shigenobu was contracting them out to Colonel Qaddafi.’ He looked at Kovalski. ‘You already have Shikomoto banged up for the mortar attack in Jakarta, and it’s more than likely that the other player was Harada.’ He made a face. ‘What I don’t get is how you could never ID him. If the CIA knew it was Shikomoto and knew there were two of them, then the other one almost had to be Harada.’ He glanced at Logan. ‘They couldn’t find him?’

  ‘They couldn’t give us an ID, Jack.’ She made an open-handed gesture. ‘Shit. Sometimes it happens that way.’

  Swann looked back at his notes. ‘They both must have gone to North Korea, because we lost sight of them after MI5 learned there were plans to attack targets in the UK, in the aftermath of the Libyan air raids. Harada did not show up in Japan again, according to the NPA over there, until 1992, when they began to monitor his activities with the sokaiya. There were only ever twenty or so hardcore members of the JRA, so I guess the money they made, which was literally millions of dollars, must have been divided between them. No doubt Shigenobu took the lion’s share, but Harada must have had a bucketful or he could never have made sokaiya. The yakuza are extremely careful who makes their way into the white-collar ranks.’ He paused and scanned the notes again. ‘Maybe they trusted Harada because of his samurai connections, I don’t know. But his family seem to have kept the tradition alive for generations. The NPA have done a family tree going back as far as 1790. They’re going to beam it over to us here.’ He paused again. ‘Harada’s married. He’s got two kids living in Tokyo. I guess the yakuza are taking care of them for him.’

  Logan cut in on him. ‘Are the yakuza involved in this, Jack?’

  ‘I don’t know. The NPA have been pretty discreet in their enquiries.’ He lifted his hands, palm up. ‘As far as we can see, Shikomoto was nothing to do with any form of organised crime in Japan. He was in North Korea with Harada, but left two years earlier. He didn’t return to Japan till 1995.’ He looked at Kovalski again. ‘I guess that’s when you first caught up with him.’

  Kovalski nodded. ‘We think he moved around quite a lot after he bombed our embassy and he certainly hid out in North Korea. But the National Security Agency checked him out in Manchuria and Mongolia as well as back in Lebanon, before he assumed a new identity and went home to Japan.’

  ‘There’s nothing there to suggest why Harada is so pissed off about his friend, other than the fact that they worked together for the JRA.’ He got up and paced to the window. ‘The other thing I can’t really get my head round at the moment is this samurai connection. The JRA didn’t adhere to any samurai traditions. They were radically left wing to begin with and then just plain greedy. The samurai were right wing, if anything, and they were all about honour.’

  ‘What about religion?’ Logan asked him.

  ‘You mean like a sort of Japanese equivalent of an Islamic fundamentalist?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Swann shook his head. ‘Chey, the samurai followed the Shinto sect. They were Buddhists.’

  Kovalski ran a hand through his hair. ‘How the fuck can anybody as aggressive and warlike as the samurai be a Buddhist? They’re pacifists for Christ’s sake.’

  Swann smiled. ‘Puzzling, isn’t it? One thing I do know is that the only way the samurai could reconcile their religion with their way of life was, ironically, the Buddhist belief in reincarnation. They believed that being samurai was a punishment. Every time they died, they would be reincarnated again as samurai, as an atonement for their previous lives. Every life lived, every generation, destined never to attain Nirvana, doomed to live eternally as reincarnated samurai.’

  Logan got up and shifted the gun under her arm. She shook her head and bent to the water cooler for a drink. ‘You think Harada believes all this, Jack?’

  ‘Yes, I do. If he genuinely sees himself as samurai.’

  Kovalski stared at the wall. ‘Makes him a fucked-up sonofabitch, doesn’t it?’

  Smylie was busy at his computer screen, typing an editorial for the Washington Post, when a fresh e-mail envelope interrupted his flow. He cursed and looked at his wrist-watch, considered the editor’s deadline and figured he had enough time to make some fresh coffee. Things had been pretty hectic of late, and all the years of work he had done on the rise of the far right was beginning to pay off. He thought of the hours he had spent listening to Butler or Trochmann, or Bo Gritz back in 1992. He thought of Billy Bob Lafitte and Jack McClamb, and Louis Beam when he first called for the single-cell Leaderless Resistance in Colorado, after Randy Weaver was arrested. Hours of rhetoric from demented men, or so he had thought. At that time, it was anti-government and a good source of story fodder for an aspiring freelance journalist. Nobody had listened to him then, but after Oklahoma, he had got his first piece taken by the Washington Post and it was syndicated to the London Times. From then on, whenever anything happened which had militia or patriot connotations, he was the guy
they called. Since those three gooks showed up in Hope Heights, Oregon, he had more videotape of himself than he did of Jack Nicholson, and he loved old Jack.

  He had no idea who these Asians were, though, or why Lafitte, Pataki and now Tommy Anderson had been murdered. It made no sense to the regular rational man, but it fulfilled the prophetic judgements of the militia-minded. Black helicopters and one hundred thousand Hong Kong troops in America. The phone rang: the features editor at the Post trying to hurry him along. Back at his computer, he looked again at the e-mail envelope, then opened it. He stared at the screen, sitting very still, and sweat gathered on his palms.

  Swann and Logan sat at the bar of the Hyatt by the National Airport, drinking shots of Jagermeister with cold beer chasers. It had been a long and arduous day, the sort of day Swann remembered during the height of IRA activity, when one set of twenty-four hours just rolled into the next and your headache was kept at bay by a cocktail of painkillers, coffee and willpower. Logan, seated next to him on the stool, yawned and lifted a hand to her mouth. Swann noticed that even in this day and age, a number of people cast curious glances their way when he kissed her or they held hands, or she rested her head on his shoulder. A white man with a black woman in America. It was still less than accepted.

  He swallowed cold crisp beer and ate handfuls of pretzels. Logan smiled and placed her hand over his. ‘You sure you don’t want dinner, Jack?’

  ‘It’s too late,’ he said. ‘I can’t be bothered to go through the hassle of sitting at a table.’ He glanced at the menu lying on the bar. ‘I might just order a bowl of chilli “to go”,’ he said.

  ‘They do good salt crackers.’

  ‘Do they?’ Swann looked at her, but she was staring at the TV set above the bar. The picture was flickering, but there was no sound. Swann followed her gaze and recognised the long hair and round glasses of the sneering Carl Smylie.

  ‘Turn that up, please,’ Logan snapped at the barman. He picked up the remote control and increased the volume, and both Swann and Logan sat in silence and listened.

  Smylie was in the ABC newsroom talking to the news anchor. On the desk before him, he had a single sheet of paper and was reading from it. ‘It came right through to me on my e-mail,’ he was saying. ‘I’m under no doubt that this is from the Washington bomber.’

  Looking down at the sheet of paper, he read the message through again. It talked of the Shield Society being the shield of the emperor. The society was a standby army whose day would come. There would be no demonstrations or Molotov cocktail-throwing, no placards, just patience until the last desperate moment, and then the SS, the Shield Society, would strike.

  When Smylie finished reading, he sat up a little straighter and swept his hair back from where it fell across his forehead.

  ‘And you have no idea of the identity of the sender?’ the news anchor asked him.

  Smylie shook his head. ‘Even if I did, I’m a journalist with protocols to think about. I couldn’t reveal my source.’

  ‘But you’re sure this is the bomber?’

  ‘Positive. The e-mail address was encrypted, technically withheld.’ He gestured towards the camera. ‘It would appear to me from reading this that the Shield Society must be some form of collective code for the movement I’ve been studying over the past seven years. Why else would someone send it to me?’

  ‘And the initials SS?’ the news anchor said. ‘They’re pretty emotive, not to say apt, given the alleged Nazi sympathies some of the more radical groups hold.’

  Smylie nodded. ‘I can understand the connotations that spring to mind, but I believe the wording is the most significant thing. “A standby army. No way of knowing when our day will come. The least armed, most spiritual army in the world.”’ He looked at the camera again. ‘For years, certain groups of people in this country have been predicting the rise of the New World Order under the auspices of the United Nations. These predictions were accompanied with what many have described as anti-federalist paranoia: black helicopters, Crips and Bloods, one hundred thousand Hong Kong troops covertly trying to disarm the people. Well, just a few weeks ago all that so-called paranoia changed. Daniel Pataki was found dead in Missouri. The FBI had a UFAP warrant out on him, and lo and behold he shows up dying of yellow fever. Then there was Billy Bob Lafitte, a vociferous opponent of federal agencies. He had his brake lines cut. Then Tommy Anderson in Nevada. Three Asian men in a black, unmarked helicopter.’ Again, he looked at the camera. ‘You know, I’ve studied this for over seven years, and like most people in this country I’m against the bombing of federal buildings or abortion clinics. I figured all this was just overactive imagination, peddling that great American export—the conspiracy theory. But now we’ve had three citizens murdered. There are no suspects except a bunch of mysterious Asians wearing government suits and driving what look like government vehicles.’

  Swann stared at Logan. ‘Can he say all this on national TV?’

  She laid a hand on his arm. ‘Honey, this is America. He can say what the hell he likes.’ Swann looked back at the screen. Smylie was saying that, in his opinion, the bombings in the Federal Triangle were the work of one of the right-wing groups, in retaliation for what they perceived to be government-inspired murders. ‘If this government’s not real careful,’ he said, pointing a finger at the camera, ‘it’s gonna have a civil war on its hands.’

  16

  IN KOVALSKI’S OFFICE, THE clock ticked beyond midnight. Logan was waiting for the phone to ring. Carmen McKensie had paged her as soon as Smylie appeared on TV, and she and Swann had gone back to work. Half the task force was still there. Kovalski’s eyes were dark hollows of flesh and he sat with his tie undone, sleeves pushed up, sipping at a cup of water. ‘Well, at least Smylie got his facts wrong,’ he said. ‘If that message did come from Harada.’

  Swann sat forward and hunted for a cigarette in his pockets, then remembered he was not allowed to smoke in the building. ‘It’s unlikely that it did, Tom, surely. The language, the rhetoric, sounds like militia to me.’

  Kovalski made a hopeless gesture. ‘I don’t know, Jack. Normally, I’d agree with you, but this whole situation is so damned weird. Anything goes, as far as I’m concerned.’

  Logan yawned. ‘If it was him, he’ll call. It’s time he called, anyway.’ She stared at the phone, but it remained silent.

  ‘It’s got to be the militia,’ Swann went on. ‘SS. Standby army. Spirituality. They think they’re Christians, don’t they?’

  Kovalski nodded. ‘Christian Identity. British Israelism. The twelve tribes of Israel being the children of Satan, not God. White Anglo-Saxons are the true chosen ones and America the promised land.’

  ‘Yackety, yackety, yah. And I’m one of the mud people.’ Logan got up and unfastened her shoulder holster, laying it across the back of the chair. She winked at Kovalski. ‘Jack still can’t figure me packing, Tom. I don’t think he’s up for the idea of me defending him in a firefight.’

  Swann ignored her. ‘What about the emperor?’ he said. ‘That doesn’t sound like the militia.’

  Kovalski lifted a palm. ‘Who knows, Jack? The Klan has a grand dragon. Why can’t they have an emperor?’

  ‘Japan has an emperor.’

  Kovalski nodded. ‘Anyways, there’s nothing doing on that front till the morning. All the dweebs are sleeping right now.’

  The phone rang. For a moment they all stared at it, then Kovalski picked it up. ‘ASAC.’

  At first he heard nothing, and then: ‘Smylie’s interpretation is interesting, but that doesn’t help you. You have till noon tomorrow to release Shikomoto.’

  ‘Harada,’ Kovalski said.

  ‘Noon.’ Harada put down the phone.

  Swann had three hours’ sleep and then Logan woke him with a kiss. He half opened his eyes, blinked and smelled her hair against his face. It was just about light outside the hotel bedroom window. ‘Rise and shine, sweet thing,’ she murmured.

  ‘Ah, Cheyenne. I
’m not even being paid for this.’ Swann rolled on his side and she moved herself next to him, slowly letting her hand drift across his belly. Swann woke up.

  ‘Bastard,’ he said, flicking shower water at her as she came into the bathroom, still naked.

  ‘You loved it.’

  ‘I know. It’s the fact that you know it that pisses me off.’

  She thumbed her nose at him and went through to get dressed.

  Kovalski did not look as though he had been to sleep and his office was crowded with the senior members of the task force. The liaison officers from the metropolitan police were there, together with the ATF and Mallory from the VICAP. Kovalski looked up again as Swann and Logan came in. ‘Noon, today,’ he said. ‘What d’you reckon?’

  Swann shrugged. ‘Everything he’s said so far has been right. He’s done what he said he would do.’

  ‘It’s six now,’ Kovalski said. ‘That gives us six hours.’

  ‘Where exactly is Shikomoto, anyway?’ a Washington cop asked.

  ‘He’s at Eastpoint in Georgia.’

  ‘Why not talk to him? See if you can find out what the hell is going on here?’

  Kovalski looked at him then and nodded. ‘I’ve thought of that, believe it or not. But right now, we got a clear field in front of us. Harada, for reasons of his own, has chosen not to reveal his identity or his war cry to the press, which is to our advantage. It’s in our interests to discuss him publicly as an “unknown suspect” only. If we talk to Shikomoto, then the word will spread. It just takes one prison guard to mutter it outside.’ He shook his head. ‘Besides, Shikomoto doesn’t want to talk to us, and finding out why Harada wants him released so badly is not necessarily gonna help us catch him.’