Murder in Foggy Bottom

by Margaret Truman

  “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.

  Minutes later, he arrived at a juncture where the road swung hard left and began its ascent up the heavily forested hill. He downshifted to gain traction and torque, but couldn’t gain speed because of the road’s rain-filled holes, and the rocks. A glance behind: The Mercedes, too, had started up the craggy incline. They’ll never keep up with me, Baumann thought as he continued to shift gears in response to the terrain. But as he swerved right to avoid a large boulder that blocked half of the road, the truck’s rear wheels lost their grip and skidded left off the road and backward down a shallow incline, stopping with a jolt against a large Douglas fir. The impact dazed Baumann for a moment, and he shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut against it. The sound of a vehicle on the road thirty feet above brought his head up. He reached beneath his seat and yanked open a flap of fabric held tight against the seat with strips of Velcro, creating a compartment. His right hand came up with two small items that he shoved into the flap pockets of his fatigues, then with an Ingram MAC-10 machine gun, with limited accuracy over any distance, but capable of gruesome results at close range. This model was a forty-five-caliber version that could fire nine hundred rounds a minute, fifteen bullets a second.

  Baumann opened the door and rolled out, hitting the ground as the first shot from the thirty-thirty-caliber rifle hit a rock with a loud ping a foot from his head. He looked up the slope and saw the two men, permanent members of Zachary Jasper’s sect, standing on the road, weapons aimed at him. Another shot, this from the sawed-off nine-millimeter, tore bark from the tree beside him.

  Baumann crawled military style, propelled by his elbows, until reaching a sharp, ten-foot drop-off. He glanced back; the men had started down after him, widening the distance between them to maneuver him into a crossfire. He allowed himself to slip over the lip of the drop-off and slid down to a muddy ravine. He scrambled to his feet, slipped to his knees, then pulled himself up to firmer ground and quickly moved through a grove of saplings in the direction of the assailant with the thirty-thirty, who suddenly appeared at the top of the drop-off. Baumann brought the MAC-10 up into firing position and squeezed the trigger, sending a dozen bullets into the man’s midsection, tearing it open, the shots clustered together as though the victim had been a target on a firing range. He’d been leaning forward, searching the forest for Baumann, when the fusillade hit. He pitched forward, the thirty-thirty preceding him, spun in the air, and tumbled to Baumann’s feet, his mouth wide open as though to protest what was happening, his torso almost torn in half by the salvo from the MAC-10.

  Baumann straightened as he heard the second man call for his partner. The voice came from behind, the opposite direction. Using trees as handholds, Baumann hauled himself up the embankment, reached the crest, and crouched behind a large rock. He saw nothing . . . until two birds suddenly flew out of a bush, and Baumann saw what had sent them into flight. The second man had darted from the bush and behind a tree. He called again for his partner; Baumann sensed from the voice that he was scared, on the verge of panic. Let him make the next move, he told himself, the MAC-10 cradled in his right hand, ready for use. He remained in that frozen position, not allowing the perspiration running down his face to cause him to move, controlling his heavy breathing, eyes unblinkingly fixed on the bush, waiting, waiting . . .

  The Heckler & Koch semiautomatic assault rifle came into view first, followed by the tentative steps of its owner from behind the bush. Baumann’s eyes widened as the man approached where he lay, head swiveling in search of his colleague. When he was no more than ten feet away, Baumann slowly reached down, picked up a stone, and, when his assailant looked away, tossed it in an arc directly behind his foe, who spun around and started shooting at the sound. Baumann sprung from behind the rock and tackled the shooter, propelling his weapon and hat into the air, and pitching him face-first onto the ground. Baumann brought his hand back and slammed the ammo clip of the MAC-10 into the side of the fallen man’s head, did it again, and again, until there was no movement beneath him. Now allowing his breath to flow naturally, and wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, he searched his unconscious enemy for keys, picked up the assault rifle, and struggled up the incline to the road. He looked into the Mercedes. The keys were on the seat. Smiling, he slid behind the wheel, started the engine, and drove up the winding, rutted road until reaching the summit, then down to where the road joined the two-lane highway. He pushed the aged Mercedes to its limit, roaring past the few, slower-moving vehicles he encountered, until reaching the small town of Blaine and the intersection of Route 5, which he took south until a little more than an hour later, when he reached the northern fringes of Seattle. He pulled into the parking lot of a sporting goods and clothing store, bought jeans, a belt, a lightweight plaid shirt, white athletic socks, and a pair of moccasins, changed into his purchases in a changing room, transferred what he’d been carrying in his old clothing to the new, paid, left, and drove to Sea-Tac, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. He checked the departure board. Good! A flight to Washington’s Dulles Airport was scheduled to leave in two hours. He bought a first-class ticket with a credit card, went to the airline’s VIP club, settled in a corner away from other passengers, and placed a call. It was almost noon in Seattle, three o’clock in Washington, DC.

  The secretary in Sydney Wingate’s office in the J. Edgar Hoover building answered the secured line. “This is Mrs. Wales,” she said.

  “I need Wingate,” Baumann said. “It’s Scope.”

  She went to the open office door and said to the special agent behind the desk, Sydney Wingate, the Elephant Man, “Scope on the SCI line.” She backed away and closed the door as Wingate picked up the secured extension on his desk.

  “Scope?”

  “Yes. They blew my cover. I’m heading back.”

  “When?”

  “Now.” He gave the details of the flight.

  “You’re bringing what you have with you?”

  “Affirmative. I’ve got it all.”

  “Come directly here.”

  “Okay.”

  “Skip” Traxler, known to Zachary Jasper as Billy Baumann—known to his handlers at FBI headquarters in Washington as “Scope”—hung up, went to a restaurant in the main terminal, where he had shrimp bisque, a salad, crusty French bread, and a local microbrewery beer, bought a paperback novel at a bookstore for the flight, and read in the departure lounge until his flight was called.

  18

  That Night

  Moscow

  Pauling was glad Lerner had chosen the Anchor restaurant in the Palace Hotel because it featured American-style seafood dishes. He’d never become especially fond of Russian food during his seven years in Moscow, although the caviar was to his liking, and there were certain lamb dishes he enjoyed at the better restaurants. He’d learned early in his assignment not to order chicken: “The Russian method of slaughtering chickens is starvation,” his American embassy friends often said.

  Lerner was enjoying a scotch when Pauling joined him at a corner table as far removed from the dining room’s bustle as possible. Pauling was served a Bloody Mary, which he raised in a toast: “Good to be with you again, Bill.”

  “The feeling is mutual, of course. Did you have a pleasant afternoon?”

  “Very. I don’t know why the Russians insist on cramming enough furniture for two rooms into one, but the bed’s comfortable, and the shower actually delivers hot water. I took a nap.”

  “A sure sign of aging.”

  Paulin
g laughed and shook his head. “I’ve always enjoyed naps, short ones, twenty-minute battery chargers.”

  “I used to enjoy naps, but now I’m afraid I’ll miss something,” Lerner said in his soft, measured voice. “Our titular leader, Secretary Rock, is in town.”

  “So I’ve read.”

  “She impresses me. Her name is apt.”

  “A no-nonsense lady. I met her once. She looks you in the eye and doesn’t let go. Where’s Elena?”

  “She’ll join us shortly. You haven’t made plans for after dinner, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Good. I’ve arranged a meeting.”

  Pauling’s eyebrows went up. “You aren’t trying to find me female companionship, are you?”

  “No, Max, I gave up pimping when I gave up naps, at least pimping for Americans. I think you’ll find the meeting useful.”

  “Good. I’ll look forward to it.”

  Lerner looked beyond Pauling to see Elena Alekseyevna crossing the dining room in their direction. He stood, kissed her on the cheek, and said, nodding at Pauling, “Recognize this stranger, Elena?”

  She broke into a wide smile as Pauling stood, grasped her hands, and kissed her on both cheeks. “You look wonderful, Elena.”

  “Thank you, Max. You look fine, too.”

  “Don’t flatter him,” Lerner said, holding out a chair for her. “He naps now.”

  Elena looked quizzically at Pauling.

  “Ignore him,” Pauling said. “Come on, catch me up on what you’ve been doing since I left—and be sure to include how my leaving devastated everyone.”

  They chatted about many things over the caviar, and the zhulienn , a small casserole of mushrooms and sour cream served in individual metal dishes, and the Dover sole flown in from England. When cups of strong, black coffee had been served to accompany vanilla morozhenoe— Pauling had forgotten how good Russian ice cream was—Elena said she had to leave.