Wildcard. Rachel Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ cops and the Bureau. Something to make it better. But for now, all she could do was to sit in the hospital with Grant’s daughters. And pray. And wait. Like Tom and his father had done in those last days. Watching his mother fade away. Like Tom had done as his father slipped into a dark and dangerous obsession.

      For a moment Miriam’s eyes shimmered. Then they hardened. “Damn it. Where is it writ large on the cosmos that the world has to be such an ugly place?”

      It was a question cops had to ask themselves far too often. A question Tom had asked countless times over the past three years and almost nonstop for the past month. A question for which there was no answer.

      “Like this garbage,” Miriam continued, holding up one of the files on her desk. “Why on earth would people believe this stuff? Commit themselves to this kind of rubbish?”

      “Hey,” he said, “why would people commit themselves to the kind of shit we do? Just because we’re on the right side doesn’t mean we’re always doing the right thing.”

      The anger in his question silenced her. For an instant, regret pierced his fury. “Miriam, I’m sorry. I’m just… I’ll get over it, all right?”

      Miriam looked at him; then a small chuckle escaped her. “Miracles happen.”

      “Right. Now, let’s get on with this chickenshit. Who knows? Maybe for once there really is a conspiracy.”

      “Wouldn’t that be something?” Miriam said, trying to shift her mood and possibly his.

      “This whole conspiracy thing…” Tom shook his head. “I know they happen. I mean, we’ve got a stack of files to choke a horse here, and these are just the incompetent idiots we’ve managed to get wind of. People conspire all the time in business. Take Enron as an example. But to go after a politician…that’s a different can of worms.”

      Tom leaned over the desk and caught her gaze, holding it tight. “If there’s a conspiracy to kill a major contender for the presidency, what have you got?”

      She hesitated, not quite sure where he was heading.

      “You’ve got a coup,” he said. “You’ve just influenced the entire outcome of the election. You’ve made sure that only people you can live with are running for the office.”

      Miriam nodded, still not sure where he intended to go with this.

      “It wouldn’t be the first time,” he said. “Look at the Kennedy hit.”

      “Oh, damn, Tom. You can’t…”

      He shrugged. “I can. I’m probably one of the few still-living people in the world who has read the entire Warren Report. It’s suspicious as hell. Anyway, my point is…if there was a conspiracy, we’ll find it.” He waved at the pile of files. “I’ll start here. You take those.”

      “Just remember,” she said, “if you crawl into rabbit holes, you’re crawling through rabbit dung.”

      Tom nodded and flipped open a file as she left the office. The Bureau had files on thousands of fringe groups. Radical environmentalists. White supremacists. Terrorist cells. Anarchists, even today. Drug and crime cartels.

      When Hoover had interviewed for the top spot in the unnamed investigative branch of the Justice Department, he had promised his boss, Attorney General and later Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Stone, that the agency would be divorced from politics. It would investigate crimes and not political opinions. That was what Stone had wanted to hear, and Hoover had been given the job.

      In fact, Hoover had headed the General Intelligence Division in 1920 under Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, and Hoover’s index card files had provided the information for the infamous Palmer Raids of 1920. In those raids, the Justice Department picked up thousands of alleged alien radicals across the country. Most were in fact citizens. Fewer than six hundred were ultimately deported.

      Four years later, despite his words to Harlan Stone, Hoover had wasted no time in setting his agents to work developing files on suspected communists, labor leaders, and other groups and individuals whom he deemed to be anti-American.

      That practice had swelled into the COINTELPRO excesses of the 1950s and 60s, until Congress and an irate public finally called for an end to domestic espionage. There were some who said the lack of such domestic espionage had enabled Al Qaeda terrorists to escape notice and kill three thousand Americans.

      Tom knew better. The Bureau still kept tabs on violent organizations and suspicious resident aliens. As a congressional inquiry had shown, there had been enough information floating among the various agencies to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Had that information been collated and presented in a single briefing, the plot and the plotters would have been obvious. It had not been a failure of data collection but rather a failure of data management. The pieces of the puzzle had been spread across too many desks in too many agencies.

      The file in Tom’s hands was supposed to be part of the new-and-improved data management system. Cross-indexed on a secure database, the idea was that an agent could follow hyperlinked threads between various groups, looking for motives and capabilities that matched a given pattern. At Miriam’s request, an agent had searched for individuals or groups with both the motive and means to commit murder in order to keep Grant Lawrence out of the White House. The results were the scores of files on his and Miriam’s desks, and the one in his hands.

      The Idaho Freedom Militia was archetypal in its ordinariness. Its founder was Wesley Aaron Dixon, a West Point graduate who had grown disillusioned with army life and left for a sheep ranch outside Boise. The file photos were unremarkable. Dixon looked about like Tom expected of a sheep rancher: grizzled and lean, with a slight middle-age paunch.

      The group’s ideology was apparently cookie-cutter Western individualism: the government in Washington was too powerful; the Supreme Court was counter-democratic; the nation should return to its federalist roots; government was inherently bad, and so on.

      One sentence was highlighted, a quote from a letter to the editor Dixon had written in 1998: “Every person should be trained and ready to defend himself and his community against the excesses of Washington, and to strike blows against a government which conspires daily to undermine his private property and his family.”

      With that one sentence, Dixon had earned an FBI file for himself and the Idaho Freedom Militia. Such was the tidal wave of information through which Miriam and Tom were wading, for no other reason than to establish that the FBI had, indeed, left no stone unturned.

      An hour later, Miriam returned. “Find anything?”

      “Typical stuff,” Tom said, finishing the file. “Except for a letter to the editor, it’s pretty much mainstream libertarian.”

      Miriam leaned over to see which file he was scanning. “Except for the part about women.”

      Tom scanned down to the passage. It was a copy of a personal letter to a former militia member. Apparently the man had turned the letter over to the FBI after having been dismissed from the organization. From the context, the man had been kicked out because his wife had taken a job.

      “The proper role of the woman,” Dixon had written, “is to bear and care for the children and the home. When a man allows her to abdicate that role, he allows her to betray God’s plan for womanhood, abdicates his own role as head of the house, and undermines the Divine balance СКАЧАТЬ