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  "Who makes this talk?" Garth asked quietly.

  "Dozens of people," Mackintosh mumbled, not looking at us. "It's no secret that a lot of people hate this administration, and Bill Kranes would be president if something happened to those two pinkos in office now. You can't blame people for wanting what's right for the country."

  I leaned close to him again, forcing him to look into my eyes. "Are you part of a conspiracy to assassinate the president and vice president of the United States, Mr. Mackintosh?"

  "God, no!"

  "Do you know anybody who is?"

  "No. I told you it's all just talk. People get mad and they vent their feelings. They just want to get the Communists out of our government once and for all."

  I glanced at Garth, who nodded to indicate he believed the old man was telling the truth.

  "Whoever murdered Thomas Dickens is doing a lot more than just talk, Mr. Mackintosh. Who told you to come in here the other day and offer me money?"

  He hesitated, and I again gripped his chin. "Paul Piggott," he mumbled, averting his gaze.

  "And who is Paul Piggott? What's his relationship to you?"

  "He's vice president of Guns for God and Jesus." Mackintosh paused, rubbed his aching right thigh with both hands, then continued, "He called and told me Bill Kranes was having a problem with some nigger claiming the Speaker had been copying his poems. That could be embarrassing if the charge was made public, and Paul said it sounded like a blackmail scheme since you were fronting for the nigger. He told me I should have a talk with you, offer you money, and see if I could pay you off. A couple of days later he called to tell me I should forget the whole thing, but by then I'd already come here to see you."

  "Was this your own money you were supposed to use?"

  He shook his head. "Guns for God and Jesus has a checking account."

  "Gingivitis doesn't have a teacup to piss in. You've probably got less than two hundred members, and you're lucky to come up with money for postage to send out some nutty mailing every few months. Suddenly you've got a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to pay off a blackmailer?"

  "There was money put in the account for that purpose."

  "Where does the money in this account come from?"

  "I don't know," he said grumpily. "I'm not their accountant."

  "Give me a check."

  Now his mood brightened. He looked at me accusingly. "So you do want money!"

  "No, I said I wanted a check. In fact, give me the whole checkbook."

  He hesitated, and Garth pointed toward the telephone. Finally he withdrew a book of checks issued by a bank in Arizona. I took it from his hand, put it in my pocket, continued, "Why did Piggott pick you for this errand?"

  "He never said. I'm the public relations spokesman for our organization, and I guess maybe Paul figured this was a public relations problem."

  I glanced at Garth, who rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. "Jesus Christ," he said. "We're dealing with a bunch of imbeciles."

  "What, is that supposed to be a news bulletin?"

  Garth leaned over the chair Mackintosh was sitting in, put his mouth close to the other man's ear. "Where can we find this Paul Piggott? Give us an address and phone number."

  The old man looked plaintively at his toupee, which I still held in my hand. I gave it to him, and he quickly mashed it on top of his head. It was off by about ninety degrees, but actually looked better than the way he normally wore it. "He doesn't have an address or phone number. He lives off the grid in Idaho."

  "Off the grid?"

  "He's in a survivalist compound, getting ready for the upcoming race war with the niggers and other mud people. They don't have electricity or telephones. When he wants to contact me, he goes into town."

  "You use the word 'nigger' again, old man, and I'm going to wash out your mouth with soap. How does he get his mail?"

  "A post office box in town." I asked, "Have you ever been to this compound?" He nodded.

  Garth retrieved a pad and pencil from Francisco's desk and dropped them in Mackintosh's lap. "Draw us a map, old man. Make sure it's a good one."

  Chapter 12

  Well, well," Garth said. "Check out the action over in the clearing at two o'clock. Are those your poster boys?"

  I trained my own pair of powerful binoculars in the direction where Garth was pointing, and nodded. "That's them."

  We were squatting down just inside a copse of fir trees on the crest of a mountain top in north-central Idaho, with the horses we had ridden in on tethered in the trees behind us; they were blowing and munching contentedly on a mound of oats we had spread out over the ground. Below us, at the foot of the mountain, sprawled a kind of ramshackle shanty town of tents and lean-tos scattered about among towering cords of stacked firewood. The only structure in the compound that looked even semipermanent was a crudely built log cabin set off from the tents and lean-tos in its own clearing an eighth of a mile or so to the south, and we assumed this was the lair of the Maximum Leader. To the north, where a rutted dirt road snaked into the compound, there was a wart of shiny black metal that was a motorcycle parking lot. We'd hoped to find Guy Fournier taking some rest and relaxation at the isolated compound, despite Mackintosh's description of the group, but from the moment we'd trained our binoculars on the site we'd realized this would not be a particularly hospitable spa for a Haitian, no matter how light-skinned. This was the neo-Nazi chapter of Gingivitis, biker division, with a scurvy band of long- and short-haired, greasy-looking, leather-clad young to middle-aged wannabe storm troopers wandering about, all armed to their swastikas with everything from enormous Magnums sticking out of their waistbands to Uzis slung over their shoulders. Some of the men wore bandoliers stuffed with ammunition, most of it not of a caliber that would fit the assorted automatic weapons they carried-whether this was just stupidity, ora bizarre form of costuming, we didn't know. There were perhaps a half-dozen women, all standing around smoking cigarettes and looking bored. Nazi regalia was everywhere, from the crude swastikas painted on the tents and lean-tos to the helmets some of the men wore.

  The sartorial standouts in this motley crew were the two young men off in the clearing taking target practice under the watchful eye of a man wearing a leather jacket, despite the heat, wrap-around sunglasses, and a black fedora pulled low over his forehead. The shooters were clean-shaven, wore crew cuts, were untattooed, and wearing Oxford shirts with button-down collars. They could have come to the compound straight from church choir practice, and they were the same antiabortion protesters whose heads had been circled in the photograph I had found in Guy Fournier's office.

  The target practice the two young men were taking was specialized, obviously in preparation for some special occasion. There were two straight-backed chairs placed a few feet apart in which the men sat stiffly, as if at attention. A crude wooden platform was set up about twenty-five feet in front of them, and above the platform were strung a number of paper targets, two of them painted red. At a signal from their trainer, the men would, in unison, quickly reach under their chairs and retrieve two handguns fashioned from some kind of clear material that was probably a type of acrylic. Then they would rise to their feet, take precisely five steps forward, raise their guns, and fire one round each at the red targets. Then the targets would be torn down and carefully examined for placement of the bullets. The targets would be replaced, the guns returned to the mountings beneath the chairs, and they would start all over again. They could be getting ready for the upcoming convention, assuming the shooters had been seeded into a state delegation sitting in the first few rows of the recently converted convention hall at the Jacob Javits Center in New York, but the exercise could just as well be suited for any of the dozens of barnstorming or fund-raising events at which the president and vice president would be appearing within the weeks following the convention.

  I watched target practice for a while, then set aside my binoculars, lay back on a bed of pine needles, closed my eyes, and listen
ed to the munching and blowing of the horses behind me. I was bone tired, suffering a fatigue that was more than a little exacerbated by the fact that I was more than a little anxious about the constant headache I was enduring and the fact that I had awoken the past two mornings to find my pillow soaked with saliva.

  It was our second day in Idaho, and I was also more than a bit concerned about things in general in the United States of America-or at least in this particular section of America. On the morning we had arrived we had rented a car at the airport, driven to this area indicated on the map Mackintosh had drawn for us, then checked into the nearest motel, which was about twenty miles to the east. From there we had set out on a series of preliminary sorties to get the lay of the land, as it were, and its populace. As far as I was concerned, the majority of the people we'd talked to could have come in on the last UFO shuttle, and they obviously regarded me in the same way, treating me not so much with curiosity, to which I was accustomed outside of New York, but with thinly veiled hostility and suspicion, as if I might have been cursed by God. Garth, on the other hand, with the rustic Nebraska air he had never lost and his natural reticence, fit right in; he could have been one of them, to all outward appearances, and the people took to him, forgiving him his odd dwarf companion. There seemed to be an inordinate number of retired L.A. cops.

  This part of Idaho seemed to me a kind of Loonyland, an open-air asylum for mild-mannered crackpots. There were no black, brown, yellow, or red faces-at least none that I had glimpsed during that first day, and it was startling to hear people who looked like they could have stepped out of some Norman Rockwell painting calmly expounding viciousness, paranoia, and hatred to an extent that made even William P. Kranes sound like a moderate in comparison. In country stores and gas stations and restaurants we-or Garth-were told harrowing tales about an impending United Nations takeover, menacing black helicopters with inverted Vs painted on their sides, and ZOG, which everyone in the countryside called the government, which they maintained was controlled by a mysterious Zionist organization masterminded by a man called Rothschild. The Holocaust was a myth perpetuated by ZOG-and even if a few thousand Jews had been killed by the Germans, the victims had deserved it. A large number of people living here against a magnificent backdrop of snow-covered mountains were patiently waiting for the End Times, Armageddon, the Rapture, and the Second Coming, events they confidently expected to transpire any day. We, meaning Garth, heard lurid tales of identification chips being implanted in people's skulls, and before long, ZOG was going to announce that every man, woman, and child would have to be tattooed on the forehead with the Mark of the Beast. These people didn't really want the government to change; what they truly lusted for was the end of the world, with rebirth in a Kingdom of God, under the benevolent dictatorship of Jesus Christ, entirely populated with people who looked and thought just like them. Through all this mad palaver over coffee, or beers, or lunch counters, Garth just kept on grunting and nodding. I kept looking away in embarrassment and anger. Certainly not every soul expressed these views, nor did everyone appear to be racist and anti-Semitic, but there were enough in the region to make me feel most uncomfortable, slightly disoriented, and almost totally alienated from the country of my birth. The insanity in the atmosphere had nothing to do with education, or birth rates, or school lunches, or the National Endowment for the Arts; these people's ignorance was willed, their superstitions and hatreds carefully cultivated and nurtured, and as far as I was concerned they deserved William P. Kranes and his dedication to make them even poorer and more ignorant, and he deserved a nation filled with them. They might represent the buttocks end of his constituency, but he shamelessly pandered to them. Thanks to people like Kranes, the sickness of these people was poisoning the country, spread through the veins and arteries and capillaries of America by rabid and irresponsible radio talk-show hosts who, for rating points and money, both fed and manipulated these people's ignorance and hatred. Perhaps in the end our efforts were senseless, and it did not make any difference whether or not the assassinations took place right on schedule, nor whether or not the CIA had its way with all of them. In the end, a democracy got the democracy it deserved, and the people had certainly spoken loud and clear in the last election. I was beginning to seriously consider the notion that, basically, America was a nation of nitwits.

  I was sick of it all, and I was afraid. I just wanted to get our business wrapped up and go home, and I wanted to stop drooling in my sleep.

  Throughout the day we sat, watched, and waited. The two shooters practiced for two more hours, then drove off with their trainer in a

  Jeep. The merry band below whiled away the rest of the afternoon wandering around and showing off their guns to each other, the women continuing to smoke and look bored. After nightfall we sat through a cross burning during which everyone got drunk. A half hour after the last reveler had stumbled off to his or her lodging, we began clambering down the mountainside under the faint glow of a half moon. On his right hand Garth had donned a weighted black leather glove, a souvenir of his long-ago days as a county sheriff when he'd had a lot of territory to cover, with little help, and the hot prairie wind made a lot of people unpredictable and dangerous.

  We came down behind Paul Piggott's cabin and went around to the front door, where Garth knocked. There was no answer, and he knocked again, harder, while I looked down the pathway behind us to make certain we were unobserved. Finally the door opened, and Paul Piggott, silhouetted against the light cast by two hurricane lamps, stood staring at us somewhat uncomprehendingly with bleary, greenish eyes that were the color of jungle mud. His long black hair hung in greasy ringlets around his puffy face. His shirt and sleeveless leather jacket were open, and his paunchy beer belly hung down over his wide leather belt.

  "Howdy, Pilgrim," Garth said in his John Wayne drawl as I drove the stiffened fingers of my right hand up through rolls of fat into the man's solar plexus. "The little dogie and I are doing a survey to see what the folks in this area think of vigilante justice and fluoride in the water."

  The breath exploded out of Piggott in a beery, belchy whoosh, and as he doubled over I brought my stiffened fingers up into his larynx, not hard enough to crush and kill, but with sufficient force to keep him talking in a hoarse whisper for an hour or two; it was a neat trick I'd learned from Veil Kendry, my sensei. Garth placed his hand on top of the man's greasy head and shoved him back into the crude, one-room cabin. I followed after Garth, closing the door behind me. Garth stood in front of the wheezing, doubled-over man in the center of the room, waiting for Piggott to catch his breath, and then, as Piggott suddenly lunged for him, swatted the man in the face with the back of his gloved hand, breaking the biker's nose, knocking out two teeth, and sending him crashing onto a sagging, ratty sofa bed set up along one wall.

  Garth unhurriedly pulled up a stool and sat in front of the couch, and while he waited for our breathless and bleeding host to compose himself, I looked around. Guns of all shapes and sizes were mounted on the walls, which were also festooned with Nazi flags and other regalia that loomed eerily and almost seemed to wave in the flickering light from the hurricane lamps. Cases of beer were stacked up on either side of the doorway. In one corner were a grill and two cans of Sterno, and in another a grimy, stained, portable toilet, apparently for use when it was raining, or too cold-or when he was just too lazy- to use the latrine outside. Against the wall opposite the sofa was a table, and on it was set, most incongruously, a shiny shortwave radio powered by four chunky dry cell batteries linked in series; the outside aerial had been too thin for us to see through binoculars.

  Finally I turned and went to stand beside my brother, who was leaning forward on the stool, crowding the cowering Piggott, who was dripping blood from his broken nose and mouth all over his bare chest and stomach. The man's eyes were glazed with shock, and he had the look of a cornered animal.

  "So, Paulie," Garth said in a casual tone. "How's the assassination plot coming along?"<
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  Piggott wiped his mouth with a trembling hand, then spat blood to the side, over the armrest of the sofa bed. "Who the hell are you?" he croaked, massaging his bruised larynx with his bloody right hand.

  "We are the marvelous flying Frederickson brothers," I replied, rapping my knuckles on his left kneecap. "We're annoyed by something that happened to an acquaintance of ours, and we're going to take it out on you. My advice to you is to simply answer my brother's questions the first time, truthfully, because he gets impatient easily. Don't bother trying to lie, because the man's a veritable human lie detector. You're liable to lose the rest of your teeth."

  He didn't take my advice. He obviously recognized the name, for he drew his breath in sharply. Then, whether out of misguided bravado or an even greater fear of someone or something else, he suffered a severe attack of stupid. "I'll die before I tell you anything," he rasped, then spat blood at my brother.

  "Suit yourself," Garth replied evenly, then hit Piggott so hard on the side of the head that the man catapulted over the armrest and crashed to the floor, where he lay half conscious, moaning and holding his head as he drew his legs up into a fetal position. Garth rose from the stool, walked across the room, and took a shotgun from a mount on the wall, then came back and pressed the wooden stock against the man's temple. In the same easy tone, he continued, "If I crack your skull open, how much shit do you think I'll get on my shoes?"

  "All right!" Piggott burbled. "All right!"

  "When and where are the assassinations scheduled to take place?"

  "I don't know anything about any assassinations!"

  "Wrong answer," Garth said, tapping the stock none too gently on the man's head. "We saw the two shooters going through their paces this afternoon. Do you expect us to believe they were tuning up for duck season?"