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EIGHT

Wednesday, 3.13pm, Washington State

The flight across Washington State had been brief, if bumpy, and the drive from Spokane gorgeous. The mountains were almost painfully beautiful, each cap dusted with a snow that looked like the purest powdered sugar. The trees were as straight as pencils, lines of them, so densely packed, the light almost seemed to strobe.

He was driving east, soon crossing the state line into Idaho – or at least the long, slender upper part of the state where the United States appears to be giving the finger to its northern neighbour, Canada. He drove past Coeur d’Alene, which sounded like a Swiss skiing village but which was most famous as the home of a racist movement known as the Aryan Nations. Will had seen the pictures in the cuttings: the men dressed in quasi-Nazi uniforms, the ‘whites only’ sign at the entrance. It would make a fascinating stop, but Will did not leave the road. He had somewhere to go.

His destination lay across the Idaho finger, in the western part of Montana. The roads were small, but Will did not get frustrated. He loved driving in America, the land of the endless road. He loved the billboards, promoting furniture stores thirty-five miles away; he loved the Dairy Queen rest-stops; the bumper stickers, advising him of the politics, religion and sexual preferences of his fellow drivers. Besides, he was planning his attack.

He had spoken already to Bob Hill, who was expecting him. Dutifully, Hill had conformed to the media caricature of a backwoods gun-nut. He asked to have Will’s full name and social security number: ‘That way I can check you out. Make sure y’are who y’say y’are.’ Will tried to imagine what Hill’s research would turn up on him. Brit? That would be OK. Americans usually liked Brits. Even if they hated limp-wristed, faggot Europeans, Brits were OK: they were kind of honorary Americans. Father a federal judge? That could be problematic; federal officials were despised. But judges were not always lumped in with the rest of the hated bureaucrats who represented ‘the government’. Some were even seen as the protectors of liberty, fending off the encroaching hand of the politicians. If Hill looked, though, he would find plenty in Judge Monroe’s record that was bound to offend. Will hoped his host was not going to dig too deep.

What else? Parents divorced: that might rile the militia men. Mind you, this wasn’t Alabama; the survivalists were not the same as the Christian right. There was some overlap, but they were not identical.

The daydream ended the moment he saw the signs. ‘Welcome to Noxon, Population: 230’. He looked down at the scribbled note perched on his lap: Hill’s directions. He had to turn left at the gas station, down a road that would become a path. The SUV began rocking from side to side, over the ruts of mud, earning, or so Will liked to think, the extra charge he, and therefore the Times, had had to pay for it.

Soon he reached a gate. No sign. He was about to call Hill, as arranged, but he was halfway through dialling the number when a man became visible in his windshield. Early sixties, jeans, cowboy boots, old jacket; unsmiling. Will got out.

‘Bob Hill? Will Monroe.’

‘So you found us OK?’

Will went into a hymn of praise for Hill’s directions, seeking to break the ice with some shameless flattery. His host grunted his approval as he trudged up a hard mud bank, heading in the direction of what seemed to be a thick patch of forest. As they got closer, Will began to make out a glow of light: a cabin, rather brilliantly camouflaged.

Hill looked to his waist, where a thick jailer’s ring of keys was weighing down one of his belt loops. He let them in.

‘There’s a chair there. Make yourself comfortable. I’ve got something to show you.’

Will used the few seconds he had to look around: a metal shield on the wall, bearing a vaguely military insignia. He squinted: MoM. Militia of Montana. There were a few framed photographs, including one of his host holding the head of a dead stag. On the metal shelves, a box of leaflets. Will peered inside: ‘The New World Order: Operation Takeover.’

‘Help yourself, take a copy.’ Will whisked around to find Bob Hill right behind him. Ex-Marine, Vietnam; of course he would know how to creep up on a mere civilian like Will. ‘Wrote it myself. With the help of the late Mr Baxter.’

‘So he was . . . deeply involved?’

‘Like I told you on the phone, a fine patriot. Ready to do whatever it took to secure the liberty of this nation – even if his nation was too duped, its brains too addled by the propaganda of the Hollywood élite, to realize its liberty was under threat.’

‘Whatever it took?’

‘By whatever means necessary, Mr Monroe. You know who said that, don’t you? Or was that before your time?’

‘It was before my time, but I do know. That was the slogan of the Black Panthers.’

‘Very good. And if that was good enough for them in their struggle against “white power” then it’s good enough for us in our struggle to keep America free.’

‘You mean violence? Force?’

‘Mr Monroe, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You can ask me all the questions you like, I got plenty of time. But first, I have something to show you. See if this interests the great East Coast intellectuals of the New York Times.’

By now, Hill was seated, behind a battered old metal desk, one that would not have looked out of place in the office section of an auto-repair shop. He handed Will, who was still standing, two sheets of paper, stapled together.

It took a few seconds for Will to work out what he was looking at. The notes on the autopsy performed on the body of Pat Baxter.

‘Missoula faxed it over this morning.’ Missoula, the nearest big town.

‘What does it say?’

‘Oh, don’t let me spoil it for you. I think you should read it for yourself.’

Will felt a twinge of panic: this was the first autopsy report he had ever seen. It was almost impossible to decipher. Each heading was written in baffling medicalese; the handwriting beneath was just as inscrutable. Will found himself squinting through it.

Finally, a sentence he understood. ‘Severe internal haemorrhaging consistent with a gunshot wound; contusions of the skin and viscera. General remarks: needle mark on right thigh, suggestive of recent anaesthesia.’

‘He was shot,’ Will began, uncertain. ‘And he seems to have been anaesthetized before he was shot. Which does seem very odd, I grant you.’

‘Ah, but there’s an explanation. Read on, Mr Monroe.’

Will’s eyes scoured the document, looking for clues. Scribbled handwriting, sent through a fax, did not make it easy.

‘Second page,’ Hill offered. ‘General remarks.’

‘Damage to internal organs: liver, heart and kidney (single) severe. Other viscera, fragmented.’

‘What leaps out at you, Mr Monroe? I mean what word there friggin’ jumps out and grabs you by the throat?’

Will wanted to say ‘viscera’, simply because the word was so undeniably powerful. But he knew that was not the answer Hill was looking for.

‘Single.’

‘My my, you Oxford boys are as bright as they say you are.’ Hill had not been kidding about his research. ‘That’s right. Single. What do you think’s going on here, Mr Monroe? What strange set of facts do we have here which Montana’s finest have so far chosen to overlook? Well, I’ll tell you.’

Will was relieved; the guessing game was making him sweat.

‘My friend, Pat Baxter, was anaesthetized before he was killed. And his body is found minus one kidney. Put two and two together and what do we get?’

Will muttered almost to himself, ‘Whoever did this removed his kidney.’

‘Not only that, but that’s why they killed him. They wanted it to look like a robbery, a “break-in gone badly wrong” they’re saying on the TV. But that’s all a smokescreen. The only thing they wanted to steal was Pat Baxter’s kidney.’

‘Why on earth would they want to do that?’

‘Oh, Mr Monroe. Don’t make me do all the work here. Open your eyes! This is a federal government that has been doing experimentation with bio-chips!’ He could see that Will was not following. ‘Bar codes, implanted under the skin! So that they can monitor our movements. There’s good evidence they’re doing this with new-born babies now, right there in the maternity ward. An electronic tagging system, enabling the government to follow us from cradle to grave – quite literally.’

‘But why would they want Pat Baxter’s kidney?’

‘The federal government moves in mysterious ways, Mr Monroe, its wonders to perform. Maybe they wanted to plant something inside Pat’s body and the plan went wrong. Maybe the anaesthetic wore off and he began resisting. Or perhaps they put something inside his body years ago. And now they needed to get it back. Who knows? Maybe the feds just wanted to examine the DNA of a dissident, see if they could discover the gene that makes a real freedom-loving American and work to eradicate it.’

‘It does seem a little far-fetched.’

‘I grant you that. But we’re talking about a military-industrial complex that has spent millions of dollars on mind-control techniques. You know, they had a secret Pentagon project to see if men could kill goats, simply by staring at ’em? I am not making this up. So it may be far-fetched. But I have come to learn that far-fetched and untrue are two very different things.’

Eventually, Will steered Hill towards saner shores, seeking the biographical details of Baxter’s life that he knew he would need. He got some, including a back story about the dead man’s father: turned out Baxter Sr was a Second World War veteran who had lost both his hands. Unable to work, he had grown desperate; he could barely feed his family on his GI pension. Hill reckoned Baxter was a son who grew up resenting a government that could send a young man to kill and die for his country and then abandon him when he came home. When history repeated itself with Baxter’s own generation in Vietnam, the bitterness was complete.

That would do nicely, serving as the easy-to-digest, psychological key needed for all good stories, in newspapers no less than at the movies. The piece was beginning to take shape.

He asked Hill to take him to Baxter’s cabin. They used Will’s car, its engine revving as it climbed further up the rutted path. Soon, Will could see colour – the yellow tape of a police cordon. ‘This is as far as we can go. It’s a crime scene.’ Will reached into his pocket. As if reading his mind, Hill added, ‘Even your fancy New York press card won’t get you in here. It’s sealed.’

Will got out anyway, just to get a feel. It looked to him like a shed: a bare log cabin, the kind a well-off family might use to store firewood. The dimensions made it hard to believe a man had made this his home.

Will asked Hill to describe the interior as best he could. ‘That’s easy,’ his guide said. ‘Almost nothing in there.’ A narrow, metal-frame bed; a chair; a stove; a shortwave radio.

‘Sounds like a cell.’

‘Think military accommodation; that’ll get you closer to it. Pat Baxter lived like a soldier.’

‘Spartan, you mean?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Will asked who else he should talk to; any friends, any family. ‘The Militia of Montana was his only family,’ Hill shot back, a little too fast Will thought. ‘And even we hardly knew him. First time I ever saw that cabin was when the police had me round there. Wanted me to identify which clothes were his and which might have been left behind by the killers.’

‘Killers, plural?’

‘You don’t think someone starts performing major surgery like that on their own, do you? They would have needed a team. Every surgeon needs a nurse.’

Will gave Bob Hill a ride back to his own cabin. He suspected that, though Hill’s office might have been basic, his house was elsewhere – and not nearly so spare as Baxter’s. The dead man was clearly an extreme kind of extremist.

They said their goodbyes, exchanged email addresses, and Will began the long drive on. Bob Hill was obviously a nut – DNA for dissidence indeed – but this business with the kidney was definitely strange. And why would Baxter’s killers have given him an injection?

He pulled off Route 200 to fill up the car and his stomach. He found a diner and ordered a soda and a sandwich. A TV was on, tuned to Fox News.

‘. . . Dateline London now and more on the scandal threatening to topple the British government.’

There were pictures of a harried-looking Gavin Curtis emerging from a car to an explosion of flash bulbs and television lights.

‘According to one British newspaper today, Treasury records show clear discrepancies which can only have been authorized at the very top. While opposition politicians demand a full disclosure of accounts, Mr Curtis’s spokesman says only that “there has been no wrongdoing”. . .’

Without thinking, Will was taking notes, not that he would ever need them: Curtis’s chances of heading up the IMF were surely slim to non-existent now. Watching the pictures of Curtis being shepherded past the baying press mob – a classic ‘goatfuck’ as the TV guys called them – Will’s mind wandered onto trivial terrain. How come his car is so ordinary? This Gavin Curtis was meant to be the second most powerful man in Britain, yet he was driven around in what looked like a suburban sales rep’s car. Did all British ministers live so modestly – or was this just a Gavin Curtis thing?

Will called the sheriff’s office for Sanders County and was told that, for all the federal investigations and Unabomber inquiries, Baxter had no criminal record whatsoever. He had been under heavy surveillance, but it had yielded nothing: a couple of unexplained trips to Seattle, but no evidence of illegality. He had never been convicted of anything. Will flicked back through his notebook. He had scribbled down all he could of the autopsy report, including the name at the foot of the document. Dr Allan Russell, Medical Examiner, Forensic Science Division, State Crime Lab. Maybe this Dr Russell would be able to tell him what Mr Baxter’s militia comrades had not. How had Pat Baxter died – and why?