Authors: David Vinjamuri
“Does it strike you as odd that a white supremacist would be dating a Hispanic girl?”
“Yes, but she looks Caucasian.”
“Even so, racial purity is a very big issue for these guys.”
“I agree with you, but I met a woman who had seen Harmon without his shirt on. He had the tattoos. Including a swastika. And he is definitely a National Front member and she definitely left Reclaim with him.”
“I’ve put together a briefing book that has the language you need to use,” Nichols said, handing me a binder. “I hope your cover is good. This festival is invitation only. It’s a tight-knit community.”
“I’m going in as a small business owner from Wyoming. He was intercepted on his way here. He served in the infantry in Afghanistan, and we knew some of the same people. I gather that he lives in a small town and there isn’t anyone else coming from his neck of the woods.”
“Does that sound a little thin to you?”
“Yeah, probably. But I’ve run out of leads. This is the only way I can think of to find Heather.”
Nichols pursed her lips, then turned to the Activity people who were still working on my appearance and my gear. “Can we have a moment?”
Without a word, three men and two women stopped what they were doing and shuffled out of the semi.
“I want to share something, but if it gets out my career is over. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“I don’t know how this connects to Heather, but I think you should understand something. The reason the FBI jumped on the murder of the protestors has nothing to do with hate crimes. It’s an internal issue for the Bureau. One of the two protestors killed was an undercover FBI agent. His cover name was John McCarthy.”
“That changes things.”
“Yes it does. We think there’s a chance that someone staged the attack to remove our agent. The second victim died because he had an undiagnosed heart condition. Nobody else was beaten as badly as McCarthy.”
“Why would you have someone undercover with Reclaim?” I asked.
“I don’t know. All I know is that for the entire time I’ve been working on the National Front, I’ve been bumping up against agents working on Reclaim and Transnational Coal. But everything is walled off from me, so I don’t know who or what they’re investigating.”
“Jason Paul, the head of the Hobart mine, told me some of the protestors were sabotaging his equipment. He got incriminating video on them and confronted one of the Reclaim leaders, Roxanne Chalmers, with it. That’s when the group splintered. Some of them left the state and others, including Heather and Anton, went to the CC Farm commune.”
“But you think there’s more?”
“If Paul had video linking the protestors to sabotage, why didn’t he just have them arrested? He didn’t show much restraint over the summer when they shut down his operation, and sabotaging the loader was much more serious and costly. So it makes me think he was using the video as leverage to get something else he wanted.”
“What would that be?” Nichols asked.
“I don’t know. But Roxanne acts as if she’s been holding onto her guilt for a lot longer than the three days since the school bus attack. And the mine hasn’t returned to full production even though the equipment has come back online. Paul’s job has to be hanging by a thread. Which suggests that he’s got some bigger plan.”
“You think he’s blackmailing Roxanne but he still hasn’t gotten the mine back running?”
“I don’t think you could blackmail Roxanne with a threat of jail. She’s the type who would probably be happy to serve time if she could stop the mine. And after her split with the other Reclaim leaders, it’s hard to imagine blackmailing her for their actions. There would have to be a carrot, too.”
“Ensuring that the mine fails slowly?”
“That’s what I was thinking. So the question is what’s in it for Paul? What could he possibly accomplish by ruining his own career?”
“And whether the National Front is connected. The men who’ve tried to hurt you and that explosive device last night...Anton Harmon could have arranged all of that on his own, right? Maybe he’s just trying to keep the family away from his girlfriend,” Nichols suggested.
“It could be, but if so it’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull. He couldn’t possibly think he’d scare me off if he knew my background, and if he killed me it would just attract more attention. It also seems like too many unconnected coincidences when you look at it that way. Imagine the odds of a tiny camp of protestors having both an FBI agent and a National Front member undercover at the same time. That can’t be a coincidence. This has to be about something else.”
Nichols put two fingers over her lips and rested her thumb beneath her chin. “You might be right. The problem is that the kind of scheme you’re describing covers at least three separate task force investigations in our office and Pittsburgh. Which makes it hard to put together the pieces. Until we can connect the dots with evidence, that is. And we haven’t gotten there yet.”
“You’re sticking your neck out more than a little just to be here, aren’t you?” I asked.
“No, just the opposite. The order to brief you came down the line from Washington. The head of our office was livid. I’m at the bottom of the food chain, so I get the scut work.” The FBI is driven by seniority, like many federal bureaucracies including the one I work for. An agent with less than two years on the job would be very junior, especially in a small field office.
“Well I appreciate it. I don’t know if I’m going to help move your investigation forward, but this is the last thing I can think to do before I leave the state.”
“Then you’re lucky they didn’t cancel the festival.”
“Why would they cancel it?”
“Haven’t you been listening to the news for the past three days?”
I shook my head, uncomprehending.
“There’s a hurricane headed up the coast. A big one. We’re supposed to get some snow by Monday, which is pretty unusual for October in West Virginia. They think it might hit D.C. or New York. This morning they started talking about it combining with some other weather system and turning into some kind of crazy Frankenstorm.”
“A hurricane?”
“That’s right. They’re calling it Sandy. Hurricane Sandy.”
17
I slowed the Night Rod to a roll as I approached a wrought iron gate. The barrier continued up the hill on either side of the road as a nine-foot chain link fence topped with barbed wire. There was an observation post visible on top of the ridge just east of me. I came to a stop about ten yards from the guardhouse as a clean-shaven man in a brown uniform with a Sig-Sauer on his hip signaled me to stop and approached me with a clipboard. His partner was inside a guardhouse with reinforced 6-inch-thick plexiglass and a gun port.
“Are you here for the event, sir?”
“Yes. My name is Ray Larney,” I replied. This guard was no rent-a-cop. He stood just beyond arms’ reach and gave the bike a careful look with one hand on his weapon before looking down to his clipboard. He would have done fine in an outpost in Afghanistan.
“Thank you, sir, you’re on the list. If you follow this road up a half mile, you’ll see the white tents. Parking is on the left. Please stay on the main road.”
He nodded to his partner and the gate slid open on rollers. I eased the bike through and kept it under thirty as I wound through the last stretch of road. The two-lane blacktop plunged into the woods for a stretch and then veered east. I was surprised to see that it cut right through the hill—they’d blasted the road as they might have an interstate. Looking up I realized that I wouldn’t want to go through this pass uninvited. With both ends blocked, it would be a killing box. As soon as I made it through the hill I found a holler that rolled on unimpeded to the horizon. It might count for a modest spread in Montana, but it was enormous in West Virginia.
The tents were set up in a large field off to the side of the road about a quarter-mile into the holler. There were two of them; pristine white and billowing like sheets in the breeze. They might have been cheerful on a sunny day but in the blustery autumn weather they looked menacing, more like Klan hoods than wedding whites. Even more jarring was the main building of the compound, which towered above the rest of the landscape. I’d seen a satellite image, but it didn’t do justice to the enormous structure. I’d been mentally prepared for a newer version of the CC Farm compound, which was something like the lovechild of two colonials and a barn. This was something else.
In front of the building, a reflecting pool the size of five Olympic swimming pools was festooned with three fountains spraying green water into the cool air. Behind the pool and a carefully tended flower garden was a building with a vaulted roof at least four stories high, which looked something like the mega-churches of middle America. The drab taupe masonry of an enormous, plain-sided church was accessorized with a two-story structure wrapped around the main building like an anaconda. The wraparound was an architectural jumble, with a dual-pitched gambrel roof running into turrets at each corner of the building. The entire structure was devoid of windows. I knew from satellite pictures that a whole compound of buildings sat behind this monstrosity, at least one of which we’d pegged as residential.
A man in a black turtleneck waved me into a field that had been pressed into duty as a parking lot. I parked the Night Rod next to a dozen other bikes—a good number of which were Harleys. There were virtually no cars to be found, just bikes, pickups and SUVs, along with a few ATVs clustered in a far corner of the field. The ATVs all bore the National Front logo I’d seen in the FBI file.
They’d gated off the festival, putting it behind a three-foot-high white picket fence like a suburban lawn party. Two young men manned the entrance. They wore Beretta 92s in a way that suggested long familiarity. One checked my name against his clipboard list while the other patted me down. He carefully slid the holster securing a Kahr Arms PM-45 from inside my belt. Nonplussed, he handed me a claim check and pointed over to a stand at the other end of the tent where I could retrieve the gun on my way out. He didn’t ask me to relinquish my folding Spyderco knife.
The music was loud, but just as Nichols predicted, it sounded more like Coachella than Hellfest. I stepped inside the tent and saw the truth behind Nichols’s assessment of the National Front. There was hardly a bare head to be seen except those crowning middle-aged men. There were a smattering of couples, a fair number of men dressed in bike leathers and a few teenagers. I even saw one couple toting a baby in one of those front carriers that mimic a kangaroo pouch.
The first tent was set up for a barbeque. Burgers, bratwurst, ribs and chicken with fries and coleslaw, along with beer and soft drinks, sat along a buffet line that chefs in white coats and toques replenished in real-time from a line of grills that stood just outside the open-air tent. The grills were upscale, stainless steel rigs that would have looked appropriate outside a McMansion in the suburbs, only bigger. Sunlight reflected from them in the couple of spots where it poked through the clouds.
It struck me that October was odd timing for an outdoor concert, even as far south as West Virginia. The mercury was barely into the fifties and shivering undoubtedly caused some of the nervous energy in the tent. The corner of West Virginia I’d explored for two days was beautiful, but I couldn’t imagine the attraction of river rafting in ice-cold water. Then again, my only experiences with whitewater have been involuntary and without the benefit of a raft.
I hadn’t moved far into the tent before another young man with a clipboard approached me. The tag on his chest said Mark and told me he was ‘Here to Help!’ Mark was one of a dozen or so men and women in their teens or early twenties milling about in identical khaki pants and white oxford shirts with the National Front logo embroidered on the chest pocket.
“Can I have your name please, sir?”
“Ray Larney, and I work for a living so call me Ray, not ‘sir,’” I said. Mark smiled as he located my name and checked me off. I felt like an evidence bag going through the chain of custody. He handed me a blank nametag and a marker.
“Just put your first name on that if you would please, sir—er, Ray,” he corrected himself. “Help yourself to lunch and enjoy the music. There are two more tours left for the day if you’d like to try one—at two and three p.m.”
“Sure would. Two sounds great. How do I sign up?”
“I’ll put your name on the list for two o’clock, Ray. The tour will meet right over there and leave promptly on the hour.” He pointed toward the entrance to the tent, flashed symmetric rows of teeth and walked away.
I skipped the buffet line and meandered into the second tent. This looked more like a trade show, with booths scattered around the periphery. The signs were specific and hard to decode, with names like “Zoning laws and community growth” and “educational advantages of cultural unity.” Only a small display tucked in the corner of the tent with the bland title “The History of National Socialism” betrayed the movement’s origins. The National Front wasn’t skimping on the budget, either. The booths were trade-show quality, with professionally produced signs and graphics. There were signup boards for more information and a schedule of weekend informational events following the music festival. Each booth also had stacks of books supporting the position it was advocating, along with custom-produced instructional manuals that helped attendees understand how to enact change at the local level. Everything was glossy and everything was free. It looked like a show they could take on the road.
All of it made sense to me. From a distance, the festival looked like it could be a college alumni reunion. Taking away the overt racism allowed the National Front to navigate in the cultural mainstream while quietly peeling off those sympathetic to its cause. Belonging to the Klan or some skinhead organization wouldn’t do for a small business owner or a company man. But belonging to a group promoting stronger communities through zoning, environmental laws and education reforms would be just fine.