Ken Goddard - Double blind

Two hours later, at 0800 hours Pacific standard time, in an open-sided barn with leaky gutters that served as a training facility for the Chosen Brigade of the Seventh Seal, First Sergeant Aran Wintersole stepped onto an array of surplus wrestling mats and introduced martial-arts instructor Henry Randolph Lee to his first four students.

At that precise moment, three time zones and twenty-six hundred miles away, on an equally cold and drizzly Monday morning in Washington, DC, Regis J. Smallsreed impatiently buzzed his chief of staff and demanded to know why the hell Simon Whatley wasn't in his office, where he was supposed to be.

Approximately two dozen increasingly frantic phone calls later, the staff chief informed Smallsreed via the intercom (with some degree of apprehension, because every member of Smallsreed's staff knew to stay the hell out of the congressman's luxuriously appointed private office between the hours of ten and noon unless the President and Congress had declared war on some country actually capable of putting up a decent fight), and cautiously advised his mercurial boss that Whatley had apparently vanished.

Yes sir, the staff chief confirmed, according to Whatley's people, Whatley got on the plane in Medford last night; but no sir, according to the hotel manager, he had not checked into his reserved room yet. Perhaps, sir, given the tight scheduling of the flights, Whatley got held over in either Portland or San Francisco; but no sir, he hadn't called or left a message to that effect, as far as anyone knew.

Already in a foul humor because a lucrative piece of legislation seemed almost certain to lose by a single goddamned vote he couldn't scare up anywhere in this new, godforsaken Congress, Smallsreed was in no mood to hear such a report from anyone, let alone his obsequious chief of staff, whom he often compared, unfavorably, to a drooling bird dog who couldn't find his way back to the blind if harbor buoys marked the path.

Accordingly, the now thoroughly irritated congressman repeated his order.

"Find Whatley — wherever he is, and whatever he's doing — and get him here, now."

At precisely 12:01 that Monday afternoon, Smallsreed's understandably nervous chief of staff asked the man catering the luncheon to hand Smallsreed a sealed note which basically said, in standard bureaucratic weasel words: We have no idea where Whatley is, but we're working on it.

At 12:55, Smallsreed's extremely apprehensive chief of staff bribed the same man (who came to pick up the remains of the luncheon) to deliver a second sealed note which basically said, in that same tail-covering verbiage: Nobody has any idea where Whatley is, but everyone in the entire office is working on it.

Regis J. Smallsreed waited impatiently until the white-uniformed attendant cleaned up the catered lunch and departed, closing the door to the private office behind him.

"The son of a bitch crapped out on us," he announced to his two companions.

"What is that supposed to mean?" Aldridge Hammond, the powerful chairman of the ICER committee, and the only man in the world that Congressman Regis J. Smallsreed truly feared, demanded from his shadowy corner of the room.

Apart from the psychological impact of having a deep and cultured but ever-so-threatening voice coming out of the darkness, there was a more practical reason for the ICER chairman's partiality for darkened corners. He was one of those genetic human rarities: a black albino whose melanin appeared in small and irregular light-to-dark brown patches over his entire skin surface… which made him extremely susceptible to the damaging effects of any source of UV light. That, in addition to his incredibly pale brown eyes and yellowish brown hair, and the gracefully fluid movements that belied his sixty-four years, gave Aldridge Hammond the chilling appearance and demeanor of a very dangerous feline creature.

It was an image that more closely approached the truth than a far-less-powerful man like Congressman Regis J. Smallsreed cared to think about.

Smallsreed's power lay in his ability to compromise and reach consensus with the 434 other Democratic and Republican members of the House of Representatives, whereas Aldridge Hammond was singularly capable of destroying the efforts of a small country to form a democracy with an almost effortless signature at the bottom of a page. The slightest nod of Hammond's head could — by means that he need never know about — easily result in the death of a man for the simple sin of getting in the ICER chairman's way.

In effect, Aldridge Hammond wielded an incredible amount of power in a manner that was almost gentle in its subtlety. Working with him in a cooperative manner required careful and constant attention to the most imperceptible of cues.

But at the moment, Congressman Regis J. Smallsreed was being anything but careful.

"For his sake, I hope it means he's shacked up with some four-star Hollywood harlot, or shit-faced drunk, or asleep in some godforsaken airport lounge." Smallsreed's porcine eyes gleamed dangerously. "Because if it means anything else, at all, he's a walking dead man."

"You think he went to the FBI?" Sam Tisbury's words conveyed all of the controlled rage of a man who had lost a father, a son, and a daughter to — in his opinion — the malicious and inexcusable actions of federal law-enforcement agents. He had absolutely no intention of losing anything to such people again.

Smallsreed shook his head.

"I don't think so. Whatley may not be the smartest fellow on the block, but he's pretty damned loyal, 'cause he's been doing my dirty work for so long, nobody else can stand having him around." The old man chuckled. "And he sure as hell knows what would happen to him if he ever did go sideways on us." The congressman snapped a number two pencil between his fingers for emphasis.

"A frightened man who feels threatened and trapped can make some incredibly stupid decisions," Aldridge Hammond reminded the politician.

"Lord knows that's the God's truth, too," Smallsreed agreed. "But I've got a lot of IOUs out there. If Whatley went to the FBI, I'm sure I would have heard about it by now."

"And if you're wrong?"

"Haven't been wrong yet all these years, have I?" The Oregon congressman gave his guest a hard-edged smile.

"So where does that leave us?" Sam Tisbury interjected impatiently.

"Same place as before." Smallsreed shrugged. "Getting ready to make a little statement, exact a little vengeance, blow any evidence all to hell, and then maybe, if we're real lucky, take the credit for saving the day. Only difference," the crafty veteran politician added, "is that maybe we ought to change our plans a little bit."

"How?" Hammond inquired in his deep, cavernous voice.

"Instead of killing them outright, I think we ought to capture all of those wildlife agents alive."

"What?" Sam Tisbury's head came up sharply.

"Hear me out now, Sam." Smallsreed raised a placating hand. "Once we do that, we have the Chosen Brigade — dear misguided souls that they are — issue a news release saying they've taken several federal wildlife agents captive, and intend to put them on trial to prove to the world that all those black helicopter conspiracy theories are, by God, true as can be, and that they'll kill them — one at a time, right in front of the TV cameras-if the FBI or anyone else tries to interfere."

"But you really don't want that to happen, do you?" the powerful shadow-man suggested. "The trial, that is."

"Hell no. 'Course not!" Smallsreed exclaimed. "So we have Rustman's team rig the entire trial site with every pound of explosives they can lay their hands on. Now I'll grant you, when news media show up, our militant friends might seriously hurt one or two of those agents to keep the FBI backed off. But at the proper time, just before, or" — Smallsreed smiled thoughtfully — "maybe just after the Chosen Brigade lets a select number of the media in to monitor the trial, we make it look like the FBI jumped the gun. Then, before you can say squat, that trial site goes up in a hundred million pieces, all the agents — FBI, Fish and Wildlife, this Lightstone fellow in particular — and all the media types die in the explosion. Rustman's team fades away in the confusion, and guess who gets blamed?"