Glenn Beck - The Overton Window

“Daniel Carroll Bailey?”

He flinched at the sound of his name like he’d been roused cold from a nightmare. The chain at his wrist snapped taut; he squinted and hunched down as though expecting another boot to the side of the head. He looked pretty bad, but with some cleaning up maybe not unable to travel, and that was good for the schedule. Beyond the cuts and bruises, if lack of sleep was his main problem then they were in good shape; he could rest on the plane.

“Are you my lawyer?” Bailey asked.

His words were weak and not formed very well. Swollen jaw, eyes trying hard to focus, one ear freshly torn ragged at the lobe from an earring theft, or maybe a bite. Before they’d brought him in someone had done a half-assed job of swabbing the blood that had dried around his nose and mouth, but a bit of real doctoring might be needed before they could get on the road for the airport.

“No, I’m not a lawyer.”

“I want my phone call, they won’t let me have my phone call-”

“You can make your call now if you want, and line up an attorney. That’s your right. But if you decide to go that route I want to warn you. This is from a high authority, the highest; in fact with your past record, your charges from last night, and especially”-he patted the folder in front of him-“the evidence from an ongoing federal investigation, the best any lawyer’s going to get you is fifteen to twenty years in a place much worse than this. That’s a fact. But it doesn’t have to be like that, Danny.”

Slowly, the other man seemed to be recovering his wits, or at least enough of them to understand what he was facing.

“Who are you?”

Stuart Kearns showed his ID, then took out his card and slid it across to the very edge of the desk.

“I’ve got nine words for you that I’ll bet you never thought you’d be so glad to hear,” he said. “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Over the intercom came an announcement that they’d just reached cruising altitude at 44,000 feet, and to punctuate that bit of news the no smoking light went off with a quiet ting.

It was a nice touch, but on a jet this size the copilot could just as easily have leaned around his seat and shouted down the aisle to update his two lone passengers on the progress of the flight.

Stuart Kearns took a pack of Dunhills from one jacket pocket, his lighter from another, then reclined his seat a notch and lit up. He inhaled deeply, then blew a thin white ring of smoke and watched it drift up toward the rounded cabin ceiling.

“What are you doing?”

Danny Bailey had awakened from his nap and was staring at the lit cigarette across the narrow aisle as though he were watching a bank robbery in progress.

“You can still smoke on a charter. On this one, anyway.” Kearns extended the pack to him, shook a filter tip halfway out. “Come on, you know you want to.”

“I quit five years ago.”

“Last chance. It’s not every day you get a free pass to break the rules.” Bailey didn’t budge, so Kearns returned the cigarettes to his pocket. “Hey, remind me, how old are you?”

“I’m thirty-four.”

“In the decade you were born a man could still smoke a cigar on any flight across this country. Can you believe that?”

“Listen,” Bailey said, “what’s your name again?”

“Kearns. Stuart Kearns.”

“That’s right-Special Agent Kearns. Well listen, Stuart, I’m glad to be out of jail, but it doesn’t exactly feel like I’m free.”

He nodded. “That’s right.”

“Right. So no offense, but there’s no reason to strain yourself pretending you’re my friend. Let’s stick to business. What do you say you just enjoy your smoke and then tell me what the hell I need to do to go home.”

It wasn’t an elaborate scheme; it couldn’t be when success relied on the performance of an informant under duress. In undercover work, if anything can go wrong it generally does. The more straightforward the plan, the better. Keep it simple, and you keep it safe.

The targets for the operation were low-level militia types with a desire to graduate to a full-blown act of domestic terrorism. They were in the market for funding, logistical support, and some serious weapons. If all went well then the only thing they’d be getting at the final handoff was arrested.

Danny Bailey would be brought along to the first in-person meet-up, to lend a crowning bit of credibility to the proceedings; he was currently the closest thing the Patriot underground had to a national spokesperson. In essence, Bailey would play the Oprah to Kearns’s Dr. Phil.

The operation itself would be quick, in and out, but the lead-up to it had required a long and careful preparation.

A few years earlier a website had been set up by the IT guys at the Bureau: www.stuartkearns.com. The backstory on the site went like this: A former federal agent had been run out of his job when he’d tried to blow the whistle on some dangerous truths. After repeated death threats, this ousted agent had gotten angry and gone public on the Web in an effort to protect himself from retribution, and to continue his crusade to expose the dark forces intent on causing a global financial collapse and ushering in a one-world government.

The global villains named on the site were a grab bag pulled from the latest full-color catalog of extremist paranoia: the Zionists, the Royals, the IMF and World Bankers, the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, the Bilderbergers, the Masons, the Grovers, the Vatican, you name it. It was a big tent, and that was the point. Search engines had soon begun to present Stuart’s site as a top-twenty destination for all manner of curious like-minded wackos, and traffic became fairly brisk.

It was evident from the home page that this wasn’t a place for the no-guts armchair militiaman. The rants, posts, links, videos, documents, and forums hosted by this fictional ex-fed-turned-Patriot made it pretty clear that he believed a violent uprising, a shooting war, was the only route remaining to set things right again in America.

This site and its inflammatory content formed what’s known as a troll in the parlance of the Internet culture. Trolling is a fishing term; you toss your lure over the side and forget about it, letting it drag behind the boat in hopes that something you want to catch will eventually take the bait.

With 200 million websites out there no one really expected this obscure destination would make Stuart Kearns a household name among the diverse followers of all the competing hate groups. The FBI and many other agencies maintained thousands of such baited traps; sometimes they paid off, most times they didn’t.

But then one day the troll hooked a fish, and from the first tug it felt like a big catch.

A new discussion group had formed in a private chat room on the site, under the heading of “Direct Action.” The members began to kick around the logistics of the Oklahoma City bombing, Tim McVeigh’s attack on the Murrah Federal Building in 1995: what had gone right, what had gone wrong, and the various conspiracy theories still swirling around the event and its aftermath. With some encouragement from the forum leader the discussion evolved-some half-baked plans that would’ve gotten the job done better, other vulnerable targets, men, methods, and materials. Many dropped out of the conversation as things got more serious, but eight stayed on.

This remaining group progressed to tentative voice chats and then to encrypted e-mail exchanges, all the while inching their way from what had started as a mere discussion toward a solid plot that could actually be executed. Three more anonymous participants eventually got cold feet and dropped out, leaving five people ready, willing, and able to commit a grotesque act of domestic terrorism.