Blood Trail - C. J. Box [70]
“Have you heard from him?” she asked.
“No.”
She nodded. “On my walk I was thinking a lot about what you saw last night. I can’t come up with a good explanation. What it all boils down to is you either trust him or you don’t.”
“He’s never given me a reason not to trust him,” Joe said.
“That’s all you’ve got,” she said, taking her coffee with her to wake up Sheridan and Lucy.
AFTER THE breakfast dishes were cleared away, Marybeth took Lucy to school and Joe read over the file he’d been given from the FBI. Bill Gordon was indeed deep inside Klamath Moore’s organization, and one of the few of his followers to travel with Moore from rally to rally. The reports in the file were records of the calls Gordon had made to the FBI when he checked in on Mondays and Thursdays. They went back two years.
Six months before, an enterprising agent had summarized the reports up to that date.
The Klamath Moore Animal Rights Movement
KM is the self-appointed leader and spokesman of the movement.
The number of “members” is unknown and as far as BG knows there is no formal membership list. Based on the attendance at rallies, BG estimates the membership to be more than 200 and less than 500 hard-core followers. KM enjoys telling the media his sympathizers are “ten thousand strong,” but there is no evidence to confirm this.
The movement has no formal name or charter. There are no officers or leadership structure. This is by design. BG describes the movement as “nonlinear,” like al-Qaeda.
BG says KM has studied al-Qaeda and used the terrorist organization as a model for structure and purpose. KM says he can never mass enough followers to mount a legitimate, large-scale fight against hunting in the United States. But like AQ, he can—with a very small organization of loyal followers—strike surgically and create chaos far beyond their actual strength.
Communication with sympathizers is done exclusively via the Web. Access to the nonpublic URLs is password-protected and changed at random. It’s unknown how many followers visit the nonpublic websites.
The financing of KM and his effort is murky. BG says KM always seems to have enough money to travel, self-publish pamphlets, and pay organization costs for staging rallies. The hat is passed around at rallies but BG says he’s seen the results and the cash collected isn’t substantial enough—amounting to a few hundred dollars, usually— to sustain such an effort. BG speculates that KM has a trust-fund inheritance and that he draws from it when he needs money. BG says only rich people never talk of money so he figures KM is rich. We have asked BG to investigate the funding angle further.
KM has close relationships with sympathetic reporters at two major television networks and one cable news network (names deleted). These reporters are rewarded for their sympathetic treatment of his cause by being tipped off ahead of time to the staging of events so they will have exclusives. KM will only talk to sympathetic reporters so portrayals of him in the media are generally positive.
KM claims to “own” two congressmen and one senator (names deleted).
KM’s last known address is Boulder, CO, but he keeps constantly on the move. He lives like a fugitive, staying with sympathizers across the nation and around the world.
KM keeps in contact with like-minded organizations including PETA, the Animal Liberation Front, Earth First!, Animal Defense Alliance, and similar organizations around the world dedicated to animal rights and the anti-hunting movement (list attached).
JOE FLIPPED to the list and was shocked by the sheer number of animal rights organizations. He counted 248 groups in the United States and Canada alone, and thirty-six more in other countries. Most of the organizations stated that they were against “hunting, the fur trade, circuses, rodeos, and animal experimentation.” The names were all unfamiliar to him, but varied from the Animal Crusaders in Tucson to Action for Animals in Oakland to SKUNKS, an acronym for the Palmdale, California, Society