Murder in Foggy Bottom - Margaret Truman [43]
Jasper sat up straight and leaned his elbows on the table. “Let me tell you something,” he said, his voice demonstrating the first sign of pique since he had sat down. “I may hate the Jew-nited States of America and its fascist government. I may be a white supremacist. I might be all those things. But I don’t approve of innocent American citizens being slaughtered by some foreign terrorist group.”
“Why are you so sure it was a foreign group?”
“Had to be. You know how they are.”
“ ‘They’?”
“Yes, foreigners.”
They talked for another fifteen minutes before Jasper was escorted from the building, placed in one of the cars, and driven back to his ranch, where two of the young men who’d accompanied him waited. This time, they cradled rifles in their arms.
Forrester said as Jasper was about to depart the vehicle, “You’d make me very happy, Mr. Jasper, if you’d invite me inside to see this ranch of yours.”
Jasper’s tongue worked the inside of one cheek before he responded, “That sort of invitation is usually called a warrant.”
“I’d rather not go to the trouble of having it printed. You know, just a friendly visit.”
“You know what Harry Truman said: ‘If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.’ Sorry, but I’m not in the mood for a party. It was a pleasure meeting you. We’ll have to do this again sometime.”
“I’ll look forward to it.”
Forrester called a number from a secured radio telephone in the car as he and the driver drove away from the ranch: “Forrester. We just dropped Zachary Jasper back at his ranch.”
The agent on the other end of the call sat in a large room at FBI headquarters in San Francisco that had been designated and equipped as the western-sector command center for investigating the downing of the aircraft. She’d been taking calls all day from teams assigned to seek out and question known right-wing militia groups.
“Anything?” she asked.
“No. Claims to know nothing. I’d like a warrant to go in.”
“No can do, at least at this stage. Justice is doing its usual blinders-on act, turned down a blanket request to search all known hate group locations. No probable cause.”
“I thought—”
“Careful. That can get you in trouble.”
“I thought they were getting info from inside Jasper’s so-called ranch.”
“Be a good soldier, Warren. It’s not for us to question wisdom at the top.”
“Christ,” Forrester said into the phone, loud enough for the driver to turn and raise his eyebrows. “What are they waiting for, another plane to come down?”
“No, they’re operating on the theory that it was the act of a foreign terrorist group.”
“What do they back that up with?”
“Looks like the administration wants it that way. You’re heading for Portland?”
“Yeah. We have the two groups to check out there.”
“Keep in touch.”
As Special Agent Forrester and his colleagues headed for Portland, Oregon, to check out two known white supremacist groups, one comprised of neo-Nazi skinheads, the other led by an aging minister who used his self-consecrated church as headquarters, Mac and Annabel Smith watched the news on TV in their Watergate apartment. A special report was in progress about a rash of bias crimes that had sprung up across the country in response to the assaults on the aircraft. The window of a clothing store in Detroit, owned by a Pakistani family, was smashed by a chanting crowd; two black teenagers, the sons of a Nigerian diplomat, were attacked on Mass. Avenue. An Arab man in Houston was chased by a club-wielding gang and forced into a busy street, where he was struck by a car and taken to a hospital. His injuries were reported as not being life-threatening.
The anchor’s report ended with:
“The president himself has asked the American people not to take the law into their own hands or judge people by their national origins. Every resource of the federal government is being utilized to determine who was behind the callous destruction of civilian commuter planes that took the lives of eighty-seven men, women, and children.”
Mac switched off the set. “Doesn’t take much, does it, to