Murder in Foggy Bottom - Margaret Truman [54]
“I’ve met Mr. Pauling,” she said.
“So he told me,” Hoctor said.
“Yes, an awards ceremony. We got to talk a little afterwards. An impressive man.”
Hoctor saw what he thought might be a mischievous glint in the Secretary’s green eyes, and smiled.
“I appreciate being brought up to speed,” Rock said, ending their meeting. “I think I’ll try to catch a nap before we arrive.”
“Good idea, Madam Secretary.”
“If a nightcap will help you sleep, ask one of the cabin attendants.”
“I appreciate the hospitality.”
A few minutes later, a snifter of cognac in his hand, Tom Hoctor leaned his head back and smiled. That damn Pauling, he thought, able to generate a gleam in even the sixty-four-year-old eyes of a female secretary of state.
Chapter 17
The Next Morning
Blaine, Washington
The main house on the Jasper ranch in Blaine, Washington, was large and sprawling. The central portion, constructed of twelve-inch-thick concrete blocks, had once been a stable. Over the fourteen years since Zachary Jasper had purchased the spread from its previous owner, he’d extended the basic structure through a series of haphazard additions, giving the house a modular look, boxes tacked on to other boxes without apparent concern for architectural niceties. Outbuildings had been constructed, too, seven in all—a barn; a new stable for the ranch’s half-dozen horses; a woodworking shop; a bunkhouse accommodating a dozen people; a cabana of sorts next to an in-ground concrete pool Jasper had poured himself; a one-story clapboard building in which the ranch’s arsenal of weapons was stored, maintained, and secured; and the most recent project, a two-story log building containing eight apartments, four up and four down.
The number of people living at the ranch fluctuated from month to month. Three women had resided there with Jasper over the fourteen years; the most recent, June, who at twenty-four was half his age, had been with him for three years. Her predecessor, a teenager, had borne him a son, and had taken him with her when she left five years earlier. The first “Mrs. Jasper” had been legally married to him when he moved the family to Blaine. They’d had four children together, three daughters and a son, Zachary Junior, who’d returned to live with his father when turning eighteen.
As of this morning, there were thirty-one residents of the ranch, many of them families that had responded to Jasper’s marketing of the ranch as a bastion of white Christian values, with future plans to expand into the neighboring states of Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming: “We will be the ten percent solution,” Jasper said in his brochures. “One day, one tenth of the United States will be free of the mud people, the Jews and the blacks and the other minorities who are destroying our precious United States of America.”
Jasper’s stated goal of establishing a white Christian homeland in the Pacific Northwest was not limited to printed material. He held daily meetings with those who’d responded to his message, at which he slipped into the role of preacher, quoting the Bible to substantiate his beliefs and demanding adherence to his philosophy. This morning, over a big breakfast cooked by the women in the commune, he pontificated to others at the large, round kitchen table, including a young couple who’d arrived a week earlier with their eleven-year-old son, and who were staying in one of the apartments in the log house.
“… and you’ve taken the first important step to creating a proper environment to bring up your youngster,” he said, patting the boy’s arm. “The way this country is bein’ run into the ground by the Niggrows and Jews and other non-Americans, there won’t be much left for your son by the time he’s grown up and startin’ his