Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(16)

Where the $66,500 went, the FBI didn’t know.

Of the two $38,000 withdrawals, an undercover agent working inside a group called Pillars of Liberty noted that shortly after the final withdrawals by Lang, Pillars had experienced a financial resurgence and had sent money to other neo-Nazi organizations to support publications and political actions.

A secret look at emails between the head of Pillars and the neo-Nazi organizations suggested that $38,000 would be a good guess as the amount of money involved. The connection was there, the investigators thought, but would be hard to prove.

Complicating the situation was that Lang had confided to a friend, who was also an FBI-recruited informant, that he’d lost some significant amounts of cash at a place called the Horseshoe Casino in Baltimore, Maryland; and that he’d used cash because he didn’t want anyone to trace his credit cards to a casino.

The confession had suggested to the feds that Lang was onto their informant, and was using her to provide himself with an alibi.

Lang, Lucas thought, might not be as dumb as the average Nazi.





CHAPTER

FOUR



Elias Dunn understood that “fascist” wasn’t a hot brand anymore, but in his research he’d found that it had been a wildly popular political philosophy in much of Europe in the 1930s, as well as in parts of South America and even in Japan, and that it was rising again in Eastern Europe.

Roughly equivalent philosophies had been popular in the U.S. as well, although they’d never gotten to the point where they achieved major elective status. They might have, if it hadn’t been for that moron Adolf Hitler.

And for good reason.

There were lots of different flavors of fascism, but they all tried to deal with what Dunn had identified, through extensive reading, as the major failing of America: the nation had lost its founding values and had fallen into a fatal decadence.

The light was going out. The country was being invaded by people of inferior cultures and inferior races. The real, vital, white America was being submerged.



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TO GET BACK would require a strong leader, a strong intelligent leadership group below him, and a strictly ordered society below that, with each group fixed in an honorable place. From top to bottom, from president to even some dumbass like Randy Stokes, there would be honorable work with decent, livable wages.

Most of all, there would be Order.

Although it was clear that blacks were an inferior race, and that Hispanics were certainly blighted, even those who claimed some European blood, there’d be honorable places for them in the American culture. They’d be separate, not equal, but would have their own secure place.

Eventually, he believed, they would, like his wife and cat . . . disappear.

Jews, of course, were a different problem. They were the Other, intelligent parasites who lived off the work of the superior races, running the banks, the media, all those middleman jobs that chipped a few greasy percentage points off the hard work of others. And, of course, their real allegiance lay elsewhere, far from America.

How to get to that new, clean, vibrant, and ordered America? Not through democracy, that was clear. Democracy had always been a danger, and even the Founding Fathers had recognized that. If everyone had an equal vote, what do you do when blacks and Hispanics became the majority, as they were sure to do, if allowed to breed as they wished?

Dunn believed in the Fourteen Words; believed with his entire being.

After Stokes got him to the 1919 website, and he’d realized the importance of the site, he’d spent several days thinking about it. As an engineer, he’d worked meticulously through several scenarios, just as he would with a housing site development, including a scenario in which the 1919 site was a fraud. That simply didn’t compute. The site had been carefully crafted to send a particular message and he’d received it.

To make this omelet, Dunn had always understood, some eggs, even good eggs, would have to be broken.

One of those eggs, if not an especially good one, was Randy Stokes.



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APROPOS OMELETS, he was making one, pushing cooked portions of the three eggs into the center of the hot pan over the steaming butter, tilting the pan this way and that until the eggs were thoroughly cooked, the size and shape of a large pancake. He dumped some pre-chopped ham, cheddar cheese, and onion onto half the frying egg, flipped the other half up on top to make a sandwich, let it heat for an extra moment, then flipped it onto a plate.

He carried the omelet and a bottle of Miller High Life to the dining room, where he could look out over his back lawn as he ate.



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ONE PROBLEM WITH meaningful political action, he knew, was that the federal government was all over it. Dunn didn’t believe in the ZOG—the myth of a Zionist Occupied Government—but there was something ZOG-like about the way the government was passed back and forth, with much shouting and the expenditure of billions of dollars, between parties with barely discernible differences.

But to step back: the FBI was all over the people who might demand real change. Open your mouth too strongly, and the next time your lawnmower threw a rock into a neighbor’s yard, you’d be looking at a federal felony.

The only way you could best the feds at that game was to be truly harmless; to be a hobby Nazi.