Uzi would leave the planning of the Black Hawk portion of the operation to DeSantos; he would have to pour over the satellite images DeSantos had left on his PC and devise a plan of action from their own point of entry to the selection of targets, successful penetration, and extraction — all without leaving sign.
Now alone in his office, Uzi saw Hoshi appear in the doorway.
“Got a minute?”
“Before I forget,” Uzi said, “I just emailed you a profile drawn up by Karen Vail at the BAU. Have someone cross reference all known offenders and see if it gives us anything worth following up. I meant to get it to you sooner, but I haven’t been at my desk long enough to make sense of my dictated notes.”
“Will do.”
He struck a key to close the encrypted satellite photo he had been studying, then swung his feet off his desk and faced her. “Okay, now you.”
She entered carrying a folder and grabbed a seat.
“I’ve done some more digging. And it definitely gets interesting.” She flipped open the file to a well-organized stack of papers, then paged to a specific document. “President Whitehall was basically elected on the strength of the NFA. Not just money, like they contributed to Knox’s senatorial war chest. They did that for Whitehall, too, for his first campaign — and in a very creative way. They set up a nonprofit, the American Liberties Consortium, which was allowed to raise unlimited funds — in Whitehall’s case, the tally was twenty-seven million dollars. The ALC then contributed all twenty-seven mil to the Committee for Preservation of American Liberties, which can spend an unlimited amount on getting Whitehall elected.”
“Why bother with the nonprofit shell?”
“It keeps their donor list private.”
“Of course.” Uzi frowned. “Sounds like legal money laundering.”
“There’s more. They also donated three-point-five million directly to the Republican National Committee, another fourteen million to support ‘unaffiliated’ groups, TV and radio ads, you know the drill.”
Uzi reached into his drawer for another toothpick as he absorbed the numbers. “Go on. You said their ‘contribution’ wasn’t just money.”
“Right. While still governor of Texas, after Whitehall declared, he corralled some key NFA people. Haven’t been able to confirm it yet, but I’d guess he called in some chips. NFA had their own agenda, too, so it might’ve just been a mutual feeding frenzy. They knew the threat to their values the Democrats would’ve forced down their throats, and they knew that Allen Moore, the Democratic challenger, was a major force. So they mobilized a grassroots get-out-the-vote campaign against Moore. They used the gun issue to win votes. It was a brilliant tactic, really. They went right to the heart of the Democrats’ support — and monetary — network.”
“Organized labor?”
“Yup. They polarized the union members by playing to their fears about losing their rights to own guns. First line of attack was the media: magazine articles drumming home the point that NFA was not antilabor, using smoke and mirrors to point out everything they did to protect jobs. Their reasoning was circular, but it didn’t matter: they repeated the lie so many times it was eventually accepted as fact. Second line of attack was convincing the members that the only difference that mattered between the Republicans and Democrats was their position on gun policy. They developed a catchy phrase: Vote Whitehall. Keep your jobs. Keep your money. Keep your guns.”
She flipped another few pages. “The strategy was extremely effective. According to a friend of mine who worked on Moore’s campaign, the split of the union vote was like a dagger to the Democrats’ heart. Basically, NFA was pivotal in defeating Moore in West Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas. If Moore had won even one of them, the White House would’ve been his. And the gun lobby would’ve taken a big one on the chin. They’d probably still be on their heels today, playing defense instead of offense.”
Uzi leaned back in his chair, chewing on his toothpick. “So their strength comes from their alliance with Whitehall’s administration?”
“That’s only part of the story. They took their victory and power and parlayed it into more of both. They’re well funded and very well organized. And they have millions of members committed to the same goal. They took in two-hundred-fifty-thousand new members in the last eighteen months alone. These are people who tend to feel threatened by the government — and they’re willing to take action to secure their rights and maintain their power base.”
“Sounds like a militia mentality.”
“That’s because they were in danger of becoming extinct, but were “saved” by 9/11. Fear swept over the country. People from the fringes of society — the militias — found strength in numbers, so they took matters into their own hands. They joined in droves. They all shared a common mentality: they loved guns, cherished conspiracy theories, distrusted government, hated gun control, were politically active — and united against a common enemy.”
Uzi shook his head. “Still, the mix doesn’t seem like a formula for rising to power like they’ve done. Militias have been around for ages, but they’ve never advanced beyond a certain point. How did NFA go from militia ally to right-wing powerhouse?”
“There was another big shift,” Hoshi said as she flipped back to the front page of the file. “Nine years ago. They merged with the American Gun Society. AGS was a small, growing organization that wasn’t on our radar. The merger seemed insignificant at the time, and nobody paid attention to it. But it brought an influx of new leadership, which was important because they were battling a powerful adversary: the NRA. Both were going after the same base. But the merger with AGS gave the NFA critical mass. Within a year, after a nasty grab for the top spot, Skiles Rathbone rose out of the dust.”
“This was around the same time Knox became director?”
Hoshi did not need to consult her notes. “Six months before.”
“So Rathbone and Knox rose together. Coincidence?” It was a rhetorical question, Uzi thinking aloud, but Hoshi was sitting on his words.
“Possibly.” She closed the folder. “NFA is now the leading lobbying organization in the country. It’s got its own national newscast, over a million political organizers, an army of pollsters, and its own telemarketing company. It’s a lobbying machine.”
Lobbying. “Do me a favor, check on Russell Fargo’s lobbying firm, see if there’s a connection — any at all — to NFA.”
Hoshi nodded, gathered up the folder, and rose. “Anything else?”
“Yeah, get with Pablo Garza at HQ on a guy named Lewiston Grant. Supposedly died in a fire in Utah, but I’ve got my doubts. Garza won’t be much help, but he might tell you more than he’d tell me. Charm him.”
Hoshi lifted her brow. “Okay.”
“Anything comes up, let me know.”
She turned and headed out, stopping only when Uzi called her name.
“Excellent work,” he said.
She smiled, then shut the door behind her.
Echo Charlie reclined in his car seat, the Sat phone pressed to his ear. In the failing daylight, he watched a man dressed in threadbare jeans and a ragged cloth jacket search trash cans in the park, extracting a few spent Coke bottles and shoving them into a ratty canvas bag in his shopping cart.