Barker waited a beat before he turned to Fuller. “Kip, get this piece of shit back to the pen.”
Jesse turned and hobbled toward the door.
Fuller caught up with him in the hallway. “That was a mistake, Jesse.”
“The hell with him,” Jesse said.
Barker’s voice came down the hall after them. “All right, all right, come on back in here and let’s talk.”
Jesse turned and held his hands out to Fuller, who began unlocking. First the handcuffs came off, then the leather belt that buckled in back, then the chain that connected the cuffs to the leg irons and, finally, the leg irons. Jesse walked slowly back into the conference room, rubbing his wrists and stretching his legs, then he sat down. There were some pencils on the table; Jesse wondered whether he could plunge one into Barker’s neck before either he or Fuller could shoot him.
Chapter 4
Barker took a seat at the opposite end of the table. “How would you like to get out of prison?” he asked.
“I’m already out of prison,” Jesse said. “Now why don’t you just cut to the chase and tell me what I have to do to stay out?”
Barker nodded at Fuller and the younger man placed a briefcase on the table, opened it, took out an eight-by-ten photograph and put it in front of Jesse.
Jesse saw a head and chest shot of a young man in the uniform and green beret of the Army Special Forces. He was rail thin, handsome, deeply tanned, square-jawed and his chest displayed many ribbons. Master sergeant’s stripes adorned his sleeves.
Barker opened his own briefcase and took out some papers, glancing at them as he spoke. “This man’s name is Jack Gene Coldwater; that photograph was taken in 1972, and, as far as we know, it was the last picture ever taken of him. Christ only knows what he looks like now. He was born in Ship Rock, New Mexico, in 1949, to a Navaho father and a white mother; he attended the local public schools, played football and was good at it. He turned down a football scholarship when he graduated from high school; instead, he joined the army; he was good at that, too. He was big, smart and tough as nails, and Special Forces got hold of him right out of boot camp. His service record says he was a natural. He pulled four tours in Vietnam and led missions all over the country, north and south, in Cambodia and Laos, mostly infiltration with only a few men; he rose to the rank of master sergeant faster than it should have been possible, and by the time the war ended he was the practical equivalent of a company commander. There were bird colonels who were scared shitless of him, and his commanding officers, his platoon leaders and company commanders, always did what he told them to. He won just about every decoration the army had to offer, except a Medal of Honor, and he was recommended for that. Word is, his regimental commander — one of those colonels who was scared shitless of him — blocked it; I wasn’t able to find out why.
“Coldwater didn’t want the Vietnam war to end, and when Saigon fell, he passed up a seat on the last chopper out, then fought a rear guard action for another week. He finished up at Vung Tau, southeast of Saigon, with his back to the sea and two men left. Then he stole a boat and sailed it down the South China Sea, past the mouth of the Mekong River, fighting a running battle with Vietnamese craft, around the cape called Mui Ca Mau, then northeast along the Cambodian coast to Trat, in Thailand, right on the Cambodian border.
“From there he and his merry band took a bus to Bangkok and reported to the military attaché at the American Embassy, who got them onto a plane back to the States before anybody knew they were there. Once home, he took discharge, and that was the last we heard of him until a couple of years ago.”
“So what’s he doing now?” Jesse asked. “Dealing drugs?”
“The DEA can be happy he’s not,” Barker said. “The truth is, we’re not exactly sure what the hell he’s doing, but we think it involves a lot of weapons. He’s living in the Idaho panhandle, on a mountain just south of the Coeur d’Alene Indian reservation, next to a little town called St. Clair; he has at least four wives, numerous children and no visible means of support. He’s the titular head of something registered as an official religion in the state, called the Church of the Aryan Universe.”
“Funny,” Jesse said, “I had a meeting with a fellow from Aryan Nation just this morning.”
“This isn’t Aryan Nation; it’s an entirely separate organization. Aryan Nation is mostly made up of convicts and ex-convicts. The people around Coldwater are apparently model citizens. They do seem to share a view of the world with Aryan Nation, though — the idea that the white man is God’s supreme creation and that everybody else is inferior.”
“Sound like a delightful bunch of people,” Jesse said.
“Yeah. A couple of years ago the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms began to get reports of somebody buying large amounts of small arms on the West Coast; then the reports got to be of bigger stuff — anti-tank weapons, recoilless rifles, that sort of thing. They put a couple of men on it; one of them got close and got a bullet in the brain for his trouble, then the trail went cold.
“About fourteen months ago — just about the time you went away — we got a snitch who said that Coldwater was the guy buying the weapons. ATF sent two men up there, undercover. One went in as a life insurance salesman — they actually trained him to sell insurance. The other got a job as a shoe salesman. Both of them simply vanished.”
“Did they report anything before they went up in smoke?” Jesse asked.
“Only what I’ve told you; that’s everything we know up to now. When the new administration came into office, some people at Justice began to take an interest in cults and white supremacist groups, and somebody at ATF, which was backing away from this real fast, passed on the Coldwater file, such as it was, to us. All of it is in Fuller’s briefcase; you can memorize it at your leisure, then destroy it. A special task force was authorized to investigate cults in general and Coldwater’s in particular, and I was picked to form it and lead it.”
“And naturally,” Jesse said, “the first person you wanted aboard was good ol’ Jesse Warden.”
Barker managed a tight smile. “The last person, actually. But I didn’t want to follow the ATF example of bureaucratic stupidity and lose a couple more men.”
“So you decided to lose me?”
“Christ knows you’re expendable, Jesse, but you also have something to gain from all this.”
“I was hoping we’d get to that,” Jesse said. “Just what do I have to gain?”
“Your freedom, if you bring off the assignment. We’re talking about a presidential pardon.”
“Oh, I love that,” Jesse said. “I suppose you have a letter from the president in your briefcase, confirming all this.”
“Of course not,” Barker said irritably. “You’ll have to take my word for it.”
Jesse leaned forward. “Dan, before we go any farther there’s something you’d better understand: I’ll go back to prison before I’ll take your word for a goddamned thing. Now let’s stop wasting time; you tell me what you want done, and I’ll tell you what you have to give me to do it. If we can’t agree, then the hell with it.”
The hell with it, indeed. Jesse figured he could disable Kip, kill Barker and disappear before anybody knew it. The two of them probably had enough money on them to get him started, and he no longer resembled any existing photograph of himself. He’d have a better chance than he would back inside Atlanta Federal Prison.
“All right, let’s get down to brass tacks,” Barker said. “As you’ll see when you read the ATF reports, Coldwater appears to have two principal lieutenants: their names are Casey and Ruger, both ex-Special Forces. Both were on that boat with Coldwater, and a distillation of both their service records is in Fuller’s briefcase. I want to know what this organization is doing, where they’re getting their funding and what other organizations they’re connected with. And I want hard evidence for at least one serious felony conviction — I’m talking twenty-five to life — for each of the three top men — Coldwater, Casey and Ruger. I intend to break up this outfit, and when you get the evidence, I want to personally make the arrests.”