Jude Devine Mystery Series (58 page)

“Detective Devine?” Footsteps intruded on her musings.

Jude turned reluctantly, almost certain the news would be bad. If so, she had done the best she could, and at least in its final moments, the cat had known kindness, perhaps the only kindness in its sad life.

But the young vet tech’s face told a more hopeful story.

“How is she?” Jude dared.

“You won’t believe it.” Courtney clapped her hands together at her breast. “She’s on her feet.”

Astonished, Jude took off her gloves and followed the bearer of good tidings into a room at the back of the surgery center where several animals were housed in large recovery cages. The little black cat sat on a folded towel staring curiously through the wire. Her head lifted slightly as Jude approached, and her golden eyes widened. Jude poked a finger through one of the gaps and let the cat take her scent. She was greeted with a purr.

“Oh, wow,” Courtney grinned. “I wasn’t sure if we’d ever hear one of those from her.”

“Do you think she’s feral?” Jude asked.

“No. She was probably someone’s pet once. She knows to use the litter box.”

“Lost, I guess. Or abandoned.”

“If you want to find a home for her, there’s a shelter off D Road.”

“No. I’m keeping her.” So much for her no-pets rule. Jude had decided a few years earlier that it wasn’t fair to have animals; she was never at home enough to pay attention to them.

“Well, we’ve done blood work and a dental, and checked everything out. She’ll need another day or two on IV fluids, then you can take her home.”

Jude stroked her new roommate’s bony head. “Okay. Call me when she’s ready to be picked up.”

And what then? The cat was so weak she would need love and care for at least a week before she was completely well. Instead she was going to be left at home alone to fend for herself. Was that the right thing to do? Jude thought about the animal shelter option again. It wasn’t as though she and the cat knew each other, or that the cat had understood Jude’s promise of a home for life.

“I don’t know how she pulled through,” Courtney said. “The vet gave her a twenty percent chance.”

“Quite a fighter.”

“She would have died last night if you hadn’t brought her in. She’ll make a great companion for you.”

Jude groaned inwardly. Emotional blackmail, just in case she thought she could back out of her pledge. “I hope I make a decent one for her.”

“You saved her life and she knows it.”

Jude met the cat’s relentless stare and had the oddest sense that Courtney was right. “Yes, maybe she does.”

Half an hour later, on the way back home, she called Eddie House again.

“Okay?” he asked, not a man of many words.

“The vet thought she didn’t have a chance, but she fought. We both made it through the night.”

“Ah.” His satisfied sigh was audible. “Then her name is chosen for you. Yiska.”

“Is that Navajo?”

“Yes. It means the night has passed.”

*

“Someone in your neck of the woods just took delivery of two hundred pounds of C-4, and it wasn’t your man Hawke.”

Jude raised her eyebrows. “Jesus. That’s enough to blow Telluride off the map.”

“Funny you should say that.” Her FBI handler sounded strangely perky for a high-level intelligence officer. “There’s some chatter about an attack on the next Telluride festival. Not from the C-4 buyer.”

“The film festival?”

“Uh-huh. I guess the sweet-corn parade doesn’t do it for them.”

Jude thought the cachet-deficit was pretty similar for both events. Who cared if a bunch of pretentious slackers in dark glasses wanted to crawl up each other’s asses for a week? There had to be more meaningful targets for domestic terrorism. What kind of point were they hoping to make by attacking a film festival:
Enough with the subtitles
?

She moved farther around the side of her Dakota, trying to shield herself against the icy winds. She could have taken the call inside the office, she supposed, but she liked to keep the two worlds she moved between separate when she could.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “Why would they waste their time?”

“Think about it, Devine. We’re talking wall-to-wall celebrities. Saturation media coverage for any incident. That kind of publicity could tempt a wannabe group looking to make a name for themselves.”

“Okay, you’re scaring the crap out of me now.” Jude could only imagine the hysteria among the local enforcement if they actually had a real problem to deal with at festival time instead of the usual cokehead-drives-his-Beamer-off-the-road incidents.

“The Telluride threat involves a C/B agent,” Arbiter said.

Which changed everything. Chemical/biological agents weren’t funny, and the people who trafficked in them weren’t playing. Jude was still having trouble believing that any self-respecting terrorist would see Telluride as a high-value target, when there was Disneyland or even that ridiculous Holy Land park in Florida. Any place where you could pay to watch a faux Christ performing faux miracles had to be a fruitcake-bomber magnet.

“Do we have any specifics?” Jude asked.

“We’ve had a spike in communications between several individuals calling themselves the Aryan Sunrise Stormtroopers, and they’ve been mouthing off around some of the neo-nazi blogs. Seems they may have their hands on a supply of abrin or ricin.”

“Aryan Sunrise…yeah, I know them.”

The fledging white supremacist organization was on Jude’s radar as well. A handful of disgruntled former members of the Christian Republic of Aryan Patriots, they’d set themselves up as a rival group soon after Republic leader, Harrison Hawke, ran his infamous “Aryan Defense Days” the previous November. Philosophical differences had blighted these unity rallies, and while the various different militias and national socialist groups quarreled with one another, the Sunrise faction had attempted to depose Hawke in an internal coup. He’d fought off the takeover bid and blamed the minor stroke he suffered in December on the stress of this power struggle.

Just before he abandoned his bunker in Black Dog Gulch to recuperate on vacation with friends in Buenos Aires, he’d expressed his dismay to Jude in one of their heart-to-heart conversations. The schisms in the Aryan movement were almost as big an enemy as the Zionist Occupied Government. How would progress for the white race ever be anything but tenuous unless there was unity? Some brothers and sisters had asked him if he would consider running for President in 2008. Hawke wanted to know what Jude thought about that idea.

As she did every time they spoke alone, she wondered if he had blown her cover and wanted to keep the enemy close, or if he had truly bought her story—the one-time FBI agent who traded a big career for life in the slow lane because she was disenchanted with the political climate. Whatever his reasons, he continued to seek out her company, a fact that thrilled her masters at the Bureau, who saw in the unappealing eugenicist the future leader of a united, reborn Aryan Nations—a vision Jude thought was as naive as it was depressing.

At their behest, she’d been building intelligence on Hawke ever since she’d moved into the Four Corners, and she’d struck up a rapport with him the previous fall. He seemed to have a thing for women in uniform, her in particular. In a touching parting gesture on his way to the airport he’d dropped by the Paradox Valley station house to entrust her with his latest writings on the role of white women in a “cleansed” America, headed up
Smart White Females Make Yesterday Thinkers Shape Up
.

On a Post-it note stuck to the front of the folder, he’d written extravagantly:

As yet you cannot know what an inspiration you are to me, Fraulein, but there will come a tomorrow when we will share the mantle of glory bestowed upon the few racially aware Aryans whose courage and race honor determine the fate of the many. Our White brothers and sisters are depending on us.

This he signed off with one of his oft-quoted Nazi maxims:

“In the hand and in the nature of woman lies the preservation of our race.”

He concluded this note with the warm and fuzzy sentiment, “At your side,
Bruder
Hawke.”

The Post-it was as close as he came to writing a love letter, and Jude had since received a couple of sneakily worded postcards from Argentina. Hawke was nothing if not paranoid, and firmly believed his every communication was inspected by the government. Jude hoped the Office of Homeland Security was that efficient, but she doubted it.

“Is it confirmed that these Aryan Sunrise individuals are in possession of the agent at this time?” she asked, wondering how in hell a few amateurs could lay their hands on toxins that were not exactly available over the drugstore counter.

“That’s your job, Devine. Verify the status.”

“And if they are?”

“Sayonara. They’re a single-cell operation only.”

Jude allowed a doubt to surface. The arrest of a group of domestic terrorists planning a biological attack would provide exactly the kind of political capital the Administration was looking for in the lead-up to the midterm elections.

“Tell me this is not just part of another bullshit Ministry for Propaganda scam,” she said. “Because if I wanted to work for Karl Rove, I’d apply formally for one of those pathological liar positions. Remind me of the qualifications: no moral compass, will commit treason if it puts a buck in Halliburton’s pocket—”

“It’s for real,” Arbiter said dryly.

The handler’s word was good enough for her. And it made sense in a twisted race-hate-think kind of way, now that she’d had time to consider it. A film festival, in the minds of these white supremacists, was little more than a celebration of Jewish “control” of Hollywood and the media. Attacking one would not only net vast publicity for their group in a horrified mainstream media, it would also elevate them to warrior status among rank and file neo-nazis.

“So, you’re saying the C-4 purchase is unrelated to the white power dipshits and the Telluride plot?”

“Different informant,” Arbiter said. “The timing is pure coincidence.”

“This place is kook central,” Jude muttered. “Do you have an ID for the buyer?”

“The name is Debbie Basher. Age thirty-five. Part-time hairdresser. Registered Democrat. No known connections with dissident or terrorist organizations. She was intermittently active in a Denver gay rights organization between 1998 and 2004, then left the area and relocated to Paradox Valley. It appears the loss of a domestic partnership prompted the change of venue.”

Jude had trouble absorbing what she was hearing. A lesbian hairdresser was purchasing plastic explosive on a big enough scale to attract Bureau attention? Something was wrong with that picture.

“Doesn’t exactly mesh with the lone-operative profile,” she said.

“We’re assuming she’s hooked up with someone. The ALF or ELF, maybe.”

“Not all lesbians are radical vegetarians.”

“No, but stats show overrepresentation among animal rights extremists, and since there are no known gay domestic terrorism groups…” Arbiter paused. “Surprising, isn’t it, all things considered?”

“I guess the homosexual agenda doesn’t include telling everyone else how to live their lives and blowing up people who prefer to think for themselves,” Jude remarked.

Arbiter murmured something noncommittal and kept focus. “The ELF is a priority target at this time.”

“I thought we had an agent in there.”

“He was blown after a failed chicken-farm operation.”

Jude frowned. The FBI had successfully infiltrated PETA, Greenpeace, and most of the animal rights-lite crowd. But the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front had dumped the Kumbaya mindset a while back. They were deeply paranoid and modeled their structure on that of terrorist organizations, operating as a network of anonymous cells. This made them tough to penetrate.

When Jude switched from Crimes Against Children to counterterrorism, she’d narrowly missed being sent on a long-term undercover gig in Portland, Oregon, a hub for ALF/ELF activists. Instead she’d received her present choice assignment, keeping tabs on the extreme right in the Four Corners region of Colorado.

“There must be a way in,” Arbiter said. “She has a few financial problems.”

“You want me to flip her?” Jude surmised.

“That would be ideal.”

“I’ll check her out.”

“Call me as soon as you have something on the ASS.”

“Roger that.”

Jude couldn’t help a small chuckle. In the heat of the moment, some genius had come up with “Aryan Sunrise Stormtroopers,” and he and his
sieg heil
buddies were so swept up in the Third Reich imagery and potential for new arm patches that no one had stopped to consider the acronym.

“For people who take themselves pretty seriously, that’s a strange handle to choose,” Arbiter remarked.

“Yep. These guys don’t call themselves the master race for nothing.”