Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(17)

Or to keep your secret.

The far right referred to people like Dunn as lone wolves. He liked the mental image that conjured up, the wolf, and that’s the way he wanted to remain. Let the alpha wolves and the betas get snarled up in alt-right politics, and their sex and power dreams. He’d remain alone.

But that message in the bottle . . . that 1919 website.

There could be only one reason for the message. Somebody, some serious group, was looking for political leverage and wanted an anonymous sympathizer to deliver it. The group’s basic philosophy would be an amalgam of all those political causes reflected in the texts attached to the website. In other words, something in the direction of fascism, even if they didn’t call it that. And they wouldn’t call it that—they’d call it “Americanism” or “The Restoration” or something similar. He’d know it when it came about.

If somebody—a lone wolf—acted on their behalf, gave that group the leverage, gave them the ability to call up a senator or a Supreme Court justice and demand a vote, a nudge in the right direction . . .

That would be a step toward a renewed America.



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DUNN HAD NO THEORETICAL PROBLEM with the idea of violence. Violence was built into fascism, had a purifying quality. But just because you were okay with the concept of violence, didn’t mean you were okay with getting caught committing it. That kind of thing was for the skinheads of the world, the doofuses who showed up for the riot with a shield and baseball bat and a funny-looking flag.

If you were going to use violence, if it became necessary, you had to be logical about it. You had to think it out. You had to plan. You had to cut your liabilities. You had to engineer it.

General George Patton had expressed it best: “No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country.”

Randy Stokes was a threat that would have to be cleared away before Dunn could take action. Stokes had put Dunn onto the 1919 website. If Stokes had left any hint of his identity on the website, and the FBI showed up at his door, he’d give up Dunn in a New York minute.



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WHEN DUNN FINISHED DINNER, he watched his backyard for a while—sometimes deer appeared from the neighboring woods, to graze on a bed of hostas that he’d laid out at the back of his yard. Hostas were the hot fudge sundaes of the deer world, and Dunn liked to watch them ghosting through the trees, and then delicately stepping out on the yard to browse. The deer were worth any number of hostas.

No deer appeared this night and he washed and dried the omelet pan, the spatula, his fork and plate, cleaned up around the sink, put the beer bottle in the garbage and got another one from the refrigerator.

Up in his office, he composed a letter on his computer using Microsoft Word. He labored over it, getting everything just right, about 1919 and his beliefs concerning the website. He printed three copies on Boise Cascade computer paper—the most common decent paper he could find. He would never touch this particular sheet of paper with his bare hands, because he knew all about DNA. He put the letters in three self-sealing envelopes addressed to three other men he considered serious possibilities for acting in the cause.

With gloved hands, he applied self-sticking “Forever” stamps on the envelopes, put them in an unused brown business envelope and carried the package down to the front door and placed it on the floor. No DNA from mucus or skin or hair contact; no fingerprints; no return address. He would mail them the next day from Gainesville.

The men who got them would have to make up their own minds about what to do.

They’d have to decide whether they really wanted to go in.

If they finally wanted to act.



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DUNN HAD THREE GUNS. The first was a Ruger SR9C, a compact 9mm semi-automatic pistol, his “house” gun. While small, the Ruger had an extended magazine that gave him the full seventeen rounds. The second was a Ruger 10/22, a .22-caliber carbine-style semi-automatic rifle with open sights, useful for killing small game, like rabbits and squirrels. The third was a scoped bolt-action Winchester Model 70 in .308, good for deer and other large game.

He wasn’t highly skilled with any of them. He’d go to a local shooting range a couple of times a year to practice with the pistol, and occasionally to a three-hundred-twenty-acre tract of wooded land he owned in West Virginia, to shoot the rifles. He’d bought the land as a possible refuge when Barack Obama was elected president.

He’d also bought a thousand rounds of ammunition for the .308 and another two thousand rounds for the .22. Things hadn’t collapsed, as he’d feared they would, under Obama. Since he hadn’t needed to shift to a survival status, he’d considered selling the land, but hadn’t gotten around to it. The tract had a small cabin on it and two ten-acre ponds with panfish. In the back of his mind, he retained the idea that he still might need it someday.

He’d bought all three of his guns under the loose Virginia laws, which allowed unregistered transfers at gun shows. Again, in the back of his mind, he thought it wise to keep his weapons purchases as private as possible, given the growing power of the deep state.



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HE THOUGHT ABOUT SHOOTING Randy Stokes and that sister of his who’d given him the website password. Imagined it, almost as a video, and re-ran it through his mind, over and over. At times, it seemed too crazy. Shooting, killing two people that you didn’t even care about? One that you didn’t even know?