Draft — Unedited Draft — Draft
Deep Cover Draft
Coming in January, 2022
Chapter 1
(June 18, 1988)
I was in the conference room of the Plains City Gazette where I usually worked these days. I still couldn’t type, but I could read copy, and I had a part-time clerk from the front office who helped mark the changes on the copy as I groused out loud about the changes the copy needed. Sometimes, I just hollered at the reporter directly. It was easier. And hollering let me vent a bit of my frustration about my wrists: still painful, still ugly, and worst of all? Still unable to use them.
Things were running smoothly, actually. Emily Gonzales liked the cop beat and was doing it well. Mornings weren’t quite as smooth as they had been when Danny Ferguson had been on staff, but she’d had only days of experience. And she was turning out good stuff. Her first big cop story was when assistant district Tiny Bellamy filed arson and attempted murder charges against Obadiah Brewster based on my deposition. She included without prompting, a quote of “No comment,” from Danny, now the PIO at the cop shop.
“Katy?” Kevin Smith, the managing editor and my boss, stuck his head into the conference room. And then he just stopped speaking.
I looked inquiringly at Kevin, who had a peculiar expression on his face. I usually found him pretty easy to read, but not today.
“Could I see you in my office?”
I nodded to my aide to clean things up. “And see if you can explain to Eric one more time how to spell receive?” Eric Morton was a great reporter. But he got his start in radio, and apparently spelling wasn’t a requirement there. Made sense when you thought about it. But in print? He damn well needed to learn to look up the words he couldn’t spell.
She giggled.
I followed Kevin into his office. It wasn’t especially big, in the first place, and our publisher, Ian McCormick, and a stranger were already in it. I found a chair and carefully kept my distance. Too many strangers wanted to shake hands. And that was so not going to happen.
“Katy, this Joseph Carroll,” Ian McCormick said. “FBI Special Agent in Charge.”
“In charge of what?” I said. I knew it was a title for the agent in charge of a team, but what exactly was he here for? I looked him over. He was 50ish, short and stocky with receding gray hair. He wore the perquisite dark suit, white shirt, and red tie. Polished black shoes. Yes, I looked.
He ignored the question. “You’re Katy Williams,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “You used to be a reporter at the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington?”
Puzzled now, I nodded.
He nodded at a map that was spread across Kevin’s desk somewhat hazardously. It looked like it would slide off at any moment. “That’s a map of an isolated house, with a cluster of additional houses, that is completely self-contained. Generators, wells, everything they need to survive. Only way in is by helicopter or small plane.”
“Ol’ man Brewster’s log cabin mansion,” I said slowly. McCormick winced at how I identified Seth Brewster, Sr., but I ignored him. That was how everyone identified him.
“Does it remind you of anything?” the FBI agent asked.
Maybe it was his reference to my past job with the Spokesman that made it click.
“Oh my God,” I whispered. I started to hyperventilate. And things were starting to go black, before I finally got my breathing under control. “Hayden Lake, Idaho.”
He nodded.
“Katy?” Ian asked.
“It’s a white supremacist compound in northern Idaho,” I said numbly. “The home of the Aryan Nation. How did I not see the similarities?” I had seen the similarities last fall with Vern Cooper’s recruitment of young men from Dallas and the surrounding areas. His camp had looked like a typical Skinhead recruitment camp. I got up and looked at the map on Kevin’s desk. There was a red ink border drawn around a fairly large chunk of land. I squinted but couldn’t make out the details.
“How much land does Brewster have?” I asked.
“About 1,400 acres, roughly two square miles,” Agent Carroll answered.
“That much. Butler only had 20 acres,” I muttered.
I looked up at the agent. “Is he recruiting? How are they getting in there?” I asked. “Is this linked to Vern Cooper’s camp last fall?”
“We’re sure he’s recruiting,” Carroll answered. “We don’t know how he’s getting them in there. The compound helicopter flies out daily. Goes to Tyler some days,” he said naming a bigger city 60 miles east of us on the Louisiana border. “Dallas others. And some days we’re not sure where they’re going.”
“Not here?”
“No, if they come here, there are warrants waiting,” the agent responded. He didn’t shift his eyes from me. I could feel them. “Good job on that, by the way.” I looked up at him in inquiry.
“Your work as a reporter and editor and your willingness to be a state’s witness about the arson and attempted murder has gone a long way toward forcing their hands here,” he said. He was still watching me, and I didn’t know why. “For now, at least.”
“A Butler Aryan Nation compound but with money?” I asked. “Good God.”
I looked back at the map. “How many people does he have in there?” I asked.
“Maybe as many as 200,” he answered. “His extended family. Others. We think some are just going in cross-country, and hoping they’ll get picked up by patrols. And we think those supply flights are bringing in others. It’s growing.”
I leaned against the desk, wrinkling the map, and faced him. “Why are you telling me all of this?” I demanded. “Why are you here?”
“We’re setting up an FBI task-force based here in Plains City,” Carroll said. “We’re here with the blessings of Judge Andrew Pettygood. Still not sure about the chief of police, to be honest.”
I wasn’t sure either.
“The sheriff we are sure about, unfortunately,” he added dryly.
I snorted. I was sure too. He was a Texas good ol’ boy, ignorant and racist, who got elected because his friends felt sorry for him when his car wash went bankrupt nine years ago. How can you bankrupt a carwash for God’s sake? He showed up at county fairs and rode a horse in every parade and kept getting re-elected. But I had been pretty sure last fall that someone was funding him, someone connected to the KKK and Vern Cooper. How else had he not known about Vern’s compound?
“So, Andrew vouched for me?” I asked, still wondering why he was here. “For us?”
“Well, he said, if we didn’t want you writing about the task force, we’d better come clean with you up front,” he admitted, his eyes curious. I ignored the curiosity. “But honestly, we want you to write about the task force. We want all the publicity we can get.”
I frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Oh, for freak’s sake man, just tell her.” Kevin was impatient. “While the task force is very visible here, holds hearings, does investigations, all of that, they’re going to send in someone undercover.”
“What?” I exclaimed. “That’s suicide.”
A younger man slipped into the room. He was in his late 20s, a bit taller than me, with similar medium brown hair, cut very short, and brown eyes. Good looking enough, but easy to overlook. He was wearing a gray V-neck T-shirt, a pair of faded blue jeans, and heavy work boots. Just like the white supremacists at Cooper’s camp. Just like the youths at Hayden Lake.
Like a male version of me.
“John?” I exclaimed.
“Hi, Sis,” said FBI Special Agent John Williams. My brother. They were going to send in my kid brother.
I put my head between my legs and hoped I didn’t embarrass myself — and everyone else — by either blacking out, or throwing up.
Coming January 2022. Book four, A Newspaper in Texas.
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