a housing site development, including a scenario in which the 1919 site was a fraud. That simply didn’t compute. The site had been carefully crafted to send a particular message and he’d received it.
To make this omelet, Dunn had always understood, some eggs, even good eggs, would have to be broken.
One of those eggs, if not an especially good one, was Randy Stokes.
* * *
—
APROPOS OMELETS, he was making one, pushing cooked portions of the three eggs into the center of the hot pan over the steaming butter, tilting the pan this way and that until the eggs were thoroughly cooked, the size and shape of a large pancake. He dumped some pre-chopped ham, cheddar cheese, and onion onto half the frying egg, flipped the other half up on top to make a sandwich, let it heat for an extra moment, then flipped it onto a plate.
He carried the omelet and a bottle of Miller High Life to the dining room, where he could look out over his back lawn as he ate.
* * *
—
ONE PROBLEM WITH meaningful political action, he knew, was that the federal government was all over it. Dunn didn’t believe in the ZOG—the myth of a Zionist Occupied Government—but there was something ZOG-like about the way the government was passed back and forth, with much shouting and the expenditure of billions of dollars, between parties with barely discernible differences.
But to step back: the FBI was all over the people who might demand real change. Open your mouth too strongly, and the next time your lawnmower threw a rock into a neighbor’s yard, you’d be looking at a federal felony.
The only way you could best the feds at that game was to be truly harmless; to be a hobby Nazi.
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.
* * *
—
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.
* * *