SIX

AT 11:15 ON THE COLD, BLUE MORNING of January 20, 1987, a barrel-shaped motorcycle gang member named Gustav Antony Magisono—Gus to his friends—let out a small burp as he stepped out of his red Nissan Sentra and walked across a small, grassy park in downtown Sandpoint. It was a typical winter day in North Idaho, where the wind careens off the deep-water lakes and is channeled up granite valleys until it has built up enough icy speed to slam every screen door this side of Canada. The sky was clear, and the ground frosted with a light snow as Gus looked for Frank Kumnick, the guy he was supposed to meet at a small park behind a downtown motel. Subaru station wagons with ski racks maneuvered the snow-lined streets of Sandpoint, stragglers from a winter carnival that had taken place that weekend on nearby Schweitzer Basin’s seventy-eight inches of packed powder. Magisono couldn’t care less about skiing. He was in Sandpoint on serious and hopefully illegal business. He was a biker in his early forties, just under six feet tall, round and balding, with a gray beard and a cocksure way of talking about himself that made it clear: He knew the right people. A weapons dealer and security expert from the East Coast, Magisono had gotten involved with motorcycle gangs and found he agreed with their white supremacist views. The summer before, he’d even gone to the Aryan Nations’ summer conference, where he listened to the incredible list of speakers and hooked up with a few guys who believed the way he did. Now he was finding himself drawn into the movement and taking the next step, trying to get involved in a group that would carry on the work of The Order and The Order II.

That’s where Frank Kumnick fit in. Magisono had talked on the phone with Frank, who said they ought to meet to go over some important business. Magisono had known Kumnick only a short time, but he seemed to be a player, and he talked of having some ambitious plans. Magisono stood in the park alone, wondering where Kumnick was. Just then, an old Jeep Wagoneer pulled up, and Kumnick leaned out and waved at him. When the Jeep stopped, Kumnick got out of the passenger seat, moved to the back, and Magisono took his place up front. In the driver’s seat was a guy he remembered meeting at last July’s Aryan Nations Congress, a thin, friendly guy with intense eyes and a midwestern accent, Randy Weaver. Kumnick was a couple of inches and thirty pounds bigger than Weaver, who was jumpy, with darting eyes. Magisono hadn’t expected to see Randy here, and right away he wondered what was happening. Since the summer congress, Magisono had had some dealings with Kumnick but none with this other guy, and all three men were wary of each other because it was just so damn easy to get caught up with a snitch these days.

From the backseat, Kumnick leaned forward, not quite as friendly as before. “How are you?” He asked if Magisono remembered Randy Weaver.

Magisono looked over at Weaver. “Hey, guy, how are you?”

“Pretty good.”

Magisono turned around and talked with Kumnick some more, but Weaver seemed quiet and nervous, and so he turned to him again. “How you been, stranger?” He was beginning to feel comfortable with Kumnick, but he still wasn’t sure what Weaver was doing here. For the things they were going to talk about, Magisono knew trust was the key on all sides.

“Didn’t you celebrate Martin Luther Coon day?” Kumnick asked.

“I took a big piss for him,” Magisono said. He complained about the King celebration in Spokane the day before, with its parade and civil rights speeches. Hell, even the governor had come to Spokane, to make a symbolic statement about the Aryans just over the state line. The others agreed it was a bullshit holiday.

“Yeah,” Weaver said. “This country has got its priorities just really screwed up. Yeah. Celebrate a communist, sex-pervert nigger. Son of a bitch.”

They all laughed.

They considered talking at the restaurant in Connies Motor Inn, but Kumnick didn’t want to because it was so crowded. Magisono suggested driving down to the Edgewater, a hotel on the shore of Lake Pend Oreille, talking in its coffee shop and then going for a stroll through the big city park there.

Weaver drove along Sandpoint’s square of one-way streets, past antiques stores, specialty shops, and restaurants, and across Bridge Street and the wide, shallow Sand Creek, into the parking lot of the Edgewater, a two-story resort at the northwest corner of the lake, sidesaddle to the round, sandy point for which the town was named. Magisono got right to business. He wanted to get involved in something big; he wanted to be around guys who could make something happen. “Are you ready to get things … ah … rolling?”

Kumnick said yeah. Weaver said nothing. Kumnick and Magisono talked some more about the dangers of getting an organization together. Especially in light of what had happened with The Order I and II. Kumnick seemed spooked by something.

“Gotta question for ya,” Kumnick said as they waited in the Wagoneer. “Can you stand an electric scan?”

Magisono was surprised. “An electric scan?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure.”

“I’ve gotten really careful,” Kumnick said. He said the scanner would tell him if Magisono was carrying a gun or was wired with a transmitter or tape recorder. “As small as a pin, it will pick it up.”

Weaver contributed, “If you’re figuring out lately, everybody’s falling for one reason.”

They thought he was a snitch? Magisono wondered if they were trying to scare him, but, in a way, he understood. Hell, he was just as careful in his business dealings. “Boy there’s a lot of shit going on, I’ll tell you that,” Magisono said. “It’s made me real, real cautious.”

Kumnick wanted to talk about the electronic scanner some more, but he didn’t pull it out yet. “I picked it up at an auction for a dollar. The same thing in a security place will cost you a hundred and ninety-nine dollars.”

After a few minutes, they walked into the Beach House, the restaurant adjacent to the Edgewater. Just ahead of the Tuesday lunch business, they got a table with a view of dark Lake Pend Oreille, where the January wind was lifting whitecaps onto the soft sand beach. The big biker excused himself and walked down the carpeted hall to the bathroom. Inside, he locked the door and, trying to remain calm, said into the tiny transmitter draped over his shoulder and taped to his chest, “He wants to do a scan on me!”

THERE WAS NO Gus Magisono. It was a cover dreamed up by Kenneth Fadeley, a thirty-nine-year-old private investigator from Spokane. He’d worked in marketing for STP—the gasoline additive—before getting into the business of confidential informing in 1983, when a friend who happened to be a Spokane cop was killed during an investigation of motorcycle gangs. “I took it pretty personal,” Fadeley said. Unlike most informants, Fadeley didn’t have a criminal record and only did it because of his friend, because of the excitement and because of the little money he made. He also found that his personality was suited to undercover work, to adopting a new identity and rooting out criminals.

Working for a few hundred dollars here and there, he posed as a bank executive to stop a rash of robberies in Spokane and staked out stores that had been hit by repeated burglaries. Once, as Fadeley was watching Johnny Carson on television in the back of an appliance store, he heard a noise and confronted the burglars in the back of the building. One of them raised a metal bar, and Fadeley shot and wounded him. A few weeks later, he helped track down a guy who had robbed a bank with a hand grenade.

But he was at his best infiltrating the Aryan Nations. In 1984, while investigating a church that was stockpiling automatic rifles, Fadeley met a Georgia-friendly agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms named Herb Byerly. Two years later, with federal law enforcement worried again about white supremacists in Idaho, Byerly had talked the informant into attending the 1986 world congress, the first one since The Order trial, which had decimated the ranks of the violent young bucks in the white supremacist movement. The 1986 congress was to be the radical right’s signal that it wasn’t going away. At the Aryans’ Hayden Lake compound, Fadeley talked with survivalists, white separatists, constitutionalists, the entire spectrum of far-right activists, even knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He jotted down license plates and met men who would later be arrested for a spree of bombings in the Northwest.

Fadeley’s assignment that weekend was to listen to the leaders who spoke and to gather intelligence about what they might be planning. He was also to get to know the radical right wingers at the conference, and so Fadeley introduced himself to a friendly guy who said his name was Frank Kumnick. They were walking across the grounds when Kumnick pointed out a smallish guy standing near a group of Ku Klux Klan members.

“Hey, there’s Randy,” Kumnick said. “Come on over, I want you to meet an individual who will always cover your backside.” Kumnick introduced the two and told Fadeley that Weaver had been in Special Forces and was a really good guy. Weaver didn’t seem involved in anything, and so Fadeley didn’t think about him anymore. But Kumnick continued talking a big game, and after the Aryan Nations Congress, the ATF agents told Fadeley to continue getting close to him.

A month later, Fadeley and Kumnick hiked up a wooded peak called Katka Mountain, near the Canadian border. There, they talked about raising money for a white uprising by kidnapping kids from the exclusive private school where Kumnick worked. The Rocky Mountain Academy was a boarding school where tuition could be as high as $3,500 a month. Filled with disciplined teachers and administrators, it catered to East and West Coast wealth, and at times housed heirs to the Du Pont and Howard Hughes fortunes. Rocky Mountain offered a place for successful people to send their kids, some of them to get them away from drugs, bad friends and relationships, or sometimes just the city. In the woods, they dried out, chilled out, and—the theory went—couldn’t find trouble even if you spotted them a convertible and $1,000.

Kumnick later wrote that the plot to kidnap children from Rocky was all Fadeley’s idea, a trick to entrap him. “When I asked why, he said ‘for money,’” Kumnick said. He said he was suspicious of “Gus Magisono” immediately and knew he was being set up. He said he only talked about that plot and the others to shine Fadeley on and to see if Fadeley slipped up.

But Fadeley insisted Kumnick was serious about kidnapping the children. “He told me Barbara Walters’s kid was there. He told me that Clint Eastwood’s kid was there,” Fadeley said later. “They were going to target the Jewish kids and anybody that was well known.” According to Fadeley, Kumnick wanted to use the money they got from the kidnapping scheme to finance terrorism, and he was especially interested in Jacqueline Guber, Walters’s daughter, who attended the school in the 1980s.

Fadeley said Kumnick wanted to hide the children on Katka Mountain while they waited for the ransom money. He also said that Kumnick planned to bury food, water, weapons, and other supplies at the base of some trees on the mountain before the kidnapping. They would find the supplies by using key chains that beep at the sound of clapping hands. But Kumnick later denied the whole scheme.

Fadeley was afraid Kumnick was serious, and so he told Byerly in the fall of 1986 and Byerly called some FBI agents in Spokane, who then called the school. Kumnick was fired a few weeks later by school officials who said his van had been seen at an Aryan Nations gathering.

Hopeful that his cover was still good, Fadeley requested another meeting with Kumnick, so they could talk about forming a group to further the white cause, to continue the work of the Bruders Schweigen. But now, in Sandpoint, Kumnick had brought Randy Weaver and was threatening to run an electronic scan on him. Fadeley figured that Byerly was nearby, perhaps a block away, in an unmarked, gold Dodge Diplomat and hopefully he understood how much danger his undercover informant was in. Fadeley knew Kumnick was a big talker, and he suspected he’d brought Weaver along to impress him with the fact that he had at least one colleague. He also knew that if he was going to find out what kind of crimes Kumnick, and possibly Weaver, might be capable of committing, he just had to go along with Kumnick and hope his cover stayed solid. And if things went bad, he sure as hell hoped Byerly wasn’t far away.

“I WAS ABOUT TO BUST a kidney,” Fadeley told the men when he rejoined them at the table. They made small talk and ordered three cups of coffee. Randy was quiet in the restaurant while Kumnick and Fadeley—the man they still believed was Gus Magisono—talked about how difficult it was to find anyone to trust. Federal informants were everywhere. Fadeley knew a few other guys who could help them with the group they wanted to form, four ex-military guys that he’d checked out himself. Of course, they would need weapons. Randy was still distant, still wasn’t talking much about their plans, so when Kumnick excused himself to go to the bathroom, Fadeley tried again. This team they were trying to form would never work if they couldn’t build trust in one another.

“We don’t know each other at all,” Weaver said.

“No.”

Always friendly, Randy offered a little bit of information about himself. “I base everything I believe on the Bible,” he said.

Fadeley said he was raised Catholic but wasn’t practicing anymore, that he trusted his values and was loyal to people like Kumnick. The conversation turned to what they believed.

“Your kids go to public school?” Randy asked.

“You bet.”

“The Bible says don’t take your hate out on your kids, but raise them up,” Weaver said. “So when you send them to school, you are giving up your responsibility.”

“It’s out of my hands,” Fadeley said.

“I’m just telling you things I read and study.” Randy wasn’t trying to preach, but people should know why they believe what they do. “And when the time comes, it’s not my responsibility to share brotherly love and my food that I save for my kids with your kids because you didn’t … And it’s comin’ down … It’s goin’ down the tubes. And you’d better be prepared to survive. Pray that you be counted worthy.”

Kumnick came back to the table for the end of the sermon he’d heard several times from Randy and Vicki Weaver. The talk switched to organization, to forming a group, and again, Randy just sat there, quiet. Kumnick was worried still. These other guys that the biker knew, they didn’t know Weaver and Kumnick’s last names, did they? Because that could be unwise. No, Fadeley said.

They paid for their coffees and walked out to the Wagoneer again, Weaver in the driver’s seat, Fadeley next to him, and Kumnick in back. Randy drove across the parking lot to City Park, a rounded, three-block point of grass and beach that was the tourist center of town during the summer. But on such raw winter days, the park was empty and Randy maneuvered the Jeep to the end of the lot. Here, even though they were smack in the middle of downtown, no one could see them.

Fadeley was becoming nervous, and he suggested they go for a walk.

“You know what sounds like a winner to me?” Weaver said. “It’s nice and warm in here. I’m gonna stay right in here.”

“That’s fine,” Fadeley said, wondering how far away Byerly was.

“I ain’t got all that blubber on me like you guys do.” Weaver laughed.

Fadeley laughed uncomfortably. In the backseat, Kumnick pulled out his electronic scanner, a black gizmo that fit nicely in his thick palm.

Fadeley sat with his left arm draped over the Jeep’s bench seat and Kumnick swept the device over Fadeley’s arm, stopping just inches away from the wire that ran over his chest. With his right hand, hidden from Kumnick and Weaver, Fadeley fingered the .22-caliber pistol holstered on his ankle. His hand strained to wrap around the handle, but he realized he wouldn’t be able to get the Velcro strap off the gun in time. He was screwed.

Instead, Fadeley grabbed the device out of Kumnick’s hand and turned it over in his own hand before Kumnick could finish scanning him. “Is that a stud finder?” Fadeley held it in his hand and pretended to be impressed, although he was trying to figure out what to do next.

“Yeah,” Kumnick said. “A stud finder will do a lot more than find studs.” Fadeley wanted to see if it would work, so he ran it over Kumnick’s chest, and it produced a long beep. Kumnick smiled, reached inside his camouflage shirt, and pulled out dog tags. Written on the tags were the words “Liberty or Death.” They talked about other things the stud finder might react to. “Hmm. Glasses?” Kumnick teased.

“Yeah, frames?” Fadeley said.

“You think so?” Weaver asked. They’re trying to scare me, trying to intimidate me, Fadeley thought. Or worse. Fadeley slowly set the stud finder down on the bench seat between himself and Weaver.

When the informant turned back around, Kumnick had a pistol, a small .22-caliber gun, black, with a pearl handle. Fadeley saw that it was pointed at his head.

“I’ll be damned,” Fadeley said. Then he laughed nervously. “I’ll be damned,” he said again. And then, for Byerly’s benefit: “A little derringer.”

“Where’d you come from back East?” Randy asked.

“New Jersey. Eighteen miles from Philadelphia.”

The Wagoneer sat alone in the parking lot, basketball hoops on one side, the cool, dark waves of Lake Pend Oreille slapping the sand on the other. Inside the car, the questions were about Fadeley’s background, where he was from, what he believed. Kumnick kept the gun pointed at Fadeley’s head, but the informant played along, laughing and talking tough until Kumnick set the gun down in his lap, still cocked, and finally relaxed the hammer and slid the gun back into his coat pocket. Fadeley’s hand loosened on the holstered pistol strapped to his ankle.

The conversation turned back to Philadelphia and Fadeley’s childhood. “I grew up fighting black kids on a daily basis. I grew up fighting Puerto Ricans,” he said.

They’d finally hit on a subject Randy was interested in. “Yeah, I run into them in the service. Mexicans are bad, but Puerto Ricans make them look tame, I think.”

Kumnick said the problem was that white men didn’t stick together anymore. Once again, they were talking about loyalty. Kumnick and Fadeley talked more about this group and how to form it. Fadeley hoped they trusted him finally.

“We have a problem,” Kumnick said. “And if something isn’t changed where we show some new leadership for the patriot movement, it’s going to be dead.” He said that’s where he disagreed with the men “to the south,” Richard Butler and his aging neo-Nazis at the Aryan Nations compound.

“The next group coming up—and this is what I consider ourselves,” Kumnick continued, “we’re going to be new leaders in the new age.” Weaver was still quiet. Kumnick asked how committed Fadeley’s men were.

“Three of the four are very, very dedicated.”

“Okay. I’ll tell you what we do.”

And then Kumnick seemed to forget his trepidation, and he laid out his plan for the next white uprising. This was the whole reason Fadeley had come down here, to hear where the vanguard of the white terrorists wanted to strike next in their war against the Jew-controlled government. Among people like Kumnick and Weaver, Fadeley believed, there was the seething potential for danger. Members of the Order I and II had robbed armored cars, murdered people, and bombed buildings, and here was Kumnick saying they’d gotten off to a good start but had grown sloppy.

Finally, the scattershot Kumnick got around to his own contribution to the white revolution:

“Okay, I’ll tell you what we do,” he said. “It’s so simple, it will blow your mind. You get a quick-set epoxy…. Go out to all the banks and shoot epoxy into the locks. When they’re closed. Hey, come that following morning, there won’t be a whole bank in town that will be able to open for four or five hours until they have, you know, pulled all the locks and gone through them.”

“Super Glue,” Fadeley said simply.

“Yeah. Right.” But Kumnick wasn’t done. He had other plans. They could somehow mess up people’s television reception. And maybe cut some power lines. And then, his masterstroke. Boundary County is home to acres and acres of hops fields used by Anheuser Busch to make beer.

“Well,” Kumnick says. “All the hops burn…. Hey, when you go into the tavern and they ain’t got no beer, shit … I mean, they are totally gonna be upset.”

Kumnick said he knew what had gone wrong with The Order. “They got too fast, they didn’t think this thing through and, uh, they absorbed too many people too quick and boy, you’re gonna get a ringer every time.”

These were the crack soldiers, the storm troopers of a white revolution that Fadeley had driven north to root out.

FRATERNITY PRANKS weren’t the only plans Kumnick had for the revolution. He talked about burning a house that was being repossessed by the IRS and spoke fancifully about shooting the agents who came up to investigate it. But later he backed away from those plans, saying the weather wouldn’t be right to ambush IRS agents. Weaver was quiet and didn’t say much whenever the talk returned to forming a terrorist group. And Kumnick just came up with bizarre plans that sounded more and more like hazing than guerrilla civil war.

“You know what I would like to do,” said Kumnick. “I would like to catch some agents [and] let them go naked. I’m serious man. You know, like take everything away from them, including … their money and all that…. Hey, they’re gonna have a hard time explaining it, you know. You talk about embarrassment. They would wish they were dead.”

Kumnick was a big, jittery man who talked nonstop and occasionally took off for the woods when he got an inkling that the heat was about to come down on him. Some people believed he was a federal informant himself. That Tuesday, he talked like a sprinkler, spraying words all over the inside of the truck about what he could do. “I told the sheriff the other day, you know, I says, you know, just playing around, you know, you guys ever come to my property, you’ll probably step on, you’ll probably step on a nail, and I shit on that nail at least four times, you know, you’re gonna die anyway. You know?”

“Yep,” was all Fadeley could say.

Fadeley tried to bring Kumnick back to reality a couple times. “I realize we are starting out small, which is what we should do,” he said.

“Right,” Kumnick said.

Fadeley said their biggest problems were finances and communication.

Kumnick said he was sending for some military radios. “This is what makes the difference between a real fighting unit and those guys that are just a bunch of jokers, see?”

They sat in the Jeep and talked, and Fadeley was painfully aware of the gun in Kumnick’s coat pocket. He tried to appear as snitch-conscious as the other two men. Kumnick said they had to be careful of the guys who would talk “when they put the electrodes in their testicles.”

Again the talk turned tough, and Fadeley wondered if he should reach for his gun. He played along with Kumnick but wanted to make sure Byerly knew how to find him if this started to go badly. The conversation “doesn’t go any farther than this Wagoneer,” Fadeley said clearly into the transmitter. “It is a Wagoneer, isn’t it?”

Kumnick talked again about the need for security within the organization. He said that if someone decided to leave, “they’re leaving permanently. Because if they think they’re gonna go blow a whistle …”

“The old story,” Fadeley said.

“Right, right,” Kumnick said, recalling that The Order I even had to dispatch one of its own. “That’s where The Order did one thing right. They did get rid of somebody, and they ain’t found ‘em yet, you know?”

Weaver still didn’t contribute to the conversation about forming this group, and so it was just Kumnick and the guy they thought was Gus Magisono, talking in circles about security and snitches.

“What’s your last name?” Randy asked Fadeley.

“Magisono.”

“What is it?”

Fadeley repeated it and said, “Italian.”

“Right,” Randy said. “But you know there are black Greeks and white Greeks and there are black Italians and white Italians.” Randy said you couldn’t trust all white people either, but he wasn’t worried because Yahweh would show him who to trust.

“Right now,” Randy said to the stocky informer, “I don’t know about you.”

“If I start to find wires on the midget, he ain’t goin’ home,” Kumnick added.

They were bluffing, testing him to see if he called in help or ran away. Again, Fadeley had to try to play it cool, to act as tough as them. “That’s right,” Fadeley said.

“Your ass is dead if you want to know the truth,” Kumnick said.

“And the same with you,” Fadeley answered.

“I’d put the. 22 in your ear and pull the trigger,” Kumnick said.

Fadeley coolly called their bluff again. “And the same with you.”

The trust seemed to rise and fall as they chattered on about other separatists they knew and such. Finally, after more than an hour in the Jeep, Randy started it up and said they should get going. They drove back across the bridge to downtown Sandpoint and an antiques store where Kumnick’s wife was supposed to be waiting for them. The solidly built Kumnick—who might’ve passed for a brother of Kenneth Fadeley—walked inside to check, and for a minute it was just Weaver and Fadeley alone in the Jeep. Randy confided that he didn’t agree with Kumnick that organizing a group would help the cause.

“Frank is a good friend of mine, and I’d back him up to anything in a minute, but, like I told you, according to the Bible, things are go in’ down the tubes and … it don’t matter, and we can think, well, let’s do this or that. Frank … ain’t gonna change what’s comin’. You can get yourself in trouble trying to change it.” The Bible, Randy said, is clear that you should trust no man.

“Frank let me come along today, for whatever reason,” Randy said.

“Frank wanted you to come along today to get you an overall impression of me.”

“That’s probably true,” Randy agreed. “I know he wanted me to scope you out and see what I thought of you.”

“Sure.”

Frank’s wife had gone on to the pizza parlor already, and so they piled back into the Jeep and headed on again, a little more comfortable with each other.

Six blocks from the Edgewater, Papandrea’s Pizza was the consensus choice for best pizza in Sandpoint, and the end of the lunch rush of skiers and downtown workers was finishing up as the three men slipped inside the door. Frank’s wife, Mary Lou, was already there and Vicki showed up as soon as they’d ordered. She’d spent the day at the bookstore, trying to find a Smith’s Biblical Dictionary. “You know, one that’s not abridged.” Vicki liked to go to the bookstore when Randy went into town, which wasn’t often. “Yeah, see, I might be sitting here till three, so I sit and read.”

The men engaged in the bizarre small talk of white survivalists: the new. 223 rifle, the new Russian-made shells, this guy who was a snitch, that guy who lives in “Niggerville, Florida.”

Kumnick and Fadeley talked more about trust, and they agreed that the time in the Jeep had made each of them more comfortable. Now they got down to business. Fadeley said he was ready to start putting some money up if Kumnick could really provide weapons. But, again, there were no specifics from Kumnick, just a bunch of loose talk.

After a while, the informant turned to Randy, who had eaten quietly with his wife at the end of the table. “After hearing us talk about different things, without making a split-second judgment, do you feel comfortable?” Fadeley asked.

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” Fadeley said.

“You guys wanna get somethin’ goin’, that’s fine with me,” Randy shrugged. “I don’t. I haven’t heard nothin’…” He didn’t finish the thought.

Earlier, Kumnick had talked about torching some house near Randy’s place that the IRS was about to foreclose on in March, but when Fadeley brought it up again, Kumnick wasn’t interested anymore. He said the weather in March probably wouldn’t be good enough.

But Randy was interested in that subject, and he agreed with the others that IRS agents in Boundary County could spark a violent confrontation.

Some people were especially hard-core, Randy said. “They go in there and they can kill IRS. Of course, they are damned fools that might do it. They have no brains whatsoever.”

They talked more about the guy who lived in the place near Randy’s and his trouble with the government. “I’ll be honest with you,” Randy said. “If they try to throw him out, I hope he kills half of them.”

“Yeah,” Fadeley said.

But things could get quickly out of hand, Randy said.

“When people stop sayin’, ‘No more,’ hey, it doesn’t all of a sudden happen,” Randy said. “You can’t just bring four, three or four agents. You have to bring the whole army.”

FADELEY WANTED TO GET GOING, and he made one more attempt to get Kumnick on the record with something more than vague, unlikely plots and racist talk. At that point, he didn’t figure Randy Weaver was of much interest to his ATF contacts.

“What’s our next step?” he asked.

“Surprise resistance” Kumnick fired back.

“Okay.” But still, the talk was all philosophy, with Kumnick and his wife doing all the talking. Even when Randy tried to talk, Kumnick cut him off. The talk of jail worried all of them, but Kumnick said he was cool, that he’d go away if he had to.

“I go back to Scripture,” Randy said, “where it says in there: ‘Some will be destined, and some will be destined to die. For this is the patience of the saints.’” At the end of the table, his pretty wife agreed with him.

Again, the conversation came around to this group they should form, and again, it was Kumnick and Fadeley doing the talking, comparing themselves to the Vietcong, the Afghan rebels, and the Contras.

“We’re only a little bit of a ring,” Kumnick said. “Put us all together, we’ll be a wave.”

They drove back to Connies, and Fadeley said he’d walk to his car from there, since it was a small town and it might not be good for them to be seen together. The others agreed. Fadeley tried once more to get some specifics out of Kumnick.

“Why don’t you do this,” he said. “Why don’t you send me down a little list … of maybe five … things you’d like to see the group accomplish by March, February, March, by say, the first of April.”

“Right.”

“Or three things,” Fadeley said.

Kumnick said “the glue thing” would be one of them. And then, maybe burning down the house the IRS wanted to repossess.

“Take care,” Fadeley said.

“I will.”

Fadeley watched them pile back into the Wagoneer.

“I got a long walk ahead of me,” Fadeley said.

The Kumnicks and Weavers were still sitting there, and he spoke into the transmitter. “They’re watching me, so stay away. They are watching me, so stay away!” Finally, the Jeep pulled away, and Fadeley began walking, his boots clicking on the sidewalk. He looked around for the gold Dodge that Byerly would be driving. He was beginning to realize how close he’d come to drawing when Kumnick pulled the gun on him. For some reason, Kumnick had only run the stud finder across Fadeley’s left arm. Man, that was close.

Fadeley was beat. He’d spent the afternoon in a Jeep with these nuts, a gun against his head. As far as he was concerned, no matter how loopy their plans sounded, these guys were dangerous, especially Kumnick. Weaver was a weird, racist zealot, but Kumnick was clearly the one who needed his attention. As he turned another corner, Fadeley allowed himself to relax. “Don’t see ‘em anymore.” He sighed. “Lord.”