“Oh.” Canfield brightened. “I see what you mean. It wasn’t that specific. It was—just a minute. Let me get my notes.” He ran around to the side of one of the big double beds and came up with his briefcase. “I spend a lot of time going over this stuff these days. I’m going crazy, sitting in this room, waiting for something to happen. But that’s what they want me to do, you know, the Bureau. They’ve sent up a couple of other guys to look into things. Here it is.” He drew out a sheet of paper and brought it back across the room to Gregor. “It’s only a copy, but you get the picture.”
Gregor got the picture. The paper was a copy of a letter. At first glance, it looked like a business letter. The format was perfect—headings and addresses in the right places, paragraphs carefully blocked out with a space between each one, closing and signature centered. To the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it started, and then, This is to inform you of the activities of an organization called America on Alert, centered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. According to its own literature, the purpose of this organization is to “save America from being oppressed under the One World Government of a New World Order.”According to its president, Michael Harridan, “the day will soon come when good Americans must arm themselves and take to the hills and the side streets to save our nation by force of arms.” I have reason to believe that that day is now here, and America on Alert is getting ready to commit a significant act of violence.
“Very nice,” Gregor said. “Nothing at all to indicate that whoever wrote it is a nutcase. It could have come from a bank.”
“It’s a mistake to think these guys are all illiterate yahoos,” Canfield said. “I thought that too, before I got involved in this. You’d be amazed at how professional some of their material can sound. That’s what makes what they do so insidious. If they wrote in bad grammar and exclamation points, nobody would listen to them.”
“Was any attempt made to trace this letter?” Gregor asked.
Canfield nodded. “We looked into it, yeah. It was mailed in Philadelphia. We got one of those profiles done on the sender, if you want to see that.”
“No.” Gregor had no use for the psychological analysis of mail—“the writer is a middle-aged male with a deep neurotic attachment to his mother”—and it wouldn’t tell him anything he wanted to know at the moment even if it were accurate. He gave the copy of the letter back to Canfield. “I want to get this straight. The Bureau got the letter. The Bureau assigned you and Steve Bridge to investigate it—”
“Well, there were about four of us at the time, back in Washington. They assigned Steve and I to come out here and do something about it.”
“Okay, what made them decide to send the two of you out here? And to send Bridge undercover?”
“We checked it out,” Canfield said. “We looked into the organization, sort of sideways. We went to their Web site. That kind of thing.”
“And?”
“And it was true. This Michael Harridan really was saying that the time was near when the black helicopters would be coming and we’d be taken over by the UN and all the rest of it. But you’ve got to watch it for a while to see what’s happening. They just don’t leap out at you and start acting like complete lunatics.”
“No, I’m sure they don’t. So you checked out their material, and that—”
“No, not that alone,” Canfield said. “It was something else. We checked out Michael Harridan.”
“And?”
“And it’s even more than I told you before. There is no Michael Harridan. Not anywhere in the country. At least, not anywhere that would fit somebody involved in America on Alert. There’s a Catholic priest in Oregon, but he’s been in Rome for the past two years. There’s an eighty-five-year-old guy in a home for people with Alzheimer’s in Texas. That’s about it. You’d think it was a common enough name. It isn’t. And there’s no Michael Harridan in Philadelphia or on the Main Line. At all.”
“So he’s using an alias,” Gregor said. “Is that all that surprising? These groups are the epitome of paranoid. Half the people in them must use assumed names.”
“No, that’s where you’re wrong,” Canfield said. “You see, the thing is, the whole movement is really hyped on trust. They’re very suspicious people. They’re convinced that everybody is lying to them. They put a lot of emphasis on the people they deal with being open and aboveboard and trustworthy.”