Deception at the Diamond D Ranch

  A Coffeetown Press book published by Epicenter Press

  Epicenter Press

  6524 NE 181st St.

  Suite 2

  Kenmore, WA 98028

  For more information go to:

  www.Camelpress.com

  www.Coffeetownpress.com

  www.Epicenterpress.com

  www.grstahl.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Places, historic events and cultural settings are based on facts. Any resemblance to people living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Scott Book

  Design by Melissa Vail Coffman

  Deception at the Diamond D Ranch

  Copyright © 2022 by G.R. Stahl

  ISBN: 978-1-94207-850-0 (Trade Paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-94207-851-7 (eBook)

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Wendy,

  I’ll go to the Grand Canyon with you anytime.

  Contents

  — PART I —

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  — PART II —

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  — PART III —

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  — PART IV ­—

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Acknowledgments

  — PART I —

  “There are beginnings and endings in the mountains, where folds layer one upon another, concealing mysteries tucked inside. Each crease is a beginning, and each crease is an end. They’re dawns and dusks, and they’re folds within us as much as without, places where questions and answers mingle as one.”

  —Miles Fourney’s journal

  One

  Boise, Idaho

  Tuesday, July 28, 2015

  Cade Rigens wasn’t sure when he lost his faith. Now he wore a bullet-proof vest and crouched behind a dumpster where it smelled like urine.

  The man next to him was draped in a black tactical uniform with knee pads, vest, harness and helmet. A side arm was strapped to his leg. The man raised into a crouch and looked up and down the alley, then talked into a hand-held radio.

  “Get into position and go on my mark.”

  Cade thought back through his decades of circuitous self-discovery. Sometimes he wondered if he’d ever had faith at all. Then again, he wasn’t even sure he knew how to define the term. Science was a kind of faith, after all, and he believed in that. He believed in photosynthesis, plate tectonics and erosion, all complicated concepts that explained near-invisible processes. Wasn’t it the same with God, he thought.

  The police officer patted Cade on the shoulder. “Just stay out of the way.”

  Cade nodded, and the man waved to a team of five more officers across the alley. They crouched together, Cade the only one not dressed in a police uniform, instead wearing jeans and a light-blue button-up beneath his vest.

  “There are three militants,” the man explained. “The other team will enter from the front and go to the ground floor. We’ll go in the back and head for the fronton in the basement. We do not know their positions or intent.”

  He lifted the radio to his lips.

  “On my mark. Three, two, one . . .”

  When he said go, there was a flurry of shuffling boots as the team barged through the alley door. Their weapons drawn, they descended a short flight of steps to a high-ceilinged room with hardwood floors, red-painted lines on the walls and large glass panes. It was a sporting surface that looked similar to a racquetball court, but the room was full of chairs lined in a grid and facing a stage and podium on one end. Behind the podium, high on the wall, were two flags: one American, the other the red background and crisscrossed green and white stripes of the Basque flag. A banner near the floor read, “2015 Jaialdi Pilota Invitational, Boise, Idaho.”

  “Clear!” said one of the officers, loud enough to hear but soft enough not to carry throughout the building. The others followed suit.

  The lead officer motioned for two of his teammates to move toward a doorway in the back of the room. “We’ve got to clear the whole level,” he said.

  Cade stood back as the officers moved in unison to cover each other and shuffle through the doorway. Cade followed, but the final officer held up his hand, the motion for the entire team to still. Cade heard a door click somewhere within the building’s labyrinth of halls and offices. The team went through a door labeled GIZONEZKOEN KOMUNA. Cade didn’t know how to read or speak the Basque language, but he knew it was the men’s locker room. He followed and found the officers crouched behind a tile knee-wall, making motions to one another in an apparent effort to develop a plan without producing sounds. Cade lifted his head to peer further into the room. On the other side near a line of white porcelain vanity sinks was a woman in blue jeans, long-sleeve shirt and sunglasses crouched and fiddling with wires on a small box—exactly as he’d asked her to do. He felt his pulse quicken. The only way they could succeed was if everyone walked out alive. He reached for the lead officer’s shoulder, but the man had already stood, his sidearm drawn and aimed at the woman.

  “Put your hands behind your back and lay flat on the floor. Do not test us!”

  The woman paused, her head cocked their direction, then slid her arms behind her back as instructed. For a moment it seemed like the confrontation would be over before it began. Then, instead of laying down, she sprang with the dexterity and muscle memory of a sprinter. She disappeared at the end of the room through another door.

  The lead officer cursed, and all four of the men in uniform gave pursuit. Cade began to follow, but before he could get to the closing door heard the sharp cracks of firing weapons.

  He pushed the door open and passed into a long hallway with a concrete floor and cinderblock walls, an enclosed space illuminated by the harsh flicker of emergency lighting
.

  “Clear the building. Go, go.” The officers ran the length of the hallway and disappeared around a corner, leaving a prone body on the concrete. Cade heard their footsteps ebb further into the building. He was alone, his eyes cinched with frustration. She’d done exactly as he’d asked. The problem was, they weren’t supposed to shoot her. Above all, they were supposed to avoid casualties. He went to the prone figure.

  “You can get up,” he said.

  A moment passed, and he heard her breathe deep before rolling over to reveal red and yellow blotches on her chest, stains left by the police team’s paintball guns.

  “That shit hurts,” she sighed.

  “I only want to guess about that.”

  “You can take my word for it. It hurts.”

  “Thanks for playing the role,” he said. “You did a good job.”

  “I’d say you’re welcome, but I wouldn’t mean it.”

  Cade motioned for her to join him, and they went to the ground level where two more bodies were sprawled across the floor.

  “That’s it, exercise off!” Cade said, his voice edgy and elevated. “You’re the cops here, so don’t let me tell you how to do your jobs, but there are to be no casualties. Is that clear? No casualties!”

  The two men who’d been laying on the ground rolled over. Like the woman from the lower level, they were covered in colorful stains from the police team’s training weapons.

  Cade went to the officer in charge, the man who’d asked him to stay out of the way in the alley. “We need a debrief,” he said. “Right now. Everyone in the basement in fifteen minutes.”

  The fronton smelled antiseptic like a school gymnasium, but it wasn’t an educational institution. It was a place where three generations of Basque Americans played a game dating to the sixteenth century. They’d brought the game, pelota, with them when they immigrated to the American West around the turn of the twentieth century, and at one time the fronton on which they now gathered was thought to be the largest indoor sporting surface in the Pacific Northwest. It was also a large open area suitable for a variety of gatherings.

  Cade went to the front of the room and cleared his throat. The din from the gathered police ebbed a little, and he cleared his throat again. The room fell silent.

  “Thanks for the exercise today,” he said. “You did a good job, but I think we’re still mismanaging the threat. It’s been a year since the last visible public land standoff, and things are escalating across the West. These political actors may have faded from public view, but the movement that spawned them is boiling. Government and law enforcement officials need to understand what motivates these people because we haven’t seen the last of seemingly average folks demonstrating antigovernment rage with violence. If something goes wrong here this week, we don’t want to reproduce the events of Waco or Ruby Ridge. I’m afraid that’s where things were leading this afternoon.”

  Cade scanned the room to confirm he had their attention.

  “I’m not a police officer, just a bureaucrat whose job it is to put together a public hearing this Saturday as safely and effectively as possible. But in case any of you have forgotten, this fringe movement has been festering for three decades and has experienced recent growth. It was born out of the Sagebrush Rebellion and county supremacy movements of the ‘80s. Its sympathizers embrace theories about a nefarious New World Order, a socialist, gun-grabbing federal government and the evils of law enforcement. In the last couple years, the number of antigovernment Patriot groups swelled from about a hundred and fifty to more than a thousand. They’ve been emboldened for a bunch of reasons, but make no mistake: when the Bureau of Land Management backed off at gunpoint last year, these men and women experienced an injection of self-righteousness. I know you’ll do what needs to be done, but if you injure or kill anyone, you’ll make a Martyr of them. I’ll stand aside in a minute and let the real police take it from here. First, though, are there any questions?”

  An officer seated near the middle of the room raised his hand. Cade pointed and nodded.

  “We’re planning a security detail for a government public hearing. Why would a patriot attack a federal proceeding?”

  Cade took a breath, realizing how far they were from a solid understanding of what could happen in a worst-case scenario.

  “Look, you can get online and read about it in your spare time, but these guys view themselves in some sort of Hamiltonian light—liberating the people from an oppressive homeland—or, in this case, an oppressive Washington, D.C. Let me be clear: these are highly-militarized groups with ideological motivations that often result in illegal actions. This kind of domestic extremism is like a religious war for some of these people, and it threatens to tear the fabric of our nation apart. There’s solid intelligence that groups sympathetic to their cause may take action leading up to or during our public hearing this Saturday. We need to be ready. Any more questions?”

  Nobody moved.

  “Thanks for your attention. I’ll turn it over to your commander, who’ll run through more scenarios and plan for tomorrow’s exercises.”

  Cade stepped aside, and the lead officer took his place. Cade had requested that local police handle the security, but now he wondered if that was a mistake. Federal law enforcement, as bad as they’d been at managing the rural uprising in the West, had more experience dealing with the nuanced threat. The commander at the podium began his lecture by talking about the dangers of close-quarter combat and snap shooting.

  Cade made his way to the side of the room where Amaia Ibarra, the paintball-stained cop he’d talked with in the hallway, leaned on one foot, the other tucked under her butt and pressed to the wall.

  “You think the tension about this park is that serious?” Ibarra asked. “You don’t think you’re overblowing things just a bit?”

  “I don’t know,” Cade replied. “Federal officials still don’t know what to do about these guys. Too much of a heavy hand risks tragedy, but allowing them to flout the law at gunpoint isn’t the answer, either.”

  “Training police is only part of it.”

  Cade lifted a brow.

  “They’ve been emboldened by politicians and pundits trolling for votes and ratings. Some of the politicians treat these guys like heroes. That’s only gonna bring out more people like them. A big part of the solution—maybe most of it—is political. Maybe there’s no need for anybody to be shot with paintballs.”

  It was a clear jab, and Cade felt it. Before he could open his mouth to argue or apologize, she turned and went up the stairs.

  Cade sighed, folded his arms across his chest and listened. The police commander introduced the next scenario they’d use to prepare, this time focusing on the public hearing’s outdoor venue. The sporting surface where they were now gathered would only be used in case of bad weather.

  “We’ll get together for the next exercise tomorrow morning,” he concluded. “Before we adjourn, though, I want to take a moment to bow our heads in prayer.”

  He looked at Cade. “Would you do the honors?”

  There were no mirrors in the room, but Cade was sure his disgust showed plain. Prayer wouldn’t help these wet-behind-the-ears local police. It wouldn’t make them better shots, give them better judgement or endow them with an understanding of the tensions between the new and old West. What they needed was determination and perseverance, not trumped-up hope in some on-again, off-again divine power.

  “Do what you need to make yourselves comfortable,” Cade said and turned into the stairway to go.

  Two

  American and Basque flags drooped from streetlight poles that lined a concrete sidewalk embossed with symbols, words and poems from a different continent. The poles were interspersed with honey locust trees that would turn gold in another month, transforming Boise’s Basque Block into a kaleidoscope of color and culture. The street’s buildings were one
and two stories tall, at least half of them made of brick, and they housed a variety of epicurean eateries with culturally-rich fare.

  Cade walked the shady side of the street, watching the embossed symbols and poems pass beneath his shoes. A song portrayed in the old Basque language, Euskara, caught his eye. The artistic rendering included a musical staff and notes, and below it was an English translation:

  “The tree of Guernica is blessed. It is much-loved among Basque people. Blossom and spread your fruit to the world. We honor you, sacred tree.”

  Not far away, in front of a well-preserved brick house, was a medium-sized oak, a descendant from a tree planted in the Basque town of Guernica in the fourteenth century. The tree of old was a sacred place where Basques from throughout Northern Spain gathered for town meetings. Each time it died, it was replaced with one of its own descendants. One of those had survived the 1937 bombing that claimed as many as thirteen hundred civilians during the Spanish Civil War, an event famously portrayed in one of Pablo Picasso’s most well-known works. Now here it was, a branch on that lineage firmly rooted in the middle of an isolated city in the Western United States. Like the Guernica Tree of old, Boise’s oak was a focal point for community events and gatherings. If the weather cooperated, it’s where they’d hold the public hearing about the new national park in a few days, an event that had been carefully choreographed to occur in the midst of an international Basque celebration that was held only twice a decade.

  Cade heard a hollow thump and followed the noise to the white picket fence that divided the street from the historic property. He discovered Officer Ibarra beneath the Guernica tree’s deep shade. Her back toward him, she was erect and tense. With a flutter of her feet, she raised her right arm in a backward sweep, allowed it to drop and release a small wooden ball. Cade heard the familiar thump again when the ball knocked into a wooden backstop at the end of the dirt court.

  She didn’t acknowledge Cade as he entered the yard and stood in the shade alongside her. She grabbed another ball, took a running start and swung her arm again. The ball rolled fast, knocking one wooden pin into another.

  “I didn’t understand much about my heritage when I was a girl,” Ibarra began without looking, but confirming she’d seen Cade arrive. “My dad built a bola jokoa court like this in the back yard of our house across town. We used to play when he got home from work. It was just part of growing up. It’s weird now, watching this process to designate a national park. Being Basque is just who I am. It never occurred to me to seek recognition for it, but I really want the park to succeed, to help my ancestors get some credit for their contributions across the West. I don’t understand why anybody would be against that.”