The Righteous Men. Sam Bourne

of Montana. There were a few framed photographs, including one of his host holding the head of a dead stag. On the metal shelves, a box of leaflets. Will peered inside: ‘The New World Order: Operation Takeover.’

      ‘Help yourself, take a copy.’ Will whisked around to find Bob Hill right behind him. Ex-marine, Vietnam; of course he would know how to creep up on a mere civilian like Will. ‘Wrote it myself. With the help of the late Mr Baxter.’

      ‘So he was … deeply involved?’

      ‘Like I told you on the phone, a fine patriot. Ready to do whatever it took to secure the liberty of this nation – even if his nation was too duped, its brains too addled by the propaganda of the Hollywood élite, to realize its liberty was under threat.’

      ‘Whatever it took?’

      ‘By whatever means necessary, Mr Monroe. You know who said that, don't you? Or was that before your time?’

      ‘It was before my time, but I do know. That was the slogan of the Black Panthers.’

      ‘Very good. And if that was good enough for them in their struggle against “white power” then it's good enough for us in our struggle to keep America free.’

      ‘You mean violence? Force?’

      ‘Mr Monroe, let's not get ahead of ourselves. You can ask me all the questions you like, I got plenty of time. But first, I have something to show you. See if this interests the great East Coast intellectuals of The New York Times.’

      By now Hill was seated, behind a battered old metal desk, one that would not have looked out of place in the office section of an auto-repair shop. He handed Will, who was still standing, two sheets of paper, stapled together.

      It took a few seconds for Will to work out what he was looking at. The notes on the autopsy performed on the body of Pat Baxter.

      ‘Missoula faxed it over this morning.’ Missoula, the nearest big town.

      ‘What does it say?’

      ‘Oh, don't let me spoil it for you. I think you should read it for yourself.’

      Will felt a twinge of panic: this was the first autopsy report he had ever seen. It was almost impossible to decipher. Each heading was written in baffling medicalese; the handwriting beneath was just as inscrutable. Will found himself squinting through it.

      Finally, a sentence he understood. ‘Severe internal haemorrhaging consistent with a gunshot wound; contusions of the skin and viscera. General remarks: needle mark on right thigh, suggestive of recent anaesthesia.’

      ‘He was shot,’ Will began, uncertain. ‘And he seems to have been anaesthetized before he was shot. Which does seem very odd, I grant you.’

      ‘Ah, but there's an explanation. Read on, Mr Monroe.’

      Will's eyes scoured the document, looking for clues. Scribbled handwriting, sent through a fax, did not make it easy.

      ‘Second page,’ Hill offered. ‘General remarks.’

      ‘Damage to internal organs: liver, heart and kidney (single) severe. Other viscera, fragmented.’

      ‘What leaps out at you, Mr Monroe? I mean what word there friggin' jumps out and grabs you by the throat?’

      Will wanted to say ‘viscera’, simply because the word was so undeniably powerful. But he knew that was not the answer Hill was looking for.

      ‘Single.’

      ‘My my, you Oxford boys are as bright as they say you are.’ Hill had not been kidding about his research. ‘That's right. Single. What do you think's going on here, Mr Monroe? What strange set of facts do we have here which Montana's finest have so far chosen to overlook? Well, I'll tell you.’

      Will was relieved; the guessing game was making him sweat.

      ‘My friend, Pat Baxter, was anaesthetized before he was killed. And his body is found minus one kidney. Put two and two together and what do we get?’

      Will muttered almost to himself, ‘Whoever did this removed his kidney.’

      ‘Not only that, but that's why they killed him. They wanted it to look like a robbery, a “break-in gone badly wrong” they're saying on the TV. But that's all a smokescreen. The only thing they wanted to steal was Pat Baxter's kidney.’

      ‘Why on earth would they want to do that?’

      ‘Oh, Mr Monroe. Don't make me do all the work here. Open your eyes! This is a federal government that has been doing experimentation with bio-chips!’ He could see that Will was not following. ‘Bar codes, implanted under the skin! So that they can monitor our movements. There's good evidence they're doing this with new-born babies now, right there in the maternity ward. An electronic tagging system, enabling the government to follow us from cradle to grave – quite literally.’

      ‘But why would they want Pat Baxter's kidney?’

      ‘The federal government moves in mysterious ways, Mr Monroe, its wonders to perform. Maybe they wanted to plant something inside Pat's body and the plan went wrong. Maybe the anaesthetic wore off and he began resisting. Or perhaps they put something inside his body years ago. And now they needed to get it back. Who knows? Maybe the feds just wanted to examine the DNA of a dissident, see if they could discover the gene that makes a real freedom-loving American and work to eradicate it.’

      ‘It does seem a little far-fetched.’

      ‘I grant you that. But we're talking about a military-industrial complex that has spent millions of dollars on mind-control techniques. You know, they had a secret Pentagon project to see if men could kill goats, simply by staring at 'em? I am not making this up. So it may be far-fetched. But I have come to learn that far-fetched and untrue are two very different things.’

      Eventually Will steered Hill towards saner shores, seeking the biographical details of Baxter's life that he knew he would need. He got some, including a back story about the dead man's father: turned out Baxter Sr was a Second World War veteran who had lost both his hands. Unable to work, he had grown desperate; he could barely feed his family on his GI pension. Hill reckoned Baxter was a son who grew up resenting a government that could send a young man to kill and die for his country and then abandon him when he came home. When history repeated itself with Baxter's own generation in Vietnam, the bitterness was complete.

      That would do nicely, serving as the easy-to-digest, psychological key needed for all good stories, in newspapers no less than at the movies. The piece was beginning to take shape.

      He asked Hill to take him to Baxter's cabin. They used Will's car, its engine revving as it climbed further up the rutted path. Soon, Will could see colour – the yellow tape of a police cordon. ‘This is as far as we can go. It's a crime scene.’ Will reached into his pocket. As if reading his mind, Hill added, ‘Even your fancy New York press card won't get you in here. It's sealed.’

      Will got out anyway, just to get a feel. It looked to him like a shed: a bare log cabin, the kind a well-off family might use to store firewood. The dimensions made it hard to believe a man had made this his home.

      Will asked Hill to describe the interior as best he could. ‘That's easy,’ his guide said. ‘Almost nothing in there.’ A narrow, metal-frame bed; a chair; a stove; a shortwave radio.

      ‘Sounds like a cell.’

      ‘Think military accommodation; that'll get you closer to it. Pat Baxter lived like a soldier.’

      ‘Spartan, you mean?’

      ‘Yes, sir.’

      Will asked who else he should talk to; any friends, any family. ‘The Militia of Montana was his only family,’ Hill shot back, a little too fast Will thought. ‘And even we hardly knew him. First time I ever saw that cabin was when the police had me round there. Wanted me to identify which clothes were his and which might have been left behind by the killers.’

      ‘Killers,