The rain was light but steady, a soaking drizzle, pools forming in shallow pockets of the black macadam. He pulled his jacket up over his head as he ran toward the store entrance, weaving among the rows of parked cars. Like O.J. going through Dulles, he thought.
The image was still in his head when his foot hit something slick on the glistening pavement and he went sprawling.
Stearns skidded against the base of a light standard. He lay momentarily stunned by the hard fall. He pulled himself shakily to his knees. One hand had lost some skin and, worse, he had torn a hole in the elbow of one of his two good suits.
The young agent swore softly. Climbing to his feet, he waved off a couple with an umbrella and another helpful shopper, thanking them. Then he limped on into the store, wondering sourly about the economy of ruining a good suit while trying to save two dollars on a prescription.
When Stearns emerged from the store and headed around the corner toward the back part of the parking area, it was still raining. He walked. What the hell, a little rain couldn’t do any more damage to this suit. He was struck by the fact that this portion of the parking lot was not as brilliantly illuminated as at the front of the store.
At first he thought that he had mistaken the aisle where he had parked. But as he looked around he saw the light post where he had taken a tumble.
With his eyes he tracked back across the lot. In the half hour he had been inside, many of the cars had left. It was now quarter to nine, almost closing time.
He spotted a sign on a post at the far end of the next aisle: M2. Yes, that was it. He remembered seeing the sign when he turned past it. He had parked in that aisle.
For a long minute Harrison Stearns stood in shock, staring through the soft curtain of rain. His heart seemed to have landed down around the pit of his stomach. Impulsively he jammed his hand into his right pants pocket. The search became frantic through his other pockets, his jacket.
He stopped suddenly. The car keys weren’t there. He must have lost them when he fell.
And the FBI car was gone.
* * * *
The young driver of the blue Ford sedan headed southwest on 66 and swung west onto Highway 50. Ironically, his route took him within two miles of Dulles International Airport. Traffic thinned out as he drove on through Middleburg. He kept watching the rearview mirror, his thin body tensed against the sight of flashing red lights.
He watched his speed. No point in getting stopped for speeding now. The theft of the car would have been reported, the license plate numbers fed into the old computers. He would have to find a place where he could switch plates.
He grinned exultantly. The guy outside Fedco had practically handed him the car keys. Scooping them up, he had offered the victim a helping hand as he tried to rise. The good Samaritan, that was him.
At the small town of Paris, near Ashby Gap on the Appalachian Trail, he stopped for gas at a self-serve station. While the gas was pumping on automatic, he walked around the car and opened the trunk with the key. The interior of the car was clean but the trunk might hold something interesting.
There were four compact cardboard boxes, each about the size of a file drawer, tightly sealed with plastic tape. With a pocketknife he ripped open one of the boxes. He pawed through the contents—tightly packed file folders stacked upright—and pulled a file out at random. As the cover fell open his gaze riveted on a letterhead: Federal Bureau of Investigation. And in one corner a bold black stamped word: CLASSIFIED.
He jammed the folder back into the box, his heart thudding. He slammed the trunk lid shut and looked around. There was no one close enough to see into the trunk. Christ, what had he done? Stolen an FBI car?
He stopped the pump hastily. He was going to have to dump this car. He wasn’t going to give them any more of his gasoline.
He doubled back from the station, remembering that he had passed the intersection of Highway 17. He had to get off the main road fast.
At an empty roadside stop he pulled off once more, curiosity tugging at him. He made sure no cars were approaching before he opened the trunk again. This time he withdrew a fistful of the file folders. They were of varying thickness, but each contained report sheets and forms, each one numbered. He scanned some of the pages carelessly. “–the perpetrator then proceeded to his vehicle and was observed…” Cop jargon. Routine stuff—Dullsville.
He started to return the sheaf of folders to the opened carton when something caught his eye: the corner of another folder lying flat on the bottom of the box, hidden beneath the upright files. He reached down and pulled it out, wondering what one file was doing out of place. It was only chance that he had seen it at all.
He pushed the other files back into the carton and examined the one which had been on the bottom. More of the same—memos, interviews…
A gust of wind whipped the file folder open. Papers spilled out. He scrambled after them, cursing. The only thing that kept them all from blowing away was the rain. Quickly saturated, the papers stuck to wet gravel, mud, a patch of macadam. He gathered them up, peering around anxiously. He didn’t want to leave anything behind.
He bunched the wet papers together and jammed them into the pockets of his nylon jacket. After a moment’s hesitation he thrust the empty folder back into the carton, burying it among the other files.
He got back in the car, shivering from the dampness and from excitement. He started down the long, twisting grade on Highway 17, heading southeast.
He drove without headlights, flicking them on once when a car approached, then turning them off again. Invisible in the darkness, he felt alone on the road. But no longer safe.
* * * *
Ben Thomason, driving an eighteen-wheeler bound for Richmond, swung the big rig ponderously off Highway 50. He could take 17 all the way through to Fredericksburg and intersect with 95 going straight south. That way he would bypass the Washington area and its heavy traffic.
Starting down the long grade a few minutes past ten in the evening, he seemed to have everything under control. The pavement shimmered black in his headlights like a pool of oil, but the light rain had almost stopped. His speed was calculated precisely so that his momentum would carry him well up the next rise before he would have to downshift. Near the bottom of the grade he saw the black carcass of a retread that had peeled off the tire of some luckless trucker ahead of him. For a moment, speared in his headlights, it looked like a body. He did not feel the bump when he ran over it.
He didn’t see the Ford sedan that was running without lights until he had it right between the horns.
Ben Thomason was a good driver, and he did the only thing he could. He put the big rig into a deliberate skid.
At first the trailer swung out slowly. It gained speed and jackknifed inward toward the cab. The whole rig drifted on the slick road surface. Thomason swung the steering wheel against the skid and it seemed for a moment as if the truck might avert disaster. But the rear trailer wheels had skirted too close to the shoulder, soft from days of intermittent rain. When the tires plowed into the wet ground the loaded trailer tipped over in ponderous slow motion.
The man in the Ford was lucky. The right front wheel of the big truck nudged the car, flipping it off the road. The driver fought the wheel as the car slewed across the wet shoulder. It crashed through a rusty barbed-wire fence guarding an empty meadow, careened down the side of an embankment and slammed to a stop, nose down, front wheels buried to the hubcaps in the sandy bottom of a shallow ditch.
Miraculously, the truck’s cab was still almost upright. Inside the cab, still gripping the wheel as if he were holding the tractor up by sheer strength, Ben Thomason swore steadily. His adrenaline was flowing and there was an oily sheen of sweat on his brow. That had been close—too damned close.
He flipped his CB switch and put in a breaker call to the nearest listening state police. The call was answered within ten seconds. Smokey was less than five miles away.
As Thomason climbed down from h
is cab, he discovered for the first time that he had banged his left shoulder and arm against the door when he was bounced around in the cab. He flexed his fingers gingerly. Nothing broken. He looked around for the Ford. Its rear wheels and trunk stuck up out of a creek bed where the car had ditched. The trunk lid had popped open on impact and a white light glowed.
Thomason was registering the fact of light where there had been none before when a curious motorist pulled onto the shoulder a short distance above him. The newcomer’s headlights slanted across the field below, catching the ditched Ford and the open meadow beyond it.
That was how, Thomason explained a few minutes later to the Virginia state trooper, he happened to see the driver of the Ford loping through the tall grass toward the dark woods beyond the field.
* * * *
Paul Macimer, Special-Agent-in-Charge of the Washington Field Office, had been about to leave at the end of a fairly typical fourteen-hour day when the call came from Special Agent Stearns to report that an FBI vehicle en route between Dulles International and FBI Headquarters had been stolen. The agent on the night duty desk switched Steams over to his boss, feeling a twinge of sympathy as he did so. The RA office at the airport came within the jurisdiction of the Washington Field Office.
Macimer blistered the young agent’s ears before he caught himself. Stearns already sounded demoralized. Heaping on more coals wouldn’t help. “All right, see if you can find any witnesses,” he said finally. “I’ll send somebody out to drive you home.” He paused and added, “Try not to get lost. And report to me in this office on Monday morning.”
Stearns was going to have a lousy weekend, he thought, but he had earned it. The night he had an FBI car stolen from him would be one he would never forget.
At nine-thirty, when there had been no further report on the stolen vehicle, Macimer at last shrugged into his raincoat, said good night to the night duty agent and left the office. “If anything comes through on that car, I want to know it,” he said at the door. “No matter what time it is.”
He was almost home, which was in a Washington suburban development southwest of the city called the Meadows, when the call came through on his car radio. The stolen car had been found. A Virginia trooper named Edward Riggins was at the scene, just off Highway 17 north of U.S. 66. Macimer made a quick calculation. He had just crossed the Beltline himself. Route 17 was about forty miles west. “Patch me through to him,” Macimer said.
A moment later he was talking to Riggins. The state trooper had answered an accident emergency call at 10:09 P.M. The driver of a Ford sedan involved in the accident, Maryland license number CAE-281, had fled the scene of the accident under suspicious circumstances. Acting upon this suspicious behavior, Riggins said with exaggerated formality, he had put through an inquiry to the NCIC-the FBI’s National Crime Information Center. At that time he had learned that the car was out of the FBI’s vehicle pool and had been reported stolen earlier that evening.
“Anything else I should know?”
“Yes, sir,” Riggins replied. “There are some cardboard file boxes in the trunk of the car. One of them has been broken open. It’s full of documents.” He paused significantly. “FBI documents, sir.”
“Sit on them,” Macimer said. “Don’t let anyone near that car. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
* * * *
Forty-five minutes later, from the highway overlooking the patch of meadow which had been cordoned off around the stolen vehicle, Macimer stared down at the car. Crazy kind of accident, he thought.
He read the statements given to Riggins by the truck driver and the motorist who had stopped. He questioned Thomason closely. “You’re sure the car was driving without lights when you ran it down?”
“I didn’t see any lights,” Thomason insisted, aggrieved. “I know how it sounds, like I’m makin’ excuses for not seeing him, but that’s the truth.”
“Can you describe him?”
The trucker shook his head. He stared balefully at his beached rig, which resembled a huge whale on its side. “Hell, he was halfway across that field before I saw him. He was tall, I guess. Kind of skinny. I could see his hair flying, so it must’ve been long.”
“What color was it?”
“Huh? Oh, dark… brown, maybe. And he was young.”
“What makes you say that if you only saw him running away from you at a distance?”
“Well, that’s just it. The way he was running. I mean, he was flying.” He glanced at Macimer. “Men our age, we’re joggers, not sprinters. We don’t run like that.”
Macimer smiled. “Not if we can help it.”
Accompanied by Riggins, Macimer climbed down through knee-deep wet grass to the creek where the runaway Ford’s flight had ended.
“You didn’t touch anything?” he asked Riggins.
“No, sir!” the trooper said. “I wouldn’t have seen those boxes if the trunk wasn’t open already when I got to it. I opened the trunk lid all the way to get a good look, but that’s all.”
“No one else has been near the car? You’re sure of that?”
“I got here before anyone went down to the car. Both the salesman in the car that pulled up, name of Woodruff, and Thomason swear to that. And I never let it out of my sight after I found those boxes.”
Macimer nodded thoughtfully. He gave the interior of the car a quick visual inspection. Then he came back to the open trunk and peered more closely at the four cartons inside. He gave a start as he read the shipping labels. The files were from the San Timoteo office.
San Timoteo. The PRC massacre.
San Timoteo was a small, sleepy farming town in northern California. It had known one brief, searing moment in the national spotlight before dropping back to obscurity.
Macimer remembered that the one-man Resident Agent’s office in San Timoteo had been shut down that spring, not long after the death of the RA, Vernon Lippert. The documents must have collected a little dust in the parent Sacramento office before being shipped back to Washington for disposition.
Something else nagged at his memory. He stared down at the opened carton, noting the knife slashes in the cardboard. It was this that triggered his memory. The San Timoteo office had been broken into after Lippert’s death. There had been a temporary flap over the incident, remindful of the Media office break-in a dozen years ago which had resulted in the theft and later leaking of FBI documents, with damaging revelations of domestic surveillance, unauthorized wiretaps, COINTELPRO operations. Nothing like that had come out of San Timoteo, but…
Could there be any connection?
Macimer doubted it. This night’s business had all the earmarks of a routine auto theft. Until the thief opened the car’s trunk, he had probably been unaware he had taken an FBI vehicle. The discovery must have scared hell out of him. Perhaps he might have tried to make something of the stolen files of documents if he’d had the chance later, but the accident had intervened.
Macimer felt a deep ache between his shoulder blades. It had been a long day, he was bone tired, but there was nothing for it. He would have to drive these documents back to Washington. He couldn’t leave them here.
“There’ll be some agents here shortly to look after the car,” he told Riggins. “Can you stay here until they arrive?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” Macimer started to close the lid of the opened carton, noted one folder protruding slightly and pushed it down, his curious glance recording the name on the tab: BREA. It meant nothing to him. “Help me get these boxes up to my car…”
It would be long past midnight before he would get to bed this night.
2
The first Saturday evening in June was a fine time for a party, and a fine time was had by all—except one. Paul Macimer suspected that Jan’s silence on the drive home was a reflection of his own distracted performance through most of the evening.
He glanced sidelong at his wife. Jan was leaning back in the seat, her head against the padded
rest, eyes closed. She looked quite beautiful in repose, her face appearing out of shadow in the repeated flicker of passing headlights like the images in a slow-motion film.
There had been a moment this evening on the Fishers’ patio as she turned toward him, the thrust of her bosom in profile, the line of hip and thigh modeled by the thin, silklike texture of her loose pants-and-blouse outfit, when Macimer had felt instant desire. Score one for twenty years of marriage…
Heading west of the Capital Beltway on Little River Turnpike, Macimer was driving in the center lane at freeway speed when the Long Valley Road exit loomed up. At the last moment he swung sharply across the intervening lane and raced into the off-ramp loop, tires biting out a protest. Jan’s eyes popped open. She grabbed the overhead passenger bar as the Buick leaned into the turn. Then the loop straightened out as the road dipped southward into a broad green valley.
Macimer’s glance flicked at the rearview mirror. The Chevrolet had not followed them down the off ramp.
He had probably been mistaken about the car being the same one he had noticed earlier when they were on their way to the Fishers’ place. A brown Chevrolet was a clone among cars.
His glance strayed again across Jan’s face. Her eyes were closed once more, but he knew she was awake.
Jan had enjoyed herself tonight. She had been the one sparking lively discussion of the President’s new energy plan, the latest GSA scandal, the male backlash she scornfully documented. She relished Washington society, where the outspoken opinions which had once raised eyebrows in Omaha and Atlanta were accepted, even cheered.
The Janet Houghton he had married twenty years ago had been a pale, undeveloped image of this animated woman at his side. She had been more awkward then, less confident, less defined. As she matured her features had grown leaner and more striking, the cheeks hollowing out under more prominent bones, the eyes seeming to grow larger and more dominant (was that a trick of makeup?), the mouth more certain of its generosity and humor. Her body at forty-one was firmer, sleeker, more elegant and more sensual, as if it had only become aware of itself belatedly and liked what it found. Her mind had followed the same direction, shedding unwanted fat and girlish softness while it sharpened the edge of its perceptions. Paul Macimer admired this woman he had married. And she could still awaken his love with a glance, a tilt of her head on slender neck, a gaze of thoughtful absorption at a fingertip burned on the stove, an unconscious frown as she examined a bill that had to be paid.
The Brea File Page 2