The Brea File

by Louis Charbonneau

  “What do you think of him?” Macimer asked.

  “Maybe I could buy accidental red lights,” Taliaferro said. “Some guys just like to run lights, they hate to wait. But I can’t swallow the Richard Petty routine on top of those two lights. I’d say he’s our man.”

  “Did you check the airport Friday night?”

  Taliaferro flushed. “No, sir.”

  Macimer said nothing. He didn’t need to. Some of the agents in the office said the boss’s “silent treatment” was a lot more effective than scorn or shouting. “Keep him under light surveillance this week. Let’s shoot the works Friday night. We’ll use a dozen cars if we have to. If he goes down George Washington Parkway all the way, we’re in luck. There aren’t many places he can make left turns once he’s moving down that way alongside the river. We’ll station a car at every major intersection he might use. And let’s get the agents at the airport in on this. See if your boy—what’s his name? Molter?—see if he’s been taking the Eastern Airlines shuttle to New York. Go back a couple months at least.”

  “Friday nights?”

  “Every night.”

  Macimer studied the map. The clerk might be going to the airport or on south to Alexandria. He could be getting off somewhere en route to take a different direction, or he could double back. Every possibility had to be accounted for, with radio cars monitoring the clerk’s route. If a beeper could be attached to his car, that would make it a hell of a lot easier to track him. Even if he were lost, it would be possible to pick up the signal again from the beeper unit without too much loss of time.

  “Shoot for Friday night,” he repeated. “We’ll track him as far as we can. But I don’t want him to know we’re onto him, so we’ll risk letting him get away from us if he can. But each time he does it we’re going to stay with him a little longer. Sooner or later he’ll take us to his drop—or to the person he’s meeting.”

  They discussed the plan for Friday night a few minutes longer before Taliaferro left the office. Willa Cunningham, Macimer’s secretary, brought him a mug of hot coffee. He had a few minutes to think. A Sunday visit to the local sheriff’s office to look at mug shots had been unproductive, but Macimer remained curious about the strange actions of the trio of robbers who had invaded his home. He wondered if it was worth sending a fingerprint team out to the house. The three had worn gloves—unusual in itself for break-and-enter thieves—but they might have made a mistake somewhere. He wondered if Xavier wore gloves when he took his girl to bed.

  Xavier. Without photo identification or fingerprints, the single name was all Macimer had to go on. A name search in the huge General Index of the Records Management Division at Headquarters was impossible with only a given name, no numerical identifier to go with it.

  The Internal Security Branch had its own Name Index, however, as Macimer knew well from his own assignment with the Branch. It was drawn from the files covering the activities of dissident and revolutionary groups, including a variety of Spanish-American, Puerto Rican and Cuban activists. And the WFO had its own files. It meant a manual search, pulling out every Xavier under, say, twenty years of age. A tedious job but worth trying.

  With a grin Macimer called Pat Garvey into his office. A second office agent at twenty-eight, Garvey was one of Macimer’s favorites, which meant he was harder on Garvey than on most. “When you’re through solving the Orioles’ pitching problems,” he said, “there’s a little project you can handle for me.”

  Garvey, he thought afterward, had done a fairly decent job of hiding his dismay.

  Shortly after ten o’clock, when Macimer had nearly finished a quick review of the stack of 5x8 cards Jerry Russell had left with him, the intercom buzzed. “You’ve got a call on line five,” Willa Cunningham told him. “It’s from Headquarters.”

  Macimer punched line five. “Paul?” a crisp voice said in his ear. “This is Russ Halbig.”

  Macimer was immediately alert. Halbig was an Executive Assistant Director of the Bureau, one of the Director’s three top assistants. At one time a Hoover favorite, Halbig had walked a very thin line since the old man’s death. There had been pressure on succeeding Directors to ease out the “Hoover men.” But Halbig had never been a highly visible member of Hoover’s inner circle and he was also very nimble on his feet. During Macimer’s early years with the Bureau he had known Halbig well. They had gone through the Academy together, graduating in the same class. They had both worked for a time in the Omaha office and again, during a long and dangerous summer in the mid-sixties, Halbig, Macimer and Gordon Ruhle had worked out of the same office on a civil rights assignment in Mississippi. Macimer remembered something Ruhle had remarked about their colleague: “Don’t ever worry about Russ. He can dodge the raindrops as good as anyone I ever knew. Hell, he could walk through a cloudburst and come out without getting wet.”

  “Is everything all right at home, Paul? I heard about Saturday night.”

  “Sure. Just a little excitement for a while, that’s all. Chip is sorry he missed the fun.” Macimer was not surprised that Halbig knew about the robbery. Any such incident involving a Special Agent would be carefully examined.

  “How’s Jan taking it? Shook up, I suppose.” Halbig often had a way of answering his own questions, as if he were too impatient to wait for a reply.

  “She can handle it. She’s more worried about Linda than anything else. They were rough on her.”

  “I can see why Jan would be worried. How old is Linda now? Seventeen?”

  “That’s right.” Trust Halbig to have verified her age.

  “You’d think the Meadows was far enough out of the jungle to escape that sort of thing, but… there aren’t any safe places anymore, are there?” The courtesies out of the way, Halbig’s tone became more businesslike. “Something’s come up, Paul, about those files you brought in a week ago. I have a meeting with the Director within the hour. I may be getting back to you.”

  “I’ll be here,” Macimer said, surprised.

  “Good. And listen, Paul, be sure to tell Jan we’re all sorry this thing happened at home. We really must get together soon. Erika was saying just the other day, we never see you and Jan anymore. We shouldn’t let that happen.”

  When Halbig rang off Macimer wondered about the real purpose of his call. He took the vague suggestion about getting together as politeness. It was true that he and Jan, the Ruhles and the Halbigs had once been frequent companions—more so when Halbig had been married to his first wife, Elaine. But that had been many years ago, before different assignments took the three men in separate directions, and before Halbig’s spectacular rise in the Bureau’s hierarchy.

  Macimer frowned. Had the investigator’s instinct which had been nagging at him the past week over the San Timoteo files been sound after all?

  What had come up that might involve him?

  4

  Those who had worked for and with Russell Lewis Halbig during his twenty years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation were of one mind in the opinion that he had never committed an impulsive act in his life. That made him the perfect bureaucrat at “the seat of government,” Hoover’s favorite term for FBI Headquarters. If there was one thing that characterized any action taken at Headquarters, it was caution. No directive initiated by a desk supervisor ever went out to a field office without bearing at least a dozen initials approving the action. And it was not approved without minute and painstaking consideration of every possible ramification, including concern for the Bureau’s image and possible embarrassment.

  His colleagues were wrong. Halbig had made one impetuous decision in his life, risking J. Edgar Hoover’s wrath. Halbig divorced his wife, the mother of his three children, with the full intention of remarrying as soon as possible, taking as his new wife a much younger woman, the beautiful blond daughter of a Minnesota congressman who was not running for re-election. Halbig simply could not face the thought of Erika Lindstrom going back to Minnesota and out of his life.

 
; As it happened, Hoover was preoccupied with more serious matters inside and outside the Bureau at the time. Halbig was not certain that Hoover had ever heard about his divorce, an action which, in the old man’s prime, would have jeopardized a Special Agent’s future with the Bureau. Halbig married Erika two months after Hoover’s death. He had regretted his headlong behavior ever since. He was less clearly aware that for the next twelve years he had been punishing his much younger wife for his indiscretion.

  Halbig’s telephone buzzed. The light blinked on line seven—the private circuit connecting the Bureau’s hierarchy with each other, bypassing secretaries and go-betweens. Henry Szymanski was on the line. Szymanski was the Executive Assistant Director in charge of the Identification Division. As such he presided over the largest and most used collection of records in the Bureau—and the one that, more than any other, had given the FBI its early reputation for being able to perform miracles in identifying criminals. No other law enforcement organization in the world could equal Ident’s 200 million fingerprint records. Most had been computerized in recent years, including some 25 million in the Master Criminal File and twice that many in the Civil Fingerprint File. Successful automation of the fingerprint identification system had been Szymanski’s ticket to the top job in the division, a job that also made him responsible for the Training Division and the FBI Laboratory.

  With all that, Szymanski was surprisingly unambitious. His rise had been a kind of accident, a result of seniority, others retiring, and his skill as a technician during a crucial period of conversion. He was uneasy with the nuances of power politics. His attitude toward Halbig was almost deferential, reflecting an awareness that Administration had traditionally carried more clout among the Bureau’s higher echelon.

  “I was just going to go upstairs,” Szymanski said.

  “I’ll see you there in about five minutes, Henry.”

  “Do you have anything on the slate this morning?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Oh?” Szymanski was curious. “Anything to do with those lab reports?”

  “Yes, it does.” Halbig hesitated. “You’ll have to wait, Henry. I’ve sent a memo to the Director on it. I’m not sure how far he’ll want to open this one up.”

  “Sure, I understand,” Szymanski said quickly. He sounded aggrieved. He was going to have to smooth off some of those rough edges, Halbig thought. If he was going to play hard ball, he had to know when to swing and when to take a pitch. “I’ll see you there.”

  Halbig’s thoughts drifted briefly back to his marriage, wondering if it had been as disappointing for Erika, after all, as it had been for him…

  He had been ridiculously infatuated with her. He remembered the way his hands shook the first time he was alone with her. He had had trouble unbuttoning buttons, his fingers clumsy as sausages. Obsessed. He should have known—Elaine, with her caustic tongue, had told him as much—that any such sick passion would either destroy him or burn itself out, like any fever. When it did abate, as predicted, he found himself hated by his former wife, estranged from his children and living with a beautiful child-wife with whom he had little communication.

  And for a Bureau man as ambitious as Halbig was, a second divorce was unthinkable. The first had been damning enough…

  Halbig shook off the distraction, his thoughts instantly returning to the memo he had sent to Landers, flagged urgent.

  This was hard ball. It would be interesting to see how Landers reacted.

  John L. Landers was a veteran field man of the Bureau, former SAC in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. His appointment as Acting Director of the FBI by the President had been popular with agents in the field, less popular with some of the entrenched hierarchy at Headquarters—men who, like Halbig, had been bypassed when Landers was jumped over them.

  So far Landers had moved slowly. Many felt that he had accepted the President’s appointment reluctantly, that he would have preferred to serve out his time with the Bureau as an SAC. He had not disturbed the organizational structure at the top, which included the three Executive Assistant Directors overseeing the Bureau’s eleven divisions. His predecessor, William Webster, had left the post of Associate Director, number two man in the Bureau, vacant. Webster preferred tighter control of day-to-day operations himself. “The director of the FBI should direct,” he had once said. Halbig, Szymanski and James Caughey, the third Executive Assistant Director, in charge of the sensitive Intelligence and Investigation Divisions, were all carry-overs from the previous administration. But Landers had given hints that he planned to fill the Associate Director’s slot with a man of his own choice.

  Halbig wanted to be that man.

  At the least.

  But Landers obviously would not make any moves until he himself was confirmed by the Senate in forthcoming hearings. If he was confirmed.

  Halbig held the thought—cautiously, tentatively. Landers was a blunt, outspoken man. He had already ruffled a few senatorial feathers. Among those with reservations about him was the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Charles Sederholm, a man for whom Russell Halbig had been able to do a few favors in the past.

  Sederholm had faced a tough, close contest in his last re-election campaign in California. Halbig had been able to provide him with some little-known information about his Democratic opponent. Nothing criminal but enough to raise doubts in the minds of voters. Sederholm had won big—so big that his easy victory had thrust him into the forefront of his party’s candidates for this year’s presidential nomination, thrown wide open by the President’s decision not to seek a second term. If he repeated his earlier triumph in California’s primary tomorrow…

  Sederholm was a professional politician. Such men did not forget a favor.

  Halbig glanced at his watch. Another minute. Landers liked people to be on time for a meeting. He didn’t like them early any more than he tolerated lateness.

  Landers was certain to bring up Halbig’s memo about the Brea file. The missing file could have far-reaching implications for Landers personally… and for Halbig.

  Point one: Landers had been in charge of the task force assigned to hunt down the People’s Revolutionary Committee when the terrorists ran amok that summer in California. And in spite of some criticism of the violent end of that hunt, Landers had unquestionably benefited from it. It had thrust him into the national spotlight. Almost certainly it had influenced the President, a hardliner when it came to crime, in his decision to appoint Landers as Acting Director. But a belated revelation of improprieties by the FBI—acting under Landers’ direction with or without his direct knowledge—would damage him. And if he had participated in a cover-up, he would be finished.

  Point two: Senator Sederholm would relish inside knowledge of the Brea affair, a juicy plum to pull out during the hearings coming up in two weeks. The consideration by the Senate committee of John L. Landers’ confirmation would begin with Sederholm fresh from his almost certain California victory, looking ahead to the Republican convention a month away, smelling blood as well as roses.

  Point three: There was no way the file would hurt Russ Halbig, no matter what an investigation turned up. If Landers were seriously compromised, there was little doubt that Senator Sederholm would act to block his appointment. The way would be clear for someone else to become Director. On the other hand, if Landers managed to emerge unscathed, he would surely react favorably to Halbig’s action in bringing the Brea file to his attention. Landers might even benefit from exposing the affair, and the result could hardly fail to enhance Halbig’s position. Landers was looking for someone he could rely on as his number two, someone with administrative know-how, an Associate Director he could trust…

  Halbig backed up, going quickly over his scenario, searching for signs of danger to himself. He found none. No matter which way the investigation went, he stood to gain.

  With a chance—a real chance—to find himself on a fast horse along the rail, with all the other favorites
dropping back, one by one.

  He liked the image, made a mental note of it as he rose and left his office, walking along the quiet corridor toward the Director’s conference room.

  He didn’t have to take the elevator. Halbig had already made it to the seventh floor. The Director’s suite of offices was only a short walk along the corridor.

  John L. Landers was a solidly built man who had always had to fight his weight to meet rigid FBI standards. Everything about him was square—including his thinking, the syndicated columnist Oliver Packard had written—from his square-jawed, heavy features to his deep, broad chest. The overall impression was of someone immovable as a big rock, and it had been suggested that this quality was the reason the President had selected him to be the Director of the FBI.

  He was also said to be humorless, tough, blunt-spoken, intolerant of mistakes. Yet the agents who had served under him in three different major field offices where he had been Special-Agent-in-Charge were, almost to a man, his most vocal admirers.

  Like his predecessor, William Webster, Landers didn’t think much of doing things by committee. Webster had downgraded the top echelon’s twice-weekly executive conferences, which he had found unproductive, instead giving more authority to his three Executive Assistant Directors. The executive conferences were still held, but less often, chaired usually by one of the Executive Assistant Directors. Landers had adopted Webster’s practice of working principally through his three key assistants. “You get fifteen people in one room, every one of them with an ax to grind, all you get is conversation,” Landers had said. “With three or four people you can get down to cases.”

  At this morning’s meeting with his three top aides Landers quickly dispensed with a number of policy matters and cases in progress. So many matters came to his desk that he had insisted on receiving only brief memos and summary teletypes, supplemented by more extensive reports only on cases of special importance. One of the latter, an ongoing investigation by the White Collar Crime Task Force unit attached to the Washington Field Office, was reported on in detail by James Caughey, quoting from a report received from the WFO. The investigation was sensitive because it involved both high-level personnel in the General Services Administration and members of Congress. Of more immediate concern was an airline hijacking currently in progress in Miami, where the Delta Airlines plane was being held on the ground.