“Only that there was an older couple and a younger man. The man might be interesting, but Stearns doesn’t remember much. Only that he was young, thin, on the tall side. He may just have looked tall because he was helping Stearns up off the ground.” Wagner grinned. “He must’ve done that with one hand while he was pocketing the car keys with the other.”
Macimer didn’t smile. “According to your latest report, you found a gas station in Paris where he stopped for gas. How solid is that?”
“It was him,” Rayburn said.
“Yeah,” Wagner agreed. “It’s one of those self-service stations, and usually those guys don’t notice much. It was a rainy night, and the attendant never left his booth. The only reason he noticed anything at all was that he saw this young guy get out of his car, a blue Ford sedan, and go around and open the trunk. It stuck in his mind because all the guy did was look inside the trunk and then slam the lid shut. By then the attendant in the booth was watching him—they get a feel for anything unusual because of holdups—and he thought the kid was agitated. He stopped pumping gas at an odd number. Most people round off to a dollar or some even number, unless it’s a fill-up, but this was something like two dollars and thirty-seven cents, which is why the attendant remembered. The kid came straight over to the booth and paid cash. No credit card.”
There was a moment’s silence before Rayburn said, “He backtracked.”
Macimer glanced at him. “I noticed that. He came back to Highway 17. Why? Because of what he saw in the trunk of the car?”
Rayburn shrugged. “Could be.”
Macimer glanced at the file once more. The two agents had found footprints in the meadow leading away from the scene where the car had been abandoned after going off the road. Softened by a month of rains, the ground had yielded good castings of the footprints. Their pattern turned out to be that of a popular brand of jogging shoe that sold in the millions.
“The fingerprints and shoeprints are a dead end,” Macimer mused aloud. “But that kid didn’t walk back to Washington. He must have hitched a ride, if he came back at all.”
“We’re working on that,” Wagner said cheerfully, his expression at odds with the tediousness of this phase of the investigation. “I figure we can make a career out of it.”
This time Macimer returned a smile. “You’ll have to make it faster than that. As of now you’re part of a special squad. This assignment comes straight from the Director. One of the files that was in the trunk of that stolen car is missing. Maybe the kid took it, maybe not. He’s the only one who can tell us.” Macimer paused. “There’ll be a general briefing of the squad in the morning. Meanwhile, if you don’t have anything better to do, go back to Fedco. What was that kid doing there? Shopping? Getting off work? He didn’t have his own transportation. Does he live near there?”
“Gotcha,” Wagner said enthusiastically.
Macimer grinned at him. “Have fun.”
* * * *
Macimer glanced at the clock on his desk after the agents left. Nearly five o’clock. He was wondering if he might snatch one normal evening at home and a good night’s sleep—it might be the last for some time—when his secretary buzzed him on the intercom. Willa Cunningham was a good-humored, efficient, self-reliant woman who had returned to office work after her agent husband died of a heart attack at forty-nine. Besides her formidable abilities at taking dictation, typing, answering the phone, organizing paper work and sifting gossip, Willa even made good coffee—without complaining that it wasn’t part of her job.
“There’s a reporter waiting on line three,” Willa said. “Name of Gerella. Do you want to talk to him?”
“Did he say what it was about?”
“He wouldn’t say. But there is a Gerella who works for Oliver Packard. And you know how Packard has been exploiting Senator Sederholm’s Intelligence Committee hearings.”
Macimer frowned. Oliver Packard, syndicated columnist, skeleton rattler, confidant of senators and Presidents, was one of the most powerful men in Washington. In the post-Watergate decade Packard had learned the lessons of no-holds-barred investigative journalism even better than his colleagues. He was for the 1980s what Jack Anderson had been in the 1970s and Drew Pearson before him.
Macimer had a grudging respect for Oliver Packard’s skill at digging into events. The man was a fine investigator with superb instincts for finding where the bones were buried. What Macimer didn’t like was Packard’s apparent willingness, when hard evidence was lacking, to attack by innuendo and suggestion.
Senator Charles Sederholm was in some ways Capitol Hill’s counterpart to Oliver Packard. An imposing man of immense power and influence, he had used the latest round of inquiries into the government’s various intelligence agencies to polish his image in preparation for his run at the presidency.
Macimer realized suddenly that California’s primary election had been held today—the polls would still be open out on the coast. That was Sederholm’s home state, and he would almost certainly lock up its delegates for the coming Republican convention before this day was over.
“I’ll talk to him,” Macimer told Willa Cunningham. “While I’m at it, see what your private grapevine says about Gerella.”
The reporter proved less openly aggressive than Macimer had braced himself for. After a few preliminaries Gerella suggested a meeting with Macimer away from his office.
“What is it you want to see me about, Mr. Gerella?”
“I’d prefer to go’ into that face to face. Let’s just say that… I’ve been looking into some recent FBI history. I hear you might be able to help me.”
The casual comment could be a routine ploy, Macimer thought. It seemed to suggest something without actually saying anything. “I don’t see how I can help you,” he said. “Does this have something to do with Senator Sederholm’s hearings?”
There was a short pause before Gerella said, “What I’m looking into, Sederholm doesn’t know about… yet.”
There it was again. The hint, the oblique but unmistakable intimation of… what? A threat?
“Would you care to be more specific?”
“I can’t do that over the phone—and I don’t think you’d want me to, Mr. Macimer.”
“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”
“I’d really like to talk to you, sir,” Gerella said, adopting a more respectful tack. “Maybe I’ve been listening to somebody’s fantasies. You know how rumors are in this town.” He paused a moment, as if willing to give Macimer time to evaluate the implied suggestion that what Gerella was looking into was based on substance, not the fanciful spinnings of Washington’s rumor mill. “We could make it some out-of-the-way place where we won’t be seen.”
Macimer laughed. “You don’t want to be seen talking to an FBI agent?”
“I was thinking of you,” Gerella said.
The words confirmed the decision Macimer had already reached. He would meet the reporter. It wasn’t so much that it was important for him to know what story Gerella was digging into or what rumors he had heard. Macimer wanted to know why Gerella had called him.
“Whereabouts?” Macimer asked.
“I was thinking of Georgetown.”
“Why Georgetown?”
“I like to eat there. You want to buy me dinner?”
“This isn’t a social get-together,” Macimer said dryly.
“Okay. Then I know a bar where we won’t be noticed.”
They agreed on the time and place and the reporter hung up. Macimer regarded the silent phone thoughtfully for a moment. Then he sighed and dialed his home phone number. Every FBI agent, and especially any Special-Agent-in-Charge of an office, ought to have a prerecorded message, he thought, telling his wife he wouldn’t be home for dinner.
* * * *
Macimer parked on a side street off Wisconsin Avenue. He walked back along the tree-shaded street past rows of Victorian and Federal period row houses, narrow brick buildings with tall narrow wi
ndows, extruding short flights of steps. The careful detailing over windows and doors spoke of a bygone craftsmanship that was now too expensive to duplicate.
Although it was still early for the dinner hour, Wisconsin was crowded. Throngs waited to get into the small, fashionable French restaurants, and young people crowded the occasional singles bars. Macimer turned right on M Street. A half block beyond the Café de Paris he found the entrance to the arcade Gerella had described over the phone. On impulse he walked past it and continued along the street to the next corner. He crossed over and started back along the sidewalk the way he had come. No one crossed the street behind him.
Macimer turned the corner onto Wisconsin and stepped quickly into the entry of a small shop whose windows displayed a collection of old prints. The shop was closed.
He stood patiently in the sheltered entry for some minutes, watching the traffic at the intersection of Wisconsin and M Street. Waiting, Macimer felt a familiar and pleasurable tension. He had spent too much time behind a desk in recent years. He missed being in the field.
At the same time he wondered about his caution. He had no reason to fear being seen talking to Oliver Packard’s reporter. But he continued to have the feeling of being watched—he had had it that night of the robbery when he spotted a brown Chevrolet several times.
Yet why would anyone be following him? Because someone believed that he had the Brea file intact? That, like Vernon Lippert, he had sat on it, hiding its contents even from his superiors?
Macimer shook himself impatiently. If what he guessed about the file was true, he understood why it was so important. What he didn’t know was to whom.
After five minutes, satisfied that on this occasion he had not been followed, Macimer retraced his steps along M Street to the brick-faced arcade. A dark tunnel led from the street to a broad inner courtyard faced with fashionable shops on two levels. Most of them were closed. Two young women with lank straight hair parted in the middle glanced out hopefully from a boutique as Macimer walked by.
On the far side of the arcade another narrow passageway tunneled through to the alley. The land here tilted downward toward the river. Standing in the gathering dusk, Macimer felt the warm, soft air of a Washington evening in June against his face. There was a smell of rain. From somewhere up the alley came the sounds of muted jazz from a small nightclub.
No one had followed Macimer through the nearly deserted arcade.
Across the alley was the rear entrance to a bar that fronted on the next street. Macimer entered through the back door. He stood for a moment near the doorway, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom.
The bar was long and narrow. There was just enough room for an old mahogany bar with a polished brass rail and a dozen or so tall stools, a narrow aisle and a row of wooden booths upholstered in cracked red vinyl. A couple of the booths and several stools were occupied.
Joseph Gerella had chosen the last booth, nearest the alley. He was sitting with his back to the room. Macimer sensed that the reporter had been watching him for a number of seconds before the FBI man spotted him.
Macimer stopped beside the booth. “Gerella?”
“Check. Sit down, Mr. Macimer. You want a beer?”
“Just coffee.”
Macimer sat opposite Gerella, conscious of a feeling of caution and a trace of hostility. The man on the other side of the table was not reassuring. Joseph Gerella wore a poor-fitting polyester suit made to resemble gray flannel. His shirt collar was unbuttoned, his tie tugged loose and to one side. There was a dark stain on the tie. His black hair came almost to his shoulders in a straight Prince Valiant cut that needed pruning. Macimer was not misled by the careless appearance. Gerella might look less like Prince Valiant than one of the Three Stooges, but there was nothing careless about his silent appraisal. According to Willa Cunningham, Gerella had a reputation as a tough, even ruthless investigative reporter. He had to be that to work for Oliver Packard. Over the years Macimer had done his own share of interrogating, and he recognized the attempted intimidation in Gerella’s stare.
A waitress wearing a tiny fluted black skirt and black mesh stockings over heavy thighs came to the booth. Gerella ordered coffee for Macimer and another beer for himself. Neither man spoke until the waitress had left them alone. Then Gerella said, “From what I hear, Mr. Macimer, you’re one of the Bureau’s straight ones.”
“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”
“No offense—all I meant was, you haven’t got into anything sticky. Nobody’s suing you for violating their civil rights, and you’re not one of the appointed apologists.”
“The FBI doesn’t need any apologists,” Macimer said sharply.
Gerella smiled. It was a wolfish display of teeth that reminded Macimer of the actor Jack Nicholson; the smile did not touch his eyes. “You really believe that? Come on, Macimer—what about all those agents who were disciplined for black-bag jobs? What about Felt and Miller and the Weather Underground break-ins? What about the whole COINTELPRO? Are you defending all that?”
Macimer sighed. COINTELPRO—the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program launched in the mid-1950s and officially halted on J. Edgar Hoover’s orders in March 1971—was not one of his favorite subjects. COINTELPRO was a “covert action program,” borrowing techniques more commonly used by foreign intelligence agencies. Few law enforcement people could be found who would disagree with the program’s goals. It had approved actions designed to discredit, expose or embarrass advocates of dangerous causes who could sometimes not be reached by the law. Sanctioned actions had involved harassment of extremist groups of the Right as well as the Left, from the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party to the Black Panthers and the Weathermen. Methods had included leaking details of Klan identities and activities to the media, provoking disputes among rival factions of target groups, even, according to some stories, false accusations. Maybe the CIA had to engage in dirty tricks—Macimer’s mind was open on that question—but the FBI and its reputation had suffered when it used such tactics.
“You’re lumping a lot of things together,” he said. “I’m not here to defend any of them to you, but I will tell you what I think—off the record.” He waited for Gerella’s reluctant nod. “I think, on balance, COINTELPRO was a mistake on the Bureau’s part, even though a lot of what the program accomplished was positive. The thing you people seem to forget is that it’s possible to do some wrong while trying to do good. And sometimes what you see as good and necessary for the country comes at the expense of someone else’s good. That kind of balance isn’t as simplistic as some people like to make it. As for those black-bag jobs and break-ins, I think the people involved were acting in what they believed to be the best interests of the United States—and without the clear guidelines we have now. We were fighting fire with fire, even if that sometimes meant technical violations.”
“You call civil rights a technicality?”
Macimer shook his head. “You’re using catchwords, Gerella. The FBI isn’t in the business of violating civil rights. It’s in the business of catching criminals and protecting innocent people-including their civil rights.”
“Like you protected Martin Luther King?” Gerella said quickly.
“If you’re going to bring up that Mark Lane hysteria, you know better—if you’re any kind of reporter.”
The two men fell silent as the waitress checked their booth and was waved away. Macimer became more aware of the murmurs of sound around them, the heavy beat of music from a jukebox, the competing voice of an overhead TV set at the far end of the bar. He was glad of the confusion of sounds. Gerella had succeeded in provoking him into talking too much, and he suspected that to the reporter his words only sounded self-serving.
“You always wanted to be a hero?” Gerella asked, surprising him. “Join the FBI and save the world?”
“Something like that.”
There was amusement in Macimer’s answer, but Gerella wasn’t really far off the mark. As a b
oy growing up in southeast Detroit, his had been a neighborhood of heroes. Some of them in uniform, limping along the sidewalk, their war over for them, the scars permanent. Others in the darkness of the old Jefferson Theater on Saturday afternoon. He could still remember watching the G-men catch up with Dillinger on screen as the famous robber emerged from another theater in another town on another hot Saturday afternoon—the Biograph on the north side of Chicago in 1934. Long before television’s smaller-scaled heroics there had been Jimmy Cagney and Lloyd Nolan and Jimmy Stewart and others equally dedicated and determined, FBI men all. There had been few doubts then, no second-guessing about the rights of criminals. Maybe something had been gained, Macimer thought; something also had been lost.
“There are no heroes,” Gerella said.
“Maybe you’re not really looking for them,” Macimer responded quietly. “You can usually find what you’re looking for.”
Gerella wagged his head, his expression suggesting awed incredulity. He lit a cigarette and waved the pack at Macimer, who shook his head. “Save me from true believers. Don’t you know people are scared of cops, Macimer? Haven’t you seen it in their eyes? And when you’re not kept on a goddamned tight rein, when the law runs wild, you scare the hell out of me.”
Macimer wanted to say that innocent people had nothing to fear from the FBI, but he suddenly thought of the two hostages who had died with the People’s Revolutionary Committee in the terrorists’ hideout. He stared at Gerella, weighing the coincidence of his search for the Brea file and the reporter’s phone call. “What do you want, Gerella? You didn’t call me up and act mysterious just so we could get together and debate the history and policies of the FBI.”
Gerella leaned forward abruptly. “Okay, how’s this? I hear you ran into something interesting out on Highway 17 a couple weeks ago.”
Macimer took his time responding. Gerella had tried to stampede him with the sudden question, which might mean that he didn’t really know anything. “Where did you hear that?”
Gerella shrugged. “I’m supposed to hear things. That’s my business. I hear there were FBI men crawling all over the hillside. You were there. Want to tell me what it was about?”
The Brea File Page 9