The Brea File

by Louis Charbonneau

  How did Gerella know he had been there? The reporter had to have an inside source at the Bureau. What source? And how much did he know?

  “The public doesn’t need to know what I’m working on.”

  “Maybe the public has a right to know about this case.”

  Macimer’s expression betrayed nothing, but he felt his internal defenses clanging into place like bars. Could Gerella know about the missing Brea file? Or was he simply casting blindly? The intensive FBI search for the youth who had stolen and abandoned an FBI vehicle would not have gone unnoticed in the Virginia countryside. There were also a number of people who might have talked about the incident—the state trooper, the truck driver, the salesman from Georgia, others who happened along that road that night. Their knowledge, however, was limited. Only the trooper knew about the documents found in the trunk of the car, and he knew no more than that.

  “I have nothing for you, Gerella. And I don’t know why you wanted to talk to me.”

  “I think you do.”

  “What gives you that idea?”

  “You’re here, Mr. Macimer.”

  The FBI man smiled. “It’s not that easy, Gerella.”

  The reporter was undismayed. “Can’t blame me for trying. Okay, Mr. Macimer—what do they call you around the Bureau, Mac? Yeah, it would be Mac, wouldn’t it? I’ll level with you if you’ll level with me. The way I hear it, there were some documents stolen. I hear you’re sitting on something hot—maybe too hot for you to handle.” He offered a friendly open grin for the first time. “If you’re as straight as they say, Mac, I’m offering you a way to get the facts out in the open. And no one has to know it was you I talked to.”

  Resenting the deceptive grin, Macimer was also jolted by the cynical proposal. He stared at the reporter in silence, thinking of the damage to the Bureau that might come if his own suspicions about the Brea file were true.

  Misreading his silence, Gerella said, “Whatever it is, I can get it, Macimer.” At least he had dropped the friendly “Mac,” quick to perceive that it had been a mistake. “Under the law you’re going to have to release it, sooner or later.”

  Macimer did not point out that no law sanctioned blind fishing expeditions through the Bureau’s files. “I don’t know who gave you a bad tip, Gerella, but I don’t have anything for you. It’s true that an FBI vehicle was stolen while transporting classified documents. You probably already know the car was recovered when it was abandoned on Highway 17 after an accident. The boxes of documents were in the trunk of the car and they were recovered. There’s nothing in the story Oliver Packard would give a paragraph to.” Careful truth, Macimer thought, quickly became a lie.

  Gerella stubbed out a cigarette and immediately lit another, using a Cricket lighter. His fingers were stained the color of old mustard. His hands surprised Macimer. They were stubby and callused, nicked and scarred, the hands of a laborer rather than someone who made a living pounding a typewriter. “Nothing in it, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You wouldn’t know about any quick trip to the shredder with one of those files.”

  Macimer felt his neck reddening. He hoped Gerella would attribute the reaction to anger rather than guilt. He hadn’t used a shredder, but somewhere along the line there had been a cover-up. He pressed anger into his voice, giving his reaction a label. “I don’t know anything about any shredding, Gerella, and you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. If you’re interested in anything in the FBI files you can request it under the Freedom of Information Act like anyone else. But you’re not using me to find out whatever it is you want to know. You sound like you’re stringing for the National Enquirer, not Oliver Packard. And you’ve come to the wrong source. Do your own dirty work.”

  “Methinks you protest too much.”

  “I don’t give a damn what you think.” Macimer dug into his pocket for a couple of quarters and dropped them onto the table as he rose. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  He was turning away when Gerella said, “The car theft isn’t the story, Macimer.”

  “Then why play games?” the FBI man snapped. “Say what’s on your mind.”

  “I’m interested in the PRC affair.”

  Macimer felt a chill slice along his spine like the cut of a surgeon’s knife. It was a moment before he answered, his voice controlled and even. “You’re a little late, Gerella. Senator Sederholm’s committee requested everything we had on the People’s Revolutionary Committee. You can read all about it in the Congressional Record.”

  He walked out, not looking back, angry and shaken.

  How much did Gerella know about the Brea file? And how did he know?

  * * * *

  From the alley Gerella watched the FBI agent walk quickly through the empty arcade. Macimer had the build and moves of an ex-jock, Gerella thought. Like Staubach five years or so after retirement. At the far end of the arcade Macimer hesitated for a moment before he disappeared around the corner onto M Street.

  Gerella wondered why Macimer had made a quick reconnoiter of the street before leaving the arcade. Did he think he was being watched?

  Macimer knew something. Gerella could feel it. And the FBI man had lied about recovering all the documents from the stolen Bureau car. Gerella knew he had lied because folded in the inside pocket of his suit coat was a copy of one of those documents. It had come to the reporter anonymously in an envelope with a Washington postmark. With a promise of more where that came from.

  Gerella didn’t know who the anonymous contributor was or what he wanted. Money, probably. Either that or he was someone with a grudge against the FBI. The brief printed note attached to the single photocopied document had revealed little: “This is just a sample. If you’re interested there’s more.”

  The document itself was enigmatic. It was one page of an obviously longer list of assignments of agents who had been part of the PRC Task Force in the summer of 1981. What interested Gerella was the date at the top of that list: August 28.

  The day the terrorists’ hideout was blown sky high.

  Gerella hadn’t made up his mind before meeting Macimer whether or not to show him the document, of which he had made additional copies. He had wanted to play it by ear, sounding out the FBI man. In the end he had decided to withhold it. Gerella trusted his reporter’s instincts, and they told him he was onto something big. And Paul Macimer was part of it.

  8

  After Paul Macimer called to say he wouldn’t be home for dinner, Jan found herself unexpectedly at loose ends. Linda was staying over at a girlfriend’s house. Chip had baseball practice, and Kevin begged an advance on his allowance to see a rerun of Star Wars IV at the local theater. Jan’s class was having its final exam tomorrow night, which meant no lecture to prepare. The examination pages had already been photocopied.

  On impulse she reached for the phone again and tapped out Carole Baumgartner’s number. Carole answered on the first ring, which Jan suggested must violate some unwritten rule.

  “On a Tuesday night as beautiful as this one, and at this hour,” Carole retorted, “there are no rules.”

  “Well, if you don’t want to wait for a better offer, how about dinner?”

  “Where’s the honcho tonight?”

  “Paul had something come up. He’ll be home late.” Jan was used to Carole’s slightly scornful references to husbands—anyone’s husband.

  “I can be ready in a half hour,” Carole said.

  On the drive over to pick Carole up at her elegant little Williamsburg-style condominium, Jan’s thoughts turned toward the end of the semester and her teaching project. It would be nice to have those Monday and Wednesday evenings free all summer, not to mention the time taken up in preparing lectures and grading papers. All the same, she realized she was going to miss the classes. The students, especially.

  She had started out with a class of twenty-six. If someone didn’t get cold feet at the last minute, there should be twenty-two students t
aking the final exam. That was an exceptional survival rate for any adult education class, according to the other teachers Jan had talked to. She was inordinately pleased that four out of five male students had stuck it out. The other eighteen survivors were all women, mostly young, a few in their thirties or forties.

  Hoping that the school administration was pleased with the class and her work, Jan found herself anticipating what she might do differently—better—if she taught a similar class again in the fall term. There were other possibilities as well. Workplace English, after all, shouldn’t be shunted off to an adult education program exclusively.

  But there was time enough to think of that. A summertime of ease. Of restless ease? Jan smiled, deciding not to give Carole Baumgartner a shot at that errant thought.

  Carole was slower than promised in getting ready, but an hour later the two women were having a drink in the cocktail lounge at Adam’s, an out-of-the-way but trendy small restaurant in McLean that was one of Carole’s latest discoveries. There was a thirty-minute wait for a table.

  As Jan glanced around, a man at a neighboring table caught her eye and smiled, lifting a glass filled with ice and amber liquid. He was tanned, thirtyish, wearing an expensively tailored light gray suit with the sheen of silk, black Bally shoes, shirt open at the throat, the predictable gold chain. Jan wondered if he could guess how many years his senior she was. She looked away.

  “I’ll take the older one,” Carole murmured, indicating the tanned young man’s stockier companion, who had a very large mustache salted with gray. “He looks like he’s been around long enough to know how, at least.”

  Jan smiled. She knew that Carole was far more particular about her dates than she pretended.

  At the piano in a corner of the lounge a young man with long, sun-bleached blond hair began to play and sing. He had a plaintive, high-pitched voice that suited the whine of the melancholy lyrics. Watching him, Carole said, “How are things with you and Paul?”

  “Fine. Why shouldn’t they be?”

  “I mean… really, Jan. Be forthcoming, as they say. Are you two having trouble?”

  “Why do you keep asking that? I’ve told you… everything’s fine.”

  “I ask because I know what I see and hear.”

  “You see and hear what you want to.”

  “That’s not true!” Carole protested. “I don’t wish trouble on you. You know me better than that.”

  “You simply think it’s inevitable, right?”

  “Well…” Carole offered an impish smile. “Isn’t it? Oh, I know, we all had those once-upon-a-time, fairy-tale dreams. Love and cherish, forever and ever, into the golden sunset at last, hand in hand. It was lovely, but it was never true.”

  “Never?” Jan said softly. “I don’t believe that.”

  “People change,” Carole said seriously. “That is inevitable. And the funny thing is that women change more than men do. Most men are still happy as clams as long as they can go to the football games or slam a racquetball and make believe they’re still the same old muscle-bound sophomores. They want to stay that way. Women don’t.”

  “I don’t see-”

  “Of course you do! I’ve watched you two, don’t forget, over the last couple years. Everything I’ve seen of Paul tells me he’s the same gung ho FBI believer he was when he joined up twenty years ago. But you don’t buy all of it anymore, Jan. And all those fairy-tale promises can’t make it otherwise.”

  Jan sat back, examining her reaction. She had been feeling restless tonight, uneasy. Had she wanted Carole to confirm those feelings? Or to help her understand them? “You’re talking slogans, Carole,” she said quietly. “Of course people change in different ways. Paul and I are no exception, but that doesn’t mean we’re in trouble, even if we don’t always see eye to eye about what the Bureau does. What’s that line from the poem? ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.’ Shakespeare, right? You see, my education wasn’t all wasted.”

  “Ever the romantic,” Carole said with a sigh. “I suppose I ought to envy you.”

  As Carole spoke she glanced toward the two men at the adjoining table. They were both rising. Carole kicked Jan under the table, not too gently. Jan glanced up, startled, to find the stranger in the gray suit standing beside her. “Jan?” he said. “I’m sorry…”

  “I know, we’ve never met.” His smile was boyish, engaging. “I heard your friend call you Jan. Look, we’ve just been called for our table. Why don’t you two ladies join us for dinner? Save you a long wait, and save us from being bored with each other.”

  “I think you’ve made a mistake.”

  “You’re sure? No strings—why don’t you ask your friend? Let’s let her decide.”

  Jan stiffened. She could be the Ice Lady if necessary. “I can decide for myself,” she said coolly. “And you’d better hurry if you don’t want to lose your table.”

  Her tone and manner dismissed him. When the two men had left the lounge, Carole said, “I said I ought to envy you your illusions, but I don’t know. That one could be from Central Casting.”

  Jan laughed quickly. “He shares your flattering opinion of him. Even if I were available, that was a little too smug.”

  “So? That comes with the blue ribbon.”

  The incident had sobered Jan Macimer. After a moment of pensive silence she said, “You’re right about my having things on my mind. But it isn’t Paul I’m worried about—it’s Linda.”

  Carole’s interest immediately quickened. She reminded Jan of a bird pecking sharply at new tidbits—an exotic, self-absorbed bird with glossy plumage. “Don’t tell me she’s fallen in love. Let me talk to her.”

  “Just the opposite. She hasn’t got over the way she was manhandled by that young thug during the robbery. All of a sudden she’s picking up on all the anti-male propaganda you’re always dumping on me. It’s everywhere, you know. You don’t have to hand out literature on your own. It’s like a new religion. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the sisters came around to the door on Sunday mornings giving a little spiel and handing out the latest tract.”

  “Hey, I thought you were simpatico!”

  “Don’t get me wrong. I can get my adrenaline flowing when I listen to the beautiful Gloria Steinem or read about the latest atrocity in the boardroom. But Linda’s too young to get it all in perspective. Overnight she’s started sounding like those teen-agers who go around announcing they’ll never get married or have children or take part in supporting a patriarchy.”

  “So she’s learning early,” Carole said approvingly. “You shouldn’t be worrying, you should be lighting a candle.”

  “It’s easy for you to find it all amusing. She’s not your daughter.”

  Jan regretted the words instantly. As Carole turned away Jan reached out impulsively. “Carole, I didn’t mean…”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “It’s just that… Carole, she doesn’t know. That kid Xavier holding a knife at her throat and pawing her the way he did has distorted everything. Linda’s almost a grown woman, and he made her afraid of being a woman. I don’t want her locking herself off, closing doors that should stay open.”

  “Those creeps didn’t really do anything to her—?”

  “To her it feels as if they did.”

  Carole’s eyes met Jan’s, her own private grief concealed. “You’re both overreacting,” she said. “Believe me, Jan, she’ll get over this. Just don’t try to force her. Let her take her time. She’s got plenty of time, God knows. And she has a good example to follow right at home. I’m going to tell her so when we have our girl-to-girl talk.”

  Jan’s smile was rueful. “Do I sound that overanxious?”

  “You sound like you need a little moral support, that’s all. Now how about another drink?”

  Before the waitress’s eye was caught again their dinner call came. Over another glass of Chablis and filet of sole Jan found herself feeling unaccountably better. Just talking about h
er concern had seemed to put it into better perspective, making it less frightening, more ordinary. It occurred to her that such reassurances usually came from talking with Paul. Those talks had broken down lately. Too often, lying beside her, he was somewhere else.

  With someone else?

  She shook off the speculation impatiently. That wasn’t the problem eating at him. She was sure of it. An SAC, she thought with a trace of amusement, didn’t have the time.

  Leaving the restaurant after dinner, feeling the caress of the balmy June breeze through open car windows, Jan felt more in control of her emotions than she had for days. Sometimes it was restorative just to sit in comfortable surroundings and be waited on and fussed over, even if the fussing was in anticipation of a generous tip. And Carole, bless her, had worked hard through the meal at being bright and amusing.

  Then she noticed that Carole was peering back through the rear window, her expression decidedly not amused. “What is it?” Jan asked.

  “I’m not sure…” Suddenly Carole laughed. “I’m not sure I’d want you along on single’s night, Jan, dear. You get too much attention. Who wants to be the ugly girl sitting with the beautiful one?”

  “That’ll be the day when you believe that,” Jan retorted amiably. “Who are you talking about—Gray Suit?”

  “Him for one. But he wasn’t the only one.” Carole twisted in her seat to glance back again. She gave a small impatient shrug. “I guess I was wrong.”

  “About what? Stop acting mysterious, Carole.” Jan glanced into the rearview mirror. A pair of headlights swerved abruptly as a car swung into a side street. Behind it the road was clear. “Did you think we were being followed? By those two would-be swingers?”

  “Not them. Did you notice the man over in the dark corner by the front windows when we first came in? No, I guess you didn’t. But he saw you, I’d swear to that. Either it was love at first sight or he was scared of you seeing him, I don’t know which.”