The Brea File

by Louis Charbonneau

  After a series of aborted meetings, Macimer finally came face to face with Leroy Parrish in a remote, abandoned farmhouse. Parrish was not a prepossessing youngster—skinny, chicken-necked, his face blotched with acne, he wore the hangdog air of a born loser. The kind, Macimer thought, who would say anything to get attention—or a reward.

  But something about Leroy Parrish rang true: his fear.

  That first meeting the youth refused to admit that he had driven the pickup truck to the scene of the bombing. He would not reveal the names of the other three men. He demanded assurances of protection if he talked—and enough money to get a long way from Mississippi.

  The SAC of the Jackson Field Office was skeptical. There were dozens of more solid leads to track down. Agents were meeting would-be informants on every street corner and behind every barn. Nevertheless, after wary negotiations over the next two weeks, an agreement was made to protect and relocate the young man, and to pay him $10,000 for his testimony—providing that he could produce evidence leading to the identity of the three bomber-slayers.

  The deal was conditional. It was one of many being made, all of them contingent on some proof that the informant was telling the truth. No one gave Leroy Parrish’s story much credence—except Macimer.

  Abruptly the youth vanished. For two frustrating weeks there was no word. Either Parrish’s story had been a hoax, a con game designed to get him some money for nothing, or he had been murdered. Then, late one Saturday afternoon in September, Macimer received a phone call. He recognized Leroy Parrish’s voice immediately. The deal was on.

  Leroy agreed to meet the FBI agent at the farmhouse where they had first met. But the youth insisted that he would deal only with Macimer himself. If the agent didn’t come alone, there would be no meeting. Parrish trusted no one else. When Macimer was dubious, Leroy offered an irresistible inducement: he would take the agent to the place where the murder weapons had been buried.

  It was a hot September day and the office was quiet. Even most of the hordes of reporters had escaped to their motel rooms and cold six-packs. The SAC could not be reached, and the few agents on hand had their own assignments.

  Russ Halbig came on duty at four o’clock; he would be in the office until midnight. Macimer told him what he was doing. Then he tracked down Gordon Ruhle. The older agent was skeptical of Leroy Parrish’s story, and he didn’t approve of Macimer meeting the youth alone in an isolated place. But he finally agreed to trail behind Macimer with two other agents in a backup car, staying well out of sight.

  Macimer drove alone to the farmhouse. He waited there with Leroy Parrish until dark. They drove north in the FBI man’s car for a half hour. Then, at Parrish’s insistence, Macimer let the youth take the wheel as they turned along back roads away from the main highway. Parrish drove with surprising speed and skill, turning frequently onto side roads. Macimer realized that the backup car had probably been lost far behind. He wondered if Parrish had known or guessed that they were being followed.

  The last dirt road led them onto a desolate farm, dark and empty, bordered by an almost impenetrable swamp.

  Macimer was knee deep in mud at the edge of the swamp, bathed in sweat as he dug by the light of a full moon, when Leroy’s scream alerted him. A car’s headlights slashed the dirt road leading across the farm toward the marshy bottomland.

  “You tricked me! I tol’ you no one else was to know!”

  Macimer stared at the headlights racing toward them. “Those aren’t FBI.”

  “Oh my God!” Parrish moaned. “Then it’s them! They been watchin’ me.”

  Macimer floundered out of the swamp. The mud sucked one shoe from his foot. “Get down!” he warned. “Behind the car.”

  The whine of the approaching car’s engine cut off abruptly. An instant later the headlights vanished. In the sudden darkness a rifle crashed. The bullet smacked through a side window of Macimer’s automobile. Macimer fired at the muzzle flash with his Smith & Wesson. Someone cried out.

  Macimer felt a surge of adrenaline. But even if he had scored a lucky hit with his first shot, he thought, it wasn’t going to be much of a fire fight. Not if the remaining attackers carried rifles to overpower his handgun.

  He crawled over to the car door on the driver’s side. Ruhle and the others in the backup car might have been left behind, but they would be searching, somewhere not far off. If he could send a radio message for help…

  When he had first taken possession of his assigned vehicle Macimer had taken the precaution of taping over the button on the door frame that turned on the car’s interior light when the door opened. He reached cautiously for the door handle.

  Either the tape had come loose or the connection had not been securely broken. As Macimer opened the door, the light came on.

  Two rapid shots drove him away from the car door. The shots had come from a second rifle, this one off to his left.

  Then another bullet ricocheted off the rear bumper.

  “Back off!” Macimer ordered Parrish. “We’re going to have to get wet.”

  “No! I can’t-”

  “If they hit that gas tank,” Macimer said grimly, “you won’t spend any of that reward money.”

  He dragged the shivering youth into the swamp. The thick marsh grass and stunted trees would hide them.

  As if in response to his thought a searchlight sprang on. From its height and steadiness Macimer guessed it was attached to the terrorists’ vehicle. The bright beam began to track across the edge of the swamp. Macimer took careful aim and fired. The light exploded.

  With the return of darkness the attackers began to fire at Macimer’s car, a fusillade of high-powered rifle shots seeking out the gas tank. When a bullet finally found the target, the concentrated force of a half tank of gasoline exploded with the fury of two hundred sticks of dynamite. Forty yards away in the swamp, Macimer was flattened by the concussion.

  He came up spluttering, found Leroy Parrish underwater and pulled the youth’s head up. Sensing the boy would scream in his terror, Macimer clamped a hand over his mouth.

  Crouching in the swamp, up to his waist in the muddy water, Macimer wondered if the attackers had been able to see him and Parrish in the searing light of the explosion. There was a good chance they hadn’t. The terrorists themselves had been close enough to the ear-shattering explosion to have been knocked flat, or even hit by flying shrapnel if they hadn’t had the sense to fire from cover.

  He retreated deeper into the swamp. Young Parrish resisted, moaning and shivering. Macimer warned him angrily. “If they find us before help gets here-if it gets here at all—they’ll gut us and fill our bellies with rocks and dump us so deep into this mudhole we’ll never be found. So make up your mind whether you want to keep sending them messages.”

  “It… it’s not just them,” Parrish sobbed. “It’s… the snakes! I can’t stand snakes.”

  Macimer felt his own blood run cold. He had forgotten that these swamps teemed with water moccasins.

  Fifty yards into the swamp Macimer found a patch of relatively solid ground. There he huddled with Parrish in the tangled grass. One thing was now certain, he thought wryly: Leroy Parrish had told the truth. And his fear had been justified.

  A half hour dragged by. With each passing moment Macimer’s hope that Ruhle and the other agents in the backup car might have seen the glare of the explosion and fire became dimmer, dwindling like the glow from the burning car. He could hear the terrorists prowling about along the edge of the swamp. They, too, were reluctant to enter it in the darkness. Occasionally they called out to each other. Two voices. That meant that one of the attackers had been dealt out of the game by Macimer’s first shot.

  Silence closed over the swamp, whose surface was now bathed in an oily sheen of moonlight. The only sounds were an infrequent small splash from something moving in the water and the buzzing of mosquitoes zeroing in on their tempting targets. Macimer began to wonder if the mosquitoes would leave enough of him to care
about. He fought off the urge to slap at them. His only protection was to slip into the muddy, foul-smelling water, leaving only his head exposed. Once he dipped his head underwater to wash off the persistent mosquitoes. When he broke the surface again something flicked past his cheek. Macimer shook the water from his eyes and stared. A four-foot snake glided across the moonlit surface of the swamp, its speed astonishing. The moccasin’s tail had stroked Macimer’s face as it passed. The agent crouched in the swamp, shuddering as Leroy Parrish had shaken in his fear.

  A rifle shot shattered the long silence of the night. Startled, Leroy Parrish gave an anguished cry. Macimer reached for him to silence him, but his attention was diverted. He stared at the point where he had seen the muzzle flash. The direction of the flash had been skyward. As if the rifleman were shooting at stars.

  A faint hope grew as Macimer waited. Then a cool voice floated over the swamp. “You out there, Paul?”

  He grinned in delicious relief. “Me and the snakes.”

  “You got your pigeon with you, too?”

  “He’s here, all in one piece.”

  “Well, you can come out and dry off,” Gordon Ruhle said. “These old boys won’t be giving us any more trouble.”

  Ruhle himself had jumped the man who had fired his rifle skyward in a reflex jerk of the trigger. Two other agents had overpowered a second terrorist. The third, wounded in the arm, had been found lying beside the attackers’ vehicle. Offering no resistance, he had even told the agents where to look for the Rothleder murder weapons buried at the edge of the swamp.

  A long time ago, Paul Macimer thought, as he drove south from Washington toward Quantico. Looking back, it seemed like a different world. The lines of choice, so clear just a few years earlier, had already begun to blur a little in the mid-sixties. But there had been nothing uncertain or unclear about the satisfaction Macimer had felt when he labored out of that muddy bottom and found the three redneck terrorists subdued and handcuffed.

  His reminiscent smile faded as he thought of Russ Halbig. Did Halbig also remember that night in Mississippi? On night duty at the Jackson Field Office, he had taken Macimer’s call. He had warned against the agents talking to any reporters. The three prisoners were to be brought quietly to Jackson while Macimer took Leroy Parrish into hiding.

  Then, Macimer later learned, Halbig thoughtfully placed a call to Washington, D.C. By the time the agents reached Jackson with their prisoners early the next morning, J. Edgar Hoover, alerted by Halbig’s call, had personally released the announcement of their capture, thus scooping the hundreds of reporters who were in Mississippi that day.

  For Paul Macimer, the Rothleder case was the high point of his tour of duty in Mississippi. Six months later he was transferred to northern California, where violent student anti-war protests were causing concern. Russell Halbig was rewarded for his role that night in Jackson by being assigned to the Administrative Division of the Bureau in FBI Headquarters. Gordon Ruhle stayed on in Mississippi for another four years. He had been particularly successful in developing a network of informants in the Klan. Ruhle became part of the FBI’s expanding operation in the South designed to disrupt and discredit the KKK, a program called COINTELPRO….

  A long time ago, Paul Macimer thought again. Although their paths had sometimes crossed, that summer in Mississippi was the last time Ruhle, Halbig and Macimer had worked together. Now, at least for one night of nostalgia, Halbig was bringing them all together. Macimer wondered why.

  Russ Halbig was not a sentimental man.

  11

  Some forty minutes after he left the Washington Field Office, Paul Macimer turned off Highway 95 as he spotted the first green sign announcing the presence of the big Marine base at Quantico. He followed the signs westward. About a half mile from the main highway a large brown bug splattered against Macimer’s windshield. Soon the collisions became frequent. One of the bugs landed in the trough for the windshield wipers. Only stunned, it clung there as Macimer drove on.

  Suddenly the ugly brown bugs were everywhere. Neatly lettered green signs directed Macimer through portions of the Quantico Marine Base until he saw the sandstone towers of the twin seven-story dormitories of the FBI Academy. Sheltered in the air-conditioned silence of his car, the windows rolled up, Macimer drove through a dancing cloud of the bugs. Only when he stopped on the broad, hot parking area in front of the Administration Building and opened his door did the full assault of the locusts strike him.

  The din was a solid canopy of sound. The shrill singing enclosed him and the brick-and-glass buildings and the surrounding woods like a dome over a stadium. Macimer hurried through the swarming cicadas, grimacing once in distaste when one of the bugs in flight struck him in the mouth. Close to the front of the building the swarm thinned out. Macimer plunged through the glass doors with a sharp feeling of relief.

  In the wide lobby he brushed a couple of locusts from his jacket. Then he paused to catch his breath, staring back across the broad, sun-baked parking area and its unwanted carpet of brown. He had forgotten about the locusts. There was always concern, each time they reappeared in their periodic cycle, that they would overtake and destroy the quiet country towns in their path. The FBI Academy seemed impervious to this attack.

  Macimer had been present when the new Academy, one of J. Edgar Hoover’s longtime dreams, was formally dedicated back in 1972. He remembered learning then how effectively isolated the agents and other Academy students were from the outside world. The new agents in training, and the other law enforcement officers selected for one of the eleven-week Academy training programs, were aware of neither the crying of locusts nor the humid June heat. The entire facility, including the administration buildings and classrooms, recreational and physical training facilities, and the tall dormitory buildings, was enclosed. Each building was connected to the others by way of glass-walled corridors. Except for visits to the outdoor firing ranges and specialized training sites, students at the Academy never had to set foot outside.

  At the main desk in the lobby Macimer identified himself and asked where he could find Timothy Callahan. The clerk behind the counter checked a schedule on a clipboard. Callahan was giving a demonstration talk over at the Big Bird at eleven o’clock. The “Bird” was a grounded aircraft used in mock hijacking field exercises. It was located near the wooden tower used to demonstrate SWAT tactics in sniper situations.

  “I can have a driver take you over there, Mr. Macimer. Mr. Callahan is going to describe the Florida hijacking, the one that happened Monday.”

  Macimer glanced at the clock on the wall behind the desk. Almost a half hour, but that probably wasn’t time enough to catch Callahan, a talkative man, before his demonstration exercise. On the other hand, it gave him a few minutes to touch bases with Gordon Ruhle, his second reason for driving down to Quantico. He asked where Ruhle was lecturing.

  There were two dozen small classrooms and a number of larger, seminar-sized conference rooms in the Academy, in addition to the thousand-seat main auditorium, the library, gymnasiums and conditioning rooms, cafeteria and coffee shop, lounges and dormitory facilities. Macimer found the seminar room number the clerk had given him and peered through the window set into the door.

  The room was a miniature amphitheater, the rows of desks in ascending tiers looking down at the lecturer’s podium with its sophisticated modern teaching aids, which ranged from a series of retractable blackboards and graphics display boards to a television console and a small computer console with its keyboard and cathode ray tube display panel. A man stood before a blackboard, his back toward Macimer. There was no mistaking those wide shoulders, the forward thrust of the neck, the thick black hair turning iron gray. Macimer opened the door at the back of the room and slipped into a seat just as Gordon Ruhle turned around.

  The older agent’s glare caught Macimer instantly, held him, then moved on without a change of expression. Macimer grinned. It was always one thing at a time with Ruhle, and duty came first. �
�I could make it short and sweet, what I think you should do about terrorists,” Gordon Ruhle said to the attentive group of agents. “You should line them all up against a wall and have your own Valentine’s Day garage sale.” He waited out the small explosion of laughter with its startled undercurrent. “But that isn’t the way we do it at the Bureau, of course. We have a manual and charter to go by. I’ll fill you in on what the Manual says, and maybe a few other things you should know about that aren’t in the book, as we go on.

  “You’ve heard the old saw, if you want to catch a thief you have to think like a thief. Well, that applies to terrorists in spades. If you’re going to get anywhere dealing with them, whether you’re negotiating for the release of a hostage, bargaining, stalling for time, trying to convince them the game isn’t worth the candle, or whatever, you have to know the people you’re dealing with. You’ve got to know how they think.”

  Gordon Ruhle paused. The room was in total silence, the creak of a desk coming like a shriek when one listener moved. Gordon still had that presence, Macimer thought. The agents in the room, all volunteers for the Anti-Terrorist Task Force, knew that this speaker was not going to give them academic theories. He would say what he thought—and what he thought was the product of hard-earned experience in the field. The knowledge he spoke of that went beyond the FBI Manual was not printed anywhere; it was inside the heads of agents who had personally fought the battles against bank robbers and wartime spies, auto thieves and embezzlers, organized mobsters and corrupt public officials—and terrorists.

  “The first thing you have to know,” Ruhle said, “and maybe it’s the last thing, too, and everything in between, is this—and don’t you ever forget it: The terrorist doesn’t accept any of your rules. He doesn’t believe in your moral or legal restrictions. He doesn’t recognize your laws. The only law he recognizes is his own. The only justice he believes in is what he creates for himself. There isn’t anything else. So he isn’t hamstrung by any nice ideas of right and wrong, of what can or cannot be done, of honor or duty or any of the other things that impose restraints on the actions of democratic governments.”