The Brea File

by Louis Charbonneau

  23

  American Airlines flight 115, nonstop to Phoenix, left Dulles International Thursday afternoon. Chip and Kevin were eagerly looking forward to the trip but Jan was unusually quiet. While the two boys were getting reading material from a newsstand, Paul and Jan had a few moments alone in the vast waiting area.

  “I still don’t like leaving without Linda,” Jan said.

  “As soon as she’s released, I’ll put her on the first available flight. Meanwhile I won’t have to worry about the rest of you.”

  “You’re serious about that, aren’t you?”

  “Carole was murdered, Jan.” The underwater autopsy had confirmed the presence of an air embolism. Even though it could not be proven that the deadly air bubble had been deliberately caused, Macimer had no doubt.

  “We’ve never been threatened before, not that I know of. Not once in twenty years.”

  “Twenty years ago you didn’t have underground newspapers printing the names and addresses of agents, making us targets.” It was a plausible evasion, he thought.

  “Maybe it’s time for you to get out,” Jan said quietly.

  “You know better than that, Jan. Besides, I couldn’t leave in the middle of a case. Especially this case. I have to see it through.”

  “Without me.” Jan was silent for a long moment, staring at him. Over her shoulder Paul saw Chip hurrying toward them. Kevin trailed behind, leafing through a magazine as he walked.

  Jan said, “Maybe you’re right, Paul. And maybe I’m the one who doesn’t belong here anymore.”

  The words echoed in Macimer’s mind as he watched the shuttle bus taking Jan, Chip and Kevin away from the terminal. He could not even guess how final Jan’s words had been, or whether the gulf between them could still be breached.

  The plane, a 707, waited out on an apron near the runways, which undulated in the heat like cheap mirrors. Unlike most major U.S. airports, Dulles International did not have separate terminals for each airline. From the single huge terminal, serving all carriers, a fleet of cumbersome-looking but surprisingly efficient shuttles loaded passengers for departure and brought new arrivals in from the landing strips.

  Macimer continued to stare across the hot apron as the passenger cab of the shuttle rose slowly from ground level to the height of the 707’s passenger door. Then there was the pantomime of the shuttle cab’s silent descent and crabbed retreat. The faces at the windows of the plane were small and unrecognizable.

  When the aircraft trundled out toward its takeoff, Macimer turned away, depressed.

  On the way to his car he took the wrong aisle in the parking lot and caught a glimpse of the two men sitting in a gray Ford sedan. Macimer paid them no notice.

  Traffic was relatively light on the wide, divided highway heading east from the airport toward Washington. Otherwise the unobtrusive gray sedan would easily have gone unnoticed, since it lagged far behind him. It stayed visible in his rearview mirror all the way into downtown Washington, and he was not sure it had broken away until he was within a few blocks of the Washington Field Office.

  By then, Macimer reflected, there was no need to keep him under direct surveillance.

  * * * *

  At the WFO Macimer reviewed the teletypes received that morning from Collins and Garvey. He read the reports by the agents who had combed Gerella’s apartment; the search had been unproductive. He also read summary reports from Rodriguez and Singleton on the search for the three missing Cubans; attached was a list of three youths—two were named Xavier—on whom the search was being concentrated because they matched all or most of the subject’s profile. Next were the FBI Lab’s reports on the detailed examination of evidence found on Roosevelt Island, along with Raymond Shoup’s autopsy report. Water in Shoup’s lungs had come not from the pool where he was found but from the river, indicating that the body had been moved after Shoup was drowned. Footprints found with Shoup’s in the soft earth near the shore of the island and along the footpath had been made by a heavyset man wearing rubbers over his shoes. Which meant no identifiable footprints, Macimer noted, unless the rubbers themselves, which had a distinctive ribbed sole pattern, were found. They wouldn’t be, he knew. Brea had worn them deliberately, and he would quickly have disposed of them.

  The Special squad’s accumulation of records covering the Brea investigation now filled most of a four-drawer file cabinet. But Brea was still out of reach.

  Just before five o’clock Joe Taliaferro returned to the office, and Macimer briefly reviewed with Taliaferro and the ASAC, Jerry Russell, their plans for another Friday night surveillance of the suspect from the Energy Research and Development Administration. The Alexandria office, Russell reported, was maintaining photographic surveillance of everyone who visited the print shop suspected of being the suspect Molter’s drop. A registered clerk from the Soviet Embassy in Washington had been identified as one of those visitors.

  Macimer left the office shortly after this briefing—an early hour for him. He instructed Harrison Stearns to call him the minute anything important came in on the Brea case. Then Macimer drove through heavy traffic to the suburban hospital near the Meadows where Linda had been kept for observation.

  Linda seemed improved—more alert, less remote. Macimer was encouraged. To occupy the girl’s mind he had her make a list of what she wanted to take to Arizona with her. He would do her packing and have everything ready.

  He wanted her away from Washington.

  * * * *

  On the drive from the hospital he looked for the gray Ford Fairmont sedan but was unable to spot it. He arrived home shortly after six-thirty.

  To cover any attempt to reach him at home during his absence from the empty house he had hooked up the answering device to his private telephone. He disliked using the tape-recorded system, though it was sometimes useful. There were three messages clocked on the recorder. He rewound the tape and switched the instrument to playback.

  The first caller had hung up without speaking, rousing Macimer from his slumped position in his chair. He shrugged off his curiosity; a great many people disliked dealing with the tape-recorded message system and automatically hung up.

  The second call was from Jan, who had arrived in Phoenix on schedule. Macimer turned off the answer-phone and dialed the number of Jan’s parents’ home in Sun City. Jan was asleep, her mother told him, tired from her flight. Macimer gave her the flight number and time of Linda’s scheduled arrival in Phoenix on Friday. If there was any change, he added, he would telephone again.

  When he hung up he wondered if Jan had really been asleep.

  Several minutes passed before he remembered that there had been a third message on his recorder. He switched on the instrument once more.

  This last call was the least expected and most puzzling. It was from Erika Halbig.

  * * * *

  Special Agents Lenny Collins and Pat Garvey dined that evening at the Nut Tree, a popular restaurant in Vacaville, an easy drive from Sacramento. It was crowded and they had to wait for a table. They were finally seated next to an interior garden which had been enclosed as an aviary. Bright-plumed birds flitted among the greenery and vivid splashes of hanging fuchsias. After watching the spectacle for several minutes, ordering a dinner of curried chicken breast and sipping an icy margarita, Collins said, “This beats Sambo’s.”

  Garvey managed only a forced grin. The day had been tiring and frustrating, a dogged attempt to reconstruct the movements of some two hundred agents who had been part of the People’s Revolutionary Committee Task Force, cross-referencing assignment sheets against daily reports for the date of August 28, 1981, and verifying these by personal interviews. Most of those agents were easily eliminated from suspicion of involvement in the Brea affair; they had worked in pairs or squads on the fateful day. That information did more than provide corroboration of their activities. “We’re looking for someone who was alone that day, acting on his own,” Paul Macimer had said. “We’re looking for Brea himsel
f.”

  Twenty-three agents listed as part of the Task Force had been on individual assignments in the field that day. So far Collins and Garvey had managed to account for only eleven of them. One of the things that was bothering Garvey was the knowledge that a commitment of more manpower would have made the review much swifter, much more certain of success. Yet Macimer’s orders had been explicit: Collins and Garvey were handling this part of the investigation on their own.

  Garvey didn’t like investigating other FBI agents, even though he knew that Brea had to be identified and exposed. He didn’t like working in the dark, and he sensed that his boss, Macimer, knew more than the agents did. And he liked least of all the fact that, sometime on Friday, he and Collins would be working their way down to Fresno—investigating Macimer himself. And like it or not, Macimer was not above suspicion.

  Garvey picked at a steak while Collins devoured the curried breast of chicken and a heaping platter of fruits, nuts and condiments. Finally, over coffee, Garvey brought up the possibility which Collins, only half jokingly, had suggested. “I can’t believe Macimer is involved.”

  “Then why are you so worried?” Collins asked cheerfully.

  “It doesn’t make sense they’d put him in charge of the special investigation if he was under suspicion.”

  “Maybe the people who put him in charge were also in on it. We don’t know that Brea acted on his own that day. Don’t forget, Macimer worked at the seat of government himself for a while. He also got nice fat promotions ahead of older agents. He’s got friends where it counts. Maybe he’s holding some IOUs.”

  “I don’t think even you believe that.”

  Collins shrugged. “I’ll tell you one thing, if Macimer was so eager to get at the bottom of this thing, we wouldn’t be out here on our lonesome. There’d be a few dozen other agents digging into these assignment checks looking for Brea. Hell, that’s one of the things the Bureau does best, throwing in the big manpower when that’s what’s needed to break a case open. And I’ll tell you something else. No matter what we find tonight or tomorrow or the next day, if there’s anything that points a finger at one of the big boys, Macimer or anyone else, and we send in our report, it’ll just disappear. That’s the last you’ll ever hear of it. Unless…”

  Collins paused, cocking his head to listen to the song of a bird with bright yellow on its wings. Collins wondered what it was; he had never had time in his life for birdwatching, any more than he had made space in his thinking for taking people on faith alone, trusting in the goodness of mankind. Garvey, he thought, was upsetting that….

  “Unless what?” Garvey prodded.

  “Unless we turn something up that we feel we should take straight to Headquarters.”

  Garvey stiffened. His skin felt cold, as if the air conditioning had been turned up too high. “Disobey Macimer’s instructions?”

  “Why not?” Collins demanded. He had been stirring another spoonful of sugar into his coffee, and he pointed the spoon at Garvey as if in accusation. “Why should we keep quiet, if those orders are part of the whole stinking cover-up?”

  “I don’t believe it,” Garvey said flatly.

  “You don’t want to. Hell, neither do I. I like Macimer. But the world doesn’t surprise me as much as it does you, Garvey.” He paused, then grinned broadly. “Besides, you’re forgetting there’s one other big name on that list. You know who it is.”

  Garvey knew. It was the name of the man who had been in charge of the task force hunting the PRC in the summer of 1981: John L. Landers, now Acting Director of the FBI.

  * * * *

  At nine o’clock that Thursday evening, while Collins and Garvey were sitting down to dinner, Paul Macimer turned off the Beltway at Exit 19 and swung south toward Bethesda. He had not seen the gray Ford following him, but almost certainly it—or another car—was close behind.

  After a short drive he spotted the brightly lit façade of the Marriott Hotel, which Erika had mentioned as an easy-to-find landmark. He turned up the hill past the Marriott and found a parking space in front of the sprawling hilltop complex of the Linden Hill Hotel.

  Macimer had once attended a law enforcement conference at the hotel. Quickly reviewing his memory of the layout, he headed away from the main entrance toward a separate large building off to the left, housing a private tennis club, open to hotel guests and members only.

  Inside the entrance Macimer was stopped by a deeply tanned fugitive from a seaside lifeguard station. He stopped flexing his muscles when he stared at Macimer’s credentials.

  “Nothing to worry about,” Macimer said. “I’m meeting someone here. If anyone asks for me, I’ll be in the locker room.”

  “Yes, sir,” the disconcerted young man said.

  Macimer walked quickly through the locker room, emerged at the far side of the courts area and immediately spotted what he was looking for: a fire exit with panic hardware, opening only from the inside.

  He glanced back across the huge open floor, past the busy courts with their scurrying, white-clad figures in shorts, toward the entrance. No one in street clothes was visible. The attendant was out of sight.

  Macimer stepped outside and moved immediately into the cover of a grove of trees behind the building.

  Five minutes later, certain that he had not been spotted, he walked past the pool area behind the Pook’s Hill Lodge and used a back entrance to reach the lobby. Through the front windows he could see the upper floors of the Linden Hill Hotel, only a quarter mile away.

  The Pook’s Hill Lodge was large, expensive, more an apartment hotel than an overnight stop, catering to those with large expense accounts. As Macimer crossed the lobby toward the elevators he could feel the sweat on his face and body drying from the air-conditioned chill. He wondered if he would have been sweating anyway, even without his brief run through the woods, on his way to an unexpected meeting with a beautiful woman.

  “Paul! Thank God!” Erika had cried when he telephoned the number she had left on answer-phone’s tape. “I was afraid I’d missed you—or you wouldn’t call back.”

  “I just got home. What is it, Erika?”

  “I have to see you.”

  To his dismay there had been a small leap of excitement. “This isn’t a very good time, Erika—”

  “Paul, I must talk to you!” The anxiety in her voice reached him clearly. This was no casual phone call. He remembered that she had been in the lounge at Hogate’s the night he waited for the man who called himself Antonelli. Coincidence, surely. Or perhaps he didn’t want to believe otherwise.

  “What’s it about, Erika?”

  “You know… you must know. Paul, it has to be tonight.”

  There was something definitely wrong with her voice. Anxiety, yes. Or had she simply been drinking the evening away? He was unsure of her and of himself, suspicious of his own swift marshaling of arguments for responding to her plea. Because he did want to.

  “Where are you, Erika? This isn’t your home number.”

  “In Bethesda. It’s called the Pook’s Hill Lodge. Just over the hill from the Linden Hill Hotel. You can come right up, Paul, number 1115. I’ll be waiting…”

  You must know.

  What did he know?

  The elevator enveloped his overheated body in cold, as if he had stepped into a refrigerator. The day had been one of the hottest of the year but he had hardly noticed the heat most of the time; he was conscious of it now by contrast. The elevator hummed upward in soft cool silence, stopping gently at the eleventh floor. The doors opened with a barely audible hiss.

  Wide, softly illuminated corridor, carpeting about two inches deep, Van Luit papers on the walls, a hush like that of an old church. He found 1115 and knocked. There was a tiny peephole in the door at eye level. He sensed rather than saw an eye peering out at him, then heard a bolt shoot back. The door flew open.

  “Paul!” It was an exclamation, as if she had not quite believed he would come. “Come in, come in…”

>   The living room was large, with floor-to-ceiling windows at the far end opening onto a private balcony and a view of city lights. The thick white carpeting, casement draperies, modern furnishings were all quietly but insistently expensive, chosen by a decorator for effect rather than because someone liked them.

  “One of the perks of living at the top,” Erika Halbig said, following the direction of his gaze toward the long windows. She answered a question in his eyes before he spoke. “It belongs to a friend of mine. She’s in the country for the summer—everyone who is anyone leaves this city for the summer. She asked me to look in once in a while.” Erika laughed lightly, nervously. “So you see, we’re quite alone.”

  Macimer looked full at her, catching the nervousness in her eyes as well as her voice. Why was she nervous?

  “What is it, Erika? You said it was important.”

  She laughed again, and the tip of her tongue flicked over her lips, moistening them. “Yes, I did, didn’t I? You’re really not making it easy, Paul. Would you like a drink?” The question might have been a sudden inspiration. “I’m one or two ahead of you. What is it—Bourbon on ice?”

  “That’ll be fine.”

  She was more than one or two ahead. The smell of gin mingled with a tantalizing fragrance as she brushed past him toward a wet bar. Watching her splash whiskey over ice cubes, then spill Beefeater’s gin over the ice in her own empty glass without measuring, he asked himself if she was acting like someone bringing him an important message, someone putting a friendly, civilized face on an ugly secret.

  Quite suddenly he knew that she was not. Her manner was almost coquettish. Her dress—a plum-colored chemise with a miniskirt, the soft, flowing, silklike fabric clinging to her body as if charged with static electricity—was calculatingly provocative.

  Carrying her drink over to a white sofa, she curled her legs under her as she sat in a corner. “Don’t look so surprised, Paul, you must have known. And for heaven’s sake, sit down!”