There was a brief silence before the caller chuckled again. “I didn’t think the photos would work, but it was worth a try. I didn’t even have to work on Erika very hard. She always had a thing for you.”
Macimer felt a twinge of something—suspicion, intuition, a blind hunch. I didn’t have to work on Erika very hard. That didn’t sound like Halbig. The words were not even those of someone carrying out Halbig’s orders. They had a boastful, proprietary ring. They were also slightly contemptuous of a woman so easily used.
The voice could have been anyone’s. For the first time Macimer sensed that it was not merely muffled, as if a handkerchief had been placed over the mouthpiece; the caller’s voice was being electronically altered, disguised beyond recognition.
But it was not Russ Halbig’s voice. Someone other than Halbig had used Erika. The truth, more subtle and devious than Macimer had guessed, teased the periphery of his consciousness.
“I figured the photos might not do it,” the caller said. “But I have something else you want.”
A band of pressure tightened painfully at the back of Macimer’s neck. He spoke harshly. “If Linda is harmed in any way, the next time you see that file will be on the front page of the Post.”
After a moment’s silence the caller said, “So you do have it.”
“Yes, I’ve got it.”
“All right, we make a deal. That’s what we both want. I tell you where to come to find your daughter. You bring the file with you. And come alone.” There was a break for emphasis before the filtered voice added, “If you bring anyone else, you won’t like what you find.”
The threat was more frightening because it was made so calmly. Macimer had to wait before he could trust himself to match that control. Then he said, “You’re Brea.”
“Could be.”
“The price of the file comes too high for me to keep it. You win.”
“We both win, Macimer. You don’t want that story released any more than I do. That’s why you’ve been sitting on it. That’s why you wouldn’t give Oliver Packard any fresh dirt to shovel.”
“Maybe.”
“You know I’m right. So you’ll come, and you’ll bring the file. And you and your daughter can just walk away clean.”
“Tell me where.” There was no point in arguing, no point in saying that no one would come away from this affair clean.
Brea chuckled softly. “Uh-uh. No names and addresses. And don’t bother checking on this phone number. It’s a public phone and I won’t be here. And it won’t tell you where I’m going.”
“As long as you have Linda, I play it your way.”
“Now you’re being sensible.” Brea then gave brief instructions, assigning what would be the first of a series of stations on the way north where Macimer was to wait for another call, each time at a public phone. There would be no way for the calls to be monitored, no way for Macimer to know where he was going. “Get started now, Macimer. And if you’ve got company, you’d better lose them.” The line went dead, just as the operator broke in to say that three minutes were up.
* * * *
The phone booth was close and hot, but Macimer stood motionless, not wanting to jar the delicate balance of intuition, knowing that he trembled on the edge of discovery. That electronically filtered voice was one Macimer had heard before. It belonged to the man who had impersonated a private eye named Antonelli. The voice was disguised either because Brea was afraid Macimer might recognize it, or because Brea took no risk of having his real voice recorded for later analysis and identification. Voiceprints were as individual as fingerprints.
Macimer had heard that voice Monday night on the phone in Hogate’s lounge. Erika Halbig’s presence there that night now became something other than coincidence. She would do whatever Brea wanted. I didn’t even have to work on her very hard. What had been her role that night? Probably nothing more than that of a lookout, someone who knew Macimer and could confirm that he had shown up alone. And who could provide a diversion while Brea met Raymond Shoup on Roosevelt Island.
Until that night Brea must not have been sure who had the contents of Vernon Lippert’s file, Macimer or Raymond Shoup. First he had suspected Macimer, as evidenced by the staged robbery and subsequent electronic surveillance. Then he had learned about the items sent to Joseph Gerella. But when Brea finally confronted Raymond Shoup, the youth must have said or done something to indicate that he had stolen only part of the file. So Shoup had died, and suspicion tilted back toward Macimer.
And Brea believed that Macimer had been withholding the file, even from his superiors, because he didn’t want the truth to come out. What made Brea so sure of him?
That’s why you wouldn’t give Oliver Packard any fresh dirt to shovel.
Macimer stumbled out of the hot phone booth. Like an organism rejecting an alien substance forced upon it, his mind twisted away from the truth, hurling up objections and denials, questioning the accuracy of his memory.
But there was no mistake. The call from Packard had come on Macimer’s private line in his den on Sunday night, less than two hours after that phone had been cleared of bugs and taps. There had been no opportunity for anyone to get at the phone again. A bug had been left in place. Brea had heard Macimer’s conversation with Oliver Packard.
And suddenly everything fell into place. It was even obvious how Linda had been lured away from Dulles International without making a scene. It was the only possible way, and Macimer would have seen it sooner if he hadn’t been resisting an answer that brought with it too much pain.
She would only have gone with someone she recognized. Someone she knew and trusted. Someone who could make plausible an abrupt change of plan about her Phoenix flight. Someone who had bounced her on his knee before she was old enough to walk.
Her “Uncle Gordon.”
* * * *
Macimer drove back to the house. When he picked up the phone to make the call to Phoenix he was calmer, though it was a call he dreaded making. Then Jan surprised him, and he realized that she had always surprised him by her strength in any genuine crisis. Uncertainty demoralized her, but when she knew what she had to face she had always been able to call on a core of resiliency that carried her through.
He didn’t hedge or try to soften the blow. Some things couldn’t be softened. I want a divorce. Your father is dead. Your child has been kidnapped. You could only say the words.
He spoke on through a heavy silence, telling Jan as much of the story of the Brea file as he could cram into a terse summary while still making sense. He ended with Brea’s call and the arrangements for their meeting. He tried to make it sound like a simple trade-off, the Brea file for Linda, but he knew that Jan was not so easily fooled. “I’ll bring her back,” he promised. “I’m responsible for what’s happened to her.”
“Responsible… it’s an old-fashioned word now, isn’t it? You’ll bring her back to the shelter because that’s what parents are supposed to do. We owe it to her.”
“I’m not sure that’s what the friendly neighborhood psychiatrist would say.”
“I know. It’s everyone for himself.”
“Sometimes you sound almost sensible.” He wished she were not so far away at this moment.
“Only when you’re listening.”
There was another long silence. Macimer felt unexpectedly calm, confident, in spite of what lay ahead of him. Jan had always been able to do that for him, he thought. Maybe he shouldn’t have needed that kind of support, but why not? Why was it so important not to need anyone? Going it alone wasn’t even the normal human condition.
“I’ll give it my best shot,” he said at last.
“I know you will.”
Macimer almost smiled. “There’s nothing like a vote of confidence.”
“Paul…”
“Yes?”
“Do you know who it is? Do you know who Brea is?”
He took a deep breath, reluctant to answer. “I wasn’t sure until this morn
ing. Now I am.” He waited for the next question but it never came. Perhaps she didn’t want to know. “Jan… maybe this isn’t the right time but there’s something else I need to have settled. Before I hang up.” It was the only hint he gave that his encounter with Brea might not be a simple trade-off. “What about us? You’re not… locked in. Nobody believes that anymore.”
“Aren’t I?” Her tone was wry. “Oh, I’ve thought about our breaking up—believe me, I’ve thought about it. But you and I… we didn’t go into it with that in mind.”
“No.” When they were married he had had this image at the back of his mind, vague and blurry like a photograph out of focus, of the two of them walking along a beach somewhere, hand in hand, fifty years later, white-haired and worn and content with each other.
“I guess I am locked in, sort of.”
“Do you wish you weren’t?” He heard the refrigerator groan as the fan cycled on. He waited for the puppy squeal of the failing mechanism. Nothing lasted as long anymore.
Her answer, when it came, was as painful for her to say as it was for him to hear. “Sometimes.”
After a short pause he said, “Well, that’s honest.”
“Do you still want us to be together?”
“I’ve never wanted anything else.”
“It will have to be different, Paul, in some ways. I need to… to explore myself a little more. I want to be surer of what I’m giving the rest of my life to.” She paused. “We don’t have so much more time.”
“We have time enough,” he said. “You were never more of a woman than you are right now, and I’m not about to lose out on the best of you after I’ve put in all this time.”
“You make me sound like an unfinished product.”
“You are,” said Macimer. “You sure as hell are.”
27
The emergency executive conference had convened at seven that Saturday morning in the Director’s office on the seventh floor of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building. In addition to the Director and two of his Executive Assistant Directors, Jim Caughey and Henry Szymanski, present at the meeting were Frank Magnuson, SAC of the New York office; Fred Valentine, the Bureau’s Counsel for Professional Responsibility; and Anthony Tartaglia, Russ Halbig’s assistant, who had the rank of Inspector. Tartaglia had been supervising the surveillance of Paul Macimer on Halbig’s instructions, and a line was open to the communications center.
Landers reviewed the events of the previous evening, including developments in the Molter case and Macimer’s involvement, the fact that Macimer’s daughter had apparently disappeared from a scheduled airline flight from Washington to Phoenix, and the search currently under way, at Macimer’s instigation, for two Latinos who had been on the same Phoenix flight. One of those Latinos, a male named Francisco Perez, had been tentatively identified as being on a suspect list of those who had burglarized Macimer’s home about a month ago. “It was Macimer’s theory,” Landers said, “that the robbers were looking for the Brea file.”
“All that doesn’t sound like a man who’s covering up for himself,” Caughey said.
“There’s more,” said Landers.
During the night Special Agent Leonard Collins had flown to Washington with the 1981 guest register for the High 5 Motel outside Fresno, California—a register which had suddenly become another question hanging over Paul Macimer’s head. Forensic specialists in the FBI Lab, working in the early hours of the morning, had tested the chemical structure of inks on various pages of the register, as well as the paper itself. Henry Szymanski had brought the preliminary reports of those tests with him to the emergency conference.
“We tested the pages for dates from August 27 to August 30, 1981,” Szymanski explained, “on the theory that the entry for August 28 might have been altered or a page substituted. The pages, by the way, are removable. The results for three of those pages—the 27th through the 29th—are unequivocal. The inks used on each page were the same. The papers are also identical in composition, age, fibers, color and texture. This becomes significant because, contrary to his activity report for August 28, Paul Macimer’s name does not appear on the motel register.”
“What about the fourth page?” Caughey persisted.
“Well… there are some differences there,” Szymanski admitted, looking uncomfortable. He liked to have all his ducks lined up in a row, and one of them didn’t fit in. “The paper is the same, but not cut from the same roll as the other three pages were. And the ink used was not the same.”
“That means nothing is proven.”
“I think a change in paper filling out a complete register is perfectly plausible,” Szymanski said stiffly.
“Yeah, sure, and a change in pens at the same time.” Jim Caughey leaned forward truculently, a broad hand beating time on the top of the Director’s desk to emphasize his words. “I’d like to see more tests—more pages, before and after the dates you’ve already looked at. If someone was going to make a switch to make Macimer look bad, and if that someone was a Bureau man, he’d damned well be smart enough to change more than the one page. He’d figure you for doing exactly what you did. The only thing he didn’t count on was that extra page.”
Landers intervened as his two assistants glared at each other. “I’m sure additional tests are no problem,” he said. “I take it, Jim, you’re still convinced about Macimer. You don’t think he’s our man Brea.”
“Do you, Director?”
Landers was slow to respond. Instead he rose from behind his desk and stood for a moment at a window which looked eastward toward the Capitol dome. He swung around to stare at Caughey. “I’ve been thinking about that call to Macimer last night from the WFO about the Molter case. You can tell a lot about a man by the way he acts in a crisis. Macimer’s daughter is missing, and he’s under extreme pressure. But you’d never have known it from the way he handled that call. When you put that together with his request for a pickup on those two young Latinos…” John Landers shook his head slowly. “If you’re asking me for a gut feeling, Jim, then I think we’ve been barking up the wrong tree. It wasn’t Paul Macimer that day in San Timoteo, poking a rifle out of a window and pulling the trigger. My gut tells me Macimer isn’t Brea.” He smiled thinly. “But that isn’t proof, either.”
Two men had upset his calculations in the last twenty-four hours, Landers thought, by reacting to pressure in unpredictable ways. At a critical moment Macimer had put the Bureau’s needs ahead of his private anguish. And Russell Halbig, the duty-bound ice man, had walked away from a breaking case because his wife needed him. Each man in his own way had revealed a balance that was often lacking, the kind of balance John Landers looked for in a good agent.
Landers surveyed the men grouped around his office, all watching him. He realized that he missed Halbig’s presence, his efficient, orderly management of information. The one reservation he had had about Halbig was that he simply didn’t completely trust a cold, unemotional man. Now Halbig had shown unexpected depths. Perhaps he was the right man to be the Associate Director of the FBI, after all. And if Landers made that decision, he could then bring Magnuson in from New York to take Halbig’s spot in Administration. Thinking of the possibility, Landers surprised the watching group by suddenly grinning. Magnuson had been needling him about turning into a politician last night in his handling of Senator Sederholm. Let’s see how Frank likes it, Landers thought, at the seat of government.
“Want to let us in on the joke, John?” Magnuson asked. He was probably the only man in the entire Bureau who still had the temerity to address his old friend by his first name.
“In good time, Frank. All in good—”
Landers broke off as a voice crackled on the open line from the communications center. It was an agent calling from a public telephone, his call being patched directly through to the Director’s office. He was part of the surveillance team assigned to Paul Macimer, and he was reporting by phone rather than using one of the Bureau’s private radio frequencies
because Macimer, if he drove his own FBI vehicle, would be able to monitor any radio communications.
The reporting agent’s brief message electrified the men in Landers’ office: Macimer had left his house. He was heading for Washington.
In the tense silence John Landers said, “Whatever is going down, gentlemen, I think this is it. We’ll soon have our answers!”
* * * *
Unlike most major cities, Washington is not a weekend place. Hotels offer special weekend packages to entice visitors to stay over the quiet days when the Congress is not in session. On this Saturday morning Macimer had no trouble finding a parking place on the street near the Lincoln Memorial. He caught a tour shuttle bus proceeding east along the south side of the Mall. At this early hour it was half empty.
Macimer got off the bus in front of the Smithsonian and strolled across the broad grass promenade. To his left the Washington Monument thrust aggressively skyward. To his right, at the far end of the Mall, rose the massive splendor of the Capitol. Pausing near a refreshment stand, Macimer watched some youngsters throwing a Frisbee. He assumed there was a team of trackers covering him, allowing one or more to drop off and others to pick up the tail. Standard Bureau procedure. What he did not understand was why, if his conclusion about Gordon Ruhle was correct, the Bureau was following him.
As Macimer strolled on he paused several times and glanced around like a curious tourist, trying to memorize the faces he saw, the color of a shirt or slacks or suit. It was a hot morning for the sandy-haired man in the blue cord suit, for instance. Perhaps, like Macimer himself, he needed the coat to cover up a hip holster.
Macimer ducked down the stairs of the Metro station just west of the Freer Gallery. He had to wait nearly five minutes for the train. By then Blue Cord Suit was looking unhappy. He knew that he had been spotted. He would have to drop out of the chase or switch places with one of the agents in a surveillance vehicle.
At Metro Center, Macimer caught another train on the Red Line. He got off at Union Station, crossed over the walkway and doubled back. He stayed on the next train as far as Farragut North. Emerging onto K Street, Macimer crossed the boulevard against a red light and broke into a run. A block south he swerved sharply into the entrance of Farragut West.
The Brea File Page 31