This time he was in luck. A train had just pulled in as he ran down the steps. He made it an instant before the doors closed.
The train pulled smoothly away. The Metro, Macimer had once heard an agent say, was about the only thing in Washington that delivered as promised. The agent was Gordon Ruhle.
When the train stopped at McPherson Square, Macimer watched the faces of the boarders. None seemed familiar. No one paid even sidelong attention to him. By this time he was fairly sure he had lost his surveillance, but he remained uneasy when he debarked once more from the Blue Line train back at Metro Center. He mingled with the crowds going up the escalator and came out on G Street.
Macimer walked over to 11th Street and turned the corner. He waited in the entry of a Chinese restaurant—closed at this early hour—for a full five minutes. No one charged around the corner. There was no available parking along the street. No cars cruised slowly past or circled the block.
Satisfied at last, Macimer started walking north. He was sweating under his suit coat but he couldn’t take it off. He was, in any event, only two blocks from the Greyhound Bus Terminal.
* * * *
Harrison Stearns was waiting in a corner of the coffee shop, looking as rumpled and hollow-eyed as many of the bus passengers who were trying to wake up with coffee after all-night rides. Macimer slipped into the tiny booth across from him. The weary young agent tried to sit up alertly.
“Have you read it?” Macimer asked, taking the thick manila folder Stearns pushed across the table.
“Yes, sir. It… it’s a bit of a shock.”
Macimer made no comment. He riffled quickly through the pages of Vernon Lippert’s file on Brea. He found what he was looking for on the last two entries. One listed four agents who had worked undercover in northern California in the summer of 1981 as a special team directly supervised by Special Agent Carey McWilliams. Because of their clandestine assignments, none of the four had been carried on the roll of the PRC Task Force.
The last page was a brief report of Vernon Lippert’s inquiries into the movements of the four men on August 28, 1981. Lippert had been able to verify the activities of three of those agents.
The name of the fourth undercover agent was Gordon Ruhle.
Macimer leaned back in the booth, his features carved in stone. He had known what he would find, but the physical proof still left him sickened rather than triumphant. “Volunteers,” he murmured after a moment.
“Sir?”
He met Stearns’s eager young eyes with an effort. “The PRC Task Force. Most of them were volunteers. It’s a question I should have asked myself but never did. Gordon Ruhle was always a world-class volunteer. Why wasn’t he there?”
Stearns wondered how close Macimer and Ruhle had been.
Macimer sighed. “Good work, Stearns. Did you have time to make a copy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll take this one, then. You look as if you could use some sleep about now.”
“I’m fine, sir.”
Macimer smiled. “You can do one more thing for me—two things, actually. Did you drive downtown?”
“Yes. My car’s on the street.”
“I’d like your keys, and I’d like a half hour. Then you hand-carry your copy of the Brea file to Headquarters. I want you to deliver it personally to the Director, no one else.”
For the first time Stearns appeared overwhelmed. “Uh… will he be there, Mr. Macimer? Isn’t he supposed to address the graduating class today down at Quantico?”
“He’ll be there. And this is what I want you to tell him…”
* * * *
For the men gathered in the Director’s office at FBI Headquarters it was a period of tense waiting. During the interval Anthony Tartaglia left the office briefly to check on arrangements for a helicopter to fly Landers to Quantico at noon. He would wait until the last possible moment. Halbig would already have had the flight scheduled down to the second, Landers thought.
Tartaglia was coming through the door when another message came through on the open line from the communications center. There was a brief, garbled transmission. Then an agent’s voice came on loud and clear. “I’m sorry, Director, but… we’ve lost him.”
“You’ve lost him!”
“Yes, sir. We had eight men following Macimer on foot, leapfrogging each other so he wouldn’t tumble how we had him covered, and three surveillance vehicles. He pulled a subway switch and lost them.”
There was a long silence. Then, in a tone as unforgiving as his square jaw, Landers asked, “What about his car?”
“We’re watching it, but I don’t think he’ll be back. He’s sure acting like a guilty man, sir.”
“If I want your opinion I’ll ask for it,” Landers snapped. He turned toward Anthony Tartaglia, frozen in the doorway, his face turning pale as he listened to the report from his surveillance team. “Put as many men in the street as you can find,” the Director said. “And the Metro lines. No telling where Macimer is now or where he’s going. But find him!”
* * * *
At a telephone booth next to a filling station northwest of Washington, Macimer waited for the first of his calls from Brea. When the phone rang he picked it up quickly and heard Brea’s muffled tones. He listened without comment to the terse directions to his next stop. Following them Brea asked only a single question: “Have you got it with you?”
“Yes.”
Macimer headed north on Highway 270. Traffic was light but he kept the speedometer needle of the plain blue Fairmont sedan steady at fifty miles per hour. He didn’t want to be stopped for speeding now.
* * * *
“Mr. Halbig is on his way here from the hospital now,” Anthony Tartaglia told John Landers. Tartaglia, still shame-faced over the failure to keep Paul Macimer under surveillance, looked as if he wished he were somewhere else—anywhere else.
“Why didn’t he telephone?” Landers said with a frown.
“I don’t know, Director. His wife is conscious now, but apparently what she told Halbig is something he wants to report to you personally.”
The Director grunted, the crease staying in place between his eyes. “What about the car rental agencies?” he asked suddenly. “Macimer isn’t running on foot.”
“We’re checking them all,” Tartaglia said. “There are quite a few-”
“I don’t want any more excuses,” Landers said grimly. “I want to know what’s going—” He broke off as his private telephone line buzzed. He had told his secretary to hold all calls that weren’t directly related to the executive conference. He pressed the button on the phone and said, “What is it, Mary?”
“There’s an agent to see you, Director. He insists that he cannot talk to anyone else. His name is Stearns.”
Landers exchanged quick glances with Jim Caughey and Frank Magnuson. Then he said, “Send him in.”
The young agent who entered the office appeared weary but excited. He approached Landers’ big desk with nervous sidelong glances at the other men in the office. He was carrying a thick manila envelope, sealed with a clasp. He held it with both hands as if afraid someone might try to snatch it from him.
“I hope this is important, Stearns.”
“It is, Director. Mr. Macimer wanted me to give you this personally—”
“Macimer! You’ve seen him?”
“Yes, sir. About… forty minutes ago. He knew you’d want to have this.”
“Never mind that, where is he now?”
“I don’t know, Director.” The young agent’s hands were shaking but there was a resoluteness in his eyes.
Slowly John Landers held out his hand and took the thick envelope from Stearns. He undid the clasp and removed a yellow folder. Landers’ glance flicked up at Stearns. “What’s this?”
“It’s the Brea file, sir.”
The FBI Director studied the agent’s face. Determination, he thought, not defiance. “All right, Stearns,” he said quietly. “Suppose yo
u tell us everything you know.”
* * * *
Two hours after leaving the Washington area, Paul Macimer stopped for gasoline and coffee on the outskirts of Hagerstown, Maryland. He was hungry but knew that he wouldn’t be able to eat. Besides, a hungry man was more alert, able to think and move faster.
After another brief phone message from Brea he drove north again for fifteen miles. He turned west along a two-lane paved road that climbed quickly into the Appalachians.
By now, he thought, the Director would have heard the full story of the Brea file from Harrison Stearns. And the search for Gordon Ruhle—and Macimer himself—would pull out all stops. He was glad to get off the main highway. Borrowing an FBI vehicle had been a calculated risk, but renting a car would have taken extra time and provided only minimal delay once scores of agents hit the streets.
Ruhle would have evaluated Macimer’s skills in evading surveillance and making his run northward undetected. His calculations had been close, even daring. Macimer knew he would not have been able to travel much farther on the main highway without being spotted.
Macimer had five minutes to spare when he reached the outskirts of Wheeler, a small mountain community where Gordon Ruhle’s next call would come at noon. The town was one of those forgotten by progress, little changed from what it had been a century ago. Steep-roofed brick and frame houses with snow catchers protruding from the roofs. Wide porches. A turn-of-the-century ice cream parlor, crowded on this Saturday. Red’s Diner, just off the road at the west end of town, looked as if it had been there from the beginning.
A phone booth stood by itself at one corner of the diner. Macimer stepped inside, relieved to find the booth unoccupied. He had been there only a few seconds when the phone rang.
Gordon Ruhle, his voice still disguised, wasted no time as usual. His final directions were terse and specific. Without waiting for Macimer to acknowledge them, he hung up.
Macimer stepped out of the booth. He stood there for a long moment at the side of the road, aware of a tingling sensation. He was being watched.
There were three people visible at window tables in the diner. All of them were staring at him. Local people, he judged, curious about any stranger. Macimer shrugged. It was possible that Gordon had had him take the last call from this telephone because it was one he could watch—and make certain that Macimer had come alone.
As he drove west out of the tiny town, he watched the car’s speedometer, clocking the mileage. He found a one-lane dirt road precisely where Ruhle had told him to look for it. The narrow track climbed through a stand of pines and emerged onto a long, narrow shelf.
Macimer drove slowly across this flat meadow, a turgid cloud of dust drifting behind him in the hot, still air. The colors of the scene were vivid, primary. The dense green of the grassy meadow, enriched by recent rains. A mass of brown, sculptured bluffs rising to a knife-edge ridge. The black trunks of blue-green pines spaced tightly behind the line of the ridge. The piercing blue of the cloudless sky, draining toward the land like thin paint, lighter as it ran toward the horizon.
And, alone in all this color-saturated space, the bleached starkness of a cabin on the ridge, like a solitary abandoned house in a Wyeth painting.
A safe place to keep a hostage, Macimer thought, staring up at the cabin. Isolated, and so situated that there was no way to approach it without being seen from a long way off.
Completely isolated. There were no telephone lines visible. Ruhle could not have made his calls from the cabin. The sensation of being watched back at the diner was not a case of nerves, then. Ruhle had been in town, stationed where he could watch the booth outside Red’s Diner.
Macimer’s heart raced faster. If Ruhle was behind him, Linda was alone in the cabin.
Was there another route to the cabin on the ridge? A back road shorter than the one he had been directed to take? A shortcut that would put Gordon at the cabin ahead of him?
Sometimes there was no possibility of a clandestine approach, Ruhle had once told Macimer. All you can do is bore right in and deal with what you find when you get there. If a man in a hideout is smart, Gordon had pointed out, that’s the way he’ll set it up. He’ll make sure you’re out front where he can see you, and if there’s an escape hole out back he’ll take it if he doesn’t like what he sees. Maybe you won’t like going in that way, naked, but that’s what you’ll do.
The narrow dirt lane left the meadow and began to climb slowly toward the ridge, cutting through a thin line of spruce that thickened toward the top of the climb. Detouring around a huge rock shoulder, the road abruptly tunneled through a pine forest as solid to the eye as a wall. The track was rough, hardly more than two ruts cut into the soft earth, its span so narrow that pine branches slapped at both sides of the car.
Macimer drove suddenly into a clearing and braked hard.
The old cabin, sun-dried and gray as an unpainted barn, stood alone near the rim. The view to the south across stepped, tree-covered spines of the mountain range was spectacular. And strangely desolate. Except for the narrow ribbon of road below the ridge, there was no evidence of human habitation or activity.
He swung the blue Fairmont in a circle, leaving the tracks of the approach road and coming about until the car faced down the road at the edge of the woods. He was not sure exactly what lay ahead, but he wanted the car ready for a fast escape if needed.
Macimer turned off the engine and stepped out of the car, carrying his black vinyl briefcase. The thump of the car door was loud in the stillness.
He walked slowly toward the cabin. No other car was in sight. There was no sign of life. No sound came from the cabin. It had a neglected, abandoned air, grass and weeds grown knee high across the entire clearing right up to the foundations of the cabin. On three sides, dense pine woods framed the clearing. Only the ridgeline was open.
He paused at the cabin door. He thought he heard a faint sound from within but could not be sure. He reached out and turned the rusty knob. The door was not locked.
Unoiled hinges creaked as the door swung inward. Macimer’s sun-drenched eyes saw only dim shadows as he stepped over the threshold.
That was when Linda screamed.
28
“Daddy—don’t come any closer! It… it’s booby-trapped—the whole place!”
Her voice quavered. Macimer heard both the fear and the struggle to control it. A feeling of wonder filled him. This was his child, his daughter. Battered physically and psychologically in these recent weeks, she had not come apart. Instead she crouched in terror at the edge of a loft overlooking the main room of the cabin—and her thought was not for herself, but for him.
“I’m all right,” she called out. “I just can’t move.”
A fierce pride stung his eyes.
As if she wanted to make certain that Macimer understood, she explained that she had tried to climb down from the loft after she was left alone. A ladder provided the only access. When her foot touched the first rung she heard a wire snap. She looked down anxiously. Dangling in the open space a few inches from her foot, attached somehow to the rungs of the ladder by wires, its familiar pineapple shape ugly and menacing, was a hand grenade.
She had remained frozen in place for long, terrified minutes, too scared to go up or down. “I… I don’t know how long I stayed there. I couldn’t move. Like a fly stuck on paper.”
Macimer peered across the room as his eyes adjusted to the dimness. The grenade was suspended in midair, attached by a network of fine wires to the rungs of the ladder and to a wooden beam underneath the loft. The web of wires was so arranged that another careless step would pull the pin of the grenade. The wire broken by Linda’s first step had been a warning signal.
“Don’t touch anything, Daddy,” Linda warned him. “He told me there are bombs and things all over—in the radio, in the light switch, maybe inside the toaster or the clock or anywhere. He wouldn’t tell me where they all were, so I… I was afraid to touch anything.”
“He didn’t hurt me,” Linda said anxiously, as if she were defending her gallant kidnapper.
“No, he wouldn’t hurt you,” Macimer said, finding his voice at last.
After all, he was her “Uncle Gordon.” So he wouldn’t hurt her. He would only stake her out as bait in a trap. The grenade and other bombs were necessary to keep her there, like the bars on a child’s crib. It would not be Gordon Ruhle’s fault if she didn’t stay put, if she tried to escape and triggered an explosion that blew off an arm or half a face. If she did what she was told, she wouldn’t be harmed.
Gordon would have worked that all out. He was doing what had to be done.
Like setting up the People’s Revolutionary Committee for a wipe-out because they were the enemy, using the unwitting police to function as his booby trap. Not nice, Gordon would say, but necessary. We’re not here to be nice.
“Stay where you are,” Macimer told Linda quietly. “I’ll see what I can do to get you down.”
First he had to get safely across the cabin. It was possible that the grenade was a dud, the warning of other bombs a ruse. Macimer thought about Gordon Ruhle and decided that one or more on the threats were real. Gordon didn’t fight only with blanks.
He examined the cabin cautiously. It was essentially a single large room with a bedroom alcove at the back on the left, a small bathroom—its door was open—sandwiched between the sleeping area and a tiny kitchenette on the right. The simple furnishings of unfinished pine were minimal but appeared comfortable enough.
The air smelled musty and stale, and dust lay thick where it had not been disturbed. The comfortable interior of the cabin belied its exterior neglect. It was either a summer house, unoccupied during the long winter, or it was an unobtrusive hideaway.
The Brea File Page 32