by Steve Berry
Foster seemed to be drifting, wandering, roaming through memories only he understood.
But I had a job to do.
“Do you know what Bishop’s Pawn means?” I asked.
He nodded. “The FBI bugged our cars, hotel rooms, telephones, even our homes. We knew they were listening, watching, making files. They never called us by our real names. They had code names for all of us. Andy, Ralph, Jesse, me. We learned about them much later, when those FBI reports became public. Martin’s code name was Bishop.”
“And Pawn?” Nate asked.
He shrugged. “I have no idea.”
I might have been young and inexperienced as a field agent, but I knew a liar when I saw one.
He was good. I’d give him that.
But he was still a liar.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I allowed Foster the luxury of his lie.
At least for the moment.
“Lieutenant Malone,” Foster said. “I want to speak with my daughter and son-in-law in private. After that, I’ll speak with you again. I’m hungry. How about you go and get us all some food.”
A shower would also be welcome. Unfortunately, I had no change of clothes and still wore the saltwater-soaked shorts and Jaguars T-shirt that I’d donned this morning. My clothes and toiletries were back in my car on the dock at Key West. So why not? It didn’t really matter if these people vanished. I had the coin and the files. Mission accomplished.
Maybe that was exactly what Foster wanted me to do.
Disappear.
I left the house and drove Foster’s Toyota fifteen miles south to Pahokee, a moderately sized town of stuccoed buildings bleached from the sun, where I found some jeans and a green pullover shirt at a secondhand store. I picked up a few toiletries and ordered four take-out pizzas at an eatery I spotted. The trip also allowed me to make a call, which I did, collect, from a gas station pay phone.
To Stephanie Nelle.
I narrated the day’s events, leaving nothing out, with an even tone and a military completeness.
“I’m sorry about what happened,” she said. “I had no idea about Jansen. I was referred to him. Which raises more issues that I have to deal with, here, internally.”
“You have some kind of revolt going on?”
“You could say that. It goes back to COINTELPRO.”
There was that acronym again.
“It took fifteen presidents, fifty years, and an act of God to end Hoover’s reign and finally dismantle his godforsaken FBI,” she said. “Over a thousand agents once worked COINTELPRO. Many of them remained with the bureau long after 1972, when Hoover died. And those men didn’t change. They just became better at what they did. I was told, though, that Jansen was not one of them.”
“Somebody lied to you.”
“I see that. But thanks to you, we came away with the files and the coin. Are they safe?”
The waterproof case remained in the Toyota’s trunk, within my sight a few feet away. The coin in my pocket.
“They’re fine.”
“I prefer you not read those files,” she said. “They’re classified.”
“How’s that possible? They came from Cuba.”
“Just return them to me, please.”
“So you knew all along there were files waiting in that wreck?”
“I did. But there was no need for you to know that.”
“Except, in the past few hours, people have been trying to kill me over them.”
“Just bring them to me.”
Looking back, that was the first of countless orders Stephanie Nelle would give me in the field. That one came in the same authoritative voice I ultimately learned to both detest and respect. She would say that I ignored her more times than I obeyed, and she might be right. One thing I knew then, though, was that before I handed anything over I planned to read every damn word in those files. My curiosity meter had tilted off the charts. Too much had happened over the past twelve hours for me to just blindly hand things over. That impetuousness would ultimately serve me well during my time as an intelligence operative, but I can’t say that it didn’t occasionally lead to trouble.
“Cotton, our job is to keep this under control. Understand?”
“There’s a whole bunch you’re not saying.”
“Welcome to my world.”
I chuckled. “Okay. I get it. Shut up and do the job.”
“You do learn fast. There’s no need to stay there. Foster and his daughter are no longer part of this. Leave now and bring the files and the coin back to Mayport. I’d send some help, but I didn’t do so good with choosing that the first time. I’ll leave it to you this time.”
Fair enough.
I hung up the phone and made a second call to Pam, to let her know I was okay. She knew nothing of my new assignment, the first of innumerable times I would keep her in the dark about my professional life. National security and all that other bullshit. The trust between us was gone, and sadly time would only make things worse. I hurt her. Bad. And each day I felt anew the force of her emotions. Was she vindictive? Probably. But I’d given her good reason. She’d been hurt and she was hurting me back. I accepted her anger because I thought it was all part of making amends. What I wouldn’t learn until many years later was how calculatedly she ultimately exacted her revenge, planting and tending my pain as carefully as one would work a garden.
I stood outside the gas station, biding my time while the pizzas were being made. The town loomed quiet, except for a steady breeze tickling the treetops. The sun was dissolving to orange in the western sky, far out over Lake Okeechobee, the dusky air still oven-warm. Shadows had begun blurring into one another like a growing stain on the concrete.
My watch read nearly 6:00 P.M.
Time for me to head north to Jacksonville.
About a four-hour drive.
The Fosters would have to find their own dinner. They were no longer important to this mission. The Toyota could be returned to Foster tomorrow. More of that rules-don’t-apply-to-me mentality I was beginning to appreciate.
I hopped into the car and drove farther south to where US 441 veered east toward the Atlantic Ocean. I turned and a sign informed me that I-95 lay thirty-five miles away. Everything Foster had told me about the 1928 hurricane still stuck in my brain. Incredible that such atrocities actually happened right here. What had Martin Luther King Jr. said? The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
Amen.
A car approached from behind.
Fast.
A few hundred yards ahead the highway became four-lane in both directions. But here there were only two. The car sped past in the opposite lane, then cut back in front and lit its brake lights. I slammed my right foot onto the brake pedal and slid to a stop. In my rearview mirror I saw a second car behind me.
Doors flew open. Four armed men emerged.
One of whom was Jim Jansen.
I was yanked from the car.
“You should have done yourself a favor and died on that boat,” Jansen said.
Two of the other men began a search of the Toyota. It took them only a few moments to find the waterproof case in the trunk. The fourth man kept a weapon trained on me while Jansen patted me down. In my jean pocket he found the coin.
He stared at it through the plastic sleeve, pleased.
“A total disaster. That’s what this is,” Jansen said. “All thanks to Cotton ‘James Bond’ Malone. Special Justice Department operative. You proud of yourself?”
“I left you stranded at Fort Jefferson.”
“That you did.”
He pounded a fist into my gut, which doubled me over.
I gathered my breath and tried to steady my nerve. The other two men grabbed me by the arms, pinning them behind me, slamming me chest-first into the side of the Toyota.
Handcuffs were clipped to my wrists.
Cars wer
e approaching from the west.
I tried to steady my breathing.
“Let’s get out of here,” Jansen said.
CHAPTER TWENTY
As messes go this one had to be an eleven on a ten-point scale. I was back in the rear seat of a car with my hands cuffed behind my back, exactly how I started in Jacksonville thirty-six hours ago. Only this time, instead of going to jail, I was headed east on U.S. 441 to God knows where.
Jansen sat in the front seat and had not said much of anything. I wondered what had happened to the Fosters and company, but realized that I’d only be told what he wanted me to know. A sinking realization had taken hold. Benjamin Foster had definitely wanted this to happen. Is that why he alerted me to the possible house surveillance? To throw me off guard? To make me think him a friend? Then he sent me off to get food, with the files conveniently in the trunk and the coin in my pocket. Straight to Jansen. I was actually getting pretty good at being bait.
Still, I thought I’d try, “You do know that I reported in to the Justice Department.”
“Ever heard of Jimmy Hoffa?” Jansen asked.
I got the message, and with the Everglades just a stone’s throw away it would not be all that difficult to accomplish.
“We saw you make a call,” Jansen said. “But agents disappear all the time. It’s an occupational hazard. Which explains why pains in the ass like Stephanie Nelle recruit young, stupid hotshots like you.”
Good to know.
We passed a lot of citrus groves, sugarcane fields, and cattle pastures before finally crossing under Interstate 95, cruising farther east into downtown West Palm Beach. From its inception the town had always lived in the shadow of Palm Beach, its more glitzy neighbor across the Intracoastal Waterway. One was created for people with money, the other for those who worked for the people with money. I’d visited both a couple of times, this side of the water reality, the other side like going to Mars. I saw that we were headed straight into outer space as the car veered right and drove across the bridge.
Tall palm trees lined the main avenue like sentinels keeping watch. We stopped at an intersection, then turned north on the old A1A highway that bisected the narrow spit of island north to south. Past a stretch of churches and high-end businesses, houses appeared.
Big ones.
“We headed to your mansion?” I asked Jansen.
He shifted in his seat and turned around to face me. His right arm came up with a gun that he nestled to my forehead.
Then he cocked the hammer.
I will say, the experience was unnerving. Never had I felt a weapon that close to me, being held by a man who clearly wanted to pull the trigger. Making it worse, my hands were cuffed behind my back so there was nothing I could do about it.
“I’m looking forward to killing you,” he said.
“Just not yet, right? Somebody higher on the food chain wants me delivered in one piece?”
His silence confirmed I was right.
“It’s a bitch to be a peon, isn’t it?” I asked.
He released the hammer and withdrew the gun, then turned back around in his seat. I exhaled, realizing I’d been holding my breath a long time.
We kept driving, traffic moving like blood through a clogged artery. The ocean was no more than a hundred yards off to the right, but invisible, shielded by the trees, the mansions, and some unbelievably well-groomed, towering hedges. There must have been some local ordinance that encouraged everyone to grow theirs thick to the sky. Here and there the road nestled close to the shore. Old money hummed a loud and obvious tune. Side streets radiated every couple of hundred feet in defined blocks and we turned down one, a narrow lane that passed between more houses, these not as large as their oceanfront companions, but nonetheless impressive.
We finally stopped at a two-story brick Colonial with a portico supported by columns that reminded me of the White House. More tall hedges screened the front yard from the street. We stopped in a forecourt, enclosed on three sides by a stone balustrade topped with urns. Flowers filled the lavish beds among more shrubbery.
Waiting at the front door was a man with neatly clipped silver-gray hair and a face as smooth and rosy as a child’s. He wore a pair of tortoiseshell glasses. I was led from the car. Our footsteps made rasping sounds on the soft stone steps as we entered a vestibule dominated by a carving stairway of gray marble that reached up to a second-floor balcony. I was waiting for the queen or the president to descend amid a flurry of trumpets. A crystal chandelier burned bright. We walked across a floor inlaid with black marble highlighted by—of all things—the seal of the FBI.
Glasses led the way to a pair of carved wooden doors that opened into a spacious library. But a quick perusal showed it was in name only, the shelves stocked with the kind of nondescript leather bindings that interior decorators used to make a room appear important.
Scores of framed photographs dotted the walls, all of the same man posing with others. I caught Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Warren Burger, J. Edgar Hoover, Robert Redford, Charlton Heston, and Walter Cronkite. Most mere poses in an office or at some gathering. Others while holding drinks. One on a golf course, another a sailboat. But at the center was always the same man looking equal to whomever he was with. His hairline progressively lightened and receded through the years but was always immaculate. I had a sense of an indexed life, collected and stored right here on this trophy wall. The whole room seemed a suffocating display, overloaded with nostalgia, like stepping back in time with someone who lived around their possessions.
A cluster of wingback chairs and a sofa, all in creamy leather, dominated the center of the room atop a hardwood floor covered with a pale-blue rug. Fading sunlight managed to find a way in though the curtained French doors. A man rose from one of the chairs and waited for our escort to bring us to him. The face was identical to the man in the pictures, but a small potbelly had grown against the tall, commanding frame. He was pushing seventy easily, but the hard and uncompromising expression from the photos remained. He wore fashionable wire-rimmed spectacles with a fawn-colored sport coat, vintage jeans, and shiny penny loafers, which gave him the air of an aging academic, the persona surely not random.
My eye caught a clock on the wall, which read 7:10 P.M.
“Uncuff him,” he ordered.
Jansen complied.
“My name is Tom Oliver.”
His attire, impeccable posture, and poorly restrained confidence came straight out of the FBI manual. But not his manners. No hand was extended for me to shake, which was fine by me.
“Please, have a seat. You and I need to speak. Alone.”
Jansen and the other guy got the message and left, closing the door behind them. Oliver assumed a position in one of the wingback chairs and reached for a pipe on the side table, lighting it up, puffing out acrid smoke. I had already caught its lingering odor in the air.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked me.
I sat. “Not a clue.”
“I worked for the FBI my entire career in law enforcement, retiring a few years ago as deputy director.”
“I’m so happy for you.”
“Is this amusing to you.”
My patience was reaching its end. “What’s not amusing is your lapdog out there, who wants to kill me. And the fact that I’ve been kidnapped and brought here against my will.”
“I doubt it was all against your will. After all, you are on a mission.”
“You know who sent me.”
“I do. Which is why we’re talking, instead of your corpse floating in the Everglades waiting for the alligators to eat it.”
He gave a grunt of satisfaction at his threat, his words and wealth seemingly enough for me to believe him.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You married money. Because a career FBI agent couldn’t afford the power bill on this place.”
He reached for a drink on the side table and swirled the clear liquid in the glass, then downed it in curious little sips.
/> “My wife’s family has owned this house for generations.”
I knew that this guy was going to be nothing more than a mine of misinformation. Every movement was measured, calm, and resolute. His goal was to suck in far more information than he let out. Best guess? The subject of the hour was Stephanie Nelle. He knew about her, just not enough. So why not corral the new guy, stick a gun in his face, then drag him into this sorry excuse for a library and wait for him to crack.
Yeah. Good luck with that plan.
I’d rather take my chances with the gators.
The study door opened and Jansen appeared.
“They’re here.”
Oliver nodded.
“Are we having a party?” I asked.
He grinned, still trying to rattle me.
“Something like that.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Jansen laid the waterproof case on the hardwood floor a few feet from where I sat. Atop it rested the 1933 Double Eagle inside its plastic sleeve. That coin was certainly making the rounds. Jansen left again, closing the library door behind him.
“He’s well trained,” I noted. “You do it yourself, or send him to obedience school?”
“Are you always so disrespectful?”
“Only to those I really like.”
“Your new friends have arrived,” Oliver said, ignoring my humor. “Foster, his daughter, and her husband.”
Good to know.
Like with Desi and Lucy, the reverend had some ’splainin to do.
“Did you make a deal with Foster?” I asked. “To get that case and coin?”
“Reverend Foster understands the gravity of this situation. He wants this contained, as I do. I’m hoping we can all come to an understanding and end this matter quickly and quietly.”
“You have the files, which makes you and Foster happy. You have the coin, which will make Valdez happy. What will make Stephanie Nelle happy?”
Oliver laid his drink down and continued puffing the pipe.
“Without the files or Valdez, she has nothing but a bunch of unsubstantiated talk. I’m trying to keep this at that level and avoid the taking of any drastic measures.”