deep field cmdr to copper miner: now we’ve got a dead congressional lawyer…woman in dcpd custody at gw e r…teagarden escaped again…misinformation dept working overtime to explain to press…house speaker doubting us…and 10th flr going nuclear…
copper miner to deep field cmdr: k…now what?…
deep field cmdr to copper miner: our only option…double down…get to key west…monitor daughter…teagarden likely headed there…get him…and get ice skater…
copper miner to deep field cmdr: will do…my word, no more f-ups…
Chapter Sixty-Five
Washington, D.C.
Traffic was light in the early morning heat.
House Speaker Henry Wayne Alderman did not bother going to his office in the Capitol. Instead, he had his driver take him straight to the Rayburn Building directly across Independence Avenue. It was late July, and Congress was about to go on summer recess for August. If he was going to do something, he knew he had to get the ball rolling quickly and in person.
“Good morning, Mr. Speaker,” the main security guard said, admitting him to the elevator bank. Alderman ignored him. He pushed the button for the top floor, where the office of Congressman Toddman Gaynor was known on the grapevine as “God’s Penthouse,” and “Methuselah’s Cold-Water Flat.”
He knew the file threatened a national crisis centering on the rights of the people to know the truth, which for him was the essence of true democracy. America had endured enough secrecy. After the last two wars and years of domestic snooping on every man, woman, and child—he’d had enough. And he wanted it to stop. He wanted the file to be formally investigated, and if found legitimate, released to the public.
“Jesus, what a shit storm that will create,” he said to himself, standing in the elevator, consumed with manic, racing thoughts. If it were to happen, he knew it would require the blessing of the man serving his thirtieth term in Congress. He understood the moment he saw the file, that his ideological opposite, the extremely conservative ninety-two-year-old Republican from Kentucky would be the fulcrum of any decision on this bewildering discovery. It was simple: either the facts would go public or they’d be dismissed as the maniacal workings of a man with a gun, a computer and a sick mind—the consequence of the recent death of his wife.
“It’s just shy of a fucking nuclear bomb,” he said aloud.
People in the elevator heard him talking to himself and exchanged glances. The two congressional staffers, one building janitor, and three cafeteria workers all recognized him as the Speaker of the House, the third in line to be president of the United States. Though curious, they said nothing.
Chapter Sixty-Six
“This can’t be good,” Walter Natujay mumbled after hanging up the phone.
He’d been summoned to an immediate appearance on the tenth floor. His previous meeting with Paula Trippler had been in his own basement office where all covert program offices were located, including his own. In nearly forty years with the bureau, he’d set foot on the tenth only once. That was when they tolerated him being there just long enough to promote him to become the first black man to head the DFC.
Both the tenth and eleventh were smaller than all others by about two-thirds, right-angled and cantilevered over the front, giving them an architectural quality of exclusivity. It was known that the tenth housed personnel working internal affairs and covert oversight, the bureau within the bureau. But God knows what the eleventh floor housed. As far as Natujay knew, no one had any definite idea. Construction on the building began while Director Hoover was chief, but wasn’t completed until after his death. In the early years, various imaginative rumors about the eleventh floor circulated on the grapevine. Among them: party room, gay bar, torture chamber, secret lab for cryogenic freezing where Walt Disney, Hoover, Hoover’s mother, Clyde Tolson and Senator Joe McCarthy were all preserved.
Two agents met him when he stepped from the elevator to the tenth floor lobby and escorted him to the large conference room where one wall was lined with mirrors which Natujay presumed were two-way viewing panes. The table was a traditional oval; the chairs were old-style barrel backs with aged leather seats. Besides himself and Paula Trippler, two others were in the room, a stenographer and the director of personnel, Ronald Wheeler, who’d been with the bureau nearly as long as Walter Natujay.
“Mr. Natujay, do you know why you’ve been called to the tenth floor for this meeting, which is being taken down by a stenographer and recording equipment?”
“This morning at the Watergate?”
“That would be correct, Mr. Natujay.”
“It was a miscommunication. Copper Miner was confused. A simple mistake, unfortunately.”
“Really?” She crossed her legs under the conference table. “Has Copper Miner become unconfused?”
Her tone and piercing stare were murderous. Not wanting her to see his Adam’s apple bobbing, he tried to suppress swallowing, without success.
“Yes,” he said. “I have moved to correct the error. Durgan Donnursk, that is—Copper Miner—is now en route to Key West where Teagarden is likely headed to rendezvous with his daughter, who has been under a loose, ‘hands off’ surveillance order. He has been told to double down. He will take out both Teagarden and Ice Skater.”
“We are aware of that, Mr. Natujay. The tenth floor tends to monitor your communications rather closely. We especially tend to monitor communications that threaten to burn down our own house.”
Sensing what was coming, he looked past her, focusing on a spot on the wall where a chair back had scraped the beige paint.
“I will clean this up, Ms. Trippler.”
“Really?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Whose idea was it to suggest to the media that Shackton was killed by a jealous gay lover?”
“Ma’am, I do not know. Shackton’s sexual orientation is public knowledge. He’s made no secret of that. I did tell the bureau press officer that we are not ruling anything out. The rest is rumor and innuendo.”
“Are you certain you made no reference to the file itself? No reference to details within the file that we wish to prevent going public?”
“Ms. Trippler, I am certain that no one in the DFC made any such reference to a spurned gay lover. That sort of thing seems to take on a life of its own in the media. Some reporter at some liberal mainstream media outlet likely decided that ‘not ruling anything out’ gave tacit permission to make such a reference.”
She didn’t like his answer, primarily because it smacked of the truth, which meant he’d made no inappropriate public statements. That irritated her. She wanted him to be guilty of as many screw-ups as possible.
“And where is Ice Skater’s satellite truck, Mr. Natujay?”
“At the company garage in lower Manhattan.”
“And where is Ice Skater, Mr. Natujay?”
“Unknown, but I am confident that Copper Miner will eventually encounter him at Key West where the daughter lives. And when he does, as I’ve said, he has supreme authority to get the job done on Ice Skater, as well as Teagarden.”
“What is Ice Skater’s state of mind?”
“Unknown.”
“What are his intentions?”
“Unknown.”
“What is the status of Teagarden’s daughter?”
“She’s adhering to her routine. As I said, I have her under a Class-1 covert surveillance. Her whereabouts and all her communications are being monitored. She can’t leave Key West without our knowledge.”
“She’s a Navy pilot. Are you monitoring every airplane the Navy owns?”
“She’s currently a robo-pilot only, in charge of teaching Navy pilots how to make the transition from cockpit to remote piloting. The principal aircraft is the X-47, which is presently mothballed. But she cannot board a plane and depart her base.”
“And the media? Are they
on her doorstep?”
“No. It seems they haven’t learned of her existence, and she’s not contacting them. As I said, she’s keeping her head down. That’s to our advantage. When Copper Miner arrives, he’ll bump her to a Class-2—overt—stakeout with all the consequence of full in-your-face psychological surveillance. At that point, she will panic, which will of course expose Teagarden and probably flush Ice Skater as well. Unfortunately, it could also result in her going public, which risks a full-blown media gangbang. That would bear mixed results.”
“Mixed result? Mr. Natujay, you’re telling me that if we have a media circus on the Dear John File, it would be a—‘mixed result’?”
His sphincter muscle tightened. He had not meant media circus regarding the DJF, but only regarding the daughter. He was trying to hold his own, but she was looking for anything she could get. The interview was not going well and there was no way for him to make it better, except to be as honest as possible. He cleared his throat and looked away from her to help maintain his composure.
“Copper Miner knows how to execute his double grant of supreme authority on Teagarden and Ice Skater, then exit immediately, leaving the liberal media in the dust. Once done, the press will be easier to manipulate when and if they do get involved.”
“And if Copper Miner is not as surgical as you hope?”
He’d had enough. He wanted to push back, but wasn’t certain he could summon the courage. He resorted to boilerplate DFC language: “Ms. Trippler, all members of the DFC are trained to be as surgical as possible when working any case granted supreme authority. If they fail, if things get messy, we address that on an as needed basis. But until that happens, the nature of the mess and the nature of our response remains unknown.”
She glanced briefly at the stenographer and director of personnel before returning to him.
“Do you think this meeting has any purpose, other than to discuss your calamity this morning at the Watergate?”
“I do not know, Ms. Trippler.”
“Well, Mr. Natujay, let me fill you in.” She slowly tapped a stylus on her netbook, reversing it end-over-end. “You have too many unknowns.” He moved to interrupt her, but her right hand shot up. “Following your mess at the Watergate Hotel, and because of too many unknowns, you will be offered a choice. You may retire or you may stay on the job. If you stay, you will face departmental charges of rank incompetence, which may ultimately translate into formal criminal charges of treason, sabotage and violation of American national security. Not to mention termination of pension.”
She stopped tapping her stylus and stared contemptuously at the black man who’d been with the bureau nearly forty years. She realized again that he actually wasn’t that much older than she. As a recruit, he’d once worked with her father, Agent Mark Trippler, a founding manager of the original Operation Over Easy. Nonetheless, there seemed to be a schism she couldn’t shake. To her, Natujay was, and always would be, old school.
Natujay glanced at Ronald Wheeler, the director of personnel, whose facial expression seemed to be trying to tell him something. He hoped it was something along the lines of, “this too, shall pass.” He turned back to Trippler.
“I’ll take retirement,” Natujay said with a sigh.
“A wise choice, Mr. Natujay.” She clipped the pen to the inside of the legal pad holding her netbook and closed the folder. “Mr. Wheeler will take you down to personnel on the second floor where you will complete the appropriate papers. Then you will leave the building immediately. A small commemorative party may be held for you among your office colleagues at a later time, but not before next month.”
The stenographer stopped writing.
Walter Natujay rose and followed Personnel Director Wheeler from the tenth floor conference room.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
“C’mon, Todd, this is damn important.”
“Speaker Alderman, please watch your language. We do not speak that way in this office.”
“I apologize, Todd. You know, I grew up on the bayous of my state and, well, that’s just the way we talk down there in God’s country.”
“This entire country is God’s country, my friend.”
“Yes, of course. Tell you what, I’ll pretend I’m in church. That way I’m guaranteed to behave myself by not swearing.”
He considered his next move while looking at the nearby wall. It was decorated with individual framed photos of Congressman Toddman Lee Gaynor next to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama. Curiously, there was no photo of him standing with the present occupant of the Oval Office. There were two prominent crucifixes, a display of the Ten Commandments and a blue-eyed Jesus glancing skyward.
The elder statesman smiled appreciatively at Alderman’s agreement to cease using four-letter words and to consider his office as good as church. He returned to using first names.
“Well, it’s like this, if you’re right, and this file is a light shone upon dark chapters of America’s hidden misdeeds of the last century, then it shall be like a plague upon the lives of our countrymen. It’s as simple as that. We’re not here to create the plague, Henry.”
“Todd, we’re here to serve the people.”
“Au contraire,” the Republican said, raising his voice and speaking in a harsh tone for the first time. “Listen to me, my good French-American friend from the bayous of Louisiana and from the opposite side of the aisle. We are charged with the job of making improvements, of building-up, of making people feel good, letting them know tomorrow is going to be as good as or better than yesterday. We must never worsen, tear down or make Americans feel badly about the history of this wonderful, God-fearing, Christian country.”
The Speaker of the House tried to force his racing thoughts to settle. He knew that swaying the most senior member of congress meant showing deference to his ego. Doing that meant arriving in person, first thing in the morning. It was the only way. The man was thoroughly self-absorbed in his own righteousness, not to mention also being the vainest man on the Hill. A phone call simply would not have had the same impact, especially not on a matter this important.
Like most political insiders, he knew the real reason Gaynor hated computers. It was because they removed the human dimension, what most people call face-to-face communication. If the human dimension was removed, so was the spiritual dimension, what Gaynor called fellowship. For him, removing fellowship was the same as removing God. Gaynor deeply feared that the continuing tilt toward an electronic society was a dangerously sloping road toward total godlessness. In the 1960s, the Bible Belt labeled it a push-button society. In the 1980s, the religious right began calling it liberal media. Now, many among the evangelical masses called it the World Wide Evil and the iDevil.
That’s why Alderman was there unannounced, sitting at that moment in Gaynor’s penthouse. Yet he knew it was only a first step. He needed to reach the old man on a level that would have real meaning, which probably meant drawing on some biblical reference, preferably a lesson taken straight from a street-preaching rabbi in Jerusalem. Being himself a lapsed Catholic, and in a frantically worried state of mind, Alderman could think of nothing.
“Todd, did you see the entries from December 1963?” he asked, stalling for time, trying to think of the best way to appeal to Gaynor’s religion and simultaneously to his vanity.
“Which in particular, Henry?”
“Any of them. Pick one and read it to me.”
“All right, my friend.”
While searching, he gave a clumsy shuffle of the papers with fingers so pale, thin and bent with arthritis they resembled broken cigarettes. An aide stepped forward to help.
“May I select a document for you, Congressman?”
“Thank you.”
He began reading the page handed to him by the aide: “Tuesday, December 24, 1963. Well what do you know, Henry, I just happened to land on Christmas Eve. That’s a good
omen.” He adjusted his glasses and continued, “Dear John, thank God no one is questioning you or your Operation Over Easy. If they were, well, I just can’t contemplate it. Your motive, of course, is wholly selfless because the bureau learned through covert means that he would—not—occupy Vietnam after the ’64 election. And America simply cannot afford to be soft on Communism. I agree with you on that. We must defend the little, far off places.
“But assassination? And then assassination of the assassin?
“Oh, John. On one level it was a brilliantly executed plot worthy of Napoleon and exemplary of your astonishing mind and even more astonishing powers. But oh, my love, I fear that all you have done is make Robert, that little s-h-i-t brother of his, a shoe-in for the job four years from now.”
Gaynor paused and wiped spittle from his mouth. He turned to his staff.
“I beg everyone’s pardon,” he said. “I spelled out that bad word; I should simply have omitted it. Please forgive me.” He turned back to Alderman. “Henry, it’s signed I love you, CAT, December, 1963.”
After a moment, Alderman broke the silence. “JFK was before my time, but you first came into office with President Kennedy. Todd, you were a part of that whole, feel-good youth movement back in the day.”
Congressman Gaynor squinted to look at the wall of artfully framed photos. Not far from the image of him with President Kennedy was another photo of him standing between J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson.
“It’s true, Henry,” Gaynor said. “I was a Democrat for eight years. Then I had a change of heart for the ’68 election, and I’ve now served this great nation as a Republican for fifty-one years. It’s not always easy, but I’m proud of my record.”
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Encrypted Field Communication
NSA Apache Code Ofc Baltimore, MD/Washington, DC/CoinTelSatOrbit53/All Points
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