by Tom Fugate
When you needed people who were more than squeaky clean you called us. Our people might do nasty things and be really scary, but the things we do go with the job. Everyone at the GIA has taken at least one oath to uphold and defend the Constitution and most have taken that oath several times for both military and Federal law enforcement. There were rumors that someone in our agency had once taken a bribe and broken that trust, but there was no hard data to back that up. All though there were a couple of people still listed as missing in action since the 1920’s and 30’s, something to do with Prohibition. Myself, I am not sure if they were missing, well they were missing to the world at large. They may have been sent to a modern version of the prison from the “Count of Monte Cristo”.
Today we would call that a black site and talk about extraordinary rendition. In the mid 80’s we did not mention places like that even in jest. In my line of work a lot of things happen that never officially happened. For some crimes death is too quick a punishment and so some of the perpetrators just disappeared. I guess that a part of our motto says a lot about the attitudes in the agency, “That This Nation Shall Survive.” So far as I had been able to find out the motto was one of the oldest things about our agency. The history that I had managed to find told me that the name had changed many times but the job never had. We have very few people who are field operatives like I am. Most of the people that other agencies see are doing exactly what our official charter calls for. These people are acting as liaisons with various agencies. Liaison work like that is seldom in the field. More often it involves directing the show.
I finished going through the material. The plan was still sketchy in my mind, as in thin like a rough drawing, not sketchy as in scary. I could get started without a lot of specialized gear. The real trick with field gear for covert ops is that it appears not to be gear for covert ops. Useful items must look ordinary. The really neat gadgets from the spy movies are usually not practical. Yeah, that automatic lock picker could be useful, but it would make people wonder why you had it. It is easier not to have to explain odds and ends of equipment to local cops. You tend to acquire the really specialized stuff as you need it and then get it out of your possession. Some of the really great devices tend to be, at least slightly, illegal. I finished reading the material and went to see Henry, our documents man.
He was working at his desk when I entered his office. “Have you been briefed on what I need for my new assignment?”
“Yes, most of it is stock stuff and I have it almost ready. The new license plates for your car are in the works. Everything is from existing legends so the names, addresses and credit cards are already in all the right databases.” He grinned broadly as he spoke. He loved this kind of thing. Legends are basically fake lives that can be used to create identities for undercover operations. Documentation was simpler in the days before computer databases. Back then it could take days to verify something as simple as a driver’s license from out of state.
“I will bring everything up to you when I have it finished.” Henry had said to me once with a big grin that it was not forgery if you were doing it for the government. He was probably right about that, at least from a legal standpoint. Making fake ID cards had been what had gotten him into government service. Actually getting caught making false ids had gotten him into government service. I think some of his phonies were better than the real things.
“Thanks, if I am not in my office I will be with Sarge, time to see what gadgets he has for me.” We both laughed at that. Everyone here got a kick out of the gadgets that agents were issued in the movies. I had never even been issued a secret decoder ring, but I did have a phone in my car. Those early cell phones were large and clunky with not so good coverage outside of a few cities, but communications were getting easier. I had used a portable satellite communication rig about four years before. That piece of kit had been slightly larger than a big shoe box.
“Okay, I will find you. I will have someone switch out the tags when they are ready.” The tags were being done on a vacuform machine. A plastic sheet would be formed into the license plate after being heated and vacuum formed onto a mold. This is the same way they make things like license plates for movies. The difference was that the tags we made would be in all of the right computer systems and would match up properly to my assumed identity. I headed down to the subbasement to see Sergeant-Major Samuel Johnson. His mother had been an English teacher, which explained the name. He was waiting for me when I walked into his lair.
“Hello Sam. Got anything for me?” He preferred Sam, Sarge, or Sergeant-Major. I had taken to calling him Sam. Something about him was like some of my uncles. It just felt right to call him that. Besides, his attitude toward me had gotten much more fatherly now that I had been shot at more than a few times.
“Your usual assortment of long guns is in your car. I included some things that go boom and some smokers. There are also several two-way radios and some other small and useful items.” His grin was just plain scary when he began to talk about explosives. I had researched part of his war record, some of it was still classified after 40 years, and had found that he had been responsible for some very loud noises in Europe and North Africa from 1941-45. The rumor around the agency was that he had blown up several street cars, buses, trains and two banks in downtown Berlin. That may not have been true, but it was possible.
“Thanks.”
“There is one other thing that I want you to take and keep handy.” He took a small box off of his desk and handed it to me. I opened the fitted wood case. Inside the box sat a very small revolver and a box of ammunition for it.
“That is a North American Arms .22 Magnum revolver in stainless steel. It holds five rounds of .22 Magnums and at close range it is very effective. Keep that with you all the time. If you are naked in the shower have that gun with you. There is a lanyard in the case that will even let you wear the gun under your shirt. It will also fit very well in the watch pocket of blue jeans. This trip you are dealing with people who hold no value on any life other than their own. This is for that last option situation when violence is unavoidable and unexpected. This is for the time when you do what you have to in order to survive.”
“How well does it shoot?”
He laughed, “It is not a gun to spend hours shooting, but it is reliable and effective. Let’s go fire some rounds.”
I picked up the box and left his office and headed to the door of our indoor shooting range. He was right behind me. I grabbed a pair of shooting glasses from a bin and a set of shooter’s ear muffs from another. We set a target at five yards and I got started. I planned only to fire the mini revolver. Sam knew that I was practicing with everything else at least once a day. When I get bored I like things that go bang and office duty can get boring when you have had the adrenaline rush of field work. People trying to kill you gets the blood pumping. The little revolver was no target gun, but I could put shots into center mass of a person sized target out to about seven yards reliably. You really hope you never need a holdout gun, but if you do need it you need it very badly. We policed up our brass and cleaned the guns. Yes, I said guns, I had decided to practice with more than just the little pocket piece. Marksmanship is a very perishable skill.
“Thanks for the revolver. I really hope I never need it,” I said to Sam as I got ready to leave his office.
“Son, you take care of family, even if they aren’t blood.” That was the most sentimental thing that I had ever heard Sergeant-Major Samuel Johnson, United States Army, retired say. I think he was worried about me. When guys like him, who had been in some of the deepest sticky brown stuff imaginable, get worried you had better be worried yourself. He gave a fatherly pat on the shoulder as I walked out.
Chapter 2
As I walked back up the stairs to my office I thought about what Sam had said about taking care of family. I guess we were family in a very real way. We were a small outfit where you either knew well or had at least met everyone. Probably
one of the reasons that the GIA had been kept small was so that everyone at least recognized everyone else. Breaking the faith with a nameless stranger on the other side of the country would be much easier than doing it to someone you knew. Even the personnel in our field offices rotated back through the DC office on a regular basis. Anyone who had the mental state in place to easily “do unto” people had probably never made it past initial screenings. The other thing about being small is that you usually have more time to fill planned vacancies and the screening can go places that it never goes with a huge organization.
Henry brought me the false documents. The name on them was Lee Williams. One thing about false identities is that if you are hiding out do not use any part of your original name. The common mistakes are to rearrange your name, use a family name and use an old address or similar things. Those are the type of false names that people who hunt people look for first. When going undercover you either have to use a first name that you will respond to automatically or train yourself really hard to answer to the new name. Since I was just trying to conceal my real identity and not hide from people hunting me we went with my real first name. If you are dealing with dangerous and paranoid people you do not want to seem lost when they call you by name. Drug smugglers are paranoid enough due to the nature of the work. Combine that state of mind with a large dose of cocaine and other illicit chemical substances and you get people who just shoot. They may not even bother to ask questions later.
I began to get legendary. No, that is not an ego trip, it is what I call learning the legend of an identity. The legend is the little details like home town, mother’s and father’s names, old high school or college, did you serve in the military and if so what units. Then there are the other details that can range from jail and prison records to old associates. Having a very good memory is essential for doing this work. Your memory does not have to be photographic but it better be very good. Forgetting details can be a fatal mistake. People living and working outside the law probably run better background checks than a lot of businesses. A business that does not do their homework might get a bad employee. A criminal enterprise that does not do their checking will probably end up ceasing to exist.
The high points of this legend were high school in Georgia and some community college. After that Lee Williams had joined the army and managed to serve a tour in Special Forces before getting a less than honorable discharge for some peccadilloes that occurred outside the service. Less than honorable rather than dishonorable was a bit important in this instance. The identity had to seem shady but with no real criminal past. He had done something wrong enough for that type of discharge and not yet bad enough for criminal charges. The idea we wanted out there was that he had done something wrong but there was no real hard evidence and so the less than honorable rather than a dishonorable fit very well. If anyone managed to see the military files they would show implication in criminal and drug activity, but not enough evidence for criminal charges.
We wanted the targets of our investigation to think that Lee Williams was either down on his luck or very good at what he did. There had to be an explanation of why he had no significant criminal past in the system. A man really good at smuggling might never have been caught. A man down on his luck might be desperate enough to be trying something different or new. If they thought it was a bit of both that would work also. My new identity’s current line of work was import/export of a less than legal variety. Lee Williams’s special area of expertise was smuggling things out of the country. If it needed transporting then Lee Williams could be the man you wanted.
I spent the rest of the afternoon going over my legend and reading the file that General Fleming had given me. I would have a handler from our organization so that I would not have to break cover to meet with any of the other agencies involved. After an initial briefing, which would occur in Atlanta and not anywhere in Florida, I would be pretty much autonomous. There are many tales of agents being found out because their bosses tried to micromanage. Field work is like Jazz music; you start with a framework and improvise from there. Mr. Murphy’s first law of combat: “No plan survives first contact.” Adaptation is the key rule for any covert agent. Stay true to the objective even if the plan goes to hell in a hand basket; just come up with a new plan on the fly. The only rule that is more important? Know when to get the hell out!
My meeting in Atlanta was in two days. I finished up at the office and went out for a good steak dinner. Getting home early I packed some things and got to bed early after I had called my parents. I didn’t call them out of some sense of premonition, but because I tried to call them at least once a week. We talked for a while and then I told them that I was going to be out of town on business for a while and that I would call when I could. This was the truth with nothing else added. Tell the truth whenever possible, it is easier to keep straight. At six am I was up and ready to go so I phoned the duty desk at the agency and left word that I was now on the job and hitting the road.
Over coffee in my kitchen I looked over a road atlas to figure out how I was going to travel to Atlanta. Since I had a day to play with I headed west to the Interstate 81 corridor and then south. I swung off the interstate at Christiansburg, Virginia and took a drive over to the Virginia Tech campus. I just drove through Blacksburg around the campus and took Highway 460 back to the interstate. I did that sometimes, just drove through Blacksburg and remembered college. Back on Interstate 81 and southbound I drove into Tennessee and turned west when I got to I-40. Stopping near Knoxville, Tennessee I spent the night. The next day saw me heading west on I-40 south again on I-75 toward Atlanta.
My meeting was to take place in a nondescript office building in a business park on the north side of the city. It was late afternoon when I pulled into the parking lot. The building was the business equivalent of a safe house. The ownership trail was more convoluted than a bowl of Chinese noodles. There were at least six different cover companies for at least four government agencies. People could come and go at all hours and not stand out. Two of the fronts were listed as computer and electronic service providers and those businesses kept weird hours. By 1985 most people had some idea of the really weird hours that computer nerds would keep so bodies moving through at 3AM raised no eyebrows in the neighborhood.
The people I was meeting had been there for several hours when I arrived. The preliminary background material should be mostly filled in before I walked into the room. When I pulled up there was a varied mix of vehicles. Unfortunately there were the three cars that almost blew the protective camouflage away. Sitting right near a main entrance were those three cars that screamed GOVERNMENT vehicle, worse yet they screamed UNMARKED POLICE CAR. Parked very conspicuously were a Crown Victoria, a Chevy Impala and an Oldsmobile. People incapable of the simplest elements of covert ops should avoid involvement in covert ops. I may have groaned out loud as I saw the cars. The only hope was that people would assume that they were government cars that were there for some business purpose. If someone had been tailed to this location then going undercover could be a very short assignment. I pulled around to the back of the building without ever having come to a stop at the front. Rule number something or other, act like you belong there. To any observer there was no direct connection between me and those vehicles. As I drove around the building I was looking out for any suspicious vehicles that might have people in them. Since I saw none I parked and entered the building through the rear entrance. Deliberate bends in the walls hid the door from view of any of the parking areas.
I punched an access code into an electronic lock on the back entrance of one of the computer service companies. The lock clicked open and I walked inside. To my right was the entrance to a conference room. I started to broadcast my very best ‘bad ass’ aura and attacked the room. Well, I moved in forcefully. There were nine people sitting around the oval conference table.
“Who are the morons who drove to a clandestine meeting in unmarked police cars?” Three hand
s went slowly up. “Another breach of security like that and this operation is over. You do realize that someone could have followed you from Florida.” From the looks on the faces I could tell that the thought had not crossed their minds. “The people we are going after have more money than a lot of small countries. Hiring people to follow cars leaving police and Federal buildings is paid for out of petty cash. Hell, they may even pay college students to follow people and make them think it is some sort of marketing research. Do not assume that you are not being followed. In this situation being followed is the same as a gun lying on a desk. The gun is loaded till you prove otherwise and you are being followed, probably even if you prove otherwise. Do not assume you are being followed, know that yes, you are being followed. If you don’t know how to deal with that situation then you need to get lessons from your senior undercover people.” My voice was hard and cold on those last few words.
“You can’t talk to us that way. Do you know who we are?” I could tell from the speaker’s demeanor and suit that he was either an elected official or a political appointee. He was trying to show the room how big and important he was. I had seen photographs in my briefing packet of the people who were supposed to attend and his face was not among them. Since no one had told me about any new attendees I could safely assume that there were none. The odds were that he had hitched a ride with one of the scheduled attendees. He had the look of someone who would not have driven themselves.