Murder in Foggy Bottom

by Margaret Truman

  As they spoke, he found himself intrigued with her manner. There was an unmistakable near-arrogance, although a better term might be confidence, and lots of it. At the same time, there seemed to be a playfulness behind her questions and comments, testing him, putting him on trial; conviction or acquittal, he knew, wouldn’t be long in coming. He decided to preempt being flunked.

  “Want to get out of here and go somewhere for dinner?”

  “That depends.”

  “Depends on what, my choice of restaurant?”

  “Depends on whether there’s a Mrs. Pauling at home thinking her husband’s working late.”

  “There isn’t. Is there a Mr. Mumford doing the same?”

  “No.”

  “Then we’ve cleared the hurdles. French? Italian?”

  “British, some German on my mother’s side.”

  “I meant—”

  “I know what you meant. Steak. I’m in the mood.”

  “Morton’s?”

  “I’m beginning to like you—Max.”

  That was eight months ago. There had been plenty of dinners, and an occasional weekend away in the country when she wasn’t chasing the elusive prize bird with her friends, whom Max considered flaky but nice enough. He’d declined invitations to join the club. His bird was his Cessna 172, which he flew most weekends, even enticing Jessica to go up with him a few times.

  “Your pleasure?” he asked after they’d gone through the motions of examining Primi Piatti’s menu.

  “Red snapper,” she told the waiter, “grilled thoroughly.”

  “Ossobuco,” Pauling said.

  “So, where are you going?” she asked after they’d chosen a wine.

  “Moscow.”

  Her naturally arched eyebrows went up even higher. “The planes today?”

  He nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Why am I going to Moscow? Colonel Barton told me to.”

  “Because the missiles were probably Russian.”

  He smiled. “You have sources.”

  “Of course. Barton told my boss.”

  “Loose lips sink ships.”

  “Ashmead is speaking tonight.”

  “I know. He had a meeting at six. The secretary was going to it.”

  “What will you do in Moscow, Max?”

  “Try to find out who handed over the missiles and in whose hands they ended up, provided they really were Russian. Actually, Barton told me to just be there in case I’m needed.”

  She fell silent.

  “Hear anything from your ex?” Pauling asked as their salad dishes were cleared.

  “Skip? Scope?”

  “ ‘Scope’?”

  “That’s a code name Skip used years ago when he was working undercover.” She laughed gently. “Better than ‘Meathead,’ which I sometimes called him. Have I heard from him lately? No. He’s probably in disguise, working underground somewhere.” Her former husband, Donald, or “Skip,” Traxler, was an FBI special agent who’d spent most of his career with the Bureau working in a special covert operations unit.

  Pauling laughed.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Something you said shortly after we met. You said the problem with the marriage was that Skip worked under too many of the wrong covers.”

  “Did I say that? It’s true. Of course, there was more to it than uncovering other women. His machoness—is there such a word? There should be—I wasn’t a willing contributor to his machoness.”

  “You were too strong a woman.”

  “I was not a subservient woman.”

  “So I’ve noticed.”

  “Besides, we weren’t cut from the James Carville–Mary Matalin mold. Skip’s a raving right-wing conservative. Maybe you’ve also noticed I’m more of a knee-jerk-liberal model.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I’m surprised the marriage lasted as long as it did, almost two years. Out of that time we were together, maybe, two months. It could have ended on our wedding night. When are you leaving?”

  “A few days, but I’ll be out of town before I head for Moscow.”

  “Oh? Where?”

  His answer was to ignore the question, no surprise to Jessica. It was always that way with the men in her life—mysterious trips, questions ignored, living in the shadows.

  “How’s your ex-spouse?” she asked.

  “Fine. The boys are getting older, almost young men now. Doris is dating a nice accountant. Coffee? Dessert?”

  “There’s no accounting for taste. Probably a good idea. Let’s go back and have a going-away party for you, but not too late. I have a feeling tomorrow’s going to be a busy one.”

  “I’ll set my wrist alarm.”

  “Have I bruised your machoness?”

  “Bruise me anywhere you want, Ms. Mumford.”

  Later that night, after he’d left her apartment, she lay awake in bed for a long time smelling him, feeling the cool dampness of the sheets where their sweat had pooled, enjoying the slight soreness between her thighs.

  But her thoughts weren’t unmixed.

  She’d fallen in love with Skip Traxler, the handsome, young FBI special agent who lived his penumbral life on the edge, always in the shadows, always away on some assignment he couldn’t discuss with her, and probably wouldn’t have even if he could. She never knew who would walk through the door when he returned from an undercover assignment: the idealistic special agent, or “one of them,” a man acting and thinking like the lowlife he’d infiltrated, an actor unable to get out of the role upon leaving the stage after a performance. She knew that was common with all law enforcement people who went underground to get the goods on the bad guys. The Bureau had a special psychological unit specifically to help agents in that situation. A nice idea, having a shrink handy when your husband emerged from the nether lands acting like a Mafia capo or Arab wheeler-dealer. Maybe she should have seen a shrink, too. Once, when he’d come home after spending two months with an Irish gang in New York, his demeanor for weeks was distant and cold, frightening in its intensity. He’d been given the customary leave after emerging from underground— “decompression time,” it was called—and spent it looking like the gang member he’d become, never even attempting to shed that guise and return to being Special Agent Traxler—until he received orders to report to Quantico for three weeks of special training. She was glad to see Skip go that time, relieved that his menacing presence had been removed from her life if only for three weeks. Menacing. Her fear of her husband grew each time they were together, an unstated, unsettling threat he exuded without acting it out with her, laying dormant like water close to the boiling point, simmering, never bubbling over but the hissing and steam offering evidence that it was there.

  The divorce was easily accomplished, uncontested, no kids to fight over, separate bank accounts that stayed that way, divvy up the cars, sell him her half share in the West Virginia cabin they’d bought as a vacation retreat, sign the papers, I wish you well. No happiness that her first marriage was short-lived and over quickly, but a profound sense of relief in its place.

  Now, it was Max Pauling in her life, and bed, ex-CIA operative in Moscow, independent to a fault, good-looking and rugged and manly without flaunting it, going back to his sub-rosa life in Moscow for God knows how long, living dangerously and loving it, loving it more than her, she knew.

  Why am I drawn to such men? she wondered as a jet from Reagan National screamed over the apartment building, causing her to flinch. She sometimes knew the answer, although was reluctant to admit it even to herself. The fact was, she lived what she considered a dull life, desk-bound and classroom-bound, spicing it up by pursuing little winged creatures and marking them off in the latest edition of Birds of North America, analyzing information at State each day that had been gathered by more adventuresome souls.

  The pension. Was that all there was to look forward to? There were worse things—or were there?

  The phone rang.

 
“Jess, things are heating up here. We need you.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Forty minutes later she was at her desk reading secured reports from the embassy in Moscow regarding the Russian government’s reaction to the initial charge that the missiles had been manufactured there. Dry words on dry paper. Indignant reactions by Russian officials, transcripts of Russian radio and television broadcasts, newspaper stories, long, verbose analyses from embassy “experts”—plenty of material to wade through. It was her job to read them once, twice, then read them through again, trying to discover any clues in what was said or, just as important, not said, and to write up her discoveries, speculations, insights into brief, pithy reports and, sometimes, longer analyses. She was good at this, reading between the lines, and behind them, and she knew it, which didn’t help when the paper traffic turned from stream into flood at times like this.

  “Coffee?” she was asked by a colleague.

  “Thanks, yes,” Jessica said, “God yes,” wishing she were back in Primi Piatti working on a second Negroni.

  Part Two

  11

  The Next Day

  The J. Edgar Hoover Building

  The multiagency meeting took place at two in the FBI’s seldom-used Strategic Information and Operations Center, a secure command center. Present were representatives of the FBI, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the CIA; the White House’s national security advisor, Tony Cammanati; Colonel Walter Barton, director of the State Department’s Counterterrorism Division; the FAA’s second in command; and the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general in charge of liaison with city and state law enforcement. The rectangular table at which they sat was surrounded by classified computers and communications equipment.

  Joe Harris, the FBI’s counterterrorism chief, chaired the meeting. “Let’s go around the room,” he said. “Give us what you have so far.”

  NTSB’s Peter Mullin led with an update of his agency’s portion of the investigation. The wreckage of the three planes was being assembled in command centers near the involved airports. It occurred to everyone in the room that with the cause of the crashes now apparent, the safety agency’s activities were rendered academic. There would be no finding of design-induced or pilot error, nor would they look for evidence of metal fatigue, instrument malfunction, or a runaway aircraft-control surface. Missiles had brought down the planes. No doubt about that. Crash site evidence was conclusive.

  Still, NTSB had to go through with much of its regular examination of the crashes as though any of those causes could have been at play. Mullin, well aware of what others were thinking, ended his brief presentation: “Even though we all know what caused those aircraft to crash, determining the attitude, altitude, and angle of attack will be useful in painting a more complete picture of what happened.”

  “Peter is right,” Harris said. “We’re trying to pinpoint the exact location of each of the shooters by determining the angle of attack, as with an angle of entry.”

  Justice’s liaison with local law enforcement spoke next.

  “We’re getting feedback on an hourly basis from police departments and emergency crisis centers across the country,” he said. “New York has activated its center in the World Trade Center. They’re monitoring subways, water supplies, and sewage systems. All known terrorist and kook groups are under heightened surveillance. Hawaii, Chicago, and Los Angeles have gone to emergency status, too. The problem is, they’re all stretched thin because they don’t know what they’re guarding against.”

  “The Pentagon’s liaison office with civilian emergency crisis authorities is swamped too,” Harris added.

  “Known terrorist groups?” Cammanati asked Harris. “Still no one claiming credit?”

  Joe Harris ran his hand over his shaved head and grimaced. “No. We’ve got our list of possibles. I believe they were sent over to you about an hour ago.”

  “We got it,” the Justice Department representative said, “and we’re distributing it to state attorneys general. They’ll disseminate to local law enforcement in their states.”

  “The president is concerned that local cops don’t start fingering individuals or groups just because they’re of a certain ethnic persuasion,” Cammanati said. “Racial or ethnic profiling big-time.”

  “We’re worried about that, too,” Harris said, “but there’s not much we can do about it short of taking control of every police department in the country.”

  Harris turned to the CIA representative at the meeting. “Want to tell us, Sam, what progress, if any, your people are making with foreign terrorist organizations?”

  “It’s all input at this point,” he said. “We’ve been keeping tabs on the leading groups for years, but no intelligence has come through pointing to any single one as a prime suspect. We’re working every group we can, Sheik Abdel-Rahman’s followers, the mujahideen, the Islamic Jihad, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Algerian groups, El Noure, Bachir Hannaqui, the FIS, Osama bin Laden. Nothing tangible yet.”

  “We’ve got a major problem,” the FAA’s emissary said.

  All eyes went to him.

  “This is raising hell with the airlines. Passengers are canceling left and right, domestically and internationally. They’re facing—the airlines—an economic disaster of unprecedented proportions. And it would be even worse if these missile throwers had hit a heavy, a 747 or—”

  “Can’t say I blame those passengers,” the assistant attorney general said. “I’m flying to New York later today on one of those puddle jumpers and I’m not looking forward to it.”

  The FAA rep ignored him. “The point is, as long as there’s a nut out there with some sort of homemade rocket launcher—”

  “Three nuts,” someone corrected.

  “One nut, three nuts, thirty, it doesn’t make any difference. Those responsible had better be brought to justice before we have a crippled airline industry.”

  NTSB’s Peter Mullin silently thought that the FAA spokesman was acting true to form, more concerned with the airline industry’s economic health than what his agency was charged with, keeping the skies safe for the millions of passengers who depended on it.

  “The missiles,” the attendee from Justice said. “They were Russian? Chinese? Homemade?”

  “Unofficially Russian,” Harris said. “Weapons men from Wright Patterson in Ohio and the Naval Air Warfare Center in California are on their way to work with the Pentagon’s weapons guys.”

  The meeting accomplished little, as far as State’s Colonel Barton was concerned. No one seemed to have an inkling of who might have been behind the missile attacks, and judging from the comments made by the people in the room, there wasn’t any breakthrough on the horizon. Still, he reminded himself as he left with the others to return to his office at State, it had been only a day since the three planes fell from the sky, hardly time to build a case against anyone or any group without a voluntary, prideful confession.

  The FBI’s Harris and National Security Advisor Cammanati stayed behind. When they were alone in the room, Harris pulled two pieces of paper from a briefcase at his feet and laid them in front of Cammanati. Cammanati picked up the first and read it over half-glasses.

  “SA-7 Grail—9M32—Shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile—Entered Soviet service in 1966—Optical sight—IR seeker activated after sighting—Four feet long—20 pounds—Range 45 to 5,600 m—Speed, Mach 1.95—2.5 kg high-explosive fragmentation warhead, 5½ pounds.”

  Cammanati laid the paper down and looked at Harris. “There’s no question about this?” he said.

  Harris shook his head. “The Pentagon says the missile fragments from the New York site were large and in surprisingly readable shape.”

  “What about the others—Boise, San Jose?”

  “I got a preliminary report on the Idaho missile just before the meeting. Same batch.”

  “Batch?”

  “There’s a batch number on them. These guys weren’t
too bright. If you’re going to use a gun, file the serial number off before you do. They didn’t bother eradicating the batch numbers.”

  “Soviet-made,” Cammanati said to himself, standing and going to the far end of the room. He faced the wall for what seemed to Harris to be minutes, turned in a few seconds, slowly shook his head, and asked flatly, “Who else knows this?”

  “Just those who need to. The CIA. They’ll have to be brought into it. The Soviet involvement. Same with State. We’re out of the picture when it involves a foreign power.”

  Cammanati cocked his head. His expression said he knew better. The Federal Bureau of Investigation might be limited under its charter to investigating domestic crime, but that seldom stopped it from poking into international cases, to the chagrin of the CIA.

  Harris didn’t comment further.

  “I’m meeting with the president and some of his cabinet when I leave here,” Cammanati said. “I’ll take your notes with me. The other piece of paper—I didn’t read it.” He went to Harris and picked up the second sheet. On it was a list of names:

  Aryan Nation

  Christian Identity

  CSA

  The Freedom Alliance

  Americans for Justice

  Silent Brotherhood

  The Jasper Project

  Nazi National Alliance

  Rally for America

  The Ku Klux Klan

  “Suspects?” Cammanati asked, shoving the two sheets into his briefcase.

  “Right.”

  “All domestic right-wing groups.”

  “Mainly. Hate groups, homegrown.”

  “You have information that points to one of them?”

  “Information? No. But we do have an ongoing investigation that might result in useful info.”

  “How soon?”

  A shrug from Harris. “Probably not soon enough to please you and the president—or the FAA and the airlines.”

  Cammanati displayed a rare smile. “Commerce marches on, Joe,” he said ruefully. “Tell me about this ongoing investigation.”

  “No can do, at least not yet. Too much at risk.”