by Walter Grant
The janitorial business was the perfect cover; with almost free access to Vandenberg they could leave the bulk of the narcotics on the air base, removing only the amounts needed to fill orders by dealers. No one would have reason to suspect a legitimate business, known to have normal night and wee morning operating hours, with service contracts all along the coast, to be dealing in drugs. Pablo knew only because of lifelong friendships, some reaching into areas he was not eager to discuss or proud to acknowledge.
Max could only guess at the percentage of profit Bell was allowed to keep for himself and what he did with his share. But Gilbird, no doubt, used his share to fund espionage.
Since Bell was unaware of Gilbird’s whereabouts, it only made sense that his connection with Spic and Span was strictly cocaine and he was ignorant of Gilbird’s involvement with the KGB. The questions for Max remained the same; who controlled the Communist cell and what was their objective? The openness with which they were operating, the chances they were taking and the total disregard for practiced methods of the KGB were in themselves scary. This could be one last do-or-die operation for the Communists. President Reagan had been tightening the screws on the Soviets, forcing them to spend over 25 percent of their gross national product on weapons buildup just to stay in the race. The weapons buildup plus the expense of their invasion of Afghanistan was bringing their economy to its knees. The citizens were complaining openly, the Kremlin was beginning to lose control, and cracks were starting to show in the iron curtain. Gorbachev had shown a willingness to engage in disarmament talks, but kept backing away from the table. Possibly he was awaiting the outcome of the KGB operation here at Vandenberg to either make or break. Max still didn’t have a clue, just instinct, but his instinct told him whatever was going down was in its final stage and time was running out for any hopes of undermining their plans. He started to perspire although the night was cool and the driver’s window on the TransAM was down.
The Pacific Telephone building on Palo Verde Avenue was dark except for floodlights in the rear, where several repair vans were parked, and a single light above the door designated Service Entrance. The door did not open when Max tugged at the handle. A small sign beside the door read “Ring for Entry.” Max pushed the button underneath the sign, and waited. Nothing happened. The door still would not open. He was about to push the button again when he heard the dead bolt retract. The door was opened by a short pudgy guy, beginning to go bald, probably in his midforties. The man was startled as Max pushed past him into the standard waiting lounge found anywhere in the country, consisting of a couch and matching chair, a corner table with a lamp, a potted plant and a coffee table with old issues of Time and National Geographic.
“I thought you were Reggie.” The man stated nervously.
“Reggie?”
“Yeah, he’s been out on a call for three hours. The job should have taken an hour at most. He’s probably asleep someplace.”
Regaining his composure, he asked. “Who the hell are you and what do you want?”
“I’m Randal Evans. I have a telephone number and I want the address to go along with the number.”
“Well, Mr. Evans.” The man, clearly irritated by the intrusion, was curt with his reply. “In the morning you go down to the library and look in their reverse directory. It’s very simple.”
“I can’t do that. It’s an unlisted number.”
“Well, you’re wasting your time. People pay extra to keep their names and addresses private. The telephone company won’t give out the address of an unlisted number.”
“I know the telephone company won’t help me, but I thought maybe you might.”
Max reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of fifty-dollar bills and counted off ten bills, and stared at the pudgy little guy without speaking again. The man’s eyes were glued to the wad of fifty-dollar bills. Max waited a few seconds and counted off ten more bills and watched for the man’s reaction. He swallowed once and glanced nervously at the door. Max surmised the pudgy little guy was hoping Reggie wouldn’t pick this particular time to show up. Max counted off another five hundred dollars and put the rest in his pocket. The man still had not spoken. He swallowed hard this time, glancing at the door again. Max waited for about ten seconds then folded the thirty crisp fifty-dollar bills and started to put them in his pocket with the others when the man held out his hand and asked, “What’s the number?”
Max pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and handed the number to the man along with the fifteen hundred dollars.
The night air, cool and fresh, felt good against his skin as he stripped off his Italian-made suit and replaced it with a set of black sweats. He traded his Guccis for Nikes and pulled on a pair of black jogging shorts over the sweat pants. Checking to make sure everything had been placed in the trunk, he closed the lid and walked away toward the street, looking back only once at the TransAM.
Half an hour later he stood surveying the Safeway parking lot. Late-night shoppers loaded groceries into their cars and drove away to be replaced by newcomers, creating sparse but continuing traffic to and from the 24-hour supermarket. The silver-gray Tempo was fairly well hidden in the cluster of cars near the store’s entrance. He approached the little Ford cautiously, walking completely around the car, looking for any telltale signs of forced entry. After rocking the car from side to side a couple of times he used the key and opened the door, rolled down the driver’s window and slammed the door shut. Reaching in through the open window he inserted the ignition key and twisted it to the start position. The starter turned the engine over several times before it caught. It ran rough for a few seconds before smoothing out to a steady purr. Reaching through the window for a second time he turned on the headlights, waited another ten seconds, opened the door and slipped in behind the wheel.
It was twenty minutes later when he turned into the parking lot behind Claudia’s apartment building, cut the lights, and killed the engine. Leaving the keys in the ignition he locked the doors and slowly walked away, keeping to the shadows. Convinced no one was watching, he broke into an easy run with deceptively long strides that carried him along the sparsely lighted streets of Lompoc back to his own car, a distance of just over eight miles, in a little under an hour.
Slowing to a walk for the last 200 yards gave his body a chance to warm down and provided an opportunity to pick up on any activity in the hotel parking lot. At three thirty in the morning very few people stirred in Lompoc and nothing moved in the parking lot. Satisfied no one had tampered with his TransAM, he opened the door, slipped into the driver’s seat, reached across to the passenger’s side, and retrieved a bottle of Gatorade. Drinking half the refreshing beverage before lowering the bottle he sat back looking at the label, remembering the first time he heard the strange-sounding name.
Bright moonlight made it easy to drive the last quarter of a mile with his lights off. A switch on the dash allowed him to disable the brake lights; as a result, no telltale red lights glowed on the rear of the TransAM as he pulled into the turn-out overlooking Spic and Span Janitorial, and parked. The warehouse was lit up like a stadium. A quick check with binoculars revealed an armed guard at the entrance to the storage yard and several cars parked along the front loading dock. Max put away the binoculars, walked across the road and climbed over the fence. About 150 feet up the hill he found the tree with the radio/recorder he had attached to one of the branches almost twenty-four hours ago. There was no green light glowing to indicate the voice-operated keying system was recording. He removed the tape and replaced it with a new cassette and climbed back down the hill to the road.
He drove south for a couple of miles before turning on the headlights and returning the brake light to normal operation. Finding a wide spot in the road he hung a one eighty and drove back into town, and then turned west toward Surf Road.
After a long, hot shower Max put on a fresh set of sweats, walked into the kitchen, and prepared a large breakfast. He ate on the patio in th
e predawn, listening to the surf below. A fog bank hung off the coast, typical for this time of year, and the air hung heavy with aromas of the sea. Before he realized it, shadowy images of Sherry were drifting through his mind. He closed her out, adjusted the headset, and pushed the play button on the cassette player lying on the table. The first voice was Claudia’s—he’d planted the bugs immediately after entering Gilbird’s office. After he and Claudia left, the next sound was the door opening followed by the voices of Bell and Hatcher. Following the exchange between Bell and Hatcher, resulting in Hatchers’ departure along with the unidentified man, Bell spoke again.
“We’ve got troubles!” He was obviously speaking to someone on the telephone. Max had not bugged the phone, so only half the conversation had been recorded, but since the VOX triggered the recorder only when sound came in on the radio, there were no breaks in Bell’s conversation and no indication of how long the man (or woman) at the other end talked.
“Some guy in here nosing around and asking about John. Says he’s an insurance investigator. Yeah. I don’t know. I think he’s a narc. I don’t like it, especially with a shipment late. Yeah. What time? Well, don’t worry about me. You just make sure those goddamn dogs aren’t around when the stuff is unloaded; they almost screwed it up last time. Yeah, well I’m gonna get to the bottom of it and somebody had better have some answers. See you tonight. Don’t sweat it.” Anger was evident in Bell’s voice and accented by the resultant crash as he replaced the telephone in its cradle. The sound was followed a moment later by the slamming of a door.
There was no way of knowing how much time had elapsed before the door opened again. A woman asked, “How long will it take?”
“About an hour to make a good sweep and another hour to change all the access codes,” answered a man with a high-pitched voice.
Well, he could forget about hacking away at Gilbird’s computer banks. The new access codes would require too much time to bypass. Besides, his computer was in San Diego and although he wanted an excuse to see Sherry, his instincts told him time was of the essence.
“Just make sure everything is completed by midnight,” the woman ordered.
“No sweat. Why midnight?”
“Everything will be explained tonight.”
“Well, well, well! Look at this.”
“Damn!” Max exclaimed as he banged his fist down against the table. He knew the man had uncovered one of his bugs and it was only a matter of time before he would find the two remaining.
“Okay. No more conversation until you’re absolutely certain the room is clean,” the woman snapped. And indeed, no other sounds emanated from the little tape player, none at all.
Bell had referred twice to a meeting scheduled for tonight. The woman had indicated everything would be explained after midnight. Midnight, however, had come and gone. Playing Good Samaritan with Claudia had denied him any chance of eavesdropping on the meeting. Chances were, with his bugs destroyed he would have had little chance of doing so anyway. With armed guards, floodlights, barbed wire, attack dogs, and probably trip wires, he stood a better chance of getting caught than he did of getting into a position to listen in on the meeting. It was becoming evident they were not as lax in their security as he had first suspected. Perhaps it would behoove him to be a bit more cautious himself. Keeping this in mind, he spent the better part of an hour viewing the latest video recording of the road in front of his house. Besides his leaving and returning the camera had recorded a woman he assumed to be Evone Gilbird, driving a Chevrolet Caprice station wagon, leaving at 6:11 last evening. She returned, followed by the Dodge Maxivan, at two 2:41 this morning. The van left at 3:56. He had probably missed passing the van on Surf Road by no more than ten minutes. He viewed one section of the video three times before dismissing a moon-cast shadow, recorded five minutes after he departed for A to Z Janitorial, as one of the numerous deer that roamed the coastal chaparral from dusk to dawn.
The telephone tap had recorded three calls, one from a woman, whose voice he’d heard in Gilbird’s office just before the bugs went dead, who confirmed the midnight meeting with an unfamiliar male voice—Max surmised the woman’s voice belonged to Evone Gilbird.
Max recalled another secret meeting that took place in August 1921, long before he was born. A secret meeting at Bridgman, Michigan when the Communist Party of America (The Third International) adopted a thesis written by J. Lovestone, Executive Secretary, Communist Party of America. Lovestone’s Party name was L.C. Wheat. The thesis was a blueprint for infiltrating and controlling every organization in America, including the federal government. Had they succeeded, Max wondered? Did his efforts really matter? Had the Communists already won? Was it just a matter of time before they openly declared victory?
Max cleared his mind and concentrated on the other two calls. They were calls to the number with the recorder; the first call was to receive a prerecorded message, and the second time the caller left a message. He had grossly underestimated their security. The recorder was set up with a voice scrambler. The caller, of course, needed a scrambler to receive the message; the message she left was scrambled as well. The dial tones, however, could not be scrambled without the cooperation of the telephone company. This service required a lot of paperwork and government approval. The Gilbirds were not about to attract attention to themselves by applying to the telephone company for scrambled dial tones. He now had the code to command the recorder to play back its recorded messages, but without knowing the codes manually set into the scrambler he would be unable to decipher the messages, even with a scrambler of his own; without these codes it would sound like gibberish.
Well, he had paid fifteen hundred dollars for the location of the telephone; it was time to cash in on his investment. The address was a surprise—not that it should have been. At least there was a chance he could get a look at the scrambler and check positioning of the coding switches—these were normally sliders, similar to the ones used in telephones to select operating frequencies between the base and remote units. It would then be simple to set up a similar system. But, first, he had to get onto Vandenberg and find building 5001, no easy task considering the air base had an area of nearly 3,500 acres. To make it more complicated, buildings on military installations were numbered in the order in which they were built, with no reference to use or location. Building 843 might be a hospital while ten miles away building 844 could be a storage shed for oil drums. To further confuse things, numbers were recycled when buildings were torn down or otherwise destroyed, so that building 63 might be new and 2,196 could be fifty years old. He would need help. It would have to wait.
The only other chance of uncovering some useful information, at the moment, lay in the dial tones recorded from the phone’s automatic dialing system in Gilbird’s office. By listening to the tones over and over several times he would be able to correctly identify each digit associated with its corresponding tone. But why bother, when an inexpensive piece of equipment, sold at almost any do-it-yourself electronic store, allowed you to convert the tones directly to numbers? It was just a matter of plugging the handy-dandy device into the tape player’s headset jack, stopping the tape at the end of each series of tones, and copying the numbers from the gadget’s LEDs. And presto, an hour’s work was completed in five minutes.
Over a fresh cup of coffee Max scrutinized the list of the ten numbers before him. He placed a checkmark by Gilbird’s home phone number, another by the message phone; the third number he recognized and checked off was Bell’s. The fourth number checked off was the last dialed, held in the zero file. It had been placed to the message phone. Three numbers had out-of-state area codes. A check in the directory placed one, a 407 area code, in Florida. Cape Canaveral was in the 407 area. The second was a Nebraska area code, 402. Offutt Air Force Base, headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, was south of Omaha and within this area code. The third was 202, Washington, District of Columbia. This was heavy stuff. Logic told Max he was in over his head
and he should call Henri and turn over every scrap of information to the Company. But, contrary to what most people believed, the CIA had limited powers within the United States. They would have to work through the FBI’s counterintelligence group. This would take time and possibly any action taken would come too late. The other three numbers were local, but a quick check of his reverse directory proved them to be unlisted. It looked like he would be making another visit to the despicable little man in the telephone maintenance office.
Max held in contempt anyone who, for a price, would compromise information their position required them to safeguard, no matter how unimportant that information might seem. Over the years he had dealt with dozens, maybe even hundreds, of people just like the little man in the dispatch office, and each time he’d had the urge to grab them by the throat and explain integrity to them as he choked the life out of their greedy little bodies. Well, that, too, would have to wait.
The early-morning news was just coming on as Max settled in front of the television. The lead story on the local front focused on a car bomb that had killed an as yet unidentified man in the parking lot behind the Rio Vista Apartments. The explosion had rocked the neighborhood at about six thirty that morning, breaking windows and sending debris flying about the parking lot, damaging several other vehicles, and injuring at least one other person. A TV camera panned the apartment building and the damaged cars in the parking lot before focusing in on Rex Brown, the on-scene reporter. What was left of Claudia’s silver gray Tempo, roped off with the familiar yellow tape used by law enforcement, was in the background. Police, along with paramedics were poking around in the wreckage. The reporter glanced at a piece of paper handed him and announced the victim had been identified as Warren Satterfield, an unemployed construction worker from Houston.