by Steve Berry
And really, really blind.
Remember that mistake I’d made?
Its presence had yet to be felt.
But it was about to.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
I rode out of St. Augustine on Highway 16, heading west toward Green Cove Springs. Originally, all I had was a name from Bruce Lael’s pad.
Cecelia Heath.
And a telephone number.
Luckily, it included the area code.
So I borrowed the house phone at the Café Alcazar and called a friend I’d made at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service in Jacksonville. Thankfully, he was at his desk and helped me out, linking an address to the telephone number. The Orange County Sheriff’s Department used that capability when Coleen had called, and NCIS had it, too. The address he provided was located in Starke, a small community in central Florida, about fifty miles from St. Augustine. Its claim to fame was twofold: a National Guard base and the Florida State Prison. I then found a local taxi company that agreed to drive me the fifty miles for $100. Luckily, I had that amount in my wallet.
I sat in the backseat of an old Chevy Impala converted into a cab and drank my iced tea, which I’d switched into a to-go cup. The sweet, cold liquid ran down my throat and felt good, spreading relief to all channels in my body. I thought about the questions Coleen would have for her father. Why had he been given a 1933 Double Eagle? And yet he never cashed the coin in. Holding on to it for over thirty years. If Valdez had not made contact, and Coleen hadn’t gone behind his back, no one would have ever known.
I realized exactly what she was thinking.
Valdez had been paid with a coin. Her father had been paid with a coin. We knew what Valdez had done to earn his payment. He’d recruited, encouraged, then made sure James Earl Ray went to Memphis.
But what had her father done?
The cab kept heading west down a twisting lane of asphalt, through stands of hardwoods and pines and farmland. I appreciated the fact that the driver stayed silent. The last thing I needed right now was a chatty Cathy.
Florida wasn’t so flat here. There were actually hills, the highway rolling in spots. No palm trees or beaches in sight. Just dense pine forests and verdant thickets that occasionally gave way to agricultural fields. I had no idea who I was heading to see, only that Bruce Lael had wanted me to make the journey. I wondered what it took to live with the fact that you’d participated in the death of Martin Luther King Jr. The man had been a son, husband, father, minister, activist, Nobel laureate, icon. He helped change the face of America, leaving a mark on the entire world. Imagine what more he could have accomplished if he’d lived. No wonder Lael was tormented. But what about Foster? Was he equally tormented? Or had his involvement been something else entirely, something more selfish that he did not want revealed to anyone.
Especially to his daughter.
All good questions.
The cab drove into Starke, a tiny town among a sea of trees, home to about five thousand people. Lots of gas stations, fast-food places, billboards, and power poles. Everything about the place yearned back to a time before tourism became the state’s number one industry. No flashy neon or high-rises, just quaint and walkable. The address I had was Greek to both me and the driver, so we made a stop at a 7-Eleven and learned directions. We found the house a few miles outside the town limits on a rural, two-lane blacktop, not far from the state prison. I paid the fare and climbed from the cab into the afternoon’s humid gloom.
A dirt lane led from the highway about fifty yards through palmetto spikes and scrub trees to a white brick house with reddish-brown shutters. The drowsy caw of a crow offered me a greeting. No name appeared on the mailbox, only an innocuous route number. I opened the box and was pleased to see envelopes addressed to either Cecelia or Cie Heath.
Apparently I was at the right place.
I walked ahead, following a low chain-length fence hidden under a bank of honeysuckle.
The crack of gunfire broke the silence.
A bullet plucked at the ground to my right, scaring the crap out of me. I stopped, a hard knot of apprehension knotting my muscles.
“Who are you?” a woman’s voice called out.
I stood there, with the backpack in one hand, focusing on the house and an open window under the front porch.
“I came to speak with you. Bruce Lael sent me.”
“You have a name?”
“Cotton Malone.”
“Walk down the drive. Real slow. And keep those hands where I can see them.”
I did as ordered, realizing that I’d been shot at more during the past twenty-four hours than ever in my entire life.
“Are you Cecilia Heath?”
“I prefer Cie,” she said, pronouncing her name See. “Why are you here?”
I came close to the porch steps and could see the rifle barrel in the half-opened window.
“Stop there.”
“Bruce Lael is dead,” I told her.
No reply.
So I drove the point home.
“Tom Oliver blew him up with a car bomb.”
Still silence.
But the rifle disappeared.
Then a small, sparrow-sized woman emerged into the porch shade, the screen door banging back on its hinges. She was in her late sixties or early seventies, mouth wide, face slightly squared off, her cheekbones framed by an unruly mass of gray-brown hair. She held the rifle angled down, her face and eyes as flat, dark, and expressionless as stone. I stood in the afternoon sun, watching her.
“How did you know Lael?”
“We were married fifteen years.”
“Do you know Tom Oliver?”
She nodded.
“I was his secretary, for nearly thirty.”
* * *
She invited me inside where the air was thick with the waft of nicotine. She did not relinquish the rifle. I could tell she was wary of my presence. I told her again who I was, who I worked for, and why I was there. Her last name was different, so I asked, “You and Lael were divorced?”
“For a long time. My second husband died a few years ago.”
“Lael wanted me to come find you. Do you know why?”
“What’s in that backpack?”
“Classified files from Cuba that detail an operation called Bishop’s Pawn.”
She smirked. “Those are two words I haven’t heard in a long time.”
“Did you work for Oliver when it happened?”
She nodded, but studied me with a calculated gaze. This woman had apparently been a career civil servant. I decided to play a hunch and found a few of the memos that had been sent from Washington back to the field and showed them to her.
Her perusal was short.
“I typed those,” she said.
“You must have typed tens of thousands of things. How do those stick with you?”
“You don’t forget plotting to kill the greatest civil rights leader in the country.”
Hearing that admission shocked me. Everyone else had beat around the bush. Not this woman. “Why didn’t you ever tell anyone?”
She shook her head. “Because when it happened I was a racist and a bigot. I hated every colored person in this country. My boss, and his boss, hated them, too.”
She glanced back at the memos in her hand.
“The summer of ’67 was full of race riots. So many people died. Black militants were on the rise, antiwar protestors were everywhere. We believed communists were behind it all. Who else could it be? Martin Luther King took his marching orders straight from the Kremlin. It made sense. Sure. Why not? Part of a national fear that people today just don’t understand. Back then, most of the country believed we had to stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. When King publicly came out in ’67 against the Vietnam War, that made him even more of a danger. Mainstream white America became terrified of King. So when Hoover decided to kill him, I frankly could not have cared less. Good riddance.”
But I sens
ed something in her. “That’s not you anymore, is it?”
“A little, maybe. I’m still no flaming liberal. But I’m not a racist or a bigot anymore. Thirty years teaches you how wrong you can be. What did King himself say? The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. He was right.”
“And yet you’ve still stayed silent?”
“What am I supposed to do?” Her voice rose. “Nobody would believe a thing I said.” She motioned to the memos. “You’re the only one with written proof. What are you going to do?”
“Are you willing to come forward now?”
“And do what?”
“Corroborate what’s in these files. Like you just said, you typed some of them.”
“What are you, some kind of lawyer?”
“Not today.” I recalled what Oliver himself had told me about compartmentalizing, and how no one knew it all but him. “How did you know what happened? Oliver surely didn’t include you in the loop on the main goal.”
She tossed me a glance as she considered the obvious strain of incredulity in my voice.
“No, he didn’t tell me a thing,” she said.
I was puzzled.
Then I heard movement from another room and someone entered the den.
“I told her,” Bruce Lael said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
I came to my feet from the chair. “You look good for a guy torched in a car bomb.”
“Your visit interrupted my diversion,” Lael said.
“A bit dramatic, wouldn’t you say?”
“I actually got the idea from Oliver himself. He paid me a visit a few days ago. He and I have never seen eye-to-eye. He told me that it would be a shame if my car exploded one day, with me in it. So I decided, what the hell, why not?”
“And the point?”
“It draws a lot of attention, which will slow him down and give me time to disappear from both him—” He paused. “—and your subpoenas.”
“I’m going with him,” Cie said. “Tom Oliver is not going to let this lie. Valdez has opened a firestorm, aggravated by you.”
“I’m glad to see you got my message,” Lael said. “I was wondering if it struck home.”
“Contrary to what you called me, I’m not some dumb-ass rookie.”
“You keep telling yourself that. Confidence is good in the field. You’re going to need it.”
“There was no body in that car?”
Lael shook his head. “Nope. Just one big bang. It’s been a few hours so they certainly know by now I wasn’t inside. The locals are wondering what the hell is going on. Oliver is probably shaking his head. The idea was just to buy me some time and slow Oliver down.” He pointed a finger at me. “I made some calls right after Reverend Foster called me. The bureau has an active investigation going on Oliver. An internal corruption probe. But the Justice Department is involved, too, separately, headed by a lawyer named Stephanie Nelle. You work for her?”
I nodded, deciding to be honest. “An FBI administrator named Dan Veddern was shot in St. Augustine. Valdez did it.”
“Shooting the head of the intelligence branch takes balls.”
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“It takes more than that to shock me.”
I said, “There are a lot of questions about why people in the FBI are so curious about a 1933 Double Eagle and a man named Juan Lopez Valdez, who made it to the Dry Tortugas from Cuba. Did you help the FBI get its hands on two 1933 Double Eagles?”
Lael smiled. “I found them during a COINTELPRO burglary around 1963, I think. I can’t really remember. They came off a mafia connection. We stole them to generate a civil war within that family, and we got one. They killed each other faster than we could have prosecuted them. Oliver kept the coins. Turning them in to the Secret Service would have raised a pile of questions that nobody wanted to answer. So we just held on to them. We collected lots of cash and valuables that way. It became a private reserve fund. I knew that Valdez and Foster were paid with those coins.”
“You recorded the transaction?”
He nodded. “Not Valdez. But I did Foster. Oliver wanted everything memorialized. His way of making sure Foster never went public. But the coin was an insult. Payment, yet not. He’d have to liquidate it somehow, which Oliver knew would be tough.”
“Was Foster an FBI informant?”
He didn’t immediately answer me. Finally, he said, “I’m going to take the Fifth on that one. Ask Foster.”
I added that to the list of questions for later. “Veddern said they were about to take you into custody.”
“Which is another reason for the big bang. I was tipped off by Oliver that Veddern was coming. His way of showing me we were all on the same side. Veddern’s problem was in underestimating Oliver. That’s a mistake I don’t plan to make. Oliver was the world’s greatest kiss-ass. All he wanted was Hoover’s constant approval. He told that SOB exactly what he wanted to hear, and did exactly what Hoover wanted. Then after Hoover died he turned on him, and managed to stay around for twenty-five more years. He knows where a lot of skeletons are buried, literally, and he still has friends in high places.”
“Where are you two going?”
Cie shrugged. “Far away from here. Hopefully far enough that Tom Oliver, or the FBI, won’t consider us a threat anymore.”
“They’ll go looking for you.”
“Sure they will,” Lael said. “But I’m real good at being a ghost.”
I was curious. “Was it as bad, back in the ’60s, as FBI history says it was?”
“Worse,” Cie said. “We had little to no oversight. Congress and presidents were terrified of Hoover. No one wanted to cross him. Ever hear of Jean Seberg?”
I listened as she told me about the actress, whoses donations to the NAACP, Native American groups, and the Black Panther Party placed her squarely on the subversive radar, so Hoover turned COINTELPRO her way. They created a false story that her white husband was not the father of her unborn child, but that instead it was the product of an affair with a Black Panther. The article appeared in both the L.A. Times and Newsweek. The stress and trauma from that supposed revelation caused Seberg to prematurely lose the baby. In defiance, she held a funeral with an open casket to allow reporters to see the infant girl’s white skin.
But Hoover didn’t stop there.
COINTELPRO conducted years more of surveillance, break-ins, and wiretapping on Seberg, all of which happened not only within the United States but in France, Italy, and Switzerland where she lived for most of her life. Progressively, she became more and more psychotic until, at age forty, she killed herself.
“Six days after she died in 1979,” Cie said, “the FBI confirmed publicly everything I just told you. Time magazine did a big article. ‘The FBI vs. Jean Seberg.’ I remember the outrage. People couldn’t believe the FBI would do something like that to a private citizen. Of course, Hoover was dead and gone by then. Oliver okayed the release of the Seberg file as a way to distance himself from Hoover. He was trying to survive the Church Committee, and he did. Little really changed, though. COINTELPRO was officially dismantled, but its activities kept going, just in different forms, and much more quietly.”
“This is something entirely different,” I pointed out.
“How do you figure?” Cie asked. “Same people. Same rules. Same thing. Do you think King was the only person they killed?”
I wondered how much this woman knew, but realized this was not the time or place.
“Can I take a look at those files?” Lael said.
I didn’t see the harm and it might lead to more information from him. So I handed over the backpack.
“This is a lot easier to carry than that case you were hauling at my house,” Lael said.
“A gift from the FBI.”
“What do you mean?” Lael asked.
“We switched it out before meeting with Veddern. Our FBI escort gave it to me.”
I saw Lael’s eyes light
up and the look of concern he tossed toward his former wife.
“What did I do wrong?”
“Get your suitcase. Now,” Lael said to Cie. “Hurry.”
Lael himself sprang from his chair and gathered up a duffel bag on the far side of the room. Cie raced into another part of the house, emerging with a suitcase in hand.
I had no idea what was happening. “What’s going on?”
“They didn’t give you that backpack to be friendly. It’s tagged. It has to be. They can track it.”
I’d only seen such things in the movies or on television. “They really can do that?”
“Absolutely. We have to get out of here. You may have screwed up everything we planned.” Lael faced Cie. “What do you think? Leave it here?”
She nodded.
Lael unzipped the backpack and removed the files, stuffing them into his duffel bag. Then he tossed the backpack across the room and said, “Let’s go.”
We rushed out the back door and headed for a detached garage. Inside sat a shiny Chevy pickup. Lael tossed his duffel bag and Cie’s suitcase in the bed and we all climbed into the cab.
“You drive, rookie,” Lael said.
I noticed that Cie had brought her rifle.
I heard the sound of a car arriving outside, then the screech of tires as it braked hard on the loose ground.
Doors opened, then closed.
Lael motioned for silence.
We crept to one of the garage windows, this one offering a view toward the front of the house.
The two men from the plaza, the ones Coleen and I had coldcocked, were here.
CHAPTER FORTY
“They’re Veddern’s men,” I whispered to Lael and Cie.
We stayed low and out of sight, not making a sound. All of the doors into the garage were closed. The two visitors seemed to be deciding whether to enter the house. A deep and leaden silence reigned.