Agh, he thought. What did you expect? You can’t do this sort of thing on the quick with a buddy helping out. This is what the FBI is for, to go through this stuff, run it down, track it, read it for fingerprints, analyze the forensics, do the dozens of tests, the magic stuff they do. You are stuck in the year 1948, and this is an obsolete black-and-white movie where the detective finds the Big Clue in some dusty old file.
But he didn’t find the Big Clue.
“Well, I guess we crashed and burned.”
“I guess we did.”
“Okay,” Bob said. “Nothing here. Nothing here at all. I’ll call the feds and see where we are. You were great, really.”
“No big deal. Semper Fi, all that shit.”
“All that shit.”
Washington rose and then said, “It is kind of funny though, a guy as red as this guy, so kill-the-rich and power-to-the-people and all that bullshit, of course he saves a letter from his broker. His broker! Can you imagine?”
“They’re all like that,” said Bob. “Look at Strong. He’s secretly trying to get a roll together, not to pay off his debts but to take off and live big like the millionaires he’d execute if he became, God help us, the big boss.”
But then he thought, why wasn’t the letter in the files with all the other crazy shit?
“Where did you find it?”
“Oh, it was folded up in Das Kapital. I don’t know why it was there.”
Bob thought, that is odd. That is unexpected.
“What did it say?”
“Nothing. It was just a recommendation of stocks for him to buy, sometime in 1972.”
Bob thought, nowhere else in all this shit is there any expression of interest in the stock market, any interest in capitalism except how to destroy it, any relationship with a broker, any connection to anything that isn’t somehow political—for Ozzie, whoever he was, was like Jack and Mitzi: a total creature of politics.
“You didn’t find any other letters like that?”
“Nah. Some guy in New York.”
A New York broker.
That set off a tiny alarm in Bob’s brain, from somewhere in his own past.
“You have the letter?”
Washington went to the case, bent, found the thick spine of the book, pulled it out, pulled out the envelope, and began to hand it to Bob.
“No, no, just look at it,” Bob said. “The guy who sent it. Was his name Ward Bonson?”
Washington looked.
“Give the man a prize. He’s a mind reader.”
“Jesus,” said Bob.
“Why? Who the hell is Ward Bonson?”
“At one time he was the highest-ranking Soviet penetration agent in the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1972, after he’d left Naval Intelligence and before he went to work in the CIA, he was a very successful Wall Street broker, just waiting for the Agency to come and lap him up, which of course it did soon enough.”
“You knew him?” asked Washington.
“I killed him,” said Bob.
24
Nick resigned every day at 8:30 a.m., and every day at 8:30 a.m. the director turned him down.
“I am not going to let those bastards tell me how to run the Bureau,” he said. “Get back to work. Bust this thing for me, Nick. Now. Soon. Fast.”
“We’re trying.”
Nick gave him a daily summary after the resignation ritual, on any given day reporting the task force’s progress along its new lines of inquiry: of the ninety-seven new suspects, Task Force Sniper, with its additional manpower, had eliminated over forty-one. But there were sixteen of that first already-vetted group who demanded more careful attention—reinterviews, records checks, travel and time line indexing, overseas liaison—and there were still over fifty to go who hadn’t been looked at at all.
Meanwhile, the scandal refused to go away. Usually things in Washington blow over as new news cycles demand new material, but the reporter David Banjax was clearly on a hot streak as he chronicled the life and times of Special Agent Nicholas Memphis, the hero and goat of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who now ran the Bureau’s sniper investigation. Banjax was given a quarter of the Times’s front page to tell the story of Nick and his first wife, Myra, whom he’d paralyzed and married. While some saw it as a human interest story that made Nick look like a prince, many others saw it as another example of Nick’s misjudgment, of his emotional cloudiness on the issue of snipers and sniper victims and the discipline and potential tragedy of the figure of the law enforcement marksman.
Then there was the issue of Nick’s “breaking” of the Bristol, Tennessee, speedway armored car robbery a year ago, in which, allegedly, the special agent had penetrated a violent mob, interdicted and destroyed a robbery attempt in progress, kept civilian casualties to a minimum, and apprehended the bad guys, all of whom now languished either in prison or in the graveyard (six had been killed).
But even that heroism, in Banjax’s telling, had its downside. Some sources gave all the credit to an unidentified FBI undercover operative who had done the actual penetrating and gunfighting. Nick had come along late and taken that man’s credit—so unfair to the unknown hero, who couldn’t be ID’d even now as, quite possibly, he was undercover in another caper. And looked at carefully, the episode itself had a sloppiness to it that made its ultimately happy disposition seem somewhat arbitrary, if not out-and-out lucky. If the conspiracy had been penetrated, why did the feds wait until the robbery itself to spring the trap? There were hundreds of shots fired at the jam-packed Motor Speedway venue, and only by the grace of God did they not kill or maim anyone. The public safety emergency also cost local law enforcement millions of dollars (to say nothing of the trauma of the wounds to several of its officers, plus the cost in medical and recovery expenses); couldn’t that have been avoided? It was also alleged by some, bitter at the Bureau’s high-handed treatment of the locals, that the real object of the Bureau’s enterprise, a professional killer who used the automobile as his weapon of choice, had escaped and still roamed the world, free as a bird. And finally there was the issue of a helicopter, shot down by an FBI sniper under Nick’s command. Again, only luck, or so it was charged, prevented a catastrophe; that crippled aircraft could have fallen from the sky onto a home or a bus or a school or a hospital just as easily as it fell upon the empty seats of the Bristol Motor Speedway, resulting in the capture of the pilot and all the personnel of the Grumley gang. Why didn’t Nick have to answer that?
Still another day, Banjax reached and interviewed one Howard D. Utey, former agent in charge of the Bureau’s New Orleans office, who’d also been Nick’s supervisor during the bungled attempt in Tulsa. Utey, now a professor of public safety and police science at a community college in Ohio, told how Nick’s poor judgment resulted in the botched shot in Tulsa and the escape of a wanted fugitive later in New Orleans during the furor over the assassination of a Salvadoran bishop, an event never really satisfactorily explained and occasionally brought up by enterprising reporters in search of an easy, sensational feature.
In short, Nick was emerging as the kind of bad-penny agent who had had a hand in a lot of disasters and yet, somehow, kept his career marching ahead, as if supported by men in high places with a secret agenda.
It was on just such a day when Ron Fields, Nick’s ever-more-grumpy number two, sat alone in the Cosi’s on I street, just down from the Hoover fortress, nibbling disconsolately at some garish salad concoction, when he looked up to see someone vectoring in on him with a raptor’s hunger. It was the girl agent, Jean Chandler, his partner in the raid on Carl Hitchcock’s abode that had broken the case wide open, or so they’d thought, weeks ago. He didn’t want to talk to her. He was depressed, he had a headache and a long afternoon ahead, and Nick had seemed even more uncommunicative that morning. Plus, spontaneous meetings between old stars like him and newbies like her were to be avoided, for a lot of reasons: he didn’t want it said he was mentoring her, which would mean he was ignoring the other juniors; s
till worse, he didn’t want rumors of an extra-hours connection, much less a sexual liaison, which scuttled careers fast in the Bureau’s puritanical halls. But at the same time he couldn’t be rude.
“Starling,” he said, nodding, “imagine seeing you here.”
“Isn’t this a little low-rent for a hotshot like the great Fields?” she said, somewhat insouciantly, for the AIC/SA relationship was an extremely tricky one, part colonel/lieutenant, part Hemingway/Mailer, part Jeter/Cabrera, part Conan/Andy.
He smiled tightly.
“I usually eat in the cafeteria,” he said. “It keeps me humble, which is hard given my natural state of magnificence.”
“Look, Special—”
“You can call me Ron, Starling, at least out of the office. We raided together, we’ve sat twenty-five feet apart in the same office for the past six weeks, despite the glass wall between, and I mean that literally not metaphorically, as I’m sure I’ll be working for you shortly, and we’ve worked the same endless hours. So I won’t wreck my career if I’m seen talking to you.”
She slid in.
“It’s said you’ve already wrecked it by hanging on with Nick. You could have gone to the director and unloaded on Nick. You could have watched as they sacked him and, if you played your cards right, replaced him.”
“Anyone can succeed by betrayal,” said Fields. “It’s time-honored, a beloved Washington tradition. I’m trying to do it the old-fashioned way, through ass kissing and dumb obedience. I do tricks. I’m the Lassie of the FBI, haven’t you heard? Now, I have to say, I have a suspicion you didn’t follow me for the classy banter; you’re here for a purpose. I’m a detective; even I could figure that out.”
“I wanted to talk about Nick.”
“You mean ‘Poor Nick.’ ”
“He is getting royally screwed. They say he’s finished and he’ll take you with him. Maybe me. Now, I don’t matter, because nobody’s shot at me yet, but you and he have been shot at a lot, and it’s no good that you guys get taken down in some political influence shitstorm.”
Fields made a show of being not impressed by her passion.
“That’s the way it goes in this town. He’s fighting the power: you got lobbyists for big rich, you got three departments who want to hang a ‘case closed’ sign on it and walk away, and you got the press. Those are tough odds. And in the end, we serve at the whim of the director. So far, he’s holding fast, but yeah, the pressure is mounting. If he decides to cut us free, wave good-bye as we drift out to the horizon, that’s the town. You have to get used to it.”
“I wish I could.”
“Seriously, you’ve done good work. Let me look around and see if I can place you somewhere. Oh, I know—in Fairbanks, going after Sarah Palin’s daughter for breaking curfew. How about the pirate porno squad, you know, enforcing those ‘fines up to $250,000’ for illegal showings of Debbie Does Dallas 32?”
“No, I don’t want to leave. I want to get this guy, whoever he is, Carl Hitchcock or not. I want to put him away. Or kill him. Maybe he’s one of the names in the notebook we haven’t cleared yet. I’d like to be there when he goes down.”
“Me too. That’s why I’m sticking.”
“Here’s what I’m asking: why can’t we do something? Do we just have to take it? Can’t we find our reporter? Who’ll tell our side and make Nick look good?”
“You’re so young, Starling. You must actually believe in justice or something fantastic like that.”
“I do.”
“Let me tell you what’s going on, and why this one is so touchy. We are fighting the narrative. You do not fight the narrative. The narrative will destroy you. The narrative is all-powerful. The narrative rules. It rules us, it rules Washington, it rules everything. Now ask me, ‘What is the narrative?’ ”
“What is the narrative?”
“The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It’s so powerful because it’s unconscious. It’s not like they get together every morning and decide ‘These are the lies we tell today.’ No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it’s a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they’ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they’ve chosen to live their lives. It’s a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They know, for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama a saint. They know communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They know Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was fucked up, torture never works, and mad Vietnam sniper Carl Hitchcock killed the saintly peace demonstrators. Cheney’s a devil, Biden’s a genius. Soft power good, hard power bad. Forgiveness excellent, punishment counterproductive, capital punishment a sin. See, Nick’s fighting the narrative. He’s going against the story, and the story was somewhat suspiciously concocted exactly to their prejudices, just as Jayson Blair’s made-up stories and Dan Rather’s Air National Guard documents were. And the narrative is the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don’t even know they’re true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything. But they will absolutely de-frackin’-stroy anybody who makes them question all that, and Nick had the temerity to do so, even if he didn’t quite realize it at the time. That’s why, led by brother Banjax and whoever is slipping him data, they have to destroy Nick. I don’t know who or what’s behind it, but I do know this: they have all the cards, and if you play in that game, they will destroy you too.”
“Why can’t we simply destroy the narrative?”
“Starling, it’s everywhere. It’s all things. It’s permanent. It’s beyond. It’s beneath. It’s above. It’s in the air, the music, the furniture, the DNA, the blood, if these assholes had blood.”
“I say, ‘Destroy the narrative.’ ”
“I say, ‘You will yourself be destroyed.’ ”
She achieved a particularly cute and fetchingly petulant look, so totally charming that he fell in love with her until he remembered he had a wife and three kids.
“So you think it’s hopeless?” she asked.
“Starling—Agent Chandler, Jean, Jean, that’s it, right? Jean, listen, you do not want to get involved with these birds. They are smart and in their way they are ruthless; they will smile at you and charm you and look you in the eye, and for something they believe is the Truth, they will cut your heart out and let you bleed out in the sun. You do not need that. You have a bright future in a job you were meant to do, and if Nick gets the ax and if I get the second ax, that’s the way the ax falls. You go on with your career and put a lot of bad guys away and don’t get hung up in this stinking town. Nick’s gone, sad to say; I guess I am too, sad to say. You do not owe us a thing; you owe that cornball lady with the blindfold and the weighing pans in her mitt. She’s the one you owe, not us. I say again, old goat to young babe, do not get involved in this. It can only destroy you.”
“If we could somehow find its weaknesses. It must have weaknesses. In its very arrogance, there have to be weaknesses. We can’t just—”
“It can only destroy you. This is Dead Man Talking: it can only destroy you.”
25
From the Franklin Park warehouse, they took Mannheim to the Eisenhower and headed east in light, late traffic toward downtown, which loomed ahead like some glittery city of the future, idealized by darkness and dramatic lighting. On either side of the highway, the dreary flats of west Chicago told a different story.
Then Washington left the expressway, taking the South Pulaski exit, heading toward the precinct house on the South Side. He cut diagonally across the grimmer parts of the city, stop-and-go all the way, through old neighborhoods, under the el track
s, down old Chicago boulevards, because like all cops he knew the secret, speedy rivers in the city’s traffic map. Finally he settled on South Kedzie as he found less traffic and gunned toward the South Side, which lay beyond the Adlai Stevenson Expressway ahead.
As they drove through the night streets of Chicago, Bob told Denny Washington the strange and twisted story of Ward Bonson, naval intelligence star, brokerage king, CIA executive, and Russian mole, and how he, Bob, had tracked him through the deaths of Donnie Fenn, his wife’s first husband, and Trig Carter, prince of peace. How it had finally, so many years later, become time to hunt for Donnie and Trig’s killer; how he had tracked Bonson and left him smeared on a wall in a Baltimore warehouse.
“Whoa, Jesus. Man, you are a player. I had no idea you were anything but a broken-down NCO,” said Denny. “That is all right, Jack. Swagger, sniper, operator, counterintel genius, world-class detective, outsmarting the professionals.”
“I ain’t no genius. I just had the motivation. In his way, he killed Donnie. So Donnie didn’t die in the Vietnam war, he died in some spy game that this motherfucker and his clown brothers dreamed up. I tracked down Donnie’s killer and turned him to splatters. Justice don’t come often, but now and then it shows up for a second or two, helped along by a good trigger finger.”
“Okay, Gunny. You tell me now what to do. We’ll get this thing figured out and between the two of us, we’ll run these fucks to earth, I swear. I’m on your team from here on in.”
“You’re a good man, Denny. Few enough of you guys left, sad to say. Nick’s another and they’re trying to ruin him. Anyhow, here’s what I see. This letter,”—still untouched by anything except fingers clothed in rubber gloves, now bagged and marked as Chicago Police evidence exhibit no. 114 and riding inside Bob’s pocket—“is a coded message. It’s an instruction from a Soviet agent, Ward Bonson, to Ozzie Harris, who was either a subagent or some kind of sympathetic freelancer or agent of influence under Bonson’s area of responsibility. I guess they got to know each other in Washington in the late sixties, when both were involved heavily in the antiwar movement, though from different sides. But it turned out they were on the same team. So somehow in 1972, Bonson sends Ozzie this letter, possibly in response to a letter from Harris. I’m guessing it’s the book code, which means it’s indexed to something easy to come by but impossible to penetrate if you don’t have the key. It has to be the New York Stock Exchange results for the date of the letter. They ran in every newspaper in America, and Harris would have no trouble getting them. So we have to find them, and run each of Bonson’s recommended stocks down. Maybe it’s as simple as first letter, maybe it’s a progression of letters, maybe it’s last letter; anyway, it has to be fairly simple. So we decode it. Maybe it refers to this thing, maybe it refers to someone like Jack and Mitzi. Then we’ll see where we are.”
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