Deadline (21 page)

B
OILED DOWN TO BASICS
, it read this way. The men were assassins, specialists in death. They did it for their country, took that ultimate step in the name of patriotism, and that was supposed to make it all right. They were an elite corps, known as Mechanics in the trade of death. They were sprinkled throughout every intelligence agency, and some could be found in the largest metropolitan police forces. Some knew others. No one seemed to know them all.

They were especially effective because they had the full resources and manpower of the departments, agencies and bureaus that employed them. Fifty men might be employed in the pursuit, but one man did the job. The top men in those agencies—the chiefs, directors, agents in charge—seemed to have no real knowledge of the Mechanics, or the nature of their work. Impossible? Maybe, but pinning them down was going to be a hell of a job. Going back up the chain of command became difficult, and after a while impossible. They were expert in muddying the water, and finally, when all else failed, they stonewalled. Some of the highest walls were apparently built by those who simply didn’t know.

There were some key contact men, who moved freely between the agencies and departments. Beyond that, responsibility blended into an eternal gray. Another you and me story, Walker thought; ultimate responsibility was shared by all. We let this happen. It’s our fault.

Shit.

Malcolm Dawes had been a career man. He was a young turk, graduating from the FBI Academy in 1952 with new skills and a conviction that the Red menace must be met at any cost. Dawes hadn’t drawn the line at murder, but if his diary could be believed, he had never pulled the trigger himself. He was a disciple of punitive philosophy. People who sold out their country didn’t deserve to live. So he hadn’t been too shocked when the loose network of killers became known to him, slowly, by degrees. It was a rough old world. People who played for those stakes had to be prepared to pay the price.

Dawes had been thirty-two years old in 1961, when a leak developed in a Central Intelligence Agency operation in Europe. Dawes had been assigned to the FBI office in London. Most people he met didn’t even know the FBI had offices overseas. Most people didn’t know anything about the world he lived in. It was partly a case of watchdogs watching the watchdogs, of one agency working against another, of operations cloaked in shrouds of jealousy and chauvinism. Malcolm Dawes worked well with everyone. Old Hoover would turn over in his grave if he could know how close Dawes had been with some CIA men in West Germany during those years. There the cooperation was surprisingly fluid, the people in tune with each other to a degree that other working agents wouldn’t have thought possible. Skids were greased. That was a term they all loved to use then. Skids were greased, and Dawes had some excellent sources and contacts that helped the CIA in more cases than he could remember.

Nobody seemed to be in charge. Nobody gave orders, at least not that final order. It was just something that became known, and the Mechanics moved on their own. Leaks were plugged. In his business, a little knowledge was truly a dangerous thing.

Especially when the knowledge came from faulty briefs. Malcolm Dawes had prepared one such, on a man known as Hollister. A double agent, whose body was found in a muddy French river one Sunday afternoon. Hollister had played a dangerous game and lost.

An innocent man. Imagine the effect on Malcolm Dawes, a man of conscience for all his hardening experience, when the murder of Hollister didn’t plug the leak. Dawes tried to chalk it up to bad luck. Handling dozens of cases over the years, you were bound to make an occasional mistake. Sometimes people had to die, for no other reason than that they played the game and were mistaken for someone else. It sounded good, only Dawes’ conscience wouldn’t let it go. He thought about it at odd moments during his workday. He saw the eyes of Hollister, a man he had met only once, staring back out of his medicine cabinet mirror.

The mistake he made was getting close to Hollister’s widow. He started by sending her some money. Mrs. Hollister came to see him, and hadn’t been fooled a bit by his contention that the money had come down through Bureau channels. She was a smart woman, smart and pretty. They talked over coffee about her husband and the dirty job he was involved in. And in the end, Hollister had been a patriot, not much different in attitude and philosophy than Dawes himself. Hollister had been killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and for bearing a strong resemblance to someone else.

Dawes met the Hollister children. He had dinner at the dead agent’s house. In Mrs. Hollister he found a lonely woman, not unlike his wife, Marie. He saw an easy mark, a conquest without struggle, and he might have justified it with the simple truth: that here was a woman who wanted and needed him. But he couldn’t do it, and it had nothing to do with Marie. It wouldn’t have been the first time that he had run out on Marie.

For Dawes there had been a turning point. Like the hawk turned dove by the sickening diet of war and death, Dawes underwent a rapid change of political philosophy. The change deepened and grew like a monster in a scientist’s lab. In this case, the lab was himself, the monster his own heart. And suddenly Malcolm Dawes became a man with a very big problem. Soon he began to detest his work. Then he began to hate the FBI. Finally he hated the country that had put him there.

That autumn he learned about the cancer. He had been coughing all summer without letup, and then he knew why. He left Europe, and quickly, in the privacy of his own den, he began writing his journal.

Maybe you couldn’t even call it that. It was handwritten in one of those leatherbound books that stationers sell as diaries. For Malcolm Dawes it had become a confessional, a tool of summing up. Walker thought he was a pretty fair writer, faced with a final awful deadline. He had gotten to the heart of what he wanted to say very quickly, with straight, simple words. The words were devastating: a scathing indictment without the extra baggage of adjectives and adverbs. In the end, that was what made it so powerful. The facts spoke so well for themselves. There were two pages of names. Powerful figures in the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, Army and other military intelligence networks, who had had personal dealings with the Mechanics. Then the names of the killers themselves, a partial, smaller list supported by the files, and by the ring of truth shot throughout Dawes’ last testament.

Perhaps it was enough. No newspaper would name names on Dawes’ say-so alone, but Walker knew that a powerful story could still be written from the diary without going into specific charges against individuals. He could cite the cases. He might even get away with naming the high-ups who supposedly had knowledge of how the Mechanics worked. Naturally they would all deny it, but his facts would be nailed down so strongly that they would have to be careful about what they said denying it. Nobody would know how much more he had, how much the official records might contradict what they now told the press. An outcry would follow, demand for the original diary and records. Finally, when the newspaper had done its job, the documents could be handed to a congressional investigative committee. Let them get the bastards up in front of lights and cameras, and sweat the facts out of them.

Walker stayed up all night, rereading, making notes. The folders contained the original files stolen from the FBI, which in turn had contained some cross-files from other agencies. The pages in the diary made repeated reference to the files, and to cases of what became known in Walker’s mind as spontaneous assassination. It was a good phrase. He would use it somewhere, high up in his first piece. Somewhere the spontaneity had to have originated, but they had protected themselves well. On the face of it, it had just grown, like the cancer in Malcolm Dawes’ body, from a single cell now lost in the maze. Suspicion. Then distrust. Surveillance. No orders, anywhere, but in every case the victim was so well set up that he almost invited murder. Bodyguards suddenly disappeared, or were shuffled away on a fool’s errand, leaving the man exposed just long enough. The Mechanics always seemed to know who and when and how, and nobody ever told them.

All the obvious ones were here. Allende in Chile. Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam. The attempts on Castro. But Walker was amazed at how many cases were domestic nobodies, guys in the federal government that he had never heard of. People with access to sensitive material. Those who had stumbled over something in the files. Men with consciences who, from a warped viewpoint, suddenly became a security risk. That was the trouble with operations like this. They started to protect America and ended by protecting only themselves. And murder was the result in either case. After a while “national security” became a broad blanket indeed. It would cover almost anything.

The man in Brooklyn whose death was ruled suicide. A man working in the federal center west of Denver. Another in Miami, just a year before Dawes’ own death. Walker struggled with the material, letting it boil around inside him before he began to write. “America, it’s a hell of a place you’ve come to,” he said aloud. Diana, half asleep on the bed across the room, looked at him curiously.

By early morning he had the bulk of it finished. He had filled a yellow pad with notes and was ready to phone it in. He had put a Chicago dateline on it: no harm there; they knew he had been in Chicago anyway.

His first paragraph did the job, got to them where it hurt. He listed the well-known cases and hinted of more to come. He got the words “spontaneous assassination” in, which pleased him. He looked at his watch.

He couldn’t remember now if Indiana was on Central or Eastern time. His watch said five-thirty, which might be six-thirty back in Jersey. Time to call. He called from the phone beside his table.

Kanin answered on the first ring.

“City desk.”

“Hi, Joe, it’s Walker.”

There was a long silence.

“Don’t smother me with your enthusiasm.”

“What am I supposed to do, give everybody half a day off just because you’ve decided to phone in? All right, Walker, I’ll ask the obvious, if you insist. Where the hell have you been?”

“I’ve been in Chicago. Right now I’m in a motel somewhere…near there. Joanne Sayers is with me. Do I have your attention?”

“Go on.”

“First I want to ask you something. Did you get a wire story out of Chicago about some cop getting shot up in an office building?”

“I’ll have to ask the news desk. Hold on.”

He was gone perhaps two minutes. When he came back, he said, “FBI agent named Armstrong?”

“Yes.”

“Wait a minute. Are you telling me you witnessed that?”

“Yeah, but…”

“Well, why didn’t you phone in last night, for Christ’s sake?”

“Because I’m phoning in now. Do you think you could shut up and listen a minute?”

Kanin barely breathed into the telephone.

“So tell me about it,” Walker said. “Read me the piece.”

Kanin read it. An FBI man named Armstrong had been shot in an elevator of the Barnes Office Building on Chicago’s north side. Witnesses said the man was shot by a woman in her early thirties, who escaped.

“I assume it was Sayers,” Kanin said.

“The cop didn’t identify her?”

“Not according to this. It really isn’t much of a story, Walker. Three graphs, just the facts. It was probably a big deal in Chicago. It would have been here too, if we’d known the woman was Sayers.”

“So now you know. Look, it just happened last night. Do you want this or not?”

“Oh, by all means.”

“Then plug me into somebody and I’ll dictate. It’ll be a long piece. You’ll need somebody to call Chicago and check out the cop’s condition, get any possible statements out of there. Is he still alive?”

“He was as of last night. Wait a minute, I’ll switch you over. I’ll give you Jerry Wayne. He already knows some of this. And Walker, don’t hang up when you’re done dictating. I want to talk to you again.”

He went through it smoothly, dictating commas, periods and paragraphs. Wayne took it quickly, and had no comment until he was finished. “It’s a helluva story, Walker. Kanin’s already got the first six takes. They’re haggling it over up front.”

“That figures. They’ll have fun with this one.”

“Kanin took one peek at that first take and got right on the phone to Byrnes. I think Byrnes is on his way over now.”

“Good.”

“I think they’re talking to the lawyers too. You’ve got some pretty tough stuff in here. Wait a minute, Kanin wants to talk again.”

“Well, where the hell is he?”

“Still up front. He said to keep you on the line.”

“Sorry, kid. Being kept on the line makes me nervous.”

“Then better give me your number so he can call you back.”

“Tell him I’ll call him back. Fifteen minutes.”

“He won’t like that.”

“So what else is new?”

Walker hung up.

He could almost see the pandemonium at the
Tribune.
Absolute chaos. So now he would learn what the bottom line was on Byrnes, what the differences were between the show he ran and the show he talked. He didn’t envy Byrnes, having to make a quick decision like that. It would have been so much easier getting a story like this by wire. They would simply banner it across Page One and be done with it. Passing along that final responsibility to the AP made it so much easier to take. Nobody’s ass was on the line; it was all somebody else’s doing. Somebody far away, in a wire service office in New York or Washington. If the story was wrong, the AP would correct itself. The
Tribune
would run it, saying, listen, people, it was the AP that screwed up. Things were different when it came from your own man, even if he had won a Pulitzer. Walker knew that. He understood that management mentality, had been keenly aware of it throughout the writing. At the last minute, he decided the hell with it, and put it all in. All the names, every connection Dawes had been able to establish clearly. Let it be the
Tribune
’s problem; he would get rid of it in one gush. And who could tell, they might print it. Stranger things had happened Jonah had lived in the belly of a whale for three days and three nights.