The Brea File (23 page)

A second listening device was hidden inside the telephone in the master bedroom. Macimer recognized it as a series bug, emplaced by cutting the phone wire and inserting the tap—about the size of a square sugar cube—in the line. It was the type of eavesdropping device that was hard to detect if not spotted in a physical search. Because it worked only when the phone was in use, there was no loading of the line at other times.

Aside from his anger over the intrusion into his private life represented by concealed microphones and transmitters, Paul Macimer was bothered by the method of their accidental discovery. Whoever had ordered them put into his home had accepted such a risk. Perhaps Macimer had even been expected to be alert enough to find the devices on his own.

Too easy. It was an old technique, the mark of the professional. Those two bugs had been meant to be found, lulling Macimer into a false sense of his own cleverness.

Which meant that other listening devices, harder to detect, remained in place.

Why? Because someone believed he had the missing Brea file? Or because someone hoped, by monitoring his calls, to learn details of the investigation? If the private line in Macimer’s study had been tapped, for instance, then someone knew everything Pat Garvey had said during his call from San Timoteo.

Macimer tried to recall every word of that conversation. Enough had been said to let the clandestine listener know that the agents in San Timoteo were digging into the events Vernon Lippert had documented in the missing Brea file.

Macimer jostled his mug, spilling coffee.
Wrong!
How could the listener have known Macimer would even be involved in the Brea investigation? The bugs had almost certainly been planted by the three Latinos who had invaded his house, ostensibly carrying out a foolish robbery. No other strangers had had access to the house for the necessary period of time. But that meant the bugs had been put in place
before
Macimer was assigned to this “Special” by the Director.

Macimer didn’t like the direction his speculations were taking. He was no more comfortable with the realization that his family, a sheltered part of his life during his years with the Bureau, was no longer immune…

A terse report from Taliaferro brought Macimer up to date on the surveillance. Molter, as he had on other nights, had doubled back along his route and changed direction several times to throw off or expose any possible pursuit. The first FBI teams had been replaced by others along the way. From the Columbia Pike, Molter had timed a changing light onto Glebe Road, making a left turn just as the traffic signal went from yellow to red.

“We were ready for that one,” Taliaferro said. “We had a car ahead of him on Glebe. He won’t give us the slip tonight!”

Molter was now heading south on the Jefferson Davis Highway toward Alexandria. “He’s not going to the airport” was all Macimer said.

The last call came thirty minutes later. Molter had left his Toyota on a side street in downtown Alexandria. Agents had followed him on foot. One of them was walking parallel to the suspect along Washington Street when Molter went down a short flight of steps and entered a small print shop. Another agent strolled past the shop while Molter was engaged in a discussion with a clerk behind a glass counter. “They do framing and stuff like that,” Taliaferro reported to Macimer. “Looks like Molter is going to have something framed.”

“A neat cover for a drop.”

“Do we move in?” Taliaferro asked. He
wanted
Molter.

“Not yet,” Macimer said. “This shop might lead us to a lot more than Molter. Besides, we’ll need cooperation from the Alexandria office now. Get your report in to Headquarters and ask for surveillance of that shop.”

“They won’t take the case away from me?” Taliaferro sounded worried.

“It’s still your case, but I want that shop placed under surveillance and that’s Alexandria’s job. We’re in their territory.”

“What about Molter?” Taliaferro asked after a moment. “There can’t be any more doubt that he’s selling out.”

“No, but we need proof. And we want to know who else is involved.” Macimer knew the frustration his agent was feeling. “Don’t worry, Alexandria will have to send you everything they get. We’re still the office of origin, and you’re the case agent.”

“And Molter’s mine,” Taliaferro said grimly. Like most FBI agents, he felt a special antipathy toward traitors, those who would sell out their country’s safety and security for whatever distorted motive—or price.

“Molter’s still yours. If he follows the pattern, he may still catch tonight’s shuttle to New York. Have you got someone from the New York office standing by at La Guardia?”

“Yeah,” Taliaferro said glumly. “If he goes there he’ll be spotted and followed.”

“Good. Whoever he sees in New York may have no connection with the sellout—that may just be where he goes to spend the extra money he’s making. But let’s find out.” As he paused Macimer could hear the crackle of other voices over the line, agents reporting in to Taliaferro that Molter was now returning to his car. “That’s probably it for tonight,” Macimer said, “but stay with him. No matter how you feel, Joe, it’s been a good night. Remember that.”

He hung up and wondered if, at precisely that moment, a voice-actuated tape recorder mounted on a nearby telephone pole had stopped hissing.

Early Saturday morning, while the mountain air held a breathless stillness, Lenny Collins and Pat Garvey slipped gently away from the shoreline of Lake Hieronimo in the Sierras and glided across the unruffled surface of the lake. In the soft, pre-dawn light the water was blue-black and surprisingly cold. Not a big lake, Pat Garvey thought, but deep. He let the oars bite deep and gave a long, strong pull.

In the center of the lake he shipped the oars and sat motionless, enjoying the stillness, the smells of water and piney woods, of oil and fish and weathered boat. That sturdy old rowboat had belonged to Vernon Lippert. Al Boulanger, owner of the boat rental and bait shop at the west end of the lake, had had it in dry dock since the sheriff left it with him back in February. “I expect Vern Lippert’s widow woman will come for it eventually,” Boulanger had surmised. “But she ain’t been up to the lake since Vern’s accident. And the sheriff, he just said not to do anything with the boat. I mean, it was state’s evidence or something like that.”

Boulanger had not seen what happened to Lippert out on the lake that February morning. No one had. The FBI man had gone out early in his own boat, probably before dawn. Around eight o’clock two hikers had spotted the boat adrift in the lake with no one aboard. Boulanger had motored out to bring in the empty rowboat.

“Did you notice anything about it unusual?” Collins asked. “Anything at all?”

“There was nothing. It was just an empty boat.” Boulanger shrugged. The questions were not new. He had told the sheriff everything he knew, which wasn’t much. Lippert often went out on the lake early in the morning when he was staying at his place. He often came there alone. There hadn’t been a storm that morning, not even much of a wind, although it didn’t take much to whip up the waves on a lake the size of Hieronimo. “Only one thing,” he added as an afterthought, prompted by the fact that he had to hunt up oars when the two FBI men asked to take Lippert’s boat out on the lake. “There was an oar missing.”

“An oar?” Collins’ question was sharp.

“That’s right. When that boat was brought in, there was only one oar.”

Drifting over the smooth surface of the lake, Collins and Garvey watched the sky lighten, the tips of the pines along the eastern rim of hills begin to burn. “Satisfied?” Garvey finally asked.

“Not very.”

“What’s bothering you?”

“Two things. One is what Boulanger said about the weather. No real wind that morning—not enough to make you afraid to take a flat-bottomed boat out. And then… there’s that missing oar.”

“What about it? If Lippert fell overboard, which he obviously did, he could’ve grabbed an oar.”

“Sure he could. But they float.” Collins’ eyes had a keen expression Garvey hadn’t seen in them before, like the eyes of a hunter who has spotted sign of a deer’s passage. “They don’t just disappear at the bottom of the lake. And that oar never showed up anywhere.”

Following his partner’s line of thought intently, Garvey shook his head. “I know what you’re thinking, but the coroner’s report found no evidence of violence. A bruise on Lippert’s temple, but he could’ve got that if his head hit the side of the boat.”

“Then what happened to that oar?” Collins paused, his gaze circling the lake, seeing the last gray of the water melt into blue as the sun stained the horizon. FBI agents had combed the shoreline routinely, corroborating the sheriff’s report that no oar had been found. “It’s not that big a lake. I can think of reasons why an oar had to disappear—and I don’t like any of them.”

At six o’clock Saturday evening, Paul Macimer turned off Connecticut Avenue onto a side street near the Chevy Chase Country Club. A moment later he drove between open wrought-iron gates and followed a circular drive that arched between fragrant clouds of dogwood and forsythia. The house, which brought a murmur of admiration from Jan, was white brick with ivy almost covering its two-story front. In front of the house, at the edge of the circular drive, an antique iron figure of a black jockey waited to take the reins of an arriving horse. Macimer pulled up near the hitching post. Another car was parked a short distance away on the drive. It bore Virginia license plates and a car rental sticker.

Held up by an accident ahead of them in heavy Saturday traffic, they were later than Paul had intended. Gordon and Mary Ruhle had arrived earlier, and the Macimers found Gordon sitting on the end of a diving board above the Olympic-size pool. He wore tight black swim trunks and his chest and shoulders were deeply tanned. The fresh white bandage on his forehead stood out against his sunburned face like a badge. Ruhle looked remarkably fit for a man in his mid-fifties, the chest deep and solidly muscled under its mat of curly black hair, his belly flat and hard. He waved to Paul from his perch and grinned at Jan. “Come on in—how often do us peons get to use the boss’s pool?”

Jan shook her head, laughing. “I didn’t bring a suit.”

“So what? Erika can fix you up. Hell, seeing you in a bikini is the main reason I’m here. You look great, Jan.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to settle for Erika today.”

Jan glanced sidelong at Erika Halbig as the younger woman climbed up an aluminum ladder at the side of the pool and emerged into the late-afternoon sun as if onto the apron of a stage. Tall and slender, she seemed unconsciously sensuous as she removed her cap, shook out her short, white-blond hair and padded toward the newly arrived guests, her bare feet toeing in slightly. Jan restrained the impulse to look at Paul. The appraising approval she saw in Gordon Ruhle’s unabashed gaze was, she suspected, an adequate mirror.

“Jan—and Paul! How marvelous you could come!”

Her swimsuit was not a bikini but a maillot, a variation on the skintight suits popularized by Olympic swimmers in the seventies. Erika’s suit was a vivid cyclamen pink. She smiled slowly and with apparently genuine warmth, completely unselfconscious as she kissed Jan’s cheek and Paul’s in turn, the kind of social kiss in which lips seemingly missed their general target. “It’s been
much
too long!”

“Yes, it has,” Paul said.

“I don’t know where the time has gone,” Jan said politely.

“I think I know—you have those three children!” Erika spoke with frequent breathless exclamations. “How
are
they?”

“Fine, just fine.” The question caused Jan to warm slightly.

“You should have brought them. Didn’t Russ tell you—?”

“Hey, what’s happening to the party?” Gordon Ruhle demanded from the diving board. “Come on, Paul. Get your feet wet.”

Macimer waved him off. “I wish I’d thought of it and we’d have got here earlier. I didn’t even expect to see the sun today.”

He accepted a drink from Russ Halbig at the bar near one end on the pool terrace. Strolling over to the water’s edge, he watched Gordon launch into a flat dive. Ruhle burst out of the water close enough for spray to catch Paul Macimer’s shoes and slacks before he jumped back. Gordon hadn’t changed, he thought with a grin. He still had to be the youngest, hardest, toughest—younger, harder and tougher than any agent he served with, regardless of age.

After swimming two fast lengths of the pool, Gordon Ruhle climbed out and walked over to the bar, where he claimed a Bourbon on the rocks. Jan and Erika had disappeared into the house. “Son of a bitch, it’s good to see us all together again,” Gordon said carelessly. “And Jan—she does look great, Paul.”

“That she does.”

Their eyes met on a level. Macimer had always thought of Ruhle as taller, though they were about the same height. The illusion came from Ruhle’s broader, more heavily muscled build. Macimer wondered if Gordon still prided himself on jerking over three hundred pounds.

He grinned again. Gordon Ruhle had always challenged him.

“If I hadn’t showed up at Quantico, I don’t suppose you’d ever have got in touch,” Gordon said.

“I haven’t been in hiding,” Macimer retorted. “All your messages must have got lost.”

“Gordon’s been on the road a lot the last couple of years,” Russ Halbig said.

“Oh? Selling brushes?”

“That comes later,” Ruhle said with a scowl. Then, with a shrug of his heavy shoulders, he added, “Somebody’s got to chase down the crazies. I’ve been on the fugitive squad. Working mostly out West.”

There was a sudden commotion as three women emerged from the house. Leading the way was a small, earnest woman with unexpectedly white hair. “Paul!” Mary Ruhle cried. “Paul Macimer!”

She flew across the terrace while Macimer tried to cover his slight shock over the way she had aged in a short time. She darted past his outstretched hands to embrace him. For a moment she clung to him tightly. Then she stepped back, her eyes moist. “It’s so… so… oh God, I’m going to be a mess. I just went through this with Jan and I thought I was over it.”