The Brea File (6 page)

On Monday morning Macimer was briefed as usual by the ASAC on important cases in progress. Heading the list was an airplane hijacking in Miami early that morning. “The plane’s on the ground now and Callahan’s down there.” Callahan was everyone’s idea of a genial Irish uncle. White-haired, dapper and sincere, he had a marvelous knack for listening and conveying sympathetic understanding. He could have a stranger spilling out his life story two minutes after meeting him. He was the head of the FBI’s national hostage unit, which included at least two trained hostage negotiators at each of the FBI’s sixty field offices. In between hijackings and major terrorist incidents, Callahan taught at the FBI Academy in Quantico.

“Where’s the hijacker from?” It was the key question for WFO. If the hijacker came from the Washington area, Callahan might want immediate backgrounding here. That would mean a team of agents to interview friends, relatives and associates to put together a psychological profile that would help a negotiator.

“He’s Cuban, been living in Miami. Says he wants to leave the country but he also wants money.”

“Okay, have our hostage team on standby. You know what happens when you have one hijacking.”

“Yeah. Imitators.”

“What else do we have?”

A long-range scam operation looking into suspicion of bribery in government construction projects involving GSA was not close to breaking. A major arson case had been turned over to the U.S.

Attorney for prosecution. Jerry Russell left several other files of developing cases with Macimer, along with a stack of 5x8 cards synopsizing less important cases. These were provided by the field supervisors in the office—the sergeants of the organization, each of whom directed a squad of from fifteen to twenty agents.

At nine-thirty Macimer had a conference with Joseph Taliaferro, the agent spearheading an investigation into the passing of secret documents from the Energy Research and Development Administration to a suspected foreign agent. The investigation had narrowed down to a half-dozen clerks of ERDA known to have access to the documents. All six were under surveillance. One of them, Taliaferro said, had lost the surveillance on two different occasions.

“The first time was a week ago Friday when he ran a light. Our people couldn’t jump the red light without revealing themselves. We had three cars playing leapfrog with him this past Friday night. Two of them got hung up behind him when he made a left turn at the last second just before another light change. Either he got lucky twice in a row or he knew what he was doing. Our third team stayed with him—they were out ahead of him—until he got onto the George Washington Parkway heading south. He went by our car at an estimated seventy-five miles an hour. There was no way for our agents to go after him without being burned.”

Macimer got out a map of Washington, D.C., and environs. It covered the entire area within the 495 Beltline. Taliaferro pointed out the intersections where the clerk had lost his tail, each time by timing a light. He had used two different bridges to cross the Potomac, Taliaferro pointed out, but both times he had ended up on the Parkway heading toward Alexandria. And Washington National Airport, Macimer thought. Some of those documents had shown up in New York.

“What do you think of him?” Macimer asked.

“Maybe I could buy accidental red lights,” Taliaferro said. “Some guys just like to run lights, they hate to wait. But I can’t swallow the Richard Petty routine on top of those two lights. I’d say he’s our man.”

“Did you check the airport Friday night?”

Taliaferro flushed. “No, sir.”

Macimer said nothing. He didn’t need to. Some of the agents in the office said the boss’s “silent treatment” was a lot more effective than scorn or shouting. “Keep him under light surveillance this week. Let’s shoot the works Friday night. We’ll use a dozen cars if we have to. If he goes down George Washington Parkway all the way, we’re in luck. There aren’t many places he can make left turns once he’s moving down that way alongside the river. We’ll station a car at every major intersection he might use. And let’s get the agents at the airport in on this. See if your boy—what’s his name? Molter?—see if he’s been taking the Eastern Airlines shuttle to New York. Go back a couple months at least.”

“Friday nights?”

“Every night.”

Macimer studied the map. The clerk might be going to the airport or on south to Alexandria. He could be getting off somewhere en route to take a different direction, or he could double back. Every possibility had to be accounted for, with radio cars monitoring the clerk’s route. If a beeper could be attached to his car, that would make it a hell of a lot easier to track him. Even if he were lost, it would be possible to pick up the signal again from the beeper unit without too much loss of time.

“Shoot for Friday night,” he repeated. “We’ll track him as far as we can. But I don’t want him to know we’re onto him, so we’ll risk letting him get away from us if he can. But each time he does it we’re going to stay with him a little longer. Sooner or later he’ll take us to his drop—or to the person he’s meeting.”

They discussed the plan for Friday night a few minutes longer before Taliaferro left the office. Willa Cunningham, Macimer’s secretary, brought him a mug of hot coffee. He had a few minutes to think. A Sunday visit to the local sheriff’s office to look at mug shots had been unproductive, but Macimer remained curious about the strange actions of the trio of robbers who had invaded his home. He wondered if it was worth sending a fingerprint team out to the house. The three had worn gloves—unusual in itself for break-and-enter thieves—but they might have made a mistake somewhere. He wondered if Xavier wore gloves when he took his girl to bed.

Xavier. Without photo identification or fingerprints, the single name was all Macimer had to go on. A name search in the huge General Index of the Records Management Division at Headquarters was impossible with only a given name, no numerical identifier to go with it.

The Internal Security Branch had its own Name Index, however, as Macimer knew well from his own assignment with the Branch. It was drawn from the files covering the activities of dissident and revolutionary groups, including a variety of Spanish-American, Puerto Rican and Cuban activists. And the WFO had its own files. It meant a manual search, pulling out every Xavier under, say, twenty years of age. A tedious job but worth trying.

With a grin Macimer called Pat Garvey into his office. A second office agent at twenty-eight, Garvey was one of Macimer’s favorites, which meant he was harder on Garvey than on most. “When you’re through solving the Orioles’ pitching problems,” he said, “there’s a little project you can handle for me.”

Garvey, he thought afterward, had done a fairly decent job of hiding his dismay.

Shortly after ten o’clock, when Macimer had nearly finished a quick review of the stack of 5x8 cards Jerry Russell had left with him, the intercom buzzed. “You’ve got a call on line five,” Willa Cunningham told him. “It’s from Headquarters.”

Macimer punched line five. “Paul?” a crisp voice said in his ear. “This is Russ Halbig.”

Macimer was immediately alert. Halbig was an Executive Assistant Director of the Bureau, one of the Director’s three top assistants. At one time a Hoover favorite, Halbig had walked a very thin line since the old man’s death. There had been pressure on succeeding Directors to ease out the “Hoover men.” But Halbig had never been a highly visible member of Hoover’s inner circle and he was also very nimble on his feet. During Macimer’s early years with the Bureau he had known Halbig well. They had gone through the Academy together, graduating in the same class. They had both worked for a time in the Omaha office and again, during a long and dangerous summer in the mid-sixties, Halbig, Macimer and Gordon Ruhle had worked out of the same office on a civil rights assignment in Mississippi. Macimer remembered something Ruhle had remarked about their colleague: “Don’t ever worry about Russ. He can dodge the raindrops as good as anyone I ever knew. Hell, he could walk through a cloudburst and come out without getting wet.”

“Is everything all right at home, Paul? I heard about Saturday night.”

“Sure. Just a little excitement for a while, that’s all. Chip is sorry he missed the fun.” Macimer was not surprised that Halbig knew about the robbery. Any such incident involving a Special Agent would be carefully examined.

“How’s Jan taking it? Shook up, I suppose.” Halbig often had a way of answering his own questions, as if he were too impatient to wait for a reply.

“She can handle it. She’s more worried about Linda than anything else. They were rough on her.”

“I can see why Jan would be worried. How old is Linda now? Seventeen?”

“That’s right.” Trust Halbig to have verified her age.

“You’d think the Meadows was far enough out of the jungle to escape that sort of thing, but… there aren’t any safe places anymore, are there?” The courtesies out of the way, Halbig’s tone became more businesslike. “Something’s come up, Paul, about those files you brought in a week ago. I have a meeting with the Director within the hour. I may be getting back to you.”

“I’ll be here,” Macimer said, surprised.

“Good. And listen, Paul, be sure to tell Jan we’re all sorry this thing happened at home. We really must get together soon. Erika was saying just the other day, we never see you and Jan anymore. We shouldn’t let that happen.”

When Halbig rang off Macimer wondered about the real purpose of his call. He took the vague suggestion about getting together as politeness. It was true that he and Jan, the Ruhles and the Halbigs had once been frequent companions—more so when Halbig had been married to his first wife, Elaine. But that had been many years ago, before different assignments took the three men in separate directions, and before Halbig’s spectacular rise in the Bureau’s hierarchy.

Macimer frowned. Had the investigator’s instinct which had been nagging at him the past week over the San Timoteo files been sound after all?

What had come up that might involve him?

Those who had worked for and with Russell Lewis Halbig during his twenty years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation were of one mind in the opinion that he had never committed an impulsive act in his life. That made him the perfect bureaucrat at “the seat of government,” Hoover’s favorite term for FBI Headquarters. If there was one thing that characterized any action taken at Headquarters, it was caution. No directive initiated by a desk supervisor ever went out to a field office without bearing at least a dozen initials approving the action. And it was not approved without minute and painstaking consideration of every possible ramification, including concern for the Bureau’s image and possible embarrassment.

His colleagues were wrong. Halbig had made one impetuous decision in his life, risking J. Edgar Hoover’s wrath. Halbig divorced his wife, the mother of his three children, with the full intention of remarrying as soon as possible, taking as his new wife a much younger woman, the beautiful blond daughter of a Minnesota congressman who was not running for re-election. Halbig simply could not face the thought of Erika Lindstrom going back to Minnesota and out of his life.

As it happened, Hoover was preoccupied with more serious matters inside and outside the Bureau at the time. Halbig was not certain that Hoover had ever heard about his divorce, an action which, in the old man’s prime, would have jeopardized a Special Agent’s future with the Bureau. Halbig married Erika two months after Hoover’s death. He had regretted his headlong behavior ever since. He was less clearly aware that for the next twelve years he had been punishing his much younger wife for his indiscretion.

Halbig’s telephone buzzed. The light blinked on line seven—the private circuit connecting the Bureau’s hierarchy with each other, bypassing secretaries and go-betweens. Henry Szymanski was on the line. Szymanski was the Executive Assistant Director in charge of the Identification Division. As such he presided over the largest and most used collection of records in the Bureau—and the one that, more than any other, had given the FBI its early reputation for being able to perform miracles in identifying criminals. No other law enforcement organization in the world could equal Ident’s 200 million fingerprint records. Most had been computerized in recent years, including some 25 million in the Master Criminal File and twice that many in the Civil Fingerprint File. Successful automation of the fingerprint identification system had been Szymanski’s ticket to the top job in the division, a job that also made him responsible for the Training Division and the FBI Laboratory.

With all that, Szymanski was surprisingly unambitious. His rise had been a kind of accident, a result of seniority, others retiring, and his skill as a technician during a crucial period of conversion. He was uneasy with the nuances of power politics. His attitude toward Halbig was almost deferential, reflecting an awareness that Administration had traditionally carried more clout among the Bureau’s higher echelon.

“I was just going to go upstairs,” Szymanski said.

“I’ll see you there in about five minutes, Henry.”

“Do you have anything on the slate this morning?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Oh?” Szymanski was curious. “Anything to do with those lab reports?”

“Yes, it does.” Halbig hesitated. “You’ll have to wait, Henry. I’ve sent a memo to the Director on it. I’m not sure how far he’ll want to open this one up.”

“Sure, I understand,” Szymanski said quickly. He sounded aggrieved. He was going to have to smooth off some of those rough edges, Halbig thought. If he was going to play hard ball, he had to know when to swing and when to take a pitch. “I’ll see you there.”

Halbig’s thoughts drifted briefly back to his marriage, wondering if it had been as disappointing for Erika, after all, as it had been for him…

He had been ridiculously infatuated with her. He remembered the way his hands shook the first time he was alone with her. He had had trouble unbuttoning buttons, his fingers clumsy as sausages. Obsessed. He should have known—Elaine, with her caustic tongue, had told him as much—that any such sick passion would either destroy him or burn itself out, like any fever. When it did abate, as predicted, he found himself hated by his former wife, estranged from his children and living with a beautiful child-wife with whom he had little communication.