The Brea File (18 page)

Macimer and Ruhle slid down the incline from the road and started around the tail of the Big Bird, as agents had nicknamed the plane. The voice of the white-haired Irishman speaking into a microphone came to them clearly. “It’s all ego,” Callahan was saying. “If the police are in on a situation, you’ve got their ego to deal with. And the hostage taker’s ego, that most of all. And your own ego and even the government’s ego. What you have to do is get past all that and play up to the hostage taker’s ego. He wouldn’t be where he is if it wasn’t important to him to be taken seriously.” Coming around the tail of the plane Macimer could see Callahan far forward near the pilot’s cabin, framed in the doorway to the plane. He followed Gordon Ruhle, circling behind the crowd for a better view. Callahan said, “So you don’t attack his ego. You stroke him. That’s the way it was with this youngster down in Miami on Monday. I had to get him calmed down, and then get him focusing on ordinary things, like did he want us to send in some sandwiches for himself and the hostages he was holding…”

Macimer could not later recall the exact sequence of events. One moment he was at the back of the crowd facing Callahan, turning his head as Gordon Ruhle started to mutter an aside to him. Then Macimer found himself on his back in the grass with dust and debris in the air all around him, shouts and screams coming very thinly through his clogged ears, and there was a sense of chaos, of sky showing where there shouldn’t have been sky, of the C-54’s tail on the ground and a gaping section of her forward fuselage ripped open like a tin can, of people lying flat or crumpled or kneeling, of others staggering around in seemingly aimless confusion.

Gordon Ruhle bent over him as Macimer struggled to his hands and knees. There was a smear of dirt on Ruhle’s cheek, a small cut bleeding slightly on his forehead where he had been struck by a piece of flying debris. “It’s Callahan!” Ruhle said hoarsely, his eyes burning in the blackened face.

“My God, what happened?”

“It was a bomb,” Ruhle said, his mouth a tight, grim line. “There isn’t enough of him left for the locusts to feed on.”

In Burbank, California, it was eighty-eight degrees at five o’clock Thursday afternoon, three hours earlier than it was in the nation’s capital. The day had been smoggy, and Mary Ruhle’s eyes were stinging as she spoke into the phone. “You’re sure you’re all right?” Her tone was anxious, as if she feared that he was hiding something from her.

“I’m fine,” Gordon Ruhle insisted. “A couple of scratches, that’s all. Paul and I were way at the back of the crowd, far enough for most of the flak to miss us.”

“You could have been up front.”

“We could have been but we weren’t, so stop worrying about what didn’t happen. Listen, Mary, maybe you shouldn’t come just now. I’m gonna be tied up with this investigation—”

“I’m coming!” she insisted. “You can’t stop me.”

“Is it worth it for just a few days? Maybe you should wait—”

“I don’t care if I have to turn around and fly home the next day. You know how I’ve been counting on this, Gordon. I never get away from the house…” She seemed to become aware that the words sounded like a complaint, and she amended them. “I don’t often get to go anywhere. It’ll be a treat for me, no matter how brief a time it is. Don’t take it away from me.”

There was a brief silence, the line humming with other conversations only dimly heard, like a conclave of ghosts. Then Gordon Ruhle growled, “I may not be able to meet you at Dulles. You’ll have to use a rental car. I’ll make the arrangements so it’s waiting for you.”

“Oh, dear, don’t you already have a rental? We don’t need two cars—”

“For God’s sake, I can turn mine in!” He often spoke to her in a tone that was brusque, sounding half angry, half exasperated, as if he were impatient with her. He was not, and she knew it. Others, unfortunately, were not so understanding, including their two children. She knew that Gordon’s tone and manner had frequently been a source of some of the friction between Gordon and their son and daughter.

“Is the seminar going well?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure. What the Academy needed was another old has-been spouting about how we did it in the good old days.”

She smiled. It was a gentle, tired smile. Mary Ruhle, though she was only fifty-three, sometimes seemed to be ten years older, her hair completely gray, her expression resigned, the joy prematurely squeezed out of her. “You’re not a has-been.” She was not cajoling him. There was pride in the words. She had always been proud of what he was.

* * * *

At 8:05
P.M
., in the modern offices of Oliver Packard, located in a converted town house on M Street in Washington NW, the night receptionist answered a call. There was someone on duty at the switchboard twenty-four hours a day, although Packard himself had long since departed for his luxurious Watergate Towers apartment overlooking the Potomac. As the columnist had often said, “The news doesn’t punch a time clock. Anything can happen, anytime, anywhere. I don’t want to hear about it next morning.”

The caller, who refused to identify himself, wanted to speak to Joseph Gerella. “I’m sorry, sir,” Toni Grissom, the night receptionist, said, “but Mr. Gerella is out of the office on an assignment. Would you like to leave your phone number?”

“I don’t have a phone—this is, you know, a pay phone.”

“Would you care to leave a message, Mr….?”

“No, no message. Wait a minute! Yeah. Listen, you tell Gerella I sent him something, but I haven’t seen anything in the papers yet.”

“You sent him something?”

“Listen, he knows. It’s about the FBI. You tell him I’ll send him, like, one more sample, that’s all, just so’s he’ll know there’s more where that came from.”

“How can he reach you?” She tried again to encourage him to give his name, again without success.

“He can’t. I’ll call him again, okay? What I’ve got ought to be worth plenty. But if he isn’t interested, there’s other reporters.”

“Wait-!”

When he hung up Toni Grissom hesitated only a second before looking up Joseph Gerella’s home phone number. There were other reporters and investigators on Oliver Packard’s staff on call that evening, but the caller had specifically asked for Gerella.

“Gerella,” he snapped into the phone.

“Hi, this is Toni at the office. You just had a call, Mr. Gerella—he wouldn’t leave his name. Do you want his message now or can it wait until morning?”

“You tell me. I guess it’s important or you wouldn’t be calling.”

“You sound grumpy.” She repeated the words of the anonymous caller. The tired rasp instantly vanished from Gerella’s voice.

“That’s all he said? Listen, Toni, this is important. Did you get it all on tape?”

“Yes, it’s all there. I turned the recorder on as soon as he asked for you.”

“Good girl. I’ll be down to pick up that tape.”

“Tonight?”

“You know what our boss says,” Gerella answered, sounding positively cheerful now. “The news doesn’t punch a time clock, and neither do we.”

* * * *

“What happened?” the FBI Director demanded. There was outrage in his voice, his strong features, his thick square body. He rose to lean over the curving edge of the conference table, planting his palms down flat against its surface, his manner almost threatening. “Damn it, I want to know! The President wants to know! The whole country wants to know!”

No one in the conference room, or watching and listening in secure communications rooms in all sixty FBI field offices across the country, answered him.

This full-fledged summit conference, involving the three Executive Assistant Directors, the Assistant Directors in charge of the eleven Bureau divisions, and representatives from all of the field offices, was the first such broad-scaled meeting to be called since John Landers’ appointment as Acting Director of the FBI. All of the top echelon from FBI Headquarters were physically present. Another sixty men—fifty-three Special-Agents-in-Charge and seven ASACs sitting in for their immediate superiors—simultaneously heard Landers’ words and saw the anger in his eyes, but they were participants in the summit conference by way of the Bureau’s own satellite communications system. Within the past two hours every available SAC had been summoned to his office if not already there. At that moment, 9:02
P.M
. Washington time, two of a network of satellites were in position for line-of-sight communication both with each other and with all sixty field offices, able to receive and relay signals to and from the conference room in FBI Headquarters.

Carrying on a tradition begun under J. Edgar Hoover, the full complement of Special-Agents-in-Charge had been called together on rare occasions involving cases seen as crises for the Bureau, highly publicized cases such as the Patricia Hearst kidnapping or far more ominous ones which had to deal with nuclear bomb threats that were never known to the public. With the advent of closed-circuit satellite television communications systems, the Bureau had followed the example of many major U.S. corporations in installing facilities for electronic super-conferences. In a special room adjoining the seventh-floor operations room in the FBI Building, and only steps from the Director’s office, an elaborate television console filled one wall, housing a bank of twelve small and two large monitor screens. In separate housings were two video cameras. The smaller screens of the console were arranged in two rows, six screens on each side of center. At each end of the console was a larger screen, on which one of the pictures displayed on the small monitors could be shown. The twin of this larger screen at the opposite end of the console was a monitor on which the Director’s square, heavy features were now on view. They were also visible on the screens in all sixty field offices. The pictures on the smaller screens changed every twelve seconds, rotating among the sixty offices so that each man present in his communications room at every field office came on screen for twelve seconds of each minute. The rotation was changed when one of the men spoke and appeared on the large screen.

It was notable that, of the fifteen persons gathered in the Headquarters conference room, and the sixty present in the various field offices, not one was a woman.

The men in the field had heard only the most meager details of what had occurred at Quantico that morning. Landers called on Paul Macimer, who was in the WFO’s communications room, to describe what happened. “As most of you know,” Landers said, “Special Agent Macimer was present this morning when the bomb went off near the FBI Academy.”

Like many other SACs, Macimer had been reached at home and called back to his office for the conference. He felt oddly conspicuous as he stared at the single camera’s eye, sensing that all those other eyes were studying him in field offices all across the country. Briefly he told of the explosion, his own stunned reaction, the confusion that followed, the emergency measures that were taken. As he spoke he watched the screen before him, which displayed a view of the conference room at FBI Headquarters. Halbig, Macimer noticed, was sitting to Landers’ right at the conference table. He wondered if that was intended to be noticed by the SACs, all of whom were sensitive to the nuances of power politics at the seat of government.

“There was no warning,” Macimer concluded. “No message was received threatening the Bureau or claiming credit for the bomb, either before or after it exploded. As far as we know right now, no one was seen near the plane who didn’t have reason to be there.”

“How could any outsider get at it?” one of the SACs demanded.

In the Headquarters conference room a camera focused on Henry Szymanski, whose area of authority as an Executive Assistant Director covered not only the lab and Identification Division but also the Training Division and its facilities. Szymanski cleared his throat. “The outside training areas—that is, those that are outside the actual FBI Academy buildings—are not under round-the-clock surveillance. As you know, they are accessible to public roads. There’s nothing we can do about that. The Academy itself is secure, of course.”

“Maybe,” someone muttered.

The FBI Director picked up on the comment at once. “If you have something to say, Magnuson,” he snapped, “let’s all hear it.”

Frank Magnuson was the Special-Agent-in-Charge of the New York Field Office, the only office in the Bureau whose chief was also ranked as an Assistant Director of the FBI. “We’d better not be too sure of our security,” he said. On the monitor screen he looked not unlike Landers himself, a heavyset man with a large, fleshy nose and jaws like two small blocks of granite. He and Landers were old friends who had worked together in the past, but in that moment Magnuson was aware for the first time that the FBI Director had changed. Either that or it was the aura of the office itself that Magnuson felt, the power and prestige and authority J. Edgar Hoover had vested in the FBI Director’s office. “What I mean is, we better be prepared to face more of the same. I’m not even surprised. The surprise is that we haven’t been targeted before. They’re taking it to us, that’s what it looks like to me.”

“They meaning whom?”

“Terrorists,” Magnuson answered bluntly. “We’ve all known it was going to come here, sooner rather than later. There’s no reason for us to go on thinking this country is off limits to the world’s terrorists. And if we’re going to be hit, then the FBI would have to be a high-priority target.”

Other men agreed with Magnuson as Landers allowed the discussion to open up, encouraging reactions. “They didn’t use to hit us,” commented the ASAC of the St. Louis Field Office. He was the only black among the sixty men whose faces kept appearing on the monitor screens. “But I guess we can all remember when that punk walked in off the street in El Centro and wiped out our agents, and then it happened in Denver. And to Agent McWilliams right there in Washington. How long ago was that? Twenty months? This is just the next phase.”

Landers allowed the speculation to continue only long enough to perceive that it was leading nowhere. “Is it the general feeling, then,” he asked, “that this bombing was directed at the FBI?”