The Brea File (25 page)

The stocky man wasted no words. He moved in fast, feinting with something held in his right hand. A gun? Gerella wasn’t sure. He was angry now, and scared. A mugging to top off his Saturday night was just what he didn’t need. He tried to block an expected blow from the stocky man’s right hand. One of the other figures snaked behind him.

Gerella broke for the steps to his building. He made it only as far as the bottom step.

A foot jabbed between his legs, tripping him. As he fell forward he felt a glancing blow off a shoulder blade. The impact chilled his brain.

He rolled and came up fighting. Gerella had had more than his share of street fights as a youngster. He hadn’t forgotten how to give as much punishment as he received. There were no rules for this kind of fight. He caught one of the slender attackers in the groin with a savage kick. The youth doubled over with a soft moan. Gerella had a disconcerting impression the victim was not a boy but a girl.

With a guttural cry—Gerella heard only the word
Dios!—
the second of the smaller figures charged. Gerella heard the sharp click of a knife blade jumping from its sheath. He was moving even before his brain consciously identified the sound. The blade tugged at his jacket. Gerella threw a right-hand punch. He felt a leap of excitement as his fist landed. Bone and cartilage yielded under the blow. Two down!

The satisfaction was short-lived. As the chunky attacker moved in, Gerella aimed a kick at his kneecap. He wasn’t quick enough. The first solid blow from the object in the stocky man’s hand caught Gerella on the biceps. It numbed his entire arm and shoulder. A shocking pain stabbed through his whole body.

Demoralized by that blow, the reporter tried to ward off another with his one good arm. He knew that no fist could strike with such terrible force. He wanted to run but his feet were suddenly clumsy. He remembered how his father tried to walk after his stroke, how he would be on the sides of his feet without knowing it.

Hands plucked at Gerella’s arms from behind. For an instant only he was caught and held. It was enough. He was helpless when a fourteen-inch length of lead pipe crushed his jaw. His mouth was suddenly filled with blood and fragments of teeth. He screamed, but he was not sure there was any sound. Maybe the scream was only inside his head.

The entire attack had taken place in deadly, purposeful silence, broken only by that one muttered Spanish oath, by the slap and scuff of shoe leather, grunts and exploding breaths, the smack of bone on flesh—until that deceptively silent impact against the side of Gerella’s face. There had been no cries to alert anyone in the apartment building. No one appeared at any of the windows. No one was in the street. No one could help him.

Gerella sagged to the sidewalk. His body involuntarily curled into a protective ball. Other blows and kicks punished him as he lay on the sidewalk at the foot of the steps. He was hardly aware of them. The pain of his broken jaw was all-enveloping. He wanted to scream at them. Why? Why do this for a lousy ten bucks?

Just before the last blow from the pipe battered him unconscious, Gerella knew that this was not just another Saturday-night mugging. It wasn’t for ten bucks. It was an attack far more callous and dangerous.

He sank toward blackness, as if the sidewalk were melting beneath him. One of the attackers’ faces loomed over him. It seemed bloated, as if distorted by the curve of a camera lens. Beneath the smeared nose the youth’s mouth moved. Gerella heard a single contemptuous word, harsh and clear:
“Traidor!”
His mind seized upon the word, puzzled over it, tried to understand what it meant.

Traitor. Betrayer.

The sense of it slipped away, and there was only darkness and pain.

* * * *

At about the same moment Joseph Gerella lost consciousness, in their suburban home on the other side of Washington, Paul and Jan Macimer were climbing into bed. To his surprise Jan did not seem sleepy. She wanted to talk.

“It’s not the same,” she said, after turning out the light and settling in beside him. “Nothing is anymore.”

“That sounds very significant,” he murmured. He had to force his eyelids open.

“It wasn’t the same tonight. Oh, I enjoyed seeing them all again, especially Mary. And I’m glad you asked her and Gordon over. She’s stuck in that motel while he’s down at the Academy.” Jan paused. “You can’t go back. Even we can’t go back.”

“That sounds gloomy.”

“I was a bobby-soxer once, remember? I went on fraternity weekends and wondered about kissing on our first date. I wore your pin. I never made love to anyone else.”

“I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

“Don’t be glib.” Jan sighed. “Tonight it seemed such a long time ago, those early years. Me and Mary and Elaine, all three of us with babies at about the same time, all of us learning how to cook hamburger a hundred ways, sharing our spaghetti recipes, wondering when you or Gordon or Russ, or all three of you, would be home again.”

“It
was
a long time ago.”

“Everything’s changed. Gordon hasn’t,” she corrected herself with a short laugh. “But everything else has. I was thinking tonight, listening to Mary, that we’ve done it all, all the cliché things. Painted the Easter eggs, stayed up all night waiting for the doctor, wrapped the Christmas presents, sewed on the buttons, joined the PTA, watched the ball games. And scrubbed a thousand floors and cleaned up the vomit and trained the dog to go outside. And sometimes, a lot of times, I was so damned
alone
. I didn’t like that part of it, Paul, I never did. And I don’t like it now.”

“Jan-”

“Maybe what I’m saying is, I need more of you. Or…” She couldn’t bring herself to finish the thought, either because she was afraid of the ending or was not yet sure what it was.

“Are you wondering if it was all worth it?”

“No! That’s not it at all! It was right for me then, for both of us. You’ve no
right
to say that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“To hell with you!”

Reaching for her impulsively, he discovered to his surprise that the pajama top was unbuttoned. His hand closed over the soft mound of her breast. He kept it there. She did not push him away.

After a moment her breathing had quickened. Still caressing one breast, he kissed the other. When she did not resist he let his hand flow down over the smooth, familiar curves of hip and belly. After a brief exploration his fingers stopped, as if surprised by what they found.

“Don’t ask
me!
” she said fiercely. “I don’t know why. Don’t ask–just don’t talk.”

He was left to wonder at the mystery of her moods. His own response to her was immediate as always. She clutched him almost cruelly, rose to engulf him. In the moment they were joined he thought that he had to send her away, that once again she would be alone.

From the Macimers’ patio off the family room, sheltered from the all-day Sunday rain, Gordon Ruhle watched a sudden squall drive the branches of a willow tree toward the ground, as if they had gone limp. The air was as warm and humid as a greenhouse. “Is it always like this?” he growled.

Macimer, standing behind him, laughed. “It stopped for Halbig’s party.”

“I suppose it had to.”

Macimer recalled Gordon’s old remark about Halbig’s ability to dodge the raindrops. It seemed to have held true throughout Halbig’s career, in spite of periods of turmoil within the agency. And now? When the Brea investigation was closed, would Halbig, as usual, be in the clear?

Would John Landers be untouched?

The two men turned back inside the house as a gust of wind blew rain across the patio. The family room was empty, Jan having taken Mary Ruhle with her on an unnecessary trip to the store—a maneuver Macimer had prearranged with her, postponing an explanation. Macimer had told her only that he wanted to talk to Gordon alone about FBI business. The three children had been treated to an after-dinner movie at the local theater.

Gordon Ruhle followed Macimer across the family room to the den. Near the doorway he stopped to inspect a number of framed photographs and other family memorabilia on the paneled wall next to the door. Gordon’s eye had been caught by the photo of Macimer in a handshake with J. Edgar Hoover. The picture had been fitted with new non-glare glass to replace the original glass maliciously broken by one of the three Latin intruders. Then Ruhle peered at a smaller photograph, a snapshot showing Macimer and Ruhle together, standing in front of the old post office building in Omaha—two men nearly twenty years younger, looking tough and efficient with their close-cropped hair, conservative suits, white shirts and ties. “What happened to those guys?” Ruhle asked.

“They let their hair grow,” Macimer said. “That’s all.”

“Yeah.” Ruhle grinned at him. “Okay, what about these bugs of yours?”

“Did you bring your toolbox?”

“Yeah. You want to tell me what it’s all about?”

Briefly Macimer described the discovery of clandestine listening devices in the hall thermostat and master bedroom. “I can’t be sure, but my guess is there might be others. I figured you’re more of an electronics expert than I am, you might be able to find them.” Macimer did not try to tell Ruhle why he was being asked to find any other devices, rather than someone from the WFO. He wanted to find out what he was dealing with without having someone from the Washington Field Office involved—and without having a report go to FBI Headquarters.

Even admitting that much to himself left him unhappier than he could remember being in his twenty years with the Bureau.

“You think your three Latinos planted them?” Gordon asked.

“I don’t know who else.”

“This place isn’t Fort Knox. It wouldn’t be so hard to break into. It could’ve been done without your knowing.”

“But I know about those three. The logical assumption is they did it.”

“Why?”

Macimer shrugged. “I wish I could be sure….”

The answer was not completely frank. But there was no point in going into the Brea investigation with Ruhle, who had removed himself from involvement in it by his own choice. “Any other time, you know I’d jump at the chance to work with you, Paul,” he had said at Quantico after the bombing. “But I can’t walk away from this. Hell, I’ve been lecturing these kids about terrorism. Now we can all see what we’re talking about.”

Macimer unlocked a desk drawer and removed the two bugs he had found on Friday. Gordon Ruhle immediately identified the first as a simple wireless transmitter. It was this bug’s signal Aileen Hebert had overheard, since it worked by radio transmission in the FM frequency range. The second device, which had been attached to the telephone in the bedroom, was confirmed as a type that worked only when the phone was in use.

Gordon Ruhle had brought in from his car a small black leather case. He removed a portable instrument from the case, identifying it as an electronic field strength meter. “Your ever popular sniffer,” he said. “If there are any other radio transmitters in the house, this will sniff them out.”

He went through the house methodically, room by room. As he worked he began to sing in a rich baritone, watching the meter on the electronic sniffer, which he tuned continuously across the range of possible frequencies.

“Is that raucous moaning necessary?” asked Macimer.

Ruhle grinned. “If there’s a radio bug here, it’ll pick up my golden tones, naturally. This little meter will let out a howl when I hit the right frequency.”

The sniffer remained silent.

Macimer felt some relief when they returned to his den. But the search was not over. There was still the possibility of another kind of wiretap, a device intruded into the telephone lines or one of the instruments. From his leather case Ruhle removed another testing instrument, about the size and shape of a cigar box. “A telephone analyzer,” he said when Macimer raised an eyebrow. “It’s got a built-in VOM that reads the resistance in the telephone line.”

Ruhle disconnected the telephone line in Macimer’s den at the wall outlet and connected the line to the analyzer. After taking a reading, he plugged the telephone into the other side of the analyzer. After a moment he offered an unreadable grunt.

“Well?”

“The normal reading is just under a million ohms. That’s without your telephone in line. Look at it now.” Macimer peered at the dial. The reading was a little over half a million ohms. “That means you’ve got more trouble.”

Using the same test instrument, Ruhle then examined Macimer’s telephone, checking the voltage reading. A high reading with the phone off the hook would indicate a series bug like the one Macimer had found upstairs. The reading, however, was normal.

When Ruhle took another measurement with the phone in its cradle, he gave a low whistle.

“You mind cutting the melodrama, Gordon?”

“First it’s my singing you don’t like, now it’s my whistling.” Ruhle’s tone was unruffled but his eyes were serious. “The reading is too low. My guess is you’ve got some kind of parallel device in there. I’ll have to check it out. Is there a public telephone anywhere close?”

“There’s one at the gas station on the corner.”

“Okay. You stay here. Make some noise—I don’t care what it is. Sing or whistle or use the typewriter. Wait about five minutes until I get to that phone, then go into your act.”

It was a long five minutes. Outside, the rain was still coming down steadily, drenching everything, not a downpour but a soaking rain. Gordon Ruhle seemed not to notice it as he ran out to his car. A few minutes after he drove off Macimer checked his watch. He began to whistle, feeling foolish.

“All right, Gordon, damn it, stop showing off,” he said after a moment. “And where did you become such an expert, anyway?” He broke off, searching for something else to say. It was surprising how difficult it was to talk aloud without an audience. Feeling increasingly foolish, he began to sing “From the Halls of Montezuma…” That ought to be right up Gordon’s alley.

The telephone rang. Macimer snatched it up. “Gordon?”

“Yeah. To answer your question, the FBI taught me everything I know. As for your singing, I think you better confine it to the shower.”