The Brea File (40 page)

“There’s more,” said Landers.

During the night Special Agent Leonard Collins had flown to Washington with the 1981 guest register for the High 5 Motel outside Fresno, California—a register which had suddenly become another question hanging over Paul Macimer’s head. Forensic specialists in the FBI Lab, working in the early hours of the morning, had tested the chemical structure of inks on various pages of the register, as well as the paper itself. Henry Szymanski had brought the preliminary reports of those tests with him to the emergency conference.

“We tested the pages for dates from August 27 to August 30, 1981,” Szymanski explained, “on the theory that the entry for August 28 might have been altered or a page substituted. The pages, by the way, are removable. The results for three of those pages—the 27th through the 29th—are unequivocal. The inks used on each page were the same. The papers are also identical in composition, age, fibers, color and texture. This becomes significant because, contrary to his activity report for August 28, Paul Macimer’s name does not appear on the motel register.”

“What about the fourth page?” Caughey persisted.

“Well… there are some differences there,” Szymanski admitted, looking uncomfortable. He liked to have all his ducks lined up in a row, and one of them didn’t fit in. “The paper is the same, but not cut from the same roll as the other three pages were. And the ink used was not the same.”

“That means nothing is proven.”

“I think a change in paper filling out a complete register is perfectly plausible,” Szymanski said stiffly.

“Yeah, sure, and a change in pens at the same time.” Jim Caughey leaned forward truculently, a broad hand beating time on the top of the Director’s desk to emphasize his words. “I’d like to see more tests—more pages, before and after the dates you’ve already looked at. If someone was going to make a switch to make Macimer look bad, and if that someone was a Bureau man, he’d damned well be smart enough to change more than the one page. He’d figure you for doing exactly what you did. The only thing he didn’t count on was that extra page.”

Landers intervened as his two assistants glared at each other. “I’m sure additional tests are no problem,” he said. “I take it, Jim, you’re still convinced about Macimer. You don’t think he’s our man Brea.”

“Do you, Director?”

Landers was slow to respond. Instead he rose from behind his desk and stood for a moment at a window which looked eastward toward the Capitol dome. He swung around to stare at Caughey. “I’ve been thinking about that call to Macimer last night from the WFO about the Molter case. You can tell a lot about a man by the way he acts in a crisis. Macimer’s daughter is missing, and he’s under extreme pressure. But you’d never have known it from the way he handled that call. When you put that together with his request for a pickup on those two young Latinos…” John Landers shook his head slowly. “If you’re asking me for a gut feeling, Jim, then I think we’ve been barking up the wrong tree. It wasn’t Paul Macimer that day in San Timoteo, poking a rifle out of a window and pulling the trigger. My gut tells me Macimer isn’t Brea.” He smiled thinly. “But that isn’t proof, either.”

Two men had upset his calculations in the last twenty-four hours, Landers thought, by reacting to pressure in unpredictable ways. At a critical moment Macimer had put the Bureau’s needs ahead of his private anguish. And Russell Halbig, the duty-bound ice man, had walked away from a breaking case because his wife needed him. Each man in his own way had revealed a balance that was often lacking, the kind of balance John Landers looked for in a good agent.

Landers surveyed the men grouped around his office, all watching him. He realized that he missed Halbig’s presence, his efficient, orderly management of information. The one reservation he had had about Halbig was that he simply didn’t completely trust a cold, unemotional man. Now Halbig had shown unexpected depths. Perhaps he was the right man to be the Associate Director of the FBI, after all. And if Landers made that decision, he could then bring Magnuson in from New York to take Halbig’s spot in Administration. Thinking of the possibility, Landers surprised the watching group by suddenly grinning. Magnuson had been needling him about turning into a politician last night in his handling of Senator Sederholm. Let’s see how Frank likes it, Landers thought, at the seat of government.

“Want to let us in on the joke, John?” Magnuson asked. He was probably the only man in the entire Bureau who still had the temerity to address his old friend by his first name.

“In good time, Frank. All in good—”

Landers broke off as a voice crackled on the open line from the communications center. It was an agent calling from a public telephone, his call being patched directly through to the Director’s office. He was part of the surveillance team assigned to Paul Macimer, and he was reporting by phone rather than using one of the Bureau’s private radio frequencies because Macimer, if he drove his own FBI vehicle, would be able to monitor any radio communications.

The reporting agent’s brief message electrified the men in Landers’ office: Macimer had left his house. He was heading for Washington.

In the tense silence John Landers said, “Whatever is going down, gentlemen, I think this is it. We’ll soon have our answers!”

* * * *

Unlike most major cities, Washington is not a weekend place. Hotels offer special weekend packages to entice visitors to stay over the quiet days when the Congress is not in session. On this Saturday morning Macimer had no trouble finding a parking place on the street near the Lincoln Memorial. He caught a tour shuttle bus proceeding east along the south side of the Mall. At this early hour it was half empty.

Macimer got off the bus in front of the Smithsonian and strolled across the broad grass promenade. To his left the Washington Monument thrust aggressively skyward. To his right, at the far end of the Mall, rose the massive splendor of the Capitol. Pausing near a refreshment stand, Macimer watched some youngsters throwing a Frisbee. He assumed there was a team of trackers covering him, allowing one or more to drop off and others to pick up the tail. Standard Bureau procedure. What he did not understand was why, if his conclusion about Gordon Ruhle was correct, the Bureau was following
him
.

As Macimer strolled on he paused several times and glanced around like a curious tourist, trying to memorize the faces he saw, the color of a shirt or slacks or suit. It was a hot morning for the sandy-haired man in the blue cord suit, for instance. Perhaps, like Macimer himself, he needed the coat to cover up a hip holster.

Macimer ducked down the stairs of the Metro station just west of the Freer Gallery. He had to wait nearly five minutes for the train. By then Blue Cord Suit was looking unhappy. He knew that he had been spotted. He would have to drop out of the chase or switch places with one of the agents in a surveillance vehicle.

At Metro Center, Macimer caught another train on the Red Line. He got off at Union Station, crossed over the walkway and doubled back. He stayed on the next train as far as Farragut North. Emerging onto K Street, Macimer crossed the boulevard against a red light and broke into a run. A block south he swerved sharply into the entrance of Farragut West.

This time he was in luck. A train had just pulled in as he ran down the steps. He made it an instant before the doors closed.

The train pulled smoothly away. The Metro, Macimer had once heard an agent say, was about the only thing in Washington that delivered as promised. The agent was Gordon Ruhle.

When the train stopped at McPherson Square, Macimer watched the faces of the boarders. None seemed familiar. No one paid even sidelong attention to him. By this time he was fairly sure he had lost his surveillance, but he remained uneasy when he debarked once more from the Blue Line train back at Metro Center. He mingled with the crowds going up the escalator and came out on G Street.

Macimer walked over to 11th Street and turned the corner. He waited in the entry of a Chinese restaurant—closed at this early hour—for a full five minutes. No one charged around the corner. There was no available parking along the street. No cars cruised slowly past or circled the block.

Satisfied at last, Macimer started walking north. He was sweating under his suit coat but he couldn’t take it off. He was, in any event, only two blocks from the Greyhound Bus Terminal.

* * * *

Harrison Stearns was waiting in a corner of the coffee shop, looking as rumpled and hollow-eyed as many of the bus passengers who were trying to wake up with coffee after all-night rides. Macimer slipped into the tiny booth across from him. The weary young agent tried to sit up alertly.

“Have you read it?” Macimer asked, taking the thick manila folder Stearns pushed across the table.

“Yes, sir. It… it’s a bit of a shock.”

Macimer made no comment. He riffled quickly through the pages of Vernon Lippert’s file on Brea. He found what he was looking for on the last two entries. One listed four agents who had worked undercover in northern California in the summer of 1981 as a special team directly supervised by Special Agent Carey McWilliams. Because of their clandestine assignments, none of the four had been carried on the roll of the PRC Task Force.

The last page was a brief report of Vernon Lippert’s inquiries into the movements of the four men on August 28, 1981. Lippert had been able to verify the activities of three of those agents.

The name of the fourth undercover agent was Gordon Ruhle.

Macimer leaned back in the booth, his features carved in stone. He had known what he would find, but the physical proof still left him sickened rather than triumphant. “Volunteers,” he murmured after a moment.

“Sir?”

He met Stearns’s eager young eyes with an effort. “The PRC Task Force. Most of them were volunteers. It’s a question I should have asked myself but never did. Gordon Ruhle was always a world-class volunteer. Why wasn’t he there?”

Stearns wondered how close Macimer and Ruhle had been.

Macimer sighed. “Good work, Stearns. Did you have time to make a copy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll take this one, then. You look as if you could use some sleep about now.”

“I’m fine, sir.”

Macimer smiled. “You can do one more thing for me—two things, actually. Did you drive downtown?”

“Yes. My car’s on the street.”

“I’d like your keys, and I’d like a half hour. Then you hand-carry your copy of the Brea file to Headquarters. I want you to deliver it personally to the Director, no one else.”

For the first time Stearns appeared overwhelmed. “Uh… will he be there, Mr. Macimer? Isn’t he supposed to address the graduating class today down at Quantico?”

“He’ll be there. And this is what I want you to tell him…”

* * * *

For the men gathered in the Director’s office at FBI Headquarters it was a period of tense waiting. During the interval Anthony Tartaglia left the office briefly to check on arrangements for a helicopter to fly Landers to Quantico at noon. He would wait until the last possible moment. Halbig would already have had the flight scheduled down to the second, Landers thought.

Tartaglia was coming through the door when another message came through on the open line from the communications center. There was a brief, garbled transmission. Then an agent’s voice came on loud and clear. “I’m sorry, Director, but… we’ve lost him.”

“You’ve lost him!”

“Yes, sir. We had eight men following Macimer on foot, leapfrogging each other so he wouldn’t tumble how we had him covered, and three surveillance vehicles. He pulled a subway switch and lost them.”

There was a long silence. Then, in a tone as unforgiving as his square jaw, Landers asked, “What about his car?”

“We’re watching it, but I don’t think he’ll be back. He’s sure acting like a guilty man, sir.”

“If I want your opinion I’ll ask for it,” Landers snapped. He turned toward Anthony Tartaglia, frozen in the doorway, his face turning pale as he listened to the report from his surveillance team. “Put as many men in the street as you can find,” the Director said. “And the Metro lines. No telling where Macimer is now or where he’s going. But find him!”

* * * *

At a telephone booth next to a filling station northwest of Washington, Macimer waited for the first of his calls from Brea. When the phone rang he picked it up quickly and heard Brea’s muffled tones. He listened without comment to the terse directions to his next stop. Following them Brea asked only a single question: “Have you got it with you?”

“Yes.”

Macimer headed north on Highway 270. Traffic was light but he kept the speedometer needle of the plain blue Fairmont sedan steady at fifty miles per hour. He didn’t want to be stopped for speeding now.

* * * *

“Mr. Halbig is on his way here from the hospital now,” Anthony Tartaglia told John Landers. Tartaglia, still shame-faced over the failure to keep Paul Macimer under surveillance, looked as if he wished he were somewhere else—anywhere else.

“Why didn’t he telephone?” Landers said with a frown.

“I don’t know, Director. His wife is conscious now, but apparently what she told Halbig is something he wants to report to you personally.”

The Director grunted, the crease staying in place between his eyes. “What about the car rental agencies?” he asked suddenly. “Macimer isn’t running on foot.”

“We’re checking them all,” Tartaglia said. “There are quite a few-”

“I don’t want any more excuses,” Landers said grimly. “I want to know what’s going—” He broke off as his private telephone line buzzed. He had told his secretary to hold all calls that weren’t directly related to the executive conference. He pressed the button on the phone and said, “What is it, Mary?”

“There’s an agent to see you, Director. He insists that he cannot talk to anyone else. His name is Stearns.”

Landers exchanged quick glances with Jim Caughey and Frank Magnuson. Then he said, “Send him in.”

The young agent who entered the office appeared weary but excited. He approached Landers’ big desk with nervous sidelong glances at the other men in the office. He was carrying a thick manila envelope, sealed with a clasp. He held it with both hands as if afraid someone might try to snatch it from him.