Black Market

31

Washington, D.C.

Washington, Carroll had always thought, was the ultimate Hitchcock movie location: so elegant, so quietly lovely and distinguished, yet paranoiac in all of its twisting, changing forms.

At 9:00 A.M. he squirmed out of a faded blue cab with a badly dented fender. His face was immediately slapped with raw cold and drizzle on Washington 's Tenth Street. He hiked up his jacket collar. He squinted through the thick, soupy morning haze that obscured the concrete box that was the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

Once inside, he found the procedure at the escort desk mechanical and unnecessarily slow. It irritated him. The Bureau's famous procedures, the inefficiency they created, played like a mocking skit appropriate for “Saturday Night Live.”

After several minutes of serious and pompous phone checks, he was granted a coded blue tag with the FBI's official insignia. He slid the plastic card into a metal entry gate and passed inside the hallowed halls.

An attractive woman agent, a researcher for FBI Data Analysis, was sitting outside the elevator on the fifth floor. She wore a man-tailored suit; her chestnut hair was wound back in a tight, formal chignon.

“Hello, I'm Arch Carroll.”

“I'm Samantha Hawes. People don't call me Sam. Nice to meet you. Why don't you come this way, please.”

She started to walk away, pleasant but efficient. “I've already collected as much material as I can for you to look at. When you told me what you were fishing for, I put in some hours of overtime. My material comes from the Pentagon and from our own classified files. Everything I could collect this quickly on your lists of names. It wasn't easy, I must say. Some of it I transcribed from material already on computer file. The rest-as you can smell-is contained in some really musty documents.”

Samantha Hawes escorted Carroll to a library-style carrel beside a silent row of gray metal copiers. The desk was completely covered with thick stacks of reports.

Carroll nearly groaned as he gazed at the mountainous stacks. Each report looked like every other. How was he supposed to find something unusual in this yawning heap of history?

He walked around the table, sizing up his task. Hidden among all the folders were connections between men-the tracks, the spoor they laid down; the events they lived through during and after Vietnam. Somewhere, surely, tracks would have crisscrossed, correspondences would have been made, relationships established.

“I have more. Do you want to see them now? Or is this enough to hold you for a while?” Samantha Hawes asked.

“Oh, I think this will do me pretty well. I didn't know we collected this much dirt on everybody down here.”

Agent Hawes grinned. “You should see your file.”

“Did you?”

“I'll be back over there, working in the stacks. You just holler if you need any more light reading, Mr. Carroll.”

The FBI agent started to turn away, then, suddenly, she turned back. Samantha Hawes seemed to be a very contemporary woman, very pretty, very confident, and genteel southern, from her looks, anyway. Carroll couldn't help thinking that in days of old she would already have been a young mother of two or three, tucked away in Alexandria.

“There is something else.” She looked concerned. “I don't know exactly what this all means. Maybe it's just me. But when I went through these files yesterday evening… I had the distinct feeling that some of them had been tampered with.”

A small, very unpleasant warning bell rang in Arch Carroll's head. “Who would tamper with them?”

Samantha Hawes shook her head. “Any number of people have access to them.”

“What do you mean when you say they've been tampered with.”

“I mean that I think documents are missing from certain files.”

Carroll reached out and grasped her wrist lightly. The information excited him. It meant that certain files, in some ways, were important to someone. Someone else had looked at them. Someone had possibly pilfered some of the documents.

Why? Which files?

He saw a strange look cross her face, as if she were asking herself about the precise nature of this unorthodox man who'd been admitted to FBI headquarters.

“Can you remember which files?”

“Of course I can.” She moved toward the worktable and began sifting. She picked out five thick files, dropping them in front of Carroll. “This one… and this… this one… this one.”

He gazed quickly at the names on the files.

Scully, Richard

Demunn, Michael

Freedman, Harold Lee

Melindez, Paul

Hudson, David

Why these five?” he asked.

“They served together in Vietnam, according to their documents. That's one good reason.”

Carroll sat down. He still expected to come away from Washington empty-handed. He expected that the faint sense of anticipation he now felt would turn out to be nothing more than a false alarm. Five men on the FBI computer list of “subversives”-a term he knew was next to meaningless, at least the way the FBI used it.

He checked his own printouts, and his heart began to beat rapidly.

Scully and Demunn had been explosives experts.

And David Hudson had been a colonel, who, according to the brief note on the printout, had been active in the organization of veterans groups and veterans rights after Vietnam.

Five men who had served together in the war.

Five men who were on his list and the FBI's.

He slipped off his jacket and then the tie he'd worn especially for his big trip to Washington. He began to read about Colonel David Hudson.