Under Siege

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The wind was out of the northwest at fifteen or twenty knots. Small flakes of snow were driven almost horizontally in against the sage and juniper that covered the sloping sides of the arroyo. Higher up on the hillsides the pines showed a tinge of white, but the dirt road leading down the arroyo was still free from accumulation.

From a window in his living room, Henry Charon scanned the scene yet again.

The snow would accumulate as the day wore on and deepen significantly during the night. How much depended only on the amount of moisture left in the clouds coming down from the San Juans. The air was certainly cold enough. It leaked around the doorsill and the edges of the window and felt cold on his face.

Charon inserted another chunk of piñon in the wood stove. Then he went into the bedroom and got out the old .45 Colt automatic he kept in the drawer by the dresser and checked to ensure it was loaded, with a cartridge in the chamber. It was. He shoved it between his belt and the small of his back and pulled the bulky sweatshirt down so it couldn’t be seen. Then he went back into the living room.

He liked sitting in the old easy chair here by the stove, with the window on his right. From it he could see the barn and the road, and against the sky, several tall hills. The mountains that were normally visible were obscured by clouds this morning.

Really, when you thought about it, it was a shame that life doesn’t go on forever. To sit here and watch the winters, to spend the summer evenings on the porch listening to the meadowlarks and crickets, to step out in the morning with a rifle under your arm and walk off up the trail looking for deer and elk as the sky was shot with fire by the rising sun, he had done that all his life and it was very pleasant.

Very pleasant.

But this other hunt would be a real challenge, in a way that hunting deer and elk and bear had long ceased to be. And he would have to pay his dues. He had learned that in life. This might well be the last morning he was ever going to sit here feeding logs into the stove and watching the snow come down. So he let his eyes travel across the juniper and pines and took it all in, one more time.

About ten or so he saw the car coming up the road. The snow was beginning to stick. He pulled on his coat and went out onto the porch.

“Hey,” Tassone said as he climbed out from behind the wheel.

“Come on in.”

“Got some stuff here in the trunk. Help me with it.”

There was a suitcase and two army duffel bags. They left the suitcase and carried the duffel bags inside. The bags were green, with U.S. ARMY stenciled on them, and they sported padlocks.

Inside, with the door closed, Tassone shivered involuntarily. “Getting cold out there.”

“Winter’s here.”

Tassone tossed Charon a key ring and went to stand with his backside toward the stove.

Charon used the key on the padlocks of the duffel bags. Each was full of money, bundles of twenties and fifties.

“Five million in each bag,” Tassone said. “Count it if you want.”

Henry Charon felt deep into each bag, ensuring it was full of money. “No need for that, I think.”

“It’s a lot of money.”

“You want the job?”

“No, thanks. I want to keep on living. My life’s worth more than that.”

“I hope to keep on living too.”

Tassone nodded and looked around the room, taking it all in. Charon replaced the padlocks and put the duffel bags in the bedroom. When he came back Tassone had his coat off and was in the easy chair.

“I got coffee if you want it.”

“Yeah. I’ll take a cup. Black.”

They both got a cup of coffee and sat listening to the wind. The snow continued to fall.

“What you gonna do? Afterward, I mean.”

Henry Charon thought a moment. “Live here, I hope. I like it here.”

“Lonely, I bet.”

Henry Charon shrugged. He had never thought so.

They drank their coffee in silence. After a bit Charon added a log to the stove.

“What do you think about the other names on the list?”

“I’ll do what I can. I told you that.”

“A million each. I’ll wait two or three months, then come up here with the money. If you aren’t here, you want me to leave it?”

“Yeah,” said Henry Charon, thinking about it. “Yeah. That would be good. I’ll get here sometime.” He hoped. “Leave the money under the porch. It’s dry there. It’ll be okay.”

“There’s going to be a couple other hit teams in Washington while you’re there.”

“You never told me that before.”

“Didn’t know before. I’m telling you now. You can back out if you want.”

“I don’t want out. But that does change things, of course.”

“I know.”

Change things! Henry Charon stared out the window at the snow. My God! They’ll be searching every nook and cranny. Still, if he could evade long enough, one of the teams might get caught. This might be the red herring he had been thinking about.

“Well,” Tassone said, draining his cup and setting it on the windowsill. “I don’t want to get snowed in here. Got a flight from Albuquerque this evening. I’d better get going.” He stood and put on his coat.

“Be careful going down. The road will be slick in places.”

“Yeah. It was starting to get that way coming up.”

“Keep to the high side and take it easy.”

Charon followed Tassone out on the porch and stood watching him as he walked for the car. Then he put his right hand under his sweatshirt behind his back and drew the automatic from his belt. He leveled it, holding it with both hands.

As Tassone reached for the car door Charon shot him, once.

The big slug sent Tassone sprawling in the mud.

With the pistol ready, Charon went down the three steps and walked over to the man on the ground.

Tassone was looking up at him, bewilderment on his face. “Why?” Then all his muscles relaxed and he stopped breathing.

Charon put the muzzle of the pistol against the man’s forehead and felt for a pulse in his neck. He felt a flutter, then it ceased. The bullet had hit him under the left shoulder blade and exited from the front of his chest.

The assassin carefully lowered the hammer of the weapon and replaced it between his belt and the small of his back. Then he went back inside to get his coat and hat and gloves.

Why? Because Tassone was the only link between whoever was paying the freight and Henry Charon. With him gone, the evidentiary link could never be completed. He had to die, the fool. And he had been a fool. The FBI would inevitably pick up the trail of the Stinger missiles and the guns. And that trail would lead to Tassone, who was now a dead end. Why, indeed!

He had shot Tassone in the front yard because he didn’t want any blood or bullet holes in the house. The rain and snow would take care of any blood outside.

Charon fished Tassone’s wallet from a pocket and took it inside to the kitchen table. There was very little there. A little over three hundred dollars in bills, some credit cards and a Texas driver’s license for Anthony Tassone. Nothing else.

He carefully fed the credit cards and driver’s license into the stove. Even the money. The wallet he put into his pocket.

Outside he pulled the pickup around and placed the body in the bed. He got the suitcase from the trunk and inspected the car carefully. As he suspected, it was a rental from one of the agencies at the Albuquerque airport. He would drive it down there himself tomorrow and park it at the rental car return and drop the paperwork and keys in the express return slot. At that moment Tassone would cease to exist. Then Charon would board the plane to Washington.

There was a candy wrapper on the floor of the car, and Charon pocketed that too.

The contents of the suitcase were as innocuous as the wallet. Several changes of clothing, toilet articles, and a paperback novel by Judith Krantz. He put everything back and tossed it into the bed of the truck.

It took him twenty minutes to travel the five miles up the mountainside to the old mine. He had the pickup in four-wheel drive, but still he took it slow and easy. The higher he climbed on the mountain the worse the snow was and the poorer the road. Tomorrow he might not even have been able to get the truck up here.

Visibility was poor at the mine, less than a hundred yards. The delapideted, weather-beaten boards and timbers that formed a shack around the shaft were half rotted, about to fall down. The mine had been abandoned in the late fifties. Henry Charon walked up on the hill, then around the mountain, then back down the road. Fifteen minutes later, satisfied that no one was around, he pulled the corpse out of the pickup and dragged it across to the mine shaft and dropped it in. The suitcase followed.

He then tied a rope around the front bumper of the pickup and lowered that into the shaft. He got a reel of coated wire from the tool chest behind the truck cab, and unwound a hundred feet or so and lowered that down the shaft. Finally, he put a flashlight, four sticks of dynamite, and a blasting cap into his pocket, took a last look around, and, using the rope, lowered himself down the shaft.

He worked quickly. He dragged the body fifty feet down one of the two drifts that led off from the bottom, then brought the suitcase and put it beside the body. He left the wallet and candy wrapper.

The dynamite he wedged between the rock wall and a six-by-six oak timber that helped hold up a weak place in the roof. He stripped the insulation from the wire he had lowered into the shaft and twisted the raw wire to the blasting cap, which he then inserted into one of the dynamite sticks. With the dynamite packed into place with dirt and small rocks, he took a last look around with the flashlight.

Had he forgotten anything?

The keys to the rental car. They were in his pocket. Okay.

Charon was not even breathing hard when he got to the surface. He pulled the rope out of the hole.

He had a little wind-up detonator in his toolbox. He attached the wire to the terminals, wound it up, and let it go. A dull thud that he could feel with his feet followed. Using his flashlight, he looked down into the shaft. It was all dust, impossible to see the bottom.

He got back into the pickup and started the engine. He turned the heater up. The visibility had deteriorated to less than a hundred feet. About four inches or so of snow on the ground.

Tassone was going to be missed, of course, but Charon thought that whoever wanted George Bush killed ten million dollars worth was not going to miss his messenger boy very much. And Charon would try to get as many of the other people on the list as he could. Of course, Tassone wasn’t around to deliver additional money, and Charon didn’t know who to go to to get paid, but so be it. Somebody was going to get his money’s worth and that would be all that mattered.

And ten million was enough. More than enough. It was more money than Henry Charon could spend in two lifetimes.

Fifteen minutes later Charon tried to pull the wire up out of the shaft. It wouldn’t come. Probably a rock lying on it. He dropped the rope back into the shaft and went back down. The dust had almost completely settled. The flashlight’s beam revealed that the drift tunnel was blocked, with a huge slab pinning the detonator wire. Charon cut the wire, then came back up the rope hand over hand.

He coiled the rope and wire and stowed everything. Going down the mountain the pickup truck slid once, but he got it stopped in time. It took most of an hour to get back to the house. Only an inch of snow on the ground there.

Inside the cabin he threw another log in the stove and washed the cup Tassone had used and put it back in the cabinet. Henry Charon made a fresh pot of coffee. After it had dripped through, he poured some into his cup and stretched out in the easy chair.

“Your ten o’clock appointment is here, Mr. Brody.”

The lawyer reached for the intercom button. “Send him in.”

T. Jefferson Brody walked over to the door and met Freeman McNally coming through. Brody carefully closed the door and shook Freeman’s hand, then pointed to the red leather client’s chair. “Good to see you.”

“Yeah, Tee. Howzit goin’?”

“Pretty good.” Brody went around his desk and arranged himself in his eighteen-hundred-dollar custom-made swivel chair. “How’s business?”

“Oh, you know,” McNally said and made a vague gesture. “Always problems. Nothing ever goes right.”

“That’s true.”

“You been watching the TV the last couple days?”

“You mean that car-bus crash? Yeah, I heard about that.”

“One of my drivers. Some of our guards tried to rip off his load. He was lucky he wasn’t killed.”

“A lot of heat,” Brody said, referring to the President’s press conference and the announced government initiatives. The papers were full of it.

“Yeah. That’s why I came to see you. Some of those things The Man wants to do are going to hurt. I think it’s time we called in some of those markers for donations we been making to those senators and congressmen.”

“I was wondering when you might want to do that.”

“Now is when. Putting the DEA and FBI together is not going to help us businessmen. Yeah, like they say on TV, it’ll take ’em forever to decide to do anything, but someday they’ll know too much. I mean, it’ll all go into the same paper mill and eventually something will pop out that’s damn bad for me.”

“What else?”

“Well, this new money proposal. Now that will hurt. I got about ten million in cash on hand to run my business on a day-to-day basis.”

“I understand.”

“Seems to me this whole thing is sorta antiblack, y’know? The black people don’t use whitey’s banks and they’re the ones who’ll lose the most. Shit, all the white guys got theirs in checking and investments and all that. It’s the black women and poor families who keep theirs in cookie jars and stuffed in mattresses. Damn banks charge big fees these days for checking accounts unless you got a white man’s balance.”

“That’s a good argument. I’ll use that.”

“Yeah. And this bail reform business. That’s antiblack too. Whites got houses and expensive cars and all to post as bail. Black man’s gotta go buy a bail bond. That takes cash.”

Freeman had two or three other points to make, then Brody asked, “Who tried to rip you off the other night?”

“I don’t know for sure, but I think Willie Teal’s behind it. He’s been getting his stuff through Cuba and that’s dried up on him. So I think he put the word out he’d pay top dollar for supplies, and that sorta tempted my guys. No way to know for sure, though, as the three dips that tried to rip me all got killed.”

“Saved you some trouble,” Brody noted and smiled.

“It wouldn’t have been no trouble. You gotta make folks want to be honest or you’re outta business. That’s part of it.”

The buzzing of the intercom caused T. Jefferson Brody to raise a finger at his client. “Yes.”

“Senator Cherry’s on the phone, sir.”

Brody looked at Freeman. “You’ll get a kick out of this.” He punched buttons for the speaker phone. “Yes.”

“Bob Cherry. How’s it going, Jefferson?” The sound was quite good, although a little tinny.

“Just fine, Senator. And you?”

“Well, I’ve been going over my reelection finances with my campaign chairman — you know I’m up for reelection in two years?”

“Yessir. I thought that was the date.”

“Anyway, those PACs that you represent have been so generous in the past, I was hoping that one or two of them might make a contribution to my reelection campaign.”

“Sir, I’ll have to talk to my clients, but I’m optimistic. They’ve always believed that someone must pay for good government.” Brody winked broadly at Freeman McNally, who grinned.

“I wish more people felt that way. Talk to you soon.”

When the phone was back on the cradle, Brody smiled at Freeman McNally and explained. McNally threw back his head and laughed. “They just call you up and ask for money?”

“You got it.”

“If I could do that, I could retire from business. You know, hire a few people to work the phones and generally take life easy.”

“Well, you’re not in Congress.”

“Yeah. My business is a little more direct. Tell me, is Willie Teal one of your clients?” All trace of humor was gone from his face now.

“No.”

“I’m glad to hear that. How about Bernie Shapiro?”

“Wellll … I’ll be straight with you, Freeman. My rule is to never discuss my clients’ identities or business with anybody. Ever. You know that.”

Freeman McNally stood and walked around the room, looking at this and that. “You got a lot of nice stuff here,” he said softly.

T. Jefferson Brody made a modest gesture, which McNally missed.

McNally spoke with his back to the lawyer. “Bernie Shapiro is in with the Costello family. They’re moving in on the laundry business. Gonna cost me. And I don’t like to pay more money for the same service.”

Brody said nothing.

McNally came over to the desk and sat on the corner of it, where he could look down on T. Jefferson Brody. “Tee, I give you some advice. You’re a good lawyer for what I need done. You know people and can get in places I can’t get into. But if I ever hear, ever, ever, ever hear that you told anybody about my business without me giving you the okay, you’ll be dead two hours after I hear it.” He lowered his face to look straight into Brody’s eyes. “You understand?”

“Freeman, I’m a lawyer. Everything you say to me is privileged.”

“You understand me, Tee?”

“Yes.” Brody’s tongue was thick and he had trouble getting the words out.

“Good.” Freeman got up and walked over to the window. He pulled back the drapes and looked out.

After ten or fifteen seconds Brody decided to try to get back to business. He had been successfully handling scum like McNally for ten years now, and though there were rough moments, you couldn’t let them think you were scared. “Are you and Shapiro going to do business?”

“I dunno. Not if I can help it. I think that asshole killed the guy who was washing my dough. And I think he killed the guy who owned the check-cashing business. Guy named Lincoln. Shapiro paid off a broad, a grifter named Sweet Cherry Lane who was servicing the guy, and she set him up.”

Bells began to ring for T. Jefferson Brody. “What does this Lane woman look like?” he asked softly.

Freeman turned away from the window. He came back and dropped into the client chair. “Sorta chocolate, huge, firm tits, tiny waist, tall and regal. A real prime piece of pussy, I hear tell.”

“If someone wanted this bitch taught a lesson, could you do a favor like that?”

A slow grin spread across Freeman’s face. “Lay it out, Tee.”

“She robbed me, Freeman.” Brody swallowed and took a deep breath. “Honest. Stole my car and watch and a bunch of shit right out of my house — and she stole the $400,000 that Shapiro paid for that check cashing business.”

“Naw.”

“Yes. The goddamn cunt pretended to be the widow, signed everything, took the check, slipped me a Mickey and cleaned me out.”

“What the fuck kind of lawyer are you, Tee? You didn’t even ask to see some ID before you gave her four hundred Gs?”

“Hey,” Brody snarled. “The bitch conned me. Now I want to slice some off her. Will you help me?”

The grin on Freeman McNally’s face faded in the face of the lawyer’s fury. He stood. “I’ll think about it, Tee. In the meantime, you get busy on those senators and congressmen. I’ve paid a lot of good money to those people, now I want something. You get it. Then we’ll talk.”

He paused at the door and spoke without looking at Brody. “I try to never get personal. With me it’s all business. That way everybody knows where they stand. When you get personal you make mistakes, take stupid risks. It’s not good.” He shook his head. “Not good.” Then he went out.

Brody stared at the door and chewed on his lower lip.

Ott Mergenthaler returned from lunch at two-thirty in the afternoon with a smile on his face and a spring in his walk. Jack Yocke couldn’t resist. “Back to the old grind, eh, Ott?”

Mergenthaler grinned and dropped into a chair that Yocke hooked around with his foot. “Well, Jack, when you’re the most famous columnist writing in English and you’ve been in the outback for a week or so, the movers and shakers are just dying to unburden themselves of nifty secrets and juicy tidbits. They can only carry that stuff so long without relief and then they get constipated.”

“A tube steak on the sidewalk?”

“A really fine fettucine alfredo and a clear, dry Chianti.” Ott kissed his fingertips.

“Who was the mover and shaker, or is that a secret?”

“Read my column tomorrow. But if you can’t wait that long, it was Bob Cherry.”

“Cuba, right? Did you tell him to read my stuff?”

“That car-bus wreck and the Bush initiatives. God, what a mess! Half the country is screaming that Bush is overreacting and the other half is screaming that he hasn’t done enough. He’s getting it both ways, coming and going. Why any sane man gets into politics, I’ll never know.”

“Any line on who the ten pounds of dope belonged to?”

“No, but funny thing. Cherry implied that the government knows all about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he’s on the Oversight Committee and presumably has been briefed, and he just shrugged off the question of how the investigation is going. Muttered something like, ‘That’s not an issue.’ ”

“What d’ya mean, that’s not an issue? They know and aren’t telling?”

“Yeah. Precisely.” Ott Mergenthaler raised his eyebrows. “Normally you gotta watch Cherry like a hawk. He likes to pretend he knows everything, has a finger in every pie. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t. Now at lunch today he didn’t say so directly, but he left me and the other two reporters with the impression that the feds had a man on the inside. And he knew that was the impression he was creating and he could see by our reaction that we thought this was very important.”

“On the inside. Undercover?”

Mergenthaler nodded.

“You’re not going to print that, are you?”

“I have to. Two other reporters were there.” He named them. “They’ll use it. You can bet the ranch on that.”

“You can’t attribute this to Cherry.”

“That’s right. But this is an answer of sorts to a legit question. What is the federal government doing to bring to justice the people who indirectly caused eleven deaths in the heart of Washington? Cherry’s answer — that’s a nonquestion.”

“And if Cherry has said that to three reporters, who else has he said it to?”

“Precisely. Hell, knowing Cherry, he’s … And I know him. What I can’t figure out is, did he spill the beans on his own hook or was he told to?”

“If you knew that,” Jack Yocke mused, “you might get a better idea of whether or not it’s true.”

“Wonder what the government’s told the Japs.”

“Call the Japanese ambassador and ask.”

“I’ll do that.” Mergenthaler made a small ceremony of maneuvering himself out of the chair and strolling off toward his office.

Jack Yocke watched him go, then jerked the Rolodex around and flipped through it. He found the number he wanted and dialed.

One ring. Two. Three. C’mon, answer the damn phone!

“Sammy.”

“Jack Yocke. You alone?”

“Just me and Jesus.”

“Your phone tapped?”

“How the fuck would I know, man?”

“Ah, what an affable, genial guy you are. Okay, Mr. Laid Back Bro, a U.S. senator just hinted to one of our columnists that the government knows all there is to know about that car-bus wreck. Our guy was left with the clear impression that the feds got somebody undercover.”

“Give me that again, slower.”

Yocke repeated his message.

“That’s all?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“Who was the senator?”

“Bob Cherry.”

“Thanks, man.”

“It’ll be in tomorrow’s paper. Just thought you’d like to know.”

“Thanks.”

Harrison Ronald Ford hung up the phone and went back to his crossword puzzle. He stared at it without seeing the words. Then he went over to the sink and vomited into it.

It’s out! The word’s out. Hooper—that asshole!

His stomach tied itself into a knot and he heaved again.

He turned on the water to flush the mess down the drain. Saliva was still dripping from his mouth.

He heaved again, dry this time. He looked at the telephone on the table, tempted. No way! That fucker McNally had too goddamn many people on his payroll.

When the retching stopped, he grabbed his coat and slammed the door behind him.

“Hooper, you fucking shithead! What’re you trying to do to me?” Harrison Ronald roared the words into the telephone. “Calm down. What’re you talking about?”

Ford repeated his conversation of six minutes ago with Jack Yocke.

“Gimme your number. I’ll call you back in eight or ten minutes.”

“This is a fucking pay phone, you shithead! Nobody can call this fucking number because Marion fucking Barry doesn’t want fucking dope peddlers taking orders on this fucking phone.”

“So call me back in ten minutes.”

“In ten minutes I may well be as dead as Ma Bell, you blithering shithead. If I don’t call the funeral will be on Wednesday. Closed casket!”

He slammed the phone onto its hook and looked around to see who had been listening to his shouting. No one, thank God!

Hooper used the government directory to look up the number, then dialed. “Senator Cherry, please. This is Special Agent Thomas Hooper.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the woman said. “Senator Cherry is on the Senate floor. What is this about?”

“I’m not at liberty to say. When could I expect a return call?”

“Well, not today. Perhaps tomorrow morning?” The pitch of her voice rose slightly when she said “morning,” making it a question and a pleasantry at the same time.

“I suggest you send an aide to find the senator. Tell the aide that if the senator does not telephone Special Agent Thomas Hooper at 893-9338 in the next fifteen minutes, I will send a squad of agents to find him and physically transport him to the FBI building. See that he gets that message or he is going to be grossly inconvenienced.”

“Would you repeat that number?”

“893-9338.”

The next call went to The Washington Post switchboard. “Jack Yocke, please.”

After several rings, the reporter answered.

“Mr. Yocke, this is Special Agent Thomas Hooper of the FBI. I understand we have a mutual friend.”

“I know a lot of people, Mr. Hooper. Which mutual friend are we discussing?”

“The one you just talked to, oh, ten or fifteen minutes ago.”

“You say you’re with the FBI?”

“Call the FBI building and ask for me.” Hooper hung up.

In half a minute the phone rang.

“Hooper.”

“Jack Yocke, Mr. Hooper. Trying to be careful.”

“Our friend tells me that you discussed with him a conversation that one of your colleagues had over the lunch hour with Senator Cherry. Who is the colleague?”

“Ott Mergenthaler.”

“And who else was a party to that conversation?”

Yocke gave him the names and the newspapers they worked for.

“Mr. Yocke, is my friend a good friend of yours?”

“Yes.”

“Then I suggest you not mention that luncheon conversation, this conversation, or his name to another living soul. You understand?”

“I think it’s clear.”

“Good. Thanks.”

“Bye.”

Hooper walked from his office to his secretary’s desk. “Is Freddy back yet?”

“From Cuba? He got in about seven a.m. He’s been over at Justice most of the morning.”

“See if you can find him.”

While Hooper was waiting he carefully and legibly wrote the three reporters’ names and the newspapers they worked for on a blank sheet of paper. Freddy came in about five minutes later. “How’d it go in Cuba?”

“We got Zaba. And enough evidence to fry Chano Aldana.”

“Great. But we have a more pressing problem. Senator Bob Cherry had lunch with these three reporters.” He shoved his note across the desk. “Cherry hinted that the government knew everything it wanted to know about that car-bus crash the other night because it had an undercover agent in place.”

“Aww, damn,” Freddy said. “He was just briefed on that this morning and he’s spilled it already!”

“Go to the director’s office, tell the executive assistant what the problem is, and see if the director will telephone the publishers of those newspapers and kill the story. Report back to me as soon as possible.”

“That may keep it out of the papers for a day or two, but that won’t cork it. It’s out of the bottle now, Tom.”

“I’ll talk to Cherry.”

“Good luck. He’s probably told a dozen people.”

Hooper rubbed his forehead. “Go see the director.”

He was still rubbing his forehead, trying to think, when the phone rang again, the direct line. “Hooper.”

“Okay, it’s me. I’ve calmed down a little. Sorry.”

“Forget it, Harrison. Where are you?”

“Why?”

“I’m sending an agent in a car to get you. You’re done.”

“How’d the word get out?”

“We told the President and briefed key members of the congressional Oversight Committees. One of the senators then had lunch with a team of reporters and dropped some hints.”

“Awww, fuck!”

“Where are you?”

“Now you calm down. Freeman patted me on the head after that incident. I’m in real tight now, man. He’s got a meeting sometime tonight with Fat Tony Anselmo. Something heavy’s going down. We’re cunt-hair close, Tom. No shit.”

“You are done, Harrison. I don’t want to see you a corpse. Not only would death be bad for your health, it’d leave me with no case. We’ve got enough to take Freeman and his associates off the street for a few years, and I’m not greedy. You’re done.”

“Now look, Tom. I’m a big boy and I stopped wearing diapers last year. I’m not done until I say I’m done.”

“Harrison, I’m in charge of this case. We can maybe keep Cherry’s little luncheon chat out of the papers for a few days, but he’s probably already run off at the mouth all over town. I don’t know. He’ll probably lie to me about it. This is your life you’re betting.”

“Two nights. Two more nights and then we bust ’em.”

“You are a flaming idiot.”

“That’s what everybody says. Talk to you tomorrow.”

The phone went dead.

Hooper hung the instrument up and sat staring at it.

When it rang again he let the secretary in the outer office take it. She buzzed him. “Senator Cherry, sir.”

He pushed the button. “Senator, this is Special Agent Hooper. We need to have a talk. Immediately.”

“I understand you made some threatening remarks a few minutes ago to one of my staff, Hooper. What the hell is going on over there anyway?”

“I really need to see you as soon as possible on a very urgent matter, Senator. I’m sorry if your secretary felt I was threatening.”

The senator huffed and puffed a bit, but Hooper was willing to grovel, and soon the feathers were back in place. “Well,” Cherry agreed finally, “I’m going out to dinner before I attend a reception at the French embassy. You could come by about sixish?”

“Senator, I know the unwritten rules, but I just can’t come over. You’ll have to stop by here.”

The senator gave him a few seconds of frosty silence. “Okay,” he said with no grace.

“The guard at the quadrangle entrance will be expecting you and will escort you to my office.”

Special Agent Hooper was staring at the classified file on this operation when his assistant, Freddy Murray, returned from the director’s office. Freddy pulled up a chair and reported:

“The director made the calls. The publishers agreed to kill the story unless it runs elsewhere, then they’ll have to run it. That leak’s plugged, at least for a little while.”

“Thanks, Freddy.”

“We got to wrap this operation up, Tom, and make some arrests. The pressure is excruciating and it’s gonna get worse. While I was in the director’s office he was on the phone to the attorney general. The AG has been talking to the President. Did you see this morning’s paper?”

Hooper laid three documents on the table. “Why’d we start this operation, anyway?”

Hooper knew the answer to that question, of course, but he liked to think aloud. Freddy Murray thought this quirk of Hooper’s a fortunate habit because his subordinates then knew where the boss’s thoughts were going without having to ask. So he willingly played along. “To find out who in the bureau is on McNally’s payroll.”

“And what have we discovered?”

“Nothing.”

“Correct.”

“So.” Hooper used the eraser on a pencil to scratch his head. “So.”

“We’ve got enough to put McNally out of business,” Freddy pointed out. “It’s not like this operation hasn’t borne fruit. Ford has filled our stocking with goodies. And the people in the front office are getting more desperate by the hour.”

“Who are the three guys we thought might be dirty?”

“Wilson, Kovecki, and Moreto.”

“Aren’t these documents still on the computer?” Hooper pointed to them. Freddy looked at them. They were weekly progress reports to the assistant director. Harrison Ford’s name was contained on each.

“I think so.”

“Let’s rewrite these reports. We’ll construct four files, one for each of McNally’s chief lieutenants, naming each of them in turn as our undercover operative. Then we let each man get an unauthorized peek at one of the files. What d’ya think?”

Freddy sat silently for a minute or so, turning it over and looking under it. “I think we’re liable to get somebody killed.”

“Listen, Harrison’s dangling over the shark pit on a worn-out, fraying rope and blood is dripping into the water. The word is out — the feds have somebody inside. If McNally hears this rumor he’ll be looking for the traitor — you can bet Harrison Ronald Ford’s ass on that. Our first duty is to keep our guy alive, and our second is to find the rotten apples around here. We’re about out of time, Freddy.”

“I don’t like it.”

“You got a better suggestion?”

“Four files. Three suspects. Who’s the fourth file for?”

“Bob Cherry.”

Freddy scratched his crotch and picked his nose. “You’re not playing by the rules,” he objected, finally.

“There ain’t no rules in a knife fight,” Hooper growled. “Ask Freeman McNally.”

“Why Cherry?”

“Why not? The shit started the rumor. Let’s give him something to season it with. A name.”

“What if our little conversation this evening goes well and he shuts up?”

“You had any dealings with this guy? He thinks he’s one of the twelve disciples.”

“Okay, so we let him get a sneaky peek at a bogus file. Then we talk to him? He’ll come unglued — we call him in so we can bitch at him about his loose mouth and we leave secret files lying around unattended? He’ll latch onto that like a pit bull with AIDS. He’ll crucify us.”

Hooper swiveled his chair and looked out the window. “Gimme something better.”

“So we forget the file for the senator,” Freddy said, musing aloud. “Let’s play to him. We’ll just stroke him and when everything’s copacetic, introduce the name into the conversation. After all, he’s entitled to be briefed. Let’s brief the son of a bitch.”

They got busy with the computer. The facts had to change on each report to fit the bona fides of the man they wanted to use. It took some serious brainstorming. They had two files constructed when Freddy said, “What if two or more names get back to McNally? Where are we then?”

They discussed it. After batting it back and forth, they decided that McNally would probably conclude that the FBI was engaged in funny business, which would discredit not only the names but the undercover agent rumor as well. They went back to work on the last file.

At noon Hooper sent his secretary home for the rest of the day. She was aghast. Hooper was insistent. “And don’t mention this to anyone.”

“But the personnel regulations!”

“See you Monday.”

By three that afternoon Hooper and Freddy had drilled a hole through the plasterboard between the outer office and Hooper’s office. They installed a one-way mirror on Hooper’s side of the wall. The secretary’s forgettable print was rehung on her side to cover the hole. Freddy trotted down the hall and borrowed a vacuum cleaner from a cleaning closet to clean up the dust and drywall fragments.

The suspects were called one at a time into Hooper’s office to interview for the new positions in the division that Hooper had just yesterday recommended be created and filled in response to President Bush’s recent announcements.

Wilson didn’t look at the files on the desk in the fifteen minutes Hooper kept him waiting. When Hooper went into the office finally, Wilson flatly stated he wasn’t interested in transferring from his present position. But he appreciated being considered.

They had better luck with the second man, Kovecki. He did glance at the target file. The name in his was Ruben McNally, the accountant. In fact, Kovecki looked at all three files on the desk. One of them was his personnel file, and he settled in to examine that closely. He was still looking at it when Hooper went in to interview him.

Moreto also looked. He selected the bogus file from the three on the desk and scanned it quickly. The name in his file was Billy Enright. Then Moreto went over to the window and stared out. He was at the window when Hooper entered the room.

In between interviews Hooper fielded a call from the director. “I want you to take your man to the grand jury on Monday. The prosecutors are doing the indictments this weekend. Monday night you start picking these guys up.”

“Yessir.”

“Hooper,” the director said, “this comes straight from the White House. I expect you to make it happen.”

At six-seventeen that evening the senator arrived. With the former Miss Georgia parked in the outer office visiting with a ga-ga young agent who was acting as the building escort, Tom Hooper and Freddy Murray gently cautioned the great man behind closed doors and gave him a fairly complete briefing on the operation, including the name of the undercover man, Ike Randolph. Most of the other things they told the senator were equally accurate but carefully tailored to fit the bare bones of the truth, which the senator already knew. They failed to mention the planned expedition to the grand jury Monday or the arrests they hoped to make within hours of obtaining indictments.

At seven thirty-two Hooper finally locked his office and he and Freddy headed for the Metro.