Under Siege

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

When Jake Grafton arrived at the National Guard Armory, over a dozen young men and three women were being led into the building in handcuffs. The troops escorting them pushed them roughly along with their rifle butts. One woman who refused to walk was being carried.

“Uh-oh,” Jake muttered as Jack Yocke pulled into a parking place in the lot reserved for government vehicles. As he got out of the car he could hear them cursing, loudly and vehemently. One woman was screaming at the top of her lungs.

The screams followed him down the hall as he headed for General Greer’s office.

The soldiers searching the Jefferson projects had run into problems, the general said. People refused to open doors, some had illegal drugs in plain sight, and some verbally and physically attacked the soldiers. The officer in charge, Captain Joe White-Feather, had arrested sixteen of the most vociferous and truculent. He also had, the general said, another eight men on a truck coming in. Some residents of the projects had sworn that these men were drug dealers, and indeed, several pounds of drugs and a quantity of weapons had been recovered by the soldiers.

“We can’t not arrest them,” the general said, and Jake Grafton glumly nodded his concurrence. In some complex, convoluted way, this whole mess was about illegal drugs and the people who sold and bought them. The soldiers were going to have to address the problem of the sellers and the users whether they or their superiors wanted to or not.

Captain Jake Grafton, naval officer, instinctively recoiled from the implications of the solution. Here was a law-enforcement function pure and simple, yet as the representatives of the government on the spot, the soldiers had to do something. But what? A problem needing a surgeon’s scalpel was going to be addressed with the proverbial blunt instrument, the U.S. Army.

Jake Grafton reached for the phone.

Amazingly enough, no one on the Joint Staff had considered this possible complication. Career officers to a man, they had approached the problem from a purely military standpoint. The time crunch had demanded that logistics and the command, control, and communications functions — C³—be addressed first. That was about as far as anyone had gotten. Yet the problem was reality now.

He got home that night at three a.m. Callie was waiting for him when he came through the door.

“Amy asleep?”

“For hours.”

“Got any coffee?”

She nodded and led the way to the kitchen. When both of them had a cup in front of them and were seated at the kitchen table, she asked, “How is it going?”

He rubbed his face. “We’re locking up everyone who resists military authority and everyone in possession of drugs. Holding them down at the armory. The jails are full.”

“You’re exhausted, Jake.”

“Without a doubt, this is one of the worst days of my life. God, what a mess! We’re all in over our heads — General Land, General Greer, me, every soldier on the street.”

“Did you have any dinner?”

“Wasn’t hungry.”

She headed for the refrigerator.

“Please, Callie, I don’t want anything. I’m too tired. I’m going to take a shower and fall into the rack.”

“We saw you and Toad on television. Outside L’Enfant Plaza.”

“An atrocity, like something the Nazis did to the Jews. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Evil. You could feel it. Wanton murder on a grand scale.”

She came over and put her arms around his shoulders. “What kind of people would do that to other people?” she murmured.

Jake Grafton just shook his head and drank the last of his coffee.

The next morning he stopped by the armory before he went to the FBI building. The rain had slackened and become a mist, under a low ceiling. The streets and wide boulevards looked obscenely empty. Jake passed an occasional military vehicle, some government cars, and the usual police, but nothing else.

All the stoplights were working. He stopped at one, but his was the only car in all four directions. He looked, then went on through.

He was stopped at a roadblock on Constitution Avenue. A soldier standing forward of the door on the passenger’s side of the car held an M-16 on him while a sergeant checked his ID card.

The sergeant saluted. “You can go on now, sir.”

“Let me give you a word of advice, Sergeant. The people we’re after will start shooting at the drop of a hat. I suggest you get a couple more riflemen to cover each car as you approach it. And you might park a couple of your trucks sideways in the street here so they can’t go barreling through without stopping.”

“Yessir. I’ll talk to my lieutenant.”

Ninety-one people were now being detained at the armory. They were being held in unused offices and in the corridors and along the sides of the giant squad bay. The soldiers had been busy. They had obtained chain and padlocks from a hardware store somewhere and were securing belligerent people to radiators and exposed pipes and anything else they could find that looked solid.

Some of the new arrivals cursed and screamed and shouted dire threats, but the ones who had been there a while tried to sleep or sobbed silently. Some of them lay in their own vomit. “Withdrawal,” one officer told Jake as he walked by trying not to breathe the fetid stench. The soldiers had a couple of military doctors and corpsmen attending these people. Pairs of soldiers took prisoners to the heads one at a time.

Forty or fifty of the prisoners appeared to be just people who had ignored the order to keep their vehicles off the street. These people were sober and well dressed and were busy complaining loudly to an officer who was interviewing them one by one, checking addresses and driver’s licenses and writing all the information down, then turning them loose to walk home. The cars stayed in the armory lot.

Jake paused and listened to one of the interviews. The man was doing his best to browbeat the officer, a major. Jake signaled to the major, who left his interviewee in midtirade and stepped into the hall. “What are you doing with jerks like that?”

“Holding the worst ones,” the major said, smiling. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “That one isn’t too bad. He just can’t get it through my head that the military order didn’t apply to him.”

After a hurried conference with General Greer and a look at the map of the city, Jake drove off to FBI headquarters. He picked up Toad Tarkington en route.

Toad sat silently beside Jake and stared at the empty streets and rare pedestrians.

The federal guard at the kiosk at the main entrance of the FBI building telephoned upstairs. Two minutes later a junior agent arrived to take them upstairs. “Not many people made it to work today,” the agent told them and gestured toward the empty offices. “We have cars going around picking up people, but we’ll only bring in about half of them.”

Hooper was expecting them. He took them into his office and poured coffee from a coffee maker on his credenza. His clothes were rumpled and he needed a shave.

“What’s your job, exactly?” he asked Jake.

“The general sort of added me to his staff temporarily. I’m really on the Joint Staff, along with Lieutenant Tarkington here and sixteen hundred other people.”

Hooper had no reply. If the military bureaucracy were half as complicated as the FBI’s, further questions would be futile. He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got about a half hour. Then I have to give a presentation to the presidential commission, or the Longstreet Commission, which is what I understand they’re calling themselves now that Chief Justice Longstreet is one of the victims.”

Without further ado he began: “As you may know, the President’s helicopter was shot down with a couple of Stinger missiles. American manufacture. We’re inventorying the Stinger missiles in every ammo depot nationwide and looking at every theft report we have, but we haven’t got anything solid yet. We’ve talked to everybody in a ten-mile radius of the little park on the river that the missiles were fired from, but so far nothing.

“Our best leads are the rifles that were left after the attorney general and the Chief Justice were shot. The rifles are identical, Winchester Model 70s, bolt action in thirty-ought-six caliber. We’ve tried to trace them both and we’ve gotten lucky. Ten years ago the rifle that fired the shot that hit the AG was sold by a gun store to a dentist in Pittsburgh. He sold it six weeks ago via a newspaper ad. A man called him about the ad, then showed up an hour later, looked the rifle over, and paid cash. No haggling and no name.

“But we got lucky again. Sometimes it goes like that and sometimes you can’t buy a break. The dentist described the man and he had a distinctive tattoo on his forearm. That came up a hit on the national crime computer. Guy name of Melvin Doyle, who as luck would have it was arrested three days ago in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, for beating hell out of his ol’ lady. Doyle’s done time for grand larceny, forgery, and a variety of misdemeanors.”

Here he handed Jake a computer printout of Doyle’s record. Jake glanced at it, then passed it to Toad, who read it through rapidly and laid it back on Hooper’s desk.

“Our agents talked to Doyle last night. He was threatened with a federal charge of conspiracy to murder a public official charge, and he talked. He says he acquired three Model 70s for a guy he knew as Tony Pickle.” He dropped another sheet in front of Jake. “This is Tony Pickle.

“Guy named Pasquale Piccoli, also known as Anthony Tassone. Grew up in the rackets, moved to Dallas in the midseventies. Was involved in S&Ls in Texas. Lately been living in Vegas.”

He sat and stared at Jake.

“And,” the captain prompted.

“And that’s it,” Hooper said. “That’s all the evidence we have.”

“The second rifle? Was it one of the three?”

“Don’t know. Doyle didn’t write down serial numbers.”

“Doyle get anything else for Tassone?”

“He denies it. We’re looking.”

“Okay, now tell me what you think.”

“Our Texas office is very interested in Tony Pickle. Seems he was sort of a Mr. Fix-it for some real shady S&L operators, most of whom are being investigated or are under indictment. It seems that two or three may have stepped beyond the usual bank fraud, kickbacks, cooked books, and insider loan shenanigans. It looks like they got into money laundering. Extremely profitable. Perfect for an S&L that was watching a ton of loans go sour and rotten.”

“What does Tassone say about all this?”

“Don’t know. We’re looking. Haven’t found him yet.”

“Who,” Toad asked, speaking for the first time, “were these S&Ls washing money for?”

Special Agent Thomas F. Hooper eyed the junior officer speculatively. “For the big coke importers. Maybe, roundabout, the Cali or Medellín cartels. That’s the smell of it anyway. Lot of money involved.” He pursed his lips for a second. “A lot of money,” he said again, fixing his eyes on the picture of Anthony Tassone.

“Forgive our ignorance,” Jake Grafton said. “But how much money does the FBI consider to be a lot?”

“Over a billion. At least that.”

“That’s a lot,” Toad Tarkington agreed. “Even over at the Pentagon that’s a lot.”

After using every minute of Hooper’s half hour, Jake and Toad left the FBI building at about the same time that Deputy Sheriff Willard Grimes pulled his mud-spattered cruiser up to the pump at the gas station — general store at Apache Crossroads, New Mexico. The deputy swabbed the windshield in the wind and bitter cold as the gas trickled into the cruiser’s tank.

When he had the nozzle back on the hook, Willard Grimes went inside.

The wind gusted through the clapboard building as he forced the door shut. “Whew,” he said, “think it’ll ever get warm again?”

“’Lo, Willard,” the proprietor said, looking up from the morning paper. “How many gallons?”

“Sixteen point six,” Willard said, and poured himself a styrofoam cup full of hot, steaming coffee.

The man behind the counter made a note in a small green book, then pushed it over for Willard to sign. Willard scribbled his name with a flourish. He put twenty-six cents on the counter for the coffee.

“How’s crime?” the man behind the counter asked.

“Oh, so so,” Willard told him. “Gonna be trolling for speeders over on the interstate today. Sheriff told me to write at least five out-of-staters. Damn county commissioners are on him again to bring in some more fine money.”

“You know,” the proprietor said, “the thing I like most about living out here is that there isn’t any real crime. Not like those big cities.” He gestured toward the copy of the Sante Fe newspaper lying on the counter.

Deputy Grimes glanced at the paper. There was a drawing right below the headline. Someone’s face. “That the guy who supposedly took a shot at the Vice-President?”

“Yeah. The President, the Vice-President, and half the cabinet. Cutting a swath through Washington, this one is. Making Lee Harvey Oswald look like a goldfish. And you know something funny? When I first saw that picture on TV last night, I said to the wife, I said, ‘Darn if that don’t look like Henry Charon, that lives up in the Twin Buttes area.’ Crazy how a fellow’s mind works when he sees a drawing like that, ain’t it?”

“Yeah,” said Willard Grimes, sipping the coffee and looking out the window at the lowering sky above the arrow-straight road pointing toward the horizon. He got out a cigarette and lit it as he sipped the coffee.

Oh yeah, now he remembered. Charon. Sort of a nondescript medium-sized guy. Skinny. Real quiet. Drives a Ford pickup.

Grimes ambled back to the counter and stared at the artist’s drawing on the front page of the paper. He squinted. Naw.

“Couldn’t be him, of course,” the proprietor said. “Ain’t nobody from around here going to go clear to Washington to gun down politicians. Don’t make sense. Not that some of ’em couldn’t use a little shootin’. The guy who’s doing it is probably some kind of half-baked commie nut, like that idiot Oswald was. But Henry Charon? Buys gas and food here pretty regular.”

“Couldn’t be him,” Deputy Willard Grimes agreed.

“Now if a fellow had it in for dirtball politicians,” the proprietor said, warming to his theme, “there’s a bunch that need shootin’ a lot closer to home. Remember down in Albuquerque …”

Five minutes later, with another cup of coffee in his hand, Deputy Grimes was ready to leave for the interstate when a game warden drove up to the gas pump and parked his green truck. He came inside. Willard lingered to visit.

The game warden was eating a doughnut and kidding the proprietor when his eyes came to rest on the newspaper. “Don’t that beat all,” he exclaimed. “If that isn’t Henry Charon I’ll eat my hat.”

“What?” said Willard Grimes.

“Henry Charon,” the game warden said. “Got a little two-by-four ranch up toward Twin Buttes. I’ve chased that sonuvabitch all over northern New Mexico. He’s a damned poacher but we could never catch him at it. That’s him all right.”

“How come you didn’t say something yesterday?” Willard Grimes asked, his brow furrowing. “That picture must have been on TV a hundred times already.”

“My TV broke a month ago. That’s the first time I laid eyes on that picture. But I’ll bet a week’s pay that’s Henry Charon. Sure as God made little green apples.”

The envelope containing the lab reports from the Sanitary Bakery warehouse case had lain in the in-basket for four hours before Special Agent Freddy Murray had the time to open it. He read the documents through once, then settled in to study them carefully. Finally he pulled a legal pad around and began making notes.

The corpse of one Antonio Anselmo, white male about forty-five years of age with a partial dental plate, had been found in Harrison Ford’s locked room at the FBI barracks on the Quantico Marine Corps base. The forward portion of his skull had been crushed. Death had been instantaneous. When the field lab people saw the body at eleven a.m. Wednesday, they calculated that Anselmo had died between midnight and four a.m.

Hair, bits of flesh, and minute quantities of blood were found on the landing of the stairwell nearest to Ford’s room. Blood type was the same as Anselmo’s. Threads of clothing and one shirt button had been recovered from the stairs. Marks on the lineoleum in the corridor that might have been made by a body.

Wallet — now this was interesting — both the wallet and a motel key bore partial prints of Harrison Ford.

A shotgun lay beside the body. It also had Ford’s prints. And there was a minute oil stain on Anselmo’s shirttail — a stain of gun oil. No other weapons in the room.

The second report went into great detail about the warehouse, with its six bodies and cocaine processing laboratory. Murray flipped through it uninterestedly.

He settled on the report concerning Freeman McNally’s house. One body in the living room. Fifty-one-year-old white male named Vinnie Pioche. Shot three times, 9-mm slugs, two that entered the back and one that penetrated his right side, apparently while he was lying down. According to the coroner Pioche had been dead when the third shot struck him — no bleeding.

Then this ringer: the pistol that fired the slugs that killed Pioche was in the weapons room and contained no prints.

The report carefully detailed where each of eighty 9-mm rounds had struck in the lower floor of the house. Refrigerator, TV, bathroom — it was quite a list. There were diagrams and Murray referred to them several times as he read.

Cars outside the warehouse. One of them contained stains of human blood on the backseat. The blood matched Pioche’s. The ignition key for this car had been recovered from Harrison Ford’s pocket.

Now Freddy Murray went back to the report on the warehouse. He looked again at the coroner’s detail of Freeman McNally’s injuries. Scrotum partially ripped from the body, severe injury to the right testicle incurred just before death stopped the heart. Death caused by a bullet through the heart, a shot fired into his back from about four feet away.

Ruben McNally — half strangled and severely beaten, but the cause of death was internal bleeding in the brain caused when his nose bone was shoved into the cranial cavity.

Billy Enright …

Freddy sat back in his chair and whistled softly. Jesus. That was the only word that described it. Jesus!

He was still making notes an hour later when Tom Hooper came into the office and sagged into a seat.

“McNally?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you think?” Hooper asked as he took off his shoes.

“Well,” Freddy said slowly as he watched Hooper knead his right foot. “I’m struck by the many points of similarity between the McNally mess and the massacre over at Teal’s.”

Hooper didn’t look up. “Bullshit,” he said.

“No, I mean it, Tom.”

Hooper dropped his right foot and worked some on his left. Then he put them both flat on the floor and looked at Freddy. “No.”

“I admit there are a lot of dissimilarities too, but it really looks to me like another gang wipeout. We are just damned lucky our undercover officer survived with only one bullet in the back.”

Hooper pointed at the pile of reports. “Look at the one for Ford,” he said. “Read me the analysis of the clothes the emergency room people took off him.”

Freddy took his time. He found the passage, perused it, then said, “Okay, there’s some blood, three different types, some brain tissue—”

“Now where in hell do you suppose he got that on him?”

“Tom, in places in that warehouse it was on the walls and in puddles on the floor. He rubbed against it somewhere.”

Hooper put on his shoes and carefully tied the laces. That chore completed, he said, “You and I both know that Ford went into that warehouse and gunned those men. He beat one to death with his bare hands. He went there to do it. No other reason.”

“Now you listen a minute, Tom. We got a ton of facts here but no story. A clever man could string all these facts together to tell any story he wanted to tell. I guarantee you that the lawyer Harrison Ford ends up with will be a damn clever man. If he gets indicted, even I am going to contribute to his legal defense fund.”

Hooper said nothing.

Murray charged on. “You think it isn’t going to come out that the bureau sent him in undercover? Ha! The defense is going to make us out to be a bunch of incompetent paper pushers who couldn’t prosecute Freeman McNally and are now trying to hang our own undercover operative. My God, Tom! The next hundred people we try to recruit to go undercover are going to laugh in our faces!”

“Cops and FBI agents gotta obey the law too. Harrison went over the edge.” The irritation was plain in Hooper’s voice. “Why are we having this conversation?”

“Ford’s mistake was not being in bed sound asleep when Tony Anselmo came calling with his sawed-off shotgun. Then he could have just died in his sleep and none of this mess would have happened.”

“I know he killed Anselmo in self-defense,” Hooper growled. “Nobody’s suggesting charging him for that.”

“You think that fight at the warehouse wasn’t self-defense? My God, Tom. He’s got a bullet in the back.”

Hooper got out of his chair and went over to the window. He ran his fingers through his hair. “So what are you suggesting?”

“I think Harrison Ford has done enough for his country. I’m suggesting we close the file on the McNally case and let Ford go back to Evansville.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

Hooper stood looking out the window.

“We should have busted McNally in September,” Freddy said, more to himself than to his boss.

Tom Hooper had spent twenty-six years in the FBI. He thought about those years now and the various tough choices he had had to make along the way. Freddy irritated him with all this crap about September. They had handled this case right all the way, and circumstances beyond everyone’s control had intervened. His thoughts turned to Ford — the man was not a good undercover agent. Oh, sure, he could think on his feet and he was brave as a bull, but he had too much imagination. He thought too damn much.

He stood at the window tallying Ford’s sins. Goddamn that asshole, anyway. “Ford was planning to gun McNally and all the rest of them, then go back to his room at Quantico. He was going to call us and claim he and Anselmo had struggled and he had been knocked out. That’s why he changed guns at McNally’s house. We’ve got no proof that he killed Pioche. None! It’s plausible that Anselmo killed him before he went to kill Ford. If Ford hadn’t been wounded at the warehouse we might not have been able to place him there. All we would have had is a bunch of corpses.”

“You think?” Freddy said behind him.

“I know! I can read that man’s mind. He’s no cop! He thinks like a goddamn jarhead. Attack! Always attack.”

Hooper turned around. Freddy was perusing the lab reports.

“You listening to me?” he asked Freddy.

“I heard.”

“Ford and McNally. They’re just alike. Screw the law! The law is for those other guys, all those guys who can’t get away with breaking it. They both think like that!”

Freddy folded the reports and stacked them neatly. He took his time with it and examined the pile to make sure it was perfectly aligned, with the files in proper numerical sequence. When he finished he spoke slowly, without looking at Hooper:

“McNally’s out of business. Permanently. That, I thought, was our ultimate goal all along. And the government isn’t going to have to spend a nickel trying him. No board and room in a heated cell for the rest of his life at the taxpayers’ expense. No appeals. No claims of racial bigotry or oppression. It’s all over.”

He picked up the stack of files and held it out for Hooper. “Close the case,” he said.

Just then the intercom buzzed. “Yes,” Freddy said into the box.

“There’s a call for Mr. Hooper from New Mexico. Another identification of that artist’s drawing of the assassin.”

“Tell her I’ll take it in my office,” Hooper told Freddy. He picked up the files and put them under his arm.

The first shots were fired at the soldiers in a poorer section of northeast Washington around two p.m. A detail had halted a beat-up ’65 Cadillac containing two black youths and were marching them toward a truck when someone fired a shot. The soldiers dropped to the ground and began looking for the shooter. The two black youths ran. One of the soldiers in full combat gear ran after them. He had gone about fifty feet when there was another shot and he fell to the sidewalk.

His comrades sent a hail of lead into a second-floor window over a corner grocery, then kicked the door in and charged up the stairs. Inside the room they found a fifteen-year-old boy with a bullet-wound in his arm huddled on the floor. Beside him lay an old lever-action rifle.

“Why’d you shoot?” the sergeant demanded. “Why’d you shoot that soldier?”

The boy wouldn’t answer. He was dragged down the stairs and, in full view of a rapidly gathering crowd, was thrown roughly into a truck for the ride to the hospital. Beside him on a stretcher lay the man he had shot.

“Honkey pigs,” one woman shouted. “Arresting kids! Why you honkies here in our neighborhood anyway? Out to hassle the niggers?”

A brick sailed over the crowd and just missed a soldier. It took the soldiers twenty minutes to run the crowd off.

While this incident was playing itself out, a dope addict in a public housing project two miles away fired a shotgun through a closed door, striking the soldier who was knocking on it full in the face.

The second shot splattered harmlessly against the wall.

The soldiers kicked in the door while the addict wrestled with the lever to break open the double-barrel. His wife was sitting nearby in a chair. She watched silently as two soldiers with their M-16s on full automatic emptied their magazines into her husband from a distance of eight feet. The soldiers were hasty and inexperienced. Some of their bullets missed. However thirty-two of them — the coroner did the counting later — ripped through the addict before his corpse hit the floor.