Shockwave (23 page)

“I
t only took a few minutes,” Dolly said, the second I looked up from the thick pile of paper she had handed to me.

“You mean to—?”

“Going back at least as far as the fifties.” She rolled through whatever I was going to say as if I’d never started to talk.

“Dolly …”

“The FBI has had informants that they
knew
were involved in killings. Not undercover agents, criminals who got a free pass to kill people, Dell. Or at least be around when that happened.”

“You mean,
after
the FBI found out—?”

“No!” she interrupted, sharply. “
Before
. I mean the FBI knew these people were in the business of killing. That they’d killed before, and they were sure to kill again. I guess they thought the information they were getting was so valuable that … Well, I don’t know how to measure such things, but if an informant’s a member of an organization that kills all the time, I suppose whatever that informant turned over would be like having a camera and a microphone planted inside. Planted so deep inside that it could never be detected.”

“But sooner or later, they’d have to testify, right? The informant, I mean.”

“It doesn’t seem so. The FBI had informants inside the Klu Klux Klan back when it seemed like they were lynching black people every week. But the only way that ever got out was when the informant himself came forward. Not out of conscience or anything. Because they were writing a book about it, maybe.”

“That was a long time ago, honey.”

“What are you saying?”

“I read through some of the stuff you printed out. Informants
came out a
long
time later. But those three kids—Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, right?—they were murdered by cops. In Mississippi. The FBI says it broke the case—the locals weren’t going to even
pretend
to be looking for the killers, so the feds had to step in.”

“So? Doesn’t that—?”

“In the stuff you pulled up, the FBI itself only drops veiled hints. You know, that they ‘reached out to all sources’? And there’s other stuff that says a Mafia man came all the way from New York to Mississippi, and tortured the truth out of one of the Klansmen. Scarpa, I think his name was.”

“Only you don’t believe that?”

“That last part? It’s a stretch. There weren’t any crime-syndicate guys working closer to Mississippi then? They had to go all the way to New York to find one?”

“Well, maybe they had a reason to use—”

“Damn!”

“Dell? What?”

“I … I don’t know. Let me see that part again,” I said, reaching across the butcher block to extract some of the red-tabbed pages of Dolly’s huge printout.

“What are you …?”

“Ssssh,” I told my wife. Not a word she liked, but I had to grab that thin thread before it vanished.

It was quiet in the kitchen. Even Rascal flopped down on a mat and closed his eyes.

Then I saw it.

“Dolly, those kids—Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman—they were arrested for speeding. Cut free a few hours later. After dark. The Klan was waiting for them. Their car was found, burned out. But the bodies weren’t inside. Now, look here, it’s right on the FBI’s own site,” I said, my finger on a single paragraph: “Acting on an informant tip, we exhumed all three bodies 14 feet below an earthen dam on a local farm.”

“Now,
that
could have happened. Some gangster
could
have tortured the location of the bodies out of someone who knew it. But right on this same page it says eighteen people went on trial but only seven of them were convicted, and
none
of them for murder. A man named Edgar Ray Killen, a Baptist preacher, the FBI says was a major conspirator—he walked free.”

“Well—”

“Wait, honey. On that same page, it says he was convicted. Of manslaughter. But not until 2005.”

“Mississippi Burning,”
Dolly blurted out. “That was a movie. I think Gene Hackman was the star. He’s a great—”

Catching my look, Dolly interrupted her cinema critique and went back to the facts. “The FBI came back down to Mississippi and reopened the case. And it was a
federal
prosecution.”

“When did Hoover die?”

“Give me a second …” she said, pounding some keys. “Nineteen seventy-two.”

“So—way
before
this happened. I mean, before the movie stuff happened.”

“What does that mean? Hoover
was
in charge when they broke the case.”

“Before that, what was the FBI doing about … that kind of thing?”

“I don’t know, Dell.”

“Me, either. But what it smells like is that Hoover was kind of forced into whatever he did. All that negative press—not just here, overseas, too. And see, right here? One of those kids, he was
from
New York. A white kid. A white
Jewish
kid.”

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?”

“It had to be the first time a white man was ever lynched in Mississippi, never mind a white Jewish kid from New York. But it couldn’t have been the first time a
black
kid was lynched down there. What I can’t see is, why would Hoover subcontract that job to some gangster?”

“The job of—?”

“Torturing someone for information. It’s not like the FBI couldn’t do that themselves. So why …? Dolly, listen, this Scarpa guy, he had to be someone the FBI trusted. Which means that they had him on a
powerful
leash.”

“What possible leash could they ever have? I mean, if he was caught, wouldn’t he just tell the truth, even to save his own skin?”

“You just said it,” I told her, seeing it myself. “The only way they could trust some Mafia guy is if he was
already
in their pocket. Already feeding info to them. A permanent informant.

“So—first they put together enough to drop him for life. Or even execute him. That’s when they tell him, ‘You know what, pal? Now you’re working for
us.’
If he ever balks, they don’t even have to get their own hands dirty. Just let it leak that he’s been feeding info. Maybe even point to some boss that’s doing time because of this guy’s ‘cooperation.’ That way they score twice—the informant they were running disappears … and the mob owes them one, too.”

T
hat sent Dolly back to the keyboard, her fingers flying like they were having an epileptic fit.

I just waited.

When she finally looked up at me, there were tiny fire-glints in her gray eyes. “Not so long ago, there were a couple of FBI agents convicted of murder, because they let known killers go right
on
killing, in exchange for feeding them information. Here! Take this new stuff—I’m printing it out now—and read it for yourself.”

I
t took a while, especially with all the flipping back and forth, but I finally put the jigsaw puzzle together.

When I looked up, Dolly was still sitting right next to me. Rascal was chewing on something he’d recently scored.

“So you think they—the FBI, I mean, the whole agency, from the top down—you think they were okay with this … policy or whatever, while the Klan was running wild, but not anymore?” I asked her.

“I don’t know. And I don’t see how it matters. The Internet has more conspiracy theories about the FBI than it does about alien abductions. What I found were cases. Not theories, not speculations, actual cases.”

“The informants testified?”

“No. That’s not what I mean. I mean
other
agents figured things out. Like if a trap was set—maybe a raid that was about to happen—and everyone
except
a certain person walked into it. A pattern, like you’re always talking about, Dell.
That’s
when they put in their own wiretaps, started their own surveillance.

“And they heard these gangsters bragging about how they had an agent in their pocket—how they knew they wouldn’t be questioned about
any
killing they were going to do, even when they told the agent in advance!”

“Damn.”

“Yes. And it’s even worse. Police detectives have been convicted of actually committing contract murders themselves. This ‘Witness Protection Program’ you always hear about? Well, some of the people they put in there, after they testified against their own gangs, they just went right on doing what they’d been doing before.”

“Killing?”

“Killing, raping, drug dealing … everything.”

“That’s insane. They had to know if they got caught all bets were off.”

“Didn’t stop them,” Dolly said. “At least, it didn’t stop all of them.”

“That fits with what I … found out myself. Only, I don’t know which end it was coming from.”

“You lost me,” Dolly said, walking over to the refrigerator.

“We know three Nazis were chasing another Nazi, right?”

“Yes,” she said, pulling out a blue bottle of that “jungle juice” she drinks whenever she finishes working out.

“They found him, and they killed him.”

“Yes,” she said again. “Which proves it wasn’t Homer.”

“That’s not enough. It’s not even close to enough.”

“But if we can
prove—
”

“What can we prove, girl? The dead man’s not talking, and the three who took him out are in the wind.”

“We have to find them, then.”

“Not until we know who we’re looking for.”

“But you said yourself—”

“I said what I said. Nothing more.”

“It sounds like enough to me. More than enough.”

“Dolly … sweetheart, just listen, okay? If the dead guy was an informant for the FBI—or whatever agency—they’d
already
know who killed him. Even if they wanted to keep out of it themselves, they could have tipped off the locals easy enough. Maybe through the attorney general or something, I don’t know. But nothing like that’s happened.”

“You think they’re still—?”

“I’m not saying that. Those Boston gang cases you found, they started out as Rhode Island cases. Rhode Island Italians; Boston Irishmen. The agents who were looking the other way, they were getting value for doing that. At least, that’s what they claimed when they were named. It says right here”—I pointed at the printouts—“when one of the Irish guys got caught later, he rolled over, but not on his gang; he blew the whistle on the agents, and they gave him a death-penalty pass for doing that.

“And when
another
gangster who was tight with him disappeared—he was gone for years; they just caught him a little while ago—it sure looked as if
he’d
been tipped.”

“So what does that mean? Why does it even matter?”

“It matters because it was the feds themselves who prosecuted those FBI agents. The same way they prosecuted a CIA man who sold info to the other side, not so long ago. It matters because it means the agency itself
didn’t
know. So, if that’s what this is—the whole business with the guy who got killed, or who killed him—they wouldn’t know
now
, either.

“See, this can’t be a rogue agent, Dolly. Not a retired guy, or someone who quit. Not in business for himself. Not selling information. And not buying it, either. Just looking the other way when this Nazi—the one he gave that ‘license’ to—
used
that license. So long as that same guy was feeding him intel on
his
own people, he was free to kill anyone he felt like killing.

“For that kind of deal to hold, he’d have to be handing over
really
good stuff. The kind of info that the FBI would take as
prize
intel … like on ‘domestic terrorism’ plots. Remember what I said about Oklahoma City? The FBI’s probably had a whole different take on the ‘White Power’ groups ever since.”

“I still don’t—”

“What if the guy who got killed
was
an informant? Not some ‘licensed to kill’ guy, just the usual kind of rat who sells out his own crew to get a deal? And what if the killer found that out from the same fed who’d given him that license?”

“Then that agent, he’d
want
the killers to get away with it.”

“Yeah. But it
was
a homicide, so it’s better if it gets solved. And Homer, he’s the perfect solution.”

“So we could never find them? The real killers, I mean. They might have come from thousands of miles away. Sent over here just to—”

“That’s right. They might. But until we know …”

“How could we know?”

“Let me see what it would cost first.”

I
looked at what I’d typed before hitting that irretrievable “send.” Cryptography is only useful if the recipient can decode it. I read it over a couple of times before I was confident that the cracker would know I was asking if the informant was still in place. Undisturbed. And still working.

Working jungle, you’re always doing death math. Hunting those who are hunting you. In La Légion, the mission is always defined. Not by you,
for
you. There is no discussion, no debate. You are not permitted even to wonder if the man walking behind you is … reliable.

But mercenaries walking those same trails would always wonder. The mission may be “sacred” to a
légionnaire
, but the only thing sacred to a merc is his own survival. And I had gone from a
“soldat pour l’honneur”
to a soldier for money a very long time ago.

I hadn’t worked for money since Dolly had said she’d come and be with me. But that didn’t mean I’d let my skills go rusty. Not because I couldn’t shake lifelong habits—because I could never know when I might need to do the one thing I was good at doing.

If the informant was still passing info to a government agent, his free pass was still in effect. If he wasn’t, it wouldn’t be that his license had been canceled, it would be that he had.

Part of death math is patience. Always patience.

B
ut I didn’t have to be patient about everything.

Now that I knew that getting Franklin involved was not an option, I had one less card in my hand. I knew Dolly wanted me to do … something. But I had to find out how much she was willing to risk before I could move on, no matter what direction the compass needle pointed in.