The Brea File (20 page)

“The shot that triggered the blowup.”

“Yes, sir.”

Macimer was silent. Garvey’s discovery was no surprise, but it was important. It offered solid evidence to prove what Macimer had already surmised. He said, “Good work, Garvey. Tell Collins I said so. What else do you have?”

“The telephone call the day before the blowup. Collins checked that out with Pacific Telephone Company records. They show a phone call coming from the pay phone at Sambo’s Restaurant—it’s inside, near the rest rooms—to the Sacramento number assigned to the FBI Task Force. The call was placed at 11:02
A.M
. That’s the exact time the call for Brea was logged in Sacramento on August 27.”

“So what do you make of all this?”

“Well…” Possibly disconcerted by the sudden question, Garvey hesitated.

“Walter Schumaker left the hideout that morning and made the call to Brea,” Macimer said. “According to your Wednesday reports, especially the interview with the Torgeson woman, Schumaker didn’t leave the house on the twenty-eighth. No one did.”

“Yes, sir,” Garvey said quietly. “So he was inside that house when the shooting started—and his agent knew he was there.” There was a thread of controlled anger and disgust in the young agent’s tone.

“Which leaves us with the big question. Who fired the shot from the Lazzeri house?”

Pat Garvey didn’t answer. An answer was not really necessary, Paul Macimer thought. The pattern and focus of Vernon Lippert’s investigation were becoming clearer.

After Garvey said good night, Macimer sat for a long time in the quiet of his den, the door closed, the sound of a television game show reaching him dimly from the family room, like those voices faintly heard on the long-distance telephone line.

Blowup. That was the word Garvey kept using about the PRC affair. An explosion. Like the blowup of the C-54 used by the FBI for training exercises at Quantico.

Macimer shook his head, almost violently. What he was thinking couldn’t be true—it wasn’t possible.

But his heart kept beating heavily, loudly.

You didn’t ignore a pattern in a series of crimes, even if the apparent pattern might prove to be nothing more than coincidence. On the contrary, you always looked for a pattern. Criminals tended to repeat themselves. Someone who would use a bomb to blow up the People’s Revolutionary Committee’s hideout might also use a bomb to get rid of someone dangerous to him.

Like Callahan.

And like Carey McWilliams, the former SAC of the Washington Field Office, blown to bits by a bomb explosion in his office at the WFO over eighteen months ago.

Bombs in themselves were not rarities anymore. Ten or more bombs, on the average, exploded somewhere in the United States every day of the year. There was no reason normally to connect a bombing in California with another in Washington, D.C., and a third in Quantico, Virginia, occurring at eighteen-month intervals or more.

Except that there was a connection, however tenuous. Timothy Callahan and Carey McWilliams had been John L. Landers’ number two and number one men in the FBI Task Force assembled in the summer of 1981 to hunt down the People’s Revolutionary Committee.

And now, of the three men who had directed that hunt and had had total knowledge of its operations from top to bottom, only one survived.

* * * *

And he was the Director of the FBI.

The call to Chuey Gutiérrez came shortly before midnight at the motel in Silver Spring where he was staying with Xavier and Rosalba. When he recognized the deep voice on the other end of the line he motioned quickly to the girl to turn down the sound on the television set. Rosalba continued to watch the movie—an old musical—without sound.

“You did well,” the man said without preamble. “I’ve just listened to the first of the tapes. Everything is working perfectly.”

“Bueno.”

“You may be able to be of service to me again in this matter. It isn’t over.”

“To you and to our country,” Gutiérrez said. Xavier, who was listening, smirked, and Chuey glared at him until the young man’s smile faded.

“I’ll be in touch. I may also want you to retrieve any future tapes.”

“I will be waiting, Maestro.”

Chuey half expected the other man to hang up but there was a pause, the line remaining open. Chuey waited patiently, guessing that the FBI man had something else on his mind.

His name was Raúl Jesús Gutiérrez y González, but he was called Chuey, the nickname for Jesús. He had grown up in and around Miami. His father, a policeman in Cuba during the Batista regime, had fled to the United States when Castro came down from his mountain. Ramón Gutiérrez had died on the beach at the Bay of Pigs, the year his son Jesús turned thirteen years of age, ceased to be a child, and became a patriot.

Chuey Gutiérrez had never blamed his adopted country or the men who had encouraged and ultimately abandoned the quixotic invasion of Cuba. He had heard and seen many of these men with his father—tough, hard-bitten, cold-eyed men who shared a soldier’s uncompromising code, even though many of them dressed in expensive suits instead of uniforms. The boy admired them. They were men like his father. Battles were won and lost, often for reasons beyond comprehension, but one did not cease to believe.

Even as a teen-ager Chuey had run errands for a man vaguely identified with “the Company.” Through him he had come to the attention of a man with another government agency, the FBI, a man he would always think of as his benefactor, the man he called “Maestro.” Through him Chuey Gutiérrez had been able to strike back at the enemies of his father, pro-Castro agents and sympathizers, and also at other enemies of his adopted country.

When the FBI man had summoned him to Washington on a matter of “grave importance to the Bureau and to the United States,” Chuey had neither hesitated nor questioned his role. Acting on the FBI man’s instructions, he had recruited Xavier and Rosalba and brought them with him to Washington. For nearly three weeks, except for one night’s action, they had been holed up in the motel in Silver Spring. Chuey welcomed the hint that their mission was not yet over. The two young ones were becoming restive, more difficult to control.

The FBI man broke the silence. “The boy is a hothead. Is he to be relied on?”

“I will see to it,” Chuey answered, glancing across the room at Xavier, who was watching him.

“What about the girl?”

Chuey smiled. “She is also reliable. The body is hot but the head is cool, you understand? She is…
muy dura
.” He had almost said
más dura
, tougher than the boy.

“I may have use for both of them. Keep them out of sight and out of trouble. Do
you
understand?”

“I understand perfectly, Maestro.”

“Bueno.”

The connection was broken. For a moment Chuey sat on the edge of the bed, staring across the room at the silent television screen, holding the receiver in his hand. He thought of the FBI man’s opening words—“You did well”—and he felt a surge of pride.

Rock Creek Park winds along the spine of the northwest section of Washington, D.C., extending beyond the District past Chevy Chase and Bethesda all the way to the outer reaches of the city. Along the way there are dense wooded areas, picnic groves, a golf course, nature center and zoo, bike paths and jogging trails. It was along one of these, early Friday morning, that a gaggle of reporters and photographers, their attitudes mirroring amusement or incredulity or mock horror, trotted in the lumbering wake of Senator Charles Sederholm.

Washington is a city of joggers, and there is nothing unusual about runners clad in shorts or designer jogging suits trotting through the parks or even along the main boulevards in the morning mists. But Sederholm was not cut from the mold of a Senator Proxmire, long a familiar figure jogging along Connecticut Avenue toward his office, trim and vigorous, looking as briskly efficient as he did on the Senate floor. Sederholm, wearing a dark blue sweat suit with white piping and a matching pair of Adidas, reminded one reporter of Laird Cregar, an actor of large girth and dominating presence who was prominent in the 1940s. The senator was about the same size as the late movie actor, well over six feet tall and weighing at least two hundred and fifty pounds. Older than Cregar in his prime, Sederholm wore a flowing mane of silver hair, but he had the robust actor’s air of extravagant appetites and joyous self-indulgence that belied his sixty years.

Within a quarter mile, wheezing and huffing, his face already a deep red, Sederholm slowed to a walk, wavered from the path and plopped onto a bench, which sagged alarmingly under his weight. Almost immediately the reporters caught up and swarmed around him. “When did you take up jogging, Senator?” one of them called out. “Is this because of the convention?”

“Do you know how many pepple in this country run?” Sederholm countered. “Half the population! This is the age of self-flagellation in public, gentlemen. Running and dieting, giving up smoking and drinking, treating our bodies like temples.”

“That’s quite a temple, Senator!”

Sederholm joined in the laughter. “Ironic, isn’t it?” Sederholm asked rhetorically. “Considering our abandonment of all restraints over the past two decades, now that we have made ourselves free to do anything we want, it has become fashionable to deny ourselves everything.”

“Won’t this jogging ruin your image, Senator?”

“I’m doing it for you, gentlemen,” Sederholm said with a magnanimous wave in the direction of several portable television cameras. “A man of my girth, a United States senator, jogging through the park in Washington at the risk of being mugged or having a heart attack, that’s as good as a squirrel on skis.”

Cutting through the laughter, a local TV political reporter said, “Does this mean you’re definitely running for President, Senator?”

Laughing uproariously (Laird Cregar in
Blood and Sand
, the reporter from the New York
Times
thought), Sederholm said, “It’s a little early to be looking at the finish line. I will say this, gentlemen”—he paused to let the TV cameras zoom in for an important statement—“no one has this convention locked up. Which means… yes, I’m still in the running.”

A babble of questions spilled over the senator’s last words, the reporters drowning each other out. Sederholm waved off the questions. He turned resolutely toward the jogging path that snaked through a stand of birch trees. From the back of the jostling circle of reporters someone shouted loud enough to be heard, “What about this bombing at Quantico, Senator? Do you have a statement on that?”

Charles Sederholm swung about with surprising nimbleness. The opportunity was too good to miss. “I do, indeed. The FBI is one of our finest institutions. It has known some difficult times, as the country itself has, but it has emerged from the fire with an unsullied reputation as the finest law enforcement organization in the world. I consider yesterday’s bombing a blow struck not only against the FBI but against the very heart and fabric of this government and its institutions. It was also an act of the most outrageous and cowardly terrorism. I knew Special Agent Callahan personally as a fine public servant and a man of generous mind and spirit. His murder is a loss to all of us.”

“Have you talked to Director Landers since it happened?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Will this have any effect on Landers’ confirmation as Director?”

Sederholm pushed back his thick, flowing hair from his forehead, the gesture revealing a large patch of sweat under his arm. “I see no reason it should have any effect. The committee, as you know, has not completed its own evaluation, but John Landers can hardly be blamed for this vicious act. It’s a symptom of what has become increasingly a lawless society.”

“Isn’t the FBI partly to blame for that?”

Sederholm ignored the thrust, choosing instead to answer another reporter, who asked, “Have there been any new developments in the bombing investigation? Any message from the bombers?”

“I understand there have been a number of communications received by the FBI, all of which are being analyzed and will be investigated. But none appears to be genuinely related to the bombing.”

“What about the Florida hijacking?”

“No connection that the Bureau is aware of.” Sederholm turned again along the path through the woods, which was narrow enough to force the reporters into a column behind him.

“Just one more question, Senator,” a stocky reporter said close to him. He had somehow pushed ahead of the others to join Sederholm on the pathway. “What do you know of the FBI’s Brea file?”

Sederholm halted abruptly. His eyes, peering out from under deceptively sleepy lids like small hoods, recognized the stocky young man as one of Oliver Packard’s reporters. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “If it involves the FBI, I suggest you ask your questions there.”

He turned and lumbered off through the woods, not looking back.

Within the hour, from the private baths in the basement below the Senate chambers, Charles Sederholm placed a call to Russell Halbig at FBI Headquarters. “You’ve got a leak, Russ,” Sederholm told him. He mentioned Oliver Packard’s reporter and the question about the Brea file. “You told me you had a tight lid on that.”

“We do, Senator,” Halbig said.

“I don’t want any surprises sprung on me,” Sederholm said, and there was nothing of the familiar jovial bombast in his tone. “I don’t want egg on my face. The confirmation hearings on the Director come up a week from Monday. Just remember, I’m the star of that little show. I’m supposed to get all the best lines.”

“You will, Senator,” Halbig said quickly. “I think I’ll have something for you before then. And if anything does break, you’ll know it first.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then Sederholm chuckled. “Before the Director, Russ?”

* * * *

More recruits for the special squad working on the Brea case had arrived during the night. After briefing the squad, Macimer called Harrison Stearns to his office to review the reports that had come in late Thursday and by overnight teletype from California and Chicago. The written reports from Garvey and Collins confirmed in more detail what Macimer had learned by phone from Garvey. An agent from the Chicago office had sent in a 302 of his interview with former agent Victor Pryor, who had been found at a security conference in the Windy City. Pryor knew nothing of Walter Schumaker’s activities during the past three years. He had provided names of former acquaintances of Schumaker; these would be followed up by agents in the Oakland RA’s office, the largest resident agency in the country.