The Brea File (36 page)

“No… nothing changes that.”

Before any more could be said an announcement over the public address system caught their attention. “United flight 27, for Dallas and Phoenix, now boarding at Gate 3. Please have your boarding passes ready.”

The shuttle vehicle that ferried passengers from the terminal to the waiting 727 aircraft was standing by. There was the usual flurry of activity at the departure gate, the usual crowding, the usual hasty goodbyes. “Have your mother call me as soon as you arrive,” Macimer said.

“Hey, I’ll get there. You’re not trying to make me afraid of flying, are you?”

Macimer smiled. At least he had succeeded in breaking her silence. “I just want to talk to her. She was asleep when I called last night to say when you were coming. I only talked to your grandmother.”

The line was thinning out at the gate as the bulk of the passengers found seats on the shuttle bus. Macimer was telling Linda again to let him know if there was anything else she might need in Arizona when she interrupted him. “Daddy, that’s you they’re calling!”

“What?”

“On the loudspeaker. Listen!”

When the announcement was repeated Macimer heard it clearly. “Telephone for Mr. Paul Macimer. Please report to the information desk on the lower level.”

Macimer frowned. The WFO knew where he was. Had something come up? An emergency that couldn’t wait?

“Go ahead, Daddy, I’m okay. Maybe it’s important.”

“Whatever it is, it can wait until you’re aboard.”

“Hey, I’m getting on in a minute. Maybe it’s Mom. Isn’t she the only one who knows this is where to find you right this minute?”

Macimer grinned affectionately. “You should be the detective. Okay, wait as long as you can before you get on the shuttle. I’ll try to get back before you leave.”

“It’s all right, it really is.”

He kissed her quickly, before she had a chance to turn away, catching her by surprise. “Okay. Take care, punkin.”

“I will if you promise not to call me that.” For the first time that morning she was smiling.

She was going to be all right, he told himself.

Macimer hurried across the wide floor of the terminal, dodging a spill of passengers arriving through another gate. Before stepping onto the escalator that led to the lower level he glanced back. Linda was at the tag end of a dwindling line before her departure gate.

He ran down the moving steps. At the information desk he identified himself and was directed toward a nearby telephone booth. He snatched up the instrument. “This is Macimer.”

“Paul Macimer?” The man’s voice was muffled, vaguely familiar.

“That’s right. Who is this?”

“There’s something for you at the Hertz counter.”

“What? What’s this all about?”

The line went dead.

Macimer felt a puzzled apprehension. He knew when he had last heard that voice.

The auto rental counters were bunched to one side of the escalators. They were brightly lit and sleekly plastic, with girls to match behind the counters. There were two pretty young women behind the Hertz counter. One was a blonde, a slightly plumper version of Erika Halbig.

“Yes, sir, may I help you?” Her teeth were so white and even they looked like caps.

“There’s supposed to be a message or something for me. Macimer. Paul Macimer.”

The girl’s mouth formed a small, soundless
O
. She peered under the counter, her smooth forehead wrinkling in a frown of concentration. The wrinkles smoothed out abruptly. “Here we are, Mr. Macimer!”

It was a gray envelope, about six by nine inches in size. His name had been printed on the front with a felt-tip marker in large, bold letters. Macimer thanked the Hertz girl and left the counter. He paused in a quiet corner to one side of the escalators. As he felt the thickness of the envelope, an instinctive caution prompted him to probe gently with his fingertips, searching for any unnatural bulges or the presence of wires. There were none. A letter bomb delivered in such a fashion seemed wildly improbable, but no more melodramatic than Timothy Callahan’s death.

Inside the envelope were a half-dozen glossy photographs. The focus had not been perfect and the images were grainy, but they were clear enough for their purpose.

More than clear enough, Macimer thought with chagrin. From the top photo Erika Halbig stared at him. The expression on her face was eager.

This picture had been taken from an angle looking over Macimer’s shoulder, revealing his back and Erika’s head and shoulders. She appeared to be looking directly into the camera’s lens. Two other photographs had been taken from the same camera position. In one of them Macimer had turned slightly toward the side. Erika’s arms were reaching around his neck, and her nude figure was plainly visible, pressing against him.

The remaining three pictures had been shot by another camera, apparently positioned high on the wall behind the white sofa in the Pook’s Hill apartment. In each of these there was a full view of the naked woman in the arms of the fully clothed man.

No problem identifying either of the principals, Macimer thought. And he certainly didn’t appear to be fighting her off, even if he did still have his clothes on.

He slid the photographs back into the gray envelope, feeling the heat in his face. Anger was rising, dominating the confused tumult of guilt and disgust and dismay.

He had been set up for blackmail by one of the oldest ruses of all, modern only in the sophisticated deployment of at least two sequence cameras—there were time lapses of an undetermined number of seconds between pictures—in the living room of the borrowed apartment. Other cameras, no doubt, had been positioned in the bedroom, carefully focused on the bed.

Macimer shook himself. The shock of the photographs had momentarily blotted out everything else. Even Linda.

He ran up the steps, bypassing the crowded escalator, taking the steps two and three at a time. Hurrying across the main level of the terminal, he saw that the crowd in the United waiting area for the Dallas-Phoenix flight had dispersed completely. The area was empty except for a single male flight attendant at the reception desk.

Macimer sought him out. He was young and handsome, his sculptured features those of a male model in a men’s fashion advertisement. “My daughter was boarding your flight 27 for Phoenix.”

“Yes, sir, those passengers are boarding the plane now.”

From the nearby expanse of windows Macimer stared across the hot tarmac. The last of the passengers from the shuttle bus were disappearing into the plane. He squinted against the glare. A slim young woman stepped from the bus into the plane. Not Linda. Macimer himself had picked out the gray slacks Linda was wearing. The woman he saw wore a skirt.

He went back to the counter in the waiting area. This time the attendant was less patient. He had folded up his clipboard and closed down the station. Macimer reached into his right-hand coat pocket with his left hand and produced the wallet containing his FBI badge and credentials. “I want to make sure my daughter is on that plane,” he said firmly. “Her name is Linda Macimer.”

“Yes, sir.” Flustered, the young man checked the flight sheet. “She checked in.”

“Are all the passengers aboard?”

“There’s only one missing, a Mr. Samuelson for Dallas. All the others are accounted for.”

Satisfied, Macimer thanked him and went back to the windows facing the runways. He waited until the plane eventually taxied slowly toward its assigned ramp. Five minutes later, as United flight 27 climbed steeply and began to bank in a wide turn toward the southwest, Macimer headed for his car in the parking lot. It was brutally hot inside the car and he thought of the men who had him under surveillance, wondering if they had waited in the hot sun as they had the day before, not risking a quick departure on his part that would leave them stranded.

Driving back toward Washington, he watched the road behind him. The divided highway was almost completely flat for long stretches. Traffic was heavier than on Friday, and he was unable to spot a tail.

* * * *

At the Washington Field Office, Macimer once again reviewed the plans for that night’s surveillance of the suspect Molter, glanced at the summary reports Jerry Russell had prepared for him on the general case load and went over the Brea case reports with Harrison Stearns. Nothing from Headquarters, he noted. No new directives, no summons to appear, not even a query about developments from the Director.

As soon as possible Macimer isolated himself in his office, told Willa Cunningham to hold any but the most urgent calls, and slowly read the summary report he had asked Agent Stearns to compile covering all known developments in the Brea affair. There was nothing in the review to surprise him; he had not expected any fresh revelations. What he was looking for was an overall perspective on the case, the appearance of a pattern, a way to reconcile elements that refused to go together. There was madness in Brea’s actions. How could that madness be part of the cool calculations of a widespread conspiracy of silence and suppression of evidence?

Macimer had never believed in the national post-Watergate paranoia about the government and everyone in it, a galloping cynicism that judged all politicians as venal or incompetent, and viewed agencies such as the CIA and the FBI as monster legions. What disturbed him more than anything else about the Brea file was that it reinforced all that distrust. No matter that the case was an aberration. There were over eight thousand FBI agents, men and women, and Macimer knew you would have a hard time finding even a handful among them who thought their FBI shields gave them a license to trample over the rights and lives of ordinary citizens. And Macimer had been stunned to discover there was even one who would commit murder to cover up his own betrayal of trust. Excesses of zeal there had been, disastrous errors of judgment for which the Bureau had justifiably taken its lumps, even the dirty tricks of COINTELPRO-but all of it together didn’t add up to a single murder, much less Brea’s record of carnage and betrayal.

The thought of dirty tricks reminded Macimer of the envelope delivered to him at the airport. Those photographs might be all that was needed to destroy an already shaky marriage. Macimer believed that Jan was close to leaving him. One glimpse of those pictures might force that decision, shattering the bonds forged over twenty years. Especially if Jan were to learn that the rendezvous documented so vividly in the photographs had taken place the very day Macimer had talked her, against her will, into leaving for Phoenix.

Macimer was a little surprised to discover that he felt no animosity toward Erika. He felt sorry for her. Like himself, she had been used. She had acted willingly enough, perhaps, but the idea had not been hers. It was Russ Halbig who inspired Macimer’s contempt. Who else could have used Erika in a crude blackmail scheme?

But if Halbig had tried to set Macimer up for blackmail to keep him silent, how could a conspiracy theory be avoided?

Trying to understand Halbig’s role in the Brea affair, Macimer could only conclude that Halbig had become a participant in the cover-up after the fact, in order to further his own ambitions. Certainly Halbig had not been directly involved in the destruction of the People’s Revolutionary Committee. For one thing, he had been in Washington at the time. For another, the PRC massacre was not his kind of operation. It had been dangerously tricky, its ramifications unpredictable, its success by no means certain, its potential for disastrous exposure too great. Halbig might be capable of putting the Bureau above the truth and even above the law. He might willingly exploit his wife’s beauty and desirability to gain his ends. But he was not a risk taker. That role was out of character.
Halbig will always find a way to dodge the raindrops
.

Was Halbig then acting on Brea’s behalf, part of a conspiracy that went so high in the Bureau that its resources—including agents to keep Macimer under surveillance—could be manipulated to serve Brea’s purposes?

There was only one man who ranked over Halbig, one man who commanded total loyalty, one man whose favor would advance or protect Halbig’s career enough to justify the apparent risks he was now taking.

But Macimer found the suspicion that John Landers was Brea—or had directed the Brea operation against the PRC-unbelievable. It did violence to everything he had known of Landers’ character and career.

Frustrated, Macimer stared at the mottled-glass panel in his office door. The answers he sought were as murky as the details of the outer office beyond that glass. He remained baffled by incongruities. Struck once more by the fact that, although Brea had used others in peripheral actions, such as the three Cubans who had terrorized Macimer’s family and brutally beaten Joseph Gerella, in each of those moments in which Brea’s own lethal hand was visible, he had acted alone.

Not a band of conspirators, Macimer thought. One man out of control. A trained killer.

And what was he planning next? If he believed that Macimer was holding documents that incriminated him, and if he was prepared to try blackmail to get them, why hadn’t he made his demands? What was he waiting for? And what other pressures would he try to bring to bear?

He would stop at nothing, Macimer knew. The cage door could not be closed again. It was too late for that.

* * * *

“It’s not there,” Lenny Collins said.

“What’s not there?”

“Macimer’s name. Look for yourself. He never registered here.”

“Let me see that. Are you sure you’ve got the right date?”

They were in a storage room behind the office in the High 5 Motel, located on Interstate 5 just north of Fresno, California. The register Collins had dug out of a cardboard storage file covered the period from April 1, 1981, to September 30 of the same year. Collins pointed at the handwritten date at the top of the page to which the register was opened: August 28, 1981.

“He never registered,” Collins said again.

“That doesn’t mean anything—”

“It’s what we’re looking for. Somebody who wasn’t where he was supposed to be that day. Whatever Brea is afraid of in the missing file has to be something like this, something small and ordinary and easily overlooked.”