The Brea File (38 page)

“You know the senator, I’m sure,” John Landers said.

“Yes… of course. Good to see you, Senator.”

Charles Sederholm smiled expansively and puffed on his Havana. What did his presence mean? Halbig felt the impact of four pairs of eyes all watching him, and he had the sensation of having interrupted a private conversation. Landers, Caughey, Magnuson—and Sederholm. Why was the senator there? And Magnuson, what of him? Was he there because he was in line for a new position of power at Headquarters? These were all big, powerful men of action.

The three senior FBI officials had spent most of their careers in the field, and each had at one time or another bossed some of the Bureau’s busiest field offices. Sederholm with his bulk was an even more imposing physical presence than the others, and he had the charismatic politician’s ability to dominate any group. Confronting four such men Halbig felt oddly diminished.

“I was just filling the senator in on the latest developments in the Brea case,” John Landers said. “I thought it was about time.” Did he know that Halbig had already briefed Sederholm on the affair? The senator’s eyes were hooded, and Landers’ expression was unreadable. “Will you have something to drink, Russ? You look as if you could use one.”

Landers handed him a stiff scotch over rocks and eyed him appraisingly. “Suppose you tell us the whole story,” he said. “I got the gist of it from what you said on the phone, but I’d like you to fill us in on the details.” When he saw Halbig’s glance stray toward the senator, the Director added, “Under the circumstances I think it’s important for everyone here to have the full story. In confidence. Isn’t that right, Senator?”

“Of course, Director.”

Halbig took a deep swallow of his scotch. What he had to say was a confession of failure. For someone of his rank in the Bureau, failure in his personal life was not something that could be compartmented, kept separate from his Bureau life.

“We’ve had Macimer under surveillance, as you know,” Halbig said. “Last night two agents followed him to Bethesda. He turned up at Pook’s Hill and parked in the lot outside the Linden Hill Hotel. Our agents arrived in time to see him enter a private tennis and racquetball club on the grounds. They didn’t think it was possible to follow Macimer inside without being spotted. The assumption was that Macimer was a member, or was meeting someone who was a member. He was gone for about thirty-five minutes. The agents had called for a backup car. When Macimer reappeared, one of the cars followed him home. The other agents stayed behind to question attendants in the club.” Halbig paused, his throat dry. “Macimer hadn’t met anyone. He hadn’t used the facility. He had simply walked through it and out a back door. Obviously he knew he was being followed, and he used the tennis club to lose the surveillance.” Halbig felt an absurd impulse toward tears. He seemed to be shrinking inside his suit, and he was drenched in sweat.

He told the rest of his story without a break, the four men in the library listening in silence, puffing their cigars. On the assumption that Macimer had come to meet someone in or near the Linden Hill Hotel, the agents spent Friday questioning people at the tennis club and in the hotel. The club’s guest and membership lists had been scrutinized, especially those who had been present Friday evening. No link to Macimer could be established. Late in the day the intensive search had focused on the Pook’s Hill Lodge, an apartment hotel in the vicinity, and the Marriott, which was back down the hill but an easy walk from the Linden Hill’s parking lot. Nothing had come of the questioning until a night clerk had arrived for duty at the Pook’s Hill Lodge. He had seen Macimer come into the hotel and take one of the elevators Thursday evening. Because the lodge was a twelve-story building with a large number of permanent and transient residents, it had taken some time to discover which apartment Macimer had visited. The attention of agents was finally drawn to one of the apartments on the eleventh floor whose owner was out of town. The apartment was occasionally visited by a friend of the owner, a woman who looked in on the place while the owner was away.

There was no answer when one of the agents knocked on the door to the apartment. The floor maid produced a key…

Halbig’s voice broke. “If the agents hadn’t entered the apartment when they did…” He struggled to finish the statement but choked up. For some time no one spoke. When Halbig at last regained his composure, he said, “As you know, the woman in the apartment was my wife. She was found in the bedroom, unconscious. She had apparently taken an overdose of sleeping pills. An ambulance was summoned and I was notified. And, of course, I immediately telephoned you, Director.”

Halbig drained his glass and stared at the ice cubes, as if he might find some meaning in them, like a subliminal message in the illustration for a whiskey advertisement.

“I appreciate how difficult this has been for you,” Landers said quietly. “However, without jumping to any conclusions, I think we must ask ourselves if what has happened has any connection with the Brea investigation.” He paused. “You’ve just come from the hospital?”

“Yes.” Halbig’s response was barely audible.

“How is Erika now?”

“She’s out of danger. She’s under sedation…”

“Good. Perhaps she’ll be able to tell us more in the morning, if not before. In the meanwhile, if you feel up to it, Russ, perhaps you’ll join us for a while. There are some decisions to be made.”

There was a long silence. Halbig felt them all watching him, waiting. With an effort he pulled himself together. What surprised him was that his decision was not even difficult, though it went against all of the care and caution and single-minded concern for his own self-interest that had brought him to his present high position in the Bureau. “I don’t think you need me to help you with those decisions, Director. And I feel I should be there when Erika wakes up. I
want
to be there. I feel… responsible for what has happened.”

There it was. Now the Director would also see him as diminished, unreliable, a man who went to pieces in a crisis. Halbig’s vision dimmed. He nodded toward the three blurred figures around the game table and at Landers.

The Director stopped him. “I understand, Russ, you should be there. Besides, what she has to say may be important. But before you go, I’d like your feel for this situation. You know Macimer and everyone else involved. But I don’t think you know about the report from Agent Collins—it came in to Headquarters a short while ago by teletype.” Landers tersely described what the two agents working on the investigation in California had learned at the motel outside Fresno. “In the light of everything else, do you think that means what it seems to mean?”

Halbig thought of Macimer’s visit to the Pook’s Hill Lodge where Erika had gone, where she had been during the past twenty-four hours while he worried, not knowing where she had gone. A man who was capable of one kind of betrayal was surely capable of another. And yet…

Landers was waiting. He wanted an honest answer. Not a jealous husband’s bitter accusation, not a wild guess. Halbig said, “I’m not sure. Something about it… it’s too pat. And too stupid a mistake for Macimer to make if he
wasn’t
in Fresno that day, three years ago. I’m just not sure.”

There was a glint in John Landers’ eyes that Halbig couldn’t read. “Neither am I,” the Director said. “Good night, Russ… and thanks for coming.”

The room was silent after Halbig walked out, as if the four men were waiting for the remote sound of the front door closing behind him. When it did, John Landers said enigmatically, “Perhaps I was wrong about him.” No one knew exactly what he meant. Then Landers shook off a scowl and resumed his place at the poker table. “It may be a long night, gentlemen. We might as well make good use of it. I believe it’s your deal, Senator.”

Charles Sederholm smiled blandly, his big hands deftly scooping up the cards and shuffling them with machinelike precision. “Party time’s over, so you’d all better count your chips. It’s time for a man’s game.”

* * * *

Macimer waited, a prisoner of the silent telephone. He knew that, sooner or later, a call would come. A call from Brea.

He stayed close to the phone, drinking hot coffee and going over the events of recent weeks, since the night he was called to the scene of a stolen FBI vehicle recovery, the first time he had ever seen Brea’s name. The logic of events all along had argued the possibility of a large-scale conspiracy involving key figures in the Bureau, possibly even the Director himself. Something stubborn in Macimer continued to resist that logic.

Not a conspiracy. One man gone bad.

Who had kidnapped Linda.

There could be only one reason.

From the kitchen came a moaning sound, followed by an intermittent squeal that mimicked a puppy’s cry. Macimer listened for a moment before he identified the labored moan and following squeal as coming from the refrigerator. With the arrival of hot weather the refrigerator was struggling. One of these days the fan motor would burn out.

Macimer gave a rueful shake of his head. The everyday trivia of living had a way of intruding upon the gravest crisis. What did it matter if some food spoiled in the refrigerator?

He felt jittery from too much coffee. Pushing his mug away, he slowly crossed the family room, carefully stepping around furniture in the darkness. Earlier he had turned off all the lights. Standing by the sliding glass doors, he stared out at the deep shadows that made of the familiar yard a mysterious cave with dark, threatening pockets. It occurred to him that someone could easily be watching him from those shadows. Someone who had killed and killed again to hide an ugly secret. In recent weeks Macimer had seen one man blown up, another drowned, a woman brutally sacrificed. But he did not fear for his own life.

Not yet. No bullet would fly from the shadows for him as long as Brea thought he had Vernon Lippert’s file. And that could be the only reason for taking Linda hostage.

There were many ways to threaten a man with a wife and children. That was why Macimer had wanted Jan and the kids safely out of the way. His instincts had been accurate, he simply hadn’t been quick enough. Now Brea had Linda.

Now he would call. All Macimer could do was wait.

* * * *

The game broke up at three in the morning. Jim Caughey was the first to leave. Frank Magnuson, in town from New York, was staying over at the Director’s home in one of the guest bedrooms. These two, along with Henry Szymanski and John Landers, would meet again in an emergency executive conference at FBI Headquarters in a few hours.

When Magnuson had gone upstairs Charles Sederholm and Landers were alone in the foyer. “I appreciate your frankness, John,” Sederholm said. “In something like this, it’s important that the Senate committee isn’t kept completely in the dark.”

“I agree, Senator,” Landers said.

“You understand that there will have to be full public hearings when this thing breaks.”

“Understood. And you’ll know as soon as it happens.”

“I hope that’s before Monday. It would be a very effective way to open the hearings.”

“I think I can promise you that, Senator.”

Sederholm smiled. They were in agreement. Sederholm would have his bombshell to release to the media, live on television. John Landers needn’t worry about his confirmation as Director of the FBI. “I don’t much care who it is,” the senator said. “Just give me Brea’s head on a platter by Monday morning.”

Landers opened the door for him. Sederholm’s chauffeur waited at the foot of the steps, door open to the back seat of a black Lincoln Continental. Sederholm’s California constituents might drive Toyotas and Datsuns, but they preferred him to ride in an American car. Landers glanced toward the street. The night was quiet. No insomniac reporters lurked outside the gates.

“Good night, Senator. Glad you could come.”

“Good night, John. Enjoyed the game.”

Landers watched the long black car slide along the driveway and turn onto the quiet street.

* * * *

Macimer woke suddenly, clammy with sweat, his heart pounding. He lay rigid on the sofa in the family room, where he had dozed off. For a moment he listened intently. Then he fell back.

He had been dreaming. And the cry which had awakened him had not come from a young girl’s throat. It was the squeal of the laboring refrigerator.

He sat up, his muscles stiff from lying in an awkward position, an ache at the back of his skull. He stared out the sliding glass door into the yard. The tendrils of the weeping willow trailed downward like a woman’s hair. The dark shadows of night were gone.

Harrison Stearns, bleary-eyed at his desk in the Special squad room at the Washington Field Office, took the call from Alice Volker early Saturday morning. He checked the time as he logged the call: 7:01
A.M
. An efficient woman. She had probably told herself she would call at seven.

“It arrived yesterday afternoon in the mail,” the woman said. “We don’t have locked boxes, you know, and Mr. Macimer said I should report anything unusual. I tried to call him at home last night but there was just one of the those answer things. I suppose he’s away on a case?” she suggested brightly.

“What was unusual about this letter, Mrs. Volker?”

She hesitated. “Well… it looks like Raymond’s own handwriting. I mean, I recognized it. And the letter is postmarked Monday. It was mailed right here in Washington,” she added. “And it took five whole days to get here.”

Stearns looked around the squad room, trying to pick out someone to send to Raymond Shoup’s boardinghouse. Then he changed his mind. He’d been up all night and needed to get out of the office for some breakfast. Besides, this was something he wanted.

“Is there anything else unusual about the envelope, Mrs. Volker?”

“Well… I think there’s a key inside.”

Monday, Stearns thought. The day Raymond Shoup was killed. Why would he have mailed a key to himself on that particular day?