The Brea File (39 page)

“I’ll be there as soon as I can, Mrs. Volker.” His excitement communicated itself as a sense of urgency. “Lock your doors and don’t talk to anyone until I get there.”

“Do you think… I mean, surely no one would…” A quaver of fear was audible. Alice Volker had not considered the possibility of danger for herself.

“Someone killed Raymond for what’s in that envelope,” Stearns said grimly. He knew he was frightening the woman but he wanted to impress on her the importance of not talking to anyone else. “Hide it, and don’t open your door. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

It took him nineteen minutes, and two more to convince Alice Volker through the locked door of her apartment that he was the agent she had talked to.

When he opened the envelope he found a key to a baggage locker at the Greyhound Bus Terminal.

“Mrs. Volker,” Harrison Stearns said shakily, “can I use your telephone?”

* * * *

Macimer’s instructions were brief and explicit, his voice calm, but there was an edge to it that Agent Stearns was certain he did not imagine. Like Stearns, Macimer believed this was the break they had been waiting for.

“I can’t leave here right now,” Macimer said, “but in any event I’ll meet you there in an hour, or as close to that as I can make it. Get some breakfast in the meanwhile. And Stearns…”

“Yes, sir?”

“Make sure you’re alone.”

* * * *

Paul Macimer found himself going through the motions of preparing for another day. A shower, with three minutes under cold water at the end of it to banish the last fuzziness from his brain. A quick shave, listening always for the sound of the telephone. Dressing methodically, thinking about Harrsion Stearns’s call and the key in the envelope. Raymond Shoup had foolishly tried to bargain with Brea, holding out his trump card—the missing pieces of the Brea file. What had he told Brea? What mistake had he made to trigger Brea’s killing rage?

In the kitchen Macimer had some orange juice, put on a fresh pot of coffee. The file gave him what he needed—something to barter with for Linda’s life. Brea seemed to believe that Macimer already had the file. But why hadn’t he called?

When the phone in the den finally rang, Macimer’s nerves jumped. He ran into the room, snatched up the phone and spoke without thinking, raw nerves and anger exploding. “Is that you, Halbig? If you’ve hurt Linda, you son of a bitch—”

“Get out of the house,” a muffled voice answered sharply. He gave Macimer a phone number, Maryland area code. “Call me from a pay phone. Now!”

The unexpected demand cooled Macimer’s rage. After a moment’s hesitation he left the house and drove the short distance to the nearby gas station, where he found an empty phone booth. He had a pocketful of dimes and quarters—a veteran FBI agent’s habit—more than enough to cover the charges.

When the phone was answered Macimer heard a soft chuckle. “You’ve got it wrong, Macimer. This isn’t Halbig.”

“I didn’t get the blackmail message wrong. You should have known I wouldn’t trade the file for those pictures. I don’t care what you do with them.”

There was a brief silence before the caller chuckled again. “I didn’t think the photos would work, but it was worth a try. I didn’t even have to work on Erika very hard. She always had a thing for you.”

Macimer felt a twinge of something—suspicion, intuition, a blind hunch.
I
didn’t have to work on Erika very hard
. That didn’t sound like Halbig. The words were not even those of someone carrying out Halbig’s orders. They had a boastful, proprietary ring. They were also slightly contemptuous of a woman so easily used.

The voice could have been anyone’s. For the first time Macimer sensed that it was not merely muffled, as if a handkerchief had been placed over the mouthpiece; the caller’s voice was being electronically altered, disguised beyond recognition.

But it was not Russ Halbig’s voice. Someone other than Halbig had used Erika. The truth, more subtle and devious than Macimer had guessed, teased the periphery of his consciousness.

“I figured the photos might not do it,” the caller said. “But I have something else you want.”

A band of pressure tightened painfully at the back of Macimer’s neck. He spoke harshly. “If Linda is harmed in any way, the next time you see that file will be on the front page of the
Post
.”

After a moment’s silence the caller said, “So you do have it.”

“Yes, I’ve got it.”

“All right, we make a deal. That’s what we both want. I tell you where to come to find your daughter. You bring the file with you. And come alone.” There was a break for emphasis before the filtered voice added, “If you bring anyone else, you won’t like what you find.”

The threat was more frightening because it was made so calmly. Macimer had to wait before he could trust himself to match that control. Then he said, “You’re Brea.”

“Could be.”

“The price of the file comes too high for me to keep it. You win.”

“We both win, Macimer. You don’t want that story released any more than I do. That’s why you’ve been sitting on it. That’s why you wouldn’t give Oliver Packard any fresh dirt to shovel.”

“Maybe.”

“You know I’m right. So you’ll come, and you’ll bring the file. And you and your daughter can just walk away clean.”

“Tell me where.” There was no point in arguing, no point in saying that no one would come away from this affair clean.

Brea chuckled softly. “Uh-uh. No names and addresses. And don’t bother checking on this phone number. It’s a public phone and I won’t be here. And it won’t tell you where I’m going.”

“As long as you have Linda, I play it your way.”

“Now you’re being sensible.” Brea then gave brief instructions, assigning what would be the first of a series of stations on the way north where Macimer was to wait for another call, each time at a public phone. There would be no way for the calls to be monitored, no way for Macimer to know where he was going. “Get started now, Macimer. And if you’ve got company, you’d better lose them.” The line went dead, just as the operator broke in to say that three minutes were up.

* * * *

The phone booth was close and hot, but Macimer stood motionless, not wanting to jar the delicate balance of intuition, knowing that he trembled on the edge of discovery. That electronically filtered voice was one Macimer had heard before. It belonged to the man who had impersonated a private eye named Antonelli. The voice was disguised either because Brea was afraid Macimer might recognize it, or because Brea took no risk of having his real voice recorded for later analysis and identification. Voiceprints were as individual as fingerprints.

Macimer had heard that voice Monday night on the phone in Hogate’s lounge. Erika Halbig’s presence there that night now became something other than coincidence. She would do whatever Brea wanted.
I
didn’t even have to work on her very hard
. What had been her role that night? Probably nothing more than that of a lookout, someone who knew Macimer and could confirm that he had shown up alone. And who could provide a diversion while Brea met Raymond Shoup on Roosevelt Island.

Until that night Brea must not have been sure who had the contents of Vernon Lippert’s file, Macimer or Raymond Shoup. First he had suspected Macimer, as evidenced by the staged robbery and subsequent electronic surveillance. Then he had learned about the items sent to Joseph Gerella. But when Brea finally confronted Raymond Shoup, the youth must have said or done something to indicate that he had stolen only part of the file. So Shoup had died, and suspicion tilted back toward Macimer.

And Brea believed that Macimer had been withholding the file, even from his superiors, because he didn’t want the truth to come out. What made Brea so sure of him?

That’s why you wouldn’t give Oliver Packard any fresh dirt to shovel
.

Macimer stumbled out of the hot phone booth. Like an organism rejecting an alien substance forced upon it, his mind twisted away from the truth, hurling up objections and denials, questioning the accuracy of his memory.

But there was no mistake. The call from Packard had come on Macimer’s private line in his den on Sunday night, less than two hours after that phone had been cleared of bugs and taps. There had been no opportunity for anyone to get at the phone again. A bug had been left in place. Brea had heard Macimer’s conversation with Oliver Packard.

And suddenly everything fell into place. It was even obvious how Linda had been lured away from Dulles International without making a scene. It was the only possible way, and Macimer would have seen it sooner if he hadn’t been resisting an answer that brought with it too much pain.

She would only have gone with someone she recognized. Someone she knew and trusted. Someone who could make plausible an abrupt change of plan about her Phoenix flight. Someone who had bounced her on his knee before she was old enough to walk.

Her “Uncle Gordon.”

* * * *

Macimer drove back to the house. When he picked up the phone to make the call to Phoenix he was calmer, though it was a call he dreaded making. Then Jan surprised him, and he realized that she had always surprised him by her strength in any genuine crisis. Uncertainty demoralized her, but when she knew what she had to face she had always been able to call on a core of resiliency that carried her through.

He didn’t hedge or try to soften the blow. Some things couldn’t be softened. I want a divorce. Your father is dead. Your child has been kidnapped. You could only say the words.

He spoke on through a heavy silence, telling Jan as much of the story of the Brea file as he could cram into a terse summary while still making sense. He ended with Brea’s call and the arrangements for their meeting. He tried to make it sound like a simple trade-off, the Brea file for Linda, but he knew that Jan was not so easily fooled. “I’ll bring her back,” he promised. “I’m responsible for what’s happened to her.”

“Responsible… it’s an old-fashioned word now, isn’t it? You’ll bring her back to the shelter because that’s what parents are supposed to do. We owe it to her.”

“I’m not sure that’s what the friendly neighborhood psychiatrist would say.”

“I know. It’s everyone for himself.”

“Sometimes you sound almost sensible.” He wished she were not so far away at this moment.

“Only when you’re listening.”

There was another long silence. Macimer felt unexpectedly calm, confident, in spite of what lay ahead of him. Jan had always been able to do that for him, he thought. Maybe he shouldn’t have needed that kind of support, but why not? Why was it so important not to need anyone? Going it alone wasn’t even the normal human condition.

“I’ll give it my best shot,” he said at last.

“I know you will.”

Macimer almost smiled. “There’s nothing like a vote of confidence.”

“Paul…”

“Yes?”

“Do you know who it is? Do you know who Brea is?”

He took a deep breath, reluctant to answer. “I wasn’t sure until this morning. Now I am.” He waited for the next question but it never came. Perhaps she didn’t want to know. “Jan… maybe this isn’t the right time but there’s something else I need to have settled. Before I hang up.” It was the only hint he gave that his encounter with Brea might not be a simple trade-off. “What about us? You’re not… locked in. Nobody believes that anymore.”

“Aren’t I?” Her tone was wry. “Oh, I’ve thought about our breaking up—believe me, I’ve thought about it. But you and I… we didn’t go into it with that in mind.”

“No.” When they were married he had had this image at the back of his mind, vague and blurry like a photograph out of focus, of the two of them walking along a beach somewhere, hand in hand, fifty years later, white-haired and worn and content with each other.

“I guess I am locked in, sort of.”

“Do you wish you weren’t?” He heard the refrigerator groan as the fan cycled on. He waited for the puppy squeal of the failing mechanism. Nothing lasted as long anymore.

Her answer, when it came, was as painful for her to say as it was for him to hear. “Sometimes.”

After a short pause he said, “Well, that’s honest.”

“Do
you
still want us to be together?”

“I’ve never wanted anything else.”

“It will have to be different, Paul, in some ways. I need to… to explore myself a little more. I want to be surer of what I’m giving the rest of my life to.” She paused. “We don’t have so much more time.”

“We have time enough,” he said. “You were never more of a woman than you are right now, and I’m not about to lose out on the best of you after I’ve put in all this time.”

“You make me sound like an unfinished product.”

“You are,” said Macimer. “You sure as hell are.”

The emergency executive conference had convened at seven that Saturday morning in the Director’s office on the seventh floor of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building. In addition to the Director and two of his Executive Assistant Directors, Jim Caughey and Henry Szymanski, present at the meeting were Frank Magnuson, SAC of the New York office; Fred Valentine, the Bureau’s Counsel for Professional Responsibility; and Anthony Tartaglia, Russ Halbig’s assistant, who had the rank of Inspector. Tartaglia had been supervising the surveillance of Paul Macimer on Halbig’s instructions, and a line was open to the communications center.

Landers reviewed the events of the previous evening, including developments in the Molter case and Macimer’s involvement, the fact that Macimer’s daughter had apparently disappeared from a scheduled airline flight from Washington to Phoenix, and the search currently under way, at Macimer’s instigation, for two Latinos who had been on the same Phoenix flight. One of those Latinos, a male named Francisco Perez, had been tentatively identified as being on a suspect list of those who had burglarized Macimer’s home about a month ago. “It was Macimer’s theory,” Landers said, “that the robbers were looking for the Brea file.”

“All that doesn’t sound like a man who’s covering up for himself,” Caughey said.