The Sentinel (33 page)

"I won't say anything."

"Thanks, Delores."

"Okay. You know something, Martha? I ... I always hated this town."

"Good-bye, Delores."

Breckinridge put the receiver down. The next person she called was Kallenstien. She found her eating dinner and asked her to return to the office.

Kallenstien arrived at the office about twenty minutes later, and Breckinridge showed her the letter.

"This letter is dynamite, Martha. Major dynamite."

"Do you agree that this means something is wrong? Something inside the Service?"

"Yes. Without a doubt."

Breckinridge nodded.

"Rachel, I'm about to tell you something that is going to knock your socks off. Something about Pete Garrison. Can we speak in confidence?"

"Meaning what""

"That after I tell you something about him I am going to ask you a question, and all I ask is that if you choose to not go along with my theory, you will forget everything I have told you. Forget it forever."

"Okay. Drop it on me, sister."

Sitting at her desk, Breckinridge reiterated what Garrison had told her, fact for fact. As Kallenstien listened, her eyes got wide. When Breckinridge had finished, Kallenstien left her desk and walked to the coffee machine, where she made a pot of coffee and put it on the burner. She walked back across the room and plopped down in a chair.

"If anyone else had told me this I would have thought they were crazy," Kallenstien said.

"Rachel, I know this is risky and that things could turn the wrong way. We could end up on trial ... or worse. I can use some help, but if you don't want to throw in with Garrison and me, I'll have no hard feelings."

"You know what I was thinking just now?"

"How nice it would have been if you would have been on vacation this week."

****

CHAPTER 26

AT MIDNIGHT, BRECKINRIDGE was still in her PRD cubicle, engrossed in doing computer records checks: extensive, detailed record examinations that involved examining every case file in which Frank Hightower was mentioned. She had been cross-referencing each case to his Secret Service informant file.

"The federal and state databases for Hightower's arrests have nothing in them to connect him to anyone in the Secret Service, other than Garrison," Breckinridge said.

"And all the entries in his informant file were written by Garrison - all generally favorable, by the way," Kallenstien said poring over some paperwork. "Hightower was a reliable informant. There were entries for up to two years ago; then the entries stopped."

Breckinridge stood and stretched.

"I checked the name Eddie Richardson through the indices and found nothing. There was one data entry that mentioned an Eddie Richardson fitting Hightower's description. But the file wasn't on the shelf. I checked the master file index and it showed that the file had been destroyed routinely because of age." She handed Breckinridge a printout of the file card.

"Martha, there is a J in the file number. Judicial cases aren't destroyed for fifteen years."

"So I noticed. It wouldn't be the first time some clerk screwed up the destruction schedule."

"Strange..."

"Someone cleaned up some files. They wanted to get Richardson's name out of the system."

"If so, they did it the right way. Just stamp the file for destruction." Kallenstien ran her hands through her hair. She looked tired. "Then they didn't have to worry about getting caught tearing up a file by one of the security cameras. It looks like we're out of luck on the Richardson angle."

"You look tired, Rach."

Kallenstien rubbed her eyes. "I could use some sleep."

"See you in the morning."

"You're going to stay?"

"I have a few things I want to finish up."

"If you want me to stay-"

"Get out of here. And thanks, friend."

Kallenstien smiled. "I'm in this for the glory."

After Kallenstien departed, Breckinridge sat at her desk and put her face in her hands to think. She recounted in her mind everything she knew, all the records checks they'd made concerning Hightower and his alias Richardson. There had to be something....

Recalling the fail-safe administrative procedure for deleted and destroyed files, she walked to a record room on the floor below where files scheduled for destruction were kept before being sent for final destruction. Hoping that the clerk responsible for records destruction was behind in her work, Breckinridge spent the next two hours looking through old files, checking the file number on each file folder one by one until her eyes began playing tricks on her. She sat back and closed her eyes and nearly fell asleep. She told herself she would finish one more pile of folders before leaving. It was then that she found the Richardson file. Oddly, its date indicated that the file was less than a year old - that it should have never been marked for destruction in the first place. In it was nothing but two sheets of blank paper and an unlabeled computer compact disk.

She took the CD to her office and inserted it into the CD port in her MacIntosh computer. OPERATION BLUE VELVET appeared at the top of the screen.

She typed the word SYNOPSIS. The screen displayed:

Secret Service joint operation (with, ATF, U.S. Customs, and RCMP) investigating arms smuggling to possible terrorists. Five arrests for possession of illegal weapons resulting in four convictions. Reports and photographic arrest data.

She typed PHOTOFILE.

A camera icon appeared. She double-clicked it.

A digital video presentation began with the title ARREST- (1534 hours) U.S. CANADIAN BORDER, then switched to a grainy film clip showing three men in the front seat of a Cadillac parked in a parking lot. Four men came into camera view running toward the car wearing raid jackets. They had guns out and were holding badges. Pulling open the doors of the Cadillac, they yanked two men from the front seat at gunpoint, forcing them to put their hands on the roof of the car. One man struggled with the officers, and was wrestled to the ground and then handcuffed. The other suspect put his hands on the side of the car and spread his legs. The man in the backseat got out of the car.

He was Frank Hightower a.k.a. Eddie Richardson.

As the two prisoners were led toward a police van on the right of the screen, Flanagan entered camera-view and began speaking with Hightower. The film stopped. There was nothing else on the tape.

"Flanagan," she muttered. She typed the words CASE AGENT, then tapped the ENTER key. In the middle of the screen, appeared:

Flanagan, Gilbert

SS Badge # 9236

Flanagan had been using Hightower as an informant. She covered her eyes to think. She knew that the secret to solving a case was to concentrate on known clues and avoid getting bogged down in too much supposition. She knew that Hightower had been involved with someone in the Secret Service; and that the person who'd written the Aryan Disciples threat letter received in the White House mailroom the day Charlie Meriweather had been murdered had left a latent impression on it that resembled a telephone number. Was there some way she could tie the two clues together? Then it hit her. Breckinridge hurried to her desk and rummaged through the Meriweather case file until she found what she was looking for.

An hour later on the tenth floor of an apartment building on Wayne Avenue in Silver Springs, Maryland, Breckinridge knocked on a door. There was a lingering odor of cooked food in the hallway.

A woman in a blue chenille bathrobe opened the door. Breckinridge showed her badge. "I'm Agent Breckinridge, U.S. Secret Service. I apologize for coming here so late."

"Are you the lady who called my sister the other day?"

Breckinridge nodded. "One of my colleagues asked you about your phone number being written on a letter that had been sent to the White House."

"Don't you people ever sleep?"

"This will just take a second. During my investigation I've come up with a name, Gilbert Flanagan. Does that ring a bell with you?"

"I don't think so."

"Are you sure? Someone you may have had contact with in the past? It's very important."

"Flanagan," she said, pondering. "Wait a second."

"Yes?"

"My sister.

"What about your sister?"

"She just got here from Mexico last year and she's been cleaning houses to make a few dollars. She has no car and sometimes I pick her up from where she is working. She has a customer with a name like that."

"Flanagan?"

"I think she cleans his house on Tuesdays and Thursdays."

Breckinridge swallowed. "What do you know about him?"

"She told me he works in Beltsville at a government training place. My sister told me he has a picture of him with President Jordan in his living room. She thinks he is a White House bodyguard for the President. His first name is Gilbert - Gilbert Flanagan. That's
it
..."

"Thank you. Thank you very much."

"Next time come during the day. I have to go to work in the morning and I need my sleep."

Using her cell phone, Breckinridge anxiously reached Pete Garrison at the Watergate and told him she was going to stop by. As she drove along 23rd Street making her way to the Watergate, the car radio was playing softly, a familiar tune that for the life of her she couldn't name - probably because she was exhausted. The day before, her life had been going along normally, and now she was sneaking around in the dark trying to figure out which one of her colleagues was trying to kill the President.

Suddenly, a wave of trepidation came over her. She checked the rearview mirror. It didn't appear that anyone was following her. But she knew that if one was the target of a sophisticated surveillance, there was no way to detect it. She'd been around long enough to know that Washington, D.C., was a place where people played for keeps, where individuals like her got steamrolled every day of the week. She told herself to stop thinking about what could happen.

At the Watergate, she knocked on Garrison's door. Moments later, she heard footsteps and assumed he was looking out the peephole.

"It's me."

He opened the door with a gun in his hand and let her in. She told him how she'd established a connection between Hightower and Flanagan and about Flanagan's part-time housekeeper's sister's telephone number being on the Aryan Disciples threat letter.

"Flanagan," he said. "That sonofabitch. This is a breakthrough. A real breakthrough."

"Is that coffee I smell?"

"I figured you could use a cup about now."

In the kitchen, Garrison poured cups from a steaming pot and seemed extremely pleased, animated actually, as she told him the details of her investigation.

"The CD," he asked. "You have it?"

She patted her purse. "Exhibit A."

"But it's not enough, Martha. In fact, it's a long way from proving anything. Flanagan can just cop to it - he could say that he worked with Hightower on a case and knows nothing about him after that. As far as the phone number on the letter, it's evidence, all right, but it doesn't tie him directly to anything. It won't be his handwriting. It sounds like the housekeeper just wrote down her sister's phone number on a piece of paper and Flanagan ended up using the sheet of paper under it to create his phony letter. I could see a defense attorney making the case that the phone number could be anywhere, because it didn't have an area code with it. We need more. A lot more."