who put out something called the
Fifty thousand leaflets, Mr. Finch assured them, would be tucked into his two-page, two-color throwaway.
“I ain't never done this for nobody before! Hope I ain't making no mistake,” he said. Not at these prices, he wasn't.
Royce was a worrier. He worried that Mr. Finch might just dump the leaflets, which he swore would be “tucked by high-speed insertion machine into each and every
“This whole idea was lunacy, Royce,” she raged, using his name like a knife blade. “We didn't use our heads. I'm going to be sued from one end of the country to the other—we didn't think about that. I can't believe I've been such an idiot!” Wisely, he kept still and let it pour until she wound down.
After shed calmed down considerably, she picked up their mail.
“You got these,” she said, handing him a stack of envelopes, bills and junk mail. There was something with a Memphis postmark. He felt a surge of excitement as he ripped the envelope open and read the communication.
A clerk without a name, a
Another faceless bod at the Tennessee end of ELINT's daisy chain had punched up Hawthorne's code number, got an active clearance, retrieved his mail drop particulars when they couldn't find a telephone contact number, and the printout had been forwarded, in an unmarked (except for franking stamps) government envelope to Waterton, where it had in turn been forwarded to Mary Perkins's post office box in Maysburg. A no-no. Something that was never done without prior consent by the case handler. An error that could have put somebody's tit firmly in the wringer. But it hadn't.
The communication had come the day after Royce stopped near Waterworks Hill and called the phonemen to ID that frequently dialed D.C.-area disconnect showing on Sam Perkins's telephone bill.
The printout listed the number. Gave its status as having reverted to Intercept. The official user: North American Medical Research Consultants. ELINT's probe identified it as “Control cover for military counterintelligence operational unit. Parentheses CLASSIFIED OPERATIONS slash DOMESTIC end parentheses.
“What is it?” Mary asked, reading something in his face and long silence.
“I'm not—hell, I don't know. Who did Sam know in a military counterintelligence operational unit?'
“Nobody.” Her pretty face was blank of expression for a second, then began to appear more thoughtful. “Unless ... no. Nobody. Not that I ever heard about. Why?'
He showed her.
“It was probably Christopher Sinclair. Does this mean he was in a military counterintelligence unit?'
“This wasn't Christopher Sinclair. Those calls were to New York—remember? We figured those out. This was someone else. Somebody Sam had a lot of contact with.'
“Mmm.” She shook her head. “I don't have a clue.'
“If it was World Ecosphere, Inc., one of their dummy phone fronts, we're in a dilly of a mess. That would mean that Ecoworld is a U.S. government drug lab. Which makes no sense whatsoever.'
“But it would explain one thing: why the FBI and the local cops haven't done anything. It would mean there was a government curtain of protection around it. As you said—it makes no sense.'
The next morning Mary checked in with her neighbor Alberta, who informed her she'd already had calls from her sister, a friend of her son's, and two women she and Owen churched with—all of whom had seen her name on a certain “ad,” as her sister referred to it. The circulars had indeed been delivered. The rest of the day was as uneventful as Mary and Royce could keep it.
The following morning, Friday, the Maysburg
“We have to buy a paper,” Mary said excitedly, coming out to the car after touching base with the Rileys.
“Yeah?'
“There was a big raid on drug dealers.'
“You mean—'
“I don't know. Alberta said she hadn't had time to digest it all—something about a bunch of people arrested for dealing drugs yesterday—but the story mentions our circular by name.'
“Does it mention you by name?'
“She said it didn't name any of us, but it told what ‘CRAC’ stood for.” CRAC was a name they'd made up to give them an official sound—Mary, Mrs. Lloyd, and her neighbors were the Coalition Rallying Against the Conspiracy. Royce thought “Coalition” sounded serious.
“I hope this isn't a game somebody's running on us. If the names Fabio Ruiz and Luis Londono are in that story, I'll breathe a lot easier.” They spotted a newspaper dispenser, and he pulled over and jumped out, getting two papers. They perused them in silence.
Royce read the story twice, fuming. He knew some of the people arrested. Nobodies. People chipping. Happy, of course, was not among those under arrest. He read the words a third time:
MASSIVE DRUG BUST NETS 16
Maysburg—A major drug raid Thursday netted 16 arrests on nearly 50 counts of trafficking in illegal substances, according to authorities.
The raid was coordinated by the Tennessee Narcotics Task Force and utilized 12 law enforcement agencies operating on the municipal, state, and county levels, as well as supervisory personnel from federal agencies.
According to a statement issued by the task force director, Gene L. Niswonger, the massive raid was the “end result of a long and continuing investigation into area drug dealers.” He described the raid as “a major success. It just shows you how many different agencies can work well together when everyone coordinates their efforts.'
Niswonger stated that property seized totaled in excess of thirty-five thousand dollars, and that the task force would use a “substantial portion” of the income derived from the sale of the property to help fund other drug- related operations.
The 16 defendants were arraigned in Maysburg Thursday afternoon. Those arrested were:
Beryl Crites, 27, three counts of sale of cocaine; Jimmy Frye, 31, two counts sale of methamphetamine; Thedra Jones, 24, four counts sale of cocaine, Bobby Tatum, 33, four counts manufacture of a controlled substance; Donny Ray Wagner, 29, two counts sale of marijuana...'
Royce skipped down to the last paragraph of the newspaper article.
Niswonger said the drug sweep was unrelated to rumors of a possible clandestine narcotics laboratory allegedly under construction in the Maysburg-Waterton area. “The idea that this community is the victim of some kind of a conspiracy is just plain ridiculous. It shows how people can act unwisely when they don't have any expertise and try to take the law into their own hands,” he stated, referring to leaflets which were mailed to homes throughout the Waterton area by a group calling itself CRAC, the Coalition Rallying Against the Conspiracy. The leaflets, sent inside supermarket shopping circulars, claimed that the group had found evidence of chemicals used in drug manufacture at a local construction site.
“Those lying fucking pricks!” He wadded the paper and flung it into the backseat. “It's all a big shuck. They have this kind of thing ready to go at any second. Anytime they think they're going to get any heat—they've always got X numbers of small-timers they can round up.” He shook his head, gritting his teeth in disgust. “This is their way of defusing the stuff about Ecoworld—see? The War on Drugs, Chapter 763. It's bullshit.'
“What now?'
