middle of a campaign season.'
That summary was followed by a moment of thoughtful silence. Well, almost silence, and probably not all that thoughtful. Havlicek kept crunching on Fritos and swigging his beer. Baker was on the floor between us, snoring. I mulled over our immediate future.
'I know a thing or two about the witness protection program, having covered some issues within it a couple of years ago,' Havlicek said.
'It's a hell of a well-run government operation. It began about twenty-seven years ago when the feds were trying to bust La Cosa Nostra, and they couldn't break the code of silence. It ends up, it wasn't that these mob underlings were so loyal. It's just that they were scared for their lives. Since then, the marshals have protected about 7,500 witnesses, most of whom, like Curtis Black, are themselves criminals. It's not a squeaky-clean process. It's not even a pretty one. But everyone familiar with it tells me it works.'
Havlicek was on a roll and kept going. 'The way it goes is, if you have something worthwhile, you cut a deal with the FBI to enter the program. Before a trial, you're given intense protection, typically in some safe house or a hotel suite. You're brought to the grand jury or to court with an army of agents around you. Once you do your thing, or once the other side pleads guilty because they know you're waiting in the wings to testify, that's it, you're given your freedom and a different identity, and you go off and become someone entirely new.'
Havlicek looked at me. 'Literally, Jack Flynn would cease to exist.
Your house would be sold along with just about everything in it. Your dog would be given a new home. You'd pack up a few personal things, some clothes and the like, and the marshals would cart you off in some armored van to a national complex over in suburban Virginia. You get to pick the region of the country where you want to move. They'll help you buy a new house or pay for a new apartment. They might help you with some job retraining and the like so you can get work. They'll get you started on getting new identification, like a Social Security card and a driver's license. You come up with your own personal history, some story of who you are and where you're from. And that's it, suddenly you're out on your own, a whole new person. I'm told that only about three people in the entire marshal's service ever get to learn your new identity-that's how closely held the secret is.'
'So the odds of us learning who Black became and where he went are not exceedingly good,' I said.
More crunching. He said, 'Except for the obvious. Suppose Black is actually dead now. Suppose he's the one sitting in that morgue, the unsuccessful assassin. Suppose it looks like the feds gave a free pass to some armored car robber more than twenty years ago, supplied him with money and a whole new life, and he turns into some sort of presidential assassin.'
'The damned question is, why does some robber flunky from Chelsea, Massachusetts, end up shooting at the president, especially after he's taken a ride on the federal gravy train. How does point A lead to point B? And what's the role of Paul Stemple?'
Havlicek replied, 'Maybe it was a hired hit. Maybe the guy's in the program. He's settled into his new life. He's working in some menial job, not making the money he was used to making when he was hitting banks and Brink's trucks back in the early eighties. And along comes this offer. Or maybe he seeks it out. You know, calls his old contacts. Maybe it's so good it makes him rich for life.'
From the limited knowledge I had of Black, it didn't sound like him.
Here was a guy who was always the ringleader, always gliding above the fray, letting others do the dirty work, telling them how to do it but never doing it himself. He was smart, savvy, even worldly. No, he wouldn't be the type to pick up an automatic rifle and take that kind of risk at Congressional just for the cash. He was smart enough to find another way.
'He's too sharp,' I said. 'He's a chief, not an Indian. He's not going to get his hands dirty like that for the cash.'
Havlicek washed down most of a mouthful of corn chips with a pull of beer and said, 'Well, maybe he really wanted this president to be dead for some reason.'
'That's what bothers me,' I said. 'And that's what gets to the point of my anonymous friend, who seems to think that if we find out about the relationship between Black and the president, we'll know why this shooting occurred. That's the crux right there, isn't it? And it seems like stating the obvious to say it must have something to do with Stemple, or Stemple's pardon must be some way involved, no?'
Havlicek nodded.
I said, 'I know this is all conjecture, but if you play this out a little further, can you assume that the FBI is covering up the identity of the shooter out of raw embarrassment that one of their witnesses went off and made a mockery of them by trying to kill the president? I mean, if something like that gets public, they're going to have the news media and congressional oversight investigators up one side of the program and down the other, and their secrecy is pretty much blown forever. Maybe the program itself is even lost in the media maelstrom.
'So our immediate mission now,' I concluded, 'is to find Paul Stemple, and find him fast. There's an election at stake in this, and that gives us two days. We find him, we get some answers.'
'And on that point,' Havlicek said, in a newly dramatic tone, 'we're in some luck.'
I shot him a curious look. He pulled out his ancient wallet, shuffled through a collection of cards and old papers, and pulled out a small sheet. He flicked his finger against it and added, 'When you first told me about Stemple and the pardon last week, I did a little research on him. I don't like coincidences. I suspected his name might come back into this story.'
'So what do you have?' I asked, impressed and embarrassed that I hadn't thought the same way.
'Well, I had to go to hell and back to get this, but I think I have a line on where Stemple is living now, and I think it's right here in D.c. I got ahold of his Social Security number through a contact I have. I used that to nail some of his bank records. I found out that he made some recent withdrawals in Washington. I got some gnome in the Pentagon to tell me he was a Korean War vet, and that he stopped at a local VA hospital last week. I canvassed some short-term real estate brokers on Capitol Hill, where one of the withdrawals was made, and one guy told me he rented an apartment to him. Some skill, some luck.' He made a motion to stand up, first placing the nearly empty bag of Fritos from his lap onto the coffee table. 'So next stop: his house.'
As he stretched his back, Havlicek added, 'Jesus Christ. We have a member of the federal witness protection program, Curtis Black, who is in some way involved in an assassination attempt. We have someone taking shots at you. We have a senior FBI official providing us information devastating to his agency. And we have some anonymous source who seems to have all the world's information in the palm of his hand. One quick question: who plays me in the movie?'
I replied, 'I don't know. Ernest Borgnine?'
'Screw you. He's about fifty pounds heavier than me. And isn't he dead?'
He ambled off to the kitchen with a few empty cans, calling out, 'Give Martin a quick call and let him know you're all right. The guy was a train wreck today.'
The hour was late, but Martin picked up on the first ring, as if once again he had been waiting by the phone. I gave him the update on my trip and progress, let him know we were heading out, and told him we'd gather in the morning.
'Boston's all over me to get something good in print,' he said, referring to the editors. 'Concentrate on a quick-but good-turnover.
Meantime, I'll hold them off as long as I can, until we know we're ready to pop.'
On his point about Boston breathing down our necks, there is a tendency in this business for the editors back at the main office to think that all us overpaid layabouts down in the Washington bureau are doing little more than waddling over to the Palm for lunch and Morton's for dinner, and in between tapping into the capital's vast public relations machine to be spoon-fed press releases on the latest triumphs of our elected officials. These same God- fearing editors believe that any time we choose, we can simply call up the White House and get the president on the line, or trundle over to the J. Edgar Hoover Building and have FBI commanders invite us into their offices and open up their active case files for us to peruse, all in the name of the public's right to know. Well, Washington reporting is hard work, and what we needed now was persistence and patience-two qualities that Martin understood, God bless him.
When I hung up, I looked at the clock and saw that it was edging past midnight. My day had begun long before dawn. I wasn't so much tired as physically and mentally demolished. My ribs hurt, and so did my head. Yet it was time to forge on. I was not going to be the guy to hold up this story. Quite the contrary, if Havlicek had a
