“Isn’t that a coincidence. They’re both dead.” McMahon stood and put on his jacket.
“Let’s go talk to Brian and see if we can find out who this mystery politician is.”
“I think I already know who it is,” Kennedy said with a glum look on her face.
“Who?”
“Fitzgerald.”
“Why?”
“He resigned from the Intelligence Committee about a year ago, claiming that he needed to focus more of his energy on the Finance Committee.”
McMahon led the way down the hall and up the two flights of stairs.
Skip greeted Roach’s assistant and told her that he needed to see the boss immediately. She buzzed Roach, and a minute later McMahon and Kennedy were let in.
Roach was sitting at his conference table surrounded by the usual stacks of files and papers. He stood and greeted the visitors, professional as always. “How’s the investigation going?”
“We may have come across a break.” McMahon looked over his shoulder to make sure the door was closed and then asked, “What do you know about a covert mission called Operation Snatch Back?” Roach looked more than a little surprised. “Where did you hear about Operation Snatch Back?
That’s classified.” Roach turned to Kennedy. “Did you tell him?”
“Not in the way you’re thinking. We stumbled across it in our investigation.”
“How?”
“Irene was looking into the file of a former Navy SEAL and the name came up.”
“In what way did it come up?” Kennedy stepped forward. “About a month after the mission, one of SEALS involved in the operation received an early discharge. We talked to his commanding officer and found out some interesting things.”
“Go on,” commanded Roach.
“Admiral Devoe, the force commander for the SEALS, told us that the officer in question, Commander Scott Coleman, was in charge of the SEAL team that participated in Operation Snatch Back. After the mission, Coleman stated that he thought the Libyans had set a trap. He also blamed himself for the loss of his men because he ordered them in.
A couple of weeks after the mission, Admiral Devoe finds out that the FBI has identified who leaked the mission. The admiral passes the information on to Coleman, telling him
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that he doesn’t know who leaked the mission, only that it was a prominent politician.
Shortly after that, Coleman demands an early discharge and gets it. So far none of this adds up to anything hard, but if the prominent politician who leaked that mission happened to be Senator Daniel Fitzgerald, then we have a possible motive.” Roach looked more than a little surprised and asked, “What makes you think it was Fitzgerald?”
“An educated guess,” said Kennedy. “Was it Fitzgerald?”
“Yes …. Both of you take a seat. This is more complicated than it looks.” McMahon and Kennedy sat in the two chairs in front of Roach’s desk, and the director sat on the edge of his desk. “What I’m about to tell you does not leave this room …. Fitzgerald was the one who leaked the mission. He didn’t do it intentionally, and that is why he was never prosecuted. In fact, we stumbled across it in an unusual way. Our Counter
Espionage Department regularly reviews the tax returns, asset portfolios, and credit history of certain people that, by the nature of their jobs, come in contact with government employees that have access to sensitive information-people like journalists, attorneys, secretaries, lobbyists, even waitresses and bartenders.
Last year, one of our agents was reviewing the tax returns for all of the employees that worked at a local restaurant. She discovered that one of the bartenders had purchased a two-hundred-thousand dollar condo in Georgetown. The guy only makes about thirty thousand a year, so a red flag pops up. She calls the mortgage company and finds out the person in question put down sixty grand for the down payment on the condo. A little more investigating and she rules out that the money came from his parents. We think the guy is probably selling drugs, but there’s an outside chance he may be talking to people we don’t want him talking to.
A lot of big hitters frequent the establishment where he works, and after a few drinks these politicians and their staffers have been known to discuss things they shouldn’t in public. “We decided there was enough to put this bartender under surveillance. We wired the bar, his condo, and tapped his phone.” Roach shook his head. “Two days before
Operation Snatch Back was to commence, Fitzgerald gets done with work and stops by for a couple of drinks. The nightly news is on and they run a segment on the anniversary of the downing of the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie. The reporter ends the segment saying that the two men suspected of planting the bomb are believed to be hiding in
Libya.
Fitzgerald responds out loud, ‘Not for long,’ and the bartender asks what he means.
Fitzgerald says, ‘Between you and me, kid, those two bastards are going to be sitting in a
U.S. jail in about forty-eight hours.” The kid asks how, if they’re in Libya, and Fitzgerald tells him he can’t go into it. “At the time this meant nothing to our people that were on the case, but after Snatch Back failed, the CIA gave our Counter Espionage people a heads—
up warning that the mission may have been compromised. One of the names on the list of people that knew about the mission beforehand was Senator Fitzgerald. Our agents put two and two together and hauled the bartender in for a shakedown. They told him he was either going to spend the next twenty years in a Federal pen or
