them. The books took the longest, and many of them had notes or underlined passages that had to be examined and determined to be text-related, not secret messages. The photographs had to be probed for things folded and hidden, the files had to be gently exhumed, each sheet quickly examined.
Many were articles, razored out, dumped in manila folders indexed by various outrages: Racism, militarism, sometimes whole drawers like Vietnam ’64-’67, Vietnam ’67-’70, Vietnam ’71-’75. There was a file of erotica, surprisingly mild, mostly drawings of women in tight latex lingerie that pushed their breasts and buttocks out plumply and had highlights from unseen illumination glowing on them; many were tied, all were made up, with bright red cupid lips. Then too there were files of acceptance letters and rejection slips, fan notes from kids, letters from lawyers threatening libel suits or political opponents expressing disappointment or outrage or sucking up. A whole file was full of mash notes from celebs, mostly second-tier movie lefties. There was a file of letters from students wanting Ozzie essentially to write their papers for them or at least do the research or-
“Hey, Sniper,” said Denny, “hey, come lookee here.”
He was lying under the box spring, a tough fit for such a big fellow, and his suit coat spilled open, showing the Sig 229 holstered to his belt.
Bob scootched and knelt and wedged, and saw where Denny’s rubberized finger pointed: inside the box spring frame, toward the end of the structure, four yellowing strands of Scotch tape peeled away from the wood, drying out in the arid atmosphere. Each one showed one end that suggested being torn or twisted loose.
“It looks like he had something taped here. And judging from the yellow color of the tape, for a long time. Then recently someone pulled whatever was there loose, breaking and twisting the tape. I make it to be four by four, about.”
“Yeah,” said Bob. “I wonder if there’s prints on the tape.”
“Well,” said Denny, “I will mark it down, and if we find something corroborating, maybe I’ll get an actual search warrant and come in with technicians, and we can check the tape for prints. Be interesting if Jack Strong’s prints showed. There’d be your proof he took something. I don’t know where that would lead you, but you’d know Jack had dug through all this, at least.”
Bob looked at his watch. They’d been at it over three hours. He had a couple of drawers to go.
Bob went back and tried to find renewed vigor as he plowed through the details of the old lefty’s life, but it had never been new to start with and stayed old all the way through, although a file of letters from angry readers showed some life: “You fucking commie bastard, they ought to hang you from a lamppost. All you Reds will get your day of the rope, you just wait.” But even the craziness grew boring, and none of the letters-the signed ones, as most bore the signature A Patriot or I Gave to My Country-displayed a name that suggested anything or led anywhere.
Agh, he thought. What did you expect? You can’t do this sort of thing on the quick with a buddy helping out. This is what the FBI is for, to go through this stuff, run it down, track it, read it for fingerprints, analyze the forensics, do the dozens of tests, the magic stuff they do. You are stuck in the year 1948, and this is an obsolete black-and-white movie where the detective finds the Big Clue in some dusty old file.
But he didn’t find the Big Clue.
“Well, I guess we crashed and burned.”
“I guess we did.”
“Okay,” Bob said. “Nothing here. Nothing here at all. I’ll call the feds and see where we are. You were great, really.”
“No big deal. Semper Fi, all that shit.”
“All that shit.”
Washington rose and then said, “It is kind of funny though, a guy as red as this guy, so kill-the-rich and power-to-the-people and all that bullshit, of course he saves a letter from his broker. His broker! Can you imagine?”
“They’re all like that,” said Bob. “Look at Strong. He’s secretly trying to get a roll together, not to pay off his debts but to take off and live big like the millionaires he’d execute if he became, God help us, the big boss.”
But then he thought, why wasn’t the letter in the files with all the other crazy shit?
“Where did you find it?”
“Oh, it was folded up in Das Kapital. I don’t know why it was there.”
Bob thought, that is odd. That is unexpected.
“What did it say?”
“Nothing. It was just a recommendation of stocks for him to buy, sometime in 1972.”
Bob thought, nowhere else in all this shit is there any expression of interest in the stock market, any interest in capitalism except how to destroy it, any relationship with a broker, any connection to anything that isn’t somehow political-for Ozzie, whoever he was, was like Jack and Mitzi: a total creature of politics.
“You didn’t find any other letters like that?”
“Nah. Some guy in New York.”
A New York broker.
That set off a tiny alarm in Bob’s brain, from somewhere in his own past.
“You have the letter?”
Washington went to the case, bent, found the thick spine of the book, pulled it out, pulled out the envelope, and began to hand it to Bob.
“No, no, just look at it,” Bob said. “The guy who sent it. Was his name Ward Bonson?”
Washington looked.
“Give the man a prize. He’s a mind reader.”
“Jesus,” said Bob.
“Why? Who the hell is Ward Bonson?”
“At one time he was the highest-ranking Soviet penetration agent in the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1972, after he’d left Naval Intelligence and before he went to work in the CIA, he was a very successful Wall Street broker, just waiting for the Agency to come and lap him up, which of course it did soon enough.”
“You knew him?” asked Washington.
“I killed him,” said Bob.
24
Nick resigned every day at 8:30 a.m., and every day at 8:30 a.m. the director turned him down.
“I am not going to let those bastards tell me how to run the Bureau,” he said. “Get back to work.
“We’re trying.”
Nick gave him a daily summary after the resignation ritual, on any given day reporting the task force’s progress along its new lines of inquiry: of the ninety-seven new suspects, Task Force Sniper, with its additional manpower, had eliminated over forty-one. But there were sixteen of that first already-vetted group who demanded more careful attention-reinterviews, records checks, travel and time line indexing, overseas liaison-and there were still over fifty to go who hadn’t been looked at at all.
Meanwhile, the scandal refused to go away. Usually things in Washington blow over as new news cycles demand new material, but the reporter David Banjax was clearly on a hot streak as he chronicled the life and times of Special Agent Nicholas Memphis, the hero and goat of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who now ran the Bureau’s sniper investigation. Banjax was given a quarter of the
Then there was the issue of Nick’s “breaking” of the Bristol, Tennessee, speedway armored car robbery a year ago, in which, allegedly, the special agent had penetrated a violent mob, interdicted and destroyed a robbery attempt in progress, kept civilian casualties to a minimum, and apprehended the bad guys, all of whom now languished either in prison or in the graveyard (six had been killed).
But even that heroism, in Banjax’s telling, had its downside. Some sources gave all the credit to an unidentified FBI undercover operative who had done the actual penetrating and gunfighting. Nick had come along late and taken that man’s credit-so unfair to the unknown hero, who couldn’t be ID’d even now as, quite possibly, he was undercover in another caper. And looked at carefully, the episode itself had a sloppiness to it that made its ultimately happy disposition seem somewhat arbitrary, if not out-and-out lucky. If the conspiracy had been penetrated, why did the feds wait until the robbery itself to spring the trap? There were hundreds of shots fired at the jam-packed Motor Speedway venue, and only by the grace of God did they not kill or maim anyone. The public safety emergency also cost local law enforcement millions of dollars (to say nothing of the trauma of the wounds to several of its officers, plus the cost in medical and recovery expenses); couldn’t that have been avoided? It was also alleged by some, bitter at the Bureau’s high-handed treatment of the locals, that the real object of the Bureau’s enterprise, a professional killer who used the automobile as his weapon of choice, had escaped and still roamed the world, free as a bird. And finally there was the issue of a helicopter, shot down by an FBI sniper under Nick’s command. Again, only luck, or so it was charged, prevented a catastrophe; that crippled aircraft could have fallen from the sky onto a home or a bus or a school or a hospital just as easily as it fell upon the empty seats of the Bristol Motor Speedway, resulting in the capture of the pilot and all the personnel of the Grumley gang. Why didn’t Nick have to answer that?
Still another day, Banjax reached and interviewed one Howard D. Utey, former agent in charge of the Bureau’s New Orleans office, who’d also been Nick’s supervisor during the bungled attempt in Tulsa. Utey, now a professor of public safety and police science at a community college in Ohio, told how Nick’s poor judgment resulted in the botched shot in Tulsa and the escape of a wanted fugitive later in New Orleans during the furor over the assassination of a Salvadoran bishop, an event never really satisfactorily explained and occasionally brought up by enterprising reporters in search of an easy, sensational feature.
In short, Nick was emerging as the kind of bad-penny agent who had had a hand in a lot of disasters and yet, somehow, kept his career marching ahead, as if supported by men in high places with a secret agenda.
It was on just such a day when Ron Fields, Nick’s ever-more-grumpy number two, sat alone in the Cosi’s on I street, just down from the Hoover fortress, nibbling
