Law of Honor
The Bureau Book Nine
Michael Newton
Law of Honor is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Copyright © 2019 by Michael Newton
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Wolfpack Publishing
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ISBN: 978-1-64119-614-7
Contents
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Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
A Look At: When Honor Dies (The Bureau 10)
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About the Author
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To Athan George Theoharis (b. 1936)
Dramatis Personæ
Hardy Gantt: a CIA agent
Wyman Gantt: Hardy's cousin, an FBI agent.
Erin O'Hara: an FBI agent
Fiona O'Hara: an attorney.
David Jordan: an attorney.
Dominic Giordano: a mafioso.
Angelo Giordano: Dom's brother, also a mafioso.
Payton Sawyer: an NYPD officer.
Stephen Barnes: a KGB sleeper agent living in America.
Created with Vellum
Author’s Note
The Bureau is a work of fiction, but real-life public figures, institutions and events often appear within its pages. Where that occurs, personal conversations and actions are the author's invention, except where drawn directly from reliable nonfiction sources. Timelines of historical events, likewise, may be rearranged, compressed or extended as required for dramatic effect. Anachronistic terms now sometimes deemed offensive, are used within these pages as they were applied during the years portrayed. Obsolete geographical names are used as they were normally applied during the years of 1984 to 1992 inclusive.
Law of Honor
Chapter 1
Harlem: July 15, 1984
At fifty-five, NYPD Sergeant Payton Sawyer had nearly resigned himself to retiring—or dying, hell, who knew?—without Assata Shakur returned to the States and a solitary cell in maximum security. The CIA claimed to have found her in Cuba, granted asylum by Fidel Castro and supported by the state at a whopping cost of thirteen dollars per day, but thanks to America's severance of diplomatic relations with the Red island nation back in 1961, the State Department had zero leverage for shaking her loose.
Now, word was coming in of covert plans to reunite Shakur with her ten-year-old daughter, conceived during one of her trials and born in prison, presently residing with an aunt who doubled as Shakur's defense attorney. Once again, you had to trust the CIA on that, and one thing Sawyer had discovered over time: the Agency lied just as frequently and as egregiously as NYPD's "BOSS," which he had served now for twenty-three years.
To hell with it, he thought. Shakur would always be just plain old JoAnne Chesimard to him, convicted cop killer and terrorist. Ironically, Congress was working on a new law to abolish parole from federal prisons, but even if it passed—and that seemed likely, given pressure from President Reagan—Shakur would be exempt because the crimes for which she stood convicted all occurred during the early 1970s.
So what?
If she was ever captured somehow and returned, no politician interested in retaining office would release her under any circumstances. She would be untouchable that way, like Charlie Manson out in California.
Or she could sit and waste away in Cuba, maybe in some drab little apartment, getting fat on nonstop rice and beans.
And maybe, Sawyer thought, that might be punishment enough.
San Miguel, El Salvador: September 29, 1984
Hardy Gantt sat in a small saloon on Avenida Principal, close to the city's largest graveyard, sipping on a tepid rum and Coke. He still marveled at how many Salvadoran towns and cities took their names from saints, when you could search in vain your whole life long for anyone who qualified as saintly in this country whose motto translated to English as "God, Unity, Freedom."
Gantt had been there long enough to say that there was very little unity or freedom in El Salvador. And as for God, the rumor was that he had long since pulled up stakes and moved away.
San Miguel was the country's second-largest city in terms of population, with some 220,000 full-time inhabitants, and while it had been spared most of the Salvadoran civil war's overt violence, refugees from the countryside were piling up in shelters and tent cities all around.
That was no surprise, given the ramped-up mayhem under President José Napoleón Duarte. An engineering graduate from Notre Dame in Indiana and cofounder of the wildly misnamed Christian Democratic Party, he had no patience with his homeland's whiny peasants, nearly half of whom spent their whole lives in abject poverty. El presidente's answer was to pile on more abuse, administered by his Battalion 3-16 killers, acting in league with agents from Langley.
Of late, the Salvadoran spooks had taken on an almost comic aspect—that is, if you weren't one of their victims. Decked out with masks, wigs and false beards or mustaches, they roamed nationwide, packing Uzi submachine guns bought from Israel, dragging suspected Reds into the double-cab Toyota pickup trucks they favored for some unknown reason, hidden behind tinted windows, using stolen license plates. Most of the suspects they abducted turned up dead or simply disappeared. Those in captivity faced torturous interrogation featuring such tactics as electric shock, water-boarding, near-suffocation with plastic trash bags, and—a little something for the ladies—rape by specially trained police dogs.
One prick who loved to join in torturing the helpless was a Langley specialist who went by "Mr. Mike" among the native soldiers and their victims, a whisky-swilling bastard who appeared to get his kicks out of the rough stuff, not unlike one of the old guard whom Gantt's father had described to him, George Hunter White of MKULTRA infamy. Amnesty International claimed that 40,000 Salvadoran citizens had been murdered and mutilated so far, by death squad members hand-picked from the army, National Guard, and Treasury Police. A spokesperson for Human Rights Watch insisted that the death squads' goal was not only elimination of alleged subversives but casting a pall of terror over the populace nationwide.
Of course, El Salvador wasn't unique in that regard. John Negroponte, U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, spent most of his time scheming with Brigadier-General Gustavo Álvarez Martínez to overthrow Nicaragua's duly-elected Sandinista government. Honduras had also welcomed 150 Argentine soldiers, veterans of that nation's "Dirty War," who'd trained under the CIA's "Operation Charly" at covert bases in Lepaterique and Quilalí.
The only good news for potential victims came from Washington, with the announcement that its School of the Americas had been expelled from Panama under terms of 1977's Panama Canal Treaty, banning any American "repressive and antidemocratic behavior." Unfazed, President Reagan has moved the torture school to Fort Benning in Georgia, which doubled as a training base for U.S. Special Forces.
As for drugs, Gantt knew the Reagan White House still continued funding Nicaraguan "Contras," although banned by
law, through the expedient of smuggling cocaine stateside and worldwide. Ex-CIA pilot Barry Seal, facing a ten-year prison term for drug-running in Florida, had flipped to serve as an informer for the DEA while continuing his dealings with the Medellín Cartel. His former pals at Langley had responded to Seal's treachery by placing a bounty on his head: $1 million if captured alive, half that if verifiably eliminated in the field.
And speaking of eliminations, Pablo Escobar's cartel in Medellín was pulling out the stops, targeting government officials from the lowest beat cop to the presidential cabinet if they ignored the gang's warning of plato o plomo: "silver or lead." In April, two cartel shooters on a motorbike had murdered Rodrigo Lara, Minister of Justice under President Belisario Betancur. Lara's bodyguards had killed the triggerman, while his driver was captured and facing a decade in prison, but there were thousands more where those goons came from, growing up in rancid slums.
Meanwhile, the CIA kept taking hits at home. Yesterday's report from the General Accounting Office listed 149 Agency projects testing drugs on unwitting subjects between 1953 and '64, when Hardy's grandfather was in the thick of it. On the positive PR side, construction had begun in May on new Agency headquarters, still at Langley, but the builders estimated that it wouldn't be completed till sometime in 1999.
Almost another century, Gantt thought, and realized that even now, at thirty-seven years of age, he couldn't see that far ahead.
FBI Field Office, Manhattan: October 5, 1984
The Bureau had finally captured of a real-life spy for Russia, but it hadn't happened in New York—and worst of all, the spook wasn't a Soviet illegal. Until two days earlier, he'd been a trusted special agent of the FBI.
The traitor's name was Richard Miller, forty-seven, of Los Angeles. He'd served the Bureau, more or less, for twenty years, but in L.A. had been what journalists now called an "office joke" of bumbling ineptitude who'd squeaked through the FBI Academy in 1964 with barely-passing grades. A chubby, bespectacled Mormon, he'd sired eight kids before the church had excommunicated him for adultery a few months earlier. His little something on the side was also married, and she was a Russian immigrant, Svetlana Ogorodnikov, who'd come to L.A. with husband Nikolai in '73, claiming political asylum. In fact, they both worked for the KGB, controlled out of San Francisco, and they'd been playing Miller from day one.
Aside from sex—the classic "honey trap" all fledgling G-folk learned about at the Academy, Svetlana offered Miller $15,000 cash plus $50,000 in gold for various classified Bureau papers. One thing he'd turned over was a manual for the Counterintelligence Division. Not satisfied with those payoffs and promises, Miller had also skimmed cash from the L.A. field office and swindled an uncle for "investment" in a bogus muscle-relaxant device he'd dreamed up. For the Reds, he'd supplemented Bureau leaks with auto-registration traces and had also scanned criminal indexes for a suitably shady private investigator. Cost to the Bureau: $500 per search.
When busted with the Ogorodnikovs, Miller was planning a "vacation" in Vienna, where he'd planned to hook up with the KGB. Instead, he faced espionage charges—the first such filed against a G-man in the Bureau's history—as well as a divorce. Svetlana and Nikolai were going down with him, while their contact from the USSR's consulate in Frisco had slipped away clean.
Erin's colleague in Manhattan, Agent Stephen Barnes, hadn't seemed overly surprised by the scandal, remarking that subversion from within the Bureau should've been expected and, in his opinion, was long overdue. When Erin asked him what he meant by that, he'd only smiled and answered, "Think about it. We've been chasing Reds since 1917 and radicals from the very beginning, back in '08. Are you shocked that they'd return the favor after all that time?"
Which made her think. Exactly what, she couldn't say, but there was still something about him…
O'Hara's days weren't all consumed by hunting spies, however. Now that Operation ABSCAM had shut down, she had her eyes on Operation GREYLORD, reportedly named for the curly wigs worn by judges and lawyers in Britain. That seemed appropriate, since its targets were judges operating in Chicago and environs. A joint project, GREYLORD teamed the Bureau with the IRS Criminal Inspection Division, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, Chicago PD's Internal Affairs Division and Illinois State Police. Tipped off to judicial corruption—no secret to anyone with eyes and half a brain since Chi-Town was incorporated in the 1830s—Chicago's judicial system reeked in keeping with the region's original native name: shikaakwa, meaning "wild onion" or "wild garlic."
GREYLORD's undercover work, starting in 1980, had involved two Illinois attorneys, certified as government informants by a senior judge in Glenville, plus two local judges risking their careers and an assistant state's attorney for Cook County. By the time of its first trial, ending with conviction of Judge Harold Conn for fixing traffic tickets on the ides of March this year, ninety-two officials were under indictment, including sixteen more judges, eight other court officials, forty-eight lawyers, eight cops, ten sheriff's deputies, and one state legislator. Conn's bagman, also convicted, was Cook County's Deputy Traffic Court Clerk. Already, guilty pleas were piling up as the defendants saw themselves accepting bribes on CCTV tapes.
Some days, Agent O'Hara wished she was a part of something like ABSCAM or GREYLORD—or even assigned to the Bureau's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, established at the FBI Academy in July—rather than spinning her wheels and shuffling papers for Counterintelligence. So far, the "leads" she'd chased were rumors leading nowhere, while surveillance at the Russian consulate on East 91st Street had failed to turn up any spooks. Ditto the Chinese consulate at 12th Avenue and West 43rd Street. Erin knew damned well there must be spies working from both facilities, but she'd begun to think they were beyond her reach.
Still, now that Richard Miller's cover had been blown, who knew what might be lurking underneath her very nose, closer to home?
FBI Field Office, Manhattan: October 10, 1984
Another working week half gone, and while he couldn't put his finger on a solid reason, Agent Stephen Barnes still believed that fellow spy-hunter Erin O'Hara had her eye on him, suspected him of something she still hadn't managed to define.
Consider her reaction to the Miller scandal in Los Angeles. She'd been astounded by the notion of a G-man spying for Russia—and, in fact, only the third agent Barnes had heard of being charged with any crime since the Bureau's inception seventy-six years earlier. Mark Felt and Ed Miller, both convicted, then pardoned by President Reagan, were the others. Granted, an agent in Tucson, one David Hale, had hired local morons to bomb the homes and other properties of mobsters Joe Bonanno and Pete Licavoli back in 1968, hoping to start a gang war, but Edgar Hoover had suppressed most of the details on that case and by the time Hale's name surfaced in '71 he was a "former" agent, hustled to retirement with a glowing headquarters recommendation that landed him a cushy private sector job.
Beyond that, the FBI's record was publicly spotless, not that other agents hadn't been dismissed over the years for peccadillos that breached Hoover's cardinal rule No. 1: "Never embarrass the Bureau." When Barnes responded to O'Hara's shock by telling her a spook inside the FBI was long overdue, she'd looked as if he'd slapped her face. Now, thinking back, Barnes wondered if he might have pushed his luck a tad too far.
Oh, well. Too late to take it back, he thought. Forget about it and move on.
From his position on the Bureau's Russia desk, Barnes had no trouble keeping up with ongoing events from his birth nation or its outposts spread around the globe. Kidney failure had finally killed General Secretary Yuri Andropov in February, clearing the way for successor Konstantin Chernenko, a chain-smoker from age nine, beset by emphysema and right-sided heart failure that left his own days numbered, performing government functions as best he could from Moscow's heavily-guarded Central Clinical Hospital. In May he'd announced a Soviet boycott of the Summer Olympics scheduled for Los Angeles, citing "security concerns" but in fact retaliating fo
r the U.S. pullout from Moscow's Olympics four years earlier.
That diplomatic tit-for-tat, of course, revolved around Afghanistan, where ugly tales of native women raped by Red Army soldiers, then shunned by their families as "dishonored," had lately surfaced in worldwide media reports. This very month, Vitaly Smirnov, Moscow's ambassador to Pakistan, had warned that journalists traveling with Afghan mujahideen units "will be killed, and our units in Afghanistan will help the Afghan forces to do it."
Always a loudmouth in the group, Barnes thought, even as clandestine negotiations strove to end the war that had become Russia's equivalent to Vietnam.
But it was all the same to him. For Barnes, his war lay where he was right now, boring within the FBI his father had despised above all things, aiding the KGB to bring it down and spread the Bureau's everlasting shame to every home from coast to coast and far beyond.
Birmingham, Alabama: November 6, 1984
Where, Dave Jordan sometimes wondered, had his life gone wrong? Not when he'd suffered nearly crippling wounds in World War Two, although recovery had taken months of therapy. Not in law school, where he'd excelled despite working two jobs in order to avoid relying on his family's criminal income.
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