by Jeff Noonan
Randall Symington was in custody.
As Randall was being taken from his car beside the expressway, Tom was on the radio. “Okay! It’s a go! All teams move in. We have Big Bird in custody. I repeat, Big Bird is in custody. Get the others! Watch them for cyanide pills. Lock down the big house! Let’s move, everyone!”
The four agents had been waiting impatiently for almost four hours in the security office of the Crystal City office building occupied by the Navy Electronic Systems Command. When they received the radio message that activated their mission, they moved to the elevator, accompanied by two of the building’s government security guards. They rode the elevator directly to the sixth floor and then walked into a cubicle they had checked out the night before.
“Fred Lebedev, you’re under arrest. You have the right - -” Their target surprised them by diving toward the floor and grabbing for his jacket, which was lying across another chair in the cubicle. His reflexes were fast, but not fast enough. Two of the men were on top of him immediately and his hands were jerked behind him. He was handcuffed as one of the FBI agents pulled the little pill box out of his jacket pocket. “Okay, guys, take him to the bathroom and strip him. Doc, check him thoroughly. Let’s go. Jim, stay here and guard his desk. We want a complete inventory of everything in this cubicle.”
Fred Lebedev, aka Fedya Lebedev, was in custody.
There were a dozen FBI agents and six CIA people in the group that descended on the Symington mansion. Included in the group were security experts, bomb experts, experts in espionage equipment, as well as criminal investigative specialists. George Gold, Tom Wright’s boss, was in charge. As planned, the senior people on the security and bomb squads took the lead on entering the mansion.
On their arrival, the door was answered by a maid, one of three they found cleaning the building. An older man was working outside on the extensive lawns and shrubbery. All four were taken into custody immediately, and quick interviews revealed that they had been brought here by Symington to do their jobs. All were from Central American countries and all were in the United States illegally. Apparently Randall Symington had brought them here with promises of citizenship and had then held them in virtual slavery under threats of deportation. The four immediately offered full cooperation with the agents, and two of the maids were put to work guiding teams around the huge structure.
Nothing unusual was found for the first few minutes. Then one team found a door that was locked and alarmed. The maid with the team told them that she was never allowed in this part of the home. In halting English, she explained to the agents that, “Mr. Symington, he tell me that I be killed if I ever go there. He show me gun and tell me he shoot me if I go there. I don’t go.”
“Where is the gun he showed you?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. It big gun, long like this.” She held her hands at arm’s length to demonstrate.
An alarm specialist was working on the alarm keypad, and soon had the faceplate off and the alarm pad hanging by its wires. Suddenly he backed away from it. “Get me a bomb guy.”
The bomb specialist was there immediately. The man who had asked for him pointed to the alarm pad. “There’s too many wires coming out of this thing. Could the extra wires go to a big banger?”
The bomb man took a long careful look and then turned to the agent in charge of the group. “Get everyone outside. This thing is wired to do something if the wrong code is entered in the pad. It could be a bomb, or even a series of bombs. I think I can take care of it, but I want everyone outside just in case. Please send in my boss, Jimmy, so there are two of us looking at this.”
Soon everyone was in the driveway, tensely grouped behind their cars while the two bomb experts worked in the house.
While they waited, a Spanish-speaking FBI agent from the criminal investigative unit began talking to the maids and the gardener. Shortly thereafter, the agent motioned for his boss to join them. “They say that there’ve been others who worked here and disappeared. The Symington bunch told these people the others had been sent home. But the gardener tells me there’s an old graveyard back in the trees that he thinks has had some recent activity. Want to take a look?”
“Yeah. Let’s get one more guy to go with us. Be careful of the gardener. He might have something up his sleeve.”
“Okay, Boss.” The three agents followed the gardener off into the trees behind the mansion while the others stayed behind the cars.
Soon after they disappeared into the trees, one of the bomb squad people came out of the building. Speaking into his walkie-talkie, he asked George Gold, the agent in charge, to come to the porch. When George arrived, the agent said, “Please come with me. I don’t think everyone should see this.” George gave him a quizzical glance, but nodded. He got on his walkie-talkie and told everyone else to stay behind cover. Then he followed the bomb disposal expert into the mansion.
The door that had been locked was now open, and the other bomb man was guarding it. George walked through and stopped cold. “Oh my God!” He continued standing there, staring at the room before him, his head slowly swiveling from right to left as he stared. “Oh my God! Oh my God!” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
The room was once the mansion’s ballroom, judging by the high ceiling and the bandstand at the opposite end of the room. But it had been converted to fit the needs of the Symington espionage ring. An elaborately carved conference table occupied a corner of the room to the right of the door. Cubicles with five desks were to the left, and a double row of file cabinets was lined up on the far side of the desks. But what was most impressive was the electronic suite that filled the rest of the big room. Communication electronics of a multitude of types were there. Microfiche readers and reader-printers stood beside automated microfilm cameras and the projectors that displayed the finished microfilm products. Some of the electronics showed known manufacturers’ nameplates, while others had lettering on them in a host of foreign languages.
George stared for a few moments more. Then he turned to the two men with him. “What about the bombs? Were there any?”
“Yep. There were three big ones that we found immediately. Plus, it looks to us like every one of those electronic cabinets has a little self-destruct bomb in it. All we have defused so far are the three big general-use bombs. The smaller ones will take us days to remove. What do you want us to do?”
“You made the right call. We aren’t going to let the multitudes outside see any of this. For now, only the bomb people come in here. I’ll get plenty of guards around the house so that no one can get in or out without us knowing it. By the time you’ve got this safe, I’ll have a team of experts here to analyze all of this stuff. For now, I’m going to take some pictures so I can take them back to our leaders in Washington.”
George lifted the camera he’d been carrying on a strap around his neck and started taking his pictures. Slowly he walked around the room, snapping pictures of every item. Suddenly, just past the conference table, he stopped, looking into an open closet. “Wow.” He took several pictures of the open closet, then he reached in and pulled out a rifle. “It’s a Springfield Model 1903, the sniper rifle that our troops used in both World Wars. It’s in great shape, from the looks of it.” Holding it in the cradle of his arm, he worked the bolt action and a glistening bullet flew out onto the floor. Bending over, he picked it up. “A 30-06! We need to bag and tag this thing. I’ve got a feeling that it’s going to be evidence in a murder trial.”
When he was done taking his pictures, he went out to the porch and addressed the agents behind the cars. “People, we’ve defused three bombs. But there’s still a bunch of them in here. We’re going to have to find and disarm all of them before I risk letting any of you in the house. If the bomb squad will join the two inside, they’ll receive instructions from them. The rest of you scatter and set up a perimeter around this house. No one goes in or out. As soon as I can get some guards in here, I’ll let you go back to your home offices.
When the bombs are all deactivated, we’ll get some of you back here. Any questions?” No one spoke up, so George had them take up guard positions.
George was about to go back into the home when a breathless agent approached him. “Mr. Gold, you need to see what the gardener just showed us. There’s an old graveyard back there. Must go back to colonial times, I’d say. But there’s six newer graves there. Three of them have headstones saying they’re the graves of Old Man Symington’s wife and parents. But separated from the main graveyard are three newer mounds of dirt that look like graves. They aren’t marked. Looks like either a Potter’s Field or a dump site of some kind.”
George followed the agent across the huge lawn and back into the trees. After a while, they got to the old graveyard. It was exactly as the agent had described. The original graveyard, where the Symington family was buried, was scrupulously maintained. But back about twenty feet into the trees was a group of dirt mounds that were scattered haphazardly between the trees, in no particular order. They were unmarked. George went from one to another, taking pictures of them all. “It looks like they were dug wherever there was soft dirt and no tree roots. I think Randall and his crew may have just made our jobs very easy.” He didn’t explain his remark.
George went back to his car and placed a radio call directly to Attorney General Saxton. Within two hours, two big green helicopters disgorged their cargo of Marines from Camp Lejeune. The entire area, mansion and grounds was sealed and kept that way as the experts searched the mansion for every detail of the operation.
The federal coroner, brought in to exhume the three graves, actually found five bodies in them. All of them had died execution-style with bullet holes in the back of their heads. Four of the five had no identification and were tentatively identified as Mexican or Central American immigrants. The fifth body was that of a teen-aged boy who had disappeared two years earlier from his nearby home after saying he was going for a walk. He had never been found, in spite of a huge neighborhood search and a great deal of publicity on the case.
Lee had opened the briefcase with the radio in it and turned it on. It was hidden under his desk so casual visitors wouldn’t see it, but he kept it on. He didn’t want to miss the alert when it came. As a result, he received the “Big Bird” message from Tom at the same time as the FBI agents in the van outside his office did. He was waiting for them when they came through the door. There were six agents, three women and three men.
Lee led the way back, gesturing to the women agents as they passed the vault. Then he continued on with the male agents, heading for Thomas Sloan’s office in the rear of the building.
The female agents wasted no time taking Sheila down. She didn’t appear to resist as they came around her desk and grabbed her arms. With her head forced down on the desk and her hands being handcuffed behind her, it didn’t appear that she had any ability to resist. But the agents didn’t notice that her knee was planted firmly on a button under her desk, sending the signal that she and Thomas had installed years before. It was designed to trigger a transmitter that would warn the others in the family that danger was imminent. It caused a sharp vibration in a bracelet all of them wore continuously. But today, although all four bracelets vibrated, only Thomas was in a position for it to be of benefit.
The three women agents closed the door and stripped Sheila, doing what was necessary to ensure that she had no cyanide anywhere on her person. Then they clothed her in a prisoner’s jump suit and waited for the male agents to return.
Sheila Novak, aka Shura Novikov, was in custody.
Thomas received the warning signal’s vibration as he was walking back from a routine trip to a ship in drydock. He was still about a half-mile from the office when the vibrating started. This had happened once before, when Shura had accidentally bumped the little button. But this time it didn’t stop right away. Thomas moved over between two buildings so that he was less noticeable and stopped to think.
He wasn’t sure if there was an emergency or not. But there was no way to check except to go to the office and see if Shura was there or not. He was carrying the little .38 Special that he always kept under his loose trousers, unnoticeable among the rolls of fat there. His pills were in his jacket pocket, so he was ready for whatever happened. He began to steadily work his way back to the office, staying as unobtrusive as possible.
He was behind a row of cars outside the building next to the combat systems office when he saw strangers come out of its front door. He shrank back into the shadow of a bus stop and waited. The strangers looked around and motioned for others inside to come out. Then they walked to a big cargo van that was parked across the street and opened the back doors. Now three women came out the door. Shura was with them, dressed in prison orange!
Thomas stiffened at the sight. He knew that he couldn’t let Shura be taken alive. None of them were ever to be taken alive! Papa had drilled that into them for years. Briefly the thought passed through his mind that they must have caught Shura by surprise. She would have gone like her sister had if she’d had the chance.
That god damned lieutenant and his red-headed buddy were coming out of the building right behind the women! The lieutenant was shaking hands with another man, apparently the leader of the strangers. He had brought this on them. That was the final straw for Thomas.
Lying on the ground behind the bus stop’s wooden enclosure, he could see them milling around and talking in front of him. Taking the little .38 out, Thomas aimed it under the enclosure at his primary target. Carefully, as Papa had taught him so many years ago, he squeezed the trigger. The sharp “crack” of the pistol almost startled him, but he saw his target go down. Swiftly he switched to his secondary target and fired. But the Lieutenant and his friends had dodged back into the doorway, and Thomas’s bullet bounced harmlessly off the bricks beside the building entrance.
The lieutenant stuck his head out with a gun in his hand and Thomas shot again. He missed. That was his last shot. All six FBI agents were firing by now and Thomas had no chance of escaping that wall of lead.
Lee saw Thomas’s body jerking and he knew this was over. He ran to the back of the van where a female agent had already started working on Sheila. The agent looked up as he approached. “She’s going to be all right, Lieutenant. He hit her in the hip, not anything life-threatening. She’ll be alive to tell us her story, for sure.”
Lee left her and walked to where two of the men were rolling Thomas’s body over. “This one’s not so lucky, Lee. He got hit at least three times, all in the head. Couldn’t see anything but his head to shoot at, the way he was lying on the ground there.”
Thomas Sloan, aka Toma Sokolov, was dead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - PEACE AT LAST
ee and Tom sat to the rear of the group in the big White House Situation Room. Both men were totally ill at ease. The National Security Council was about to commence a meeting at the long table in front of them, a meeting chaired by the President himself. Neither Lee or Tom had ever participated in such a high-level gathering before this. Lee was wearing his full dress white uniform, complete with his brand-new lieutenant commander shoulder boards. Tom was in his best three-piece suit. Neither man could figure out why they were there.
The President called the meeting to order. “All right, let’s get started. As some of you already know, it’s been three months to the day since we uncovered one of the largest espionage efforts to ever happen on American soil. Because of that incident, we had to take many actions to alleviate the threat and cancel out the damages as best we could. We’ll be recovering from this disaster for years, but I want to make sure that we’re all in synch and heading in the same direction. That’s why I called this meeting. I want each of you who have been involved in this situation to briefly summarize the actions taken to date and all planned future actions related to this. Please hold your questions until the presentations are complete.”
The President looked around the room, then spoke again. “First pe
rson up will be the Attorney General. Mr. Saxton, if you will start us off with a summary from your perspective?”
Bill Saxton stood and moved to a screen at the end of the table. Signaling to a camera operator, he began with a description of the events leading up to the capture of first the Skimmers and later the Symington group. This portion of his screen presentation was mostly in outline form, interspersed with some pictures of the shipyard, the Skimmer’s burned-out row house, the mansion, and the Symington family. He was effusive in his praise of the efforts of both Tom and Lee, a fact that caused them to shrink, embarrassed, into their chairs. Then he began telling the audience about the events that had occurred since the Marines had sealed the mansion. The two sat up straighter. There had been a complete blackout of news since that day. They were curious to find out what had happened since then.
The Attorney General’s screen presentation from here on was mostly pictures of the various equipment that had been captured. “From here, I’ll be discussing the actions that have been taken in the past three months in a joint effort by the Justice Department and the CIA. Mr. Dolby will help me out with his agency’s involvement as we go along. We’re working this together, so the story is best told by us jointly.” He paused, and Bill Dolby commented that this was the best way to address the ongoing actions. The President nodded, and the Attorney General continued speaking.
“Well, the old mansion turned out to be a treasure trove for both the CIA and the FBI. We put our best talent to work in an effort that had teams of specialists inspect, analyze, and disassemble all of the electronics, as well as the security apparatus, in the building. The equipment was the most complete set of spy communications equipment we have ever seen anywhere. It could handle every medium, from film to pictures to microfiche to the spoken word. The signals from this equipment suite were scrambled and coded in a variety of ways. Analyzing this suite gave us a great deal of insight into Soviet communications and coding methodologies.”
