The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  He looked at me for a long moment, his face serious, then nodded. “I think we need coffee,” he finally said, and I beamed at him with relief.

  It was about an hour later, as he reviewed the transcripts of my Microcam footage from the burglary while I highlighted references to Liddy in Beth’s notes, that he spotted the first clue I hadn’t.

  “Who’s Opal?” he said.

  “Who’s what?”

  “Opal,” he repeated. “It’s in the transcript, right here. It’s James McCord. ‘You better not [unintelligible] ‘another chance with Opal to [unintelligible] get it right.’”

  “I think it was ‘hopefully’ instead of ‘with Opal to,’” I said. “The Microcam was taped to a pencil buried in carpet, and whole chunks of that transcript are useless. The carpet muffled the sound and threw off the auto-transcription.”

  “Well, did you ever actually look to see if there are any women named Opal working at the White House or for the campaign?”

  I was forced to admit I hadn’t.

  “I’m not saying it means anything, necessarily,” he said. “I’m just saying, it’s an unusual name. It would probably be fairly easy for Calliope to check.”

  “Should we call in?”

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “I think I’m starving,” I said, realizing as I said it out loud how true it was. “Did you eat dinner?”

  “Well, yes, I did,” he said. “Three hours ago, at a normal human being’s dinner time. Have you not eaten anything yet?”

  “I didn’t have time to eat, I’ve been doing this all night.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I can tell you’re getting cranky, so how about this – I’m going to go get food, because I think we’re going to be up all night and we’re going to need sustenance. You page Calliope, see if she can dig up anything on Opal, and have her call us in an hour with whatever she finds.”

  “Got it.”

  “We’re going to crack this,” he said, and there was something so reassuring in his voice that just for a moment, I believed him.

  * * *

  He returned about half an hour later with a giant brown paper bag. “What’s in there?” I asked.

  “Food. As promised. Do you have beer?”

  I made a vague gesture in the approximate direction of the refrigerator, then made a loop through the apartment closing all the curtains, so I could project Calliope onto the wall where we could both see her instead of huddling over my handheld.

  I could hear Carter clattering around in the kitchen; when I returned I saw he had neatly set out a cluster of white paper boxes and put two tidy place settings on the kitchen counter, with plates and napkins and silverware. The food had come with chopsticks in paper wrappers and little packets of sauce, which were lined up in the center between us. He had even opened a beer for me and set it, label perfectly centered, to the left of my plate.

  “It is clear from this kitchen that you prefer to eat standing up,” he said. “I prefer a bit more formality. This is my compromise. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I grinned. “I can meet you halfway.”

  He opened the boxes one by one. “Now remember,” he cautioned. “This is midcentury American Chinese food. You’re going to need to appreciate it, or not, on its own merits, but don’t get hung up on historical accuracy, okay?”

  “This is not my first rodeo, pal,” I said as I speared a rosy slice of barbecued pork with my chopstick and popped it into my mouth. “I know about the cultural bonds between Jewish communities and Chinese-owned restaurants in early 20th-century New York and how Chinatowns sprang up throughout the Western U.S. as the railroad boomed and how Chinese food became a cultural signifier for urban living in 20th-century popular culture. Don’t try to tell me about – oh my God, what am I eating?”

  “That’s chop suey.”

  “The hell is chop suey? This is not Chinese food.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

  “No food from the actual country of China tastes like this.”

  “You don’t have to eat it.”

  “More like chop gluey.”

  “Just put it back.”

  “No, I’m good. I’m on a roll. Chop suey? More like – More like—”

  “Take as long as you need.”

  “I should chop sue you for making me eat this!”

  “There it is.”

  “That was my last one,” I said, my mouth full. “This chicken’s pretty good, though.”

  “Two Advanced Time Travel degrees between us,” he said, “and I bet neither of us could answer the question of who General Tso was and why he gets a chicken named after him.”

  “Yeah, because there was no pre-1982 Asia on our exams,” I pointed out. “It’s a little difficult to get U.S. agents excited about the rich tapestry of Chinese culture when their office looks out over the dead pit where the White House used to be.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not real,” he said, passing me the egg rolls. I pulled one out and chomped it in half, immediately burning the roof of my mouth. “None of that is supposed to happen. That’s what you have to remember. Are you listening?”

  “Sorry. This egg roll just tried to kill me.”

  “You eat like a wolverine.”

  “You come into my house, you call me names—”

  “I brought you food—”

  “You did bring me food. That is true.”

  “See, this is what’s called a partnership,” he said. “I provide a veneer of respectability and manners, you contribute the serial-killer wall of newspaper clippings. I think this is gonna work out, Bellows, I really do.”

  Before I could come up with a sufficiently scathing retort to this, I heard the Comm in the living room buzz.

  “Brace yourself,” I told him. “That’s Calliope calling back, and she said she’d have my mother with her. Are you ready to meet Deputy Director Katharine Bellows? Do you want to pee first so you don’t wet your pants in fear?”

  “I’m not the one that got arrested my first day on the job. What do I have to worry about?”

  “Famous last words, pal,” I said, and he followed me into the living room.

  “Agent Hughes,” said my mother. “Pleased to meet you face to face. This is Calliope Burns, Agent Bellows’ tech.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Carter, and Calliope smiled and nodded back at him, then made a mortifyingly unsubtle “He’s cute!” face at me, which Carter wisely chose not to see.

  We caught them both up on our progress so far, which hadn’t been much, though Mom was interested in what the atmosphere was like on his side of the White House after the break-in.

  I was pleased to see how easily she and Carter conversed with each other; he was deferential to her as a senior agent but not at all intimidated, and she peppered him with the kind of detailed, seemingly irrelevant questions – How is the First Lady’s mood? Is the President ordering different food for dinner? Who comes to meet with him after hours in the Residence? – that showed she trusted his powers of observation.

  “Oh, by the way,” said Calliope. “I ran that word search and came up dry. No female employees in the White House by that name. When I widened the circle, all I got was a former housekeeper and the wife of one of the press aides. Either of those the woman you’re looking for?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “But thanks for checking.”

  “What woman?” Mom asked.

  “It might be nothing,” I hastened to explain. “Carter and I are having a difference of opinion as to whether the auto-transcription of the Microcam footage might have made an error.”

  “No, I think you’re right,” said Carter glumly. “I think it was ‘hopefully.’ Or something like that. It was a long shot.”

  “You were hoping Opal was going to be, like, the finance director of the re-election campaign, weren’t you?” said Calliope. “I’m sorry. It would have been so convenient.”

  “What name did you j
ust say?” said my mother, very quietly, but with a strange tone in her voice that caused the three of us to look at her in puzzlement.

  “Opal,” I said. “Why?”

  “Calliope, is this a secure line?”

  “It’s the standard director-level frequency, ma’am, security clearance 8 and up. Is something wrong?”

  “Listen to me,” she said urgently. “Nobody say another word. Calliope, scrub this call from the records. Reggie, stay right where you are.”

  “Mom, what the hell –“

  The screen went dark. Carter and I stared at each other in bewilderment.

  “Well, that was . . . I’m not sure what that was,” I said.

  “Where did she run off to in such a hurry?” said Carter.

  “I have no idea.”

  And then, out of nowhere, I heard a soft ping! from my Comm, and we no longer had to wonder where my mother had gone.

  She was standing right there.

  Thirteen

  I Got the Paranoia Blues

  “It was called Operation Gemstone,” my mother said as she handed me a large paper cup of coffee from the all-night deli. She had decided, after submitting Carter, me and my apartment to aggressively thorough scans for hidden electronic devices (“Mom, you really think someone snuck a bug into my pocket without me noticing it?” “Please. How many times have you come to work wearing mismatched shoes?”) that it was safer for us to have this conversation in a public place, and preferably moving.

  So she had left Carter keeping watch at my apartment while we took a stroll around the Tidal Basin, which at this hour was just busy enough for decent camouflage but not busy enough to run the risk of eavesdroppers. Any time a pedestrian neared us, she slowed our pace to let them pass and waited to speak again until she had put some distance between us and them.

  “It was treated, for the most part, as an old wives’ tale,” she went on. “Kidnappings, black bag operations, a houseboat full of prostitutes to ensnare politicians. Cheap spy novel stuff. Most of the Bureau agents didn’t really believe it had ever existed. The rumors were too crazy. The plan cost an insane amount of money, for one thing. Upwards of a million dollars. Nearly every element of the plan was a felony – miles beyond standard opposition research.”

  She went on, “It was pitched in a White House meeting by some unnamed aide, and of course Nixon’s campaign manager threw it out. Presumably whoever was crazy enough to propose it with a straight face was fired on the spot. But the point is, of course, that Operation Gemstone never happened.”

  She took a long drink of her coffee. “It’s a pity we’re too late in the season for the cherry trees,” she said absently. “They only bloom in April. I haven’t gotten to see the cherry trees in six years.”

  “Mom.”

  “Right. Anyway. Well, first of all, from your reports on the break-in it seems reasonably likely to suppose, if there was an Operation Gemstone, that Gordon Liddy and his secret re-election campaign slush fund were behind it. Second of all—”

  “You could have told me all of this over the Comm,” I said impatiently, and she looked away. “Mom, why are you here?”

  She stopped walking, then, and stood for a long moment looking out over the water. My heart began to thump in my chest. Finally she collected herself and gave a little shake of her head as though returning back to earth from somewhere very far away.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is . . . you’ll understand. This is very difficult.”

  “Mom, you’re scaring me.”

  “I first read about Operation Gemstone nearly thirty years ago,” she said, “in the files of a fellow agent. He had formed a somewhat colorful hypothesis which he shared with me – he had very little to back it up, just an endless succession of wild hunches, but the few hunches he could check were disturbingly accurate.”

  She took a long sip of her coffee before continuing. Her voice was clear and focused, but her eyes weren’t, as though part of her was somewhere else entirely.

  “He had a theory that perhaps the campaign hadn’t killed Operation Gemstone after all,” she went on, “but simply whittled it down. Slice out the most egregiously over-the-top elements – the kidnappings, the prostitutes – and what remained would have been a tidy, affordable and tremendously thorough campaign of espionage, smears, misinformation and illegal data-gathering to sabotage the Democrats. Not just to secure the 1972 election, but over several years.”

  “The agent was ordered, none too gently, to stop wasting company time investigating it. But the obsession never left him, not until the day he—” She stopped, swallowed hard and collected herself.

  “Mom,” I said urgently. “Mom.”

  I didn’t want it to be true. It was too hard already, I thought to myself. All of this was too hard. She didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to hear her say it. We stood there, miserably, looking out at the water, until I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “It was him, wasn’t it?” I said, but it wasn’t a question. “The other agent was Dad.”

  “Let’s sit for a moment,” she said, motioning us over to a park bench. I sat down with a hard thunk and flopped back against the cold, hard slats. She sat down next to me, but distantly. We shared the bench like a pair of strangers.

  “He found something,” she said finally, breaking the long silence. “That’s what I came to tell you. He was digging through some documents for a routine patch in Reagan’s first term and ran across a fragmented, heavily redacted FBI memo which seemed to describe a two-part electronic surveillance plan to be carried out both at the campaign office of George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic candidate, and a second location that was never specified.”

  She looked at me seriously. “It had been given a code name,” she said. “Reagan referred to it as ‘Opal’.”

  I felt my blood run cold. “The Watergate was the second location,” I said. “DNC headquarters.”

  “Yes.”

  “And they were never caught. Nobody ever knew.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And Kitty’s friend—”

  “That was Sapphire,” she said. “Just as you described it. The boat in Miami and the call girls and everything.”

  “What happened at the McGovern office?” I asked. “Did they plant wiretaps there? Was it part of the same plan? Did they steal the election?”

  “He never found out,” she said, her voice flat. “He called Daisey to ask for permission to set up a McGovern campaign task force. Daisey said no. And then three days later—”

  (No, don’t say it, don’t say it—)

  “…he was sent to Sharpeville. And never came back.”

  I couldn’t speak. My throat had closed up, tight with repressed sobs. I could hardly breathe. I became strangely aware of the heat of my coffee seeping from the cup through to my hand, heavy, warm and comforting. The rest of my body was made of ice. The hand wrapped around the coffee cup was the only thing that was warm.

  It all made so much sense, suddenly. Such a bleak, horrific kind of sense. I felt that my life had been composed of a dizzying kaleidoscope of questions that had suddenly, neatly clicked into place and resolved into one dark answer.

  “They killed him,” I said. “Because he knew about Gemstone.”

  ‘’Yes,” said my mother. “I believe they did.”

  She leaned back against the bench and closed her eyes, and I scooted closer, pressing myself into the side of her body, not affectionately, but just wanting to feel her physical presence attached to me in some way. To keep her from disappearing too.

  “I didn’t ever really believe him,” she said. “The whole thing was so crazy; you wouldn’t have believed it even in a third-rate spy thriller. I was angry at Daisey – my God, was I ever angry at Daisey; for negligence, for ignorance, for refusing to listen – but in my wildest dreams it would never have occurred to me that Carstairs’ death was deliberate. Even when you told me about Kitty, even after the break-in. I hadn’t t
hought about Operation Gemstone in decades. It wasn’t until you mentioned Opal that I finally put the pieces together.”

  She pulled a small portable data drive out of her pocket and handed it to me.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “I was pregnant when your father died,” she began.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “My first trimester was very difficult,” she went on, “and I was sick nearly every morning for several months. Carstairs made arrangements with Human Resources so we could work from home in the mornings and come in together at noon.”

  “Is this going somewhere or are you trying to get me to apologize for my half of all that vomiting?”

  “Listen to me, Regina. HR gave us security clearance for our home network so we could work from there unrestricted. Log into the Hive, share files, everything. After Daisey slapped Carstairs down about wasting time on Operation Gemstone, he told Carstairs to delete the whole file from his computer.” My eyes widened as I realized where she was going with this.

  “He didn’t delete it,” she whispered, incandescent with triumph, and suddenly she was twenty years younger; she was the legendary Katie Bellows again, and I saw her for the first time as she must have been before Carstairs died, all bright-eyed and fiery and alive with the joy of the hunt.

  “I had forgotten. But he didn’t delete it. He just took it home. Now you have all of your father’s research on Operation Gemstone. And, most importantly, the Bureau doesn’t.”

  I wanted to share in her delight, but something in the way she was looking at me felt strange. “Embeds have cargo drops,” I said. “Even if you were afraid the Comm link wasn’t secure and you didn’t want to send the files remotely, you could have cargo-dropped this drive right to Carter’s apartment. But instead you came here yourself and put it right in my hands.”

  “It’s the safest way.”

  “It’s also the most conspicuous,” I said. “Katie Bellows doesn’t accidentally tip her hand.” We looked at each other for a long moment. “You’re not going back, are you?” I asked, desperately hoping to see a denial in her eyes. But she just nodded calmly, entirely unfazed, as though we were discussing the weather.