“This isn’t a private matter,” said Bob and placed a folder on the agent’s desk. “Four days ago there was a multiple murder in Oshkosh.”
“Most murders are not a federal concern, either,” said Agent Lingworth. “Those, as you know, are local concerns.”
“How about if the murders were committed by a former federal agent?”
“What sort of fed?” asked Lingworth, remaining unruffled despite the peculiar turn the conversation was taking. “Surely not one of ours?”
“One of the five men they found on the scene, the one who killed the other four, then shot himself, was Michael Method,” said Bob. “He was once a full colonel in the Army, Special Forces no less, and he was an operative at various times for the CIA, and maybe for other agencies in the intelligence community.”
“Mr. Mathers,” said Lingworth, folding his hands on his desk top, “as a former law enforcement officer you can appreciate how many cranks contact this office in any given month, claiming they know JFK’s real assassin and that maybe a Chinese spy is living next door to them. Put yourself in my position: would you believe somebody off the street saying that this dead man in Oshkosh was once some kind of high level intelligence operative?”
“The locals in Oshkosh can’t identify the body, can they?” said Bob. “Don’t be surprised. I don’t have an inside source anywhere in Wisconsin. I know everything concerning Method is secure. He might as well have never been born.”
“If he’s a man never born,” said Lingworth, “how are we going to know this is him?”
Bob took several stapled papers from the folder he had placed on the desk. “This is a summary of the lab evidence in the unsolved murder of Wayland Zah, which took place in Utah in May of 2009,” explained Bob. “Notice the MO: three 7.6 millimeter bullets to the head.”
Lingworth put on his half-lens reading spectacles and had a look. “So?”
“Stay with me,” said Bob, producing a second stapled packet. “This is a similar report of a triple murder in Washington state last summer. The same MO: Mr. and Mrs. Thorpe and Abraham Wilson were all shot three times in the head with a 7.6 millimeter gun. Compare the signatures of bullets with those in the Utah murders. They’re all fired from the same weapon, an antique Lugar, probably from the Second World War.”
“Really?” said Lingworth and held the papers side by side.
“Last, here is the report on the murders of Kenneth Greeley and Lilly McCoy in Alexander City, Alabama, earlier this month,” said Bob and handed the agent a third packet. “Again, the same gun, the same type of bullet in their heads. These were supposed to look like a double suicide, however, the bullets don’t match the gun they found in Mr. Greeley’s hand. I don’t have any reports from Oshkosh, but I can bet you’ll find Method used the same gun there, too. He was hurried up there. Maybe he didn’t have time to put more than one bullet in each of his victims, otherwise, I’m sure everything else will match up. You’ve got nothing to lose by looking. If I’m one of your cranks, you’ve lost five minutes. If I’m right, you’re the hero.”
Lingworth looked at the packets, then rechecked them in his distinctive, deliberate way. “Not a bad piece of detective work, Mr. Mathers,” he concluded. “I won’t ask what a security guard is doing with three police files, still... very good. A couple questions come to mind, however, Mr. Mathers. First, why on earth did you come to me? I could have you held in custody, at least for a time, anyway.”
“As I remember, sir, your wife was sick thirteen years ago,” said Bob.
“Yes, Betty is a breast cancer survivor,” nodded Lingworth.
“During the Allison investigation, you had to tend to your wife,” recalled Bob Mathers. “Another field agent, I think his name was Butler, took charge of the case.”
For the first time in the interview the serene visage of Agent Lingworth betrayed an unguarded emotion. At the mention of the hated name “Butler,” a tic developed in his right eye, and he whispered “yes.”
“As I recall,” Bob continued, “Mr. Butler became a local director, and you…?”
“I am still a field agent, in Milwaukee,” said Lingworth. “Your point is?”
“I thought you were a man who wouldn’t mind becoming a hero,” said Bob.
As when he deliberated upon the packets, Lingworth tapped his fingers upon the papers while he thought.
“What was your second question?” asked Bob.
“How,” asked Lingworth, “did you know about this Method person? A good cop might have put together the murders. I admit you’ve got me believing you’re onto something there. I don’t get any of this cloak and dagger nonsense. Why would you know anything of his intelligence activities?”
“A man in a bar in San Francisco told me,” said Bob. “He said Method had connections to every one of the victims. They had been in South America together, mixed up in some secret operation.”
Bob did not say that the man in the bar was John Taylor, or that the secret operation was the attack on the dams. Taylor and Mondragon were names that had already been in the tabloid press, and a tough-minded agent of Lingworth’s mold would shy away from sensational stories.
“What man in a San Francisco bar?” asked Lingworth.
“He didn’t tell me his name,” lied Bob. “I only know he was somehow tied to the same business in South America.”
While not the most brilliant investigator the FBI had ever employed, Agent Lingworth was more than competent at his job. After conducting thousands of interrogations over the course of thirty-one years he certainly could tell a blatant lie when an amateur liar like Bob laid one before him. He tapped his fingers again while he decided he would, at this stage in his career, indeed rather become a hero than find out the entire truth.
“This had better be good,” he said as he reached for the telephone to call the Oshkosh Police Department.
LXXXIV
12/16/10 12:15 EST
“Would your journalistic standards keep you from running the story?” Bob asked.
Henry Peppers, investigative reporter for The World Wide Sensation, nearly choked on the ham sandwich he was eating when Bob Mathers asked him that question.
“Say what?” said Henry, checking the loose toupee on his head. “You ever read The Sensation, pal?”
“I’m from Arizona,” confessed Bob.
“Nobody’s from Arizona,” announced Henry Peppers, and shoved another quarter of his sandwich into his mouth. “Arizona is where you go to die, those who can’t afford to, do it in Florida. But never mind. We can do this kind of story standing on our heads.”
Bob had questioned going to the Queens offices of the infamous scandal sheet. They, however, had no hesitation about meeting with him. The receptionist in the front room had not wanted to waste time looking at the evidence he had brought to the newspaper. “Whatever,” she had shrugged. “Mr. Peppers takes anything. It don’t matter how crazy you are.”
“You have sources in Terre Haute?” Bob asked Peppers, referring to the federal prison in which the forty Colombians were being held.
“Sure. We got sources up the ass,” said Henry.
The reporter wiped some of the excess mayonnaise off his lower lip. He cleaned his hand on a stack of documents piled beside his chair. The stack was becoming increasingly crusty after standing beside Henry’s workstation for the past seven months; he had forgotten about the story the papers were connected to. As long as they were useful he kept them near him.
“We can bug the fucking Degos’ cells if we have to, please excuse my French,” said Henry. “We got stringers on the moon. We talked to two of the bombers already.”
“You have?” asked Bob.
“That was for the ‘Terrorists in Love with Dolly Pardon’ story. I got it here someplace,” said Henry and searched through the heap of notes he kept inside a file cabinet marked, “Other Stuff.” He did not locate the item he had in mind, but did find something about one of the Colombians seeing the face of J
esus on his cell wall. “Gotta get better organized one of these days,” Henry said.
“How will you double check what the Columbians tell your source?” asked Bob.
“Like the shoe company says: we just do it, no matter what. We check everything four times. I mean we have four sources for every story. Or about that. Sometimes less than three, or there about. Whatever it takes,” said Henry, who had not double checked anything other than his paycheck in the fourteen years he had worked for The Sensation.
“Here are some recent pictures of Mr. Erin Mondragon and Mr. John Taylor,” said Bob and gave Henry six large photographs he had found in financial magazines. “Your sources will be able to show these to the Colombians?”
“Sure thing, pal,” said Henry, which was almost as true as words he had spoken concerning his newspaper’s sources.
LXXXV
12/18/10 06: EST
The next edition of the The Sensation hit the streets two days later, at one minute after six o’clock in the morning. Henry Peppers had not made actual contact with any of the Columbians imprisoned in Terre Haute; they, Henry discovered, were in special
confinement and had contact only with the guards and the court appointed attorneys
handling their appeals. Henry did have a letter from a cousin of someone who knew a guard at the facility, and the letter declared the guard had spoken once to one of the
Columbians, which by Henry’s journalistic standards was very close to having the
convicted terrorists identify the photographs of Taylor and Mondragon as Vladimir
Petrovski and Charles Corello.
Henry combined this uncovered “fact” with an archived story of a man doing time in an Indiana state prison. Terre Haute was in Indiana, so Henry presumed that the other man’s experiences were probably about the same as the Columbians’. The Sensation’s lawyers told the editor and Henry that since stories about Mondragon and Taylor had already been published in other tabloids and since the courts had not forced those other papers to reveal their sources, The Sensation could not be sued in this instance.
“FAT CATS BLEW UP DAMS!” the headline on the December 18th edition
proclaimed. The entire front page was an altered photograph of Erin Mondragon
smoking a cigar made of one hundred dollar bills and walking a few paces ahead of a grinning John Taylor, who was holding a copy of Mein Kampf under his arm. Above the two men floated some of the ghostly faces of children killed in 2009 by the floods the torpedoed dams had released.
The accompanying story depicted, with an accuracy uncharacteristic of The
Sensation, Mondragon and Taylor as the leaders of the conspiracy that had destroyed the dams on the Colorado drainage. Henry Peppers also asserted that one of the Columbians was the illegitimate son of Caesar Romero, which was a lie, but Henry could put only so many factual assertions in one story.
The Sensation sold out that week, and the mainstream media ignored the front page story, as they had ignored The Sensation’s earlier stories dealing with the world’s fattest man, the risen Elvis, and the true meanings of Nostradamus’ most recent predictions. Some of the nation’s less fastidious news sources, namely syndicated television talk shows, late night radio programs, and Internet chat rooms, did pick up the tale. For several days, which was about as long as any story could hold the public’s attention, a few paparazzi harassed Taylor and Mondragon everywhere the two men went. The yapping spaniels of the supermarket press pursued John Taylor from his San Francisco business office to his suburban home. Erin Mondragon, on the other hand, was safely fortified in his building and met the press on terms he alone chose.
One brave stranger did yell at him during his morning jaunt to the coffee shop, “Do you know anything about the killings?”
“Listen, children,” answered Mondragon with a laugh, when in reality he was furious, “I am a businessman. Nothing more. Why don’t you ask me about this year’s Cancer Fund Banquet? I’m the chairman. We’re going to raise over two million dollars this holiday season.” He upbraided himself for sounding more forced than charming. Don’t be defensive, he cautioned his inner person.
The daring paparazzo was not to be deterred, regardless of how calm Mondragon remained. “Then you deny you were involved in the terrorist bombings?” he called from the other side of Market Street.
“Why not ask if I’m Martin Bormann?” retorted Mondragon. “Sir, my life is an open book, on loan from the public library, you might say. You speak to any of my friends, my business associates, the many, many charities I work for; they will tell you Erin Mondragon wouldn’t hurt a fly. Check my passport. I haven’t been out of the country in twenty years. These accusations are preposterous.”
He was a few feet from his office building’s front door and was anticipating leaving the reporter and the annoying dog and pony show behind him on the busy street.
“Did you serve time in Boron Federal Prison with a man named Wayland Zah?” someone on the other sidewalk called out to him. “Didn’t Wayland Zah tell you about Charles Corello, with whom Zah had done time in Solano? And at Boron weren’t you and Zah both familiar with Earnest Gusman, the Columbian terrorist recruiter killed by a package bomb in Cartagena?”
The doorman had his hand on the faux crystal door handle, and Mondragon’s right foot was almost at the point where the cement sidewalk yielded to the inlaid marble of the Mondragon Building’s front lobby when the questions hit his ears. His cup of café mocha spilt over his smooth, manicured fingers; the sudden pain of the hot liquid caused him to drop the Styrofoam cup, splattering coffee on his oxblood loafers as it fell. He turned and saw across the street a stocky man of about thirty-eight years; his inquisitor’s cheap plaid shirt and short crew-cut did not fit the bohemian style of most tabloid stringers. If the man had been in another crowd, Mondragon would have said he looked like a cop.
“What is your name, sir?” Mondragon called across the street to the stranger.
“I’m an investigator,” said Bob Mathers.
“Whom do you represent?”
Something about the man’s distinctive high forehead and the manner he held his chin low put Mondragon in mind of someone he had seen before. He could not, for the life of him, remember the name that went with this face.
“We’ve met?” called Mondragon, whose bodyguards were bunching around him and covering his head with an umbrella from the light, cold rain.
“Briefly, down in Page, Arizona. You were with your friend Taylor and Wayland Zah.”
Images of a tiny, poorly furnished coffee shop on Lake Powell Boulevard appeared in Mondragon’s mind. As rarely happened in his life, he could not think of a clever word that would provide him an escape from an awkward situation. He’s that cop the Indian spoke to, thought Mondragon. Why is he here?
“I’ve never been to Arizona,” said Mondragon, realizing as he spoke that this was the phantom who had driven Method into his killing spree. The old colonel had not been completely crazy; he had a root cause for his madness. “What did you say your name was?” he asked Bob.
The stringers on the far side of Market Street and the bodyguards around Mondragon looked back and forth from Bob to Erin and were confused by what was happening.
“I didn’t say,” said Bob.
“Staying in the Bay area?” asked Mondragon, not expecting an answer.
“I’ll be around,” said Bob and turned away.
LXXXVI
12/19/10 15:21 PST
A team of bottom-feeding reporters that afternoon ambushed John Taylor inside one of his favorite watering holes in Oakland. By three-twenty PM Taylor had already drank more than was good for any two men, and he mistook the throng of rowdy young men and women in their black Puma berets for a party gathering in his bar to celebrate a wedding or someone’s birthday.
“Are you John Taylor?” said a young fellow sporting a shaved head and an earring shaped like a crucifix.
“Am I famous now?” Taylor as
ked, brushing with both hands at the heavy cloud that was forming around him.
“You could be,” said the young man.
“I can’t sing or dance,” said Jack. “What good could I be to you people?”
Other reporters pressed around his bar stool, trapping Taylor against the bar.
“Were you in Venezuela five years ago?” a woman asked him.
“I was drinking at the time,” said John. “I could have been anywhere.”
“Do you know a Miss Alexandra Lubov?” another male stringer asked him.
Somewhere in the heavily sedated folds of John Taylor’s brain there came the realization that these loud, pushy people were not any sort of party goers. Maybe they were demons, he thought, and felt a pang of fear. “This is nobody’s birthday?” he asked.
“Did not Miss Lubov teach you to speak Russian?” asked a man behind him whose face he could not see.
“My friend Erin, he wanted to expand my horizons,” said John.
“You had to learn Russian to pretend to be Petrovski,” said the voice in the midst of the flood of dim faces dancing before Taylor’s unfocused eyes.
After a few seconds of struggle, John narrowed his vision onto the man who asked the last questions, and he beheld a face he had seen before, the face of the angel he had met in the Blue Horn thirty-four days earlier. “Erin says I shouldn’t...” he began.
The security man watching over Taylor for Mondragon elbowed a path through the reporters to the addled businessman. He immediately led Taylor toward the front door of the saloon as the tabloid reporters called out more questions for him.
“You touched me!” screamed one offended reporter at the security man. “I’ll sue your ass off!”
The angry journalist bulldozed his way through the crowd of patrons, the majority of whom were oversized bikers, as he yelled invectives at Mondragon’s henchman. Shouting insults in an Oakland biker bar is never the wisest course of action, and when verbal abuse is accompanied by shoving and some errant elbows there is a high probability of a violent misunderstanding.
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