by Gene Riehl
She spelled the unusual name, furnished an address along with a phone number.
“The other agent,” I said. “You sure he was one of ours?’”
“Talked like one of you people. I didn’t see his credentials. Like I said, we spoke on the phone, but I had no reason to think he wasn’t.” Sounds of paper shuffling. “I made a note for the file,” she said. “Bennett. Robert Bennett. Works out of Boston, he told me.”
I stared at the wall opposite my desk. She was mistaken, of course. If she weren’t, Special Agent Bennett’s report would be in Lisa’s paperwork already. But there was no use belaboring the point.
“You’re right,” I told her. “We should keep better track of one another.”
I thanked her, hung up and sat quietly for a moment. Robert Bennett. I wrote the name on my notepad, along with the city, Boston. I picked up the phone, called Lisa, asked her to come to my office with the Thompson file, then went to the door and unlocked it. On the way back to my chair I reached out and snatched up the money on the desk. I pulled my briefcase up close and stuck the bills back into their hideaway. As I did so, I felt a throb of disappointment, and recognized the problem immediately.
I’d been looking forward to the gamble, but winning had been too easy, way too easy to get my blood pumping. Far too many agents could have done the same thing. It was a score, no doubt about it, but it didn’t mean anything. Sure as hell didn’t mean I was walking around lucky, not yet anyway. But I still couldn’t help smiling when Lisa came through my door.
I told her what I’d just heard from the alumni woman at Harvard Law, and she smiled back. Despite her certainty that the Thompson file contained no reference to Jabalah Abahd or SA Robert Bennett, we double-checked anyway. Our smiles waned as we failed to find what we were looking for, and died altogether after my very short conversation with the FBI switchboard in Boston.
“She was mistaken,” Lisa said, “your alumni woman. Had to be. She talked to someone named Robert Bennett, heard the words ‘federal agent,’ jumped to the wrong conclusion.”
I nodded. It happens all the time, but there was still a problem. Why would another federal agency be looking for the same roommate? The coincidence was ridiculous. It was more likely that Robert Bennett was indeed an FBI agent, but not from the Boston office.
“Call Personnel at the Hoov,” I told Lisa. “Bennett’s out there somewhere. Let’s get hold of him and see what’s going on.” I reached for the phone again. “I’ll call Jabalah Abahd, set up a time for you to see her.”
Lisa headed out the door. I glanced at my notepad for Abahd’s office phone number, reached for the phone and punched the numbers. The lawyer answered the phone herself.
“May I ask why?” she wanted to know when I told her why I was calling. “I spent an hour with your Agent Bennett a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t like talking to him in the first place. Frankly, I resent having to repeat that kind of story a second time.”
I frowned at my reflection in the window to my right. Again with the Robert Bennett, but a new twist this time. “That kind of story? I’m sorry, Ms. Abahd, but I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I take no joy in any of this, that’s what I mean. Just seeing it in my old diary was bad enough. I told Bennett the same thing. What you need to do is find him and leave me out of it.”
Hearing her words I felt a sudden buzz at the back of my neck. A diary … an old diary? The buzz was replaced by a sense of anticipation I hadn’t enjoyed nearly often enough since my days in criminal work. I had to see that diary for myself. I had to hear what Abahd had to say about it, why she’d kept such a record in the first place, and still had it with her all these years later. I thought about asking her right now, on the phone, but she was already reluctant enough as it was.
“Are you sure Bennett was an FBI agent?” I asked the lawyer instead. “That he wasn’t a Senate investigator instead … or someone from the media? Sometimes people get confused.”
“I don’t get confused, Mr. Monk, not ever. I see FBI agents dozens of times a year. Robert Bennett was quite a bit larger than most of you, but he had the same credentials, the same dark blue suit, the same everything.” She paused. “Is there anything else? I’ve got to be in court in ten minutes.”
“Can I see you sometime this afternoon?”
“Not a chance. I’m in court till five.”
“What about later this evening?”
“You’re not going to go away, are you?”
“I can’t force you to see me.”
The silence on the other end grew long enough to make me wonder if we’d lost the connection. “Ms. Abahd?” I asked.
“I’m thinking,” she said. “I’m thinking I have to see you, that I don’t have any other choice.” I heard the sound of shuffling papers. “My evening’s free. If you really must, you can come to my home at seven.”
She gave me her address, I told her I’d see her at seven. I hung up and stared at my reflection in the window to my right, then called Lisa.
“A diary?” she said, when I finished reporting my conversation with the lawyer. “Gotta see that, of course, but you don’t have to do it … you don’t have to drive out to Cheverly tonight. I’ll get Jim Allen, we can catch a bite to eat, see her afterward.”
Not a chance, I didn’t bother to say. “You have plenty to do already. I don’t want you to go home tonight until you’ve found this Robert Bennett. And I need a rundown on Jabalah Abahd, a.k.a. Dalia Hernandez. Whatever you can wring out of the computer. By five o’clock. I want some time to go over it before I go to Cheverly.”
I hung up and scheduled the rest of my day. A quarter to three, I saw by the clock over the door. I had a couple of administrative duties scheduled for today. I couldn’t put them off, but they wouldn’t take more than an hour at the most. I had an appointment with Dr. Chen at six, but that wasn’t going to work anymore, not with the Abahd meeting at seven. Maybe he could squeeze me in earlier. I reached for the phone, called his office, spoke briefly to the doctor’s receptionist, but no luck. Chen’s book was completely filled. I canceled my appointment, then went to work on my chores.
As the newest of the supervisors, I was saddled with a number of jobs no one else wanted, the tedious but very necessary chores that somebody has to do to keep the place running. Today was code-changing day for the supervisors’ bureau cars—bucars, we call them—and I was the one who had to change them. Our radios use specific electronic codes for the private channels we require to prevent the bad guys from listening to us, to keep the media from showing up when they shouldn’t. The codes are changed on a regular basis for obvious reasons, and to change them I had to stop first at the tech room on the second floor. A few minutes later I punched the electronic keypad next to the tech room door and pushed through.
The room was huge, looked like a warehouse at Circuit City. Rows and rows of metal shelving lined the walls, filled with electronic gear of every size and description. Television sets, video cameras and recorders, FM radios—walkie-talkies as well as the heavy control units that were fitted into the trunk of every bucar in the basement garage—along with cellular telephones, computer terminals, and CRT monitors. A high-tech reliquary, a shrine to Our Lady of Silicon Valley. Looking at the shrine, I could only shake my head. I liked to think I could keep up with state of the art, but in here I knew better. In here I might as well be Amish.
But the techies themselves—the dozen men and women assigned to the technical squad—had to be out on the job somewhere. Only one appeared to be in residence this afternoon.
Gordon Shanklin—the most senior of the technical squad people, and an agent I’d spent years working with when I still did the kind of work that required his expertise—peered at me from his perch atop a stool at his workbench near the front of the room, then adjusted the baseball cap sitting backward on his shaggy head. His appearance no longer surprised me. In here the normal rules of dress and hairstyle didn’t apply. Tech agents live
in a different world, a quantum world of particles too small and too quick to measure, and the techies’ interest in human beings was pretty much limited to eavesdropping. Shanklin and his buddies were not so much FBI agents as shamans, mystics best left alone to play with their incomprehensible toys. The official bureau more or less ignored their eccentricities.
“Dude,” Gordon Shanklin said before I could speak. “Is it that time again?” He grinned. “Or are you slumming in your spare time?”
“You’re right, Gordon, both ways. It is that time again, and I am most definitely slumming.”
“Must be nice,” he said, “upstairs with all the pretty people.”
“Road to the top’s a tough one, pal. Maybe you better start kissing my ass right now … before the rush.”
He laughed in my face, then got off his stool and disappeared into the stacks for a moment, came back with my code-changer machine, a long thick black plastic device that looked like a TV clicker on steroids. He handed it to me, then climbed back onto his stool.
“Ever gonna see you more than once a month?” he wanted to know. “Ever gonna go back to working for a living?”
“Tell you what. Have your people get with my people, we’ll do lunch.”
“Fuck that,” he said. “I can’t afford lunch with you anymore, not unless I can figure out a way to beat you at liar’s poker for the check.” He laughed. “We do miss you down here, Puller. Come back when you can spend a few minutes.”
I promised I would, then went downstairs to the garage.
The twenty or so supervisory staff cars, including my own Chevy Caprice, were all parked in the same row near the elevators, mine at the far end, Kevin Finnerty’s only a couple of steps from the elevator. I started with mine. Opened the trunk to get at the radio unit bolted into place back there. About the size of a big-city telephone book, the control unit was a simple black steel box filled with electronic stuff I’d never bothered to study. All I cared about was that the damn thing would work when I needed it.
I plugged my code-changer into the appropriate socket at the rear of the box, pushed the correct sequence of buttons on the hand-held unit, then waited for the high-pitched tone that indicated the proper code had been entered. I unhooked the code-changer, closed the trunk of the car, then started down the line and repeated the process with the rest of the cars, finishing with Kevin Finnerty’s.
Twenty minutes it took me. I headed upstairs and returned the unit to Gordon Shanklin, who was so deep into whatever he was doing on his workbench he did little more than grunt as I walked up, left the unit, and went back out the door.
My second chore took me to the switchboard on the first floor.
Gerry Ann Walsh ran the switchboard better than anyone I’d ever seen. A pretty woman of middle age, with short blond hair and wire-rimmed eyeglasses, she smiled as I approached.
“The all-clear book?” she asked.
“You’re way ahead of me, Gerry Ann. As usual.”
She opened a small cabinet to her right, pulled out a spiral notebook, and handed it to me, a book that contained the all-clear codes for the various home-alarm systems connected to our switchboard from the residences of agents and supervisors assigned to WMFO. Whenever a particular system got triggered, the phone rang at the switchboard. Whoever was on the switchboard would call the appropriate residence, and if it was a false alarm—which was almost always the case—the agent would give the operator an all-clear code, a four-digit sequence that would stop the alarm and prove to the switchboard that there was no reason to send a response team.
There were lots of false alarms, I could tell just from the wear and tear. The all-clear book’s pages were wrinkled and dog-eared from overuse, but there was no other way to make the system work. All alarm companies operated the same way, especially after the cops had begun refusing to send units until it was certain the alarm was valid and had begun charging something like five hundred bucks for responding to mistakes.
My job was to make sure the book was still there, that no one had stolen it, or had sold it for the obvious value it would have to a burglar or a whole team of burglars.
I examined the pages for a moment, the lists of names and corresponding all-clear codes, saw nothing amiss, then handed the book back to Gerry Ann and went on my way. Next stop, my last stop, the gun vault on the third floor.
The weapons vault was basically a gigantic safe, like the main vault of a large bank. I had to consult the card in my wallet for the combination before twirling it and swinging open the heavy door.
About the size of a racquetball court, the vault’s walls were covered with weapons. On the wall to my left hung the shotguns, several dozen big Remingtons hanging in rows. Under the guns, behind substantial doors in the steel cabinets, was stored the ammunition, from birdshot to the rifled slugs that could tear a grapefruit-size hole through human flesh and bone.
To my right the automatic rifles, olive drab military shoulder arms capable of immense and lightning-quick destruction when the need called for it. And handguns. Maybe thirty of them, from tiny one-shotters that could be concealed in a belt buckle, to hefty semiautomatic pistols—Smith ten-millimeters and Sig Sauer nines. Every FBI agent is issued his or her own weapon, a choice between the larger Smith-10 or the Sig Sauer, and agents are free to purchase and carry other bureau-approved sidearms. But once in a while you need a special gun, and this is where you come to get it.
My job was a general inspection to make sure everything was clean and at least appeared organized. Also to check the log near the single desk inside the vault to see how many weapons were checked out, how long they’d been gone, and whether or not they should have been returned by now.
I took about ten minutes in the vault, then locked it up and went back to my office at Squad 17.
I sat at my desk and ignored the paperwork. I couldn’t make myself start so late in the afternoon, but I still had a chunk of time to kill before going out to see Jabalah Abahd in Cheverly. I felt a familiar and very pleasant flutter in my stomach as I decided what to do with it.
There was a brand-new card room across the Virginia line in Arlington. I’d be just another face nobody’d ever seen before. A couple of hours might go a long way toward replenishing my depleted briefcase. The fluttering rose up my body, a spreading warmth that made me want to bolt from my desk and head for my car. I grabbed my daybook from a pile of paperwork to my right, just to make sure I was indeed free. I opened it to today’s page and saw that it was a good thing I’d checked. It had completely slipped my mind that Gerard Ziff had changed our regular Friday appointment to this afternoon at three.
I thought about the card room again, then decided to phone Gerard and put him off until later in the week. The French intelligence officer had information from Paris on several cases my squad was currently working, information we needed to make our deadlines. Despite that, the prospect of knocking over a fresh card room was too good to ignore. I could almost smell the felt on the tables, the invigorating aroma of fresh-won money. I could meet Gerard tomorrow morning for breakfast instead. I’d still get what I needed from him in plenty of time to make my deadlines.
I got as far as the telephone before an attack of good sense stopped me. In my business Gerard Ziff was an important contact, far too important to neglect.
So I locked my desk and headed for the tennis club.
FIVE
Gerard Ziff was a spy. He wouldn’t admit it and I knew better than to ask, but that was the game we played. That and tennis.
As the French embassy’s undersecretary for FBI liaison, it was his job—his nominal job—to broker the services of law enforcement in Paris and the rest of France to the FBI in Washington. My SPIN squad handled a number of investigations involving nominees who’d spent time in France and all over Europe, but that wasn’t the only reason we used Gerard Ziff. His Gallic nose had been sniffing the Washington political air for years, and his sources inside the Beltway were often better than ours.
So we met once a week, the routine a pleasant mix of commerce and pleasure. First a set of tennis in the indoor club on K Street he belonged to, then down to business over a glass of something or other in the club’s bar.
It was our habit as well to put a few dollars on the game, and in the locker room—royal blue carpet, mahogany lockers, musty odor of old money—he went into his ridiculous act, designed to equalize my ten-year age advantage and his flamboyantly mediocre ground strokes.
“I have the … how do you say it? … the mal de tête … the headache.” He winced as he tied the laces of his tennis shoes, then groaned as he rose from the bench in front of his locker. “The Greeks,” he continued, “… mon Dieu, the Greeks … a party at their embassy last night.” He shook his head, his brown eyes sorrowful. “Peut-être … maybe … maybe we should just hit today. Maybe I should not risk the wager.”
I laughed out loud. Gerard Ziff spoke immaculate and idiomatic English without a trace of an accent, except when he was running a game on me. The worse his English, the harder he was trying to screw me over. Today he sounded like a mixture of Pepe Le Peu and Maurice Chevalier. “You got the mal de tête, all right,” I told him, “but if you’re not on the court in two minutes you’re gonna have the mal de everything.”
He shrugged, then gave up the accent. “I’m not kidding this time, you asshole, not about the Greeks anyway, and their fucking ouzo. I gotta have alleys today. I gotta have both alleys.”
“One alley.” I couldn’t beat my father if I let him use the full doubles court to chase me around in.
“Okay, damn you … but you only get one serve.”
I shook my head. “Both serves.”
“Four games then … I start four up, I get the serve.”
“Two games, I serve.”
He stared at me. “Right, like that’s gonna happen. Three games, I serve, I get one alley.”
I turned the negotiation in a more important direction. “Hundred dollars?”
