Quantico Rules

by Gene Riehl

  I did so, then took the first street to my right and stomped on the gas. Another right and I was paralleling the van, then a third right and a quick left back onto Connecticut. I searched the street ahead of me, but they were gone. Shit. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the van half a block behind me. I’d outrun them, encircled them too fast to stay behind the van. I swung into the curb lane and dawdled along until they went by. Now we would see how good they were.

  The van continued up Connecticut for a mile or so until we approached the stoplight at Nebraska. The light was green as we got close, but the van slowed as if the driver were lost. Horns began to honk and I knew what was about to happen. I’d done the same sort of thing so often I might as well have been driving the van myself. The light turned yellow—the van at a complete stop now—but when the light turned red it shot through the intersection. More horns honked, a couple of angry shouts rang out. In the next instant the van was back in motion up Connecticut and I was stuck at the red light, with the same problem as before. If I blew through it I’d cause a commotion the van would see, would recognize me for what I was. Only this time it was worse. If I let them go this time, I wouldn’t ever catch them again.

  I looked both ways to make sure I wouldn’t kill or be killed, then raced through the intersection. They’d probably made me already, when I showed up the second time on Connecticut. Now there was nothing left to do but bumper-lock them.

  Half a minute later I was right on their tail.

  If they’d made me, they would follow the book, take me all over hell, anywhere but back to their base. I glanced at my gas gauge, even though I knew it was full. No surveillance agent starts an operation without a full tank.

  I settled in for the long haul.

  Just before we got to the D.C. line at Chevy Chase, Maryland, the van turned right at Northhampton Street into the surrounding residential area. We passed a small library on our right before the van turned left on Chevy Chase drive and accelerated into all-out escape mode. By the time I made the same turn it was almost out of sight in the winding neighborhood. I floored the Caprice, relieved at least to know that at this time of day there was almost no one on the narrow streets.

  Up ahead the van made a left. I shot after it, kept on its tail through a series of quick turns and squealing tires. I saw a school zone looming and to my relief the van turned down another street to keep away from it. By doing so they’d come closer to identifying themselves for me. Really bad guys don’t give a damn who they run over. Whoever these people were, they weren’t prepared to endanger little kids.

  I’d lost track of street names by now, but at the next intersection I ran out of luck.

  The van went through, but before I could get through behind them a red SUV blew the stop sign to my right. Suddenly it was right in front of me. I could see the wide-eyed driver trying to outrace me before I hit him. He almost made it but inexplicably skidded to a stop. I stomped the brake halfway through the firewall, but couldn’t stop before I hit him in the rear quarter-panel.

  My airbag exploded in my face, then sagged away. I slumped against my seat. The damage from the collision was insignificant—I’d almost been stopped when I struck the SUV—but the drain-cleaning van was gone, and I’d be here at least an hour with the other driver.

  The man was out of the car when I came around to talk to him. Dark hair, not very clean dark hair, long over his collar. Suit and tie, European cut with the thin shoulder line, narrow waist, and tighter-than-American trousers. A diplomat, maybe. This part of town was filled with them.

  “Are you hurt?” he wanted to know.

  I changed my mind about the diplomat part. He didn’t have any trace of an accent.

  “Thank God you’re a good driver,” he continued. “I didn’t even see the stop sign.” He lifted the cell phone in his hand, showing me the reason he hadn’t.

  “I’m okay,” I said, then looked at him, surprised at the flatness of his affect. I spent a lot of time with people under stress, and he didn’t look all that shook up.

  “Guess we better trade info,” he said. “Get us both on our way.”

  Together we examined the damage. My plastic bumper had flexed and retracted the way it was designed to do, and with the exception of a couple of insignificant scratches there was no damage to my Caprice. His Toyota Four-Runner wasn’t quite so lucky. The dent in his rear quarter-panel would have to be pounded back into shape and repainted.

  “Look,” he said, “I don’t want to get my insurance company involved here.” He glanced back at the stop sign. “It was my fault. My car is the only one damaged.” He looked at my bumper. “Would a hundred bucks be enough to buff out those scratches?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t need any money, but I do need your ID, your driver’s license and registration.”

  The bureau was pretty strict about that. People have a way of coming back later with claims impossible to deny if you just walk away from these things.

  “Of course,” he said. “Registration’s in my glove compartment.”

  I followed him around to his car. He’d left the door open. He climbed in and reached across to the glove compartment. I glanced at the edge of his door, then looked closer at the maintenance sticker glued there. The sticker featured a drawing of a big goony service-station attendant holding a tire and smiling. I bent closer. Best Price Service, the sticker said. Tires and Batteries a Specialty. I felt myself frowning. I’d seen that guy before. As a matter of fact, I’d been at that very service station.

  I backed away and bent to examine the front tire. A Michelin tire, but that wasn’t what started the tightening in my gut. Lots of people buy Michelin tires. I bent even closer, until I could read the imprinted code numbers stenciled in white above the small numbers designating the size of the tire. Stenciled white numbers I’d been told not long ago would appear on only a few very special Michelin tires in this country.

  I straightened up, leaned into the car, right up into the driver’s face.

  “Good job,” I told him. “I’ve got to give you that much.” I glanced up the street where I’d last seen the brown van before it disappeared. “You think they made it back to the barn yet?”

  He stared at me. “What are you talking about? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means it’s time for you to shut up. It’s time for you to call Gerard Ziff and tell him we’re on our way.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  While the driver of the SUV called Gerard, I phoned Brodsky to bring him up to date. This was the point where I was supposed to tell him he couldn’t come along, couldn’t be allowed to join us to wherever Gerard had in mind to take me. That he had no need to know. That I would brief him when I got back. It was what the rule book called for. What the Hoover Building would demand. But that didn’t mean I was going to do it.

  First of all, he’d throw a fit. Secondly, he had as much need to know as I did, and every right to know. Besides, Gerard Ziff had started it, and I didn’t give a damn what Ziff thought anymore.

  Both the sheriff and the spy showed up at the same time, Gerard driving the drain-cleaning van I’d been chasing. Ziff pulled up to the intersection from which his man and I had moved our cars, then lowered his window.

  “Get in the back,” he told us. “The door’s open.”

  Brodsky glanced at me. I nodded, then followed him to the rear of the van. On the way I heard Gerard order the SUV driver to return to the embassy.

  The slender dark-haired man who opened the back door nodded curtly as we climbed aboard, then returned to the swivel chair in front of his gadgets. And what gadgets they were. The van’s interior looked like the control room at NASA.

  On the wall to my left, half a dozen television monitors sat in a rack six feet high, an equal number of videotape recorders in the rack next to it. Fifteen or twenty radio-frequency scanners occupied another rack on the same wall. On the opposite wall were the cameras. Shelves of them, each camera secured by
straps to keep it from falling. Nikons to Hasselblads, Polaroids to Sony digital camcorders, a sixteen-millimeter motion picture camera, and several built-in baskets of lenses—tiny document lenses all the way up to the two-thousand-millimeter leviathan clipped like a fire extinguisher to the bulkhead behind the driver’s seat. Then the listening gear. Wee microphones in their own baskets, a parabolic unit the size and shape of a satellite dish held against the ceiling of the van by bright chromium fasteners. Finally, enough audiotape recorders to start up a new radio station.

  I looked at Brodsky for his reaction, but his face showed no expression at all. I stepped toward the driver’s compartment, past a black curtain that divided the working space from the driver.

  Gerard turned at the touch of my hand. “Something to see, isn’t it?” he said.

  “I didn’t come up here to congratulate you. All I want to know is what’s going on? And where we’re going.”

  “Give me ten minutes. You can ask all the questions you want to when we get there.”

  I went back to Brodsky, already sitting in one of the three captain’s chairs that rotated to face any direction. I didn’t have to tell him what Gerard had said—he had to have been listening—so I sat in the second chair and tried to turn off my brain until there was some reason to use it. The van started to move. The driver made a hard right turn and I braced my legs to keep from falling to the floor. Brodsky glanced at me, I stared back at him. The quiet Frenchman in the third chair did nothing at all.

  “Forgive the melodrama,” Gerard told us after we’d reached our destination, as he held the rear door open for us to leave the van, “but no one can be allowed to see you near this building.”

  We stood for a moment in the semidarkness of what I decided was a subterranean garage. I could smell the oil that no amount of cleaning ever gets out of a concrete floor. I could hear water dripping somewhere beyond the forest of support columns thick as redwoods. As my eyes adjusted to the lighting, I realized we were surrounded by cars and trucks.

  “Come this way please,” Gerard said. “And welcome to you, Sheriff Brodsky. Please forgive my lack of manners before, but time is important at the moment.”

  Brodsky nodded but said nothing.

  Gerard led us through the gloom, hit a buzzer next to a tall metal door. The door opened and we passed through. On the other side we stood quietly. The high-ceilinged room stretched away like an oversized entrance hall, a number of corridors running from it toward wherever and whatever lay beyond. Gerard bent to speak to a young woman sitting at a small desk close by, then straightened up and turned back toward us.

  “Follow me. The ambassador is most anxious to see you.”

  We trailed him to the second corridor on the left, then down the hallway to a conference room done in wine-colored carpet and mahogany paneling. Indirect lighting made the immense cherry conference table in the center of the room gleam like polished leather. Beyond the head of the table stood a big-screen TV. Two standing flags dominated the front corners of the room. The French tricolor and Old Glory. The American flag looked to be the newer of the two, and I couldn’t help wondering if it had been brought in especially for us.

  Gerard led us to the head of the table, motioned for us to sit, but remained standing himself.

  “Welcome to France,” he said. “Once again I’m sorry for the cloak and dagger, but I think you’ll agree it was necessary in this case.” He touched a button built into the tabletop. “The ambassador will be here in a moment.”

  “Damn it, Gerard,” I started, but stopped when a door off to our right swung open and a movie star came through.

  At least that’s what the man looked like.

  A tall man with an impressive sweep of thick gray hair and a silver mustache, immaculate European-cut dark suit draping his muscular body, he strode to us and stood next to Gerard.

  “Monsieur L’Ambassadeur,” Gerard said, “permit me to present my friend from the FBI, Special Agent Puller Monk, and his associate, Sheriff Edward Brodsky.” He turned to us. “Gentlemen, I have the honor of introducing his excellency the French ambassador to the United States, Jean-Louis Marchand.”

  I stood to shake the hand he’d extended, but said nothing. Ambassador or not, this was bullshit. Marchand turned to Brodsky, shook the sheriff’s hand as well.

  “Sit, please,” he told us. “Since our man called with Agent Monk’s demand to know what was going on at the zoo, we have been talking nonstop with the Quai d’Orsay. Our president himself has been consulted. He has given me his orders. I am here to carry them out.”

  I nodded but continued to say nothing. I wanted to think it was because I was in control of the situation, but the truth was I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  “It’s a matter of diplomatic immunity, Agent Monk,” Marchand continued. “Your demand of Mr. Ziff is noted, but—with respect—we have no legal or moral obligation to include you in the business of the government of France.”

  I stared at him for a moment, then glanced at the sheriff and rose to my feet.

  “Come on, Brodsky. We’ve got too much work to do to listen to this garbage.”

  The ambassador shrugged. “Je regrette… I’m sorry you feel that way, but surely you understand.”

  “I hear what you’re saying, Mr. Ambassador, but that has nothing to do with my own obligations in this matter. The moment I leave here, I’m going to the Hoover Building, to the director of the FBI, most likely with him to the Oval Office.” I smiled. “I, too, regret the inconvenience it may cause you, but surely you understand.”

  Marchand turned to Brodsky “Perhaps you can help me here, Sheriff. Perhaps you can prevail upon Agent Monk to—”

  Brodsky held up his big hand. “I don’t care about your diplomatic immunity either, Mr. Ambassador. I’m here on my own homicide investigation, a murder in Cobb County. You were following my killer. I want to know why.”

  Marchand sighed, glanced at Gerard Ziff, then turned back to me.

  “I will have to call my president again.”

  “No, you won’t. You know damn well he gave you a fallback if you couldn’t bully me out of here.”

  He smiled. “You’re an interesting man. As a matter of fact, we do have authority to handle this particular contingency, if need be.”

  “I thought you might.”

  “Please sit down again.”

  We did so. He addressed his words directly to me.

  “I can’t help recalling a famous story about your President Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover. Johnson’s advisors begged him to fire Hoover, who was by then a senile despot. President Johnson refused. ‘I’d rather,’ he told his people, ‘have the old bastard inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.’”

  Ambassador Jean-Louis Marchand smiled.

  “I don’t like the way you’ve extorted your way inside our tent either, Agent Monk, but you’re here now, and we will just have to make the best of it.”

  Then he nodded at Gerard, and the spy began to speak.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I reached for my notebook, but Gerard shook his head. “No, Puller,” he said, “not on paper. None of this goes on paper. Not ever. Trust me, you won’t have any trouble remembering.”

  So I sat back and listened.

  “Forgive me if I bore you with history you undoubtedly know better than I do, but this all started with Hoover and his COINTELPRO assault on the Fourth Amendment, back in the sixties.”

  I nodded. Hoover’s counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, was before my time, but I’d heard all the stories. Especially the infamous Library Awareness Program, a benign name for a hideous policy that targeted the nation’s public libraries, that forced FBI agents to recruit librarians into informing on anyone reading or checking out leftist literature. Jesus. Talk about the Taliban.

  “But COINTELPRO didn’t originate with Hoover,” Gerard said. “The man who actually designed and built it was Kevin Finnerty.”

&nbs
p; I stared at him. That was something I definitely didn’t know. I checked Brodsky for a reaction. Nothing.

  “But I’m getting ahead of myself. Prior to Finnerty’s entry into the bureau, Hoover was fighting a losing battle to keep himself relevant. Clinging to remnants of the glory he’d won from his fight against the Communist Party in the United States. By the mid-sixties their political arm, the CPUSA, was for all practical purposes dead. His agents told him that without the attendance of FBI informants there wouldn’t be any meetings at all, but Hoover had no intention of giving up the communist enemies who’d made him a national treasure. He forced the bureau to keep up the fight until Attorney General Bobby Kennedy finally shut the program down for good.”

  Again I’d heard the stories.

  “The loss of his beloved enemy devastated Hoover, until he came up with a new one. The civil rights movement was flaring up everywhere, and it didn’t take ten minutes for Hoover to brand Dr. Martin Luther King a Communist puppet working directly for the Kremlin.”

  I nodded. Hoover’s blatant racism had so disgusted the Kennedy administration, both JFK and his attorney-general brother vowed to get rid of the old bastard, to restore the FBI to the control of the Department of Justice. But before they could do it, Hoover lucked out again. The antiwar movement’s increasingly violent protests made it impossible to topple the director, a man ordinary Americans considered their last hope against anarchy.

  “Hoover recognized that to keep his iconic stature he had to cripple the rioting students. In a time of national fear, a program like COINTELPRO looked pretty good to everyone.” Gerard smiled. “A bit like today’s Carnivore program, I might add.”

  He stopped smiling.

  “Hoover was now free to attack with a vengeance, and his victims included not only library users but any American who dared question the wisdom of a war nobody believed in anymore. Men who looked up from the graves of their sons to ask why. Women working for equality in the workplace. Women Hoover forced his agents to classify in their reports as ‘known female liberationists.’”