by Gene Riehl
“Paris agrees with every word you say.”
“And Brenda Thompson’s going to be his next victim, the next Jeannette Randall.”
“What else could it be?”
“Christ.”
Then I realized what was wrong. Why he had to be wrong.
“The Randall stuff’s new, relatively new. But what about Thompson? Whatever Finnerty’s going to use on her has to be more than thirty years old. Where would he get something like …”
My voice died as I knew where.
“You can’t be serious, Gerard. You can’t be telling me those files actually exist.” I turned to Brodsky, then back to Ziff. “That Hoover’s secret files are still out there.”
“I don’t think there can be any doubt.”
“But how did you … How long have you …”
“We don’t know for sure, for absolute certain, that’s what Finnerty is using, but we can’t deny the possibility. My government was looking for them the day Hoover died back in ’72. I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but I suspect we were not alone.”
I just looked at him. At this point I would have believed anything.
“We thought we had them early on,” Gerard continued, “a few hours after his death, but they disappeared. Vanished without a trace. I think we’re right, but we’ll never know until we actually see them.”
“So you’ve got more video. More of what we just saw.”
“Enough to satisfy our suspicions. Added to what I’ve inferred from your unusual inquiries this past week about Brenda Thompson, we know we’re right about what he’s planning for the judge.”
“Hoover died thirty years ago. How could anything he dredged up hurt anyone now?” The instant I heard my question, I knew the answer. “Of course, Gerard. You call them Hoover’s files, but they’re not, not anymore. Now they’re Finnerty’s. The ADIC is using Hoover’s system, not necessarily the same information. Or maybe a combination of the two. Gathering intelligence any way he can, using it to rebuild the bureau back to the days when Hoover ran the government.”
“And not just Finnerty I’m afraid.”
I stared at him. How much worse was this going to get?
“At least two others,” Gerard continued. “Bureau people as well, from the sound of them, but we haven’t yet been able to make an ID on either one.”
“From the sound of them?”
“From context, yes. From Finnerty’s end of the phone calls we’ve intercepted.”
“A wire? You’re running a wire on him?”
Gerard glanced at the ambassador. “Something like that.”
“And the restaurant. How long have you been watching him at La Maison?”
“Only since we bought it and sent him an invitation to the grand reopening. Invited him to enjoy privileges reserved for Washington’s most important people. He showed up, of course—few bureaucrats can resist such an invitation—and we made sure our people put him at a special table. A very special table. When he began to come back regularly we made it even easier for him. No matter the line outside, no matter the day or time of day, Kevin Finnerty always gets that same table. Fact is, nobody else is ever seated there. And he’s such an egomaniac we’ve never overheard him even wondering how it could possibly happen that way.”
“Hoover and Clyde Tolson never did either, from what I’ve heard. Not La Maison, of course, but the same table at Harvey’s out on Connecticut Avenue every night of the week.”
I looked at Gerard as a second thought crossed my mind, but he shook his head.
“No, we didn’t own Harvey’s. And we didn’t have to, in those days. Hoover was so powerful, had so much public support, he didn’t bother to hide what he was doing.”
“But you still didn’t answer my question, not really. Are you tapping Finnerty’s phones now? Right now, every day?”
He shook his head. “The firewalls on his phone system at his office and his home are unbeatable. We didn’t even bother to try his office, and his home phone calls—both incoming and outgoing—hit four or five satellites at the same time. Half a dozen cities around the world showed up on our pen register.”
“So how …”
“Microphones.”
“Bugs? If you can’t tap his phone, how could you penetrate his house?”
“We didn’t. The bureau sweeps his house too regularly to make in-house microphones an option.” He paused. “But they didn’t sweep the house across the street.”
“You bought a house?”
“Of course not.”
“Don’t try to tell me you rented one, I know better than that. Nobody ever sells a house in Kalorama Heights, much less rents one out.”
“You wouldn’t believe what happened. The newly retired couple across from Finnerty’s house won an all-expenses paid vacation on the Côte d’Azur. You should have seen the looks on their faces. We paid for the first month, but they liked it so much they stayed another thirty days on their own money before coming back home. Enough time for us to get what we needed. To know for sure what your assistant director is up to.”
Of course. The bureau uses the same ploy, although not quite as grand as the French Riviera. Four free nights in Cancún is more our speed. Fun in the sun. All you have to do is listen to a one-hour sales presentation, from an undercover FBI agent with a flair for smarm.
“So you don’t have it anymore,” I said, “the lookout.”
“Unfortunately not.”
“I’m confused about something else. What Finnerty did with Senator Randall is awful, but we have laws against that sort of thing. He’s nothing more than a criminal. You have the evidence. Why not just take him down?”
“How would you suggest we go about it?”
“You and your ambassador take what you know to the president of France. Let your president deal directly with the White House. Believe me, the Oval Office will do the rest.”
Ambassador Marchand interrupted.
“You are suggesting we tell the White House that the Republic of France has been running intelligence operations in his country for decades, that we still have one going right under his nose. That we have infiltrated his FBI, devoted an entire restaurant to doing so. That we run covert and entirely illegal surveillance in and around the three branches of his government. That we … I think you get my point.”
I nodded. I’d been wasting time even bringing it up. So I turned back to Gerard and changed the subject to what had brought me here in the first place.
“What about today, then? At the zoo. What was Finnerty doing out there with a thug like Jerry Crown? If that’s his real name.”
“It isn’t,” Gerard said, but didn’t elaborate. “The fact is we don’t know what they were talking about out there today, not yet anyway. Our tech people are downloading the raw data now, turning it into something we can listen to. They’ll bring it in here when they finish.”
“If Crown’s not his name, what is it?” I summarized my Tuesday telephone conversation with Harvard Law School, and the one with Jabalah Abahd. “I came up with the name Robert Bennett early on. It’s either the same guy, or you’re right about Finnerty running an entire network.”
“Jerry Crown and Robert Bennett are indeed the same man. But his true name is Vincent Wax.”
I glanced at Brodsky, but he shook his head to indicate the new name meant nothing to him either.
“Who is he?” I asked Gerard. “Vincent Wax.”
“He’s got FBI credentials and badge, the same weapons, the same access to FBI files and records. Nobody can find him on the official rolls, but he looks like an agent to me.”
“Except that he’s a killer.” I paused as I realized what else that might mean. “Christ, Gerard, did you know? Did you have information before Wax killed—”
Gerard interrupted with a firm shake of his head.
“Absolutely not. As I said, Finnerty and Wax meet very infrequently. We have an extremely covert operation going on here, but it d
oesn’t include letting people be murdered just to keep it secret.”
“So why didn’t you tell me about him after what happened to the lawyer in Cheverly? Why haven’t you—”
I stopped talking as I heard a knock on the conference room door behind us.
The door opened and a thin young man with glasses too big for his face came in with what looked like a digital receiver-tuner under his arm. He walked up to where we were sitting at the front of the room, set the electronic box on the table. Gerard didn’t bother to introduce the technician as he unfurled some wires from the box and plugged them into electrical outlets built into the top of the conference table.
“How did we do?” Gerard asked him.
“Not as well as I’d hoped.”
The man’s voice was dry and uninflected, the tone of a technician more interested in his equipment than what it was being used for. The same tone I was used to hearing from our own techs at WMFO.
“To keep out of the intermittent rain,” he began, in English just as good as Gerard’s, “the targets chose a partially protected bench directly in front of a large signboard. The board was dirty from the rain of the past few days and provided a less than acceptable surface for an interferometric laser intercept.”
He looked at me and I nodded. Laser snooping had become old hat. The bureau—as well as every other secretive agency—had learned long ago to draw the curtains whenever there was important business to discuss.
“The laser,” he continued, “bounces a continuous signal at the dirty surface—the dirt itself, actually—which is vibrating with the sound waves produced by the targets themselves as they talk. The reflected beam interferes with the outgoing beam and the computer digitizes the resulting disturbance and converts it to audible speech.” The technician cleared his throat. “Unfortunately the rain eroded our signal quality badly, but we used a second computer and a fuzzy logic program to make the intercept at least recognizable.”
“What about pictures?” I had to ask. “Get any video?”
Gerard took the question. “We don’t need pictures. We know who they are. Only thing that matters is what they talk about and what they’re planning.”
The technician touched a switch on the box. A sort of hissing—“white noise” it’s called in the trade—filled the room, the box obviously plugged into the conference room speaker system. The voices were metallic, Finnerty’s pretty much unrecognizable, but the context made it unimportant. Clearly the ADIC was in charge.
“We’ve got sixty seconds,” the voice that had to be Finnerty’s said. “I’m not pleased with what happened in Brookston. You were told to make sure they were both dead.”
“I was sure. The preacher’s head was gone, for Christ’s sake. The Sands woman was covered with blood. I still can’t believe she’s alive.”
I stared at Gerard, opened my mouth to talk, but he held a finger against his lips and glanced toward the technician. Not with him in the room, Gerard was telling me, so I shut up and continued to listen.
“Well, she is alive,” Finnerty said. “That’s why I’m here today. She and her supervisor can no longer be …”
A second hiss of white noise covered his words. I glared at the technician.
“The rain,” he said. “Must have been a sudden squall against the signboard. There is not much to be done about that.”
We continued to listen. The voices kept fading in and out.
“… Monk, too,” Finnerty said, “most of all Monk… He and the woman are … This time you have to be god-damned …”
The voices died in another blizzard of interference.
I turned to Gerard. “Damn it, what good is—”
Before I could finish the question, Finnerty’s voice crashed into the room with a clarity I felt all the way down my backbone.
“You’ve got forty-eight hours to make sure they’re dead!”
The recording disintegrated into nothing but static. The technician turned off his machine.
“That’s it,” he said. “I presume that was the end of the conversation, but even if it wasn’t, we didn’t pick up anything else.”
I stared at the electronic box as Finnerty’s order to Vincent Wax continued to reverberate through my head. The ADIC’s plan to extort Brenda Thompson—to “own” America’s next Supreme Court Justice—was a clear threat to national security, maybe to the well-being of the whole world, but all of a sudden it had become much more personal as well. A secure planet was a good thing, hard to argue against that, but it wouldn’t do Lisa and me much good if we were too dead to enjoy it.
The moment her name passed through my mind I used my cell phone to call Lisa at home. The pressure of my grip on the phone increased as I waited for her to answer. I waited through the first six rings, then heard her answering machine. I let go of the breath I hadn’t even been aware of holding as I listened to her ask if I would leave a message.
“Damn it, Lisa,” I said after the beep. “Where the hell are you?” I paused. “Pick up if you’re there.”
Nothing.
“Look,” I said. “Get out of your apartment the second you hear—”
Her voice burst in.
“Puller. I was in the shower.”
“Don’t say another word. Just get out of your apartment. Hang this phone up and get out. Now!”
“But … What are you talking—”
“Call me back from your car. And don’t use your bucar. You can reach me on my cell.”
“I don’t understand. What’s going—”
“Now, goddammit! Right now!”
She hung up and we waited in silence until my phone rang forty-five seconds later.
“I’m at the French Embassy on Reservoir Road,” I told her. “Look it up if you don’t know where it is. I’ll wait for you here.”
I broke the connection, then turned to Gerard and tried to assure myself Lisa would be okay until I could get her back inside my corral.
“When will he do it?” I asked him. “When will Finnerty go after the judge?”
“Too soon, and that’s our biggest problem. Her Judiciary Subcommittee hearings should end tomorrow afternoon, and her name will probably go to the full Senate for confirmation on Friday.” He shook his head. “It’s too quick. We’d counted on a couple of weeks at least, her being the first black woman on the Court, but now we’re down to forty-eight hours. There’s no way we can get set up that soon.”
“Then why are we wasting time? Why aren’t we out on the street already?”
Ambassador Marchand answered. “We can’t do anything about what he’ll do to Brenda Thompson. The only thing we can do is wait for Finnerty’s next victim to appear. Continue gathering intelligence for next time.”
“Next time? Were you listening, Mr. Ambassador? What more do you people need than the corruption of our Supreme Court? A death threat against two FBI agents?”
“I didn’t say nothing should be done, Agent Monk, only that we can’t do anything.”
“That’s bullshit. I need you. You think I can just walk into the FBI director’s office and tell him what I saw today? What I heard Finnerty order Vincent Wax to do? And expect him to believe me?”
I wheeled on Gerard, but he said nothing. Clearly he knew better than to take my side. I spun back toward the ambassador.
“So what the hell do you people do? I understand you can’t take Finnerty to court, I know you can’t compromise your government, but we’re talking about murder here. Two murders already, another two on order. What does it take, for God’s sake?”
Marchand shook his head. “I wish we could help you, but in this country all we can do is watch, until the time comes when we have no choice but to act.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean? What are you talking about, act?”
“That you will never know, Agent Monk. No American has ever known about that.”
I paused for a moment to compose myself.
“Well, this time is different,�
�� I told him. “This time an American does know. This time an American is taking over. I have no intention of waiting for Finnerty to try again. I don’t intend to die to keep your government out of this, and I sure as hell won’t sit back and watch him take over the Supreme Court either.”
“All I’m telling you is that we won’t help.”
“You will help. As a matter of fact, you will work right next to me until I don’t need you anymore.”
“Be reasonable,” Marchand said. “Even if Paris authorized such a thing, there’s still the time problem. What can we possibly do in forty-eight hours?”
“Nothing … not if we don’t get off our asses and get started.”
There was a long silence. I could hear Marchand breathing, before he turned to Gerard, but Gerard just shrugged.
“I told you,” he said to his ambassador. “I told you about this man. I told you what would happen if he caught us.”
Silence again, a long pause. I leaned toward Marchand, making myself bigger, so big he couldn’t refuse me. But he did.
“It’s out of the question, Monk. I’m sorry, but—”
I talked right over the top of him.
“I’ll give you an hour to talk to Paris, Mr. Ambassador.” I turned to leave, then turned back to him. “If you want me after that, I’ll be at the Hoover Building with my director.”
He didn’t have a chance to respond before Brodsky and I walked out the door.
We waited for Lisa at the embassy front gate. She showed up twenty minutes later and we went back inside. After a full hour of threatening, bribing, and shouting, the French finally surrendered, and the three of us returned to Lisa’s Toyota Corolla for the drive to the sheriff’s car, still parked where he’d left it at the scene of my crash. The rain had stopped while we’d been at the embassy, but it started again as we got back to his Buick. It was pouring when I turned around to the backseat.
“You don’t have to do this, Brodsky. We’re going to color outside the lines here. You’ll still get Vincent Wax. I’ll deliver him personally, but this might be a good time for you to—”
His scowl stopped me.
