by Gene Riehl
Back at Finnerty’s car I opened the trunk and bent inside to inspect his radio unit. From my pocket I pulled the microphone/transmitter unit and long cable I’d removed from Gordon Shanklin’s collection upstairs. I bent closer to the radio unit, located the auxiliary power supply socket at the rear, plugged the end of the cable into it, then ran the black cable through the pass-through at the rear of the trunk and up behind the back seats of the car. I crawled back out of the trunk, walked around the car and peered inside to check my work. I nodded. Couldn’t see a damn thing. Finnerty wouldn’t either, not unless he made a point of looking for it.
I walked the ADIC’s spare keys back to Freddy Vitek. He didn’t even bother to acknowledge me as I passed by on the way to the cabinet in his office. I replaced the keys and headed back upstairs.
At the main switchboard on the second floor, Gerry Ann Walsh was busy handling calls. She looked at me with questioning eyebrows.
“Don’t bother,” I mouthed. “I know where it is.”
I walked around behind her and grabbed the all-clear book from the top drawer of the gray metal file cabinet at the back of her space, opened it, and made a mental note of the code I needed, then replaced the book.
“Thanks,” I mouthed again as I left Gerry Ann to her callers.
Next it was the gun vault on the third floor, the same floor as my own office in Squad 17. Now I had to be more careful.
I spotted a couple of agents from my squad talking in the hallway ahead, so I ducked into a doorway until they moved on. I double-checked to make sure the coast was clear, then hustled to the gun vault, twirled the combination, and was in and out in less than a minute. I tucked a Sig Sauer nine-millimeter semiautomatic into my briefcase with the electronic gear, along with the four-inch silencer I would attach to the pistol later.
Back in the garage, I climbed into the Caprice and smiled at Lisa. She smiled back as we headed back up to the street and on our way to Brodsky at the Hilton. Before we got there, I called my father’s nursing home and caught Jack Quigley in his office.
“Cutting it close, aren’t you?” he told me. “We were getting ready to box up his stuff and have it ready for you to pick up when you come to get him.”
I told him why I was calling, that I was ready to use my Visa card to settle the account, to keep my father right where he was.
“You’re going to pay?” he said. “You’re actually going to give me some money?”
“I’m in a hurry, Jack.”
“How much? How much you want to put on the Visa card?”
“All of it.”
“Ninety-five hundred dollars? You’re kidding, right?”
“You want it or not?”
He shut up and ran it through.
That night at the Hilton we rehearsed. Lisa, Brodsky, and I, along with Gerard Ziff, who came over to get his instructions for the next morning. I practiced for a couple of hours on a few of the skills I hadn’t used for a while, performing them over and over as I worked to get ready. Brodsky gave me a few tips from his detective days, a couple of things I’d never thought about.
“Look,” he told me around eleven-thirty, as we were finishing up for the night, “just think of a lock as a woman.”
His smile showed he wasn’t accustomed to using it.
“Get in there and feel around. Hit the right place, it’ll open up for you.”
I stared at him. “Another joke? Jesus, Brodsky, don’t tell me you’re finally letting go.”
He quit smiling. “Just took awhile, Monk, that’s all. A lotta bad history, lotta bad blood. For you people, too … Don’t think I haven’t noticed.” He glanced at Lisa. “But you two …”
He let the words die, then started again.
“We’re both here to get what we need, that’s all I’m telling you. And you’re not doing the feeb thing … not running a game on me.” He paused. “What I’m trying to say is that you don’t suck.”
I grinned at him. Lisa touched his beefy shoulder.
Gerard Ziff went home. The rest of us went to bed.
THIRTY-TWO
We were in place at seven-fifty-eight the next morning. From here on in, the exact time of day would begin to mean something.
Lisa was using my Caprice, parked around the corner in Kevin Finnerty’s neighborhood, waiting for her first assignment. Brodsky was at Vincent Wax’s apartment on Seaton Place. Gerard was at the French embassy to coordinate whatever we came up with, to provide whatever technical or manpower needs we might have if their drain-cleaning van turned out not to be enough.
I was by myself in that van, just around the corner from Finnerty’s three-story brick house on Belmont Road in Kalorama Heights. At eight-fourteen I picked up my cell phone and called the ADIC at his office.
“Puller Monk,” I told his secretary. “Is Mr. Finnerty in yet?”
“Of course he is,” Barbara Perkins growled, “but he’s out at Quantico already. At the SAC conference. You can call him if it’s an emergency.” Her tone suggested it better be an emergency if I planned to bother her boss.
I told her it wasn’t important, then hung up and punched Brodsky’s number.
“Wax’s van is still here,” he told me, “but the battery on our locator transmitter is just about gone.”
“Finnerty’s tied up,” I said, “but the wife’s car is still in the driveway. Lisa will take her when she leaves. With the transmitter gone, you better tighten up on the van. Forget about discretion from here on in. Just make sure Wax doesn’t come over here until I’m finished inside.” I paused. “And Brodsky?—”
“Quit worrying,” he told me. “He won’t get anywhere near Lisa either.”
Next I called Lisa.
“You ready?” I asked her.
“I was ready yesterday. Finnerty made sure of that.”
“Look, Lisa”—I tried to think of a way to say it—“I need you for this. But I need you even more after this, know what I’m saying?”
“I’ll be careful, boss.”
But she wouldn’t be, I knew, and I wouldn’t expect her to be. We were both FBI agents. She would do whatever it took to keep Finnerty’s wife off me. Anything less would be an insult to both of us.
Finally I called Gerard at the embassy.
“It’s a go,” I told him. “Just as soon as the wife leaves.”
I broke the connection, then started the van and pulled around the corner and into Finnerty’s street. Close enough to his big brick house to see his wife’s dark blue BMW sedan in the driveway, far enough way to keep her from spotting me if she cared to look. The street was quiet. In a neighborhood this nice it was probably always that way.
I glanced at the clock in the dashboard. Eight-thirty-two. I refused to think the worst, that Finnerty’s wife would choose today as stay-at-home Thursday, or that she wouldn’t leave until the maid showed up at two o’clock for what Gerard had described as her regular afternoon cleaning session. That I’d have to come up with some kind of ruse to get both of them out of the way long enough to accomplish what I needed to do. Going into the house without proper backup and preparation was risky enough. I sure as hell didn’t need another complication.
All I could do was move my seat back, settle in, and wait.
An hour and a half later the ADIC’s wife came out her front door.
Dressed to the teeth, she strode to the BMW sedan in the circular driveway and got in. Lunch, most likely, or some heavy-duty shopping. She’d be gone at least an hour, I was certain, and the maid wouldn’t show up until long after I was gone.
I punched Lisa’s speed-dial number. “Blue Beemer’s out. I’ll call the direction when she starts to move.”
I watched the lady start the car and pull out of the driveway, turn west toward the first intersection, sweep past me and around the first corner toward Lisa.
“Got her,” Lisa said before I could report. “I’ll put her down and get back to you.”
Twenty minutes later my cell phone
rang.
“She’s down,” Lisa said. “Looks like lunch with friends.”
“Stay tight on her. I’ll need an hour.”
“Count on it.”
I put the phone back in my pocket. Despite the situation, the potential for disaster, I found myself smiling at the team I’d assembled. My homicide-dick sheriff, my ex-prosecutor, my tennis-playing French spy. And their leader. A gambling-addicted father-hating dome-owning son of a bitch who knew better than to tilt at windmills but couldn’t make himself stop.
I started the engine, drove halfway up the block, right in front of. Finnerty’s house now, parked at the curb, and shut down the engine. I opened the door, got out, adjusted my white coveralls, then turned back and reached for my leather satchel with the gear I’d lifted from Gordon Shanklin’s tech room. I pulled it out of the van, then closed and locked the door. The Neighborhood Watch probably had a fix on me already, but all they were seeing was a hardworking drain repairman, eager to start his day’s work.
I strode up Finnerty’s circular driveway. At the forest-green front door I examined the lock and realized that Gerard Ziff’s people had done their homework. The Baldwin lock system was exactly as the French technicians had described, exactly the same as the one I’d spent an hour practicing on last night. The polished brass pull and the keyed deadbolt gleamed with quality, but they’d never been designed to baffle any sort of lock man at all. I took a quick look up and down the street, then dropped to my knees.
From my overalls pocket I pulled a tan leather pouch, opened the drawstring, and withdrew the two picks it would take to turn the lock. A tension wrench and a hook, black-steel tools that except for the color reminded me of the tray next to a dental chair. I bent closer to the lock, then reached into the same pocket for a tiny cylinder of spray lubricant, spritzed the misty oil directly into the lock.
I inserted the tension wrench into the keyway twisted it slightly to the right until I felt it trying to turn the mechanism that would slide the bolt out of the door jamb. I pushed the steel hook into the lock right alongside the tension wrench, then used the technique I’d worked like a dog to perfect back in training school, had used more than a few times since.
I jiggled the hook to lift the teeth, the tension wrench to keep them from slipping back down. One after another, five in a row, before I twisted both tools to the right and turned the lock. I felt my eyes widen. Under twenty seconds? Amazing what could happen when you mixed adrenaline and WD-40. I realized my hands were shaking. Couldn’t be fear, I told myself, but I was lying and didn’t mind admitting it. An agent who feels no fear is either crazy or awfully damn new.
I stood for a moment to gather my wits, then opened the door.
A shrill whistling tone greeted my entrance, the warning signal that started the forty-five-second countdown before the system would send a silent alarm to the switchboard at WMFO. I moved to the nearest telephone, on an antique table in the living room, picked it up, and dialed the office switchboard.
“It’s Kevin Finnerty,” I said to a voice I didn’t recognize, a young man who couldn’t possibly have recognized mine. “You’re going to get a silent alarm from my house. I tripped it by mistake. I need you to reset the system.”
“Yes, sir,” the kid said. I could hear him turning to reach for the all-clear book behind him. “Just give me your clear code and I’ll reset it.”
I did so. He thanked me and hung up. A moment later the shrill tone disappeared and I went to work.
Kevin Finnerty’s home was even bigger inside than it looked from the outside. Complete coverage was out of the question. I would have to make some choices. I looked for a place to start.
On the hardwood flooring in the living room, Persian carpets separated three distinct groupings of furniture. Nice stuff—traditional, with lots of flowery fabrics—but I wasn’t interested in the furnishings. The floor-to-ceiling gray stone fireplace at the far end was what caught my eye. And the bookshelves flanking it, almost completely filled with leather-bound books, the various gaps filled with a variety of small bronze sculptures.
I set my satchel down on the floor next to the shelves, opened it, and grabbed a very special leather-bound book to add to the collection. Two inches thick, a pseudo-volume containing not a word of text. I laid it open to check the real contents, the L-12 assembly I’d swiped from Shanklin. A miniature video camera, microphone, and transmitter, along with a half-dollar-size battery. A smaller, smarter version of the bureau’s old WQM60 I’d used in the past.
I lifted the book to the shelf on the left side of the fireplace, shoved it between two others, then stepped back to check it out. The leather binding matched the rest of the books, and the decorative tooling on the spine hid the minuscule lens peering out into the room. I trusted that these bookshelves served the same purpose in this house as in most homes, more decorative than functional. Wouldn’t do to have either of the Finnertys reach directly into the lens for a late-night read.
I closed the satchel and continued down the long hallway toward the back of the house.
The next left was the TV room, the sixty-inch Matsushita console dominating the front wall. Top of the line, I saw. Theater-quality surround-sound speakers, DVD and VCR included. Two matching green leather recliners facing the screen. In addition to the floor speakers running off the digital amplifier/receiver, the TV set had its own built-in speakers in the front. I pulled the woven-fabric cover from the right-side speaker, installed another L-12 assembly, not built into a book this time, of course. I backed up to inspect the installation.
The speaker fabric was perfect, loosely enough woven to allow the lens an unobstructed picture, but far too dense for anyone in the room to notice the camera behind it. Now the Matsushita was a TV with two functions. Kevin Finnerty might not be watching it, but it would sure as hell be watching him.
I stepped out of the room and continued up the hallway until I found Finnerty’s home office. The door was closed. I opened it and went through, closed it behind me and looked around.
Walnut shelves lined the wall to my right, but there were few books. The shelves were covered with framed photographs of Kevin Finnerty with famous people. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, father and son. But most of all J. Edgar Hoover. Half a dozen pictures of Finnerty with the bureau’s first director. In them Finnerty looked like a kid, but the old man’s complexion already resembled the bronze statue in the Hoover Building’s interior courtyard. The only nongovernmental people I spotted were Billy Graham and Pat Robertson. Just the sight of them made me queasy.
There were no women, no blacks. No Mrs. Finnerty, no children.
The books were memoirs, I saw, authored by some of the same people in the pictures. The most prominently displayed was Hoover’s Masters of Deceit, his 1958 diatribe against domestic Communists, a book containing little more than jingoistic phrases designed to entertain the Joe McCarthy lovers who constituted its readership.
I moved across the red-and-blue Tabriz carpet that covered much of the maple flooring. Matching blue-leather armchairs faced an antique walnut desk in front of the ceiling-high window that dominated the room. Another Hoover picture sat on the desk, facing the room. I recognized the old man’s last official portrait, taken about 1960, freezing him in combat position against the Kennedy brothers’ latest onslaught. The first director’s unmistakable blocky handwriting covered the lower third of the portrait. I stepped closer to examine the inscription. “To one of the chosen,” I read out loud. And it was signed simply Edgar. I felt my eyebrows lift. Hoover’s use of the name only a handful of people on the planet dared utter told me a hell of a lot more about his relationship with Kevin Finnerty than a hundred rumors.
Two telephones stood side by side on the desktop, one standard, the other a STU-III phone—a secure transmission line we called the batphone—that sat atop an electronic box. When connected to a similar phone anywhere in the world, the batphone’s signal could not be intercepted. Finding it here
didn’t surprise me. Bureau regulations require using the STU-III phone for anything even remotely resembling a classified matter, and there are no exceptions. As the assistant director heading the Washington Metropolitan Field Office, Finnerty had to maintain a STU-III phone here at the house. Seeing it, I now understood something else.
Gerard had mentioned the problem of tapping Finnerty’s conversations—chasing the signal from satellite to satellite, country to country—and the batphone was the reason why.
Finnerty’s office was the most logical choice for any sort of meeting with Judge Thompson, but I couldn’t use another L-12 book on these bookshelves. There were too few books, for one, and unlike those in the living room the ADIC probably read these. Every night, maybe.
I checked the blue-velvet drapes drawn tight across the massive windows. I couldn’t use the drapes themselves—God knew what would happen if Finnerty decided to open them, I pictured the bug bouncing on top of his desk—then noticed the matching valance above the drapes. No matter what Finnerty did to the drapes, the padded and velvet-covered valance was screwed solidly to the wall behind it. A bug planted there was going nowhere.
I stepped behind the desk, laid my satchel on the gleaming desktop, opened it, and grabbed another mini-assembly, this time attached to a needle-sharp chromium hook. I used Finnerty’s chair, pulled it next to the window, and stood on it to inspect the valance. Across the top, all the way across, blue pleating had been stitched into place.
I reached behind one of the pleats near the center of the span, hooked the L-12 securely into place. With a tiny knife blade from my pocket I cut an all-but-invisible slit, pulled the fiber optic lens just far enough into the slit to allow the lens to see. I fluffed the material back into shape, climbed down and looked at my handiwork. Perfect, I would have had to climb back up on the chair to find it again.
