by Steve Berry
“I was thinking of heading to somewhere between Naples and Fort Myers.”
She shook her head. “Can you make it to Lake Okeechobee?”
That was miles inland, toward the center of the peninsula, a massive expanse of fresh water that drained into the Everglades.
“We can get there, but there’s a lot of land between the lake and the coast. Somebody along the way is going to want to know who we are and where we’re headed.”
South Florida was notorious for drug trafficking, and an unidentified aircraft not responding to radio requests would raise nothing but red flags The situation would only escalate if Jansen called in reinforcements. I had not, as yet, mentioned the former agent to her.
“Does the name Jim Jansen mean anything?”
She stared across at me and shook her head.
“That’s the guy who brought me in the boat, then left in the plane and tried to kill me. He was also the one shooting at you from the beach.”
She still held the gun, in a way that I noticed wasn’t casual or with any apprehension. Instead, it signaled someone familiar with firearms.
“Are you a cop?” I asked.
She nodded.
I should have been surprised, but she’d handled herself under pressure like someone with training. “Is this official?”
“Personal. It concerns my father.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone back there at the fort you were a cop?”
“I was debating that when you showed up to rescue me.”
I caught the touch of sarcasm.
“Who is your father?”
“The Reverend Benjamin Foster, of the Christian Faith Baptist Church, Orlando, Florida.”
“How does Valdez know him?”
She reached into her pocket and found the coin. “This is yours. But those files in the back are mine. That was the deal I made with Valdez.”
She slipped the coin into my shorts pocket.
“I don’t work for Valdez,” I pointed out.
She shrugged. “A deal’s a deal. And I don’t want that coin anymore.”
I decided now was not the time to tell her that I wasn’t about to allow her to keep that waterproof case. Though I had no idea what it contained, it apparently was important enough for Valdez, Jansen, and this woman to all want it. I already knew Stephanie Nelle wanted it, and what better way to impress my new boss than by delivering the coin and the case? But something told me outsmarting Coleen Perry was not going to be easy.
“Where are you a cop?”
“Orange County Sheriff’s Department. Orlando. What do you do?”
“Until yesterday, I was a Navy lawyer. Now I’m not sure what I am. Bait, I think.”
Jansen’s duplicity still bothered me and I wondered how much information Stephanie Nelle had also withheld. Out the window I saw only ocean. We were still miles away from the Florida coast.
“See if there’s a chart anywhere.”
She searched the compartments and found one.
Thank goodness. Dead reckoning would have eaten up a lot of fuel. “What’s at Lake Okeechobee?”
“I have relatives. I was headed there tomorrow.”
That would have been after she made the deal with Valdez and had the files in her possession. But things had changed. As they had for me, so I assessed my options. Landing anywhere on the coast could be a problem. Lots of people and police. Okeechobee had people, too, but it was off the beaten path and its rural location would offer a measure of privacy, one that might be advantageous. The problem was that landing anywhere near where we were ultimately headed would be like dropping a trail of bread crumbs.
So I made a decision.
“We’re going to set down away from your relatives,” I told her. “Then head that way.”
* * *
The fuel gauge was near empty as Lake Okeechobee came into view. I’d dropped down low once we’d found the Everglades in the hope of staying off any prying radar. So far, no radio contact had been made and no other planes or helicopters had been spotted.
The lake was enormous.
About forty miles long and thirty wide. Over seven hundred square miles of pristine water, the second-largest lake in the continental United States. A mecca for fishermen and water sports enthusiasts. It also served as a divide among five counties, which meant a ton of local law enforcement from every direction.
“Head east,” she said.
I stayed low and followed her instruction. A highway ran north to south, near the eastern shore.
“That’s U.S. 441. Track it north.”
I banked left and kept going, glancing at the fuel gauge, realizing that we needed to get down soon.
A town came into view.
“Port Mayaca,” she told me.
A string of houses began to populate the shoreline like islands in a chain. Huge oak trees draped with vines shielded most of them. A few alligators basked in the sun on the shore.
“My family’s place is five miles farther north.”
That’s all I needed to know.
I reduced the throttle and began to descend. Most of the lakefront properties had docks and any one of them would do. I swung around and dropped out of the bright sky, the plane wobbling in the warm afternoon air currents. I kept the nose high as we gently kissed, then skipped off the flat water. We bounced a few more times then settled on the surface, the pontoons jolting us to a stop. I used the engine to glide across the lake, approaching one of the docks, then killed the prop and glided toward shore.
Coleen opened her door and hopped onto the dock.
I released my harness and climbed across the passenger seat, jumping over to the aluminum deck. A rope was there, tied to one of the vertical supports, and I used it to secure the plane. Then I reached back inside and retrieved the waterproof case, which I immediately noticed was much lighter. Those weights Valdez had mentioned were gone. That meant Jansen had opened the container. But something remained inside. I could feel it shifting back and forth.
“I need a phone,” she said.
We left the dock and headed for the house, which appeared to be unoccupied. No vehicles sat in the drive. No sign of anyone. Heat and humidity had settled all around us like a moist blanket. Buzzy, circling flies prospected our sticky skin. Coleen peered in through the glass of the back door.
“There’s a phone in the kitchen.”
Before I could say a word, she used the gun to break the glass, then reached in and opened the lock. Now burglary could be added to my growing list of crimes. I decided to stay outside and keep watch, but I could hear her talking on the phone. I laid the case on top of a picnic table, near a swing set. Time for me to find out what this was all about.
I released the latches.
“Don’t do that.”
I turned.
She had the gun aimed straight at me.
“You going to shoot me?”
“If you don’t close that lid, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“I was nearly killed for what’s in this case,” I said. “I want to know for what.”
The gun stayed aimed at me.
I stared into her eyes, which were brown and hard, wondering what was torturing this woman. She was troubled, of that I was sure. But I wasn’t backing down. “I’m here for the Justice Department. And whether you like it or not, you’re not in control.”
“You have no idea what I’m capable of.”
“You’re a cop. That’s all I need to know. You don’t shoot people for no reason.”
And I was right.
She lowered the weapon. “All right, let’s both take a look.”
Sounded like a plan.
I turned my attention back to the case.
She exited the house and approached the picnic table. I opened the lid to see several file folders lying inside. They were definitely old, a faded green, edges tattered. Two words were printed in thick black marker on the cov
er of the top one.
BISHOP’S PAWN
They meant nothing to me. So I asked, “Do you know what that refers to?”
Two sounds broke the silence almost at the same time. A distant siren and the basso beat of rotors through air. I glanced up, stared out over the lake, and in the far distance saw a black dot in the afternoon sky.
Helicopter.
The siren had to be the local police.
“We need to get out of here,” she said.
She didn’t have to tell me twice.
I slammed the lid shut and snapped the latches in place. With the case in hand, we rushed around to the front yard. The house was set back from the highway, among trees at the water’s edge. A detached garage stood off to the side. Coleen ran toward a window in the garage’s side wall and gazed inside.
“There’s a pickup truck.”
“Do it.”
She smashed the window, opened the sash, and climbed inside. A moment later the garage door rose and I saw an old Chevy. I ran to the driver’s door and opened it, sliding the case across the front bench seat. Coleen climbed in on the passenger side. I knew what had to be done, so I reached beneath the steering column and found the ignition wires. This truck was plenty old enough that it could be hot-wired. I’d learned, as a kid, working on my grandfather’s onion farm, how to get a truck going out in the middle of nowhere. I located the three wires, tore them from their connectors, and found the two that triggered the starter.
The engine coughed to life.
I twisted them together, slammed the door closed, and settled in behind the wheel. Perhaps somebody had noticed our arrival and sent a welcoming committee, none of whom I wanted to meet. I backed the truck from the garage and we sped away. The house and the trees blocked our exit from the lake side, but the chopper was still a long way off. The sirens seemed closer but we managed to find the highway and head north without spotting anyone. I decided to slow my speed so as not to attract attention, as it was unclear from which direction the sirens were approaching.
But we passed no police cars.
I kept driving north.
* * *
I stopped the truck in a Dairy Queen parking lot, nestled safe among other vehicles.
“Coleen,” I said to her. “I’m not your enemy.”
“You saving my hide at Fort Jefferson doesn’t make you my friend, either.”
“But it ought to buy me something.”
She smiled.
For the first time.
“You said you’re a lawyer. Have you been one long?” she asked.
“About six years. I’ve only been a Justice Department agent, though, since yesterday.”
“Why do you think this guy Jansen wanted you dead?”
“I don’t know. But I intend to find out.”
Then a thought occurred to me. “They’ll know we used the phone in that house. Your call can be traced.”
“I didn’t make one,” she said.
“I heard you.”
“All show, just for you. I planned to take you down outside, then leave with the files. I was just about to do that with a smack to the back of your head when we heard the sirens.”
I stared back out the windshield. “Once again, what is Bishop’s Pawn?”
I’d sensed back at the house that the words were not unfamiliar to her.
“It was a classified FBI operation that ran from mid-1967 to the spring of 1968.”
“How do you know that?”
“My father told me. It was part of COINTELPRO.”
That acronym rang a bell.
Reading was my passion. I devoured books and, thanks to my eidetic memory, I never forgot a word. J. Edgar Hoover had always been a fascination. Lauded as a saint and savior in life, since his death in 1972 we’d come to learn that he was neither. His legal abuses had become legendary, COINTELPRO perhaps the pinnacle of FBI corruption.
The Counter Intelligence Program started in the 1950s to combat a supposed communist threat within the United States. But it morphed into something far more ugly, eventually infiltrating a variety of political groups. The Socialist Workers Party, KKK, Nation of Islam, and Black Panthers all were targeted. But so were more benign groups like the Puerto Rican independence movement, feminist organizations, and anything that advocated left-of-center positions, especially antiwar protesters. Its goal? To expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize any threat. To accomplish that it routinely relied on burglaries, opening people’s mail, forged documents, having people fired from their jobs, planting fake news articles, even encouraging violence between rivals. It wasn’t until 1971 that it was finally exposed, thanks to a group of citizens who burglarized an FBI field office in Pennsylvania, stealing every file and sending them to journalists. That led to a congressional investigation—the famed Church Committee, named for its chairman, Senator Frank Church—which officially identified all of the abuses.
Another siren could be heard, approaching from the south. A moment later a Martin County Sheriff’s car raced by on the highway, lights flashing.
“I really do have family here, on the lake,” she told me.
“We’re not going to be able to get far in this truck,” I pointed out. “If they’re looking for us, which we don’t know for sure, it won’t take them long to find the owners of that house and learn what kind of vehicle they kept in the garage.”
“Good thing we don’t have to go far.”
I fired the engine back up.
“Do you have any idea what kind of operation was part of Bishop’s Pawn?”
She stared across the truck’s bench seat, and for the first time I saw pain in her eyes.
“I think it might involve the death of Martin Luther King Jr.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
We drove farther north on U.S. 441 around Lake Okeechobee.
Her comment was troubling. I tried to learn more but all she’d offer was that Valdez had mentioned to her during their calls that Bishop’s Pawn also concerned the King assassination.
“I was hoping to learn more today when I met with him,” she told me.
Which explained all the questions about Valdez back on Loggerhead.
We rode for a while in silence. Finally, she directed me off the highway, down a dirt lane to another house set among a necklace of live oaks, cypresses, and palms. This one was rambling, wood-sided, and ranch-style, fronting the shore. A dark-colored Toyota coupe was parked off to the side. I had a million questions and I desperately wanted to read the files in the waterproof case, but I opted for patience, deciding that ears open and mouth shut might bring me answers faster.
I figured we were about five miles away from where I had landed the plane. Too close for me, but I doubted anyone would be looking here. Why would they? Unless they could connect whoever owned this house to Coleen. What I needed was a phone. Pam owned a cell phone, but I hadn’t moved in that direction. Not yet, anyway. People being able to find me wherever I might be wasn’t appealing. When I left the base I didn’t particularly want to be found. But this new gig with Justice seemed tailor-made for more instant communication. Trouble was, the phone Pam owned only worked here and there. Lots of dead zones in and around Jacksonville.
And the things weren’t cheap.
The front door to the house opened and an older black man emerged. He was dressed in a neat, single-breasted suit that accentuated his thin frame. His face was handsome and fleshed out, dark hair fading to gray at the edges. But his eyes, a firm coal black, radiated unquestioned authority.
“Who is he?” I asked.
She did not look pleased.
“My father.”
* * *
I learned that the weekend house belonged to Coleen’s in-laws. Her husband was a lawyer who worked with an Orlando firm. I was a little surprised about the marriage, as she wore no wedding ring. Her father—the Reverend Benjamin Foster—seemed reserved, as he’d said only a handful of words since we arrived. She was
clearly annoyed by his presence.
“I told you to leave this alone,” Foster said to her.
“You have no right to ask that,” Coleen shot back, her voice rising.
“I have every right.” His tone was not much above a whisper. “This is not your concern. I told you that, more than once.”
“It is my concern. I want to know what happened.”
“I told you what happened.”
She glared at him. “No. You told me what you wanted me to know.”
“You went to meet Valdez?” her father asked.
She looked surprised. “How did you know that?”
“Tell me everything that happened,” he asked, ignoring her question.
She shook her head.
He faced me. “Will you tell me?”
Why not.
I introduced myself and explained my Justice Department connection. The older man listened to my story without saying a word. I could see that Coleen did not appreciate my frankness. When I finished, he said to her, “You will stay here. I have to speak with this gentleman in private.”
Coleen started to argue, but he raised a hand. “You don’t want to try my patience any more than you already have.”
She nodded, seemingly surrendering to his parental will.
The older man pointed at the waterproof case.
“Bring that with us.”
* * *
We left the house in Foster’s Toyota with him driving. The case with the files rested in the trunk. We headed south down the highway to Port Mayaca, where U.S. 441 intersected with State Road 76. Foster turned onto 76, paralleling one of several human-made canals that drained into the lake, and drove a few miles east to a cemetery. He turned off the highway, through an open gate, and parked the car. The land was spacious and tranquil. Tall palms and bushy trees dotted the well-kept grass. No funeral was in progress and no one was around.
We stepped from the car.
A leafy scent filled the warm moist air.
