The Bubble Gum Thief

by Jeff Miller

  “Yes.” She wanted to try to talk him down to 120, but held her tongue.

  He seemed to read her mind. “At five nine, one twenty-five is still too low. What are you now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “One ten maybe. And headed in the wrong direction. I want you right.”

  “Okay.”

  “Dagny, I want to be clear; I’m not punishing you.”

  “I know,” she replied, even though it felt an awful lot like punishment.

  Cooper pushed his chair back, stood up, and reached for his briefcase.

  “Who’s teaching the class?” Dagny asked.

  “Timothy McDougal.”

  “Isn’t he crazy?”

  Cooper shrugged. “It was the only class I could get you into with such little notice.”

  Dagny nodded and watched Cooper leave.

  She sat there in silence for a while. The phones in the outer offices were still ringing, even at this late hour—Bureau brass inquiring about the Mouse, she feared. An electric typewriter hummed—someone was filling out an evidence card and didn’t know how to use the templates on the computer. A group of men were chuckling in the hallway; she wondered if they were laughing at her.

  Dagny pulled her cell phone from her pocket and looked to see who had placed the call that had almost gotten her killed. When she saw Mike’s name on the screen, she smiled, and suddenly felt a little less alone.

  CHAPTER 4

  January 15—Warwick, Rhode Island

  In retrospect, the best thing that ever happened to Senator R. Brock Harrison Jr. was that hooker falling off his boat.

  At the time he’d been a rising star. Upon his elevation from the House to the Senate, Tim Russert had praised his preternatural political skills and visionary eloquence. David Broder had referred to him as “future president Harrison.” Maureen Dowd said he was “delicious.” Then, amid talk of a presidential bid, reporters began to follow him closely. The attention was flattering, but it cramped his style. The slightest extramarital indulgence required incredible feats of subterfuge and misdirection. Awkward disguises. Switching cars and such. It had been hard enough keeping things secret from his wife, but reporters weren’t so easily deceived. Unlike Mrs. R. Brock Harrison Jr., they didn’t have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion of a perfect marriage.

  So when that hooker fell off his boat, the accolades gave way to denunciations and the man who would be president became just another punch line for the late-night comedians.

  But a funny thing happened. The good people of Rhode Island reelected Senator R. Brock Harrison Jr. Although he’d never be president, he realized that virtually no sexual misdeed could ever disqualify him from the Senate. And to the surprise of many, including the senator, Mrs. Harrison stood by her husband after his very public mea culpa and a three-week stint at the Promises Clinic—a medically accredited rehabilitation center/health spa/thirty-six-hole championship golf resort in the foothills of Tucson, Arizona.

  The whole experience was rather liberating, and the past three years had been one long erotic and culinary orgy, conferring upon him thirty-five new pounds and a case of gonorrhea. At forty-six years old, Harrison was in the prime of his life.

  As the senator worked the crowd at the Warwick Museum of Art, he kept checking his watch. Across the room, a skinny girl in tight jeans was twisting the cap off a Miller Genuine Draft. She had jet-black hair and when she stretched, her shirt lifted to expose her midriff, showing off her belly ring. Harrison imagined that she owned a secondhand guitar and wrote songs in minor keys about her feelings. Good Lord, she was sexy.

  Harrison started toward her, but Margaret Meddlebaum, the museum’s matronly director, caught his arm. He concealed his annoyance and turned on the charm. “Margaret, my lovely dear, is it time already?”

  “Yes, Senator, if you don’t mind.”

  She walked him to the podium and the crowd grew quiet. While she introduced him, he glanced at his watch. His appointment was at nine thirty, so he had to keep it short. Maybe he’d abandon his ten-minute speech for the five-minute one instead. He surveyed the crowd of social do-gooders, aging hippies, and young free spirits. Every one of them voted for me, he thought, and will again. He flashed his broad smile and pushed his blond hair away from his eyes. Keep it short, he reminded himself.

  “It’s great to be here, but I have to run.”

  Harrison had jettisoned the five-minute speech for a five-second one. He offered poor stunned Margaret a quick good-bye, kissed her cheek, and left through the back door. A minute later, he was driving his Lexus down Route 117 into West Warwick, following very explicit directions. Suspiciously explicit, in fact.

  If it was a setup, Harrison had his story—he was conducting research for a bill pending before the Senate. This actually seemed like a good cover to Harrison, but then again, he was a little drunk.

  The senator parked in a lot at the corner of Saint Mary’s Street and Legion Way. It was 9:24 p.m. He fiddled with the radio, then turned it off. When a police car approached on Legion Way, Harrison’s throat closed tight and he couldn’t breathe. After the policeman drove past, he laughed nervously, then fiddled with the radio again.

  At 9:32, a black Ford Explorer turned into the lot and pulled next to Harrison’s driver’s-side door. The other driver turned off his engine and lowered his window. Harrison did the same.

  Shadows hid the man’s eyes. “It’s five hundred.” The man’s warm breath drifted into Harrison’s car.

  “You said it was two hundred.” Harrison knew he was being taken, but he wasn’t surprised. He had brought $1,000 just in case.

  “It’s five hundred.”

  Harrison didn’t budge, and the man in the Explorer started his engine. “Okay,” Harrison relented. “Five hundred.”

  The man turned off his car. “It’s six now.”

  Good Lord, if only Harrison were just some street junkie, then the guy would have given it to him for two. “Okay, six.” The senator fumbled with his wallet and then placed six hundred-dollar bills in the palm of the man’s white latex glove. The man took the cash and then leaned forward into the light, revealing his face.

  “Look at me. Do you see me?”

  Harrison stared back into the man’s eyes. So cold, Harrison thought, as cold as the winter air. Harrison looked away.

  “Look at me!” he commanded. “Do you remember me?”

  Harrison looked back at the man’s face. He did look vaguely familiar.

  “Do you?” the man barked.

  “No,” Harrison said, looking away again.

  “You will.” The man turned the key to his car, starting the engine.

  His voice was so haunting that the senator nearly forgot about the merchandise. “Hey, what about the...”

  The man in the Explorer grunted, or maybe laughed. He receded back into the shadows and tossed a bag of cocaine through Harrison’s window, onto the senator’s lap. A white card was attached. Harrison tore it from the bag. It looked like a business card and had a piece of gum taped to the back. The card read:

  THIS IS MY SECOND CRIME.

  MY NEXT WILL BE BIGGER.

  When Harrison looked up, the Explorer was gone. Yet the image of the man’s face and those cold, cold eyes seemed to float outside the car window. Why did his face look familiar?

  Harrison ripped open the top corner of the bag and dug his pinkie into the snow-white powder, then brought a pinch up to his nose. Good Lord, he felt alive. He started the car and slammed on the accelerator. If he hurried back to the museum, the skinny girl might be waiting. Maybe he could take her out on his boat.

  CHAPTER 5

  January 16—Quantico, Virginia

  The FBI Academy is nestled deep in the Quantico woods. Apart from Hogan’s Alley and the gun ranges, the Academy’s nondescript concrete campus feels like that of almost any small college. Prospective agents live in dorms, eat at a dining hall, and, if they choose, pray in the chapel. In the la
rger classrooms, agents-in-training sit at long curved tables on elevated tiers. The orange molded-plastic seats at these tables aren’t padded, but they do swivel. Sometimes they squeak. When someone from the Behavioral Science Unit flashes bloody crime-scene slides on a large screen and describes the methodical way in which a body was torn to pieces, no one notices the squeaking. But when a Department of Justice lawyer lectures about the technical details of the exclusionary rule, the squeaking seems to grow to an intolerable pitch.

  Dagny’s chair didn’t swivel, and the room she was sitting in didn’t look much like a college classroom. It looked like what it was—a large basement supply closet. Pallets of toilet paper were stacked in one corner and an old mimeograph machine sat in another. There was no chalkboard or lectern, just a single easel with a dry-erase board. Overhead, a single bulb hung from a cord that swayed when the air kicked on. The center of the room was packed with old wooden chairs with attached desks—refuse from a middle-school yard sale. A small desk sat at the front of the room, facing the students. Dagny surveyed the other nine agents who had been selected to participate in the Professor’s program. It was a motley crew. Two grey-haired men in the back of the room were playing Game Boys. The young woman to her right was sleeping. She wore too much makeup, and her nails were bitten to the quick. The young man behind Dagny looked seventeen; because of his short red hair, the Nintendo agents kept calling him “Opie.” Although the class was intended to be a comprehensive overview of counterterrorism techniques, it looked more like a scene from The Breakfast Club.

  It was five past nine, and the Professor was late. When the door finally swung open, craned necks gave way to disappointment as a handsome black man walked in. Dagny recognized him as Brent Davis, an ambitious agent, two years her junior. Brent had all the markings for success in the FBI—a deep voice, a fighter’s body, and a scholar’s mind.

  Dagny had met Brent just once, three years earlier at the National Institute of Justice’s annual conference in DC. He had been working the room pretty hard, smartly building a network of useful connections, and foolishly thinking Dagny could be one of them. They had talked for only a couple of minutes then, so she was surprised that he seemed to recognize her now. When their eyes met, he smiled and gestured for her to step out to the hallway.

  “Dagny Gray,” he said. “I don’t get it. I know it’s January sixteenth, but it feels like April first in there.”

  He’d remembered her name. “You still in California?” She rolled her hair between two fingers, and stopped when she realized she was doing it.

  “No. Colorado and Texas since then, but I’m hoping to end up at the home office. Thought this course could help.”

  “Surprising mistake for a blue-flamer,” Dagny said, making a friendly jab at his ambition. “I’m surprised you remember me, by the way.”

  Brent smiled. “You’re not an easy face to forget.”

  If she’d felt like flirting, she would have replied, “You either.” But instead she suggested they go back in.

  Brent agreed and followed her into the classroom, claiming the lone empty seat, two away from Dagny.

  Another twenty minutes passed without the Professor’s arrival. Dagny wondered if he was just a mythical figure, like a unicorn or Sasquatch. After all, McDougal’s life did seem to be the stuff of legend. In the late fifties, he disrupted a socialist-terrorist network based in New England, preventing an attack on the New York subway system. A few years later, he stopped a group of pro-Castro dissidents from setting off explosives in a handful of Miami hotels. And then in the late sixties, he infiltrated the Weathermen and helped sabotage a number of planned attacks, including the bombing of a noncommissioned officers’ dance at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. McDougal had fought domestic terrorism long before most people were even aware that it existed.

  For all his heroics, McDougal had a reputation as a malcontent. When he learned that COINTELPRO—the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program in the sixties—had been gathering evidence against the Weathermen through illegal searches, he refused to work the case. He was rewarded for this principled stand with a stint in the Iowa field office, where he headed the investigation of an interstate cattle-thieving operation. Two years later, the cattle thieves were locked away, and McDougal began to work his way back into the Bureau’s good graces. He helped local police catch a serial killer in Des Moines, and then did the same in St. Louis, Detroit, and Indianapolis.

  These successes won McDougal an invitation to work at the newly created Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico. At the BSU, he lectured new Academy recruits and his didactic and Socratic style earned him the nickname “the Professor.” Despite its derisive origins, McDougal actually liked the nickname and encouraged its use. And since he had no clear title at the Bureau, it was easy for most to simply refer to him as the Professor.

  At first, McDougal’s work in the BSU was widely appreciated, but as he grew older and crankier, his act started to wear thin. In the early nineties, he started writing predictive and prescriptive articles criticizing Bureau operations and forecasting an onslaught of new domestic terrorism. For a while, they appeared in the FBI’s monthly Law Enforcement Bulletin, but when McDougal’s alarmist tone escalated, publication was refused.

  Undaunted, McDougal self-published, faxing Professor McDougal’s Journal to field offices around the country. Younger agents referred to them as “Letters from Grandpa Simpson.” But after the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the attack on the USS Cole, these dispatches seemed more prophetic than crackpot.

  Members of Congress quoted from McDougal’s missives when questioning Bureau leaders, which only earned McDougal additional enmity within the FBI. He was stripped of his lectures, moved to an isolated office, and given nothing to do.

  Things changed when the new president was elected.

  The president’s father had served as a senator in the 1960s. Some claimed that McDougal had tackled an assassin just as he was raising his gun to shoot the senator. Others said that McDougal dove through the air and intercepted the bullet with his body. Still others insisted that there had never been any gun at all, and that McDougal had discovered that the senator’s cook had been poisoning his boss’s food. Regardless, the election of the president seemed to change the Professor’s fate, because he was subsequently allowed to create his own domestic terrorism course. Bureau leaders were not happy about this, hence the shabby classroom digs.

  The years of undeserved indignities were said to have weighed heavily upon McDougal, and the man unfairly maligned as a crackpot had supposedly become one. That’s why few had signed up for the class, and why Brent’s presence was such a surprise.

  Given the Professor’s heroic reputation, Dagny had expected him to be big and strong, but it was a short, slight man who finally limped through the door, looking more like an old mad scientist than some kind of James Bond. His small, round head started with a shiny bald spot and ended in a pointy grey beard. Round wire-rimmed glasses sat on his sharp nose. He wore a tweed jacket with patches on the arms, and his frail body shook with a frenetic energy, though he actually moved very slowly. A cane would have helped; Dagny figured he was too proud to use one. She guessed he was in his midseventies, though he could have been as old as eighty, or even ninety. It was hard to tell for sure; he just looked old.

  Despite the Professor’s appearance, his voice was vibrant and strong.

  “Welcome to what I am sure has been described to you as the end to your career in the Bureau.” He spoke in a quick, agitated manner. “I am an old coot, a has-been, a crackpot, a lunatic, a madman, right? You’ve heard all of these things, I assume. There are rumors and stories about me. I won’t discuss any of them. That’s not why we are here. Suffice it to say, you can look around this room and draw your own conclusions about my stature within the Bureau.

  “Some of you—all of you, I hope—are wondering what this program is supposed to be. Six weeks of what, exactl
y? We already have counterterrorism training, so what is this, besides a vanity project?” He paused a beat and then continued. “I’ll tell you what it is: it’s another view.

  “After September eleventh, the Bureau put four thousand agents on the case. That’s what you do with a big case, right? You throw people at it? I’m skeptical. I believe that a handful of people can do a better job than a thousand. We spend too much time looking for information and not enough time analyzing it. We are handicapped by our size. We have too many layers. We are—pay attention to me!” The Professor threw a book at the woman sleeping next to Dagny. It missed, but still woke her. She looked like she was about to cry. The Professor was unmoved. “There may come a time when you are working a case, and you will have to make decisions, and those decisions will have import. If you make the wrong decision, people could die. Perhaps many. Perhaps thousands or even millions. I may or may not be able to tell you something that helps you make the right decision. But God help you if I do and you can’t remember it when it matters. This class is important!”

  The Professor limped around to the front of the desk and leaned against it. He scanned the room, taking inventory of his disciples. Dagny pegged his look for extreme disappointment.

  “Agent Gray?” he called out.

  Dagny was startled. “Yes.”

  “How is practicing law different than practicing law enforcement?”

  “In law you can always ask for a continuance.”