by Stuart Woods
“Not exactly, but he’s an American journalist, in a manner of speaking, who works for a rag called the National Inquisitor, based in D.C. Know it?”
“Vaguely. It’s gossip, isn’t it?”
“Right.”
“So how does this interest us, Owen?”
“I went through his effects. His name is Edward Partain, American. He had quite a lot of cash and credit cards on him, so it wasn’t a robbery.”
Lance was getting ready to hang up, when Masters stopped him.
“And he was carrying a photograph of Teddy Fay.”
Lance was stunned. He took a moment to collect himself before he spoke. “There are no existing photographs of Teddy Fay,” he said. “He removed them from all the databases before he started assassinating right-wing politicians.”
“There’s at least one photograph now,” Masters replied.
“And how do you know the photograph is one of Teddy Fay?”
“Because I knew him when I was a field agent. He outfitted me for a couple of missions-fake passports, driver’s licenses, credit cards-that sort of thing. He was the top guy in Tech Services.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Twelve, fifteen years.”
“And how old is the photograph?”
“I’m not sure. Five to ten years, I’d guess.”
“Have you mentioned this to anybody in your station?”
“No. Nobody’s in yet.”
“Then don’t. Scan the photo and e-mail it to me now.”
“Will do.”
“Did you get the original or a copy?”
“I got the only one on the body.”
“Send it to me in an overnight pouch, and don’t make any copies,” Lance said.
“Okay. The e-mail just went out.”
“Did the police know anything about this Partain?”
“He had a hotel bill in his pocket from a fairly elegant small hostelry, so they went there and turned over his room. The only odd thing was that he had a receipt for an envelope deposited in the hotel safe, and there was twenty-five thousand dollars in cash in it. It was odd, because he had another five grand in traveler’s checks in his jacket pocket, plus a grand or so in cash and half a dozen credit cards. The police talked to the hotel bartender, who said Partain had a drink with a guy the night before last, somebody he met there in the bar.”
“Description?”
“American, six feet, a hundred and seventy, fifty-five to sixtyfive, and balding, with a comb-over, thick eyebrows, and mustache. Wore heavy-framed glasses.”
Disguise, Lance thought. “All right, Owen, I’ll get back to you.” Lance hung up and sat, thinking, for a couple of minutes. This was trouble. He’d certified Teddy Fay as dead to the director, and since her husband was president and was running for reelection, she wasn’t going to like hearing this report. Teddy Fay had “died” before, then turned up on the island of St. Marks in the Caribbean last year, before being thought dead again aboard a sunken yacht in deep water.
The president had withheld the information from the public that Teddy Fay had turned up alive twice after being confirmed dead, and if this broke now it could torpedo his reelection, which meant that Katharine Rule would no longer be director of Central Intelligence and, since Lance was her handpicked boy, his prospects for holding on to his career wouldn’t be so hot, either.
Lance picked up the phone and called Holly Barker, whose office was adjacent to his own.
“Yes, Lance?”
“Come in here, please.” Lance turned to his computer, found the e-mail from Owen Masters and printed out the photograph.
There was a knock on the door between their offices, then Holly walked in. Since he had been promoted, she had become his most trusted assistant. “Good morning,” she said. Holly was tall and newly slender with short-cropped hair and a firm jaw. She was a retired Army officer who had been chief of police in a small Florida town when Lance had discovered her, recruited her, and seen her trained. She was also one of a tiny handful of people who had actually met Teddy Fay.
Lance handed her the photograph. “Do you recognize this man?”
Holly looked at it carefully. “No, who is he?”
“Owen Masters in Panama says it’s Teddy Fay.” Lance related Masters’s phone call.
“It could be,” Holly said, “but I never saw Teddy except in some sort of disguise, and he was very good at it.”
“Owen knew him fifteen years ago, when they were both at Langley.”
Holly shook her head. “I’m sorry, I just can’t tell. I didn’t know a photograph existed.”
“Neither did anybody else. I want you to go to the offices of the National Inquisitor this morning, get the negative and any copies of the photograph, and scare the shit out of the editor. I don’t care what you threaten him with or do to him, but see that his paper doesn’t run a word about the photo or Teddy.”
“What about freedom of the press and all that?” Holly asked.
“Fuck freedom of the press. You can shoot the guy, if you think you can get away with it. Now get moving.”
34
Holly went back to her office, thinking she had never seen Lance so exercised about anything. Normally he was the coolest operator she knew.
Before she followed his orders she had some prep work to do. She began by going to the website of the National Inquisitor and finding the address of their offices and the name of their editor, Willard Gaynes, then she called Jeannie in Tech Services.
“Jeannie.”
“Hi, Jeannie. It’s Holly Barker. I need some quick work.”
“Tell me.”
“I want a general sort of court order from a federal judge requiring the National Inquisitor to divulge any and all information I request and to produce any documents and photographs I ask for, and a separate search warrant, signed by the same judge, allowing me to tear apart their offices if they don’t give me what I want. Make the order unequivocal and eyes-only secret, with jail as an alternative and national security as a reason.”
“How soon?”
“Yesterday.”
“Gotcha. I’ll get back to you.”
Holly went back to her computer and began doing searches on the backgrounds of both Willard Gaynes and Edward “Ned” Partain. She found interesting stuff and began reading it. Then she called Owen Masters in Panama City.
“Masters.”
“Owen, I’m Holly Barker. I work for Lance Cabot.”
“I know who you are.”
“Please call your police contact and ask him to see that his department doesn’t call Ned Partain’s editor until exactly noon today. I want to break the news to him personally.”
“Anything else?”
“No.”
Masters hung up without further ado.
***
Fifteen minutes later there was a knock on Holly’s door.
“Come in.”
A woman of about fifty walked in and handed Holly two envelopes. “Here you go,” she said. “The court order has a reasonable facsimile of the signature of Judge Ezra Wolfe of the First District Court, and so does the search warrant.”
Holly read the court order and smiled. “Nice work,” she said. “Beautiful job on the letterhead, too.”
“The letterhead is authentic,” Jeannie replied. “We lifted a ream of it from the Federal Printing Office last year. And I made a call to the judge’s clerk, who is on the payroll, so if anybody checks either the order or the warrant, he’ll provide backup.”
“Perfect,” Holly said. “Thank you, Jeannie. I owe you one.”
“It’s what we do,” Jeannie said, and with a wave, left Holly’s office.
***
Ateleven forty-five, Holly walked into the editorial offices of the National Inquisitor and spoke to a woman at the reception desk. “My name is Branson. I want to see Willard Gaynes now.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
Holly reached into her
purse and removed an envelope. “Give him this,” she said. “He’ll see me.” The envelope contained a business card identifying Holly as Assistant Director Hope Branson of the FBI.
“Just a minute,” the woman said. She left the reception room and was back in less than a minute. “He’ll see you,” she said. “Through the door, down the hall to the corner office.”
Holly followed the directions, opened Gaynes’s closed door, walked in, flashed an FBI ID and sat down.
“So, what can we do for the FBI today?” Gaynes asked. He was a short, heavily jowled man with oily dyed-black hair.
“You have a reporter named Edward ‘Ned’ Partain?”
“Yes,” Gaynes replied. “He’s out of town on a story.”
“I know,” Holly replied. “In Panama. He’s dead.”
Gaynes’s eyes widened. “Wait a minute,” he said. He looked at the card Holly had sent him, then picked up the phone and dialed the number on the card, which connected him not to the FBI switchboard but to a facsimile at Langley. “Do you have an agent named Hope Branson?” he asked. “All right, Assistant Director Branson. Please connect me with her office.” He waited, then listened. “Never mind,” he said, and hung up the phone.
“Now,” he said to Holly, “what the hell are you talking about?”
“The body of Ned Partain was found aboard a tanker bound from the Panama Canal to Galveston, Texas, yesterday. He appeared to have fallen from some place along the canal onto the deck of the ship.”
“Was this a homicide?” he asked.
“Possibly. The autopsy is being conducted as we speak.”
The phone on Gaynes’s desk rang. “Excuse me,” he said, and picked it up. He was on the phone for less than a minute. “That was the Panama City police. Apparently, what you told me is true.”
“Tell me why Partain was in Panama,” Holly said.
“We don’t tell the FBI that sort of thing.”
Holly handed him the court order. She waited while he read it, then said, “Tell me what I want to know, or you’ll be in the federal detention center in twenty minutes.”
“I’ve never seen a document like this,” Gaynes said. “Hold on.” He called the number on the letterhead, asked for the judge’s clerk and questioned him, then hung up and turned back to Holly. “What do you want to know?”
“We don’t like it when American journalists die in foreign countries,” Holly said. “Tell me everything about Partain’s assignment.”
“Ned was in Panama to interview a man who is believed to be Teddy Fay.”
Holly snorted. “Teddy Fay is dead,” she said, “confirmed and reconfirmed.”
“Maybe,” Gaynes said.
Holly held up the e-mailed print of Teddy’s photograph. “Is this the man you thought was Teddy Fay?”
Gaynes looked surprised. “Yes.”
“This man is a CIA officer on assignment in South America. Where did you get the photograph?”
“From a woman named Darlene Cole, who works for a law firm in town. She knew Fay years ago.”
“Which law firm?”
“Barton and Falls,” Gaynes said.
“Give me all the copies you have of the photo and the negative.”
“I don’t have the negative,” Gaynes said. “Ms. Cole was cagey about that.”
“How many copies do you have?”
“Look, you’re out of line here.”
Holly handed him the search warrant. “I can have a team of agents here in half an hour to tear apart your offices, but of course, you’ll be in detention by then.”
Gaynes went to a safe in a corner of his office, punched a number into the keypad, and opened it.
Holly watched him and memorized the combination. It might come in handy one of these days.
Gaynes took out an envelope, examined the contents, and handed it to Holly.
She found half a dozen copies of the photo and tucked them into her purse. “Give me the card I gave you,” Holly said, “and the court order and search warrant.”
Gaynes surrendered the documents.
“You are under a federal court injunction not to speak of this to anyone,” Holly said. “I was never here, do you understand?”
Gaynes nodded. “I understand.”
“If you talk about this to anyone on your staff or off, bad things will happen,” she said.
“All right, all right,” he said, raising both hands. “Will you let me know more about Ned Partain?”
“The Panama City police will deal with you on that,” Holly said. “Good day.” She rose and walked out of the office, satisfied with her day’s work.
As she passed the reception desk, a skinny, slightly disheveled young man wearing a backpack was talking with the receptionist. “But I have to see Gaynes right now,” he said. “Ned Partain is out of town, and this is too important to wait.”
“I told you, he’s with somebody,” the woman replied.
Holly pressed the elevator button. “Not anymore,” she said. “Mr. Gaynes is entirely free.”
“What is your name again?” the secretary asked.
“Felix Potter,” the young man said.
The elevator arrived, and Holly got on.
“It’s about some very important tapes,” the young man said.
The elevator door closed, and Holly rode down.
35
Felix sat in the reception room at the National Inquisitor for more than three hours, getting hungrier and hungrier but determined to see Willard Gaynes. Finally, the receptionist got up and went to the ladies’ room, and Felix saw his chance. He was through the door and into the editorial offices before the woman had a chance to get her knickers down.
He stopped for a moment and assessed the layout of the floor. There was a sea of desks in a large newsroom, and offices, apparently for higher-ranking people, along the walls. Where would he sit if he were Willie Gaynes? he asked himself. The corner office, that’s where.
Felix walked purposefully along one side of the newsroom, not dawdling but not hurrying, either. He was wearing a necktie and his best jacket, so he wasn’t dressed too differently from how the other men present were dressed. The corner office was dead ahead, and the door was closed. He stopped, took a deep breath, let it out, rapped on the door, opened it, and stepped in.
Gaynes was sitting at his desk, talking on the telephone. He looked up at Felix and put a hand over the mouthpiece. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.
“I’m one of Ned Partain’s best sources, Mr. Gaynes, and Ned told me that if ever I couldn’t reach him about something important I should come directly to you.”
Gaynes pointed at a sofa. “Sit over there and shut up,” he said, then went back to his phone conversation. “Seсor, please give me the name and number of that funeral home,” he said, then jotted down the information. “Can you tell me, seсor, was this accidental or a homicide?” He listened. “All right, I understand that the official investigation will take some time, but can you give me your personal opinion, based on your experience as a police officer?” He listened again, and his face grew more serious. “Thank you, seсor,” he said. “Please call me at this number should you learn anything new about the case, and may I call you again, if I have any questions? Thank you, seсor, and good-bye.” He hung up and turned to Felix, but he said nothing. He seemed to be deep in thought.
Felix waited him out, and suddenly Gaynes seemed to snap out of his reverie.
“Who the fuck are you?” he asked, as if he hadn’t asked before.
“I’m Felix Potter, Mr. Gaynes, one of Ned Partain’s sources. Ned told me to contact you if I had something important and couldn’t find him, and I can’t find him.”
“That’s because Ned is in Panama, playing the role of corpse,” Gaynes said. “I’ve never lost a man due to violence before, and I’m having a little trouble digesting it.”
“Ned has been murdered?” Felix asked.
“It appears so. That’s the op
inion of the Panamanian police officer I just spoke to, anyway. You’ve worked with Ned, you say?”
Although Felix had set eyes on Ned Partain only once, in a coffee shop in the building, he saw an opportunity. “Yes, sir, and I’m extremely sorry to hear about Ned’s death. Is there anything I can do?”
“You can tell me what’s so important that you come barging into my office unannounced,” Gaynes said, appearing to recover himself.
Ned held up his briefcase. “Mr. Gaynes, I have something in here of national importance, something that could have an important effect on the presidential race.”
Gaynes sighed. “Spit it out, kid. This has been a bad day all ’round, and there isn’t much of it left.”
Felix opened his briefcase and took out a small CD player. He got up and walked toward Gaynes’s desk. “I have a recording of two people here that’s going to knock your socks off, Mr. Gaynes.” He set the little machine on Gaynes’s desk and switched it on.
“This better be two celebrities fucking,” Gaynes said.
“Almost,” Felix replied. The two voices began speaking, their conversation broken, then there was a gap, and they spoke again.
“What’s with all the interruptions?” Gaynes asked. “And why do I care about this?”
“These people were on a cell phone and were recorded just outside the White House,” Felix said.
“What, you’re telling me they’re White House staff? That’s certainly not the president’s voice. This guy doesn’t have a southern accent.”
“Sir, what does it sound like to you that they’re doing?” Felix asked.
“Doing? They’re certainly not fucking. I’ve heard a lot of recordings of people fucking, and that’s not what they’re doing.”
“No, sir, but they’re talking about fucking.”
“Well, I guess you could draw that conclusion,” Gaynes said, “but I wouldn’t want to have to prove it in court. Why do you come in here with crap like this?”
“Because the man is the vice president of the United States,” Felix said.
“The vice president is dead,” Gaynes said. “Don’t you watch TV?”
