by Jake Devlin
“Yes; at least, he told me he was – um – the Special Agent in Charge.”
“And he also denied both the pickup and holding him?”
“Right. But his voice was off somehow when he said that.”
“Might be a coverup of some kind, huh?”
“I think so, but I just don't have any idea why the FBI would do something like that. It's just all a big stone wall, nothing to go on except that Gordy's not here.”
“Well, we've got Carie's video.”
“What? Carie has a video?”
“Yeah. She was shooting you and Gordy dancing, 'cause you looked so happy together.”
“Nobody told me.”
“Oh, geez, I thought you knew.”
“No. Oh, Jill, that's great,” she said, hugging Jill. “Can I see it?”
“Sure; I think she's got it with her.
“Hey, Carie?” Jill shouted to her sister.
“Yeah?” Carie replied.
“Can you bring that video down here, let Rosemary see it?”
“Sure.”
A few minutes later, Rosemary said, “Look, that's them, right there. And see, there's their badges. Oh, Carie, this is such good news. Thank you, thank you, thank you.” She hugged both of the sisters. “Can you send that to me?”
“Sure. What's your number?”
Rosemary gave it to her and a few moments later, Rosemary pulled the video up on her phone. “Got it. Oh, Carie, Jill, thank you!“
Jill said, “You know, we probably ought to send copies of that to a lot of other people, too, just to be on the safe side.”
“You think” – Rosemary started to say.
“Yeah, I do. This could be more than just a coverup.”
“Oh, geez. Carie, what do you think?”
“She may be right. I can send it to a bunch of friends, ask them to save it somewhere safe, and I can upload it to the internet, too, and get it to some news people. And I'll copy it to some DVDs and spread them around, too.”
“Great. Let's get that rolling. This is the first piece of good news I've had. Thank you both again.”
- 82 -
January 10, 2013
12:33 a.m. local time
Aboard Defiance
In the Gulf of Aden
“June 1985 was the first time any operatives in our group had been compromised. We'd been warned to be alert for any signs of a Soviet mole, ever since our initial training, of course, had to take a polygraph every year, but when we lost two of our honey trappers in a single op, we knew we had one somewhere on the inside. So we had to find him and do it quickly.”
“But you never did?”
“Nope; he covered all his tracks too well. We never dug him out.”
“But you had your suspicions?”
“Yeah, but not until much later, and now I'm pretty sure I was set up to suspect Zach.”
“By your guy, my classmate?”
“Yeah.”
“And when did your suspicions get targeted at Zach?”
“Oh, not long after we got married. He became my case officer in 1987, and we got married in May of 1989. I think the first time I suspected him was about two months later.”
“Okay; that gives us that timeline. Now, have you found anything in the latest batch of info from Phil and Nadia, anything useful at all?”
“A couple of things. First, he often has dinner at this restaurant in Georgetown.” She pointed to a highlighted name in the report.
“Ah, one of the best and most discreet. Any particular schedule?”
“Not from what's in this report, just that it's a couple times a month, but random dates and random dinner partners.”
“Okay. What else?”
“Just an anomaly. Once a month, always on a Sunday morning, he gets in his personal car and drives off, leaving all his bodyguards behind. He's gone for a little over two hours, gets back just before noon and goes back into his house, alarm set and bodyguards back on duty. But nowhere in the reports does it show where he goes.”
“Nobody ever followed him?”
“Not from the reports Phil and Nadia were able to dig up.”
“Okay. We'll put some surveillance on him for that.”
“Other than that, so far he comes off as squeaky clean.”
“And that's suspicious in and of itself.”
“Got that right, Jake.”
“I'll keep all the teams looking. We'll get to the truth, Pam; I promise you that.”
“I know, Jake, I know. But now come to bed; you're exhausted.”
“Yeah, it has been a long day.”
“And I won't keep you up much longer.”
“Oh, I have a feeling you will.”
“Now that you mention it, you're right.”
- 83 -
January 10, 2013
10:08 a.m. local time
Fort Myers, Florida
“No, definitely not ours,” the Special Agent in Charge said. “But those badges do look real. I'll have the techs run 'em through our facial recognition program, see if we can get some IDs.”
“Thank you,” Rosemary said, sighing with relief and squeezing Jill and Carie's hands.
“And then what?” Dallas asked.
“Well, once we find 'em, we'll charge 'em with impersonating a federal officer, kidnapping and whatever else we can come up with.”
“And you'll get Gordy back?” Rosemary asked.
“We'll do everything we can. But it's going to be tougher because you waited till now to bring this to my attention.”
“I called every day since he was taken. Your receptionist always said you didn't take him or have him. And you said the same thing when I got through to you that one time.”
“We didn't, so we wouldn't have any record. But now that I've seen that DVD, we'll open an investigation and do everything we can to find and recover him and bring the perps to justice.”
“What can we do now?” Carie asked.
“Go home, leave it in our hands, and we'll let you know when we have something.”
“So we do nothing?” Rosemary asked.
“Leave it to us; we're the professionals. But now I've got another meeting, and I'll get this DVD to the techs. Thank you for coming in.”
After the four women left, he leaned back in his chair, rubbed his temples and picked up the phone.
“Leon, we've got a problem. I'll have to check with my dad, but you and Charlie need to move that guy today. Get him out to the place in Lehigh.”
- 84 -
January 11, 2013
9:05 a.m. local time
Casa Mila (La Pedrera), Barcelona, Spain
When Senora Talsis opened the door to the roof for the dozens of tourists who'd been waiting for up to an hour to wander among Antoni Gaudi's amazing sculptures, nothing in her six and a half decades of life had prepared her for what was about to occur just beyond the base of the Helmets.
As the tourists streamed past her, the Americans pushing and elbowing the others as they surged to get to the head of the crowd, she stepped quickly behind the now-open door, sighing to herself at the rude behavior. But with two weeks to go before her long-awaited retirement, she had long ago come to regard the Americans with both contempt and futility.
But when a particularly heavy American male stepped on her foot and jostled her as he shielded himself from the wind to light a huge cigar, she pulled herself up to her full five-foot-four-inch height, waggled a finger in his face and hissed, “No smoking, sir. Please extinguish that.”
“Lady, it's an open roof. You can't ban smoking up here.”
“Did you not see the signs on the gate below?”
“Signs? What signs? No.”
“They are there and you cannot smoke anywhere in Casa Mila, even up here.”
“Lady, do you know who I am?”
She paused and looked at him closely. “No, I do not.”
“Well, I'm Sam O. Brickelmortimer and I'm an American fucking Senator, and you wil
l give me the respect my office deserves.”
“Sir, you are in Barcelona, Spain, and I am Catalan, so no matter what respect you think your office commands in your home country, it does NOT allow you to smoke in Casa Mila, even on the roof. Now, extinguish that cigar immediately.”
“And what are you going to do if I don't?” The Senator blew a mouthful of smoke directly into Senora Talsis' face.
“Is there a problem here, Paris?” The Senator turned to face the door and the uniformed guard staring up at him.
“Put out that cigar, Senor. There's no smoking in Casa Mila.”
“Don't you call me Senor, sonny; it's Senator,” he blustered.
As the commotion rose, several of the tourists ahead of and behind the Senator aimed their cell phones in his direction.
Oblivious, the Senator continued to bellow at the guard, “And don't you ever tell a United States Senator what he can or cannot do!”
“Senator,” the guard said, his voice dripping with contempt, “if you do not put that cigar out immediately, I will put it out for you.”
“Oh, yeah? You and what army?”
“Kein rauchen, Dummkopf (No smoking, dumbhead)!” a high-pitched voice rang out, and as the Senator turned toward it, he immediately found his cigar, his face and the front of his four-thousand-dollar suit sprayed with water. A five-year-old boy kept his squirt gun aimed at the Senator's face and yelled, “Schweinhund, (pigdog)” while a distinctively American male voice came from the crowd, “Asshole!”
Photos and videos of the Senator's dripping, angry face and his clumsy pursuit of the boy, who ran nimbly through the crowd, and the Senator's final moments of life, as he stumbled into and through the guard fence, slid and fell six and a half stories to the courtyard floor and his squishing, blood-spattering, scream-ending death, immediately began trending on social media around the world.
Senora Talsis and the guard hurried to the broken section of the fence, the guard calling for security and maintenance on his radio, while Senora Talsis launched back into her ritual spiel.
“Move along, please; siga adalante, por favor; weitergehen, bitte; dépéchez-vous, si'l vous plaît; muovetevi, per favore; pade passeur, por favor; lad os gaa videre, vendligst; Prahadite, pazhalusta, Pazhalusta, prahadite; keep going, eh.” (The last one for Canadians.)
When the Barcelona policia were able to analyze the photos and videos, they determined that the senator might have bumped into, tripped over or been pushed by a heavyset gray-haired woman just past the first set of helmet sculptures. Despite a wide-ranging search, with assistance from Interpol, the CIA, NSA, FBI and the media, the woman was never found, so the case remained open, with a tentative cause of death as accidental.
None of those agencies ever discovered any trace of a call on an encrypted satellite phone ten minutes after the incident, made by a slim young brunette six blocks away from Casa Mila, carrying a bulky shopping bag. “Authentication 4873645. Target terminated. An opportunity presented itself and I took it, got away clean, I think. But we'll head back to Madrid and then on to – oh, you can? Great; that's better. We can be there in maybe an hour – no, tell the pilots an hour and a half, okay? Good, great. See ya soon, Amber.” She put the phone back in her bag.
“Damn, Carie Berry, I didn't get the chance to cut his balls off.”
- 85 -
January 12, 2013
1:13 p.m. local time
Aboard Defiance
In the Gulf of Aden
“She did? Good for her. Maybe they're ready to come into the inner circle. What? Oh, yeah, they'll be surprised. All that time we spent on the beach and they had no idea. I'll love to see the look on their faces. And when they meet Pam here, too. Oh, yeah, that'll be great.
“So how's the R&D building coming along? Damn. Any way to hurry 'em up? Greg and Julie have reached the limits of what they can do here. Oh, yeah, it works fine, but the ranges are limited. Did one test, nineteen kilometers and 84 minutes. I even stuck a pencil in the thing as it was growing and that went along, too. I was totally awestruck at the potential. You've got to see it to believe it, Amber. So the sooner you can get the building done, the sooner you'll get to be astonished.
“Anything new from Phil and Nadia or the other teams? Really? Great. Shoot it over as soon as you can. Pam'll be glad to see that.
“What else? Six? Really? Geez, what's this world coming to? Guess it's just getting more polarized. Can we handle 'em all? Well, if you need me and Pam to take one again, let me know. Who? Kitty and Robin? Oh, right; the newbies. They wanted what? The Catbirds? No, that's no good, too cutesy. Tell 'em to come up with something else. But you think they can do the job? Okay; fine. Let 'em loose on it.
“Anything else? What? And you left that for now? That shoulda been the first thing. Okay, okay; sorry. Did you try his chip? Shit. Well, keep monitoring. So who's got him? Really? They were the two dirtiest guys in the Bureau, and they're still in tight with the asshole's son; at least the asshole father is dead, thanks to the Mimosa twins. They did? Can you send that over, too? I want to see that for myself. And send me the dossiers on those three assholes. Yup, anything we've got. Shit; twelve days. They've probably killed him by now. We've got to move fast on that, just in case. I owe him; it's my fault. No, I know he agreed, but he – shit. I owe him.
“Our girl over there still got her cover intact? Good. Get in touch with her and let her know we're doing all we can, okay? Good. Anything else? Okay. Thanks, Amber. All hands on this, okay?”
He hung up the satphone and headed up to the deck above the bridge to give Pam both the good news about her guy and the bad news about his.
- 86 -
January 13, 2013
9:13 a.m. local time
Bonita Beach, Florida
“Thirteen days! Oh, Dallas, I'm so afraid he's dead.”
“C'mon, Rosemary, you gotta keep your hopes up” Dallas said. “I'm sure something's gonna happen soon and you'll see he's okay.”
“Right,” Jill and Carie chorused.
Sharon added, “C'mon, Rosemary. Chin up. Look at what we're all doing.”
Rosemary looked around and saw Gordy's PVC lounge sitting in his usual spot, empty except for a large sign that read “Where is Gordy O?” and another with a photo of him and the words “Attention, FBI. Free Gordy O. NOW!!!!” Scattered around the beach, several of the beachgoers held similar signs or had them hanging on their chairs or umbrellas. All told, at least twenty signs were on display. None were visible near Ron and Jenny's chairs.
“We've also got it on all the social media sites, and it's going viral,” Janet said. “And I got two of the local stations to come down and do stories. They should be here soon.”
“Oh, gang, thank you for all you're doing. I just hope some of this works,” Rosemary said. “And I got a call from some reporter in DC. I have no idea how she found me, but she apparently met Gordy when he was up there last month. She wants to help, too, so she's putting a story in her paper. Sondra something, I think.”
“Uh-oh,” Dallas said. “What's this?”
A Collier County sergeant and a deputy walked onto the beach, looked around and loudly said, “Who can tell me what this is all about?”
Rosemary, Jill, Carie, Dallas, Janet and Sharon all waved. The sergeant and his deputy walked over to them.
“Okay, what's going on here?”
Dallas was the first to speak up. “The FBI kidnapped our friend and we have no idea where they've taken him or what they might have done to him.”
“What do you mean, kidnapped?”
“They took him out of our New Year's Eve party, and nobody at the FBI will tell us why or where he is, and they've denied taking him at all, even the top agent there. He said the guys that took him weren't agents at all,” Rosemary said, beginning to sob, “and we're all worried about him.”
“This is not Argentina, but it's like they've disappeared him,” Jill put in.
“Wait a minute. You mean th
at author guy, Jake Devlin?”
“Yeah, but that's his pen name; his real name is Gordon – but I can't pronounce his last name,” Dallas said.
“Did you check with the FBI under both names?”
“Yes, I did,” Rosemary said. “They all said they had no record of his being arrested, detained or even picked up, even the top guy. It's like Jill said, they disappeared him.”
“Off the books,” Sharon said.
“Wait a minute. You said the SAC told you the guys who took him weren't agents. Why are you aiming your protest at the feebs?”
“Who else is looking for him?” Dallas asked.
“If they even are looking, if they don't have him,” Jill said.
“The SAC could be lying,” Sharon added.
“We're just prodding them,” Carie said, “not protesting.”
“Okay, okay, girls,” the sergeant said. “As long as you're not chanting or disturbing the peace, these signs are fine. And I'm going to check with the feebs, see what they tell me. But don't expect much, okay? They're not too friendly to local cops. How can I reach you, other than here on the beach?”
Dallas gave him one of her cards, and Rosemary wrote her name and phone number on the back of it. The sergeant gave them each one of his.
“Sergeant … Dooley? Thomas Dooley?” Rosemary asked.
“Right.”
“You're the one who broke up that abortion bunch, right?”
“Yes, ma'am; that was me.”
“I thought you looked familiar.”
“I've also got a personal interest in this. I wanted to tell him it was okay with me that he used my name in his book. So I'll do whatever I can to help get him back.”
“Thanks, Sergeant,” Rosemary said, smiling as best she could.
“I'll be in touch,” he said, as he and his deputy left the beach.
Later in the day, two TV reporters showed up and interviewed the women, took several shots of the signs and did standups near Gordy's lounge. The stories were the first stories on each of those local stations' evening and nighttime news shows, accompanied by edited portions of the video Carie had shot on New Year's Eve.
