October's Ghost

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  Avaro had heard them come through the front door but had no time to react. The gun under his right leg could do nothing now. His hands, clad in fingerless black gloves, came up slowly so there would be no doubt as to his intentions.

  Two of the agents from the follow-up team put their guns on the suspect from the doorway as the rest of the house was checked and secured. The team leader then stepped gingerly into the room, his MP-5 trained on the man. Proper procedure dictated that the suspect be instructed to “go prone,” but that was obviously not an option in this case.

  “Do you have any weapons?”

  Avaro’s eyes fell on the yellow “FBI” stencil on the agent’s chest. The idiot had to call from his house! Fucking fool! “Under my leg.”

  The agents’ fingers placed the barest amount of pressure on the triggers of their submachine guns at the admission. One stupid move was all it would take.

  But that move would not happen. The team leader sidestepped to the man and reached under his right leg. The bone in the atrophied limb was easily felt through the thin cotton pants. He eased the 9mm pistol from between the leg and the cushioned seat of the wheelchair and laid it on a table to the side. “Anything else?”

  The barrel was a few inches from his face, and he looked through the sights in reverse to see the blue eyes of the FBI agent staring down the right way at him. The stupid, fucking fool! “No.”

  “Baker King, this is Baker Leader, we have house secured and unknown male in custody.”

  “On our way.” Agents Christopher Testra and Frederico Sanz got to the back room just as the house’s only occupant was being cuffed and Mirandized. That he was in a wheelchair surprised them, but only momentarily. What the rest of the room held was infinitely more interesting.

  “Nice setup,” Testra commented. The compliment had a purpose beyond the commentary.

  “Thanks,” Avaro replied.

  Thanks... The voice sounded identical. Testra got a nod from his partner. “You’re welcome.”

  “So your guys page you, leave a number of a phone booth, you call them there, and...”—Sanz gestured to the sophisticated communications setup on the table— “What, you use this to keep in touch with your boss?”

  Testra visually examined the multiline cellular system spread across the table. Two phones, indoor antennae, a coax cable going out the window—to a roof antenna, no doubt. And... Hmm. You are a serious player. “An encryption package?”

  “Well,” Sanz said in a very teacher-like fashion. “We are a very smart fella. Now why don’t you be even smarter and tell us your name and who you work for.”

  Avaro stared stoically at his inquisitors. He would say nothing, and there was no way they could make him talk.

  “Mum’s the word, eh?” Testra picked up one of the cell phones and dialed a number from memory. “You were right to think we couldn’t tap your cell calls, at least not without a whole lot more trouble.” He bent forward and smiled at the defiant face. “But that don’t matter now... Hello, this is Special Agent Christopher Testra, Miami FBI. Blue Rainbow Sunset.” The confirmation of the code phrase came from the phone company supervisor without pause. “I have a federal wiretap warrant, and I need the name of the registered user of this number and a list of all calls made from it for yesterday and today. I’ll wait.”

  Their prisoner’s expression changed as the seconds of waiting dragged to minutes. “I ain’t done nothing, man.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Sanz said. “My guess is that your fingerprints are all over this stuff. I didn’t see any ramps from your doors, so my guess is you’re pretty much a homebody.” A quick flash of anger resulted from the comment. “Which ties you to this place quite nicely. And we have you on tape talking to a very bad boy about some very naughty things. No, I figure you’ve done plenty.”

  Testra scribbled a few things on his notepad before thanking the supervisor and hanging up. “Well”—he looked down at the name—“Avaro Alvarez. Pleased to meet you.”

  Alvarez? Avaro Alvarez? “Did they have the call list?”

  “Ten minutes, Freddy.” Testra caught the speculative tone of his partner, then the name clicked. He had worked too long on the Coseros case to forget the name of Alvarez. “Do you think his daddy knows what he’s doing?”

  Sanz smiled. “We should know in about ten minutes.”

  * * *

  Some arrests required force. Others required guile.

  “Hey, we got a gas leak.”

  The booming voice from the porch startled Sam Garrity. His nose tested the air as he walked through the living room to the front door. There was no obvious rotten-egg smell, which had come to be associated with natural gas, though that was produced by an additive to the odorless gas. But smell or not, it was nothing to fool with. There had been problems in the neighborhood before with leaks in the underground lines. He didn’t need the added distraction on this day especially, but what was there to do?

  “Where’s it this time?” Garrity asked the worker after opening the door. He was a stocky black guy, dressed in the blue jumpsuit that gas-company workers wore when the work got dirty—Great! Digging again—and carrying a probe that looked like a vintage metal detector less the sensor plate at the bottom.

  “Not sure, but we got a pressure-drop warning,” the worker explained. “We’re checking all the streets and all the houses. It should take just a couple minutes. But if the sniffer detects anything, I’ll have to shut your meter off for a while.”

  A “So what?” look flashed on Garrity’s face. “Who needs gas when you’ve got a microwave?”

  The worker smiled, but not at the joke. “Sure, but cold showers ain’t no fun.”

  “Yeah. Come on in.” Garrity stepped aside and let the worker pass through before pushing the door closed...

  But it stopped against something, which his eyes identified as the foot of the worker just before he felt the touch of cold steel behind his left ear.

  “FBI. If you move, you will be dead.” The agent tilted his head toward the microphone concealed under the jumpsuit. “Whiskey One. I’ve got him.”

  In seconds there were two more agents in the front room. The trio put Garrity on his face, searched him, and cuffed him before lifting and setting him in a straight-back chair one agent had dragged in from the adjoining dining room. More agents, cops, and who-knew-who-else were arriving, and soon the street in front of Samuel Garrity’s modest Hyattsville home was impassable. One agent showed the stunned man the search and arrest warrants, reading the pertinent portions of both along with the requisite Miranda warning, then stepped out of the way as another man entered the living room.

  “Hello, Sam,” Deputy Director, Intelligence, Greg Drummond said. “I hear you’ve been moonlighting.”

  Garrity’s face, painted with surprise, followed the DDI as he strolled around the room like a disappointed parent who’d just caught his teenager in a lie. A very big lie.

  “I’m just curious, Sam. Why?”

  There was no answer, just an averting of the eyes.

  “I see,” Drummond said knowingly. It was money. He had dealt with treason in many forms, and one thing that always stuck out when those motivated by ideology were caught was their willingness to slam the system they’d struck out at with their actions. Those motivated by greed had no such conviction that could “explain” their acts, even if they thought otherwise.

  “Mr. Drummond, you should see this,” the supervising agent said, leaning through the doorway of a room down the hall that bisected the house. “We have some interesting stuff in here.”

  Drummond saw Garrity’s eyes widen a bit as he looked to the agent speaking. “One minute. Well, Sam, how do we do this?”

  “What do you mean, sir?” He added the “sir” out of habit, and subconsciously in the hope that it might bring some mercy.

  “I mean that you can tell us everything—everything— and then we can see if anything can be worked out.”

  The offer
was thin, but then what else did he have? Everything they needed to hang him was in the room they were now pawing through. Garrity was far from a genius, but it took much less to realize that things were going to happen with or without his cooperation. He decided to get on the boat before it sailed without him. “All right. I’ll tell you whatever you want.”

  “Good.” The DDI turned to his Agency bodyguard. “Pick a room and get the stenographer in here. We have a story to hear.”

  * * *

  Mike Healy paused after the Agency’s Florida liaison to the INS finished recounting what he knew. Getting him to do even that had taken some strong words from the DDO. CIA officers were not prone to disobeying direct orders from a superior, in this case the DCI himself, but then disobeying a deputy director had about as much appeal to it. It was the choice of who was on the other end of the secure phone.

  “You are absolutely certain of this?” Healy asked after processing the believably unbelievable.

  “Positive, sir,” the officer affirmed. “I did just like the director ordered. When Portero came in for an interview, he gave me this big long story about a missile and said he had proof of some kind. I thought he was a bit loony at first, but his past checked out. Plus he knew things that only someone in a government position would know. So, I got all the pertinent information and passed his story to Director Merriweather, just as ordered.”

  “Pertinent information?”

  “Right. Name, address, phone.”

  “Anything after that?”

  “About a month later the director called me personally and told me to forget what Portero had told me. So I did.”

  Healy was thinking ahead of himself, trying to add this new piece to the overall picture. “No notes, correct? No hard copy of any kind?”

  “It never happened, sir,” the officer said: “Just like the director told me... I forgot. Until now, that is.”

  “Forget it again,” the DDO directed. “This time on my order.” Click. “Anthony, what have you done?” he asked after hanging up. Whatever it was, he couldn’t use the officer he had just talked to to prove it. The Agency relationship with the INS was quasi-legal at best, but very necessary, which meant he could jeopardize neither the officer nor the ongoing operation. And that, in turn, left no way to use the information to hang his esteemed boss high and dry.

  “There has to be a way,” Healy told himself, wishing that determination were enough to make his desire a reality.

  * * *

  Nick Beney caught his boss coming through the door. “That was fast.”

  “You said hurry. What’s up?” Bud asked, setting his bottled water on the deputy NSA’s desk.

  “More now than when I called you.” Calling anyone out of a meeting with the President took guts, precisely the reason Bud had chosen Beney as his deputy. “Greg Drummond is on a mobile and Director Jones is at Hoover, and Mike Healy just got in the queue. He’s at Langley. All urgent, to use their words.”

  “Wonderful,” Bud said. Urgent had to mean something about Cuba, and a trio of calls from the integral players in the situation could hardly signal anything positive. Life wasn’t that fair. “Let’s not make anyone wait. Conference it, and I’ll pick up in my office.”

  Bud walked behind his desk and twisted the window shades closed to cut the glare from the afternoon sun. He finished the water with a quick gulp and lifted the handset. “Hello, everybody.” He was answered by three return greetings. “First of all, nobody is on speaker, right?” None were. The speakerphone was too much of a security risk, allowing those within earshot to hear things that were never intended for their ears. “And this is a four-corner conversation here, so let’s keep the interruptions to a minimum. Gordy, do you want to start?”

  “Sure.” The FBI director could be heard flipping pages on his end of the line. “Our Miami field office served search and arrest warrants on the occupant of a house who a wiretap indicated was receiving information from a CIA employee. Greg was in on the warrant service up in D.C.”

  “This was the leak you were worried about?” Bud asked.

  “Yeah,” Drummond answered. “What did you get, Gordy?”

  “The person receiving the information was Avaro Alvarez, son of José-Ramon Alvarez.”

  “The head of the CFS?” Bud asked.

  “Exactly.” Jones confirmed. A barely audible “Jesus” came from the DDI’s end of the line. “Avaro Alvarez was also directing the actions of two men in Los Angeles who killed Francisco Portero and one of my agents.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Drummond said clearly this time. He knew just about everything after talking to Garrity, but not that. “You’re sure? Directing them?”

  “The tape does not lie,” Jones said. “And we should know more soon. I just got word a few minutes ago that one of the gunmen was captured alive by the L.A. office. But let me tell you the rest. Avaro also had a sophisticated communication scheme involving pagers and phone booths worked out. He used this with the men out west and with the CIA leak. His name’s Samuel Garrity. Anyway, Garrity broke security and used his home phone. That’s how we nailed them. But he also had an encrypted cell-phone system set up to keep in contact with his bosses.”

  “Encrypted. Like a voice scrambler?”

  “No, Bud. Beyond that. It was one end of a multi-user package. Any phone with the same coded package can decrypt the transmission and convert the signal to simple audio. Without the package all someone would hear is white noise. It’s a pretty fancy system for a user like Alvarez.”

  “So the other end has to have the same equipment,” Bud said.

  “Right. Actually the properly coded microchip,” Jones explained. “And guess who was at the other end? Avaro’s cell-phone records indicated calls exclusively to one number. That number is a cell phone registered to a company called Onotronics.”

  “Wait,” Drummond interrupted. “Onotronics out of Fort Lauderdale?”

  “I knew you’d recognize it,” Jones said. “A major manufacturer of secure communications systems. They even did work on WASHFAX and SECVOCOM. And the company is owned and operated by Gonzalo Parra.”

  “Number two in CFS,” Drummond expanded.

  “And the calls in the previous two days have all terminated at a cell node near Shelton College, on the Cape.”

  “Dammit,” Bud said softly. Why them? There were plenty of legitimate Cuban-American groups longing for their nation to be free again. Bright, patriotic, honest people. And too quiet in this case. The CFS had made the most noise making a name for itself, and had garnered much of the attention that should have been directed elsewhere. It was little wonder the rebels chose to contact such a “high profile” group, and less surprising that Anthony Merriweather had anointed them as the chosen ones. His chosen ones.

  “It’s all very incriminating,” Jones said. “But not direct enough to prove CFS involvement beyond Avaro Alvarez. From this there’s no way to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Parra or any other CFS official was at the receiving end of those calls. We have him cold on espionage and conspiracy to commit murder, but we can’t legally extrapolate that to his father or anyone else without more evidence.”

  “I think I can give some of that,” Drummond said. There was a determined edge to his voice that came from the revelation that murder was side by side with treason in the CFS’s repertoire. “Garrity came clean. Completely. The leak I thought I had in my directorate was actually in the next office.”

  “What?” Bud said, the suggestion hard for even him to comprehend. “You mean Anthony?”

  “Yes, but he didn’t even know he was giving just about everything discussed in his office to Garrity, and by way of him to the CFS.”

  “How?” Bud asked.

  “Anthony’s incessant scribbling and note-taking.”

  “But that all went into the burn bag,” Healy said. “I thought we discounted that”

  “The notes, yes. But Garrity didn’t need those.” The DDI explained
the janitor’s exploitation of the device to decipher indented writing.

  “We use Deep Reader!” Jones said, making the same mental note as the DDI to see that more stringent security measures be implemented regarding note tablets.

  “But how did this Garrity link up with the CFS?”

  “Chance and availability, Bud. When Garrity decided to use his toy for some moneymaking, he just went to the top of the list. The CFS was the big topic of the moment for Anthony, and they were reachable. Not like some of the other parties in his notes. Garrity couldn’t very well just go up to the Chinese embassy, or wherever, and say, ‘Look what I can do for you.’ But he could easily slip away to Florida, like on a vacation, to make his pitch to Alvarez and his bunch.”

  “The money,” Healy said.

  “Yep,” Drummond said. His counterpart had made the connection. “Garrity was passing pilfered intel to the CFS, and they were selling it to any and all takers. A financial trace that S and T was running identified a long list of contributors to a CFS account in Bern. The Chinese, the Israelis, Russians—all through intermediaries. It goes on and on.”

  “The Russians,” Bud said with a slight chuckle. “I guess it wasn’t just my convincing that got them to come on board.”

  “You laid the groundwork, but catching Anthony’s thoughts on the modernization program might have been the convincer,” Drummond said.

  “So there is no druggie connection between the CFS and Coseros,” Healy observed.

  “Maybe in the future, but all Coseros has done so far is pay for information.”

  “No wonder he could avoid indictment,” Jones commented.

  “Right. Every time I went in to brief Anthony on a new surveillance of Coseros, the same information made its way to him through the CFS.”

  “Wait a second,” Bud said. “A CIA leak was supplying Anthony’s notes to the CFS through Avaro Alvarez. They were then selling this information to Coseros and others to fill their coffers. Plus, the son of the CFS head was also directing the actions of two men who killed the man who had the tape of the Castro/Khrushchev conversation. My question is why the CFS would have any interest in Portero?”