Triple Crown

by Felix Francis

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Only the box, thank you.’

  I again paid in cash and gave a false return address. The transaction might have been anonymous but I had noticed the CCTV camera in the corner of the store, silently recording the faces of everyone who entered. I wondered whether I should have used one of my disguises, but perhaps I was being paranoid about secrecy.

  But it was better to be paranoid, I thought, than dead.

  I spent some of Sunday afternoon sightseeing.

  To be precise, I took a taxi from my hotel across the Potomac to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial.

  My first disappointment was that the cherry blossom was well past its prime, with much of it now decaying on the ground beneath the trees that surrounded the memorial. But there was enough remaining to give me some idea of how magnificent it must have been only a week or so earlier.

  I climbed the circular marble steps and walked between the classical Ionic columns. In the centre, under the shallow marble-clad dome, stood a nineteen-feet-high bronze statue of the third president of the United States. I looked up at the face of the man after whom I had been named.

  Jefferson Hinkley.

  As a child I had hated my name. I was made fun of at my junior school because of it and I had vowed at the time that, thereafter, I would be known only as Jeff.

  Curiously, in the presence of his likeness, I felt a slight affinity towards the man. Not that he was buried here. His final resting place was on his family plantation at Charlottesville, about 100 miles south-west, and this memorial had been built more than a hundred years after his death.

  Jefferson was perhaps best known as the principal author of the US Declaration of Independence and part of his preamble was cut into the marble: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness . . .

  Strange, therefore, that Jefferson had been such a strong supporter of slavery. Indeed, he’d even had African slaves working in the White House during his presidency and, after his death, 130 slaves from his plantation were sold at auction to help pay his debts.

  All affinity gone, I walked away without a backward glance across the bridge into West Potomac Park and on to the memorial of my other presidential namesake.

  In full, I was officially Jefferson Roosevelt Hinkley. I was never able to ascertain the reason why my parents had named me after dead American presidents. By the time I realised where my strange forenames came from, my mother had died and my father claimed it had been her idea and he couldn’t remember the reason. In truth, he couldn’t remember much, other than where he had hidden his whisky.

  I had always imagined that the Roosevelt after whom I had been named was Franklin Delano, the hero president of the New Deal and the Second World War, rather than his fifth-cousin Theodore – he of teddy-bear fame – who only became president due to the timely assassination of his predecessor.

  The memorial to FDR was very different to that of Jefferson, being very much a creation of the mid-1990s. It lacked the grandeur of the earlier structure, consisting of four outdoor ‘rooms’ depicting the four terms of his presidency.

  One of the many inscriptions on the memorial caught my eye, an extract from Roosevelt’s inaugural speech on first becoming President in 1933.

  The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

  I hoped he was right.

  ‘Mr Hinkley,’ called the young woman at Reception as I walked into the hotel, ‘package for you.’

  I signed for a small plain-white padded envelope with my name written on the front in pencil. It had to be from Tony, I thought. No one else knew I was at this hotel.

  The envelope contained two USB flash drives and a short handwritten note:

  Here are the agency personnel files, the communication inquiry and the operation reports. I had them copied from the off-site data backup server so no one at the agency should be aware. I’ve asked my wife to deliver the package.

  He’d clearly been busy in the twenty-four hours since we’d met.

  The flash drives were each sixty-four gigabytes and they were both crammed with data.

  I sat at the desk under the picture window and opened the first drive on my computer. It contained the personnel files of not only the racing section but all 2,631 employees of FACSA, as of the previous Friday. They were listed alphabetically by last name and it took me some time to navigate my way around the index to access them by section. But, before long, I had found the files of the eight agents working specifically on horseracing, together with their section head and six support staff – two intelligence analysts, one IT specialist and three admin assistants.

  I connected the new printer to my computer with the USB lead. I had purposely not bought one that worked wirelessly and, furthermore, I ensured that both the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities on my laptop were switched off. Unlikely as it might be, I did not want someone else remotely snooping on my snooping.

  I printed out the front page for each of the fifteen files and laid them out on the floor in a large semicircle round my chair. Fifteen faces stared up at me like arrest mugshots. I stared back at them.

  Was one of these faces really that of a mole – someone who was prepared to forewarn wrongdoers of an impending raid? And if so, why? For financial gain? Or out of some misplaced sense of mischief?

  Six of the fifteen were women – two of the agents along with four of the support staff.

  Where the hell did I begin?

  I spent the next four hours cross-referencing the names of the fifteen with their phone and email records that Tony had provided.

  It was a mammoth job and I had barely scratched the surface by the time the figures began swimming in front of my eyes from tiredness.

  By then I had discovered only one thing of interest.

  I had no absolute proof, no smoking gun, but I was pretty sure that two of the agents were engaged in a secret relationship. It was something about the tone of their emails, together with the number and timing of the phone calls between them that left little doubt.

  I looked more closely at their files.

  Robert Wade, known as Bob, was forty-two, a former DC Metro-area traffic cop, married with two teenage daughters. He had been recruited into FACSA at the time of its creation sixteen years previously and was now considered to be one of its senior agents. According to comments in his assessments, he was being tipped as a future head of the horseracing section.

  Steffi Dean was a recent recruit, having been a field agent for only a year. A graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, she had spent seven years in the service as a logistics officer, rising to the rank of captain before quitting the military to join the agency. At twenty-nine, she was thirteen years younger than Bob Wade, and single.

  I leaned back in the chair and yawned.

  I wasn’t here to pass judgement on the morals of the agents, just on their honesty. We all have our little secrets. It was only those that harboured corruption that I was after.

  I went on through the lists but my concentration levels were dropping so much that I was wasting my time.

  I glanced at the brightly lit red digits of the hotel alarm clock – 10.02 p.m. Hardly time for bed, but it was 3 a.m. back in London and I could hardly keep my eyes open.

  I would have to continue in the morning.

  As requested, I presented myself at the Federal Anti-Corruption in Sports Agency at nine o’clock on Monday morning dressed in my best Armani suit plus silk tie. First impressions were important and an Englishman abroad would be expected to be smart.

  The agency was housed in what appeared to be a normal, modern, glass-and-concrete office block, whose architect had clearly devoted only a minimum of imagination to its design.

  But there was nothing normal about the security arrangements.

  The building and its associated parking lots were surrounded by an eight-f
oot-high steel fence topped with razor wire, and the main gate would not have looked out of place at a top-security prison.

  When I arrived on foot there was a line of vehicles being checked through, each of them having to first negotiate a tight chicane of large concrete blocks before being searched by the guards, some of whom had machine carbines slung across their chests.

  ‘Papers?’ demanded one of the guards in a manner that reminded me of a Gestapo officer in a war film.

  I handed over the letter of introduction I had been given from the US Embassy in London together with my passport. The guard left me standing outside the pedestrian gate as he went into the guardhouse to check my credentials.

  I waited.

  There was a large notice on the guardhouse wall that declared that all firearms were prohibited on these premises unless authorised by the Attorney General of the United States. Beside it was another that announced that it was unlawful for more than twenty-eight persons to occupy the guardhouse at any one time, by order of the US Department of Homeland Security.

  I was attempting to count the guards, to ensure there were fewer than twenty-eight, when the Gestapo man returned and handed back the letter and my passport together with a FACSA-branded lanyard attached to a rectangular pass with ‘VISITOR’ stamped diagonally across it in large red letters.

  ‘Use the front door,’ he said, letting me through the gate and pointing across at the building. ‘Report to security inside.’

  More security? What are they hiding?

  I had to empty my pockets and then pass through a metal detector before I was directed towards the building’s main reception desk where again I had to produce my letter of introduction.

  ‘Norman Gibson is expecting me,’ I said.

  I was asked to wait.

  The receptionist made a telephone call and, presently, a man in his late forties appeared from the lifts and strode purposefully towards me.

  ‘Jeff Hinkley?’ he asked. ‘I’m Norman Gibson.’

  We shook hands.

  ‘Delighted to meet you,’ I said.

  ‘Let’s go up.’

  He used his lanyard pass to activate yet another security barrier and ushered me through.

  ‘It is like getting into Fort Knox,’ I said.

  ‘Blame Timothy McVeigh,’ Norman replied.

  In April 1995 Timothy James McVeigh had detonated a 5,000lb bomb outside the federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including nineteen young children in a day-care centre. Needless to say, security since then had been greatly beefed-up at all US federal buildings.

  ‘I’ll fix it so you get your own pass,’ Norman said. ‘Then it’ll be easier for you to get in. Security is a bore but I suppose it’s better than being dead.’

  ‘Much,’ I agreed. ‘And the threats seem to be ever-increasing.’

  ‘You’re so right. We have more than our fair share of nutcases who blame the government for everything. Plus we have the anti-abortionists and the animal liberation lot to contend with – both worthy groups, I’m sure, but they seem to attract extremists. And don’t even mention the Islamic militants . . .’

  I thought about the security arrangements at my office in London – or rather the lack of them. There was a reception desk in the lobby by the front door of the building but it was usually unmanned. The main reception for the horseracing authority was on the second floor and that was dead easy to bypass.

  We took the lift up and I followed Norman along a corridor and through two more security doors before we reached his office, a glassed-off corner of an otherwise open-plan space.

  ‘Welcome to the racing section at FACSA,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Who are you with?’

  ‘The BHA,’ I said. ‘The British Horseracing Authority.’

  ‘Is that a government agency?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It was set up by the British Jockey Club and is wholly funded by the racing industry. We’re responsible for the regulation of all horseracing in Great Britain.’

  ‘We could do with something like that here. American racing is still regulated by the individual states, each of them with different rules. Everyone agrees it would make sense to have a nationwide authority but the states are reluctant to give up their power bases. They all think they know best. That’s why we at FACSA act as the de facto upholder of common standards using federal anti-corruption legislation.’

  It sounded like a line he’d used often before.

  ‘But it is a bureaucratic nightmare.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Everything to do with governments is.’

  ‘The BHA gets no financial support from the British government, nor do we answer to it.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ Norman said. ‘Now, how can we help you?’

  ‘I’ve really come only to watch and listen,’ I said. ‘To study how you do things and compare them to our own methods. To see if there’s something for us to learn.’

  He nodded. ‘I hope there is, but you have far more racing over there than we do here. Perhaps we should be the ones taking lessons.’

  I smiled at him. ‘Maybe there will be something I can spot that would be beneficial to us both.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Norman said, although my smile was not reciprocated and I detected a slight annoyance that an outsider was here at all, let alone a foreigner with more experience of racing.

  ‘I’ll try not to get in your way,’ I said.

  ‘Good. We’ve not had a foreign observer in this section before. Most go to the FBI anyway, although I think our baseball team had someone from Japan last year.’

  ‘How many sections are there in FACSA?’ I asked.

  ‘Lots,’ he replied somewhat unhelpfully. ‘The major sports each have their own – baseball and basketball are the biggest. Then there’s the Olympic Games section. That’s where it all started. There was such a hoo-ha over allegations of bribery to get the Winter Olympic Games at Salt Lake City back in ’02 that the Department of Justice set up FACSA to ensure it could never happen again.’

  I had a vague memory of all the fuss at the time.

  ‘You should have a FIFA section,’ I said with a laugh. ‘That would keep you busy.’

  ‘We do,’ he replied seriously. ‘We pass our findings on to the FBI as we have no jurisdiction outside the US. Hence it was FBI agents who made arrests with the Swiss police at FIFA headquarters back in May 2015.’

  ‘Have you been with the agency long?’ I asked.

  ‘I joined twelve years ago,’ he said. ‘Moved from Chicago. The winters were too long and cold up there.’ He smiled but it didn’t really reach his eyes.

  And I knew the real reason why he’d left Chicago.

  I’d been up early and studied his personnel file.

  He had been a high-flying detective in the Chicago Police Department, promoted young to be commander of the 26th District on the city’s South Side. However, his glittering police career had stalled somewhat when five of his junior officers had been arrested for planting incriminating evidence to secure a conviction. Even though the investigation by the FBI had concluded that Gibson had not known about or been involved in the conspiracy, he had done the honourable thing and resigned.

  That principled action had been rewarded by the call to set up the racing section at FACSA.

  There was a knock on the office door. Norman looked over my head and stood up. ‘I’ve arranged for you to spend time with one of our special agents, Frank Bannister.’ He waved the man in. ‘Frank, this is Jeff Hinkley, from England.’

  I stood and shook Frank’s hand while we both looked each other up and down. He was taller than me by at least four inches, and broader too. He squeezed my hand hard as if to make sure I knew that he was also stronger. He smiled down at me and I smiled back without a waver. If he wanted to play silly games, so be it, but I wouldn’t rise to his bait.

  ‘Frank will show you the ropes,’ Norman said. ‘Stick to him like glue.’


  Frank didn’t look best pleased at the prospect but he was civil enough – just.

  He showed me round the office and I met the other staff.

  ‘Bob Wade,’ one of them said, smiling warmly and offering his hand. ‘Welcome to the madhouse.’ He laughed with a distinctive rapid-fire guffaw.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  Steffi Dean sat at the desk next to his. Not conducive, I thought, to hard work. I also shook her hand and wondered what she saw in Special Agent Wade, who appeared somewhat older in the flesh than in his personnel-file mugshot.

  ‘Are you all special agents?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure are,’ Frank said. ‘All FACSA agents are special.’

  I wasn’t sure if he was being facetious.

  ‘Ignore him,’ Steffi said. ‘But he’s right. Special agent is a rank and all FACSA agents are special agents. We’re all L-E-Os, just like the special agents in the FBI and DEA.’

  ‘L-E-Os?’

  ‘Law-enforcement officers.’

  ‘Does anyone have only regular agents?’ I asked.

  ‘Not here,’ Frank said loudly. ‘Nothing regular about this lot.’ He laughed expansively at his own joke while Bob and Steffi looked slightly embarrassed.

  ‘Does everyone carry a gun?’ I asked.

  It was difficult not to notice the automatic pistols that each of them had in holsters either on their belts or under their shoulders. The Attorney General had clearly been busy with his authorisations.

  ‘Only the special agents,’ Steffi said. She patted the gun as if it were a family pet. ‘Never leaves my side. I even sleep with it under my pillow.’

  I wondered if there were two guns under her pillow when she slept with Bob Wade.

  ‘Have you used yours much?’ I asked her.

  ‘Only on the range. We all have to pass a marksman test every year in order to keep our special-agent status. But I’ve never had to use my weapon in the field. Not yet, anyway.’

  ‘Is it loaded?’

  She smiled at me as if I was an imbecile. ‘Of course it’s loaded. No point in having it otherwise.’ She removed the gun from the holster. ‘Glock twenty-two-C, point-four-zero-calibre automatic.’ She pushed a latch on the pistol grip and slid out the magazine, visibly full of shiny brass bullets. ‘Fifteen rounds per mag. Smith and Wesson hollow-nosed expanding ammunition. And I have a silencer plus two more full mags on my belt.’