The Eldridge Conspiracy

by Stephen Ames Berry

  “No doubt,” said Philip as the sentry returned. Not for the first time he reminded himself that Iceman was intelligent, obedient and very fast.

  The corporal handed them their credentials and two visitors’ badges. “Please park there on the right and enter through the main doors to my left. Clip the badges to your jackets and wear them at all times.”

  “Thank you,” said Philip, pocketing his fake ID. In the past year he’d been, variously, an FBI agent, a CIA officer and a USAID agronomist. “Which floor is the EPMAC facility on, corporal?”

  “Fifth, sir. Take the left elevator. The one on the right is always reserved for the Admiral.”

  “But it’s 8 p.m.,” said Martin.

  The Marine stared at him blankly.

  “Let’s go,” said Angie, rejoining Paul inside the door to the main corridor. “Come on!” she cried as the smoke began filling the SLIF work area. They ran from the room, shutting the door behind them.

  “If this building goes up, Jim’s gonna have to find me another job,” said Paul.

  “Not the best time to ask him,” said Angie. “What about the sprinklers? Smoke alarms?” she asked as they ran for the garage.

  “There aren’t any,” he said. “The government exempts its older buildings from that silliness.” An elevator bell chimed.

  Stepping from the elevator, Philip and Iceman saw the smoke seeping under a door to their right and two people in brown overalls going through a set of doors to their left. Philip recognized one of the faces that glanced back at them, just before the doors swung shut. “Milano!” he cried.

  Torn between his orders to preserve the surviving SLIF records and his desire to get Angie, Philip called, “Get them! I’ll see to the fire!”

  Iceman took off in pursuit.

  Philip ran toward the smoke, stopping only long enough to pull the fire alarm. Klaxons echoed through the empty building. He kicked open the door to the SLIF office, then staggered back from the searing heat, arm thrown across his face. Acrid smoke billowed past him, pouring into the hall. Gagging, he turned toward the elevator only to find it gone, automatically sent to the lobby when he’d triggered the fire alarm.

  Smoke filled the hallway. Philip ran through the fire door and down the stairs, taking them two at a time.

  Paul was backing the van out of its parking space, turning for the exit ramp, when Iceman came tearing around the corner, twenty feet behind them, an automatic in his hand.

  “Gun!” cried Angie as Paul straightened the van out and accelerated for the exit, engine roaring.

  Iceman fired seven quick shots. He got off three more as the van disappeared down the ramp with a squeal of rubber. The hollow point rounds punched through the vehicle’s paneling, a series of overlapping dull Kachunks! A bullet found Paul. “Fuck!” he gasped as it seared along his ribs, then punched into the dashboard, destroying the speedometer.

  The van swerved, hitting the ramp wall, bouncing back to the center as he fought for control.

  Philip ran through the deserted lobby and into the parking lot. Behind him the fire alarm continued, seconded by the flashing of strobe-like evacuation lights.

  “Corporal!” he called, jogging to the guard post. “A vehicle’s coming down that parking ramp. Stop it!”

  The Marine ignored him, instead signaling to the guards manning the main gate to open it. “Sir, Post One,” he said into his radio. “The fire apparatus are approaching. It’s the whole fifth floor is...”

  Gunfire mingled with the sounds of sirens and air horns drawing near.

  “Small arms fire in the complex, sir!” said the corporal. “Say again, small arms fire in the complex!” Overhead windows suddenly exploded, tongues of orange-red flames licking upwards as glass cascaded into the parking lot, sending the Marines scurrying away from the building.

  Philip heard a vehicle racing down the parking ramp. He turned toward the parking garage exit, drawing his pistol, only to freeze in mid-stride as something sharp and hard gripped his right wrist. Looking down, he saw his old friend the Rottweiler growling up at him, the fire’s red flames dancing in its eyes.

  “Gun on the ground, sir! The corporal’s M16 was aimed at Philip’s chest.

  “You have to stop that van!” cried Philip, dropping his pistol even as the van shot from the bottom of the ramp and out the gate, opened wide to receive the fire engines roaring down the street. The van turned right and was gone, seconds before the first of the engines came through the gate.

  “Sir, you’re not in my chain-of-command,” said the corporal, as a Marine Humvee pulled up beside them, disgorging reinforcements. “And you’re not authorized to carry a weapon on this base. On the ground, sir. Before Chewie takes your arm off. Please.”

  Chewie growled hopefully, tightening her grip.

  Smoldering with rage, Philip did as ordered.

  Next time, thought Philip, as rough efficient hands searched him and his wrists were handcuffed behind his back. Next time.

  “You’re sure a fun date, Angie,” said Paul, as she finished wrapping a great swath of gauze around his side.

  “Not so bad yourself,” she said, neatly cutting off the bandage and securing it with a couple of butterfly pins. “Where’d you learn that little thing with the lock picks?”

  “I wasn’t always a programmer,” he said, wincing at the pain as she helped him pull a t-shirt over his head.

  They were back on Royal Street in the office at the back of the shop, the bullet-riddled van taken away by a friend of Paul’s who “fixes things.”

  “Want to tell me what you and Mr. Jim are into?” asked Paul.

  “No,” she said, with a tired smile. “Want to tell me why you didn’t mind helping me break, enter and torch a Federal installation? Guess that’s, what? A hundred years in jail?”

  “Only ninety-eight with good behavior.” He smiled weakly. Walking to the small fridge in the back he took out a beer and held it up. “Last one. Split this with me, and I’ll answer your question.”

  “Deal,” she said. “Here, let me open it,” she added, as he struggled one-handed with the tab.

  “When’s your flight?” he asked, pouring a carefully gauged half a beer into a glass.

  “Oh-six-hundred. First plane out.”

  “Time enough to tell you about Mr. Jim’s Small Business Administration. Though we may have to go out and get us some more beer before we’re finished.”

  “You shouldn’t be drinking very much,” she admonished, accepting her drink. “Retards coagulation.”

  “We’ll get us some light beer, then,” he said, raising his glass. “Here’s to still being alive.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” said Angie as they touched glasses.

  New England

  November 1998

  Chapter 14

  “I thought you’d given up looking for trouble?” asked Tooky as the waitress brought their double espressos. “Got yourself a cush government contracting job.”

  “Trouble found me,” said Jim.

  “Always the way, isn’t it? So, what’s up?”

  “I need your help in locating some people and getting to them before others do. Trouble is, I don’t know who they are—I only have their grandparents’ names, with addresses from 1943.”

  “Jesus, Jim! 1943? You don’t need a private detective agency—you need a genealogist.”

  “Tooky.” Jim leaned forward intently. “I can’t tell you any more, but if the bad guys start grabbing folks before we can get to them, our grandchildren may not be around.”

  “Didn’t know you had kids,” said Tooky.

  “I just found out.”

  “You old rascal!”

  “Kaeko’s alive.”

  “Oh,” Tooky set his cup down. “Okay,” he said after a moment, “so, maybe you’d better just knock off the need-to-know crap and tell me everything.”

  He was a big man. Jim had watched Tooky Azarian’s brown flesh expand over the years, from the trim CI
D officer he’d first met in Tokyo, to a larger, seam-challenging CIA officer in McLean, and now, in comfortable retirement, a very fat man. Over the years those who’d thought Tooky slow in either brains or speed had been quickly disabused of their misconception.

  “It’s real nasty, Tooky,” said Jim. “Two people who got involved in this are already dead.” Customs Agent Killed in Washington Area Break-In, had read a small headline in yesterday’s Boston Globe. “The opposition would like nothing better than to add my name to that list—mine and anyone helping me.”

  “Jimbo, let me tell you something. I’m upper middle-aged. I’ve got a good pension, two lovely grown kids, a nice business dealing with minor industrial espionage, wayward spouses and runaway teens. More business than I can handle, really. I’ve got over thirty employees, three offices—I’m thinking of franchising.” He leaned forward. “I am so bored. I haven’t had a real challenge since before the Berlin Wall came down. Remember busting that GRU operation in Luxembourg?”

  “This isn’t the GRU or the KGB—these guys are more like the Assassins Guild. There are no rules of engagement. And if you come in on it, we’re all alone. If we screw up, Uncle isn’t going to bail us out, give us an ‘Atta boy!’ and send us to Jamaica for R&R. We’ll be dead. Worse, Uncle’s behind these guys.”

  “Jimbo, can you do whatever you need to do without me?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’m in.” He held out his hand. They shook, Tooky’s larger hand engulfing Jim’s. “Hell, if it comes down to it, I’d rather go out with my boots on.”

  “Let’s take a walk,” said Jim, rising and throwing some money on the table.

  They walked slowly up an almost-deserted Hanover Street, turning left into the green stretch of Paul Revere Park, Jim doing most of the talking, Tooky sometimes nodding, interrupting occasionally with a quick question.

  “What you need,” said Tooky a half-hour later, as they ate cannoli at a small cafe on Prince Street, “is for me to run down those names, come up with third-generation survivors and their addresses.”

  “Yeah, but I need it yesterday. The theory is Whitsun doesn’t have any of these names, but if he does, or gets some, he has a magical data system that can track down descendants in seconds.”

  “Well, I’ll have to do it the old fashioned way. Fortunately you haven’t got that many names. When I said it sounded more like genealogy research, I meant it. And there are all sorts of genealogy resources out there. Deaths, births, current addresses. You did say you have the social security numbers?”

  Jim took a diskette from his pocket, passed it to Tooky. “Take it, you’re committed.”

  “If my wife knew about this, she’d have me committed.” Tooky slipped the diskette into his pocket.

  “Give me what you can get within the next twenty-four hours,” said Jim, writing a phone number on a napkin. “Memorize and...”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said the big man, glancing at the number and then shredding the napkin. “Teach your mother to suck eggs. How long you going to be in town?”

  “Until Angie gets back from New Orleans, at least.”

  “Want to come over for dinner tonight? We’ve got a nice place down in Cohasset, on the water. Maryann’s doing Chicken Marengo. Bring Angie along if she’s back.”

  “Love to, but tonight I’m attending a lecture at Harvard.”

  “You?” laughed Tooky. “I think I may pass on that Chicken Marengo just to see you at Hah-vad.”

  The sound of the key in the apartment door jerked Jim from a quick nap. He was only half off the bed when Angie arrived, overnight bag in hand. “Having a little nappy?” she asked, dropping her bag on the rug and giving him a kiss.

  “How’d it go?” he asked.

  She told him, pouring herself a beer and sitting on the sofa. “I made Paul let me take him to his sister’s house in Metairie,” she concluded. “She’s a nurse. She gave him a shot—none too gently—and told him he was an idiot. She also told him he’d be fine and would have a very nice scar to impress the girls with. Oh, and Paul told me all about Mr. Jim’s SBA program.”

  “Did he now? You know, that’s not what my bosses called it. You want some coffee? Had anything to eat?”

  “Yes and no. So you were the CIA’s Robin Hood?”

  “Oh, just another chapter in the life of a demi-god,” he said, ducking a thrown sofa pillow.

  They’d given him money—it had been Billy Budd’s idea—money to expand a loose network of domestic contacts into a cohesive whole. It was strictly illegal, of course, but the Agency had been burned too many times by sloppy FBI counterintelligence and desperately wanted its own domestic sources. So, with a covert blessing from the White House, Jim Beauchamp had been given seemingly unlimited funds and sent forth. The model to be used was that which had worked so well for so long overseas: establish businesses in key areas, using them as fronts through which to monitor things of interest—things like the movement of Soviet diplomats, their contacts and communications, sniff out and unearth possible sleeper agents and terrorists. Jim’s to-do list was seemingly endless, driven by Cold War paranoia and directed by officers who perceived themselves as the last virulent bulwark of a decadent West confronting an expansionist Evil Empire.

  It was a mindset of which Jimbo took full advantage.

  In seven heady years, years during which the economy was in the crapper, CIA money seeded hundreds of successful small businesses, many of them minority-owned, all established by Jim Beauchamp through a variety of dummy corporations and venture capital firms. All could be called upon to perform certain tasks for the United States—some were asked to do so, most weren’t. One requirement of funding was the provision of scholarships to bright kids who otherwise wouldn’t have gone to college—kids like Paul Laval.

  Then one day it was all over. The Berlin Wall was down, Russia was broke and communism lived on only in Fidel Land. Jim Beauchamp’s career as the CIA’s greenback-planting Johnny Appleseed ended. Carte blanche for the military and the intelligence community also ended even as fiscal scrutiny increased—Jim’s long discussions with the Agency’s audit and inspector general services were just beginning. The same people who’d before wanted to know as little as possible about his activities now couldn’t know enough. (“Beauchamp’s questionable use of the funds entrusted to him casts disrepute upon the Agency and may ultimately hinder its ability to perform its mission,” read a portion of a memo from Rick Ames to then Deputy Assistant DCI Harry Rourke, a copy of which Jim had long cherished.) In the end, when they couldn’t prove he’d taken a penny for his own use—because he hadn’t—they sent him off to school, let him work a few more years, then made him a retirement offer he knew better than to refuse.

  “It was one of those Rearm America binges,” said Jim as Angie poured more coffee. “Money just poured in and out into the usual greedy hands. It would’ve been obscene given the chance I had not to try and do some lasting good rather than just filling the usual platinum rice bowls.”

  “So then they threw you out.”

  “I didn’t mind. It was the most fun I’d had since Emmy died.

  “Freshen up, Milano. We’ll go over to Dom’s, have some real Italian food, then take the train over to Harvard Square.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re attending a lecture at Harvard’s Cronkhite Graduate Center: America’s Forgotten Fathers. Apropos, isn’t it?”

  “This wouldn’t have anything to do with...”

  “It would.”

  Paul Laval had no idea why his father wanted an inventory. It wasn’t as though the old man moved much merchandise or made more than a modest income from the place. It was possible, he thought, moving with the clipboard along the center display cases, that he was thinking of selling and retiring. Stopping, Paul counted, then wrote “Gris-gris bags, 11” on the yellow legal pad.

  He looked up as the tinkling bell above the door announced a customer. “Good morning,” he said. The customer, a
thin white guy in his thirties, nodded, eyeing the display cases as he moved slowly through the store, hands in jacket. It was a cold day for New Orleans, with temperatures in the upper 40’s. The morning radio reported commuters were running their car heaters.

  Paul turned back to his work, having assessed the customer as a blue-collar tourist, here for some good food, laughs and window shopping. Yet, he thought, eyeing something with feathers that he decided to list as “Curio, feathered (1)”, there was something very familiar about that pinched face...

  He made the connection too late, remembering just as a sinewy arm snaked up under his chin and a hand clamped down atop his head, immobilizing it. “This is for fuckin’ me up, boy,” a voice with a nasal Ozark twang said softly in his ear.

  Struggling to free himself from that iron grip, Paul felt the cold tip of the ice pick behind his right ear, then a sharp sting and blinding pain behind his eyes as Iceman drove the long blade home, twisting the wooden handle in wide circles as Paul’s hands fell from his arm, his body spasming as he died.

  Iceman waited until the last tremors had faded, his and Paul’s, holding the body hard against his own, awash in the raw sensuality of the moment and the release it brought him.

  With a wary eye on the shop door, Iceman lowered the body to the ground. Setting the ice pick aside, he took out the big clasp knife he always carried. Opening the largest blade, he grabbed Paul’s hair and carefully cut his throat from ear to ear, avoiding the pooling blood as he all but severed the head. The combination of the ice pick and throat wounds were his trademark, and it really pissed him off when a sloppy medical examiner missed the pick wound. Happily, he thought, squatting to clean knife and ice pick on Paul’s shirt, that hadn’t happened for some years. So well-known was his work now that any ME in any major city, being presented with a slit throat, always looked for a puncture wound behind the ears.

  Turning the shop’s sign to “Closed,” Iceman gathered up his tools, tidying up in the bathroom before heading out for crawdads and an ice cold Dixie beer.