by Noel Hynd
“Haven't been out. Don't go out,” Ludlow said.
Ludlow's hand came to the photograph. He held it between his thumb and forefinger for several seconds, stared into its black-and-white, cola-stained eyes, and gave it more attention than all of the other material combined.
“I don't remember seeing this before,” Ludlow said.
Spur of the moment: Cooper desperately groped for something and came up with a truly inspired distraction. “You any relation to the President?” Cooper asked.
The archivist looked up. “What?” he asked.
“Are you any relation to President Johnson?” Cooper asked.
“Which President Johnson? There have been two,” the archivist said.
“Well, either?” asked Cooper.
“No,” Ludlow said blankly. “Neither.” Ludlow looked back down to what he was doing. He turned the photograph over and compared the handwritten penned coding on its back to the item number in the file inventory. Then he looked up abruptly. He stared at Cooper.
Ludlow glanced back to the photograph for a final second. He shook his head.
“What’s wrong?” Cooper asked.
“Ugly bastard, this guy,” he said, looking at the photo and returning it to the file. Then he inventoried the next set of papers. From somewhere, Cooper thought he felt a breeze. Then, seconds later, Ludlow flipped shut the file and sealed it.
“Anything else today?” the archivist asked.
“No. Thank you. In fact, I’m finished here.
Ludlow gave him half a nod. Cooper turned and left, exiting through the swinging doors. Sergeant Bernard paid him no notice.
Cooper’s spirits soared on the main floor when he came out of an elevator. He was only a minute from the building's main entrance. He rounded a final corner and his heart spasmed. He found himself looking into the unfriendly blue eyes of Brett Molloy. It appeared to be no chance encounter. “Hello, Cooper,” Molloy said.
“Hello, Brett.”
“Got what you needed?”
The encounter was awkward, the exchange stilted. A large figure that hulked into view behind Molloy, a Virginia State Police sergeant, who was his acquaintance's escort.
Cooper bluffed it all the way through. “Frankly, I'm disgusted,” Cooper said, shaking his head. “Your files aren't telling me much that I don't already know. You sure they're complete?”
Molloy laughed and opened his hands in a gesture of futility.
“Freedom of information,” Molloy said. “You fellas in the newspapers have plundered us for years. Why should we have anything left?”
“I was hoping it would be somewhat more productive.”
Molloy shrugged, starting to move again. The trooper followed him.
“You staying for more? You need a new pass for tomorrow?” Molloy asked.
“I'm going back to New York,” Cooper said. “I have a job to keep. If I can't find a damned thing to write about in your files, I'd better find something somewhere else.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Molloy answered.
“Well, thanks for the access, anyway,” Cooper said politely, moving away from Molloy. He was out the door two minutes later and into his car five minutes after that. As he drove from agency property, the picture of David Charles in his pocket, he enjoyed a miraculous sense of relief. At the same time, the sense of being followed had lifted as well.
Chapter 48
On Monday from his hotel, Cooper telephoned the Baltimore County Medical Examiner's officer. He spoke with a woman named Deana, a solicitous lady who sounded as if she were in her fifties. Deana confirmed the death of David Charles. The date checked with the certificate in the CIA file. But to Cooper, inconsistencies lurked. David Charles’ name had never popped up when Cooper had run him through the data base in New York. Calls to local libraries in Washington and Baltimore confirmed that David Charles's death had never received any obituary notice.
Cooper asked the current location of Herbert Schmidt, M.D., whose signature adorned David Charles’ death certificate in the CIA’s Soviet Registry. She explained that there were five valid signatures for February 1965, she said. The surnames were Penrose, Siegel, Eksmann, Young, and Arroyo.
“What about Dr. Schmidt?” Cooper asked.
“There is no Dr. Schmidt. I’ve worked here since 1956,” Deana said. “I don’t know no Dr. Schmidt.”
Something was wrong. Cooper knew that inconsistencies often bracketed lies. No obituary for a man who from all indications was prominent. His death certificate in CIA files, at least for show purposes, very possibly contained a fraudulent signature.
“I wonder, Deana,” Cooper said, “if you would be kind enough to check your files. Here’s the name and date of death. Could you tell me whose name appears on the bottom of it?”
Cooper said he would hold. He did, victimized for five minutes of an “E-Z listening” station. Anonymous studio singers found new subtleties in the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth.
When Deana returned she admitted that something strange had happened. “We keep our files very carefully here. David Charles is listed in the index,” she said, which meant that he died in Baltimore County on the date given. “But as to the original document,” she said, “someone took it and never put it back.”
“How long ago might that have happened?” Cooper asked.
Deana conceded that the document might have disappeared a day ago or as long ago as the time of the man’s death. There was no way to tell. The courthouse could be a sloppy sometimes, she apologized.
Cooper set down the telephone. The challenge as a reporter was always cutting through the lies and corruption to find the truth. There was a bonus this day, however. With permission from S.W. Murphy in New York, Lauren remained with him on assignment.
Chapter 49
Richard Nixon’s Vice-Presidential candidate, Spiro Agnew had found his niche as the campaign’s hatchet man, launching frequently into acidic criticisms of political opponents, intellectuals, journalists and anti-war activists.
Agnew blasted his adversaries with relish, hurling unusual epithets, most of which were constructed for him by two young Nixon speechwriters, William Safire and Pat Buchanan, writers blessed with wonderful gifts for sorehead gut politics and alliteration.
“An intellectual is a man who doesn't know how to park a bike,” said Governor Agnew of America’s educated class. They were also, “pusillanimous pussyfooters” and “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Even worse, said the possible Leader of the Free World, the anti-war folks were "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” Much like Governor Wallace, he went after the press, maintaining that, “Some newspapers are fit only to line the bottom of bird cages,” a reference to one paper whose motto was, “All the News That’s Fit To Print.” And all these groups were “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”
The target groups bristled.
The base had orgasms over it.
Agnew, for some, was almost as much fun to listen to as George Wallace, whom Nixon and Agnew never attacked. After all, the Nixon and Wallace voters would heartily have agreed with Chairman Spiro’s pronouncement, “Confronted with the choice, the American people would choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb.”
But as the campaign wore on, whenever Agnew went off his script, his foot ended up in his mouth. Asked why he wasn’t going to visit any depressed urban areas, the former County Executive of Baltimore said, “If you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.” At one rally, asked if he had seen the Polish-American group on the audience, he said that he “hadn’t seen any Polacks” at all that day.
The ink of the major newspapers was barely dry on that when Agnew referred to Gene Oishi, a Japanese-American campaign reporter from the Baltimore Sun, as “the fat Jap." The Washington Post broke the story. Agnew offered apologies. Until this time, the GOP usually didn’t indulge in such negative attack politics. The time
s they were indeed a’changin’.
Chapter 50
A day later, Frank Cooper sat in the main newspaper microfilm room of the Baltimore Public Library. At a viewing stall, he read fine newspaper type until his eyes ached. Lauren sat at a separate reading booth, poring over the same reels as Cooper as soon as Cooper had finished.
They worked the month of February 1966. They searched for a mention of David Charles. The elusive man's name had not appeared in any index for the Baltimore Sun or the Baltimore Evening Sun. They concentrated on any dates around February 8, 1966. Cooper wondered if the date was as fictitious Dr. Schmidt who had “signed” the document.
After three hours, Cooper and Richie had scanned every article, no matter how small, on every page for the entire month. They had also done the same for the Washington dailies.
They went out for a sandwich at noon.
“Makes no sense,” he said. “A man like that dies. No write-up in any paper. Either he never died, and the accident never happened, or someone went through and purged every account from the official record. Who would do something like that?” He tried to tie it back to Angleton, Nosenko, and Golitsyn. Or Lukashenko in Paris. Or Margot's father.
They returned to the reading room before one thirty p.m. Cooper requested microfilm of any local dailies or weeklies for the month of February 1966. These were not on film yet, so a bearded librarian named Maurice presented him with a stack of four different publications. One was a leftwing counterculture publication of which the main features were ads for head shops and escort services. The three others were suburban and were as straight as a D.A.R. convention.
Cooper and Lauren spread out their task on a long rectangular reading table. Shortly after three in the afternoon, Cooper hit gold. Buried at the bottom of page eighteen of the Pikesville Eagle was a small item without a byline. It recounted a motor vehicle accident on Arlington Boulevard north of Baltimore.
Cooper muttered aloud when his eyes settled upon it. “I might have it,” he said.
Lauren looked up. Then she came to his side and read over his shoulder. In the early morning hours on the date in question, there had been a fatal one-car collision in bad weather conditions on Arlington Boulevard. The conditions surrounding the death were identical to what the CIA file had stated. The deceased name was given as “M. Wallach.”
Silently, Cooper read further. A Baltimore city detective named A. Grady was following the case, assisted by an officer named M. McCray. Cooper made a print of the article. He ran an index check on the name “Wallach” just in case it had appeared inaccurately elsewhere. It hadn't. Nor had there ever appeared any follow-up of the story, even in the Pikesville Eagle.
The two reporters had a confirmation.
An “incident” really had occurred, probably involving the State Department officer who had been in Paris in 1964-65. Leaving the city library, Cooper bought a map of Baltimore and the surrounding area. Cooper and Richie found the location where the accident had occurred. What they needed next was someone who had been at the scene of the accident, or crime, and who could remember what had happened.
Chapter 51
Misha, a Ukrainian native, was now ensconced comfortably in a motel in Florida. Poised to complete his various assignments in the United States, he had taken a forty-dollar-a-day room at the Trade Winds Motel on Fort Myers Beach. He was on the second floor of the building. He liked to sit out on a small private terrace. There he could enjoy the morning and early-evening sunshine. There he could also watch whoever walked on the beach.
Misha remained in contact with his American associates. They had supplied him with the next tools of his trade. He was looking to rendezvous with an important “client,” as his superiors called her. From a distance, he had already seen the client—twice, in fact, which was why he had taken a room at the Trade Winds. Misha had already noted where the client normally parked her car when spending time at the beach. He had watched her from a distance as recently that very afternoon.
During the 1930’s in the Soviet Union, following new Soviet doctrine, the Red Army initiated a countrywide program to promote individual marksmanship to youth. The most talented would then become active-duty infantrymen. The Soviet program included the establishment of elite sniping schools. There, seasoned instructors taught tactics and marksmanship.
Misha had been a young man of nineteen when the “Great Patriotic War” broke out in 1941, but he had already distinguished himself as a marksman through the sniping schools. He soon became a sergeant in the Red Army. In Poland, the Red Army recognized the impact of sniping. Soon, special schools produced a significant number of snipers. Throughout the war, their primary weapons were the battle-tested M1891/30 rifles with scopes. Misha preferred the less accurate Tokarev STV-40 semi-auto rifle to the bolt-action Mosin. The Tokarev offered a rapid second-hit capability. It made Misha lethal within fifteen hundred meters. If his first shot didn’t kill, it would daze the target. A quick second shot would complete the mission.
The war ended. Other wars began. Misha worked in various spots around the world, including Africa and South America. In Argentina in the 1950’s, he solved some problems for the dictator Juan Peron. He was rewarded handsomely in American currency and with three Argentinian passports, all to different names and identities. The passports were flawless. They were official documents and Argentinian passports were accepted anywhere. In Argentina, he had also learned Spanish.
When Misha had first killed people twenty-six years earlier as a sniper, the act of ending a human life had been a professional assignment. The targets were enemies of the state. He knew this much: the Soviet Union had sacrificed greatly, Stalin was a wise leader and imperialist capitalist enemies were everywhere. So he did his job and did it well. He asked no questions.
After all, the imperialists performed assassinations, too. In 1960, the newly liberated Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was judged by the United States to be too close to Russia. President Dwight Eisenhower signed off on his execution. The CIA sent a scientist to kill him with a lethal virus disguised as toothpaste, though this became unnecessary.
On January 17, 1961, the murder of Lumumba was carried out via two inter-related assassination plots by American and Belgian governments, which used Congolese accomplices and a Belgian firing squad. Other leaders targeted by the CIA in the 1960s included the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, president Sukarno of Indonesia and president Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam.
And who could even count how many clumsy attempts the Americans had made to assassinate Fidel Castro? They had tried exploding pens, a contaminated diving suit, and a cigar packed with explosives. They had even recruited two Yankee gangsters, Sam Giancana, the boss of the Chicago mob, and Santos Trafficante, the head of the mob’s Cuban operations, both members of the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list to try to snuff Fidel. All to no avail.
Misha’s assignments came and went. He left the Soviet army after twenty years. He trained other pro-Moscow assassins. He freelanced. He remained a loyal ‘Son of Lenin.’ Snuffing out a human life remained a professional task. But as he aged, he liked it less. He was anxious to retire and escape to a safe haven such as Argentina and put it all behind him.
In Ft. Myers that evening, Misha strolled to the strip of sand that the current client favored. He estimated the distance between the beach and the parking lot. Then he turned and looked back toward the Trade Winds Motel. He looked directly at his room, which was third from the end on the second of the motel's two floors.
But he needed more of a landmark. Looking around on the beach in the dim light, he spotted a child's sand bucket, a white one covered with blue and yellow stars. It had been abandoned during the day. It would now well serve Misha's purposes.
The Ukrainian picked up the bucket and placed it in the center of the beach, as close as he could to the client’s usual path. He turned the bucket on its side and weighted it with rocks. Then he returned to his motel room. It was 7:05 p.m.<
br />
He locked both the door to his room and the door to his private balcony. He drew all the window shades. There was one table in the room. Misha removed everything from its surface. Then he opened one of two suitcases with which he traveled. From it, he drew several smaller bundles, all wrapped tightly with old sheets. He methodically placed the bundles on the table.
He unwrapped them, starting with the largest, the breech and barrel of a custom-made rifle. It was twenty-four inches long, made from black chromium steel and surprisingly lightweight. He examined the instrument carefully, playing with the bolt, clicking it in and out of place. The weapon was an ingenious variation on the traditional Soviet-made Tokarev STV-40. Piece by piece, Misha put together a weapon that acquired the contours of the classic Russian armament. He was pleased with it. It would do the job he was assigned to do.
Misha threw a sheet over the weapon to protect it from any unwelcome eyes.
To pass the evening, he watched television. As he watched, he ate a pair of sandwiches and drank some beer. Once or twice he stepped out on his balcony. He kept the weapon assembled overnight.
He arose before dawn the next morning. He stepped to his balcony and looked at the deserted beach. It was a few minutes past five a.m. The toy bucket was still in place. There was no one on the beach. “Good,” he whispered to himself.
He went back into his room but left the balcony door slightly ajar. He moved the table with the weapon upon it closer to the door. Through the partial opening, he sighted the weapon, drawing an aim on the child's bucket. He locked in on it. He squeezed the trigger twice.
