Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's

by Noel Hynd

  Lately, his vigil had been marked with frustration. Cooper had been in his apartment so infrequently of late that Misha gave thought to using his handgun and hitting him somewhere else. That, of course, would need permission from those above him. He hadn't asked for it yet.

  Misha set down the can of beer that had been in his hand. He bided his time. Waiting for the right moment to make a kill was frustrating. One could wait weeks, sometimes even months, for the proper moment when the shot would be one hundred percent successful and the escape would be also. Then one would have to recognize the moment and seize it.

  These were lessons he had learned in his career in the Soviet Red Army. His finger on a trigger was devastating. Sudden first shot, then quick second shot. It was still a trademark, just as it had been in Hungary, Poland and Germany. Two bullets: the bloody song of success! The vile Nazi Oskar Dirlewanger may have eluded his one-two sniping, but few other targets had.

  In certain windows in Cooper's apartment the lights glowed. Misha's weapon focused onto the bedroom. It was there that he would have a clear shot of Cooper as he lay in bed or sat at his desk. Misha waited. Cooper was in the habit of leaving the shades up, which made the assassin's task possible. The assassin watched with fascination.

  In the apartment, Cooper lounged onto a chair in his living room. He glanced at the rest of his mail. The woman went to the kitchen, found some beer and soft drinks, and poured some refreshment for both of them.

  Twenty-six minutes later, a light flashed on in the bedroom. The assassin was poised and ready to fire. If only his target, Cooper, would sit down or lie down for two seconds, he would have his shot. This task was infinitely more difficult than the shot in Fort Myers. Here also, the young woman in the room with Cooper complicated the mission.

  Misha watched. He waited.

  It was not Cooper who appeared in the bedroom, however. It was the woman. This night the assassin was on the receiving end of more than he bargained for. Or deserved. He sipped more beer and watched.

  There was a protocol for such situations. To kill Cooper and allow his woman to live would be to invite an immediate police report and investigation. To kill them both with two quick shots would allow some time—hours, maybe days—to elapse before the hit was discovered. By that time, Misha would have destroyed his weapon and escaped the United States.

  So he watched. He kept his weapon trained on Cooper’s apartment. He waited for the moment when he could launch two shots in less than five seconds.

  The woman pulled off her blouse and skirt. Then she took off her bra.

  The distant assassin was perched in the darkness of his window, the sash raised only about eight inches. He watched intently through the telescopic sight on his rifle, moving the sight as needed and following his prey. He felt a surge of jealousy and anger at Frank Cooper. To have a woman as fine looking like this almost naked in his bedroom was more than a meddlesome middle-aged newsman should merit.

  Misha's resentment translated into a mad desire to get a shot off and get the job done. He would make his hit before the couple could make love. He was getting anxious now. He had the bed within his sight. And now there was some cruel spice to this assignment. He would kill them both as they lay down together. This, he told himself, would be some shot, a fitting act of retirement!

  ***

  In Cooper's apartment, Lauren undressed completely and stepped into the shower. The warm spray felt good on her. She washed herself completely and exited. She jumped slightly when the arm of a man slid around her waist.

  “I didn't expect you!” she said. Cooper stood near her.

  “Well, the door was unlocked. So why wait outside?” He was still dressed. But he pulled Lauren to him and kissed her.

  “Can't a woman have any peace while she's showering?” she pouted.

  “Not if she’s completely undressed, and is in a man's bathroom,” he said.

  He leaned forward and kissed her again.

  Lauren toweled herself dry. Cooper stepped into the shower, blasting himself with the warm water. As he shaved, she grabbed one of his bathrobes and put it on. She went into the bedroom and sat down on his bed.

  Chapter 83

  From several hundred meters away, Misha’s rifle sight was upon the right side of Lauren’s temple. The assassin peered steadily at his target. His finger slowly went to the trigger. What the hell, he thought. He'd kill the woman, too.

  Two quick shots and…

  Lauren sat up for a moment. She removed her robe and tossed it to a nearby chair. She sat naked on the side of the bed, thumbing through a magazine.

  He lowered his site. He targeted her left breast. The shot, Misha knew, would send the thirty-two-caliber slug of steel through her heart, and the kill would be instant. Then he would shoot Cooper as he came to her rescue.

  A second later, Cooper appeared in his bedroom, a towel around his waist.

  “Took my robe, huh?” he said to her.

  “Took it and got rid of it,” she said.

  “I like you just the way you are,” he said. “Without it.”

  He turned off the overhead light but left on a dim light on a night table.

  Misha's hand was upon the stock of his weapon now. His finger tightened on the trigger. With his other hand, just for a moment, he made a final adjustment the weapon's scope.

  “If I don't have clothes,” Lauren asked her lover, “why do you?”

  She reached to him and pulled his towel away. She flung it in the direction of the robe. She pulled him down to her, but she hardly needed to. He followed her onto the white sheets of the bed.

  Misha checked his sight. His eye adjusted to the dimmer light in the distant bedroom. His hand slowly moved back to the trigger. His strategy remained fluid. He had the man now. Misha would shoot the man first and when he tumbled away he would shoot the woman in her bare lower abdomen. If they were still visible after they tumbled, he would throw extra shots into them for good measure.

  For a moment Misha was distracted. Voices! Hallway or next apartment? Excited voices. An argument. Drug dealers in the hallway, he quickly surmised. He refocused. He steadied his aim again.

  Lauren sprung up from the bed.

  “Where are you going?” Cooper asked.

  “Good God, Frank!” Lauren said. “What do you think I am? A porn actress? I can't make love with a window shade up!” she said.

  Cooper laughed. She strode purposefully toward the room's only shade.

  “Women!” Cooper said.

  Cooper reached to the bedside lamp and turned off the only light in the room.

  The window went dark as the woman yanked down the window shade.

  No shot!

  Misha’s finger froze on the trigger. He could have launched the first shot, but the second would have been impossible! He cursed violently in Ukrainian. He withdrew his rifle from the window and lowered it. Misha was furious. He would have to wait longer. But he knew his day was inevitable. It was just a matter of time and the precise moment, just as it had been dozens of times in the past.

  He began to wonder: was this target too elusive. Was his method wrong in trying to snipe across several hundred meters of New York City. Might this not be better accomplished, he again reasoned, by coming in close in private with a pistol and just blowing Frank Cooper’s head off?

  Chapter 84

  Toward ten on Monday morning, November fourth, Lauren came by Cooper’s office on a coffee break. A tired Marty Friedkin wandered in at about the same time. He looked downward at the desktop.

  “What are you doing?” Friedkin asked,

  “What the hell else would we be doing? Tomorrow’s layout,” said Cooper.

  “Why do you have a picture of Deke Moreland?” Friedkin asked.

  “Who the hell is Deke Moreland?” Cooper asked.

  Friedkin pointed to the picture on the Firebird file of David Charles.

  “Deke Moreland,” Friedkin said. “I just saw him the other day. He didn’t
croak overnight, did he?”

  Cooper and Lauren stood speechless.

  “What are you saying?” Cooper asked.

  “Oil guy from Texas. Has been travelling with Wallace. But he’s in New York right now. Staying at the Roosevelt Hotel. I have his business card.”

  Friedkin fished into his wallet and found it. Deke Moreland: American Mustang Gas and Oil. There were offices in Houston and Oklahoma City.

  “You want me to set something up?” Friedkin asked. “A meeting before he leaves town?”

  “Oh, my God,” said Cooper. He held aloft the business card. “Yes. We’d like to meet him. May I keep this, or do you need it back?” he asked.

  “It’s all yours,” Friedkin said. “It’s not like I need to order a thousand barrels of Arabian crude or anything.”

  Topher Williams was passing Cooper’s office a few moments after Friedkin departed. Cooper buttonholed Topher and asked him to be on the lookout for Jean Claude, the bike messenger and demon of the lower Manhattan side streets. He asked Topher to tell Jean Claude to stop by his office for a private meeting.

  Five minutes later, Cooper walked down the hall to the desk of JoAnne Klein, the drama editor. “You using this?” he asked, indicating her phone.

  “Doing something sneaky?” she asked.

  “Of course. Does it bother you?

  “Not if it earns me a favor.”

  “How about Rangers tickets from the sports desk?”

  Cooper winked. “Deal,” he said.

  Cooper borrowed the phone line. He called his friend Bill Schyler at the Wall Street Journal. Could Schyler take a look at any reports they had on American Mustang Gas and Oil? Could he perhaps phone back with a summary of what he could find out, finances, business dealings, whatever? Or, better, could he kind-of-maybe-perhaps photocopy what the Wall Street Journal had and slip it to a bike messenger named Jean Claude who would stop by later in the afternoon?

  “Strictly against our tight-assed regulations,” Schyler said. “Don’t even ask me stuff like that. You know how things are.”

  “Yeah,” Cooper said. “I know. I’m calling you from the entertainment department at the Eagle. Any Broadway shows you’re interested in seeing?”

  Schyler laughed. “Must be a good story, the one you’re chasing.”

  “It’s a hell of a story.”

  “Zorba. Forty Carats. Hair.” Schyler said. “Not that I’d accept a crude bribe.”

  Cooper repeated aloud the names of the shows. JoAnne gave a thumbs-up to all three.

  “That’s a shame, your streak of integrity. We’ve got some great seats here.”

  “How will I know Jean Claude?” Schyler asked.

  “He’ll find you.”

  Cooper rang off. JoAnne Klein wrote out visiting press requests for all three shows. The vouchers could be redeemed for two house seats at the box office from a section not available to the public. JoAnne would repay the producers via the Eagle with brief stories on featured actors in each show, articles that seemed like news but were actually product placement. Cooper would get single game press passes via Lauren’s sports desk to give to JoAnne, so she and her husband could go see the Rangers at the new Madison Square Garden on top of Penn Station. Jean Claude would get twenty-five dollars in cash from petty cash expenses in the obituaries account.

  At the end of the day, Cooper had a confidential ten-page report on American Mustang Gas and Oil from the Wall Street Journal’s private files.

  The report raised his eyebrows.

  Mustang Gas and Oil was a privately held company. AMGO produced no oil or gas themselves. They were a service company, providing equipment, engineers and technicians mostly to foreign oil fields. To this end, and possibly others, their CEO Daniel Keith “Deke” Moreland frequently jetted around the world making deals. Moreland was active in lunatic-fringe far-right politics in the United States and Europe, but in the financial community, that was not a bad thing. While Moreland was individually wealthy, AMGO had just been getting by for several years, according to the WJT report. But business had up ticked enormously in 1966 and 1967 and the first half of 1968 was almost euphoric. The report did not indicate why.

  Cooper chose to keep a lower profile than usual. Rather than returning to his apartment on 96th Street, he and Lauren slept down at her place in the East Village.

  They discussed AMGO but could only speculate.

  Chapter 85

  On election day, November 5, 1968, Hubert Humphrey and his wife Muriel voted by paper ballot in Waverly, Minnesota a mile from their home. They had attended a party in Beverly Hills the night before, then caught a red-eye flight back to Minnesota at 2:30 in the morning. The Humphreys napped during the day, they went to the Leamington Hotel in Minneapolis to await the verdict of the American people.

  Nixon voted in his home state of California, then flew on a private chartered jet to Newark International Airport in New Jersey. A black limousine awaited him and sped him to his election night headquarters on the thirty-fifth floor of the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan.

  George Wallace wound up his campaign in Georgia with a rally on the steps of the state capitol in the company of the segregationist governor, Lester Maddox, who had risen to fame fighting integration of his chicken restaurants by chasing African-American customers away with axe handles. Wallace was in his usual feisty mood, telling an audience that “the Republicans wouldn’t spit on a Georgian except for your vote.”

  The Taylor Sisters sang “Those Old Cotton Fields Back Home” and a final chorus of “Are You For Wallace?” as the governor exchanged winks with singer Lisa. The candidate himself called for people “of all races” to reject “the attacks on me by left-wingers of both parties.” Then Wallace flew back to Alabama to vote, presumably for himself.

  Cooper voted for Hubert Humphrey at a public school on Amsterdam Avenue. Lauren’s polling place was on Avenue B in a Ukrainian church, and she voted for Dick Gregory on the Peace and Freedom party line on the extreme end of the ballot.

  At seven minutes past noon that day, Bill Schyler phoned Cooper at the Eagle. Cooper got a call back number and went this time to a phone in the advertising department and returned the call. Schyler had read the same report out of curiosity and had run some of the information from it past one of the political reporters on the Journal.

  The political reporter had put two and two together and come up with a guess.

  “My friend here reminds me,” Schyler said, “that ever since Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s top-secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow, Soviet procedure has changed about working with some western partners on energy development. This was a huge shift in Soviet policy. Now you come to three years ago and something called The 1965 Soviet economic reform. It’s sometimes called the Kosygin reform.”

  “News to me. Explain it.”

  “The Soviets initiated a set of changes in the planned economy. Alexei Kosygin had just become Premier of the Soviet Union following the removal of Nikita Khrushchev in 1965. Kosygin was a Marxist economist. In short, the reforms introduced profitability as an indicator of success. The measures were ratified by the Central Committee September 1965. Not too different from Lenin’s economic reforms in the early 1920s.Workers of the world, shop till you drop. Combine that with the recent discovery of several new oil fields. The Israelis have been delivering the texts of all these changes to U.S. officials.”

  There was a pause. Then, “Let’s just say that some of the resourceful Jewish spies have had an eye on some of the oil fields in Kazakhstan for the last few years,” the Schyler continued. “Your guy Moreland has apparently been there himself. And so are dozens of his engineers and an armada of his equipment. Huge financial interests via American Mustang, I’d guess.”

  “The money trumps the political ideology, huh?” Cooper said.

  “Doesn’t it usually? I hope that helps.”

  “That helps,” said Cooper.

  “By the way,” Schyl
er continued, “did you ask me about someone named David Charles?”

  “I did. Yes. Why? Find something?”

  “Nope. But Deke Moreland has two sons. Their names are Charles and David. Thought that might amuse you”

  An hour later, Friedkin phoned. Deke Moreland was still in town and would agree to see Cooper that evening in his hotel suite. He was a busy man, he had informed Friedkin, but he would make time for Cooper. So he had allotted him half an hour late in the evening, maybe around 10 p.m. After that, he would be on his way to a Wallace wrap-up party.

  As for the national election, the initial results looked good for Humphrey. Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania and Michigan went Democratic as traditional blue-collar votes returned to their party. Better yet, it was later discovered that some voting machines in Philadelphia had done their dubious math early: they already had tallied their voting machines the day before the election. A good Irishman, Mayor James H. J. Tate, was hoping for the ambassadorship to Ireland in a Humphrey administration and was doing everything possible to make it happen.

  Chapter 86

  In New York City the evening of the election, Frank Cooper sat by himself in The Rough Rider Room at the Roosevelt Hotel on East 45th Street. He glanced at his watch. Deke Moreland was waiting upstairs. Lauren was due to join him any moment. He used to have drinks here with Margot Bradford, who started off this whole episode in his life by getting him to interview her father. Margot and he had two running points of amusement about this cocktail lounge. The first: Margot claimed that some of her girls scored their best clients at this place. “Well-heeled young men from good families, looking for their first sexual experiences,” Margot had intoned mischievously. The second: It was common currency from some prep school habitués of the place that one of the bartenders looked just like a math teacher named Mr. Cary, nicknamed “The Buzzard” at one of the Connecticut prep schools.