by Steve Berry
We wound our way into the center of downtown, traffic typically congested for a busy summer afternoon. Past Flagler College we came to Government House, then the city’s main square.
The Plaza de la Constitución.
The oldest public park in America.
Once it was a community focal point. A place of progress and protest. Now the tall trees, shrubbery, and tight grass accommodated tourists enjoying the shade. Pam and I visited last Christmas when the trees, and the rest of the city, were illuminated with thousands of tiny white lights.
The SUV eased to the curb.
“He’s waiting for you near the slave market,” our driver said. “We prefer you not haul that case around in the open. There’s a backpack in the rear. Use it.”
I made eye contact with Coleen and nodded.
She reached around and found a green canvas shoulder bag. Then she removed the files from the case and stuffed them inside.
“You have to leave the gun,” the driver said.
I shook my head.
“It’s not a request. No weapons. We don’t want any attention drawn to this gathering.” The guy paused. “We went to a lot of trouble to set this up in a nice public place, so you’d feel at ease. You’re definitely going to want to hear what he has to say.”
I weighed the options and made another of those choices.
“Leave it,” I told her, then I climbed from the vehicle.
We crossed the street into the plaza.
Coleen donned the backpack.
Concrete walks stretched in several directions beneath the leafy canopy. I caught sight of the olden monuments, the cannons, a wooden cupola topped with a bell, and a Spanish well. We followed one of the paths to an open-air pavilion that had acquired the dubious label of slave market. Whether any slaves were ever sold here was a matter of debate. Waiting out front was a short, thin man dressed in a sport coat and jeans. Perspiration glistened at the start of a receding hairline.
“Lieutenant Malone. Ms. Perry. I’m Dan Veddern.”
The guy did not extend a hand to shake.
“I can’t say it’s a pleasure to meet. You’ve both been nothing but trouble.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I immediately disliked this guy.
He reminded me too much of my current CO. Arrogant. Self-righteous. Moralistic. Little-man syndrome.
“I was forced to come all the way down here to this godforsaken heat and humidity,” he said. “Thanks to you two.”
“It’s the oldest city in America,” I pointed out. “Great place to visit.”
He tossed me a wiry grin. “I bet that smart-ass attitude really endears you to your commanding officers.”
“I learned it in anger management class.”
He didn’t seem amused at my humor.
“I’m director of the intelligence branch for the FBI.”
I assumed we were supposed to be impressed.
“And if Stephanie Nelle had come to me, instead of recruiting you, we wouldn’t be here.”
The plaza was busy with tourists milling in every direction, taking pictures, pointing out landmarks, enjoying the agelessness. The streets beyond were lined with taverns, restaurants, galleries, and shops. All busy. I liked that we were in public. I didn’t like the fact that this guy had chosen both the time and place.
“What do you want?” Coleen asked.
“I assume you’ve read the files on your back.”
Neither of us replied.
“Okay. I get it. I’m the enemy.”
He stood close and spoke low. We were positioned off to the side, about ten feet away from the airy pavilion, off the concrete path, in the grass. Nobody paid us any attention.
“You opened a bad can of worms,” he said to Coleen. “When you talked with Valdez.”
“How do you know she did?” I asked.
“We monitor international calls.”
News to me.
“And when the words 1933 Double Eagle were mentioned,” he said, “that grabbed our attention.”
“So you can isolate certain words in certain calls?”
“You’d be amazed what we can do.”
Probably so, but that discussion was for another day.
“Was Valdez once FBI?” I asked.
“Unfortunately. Before that he was CIA. He was the one who gave them the bad intel on the Bay of Pigs.”
I hadn’t heard those three words in a long time.
Three days in April 1961. A military invasion of Cuba, carried out by thirteen hundred CIA-sponsored Cuban exiles, which failed so badly it only strengthened Castro’s hold, making him a national hero, driving Cuba straight into the arms of the Soviet Union. I recalled a New York Times article from a few years back when an internal CIA report on the invasion was finally declassified after thirty-five years. It found that the agency had exceeded its capabilities and failed to realistically assess the risks. Even worse, it had recruited poor field leaders, established no organized internal Cuban resistance, exercised awful internal management of communications and staff, and, overall, lacked a realistic battle plan.
A disaster all the way around.
“In hindsight,” he said, “Valdez probably gave them the bogus intel intentionally. He ended up working for Castro in the 1970s and ’80s. He was probably playing both sides all the way back to ’61. The CIA got rid of him in ’62. That’s when Hoover picked him up. I’ll ask again. Have you read what Valdez brought?”
“We both have,” Coleen said.
I could see that development troubled him.
“I keep secrets for a living,” he said. “This country has always needed people like me to keep its secrets. You do realize that this whole thing is way beyond classified.”
“How are these reports classified?” I asked. “They came from Cuba.”
“They were created during an FBI operation known as Bishop’s Pawn.”
There were those two words again.
“It was part of COINTELPRO.”
And the third word of the day.
“Hoover liked everything written down,” he said. “And I mean everything. There are reports after reports after reports. Millions of pages from those days. You can’t imagine how much paper. We’ve known for a long time that Valdez managed to get his hands of some of the classified documentation from Bishop’s Pawn. How? I have no idea. But he’s blackmailed us with it before. Years ago it was cheaper and easier to pay—”
“Than kill him?”
I couldn’t resist.
“Not necessarily. But he stayed in Cuba, which made that option more difficult.”
“For the FBI?” I taunted. “Come on? You guys have reach.”
“We do, which I hope you won’t forget.”
I received the message loud and clear.
“So we’re clear,” Veddern said, “if I had been around back then, I would have taken the SOB out. Absolutely. That’s the trouble with blackmailers. They never go away.” He motioned to everything around us. “Hence, once again, why we’re here in this oven.”
“Tell us more about Valdez,” Coleen asked.
“Why are you so interested in him?”
“I read the files. They’re enlightening.”
“I bet they are. How do you know they’re real?”
“You just said they were,” I said.
He pointed a finger my way and smiled.
“How about we dispense with the bullshit and you answer her question,” I said. “What about Valdez?”
“J. Edgar Hoover thought himself a master of the intelligence business. Before 1947 he was with the CIA and did a good job rooting out Nazi spies in World War Two. But after the war the FBI was supposed to get out of the intelligence business. Spies became the CIA’s problem. But Hoover couldn’t let it go. He kept his nose in the intelligence business. After the CIA cut Valdez loose, Hoover brought him on to root out homegrown communists. In 1967 Hoover switched him over to Bishop’s Pawn. Nearly e
verything we have on Bishop’s Pawn is gone, except for records that detail Valdez’s employment history.”
I considered the implications of what this man was saying, recalling articles and books I’d read on the King assassination. Everyone saw a conspiracy. The various theories ranged from the amazing to the fantastical. But this was no theory. If what I’d read was true, the FBI had been an active party to an actual conspiracy to commit murder.
Which reminded me about Bruce Lael.
“We just watched a man being blown up,” I said.
“Tom Oliver doesn’t like loose ends. But that’s the thing about conspiracies. By definition, they require participants. We were about to bring Lael in for questioning. This meeting was originally meant for him. We assume Oliver found out and decided to move first. I honestly didn’t think he’d make a move on Lael, but I’ve been wrong about Oliver before.”
“Arrest him,” Coleen said.
“There is a little thing called proof. We’re gathering it, as we speak. When you two appeared earlier, I had my agent on the scene bring you here instead of Lael. Of course, we’ve been looking for you both since we found out what happened on the Dry Tortugas.”
“How much of Bishop’s Pawn do you know about?” I asked.
“What you’re really asking is, Did the FBI participate in King’s death?” He shrugged. “I can honestly say I don’t know the answer to that question. I can also say that there’s not a single piece of paper I’m aware of in our files that even hints at such a thing. And I would know.”
“Because you’re the keeper of secrets,” I mocked.
“Precisely.”
“But you know that Bishop’s Pawn involves King’s death,” I pointed out. “Valdez blackmailed you before. So whatever you bought back then had to point that way.”
He nodded. “It did. The bastard sold just enough to keep them coming back for more. But those documents are long gone, too. I only know what I just said from speaking to an agent, a few years ago, who was there back then. Another keeper of secrets who’s dead now.”
I knew this guy’s type. He craved order.
And all he had right now was chaos.
“I do know Bishop’s Pawn was an atypical FBI operation, highly classified. Jansen, Lael, Oliver, and Valdez participated. My guess is James Earl Ray knew the least, on purpose, since the idea seemed to be for him to take the fall when it was all over.”
“Ray pulled the trigger?” I asked.
Veddern nodded. “No question in my mind. And pretty damn amazing, really. One shot, from a long way off. And he was no marksman. He’d barely fired a rifle and certainly had no sniper training. But he did it.” The guy cocked his fingers to form a gun, then bent his thumb signifying a shot fired. “Right in the head.”
It was a tacky gesture, but I assumed that came from dealing with bad crap all the time. People died in the law enforcement business. It was part of the job. Easy to forget that such was not the case with 99.9999 percent of the rest of the world.
“This whole thing is a nightmare,” Veddern said. “It’s been dormant a long time, but it just keeps coming back for more. We cannot have any public speculation that the FBI may have been involved with the death of Martin Luther King. If Stephanie Nelle had come to us, we could have handled this quietly. There are things involved she has no way of knowing. Instead, she sends you out there to generate a hurricane.”
“It is my first assignment,” I noted, with a grin.
“Lucky for us.”
I caught his attempt at humor.
“We want this to be over,” he went on. “We want it contained. Look, everybody knows Hoover kept a slew of secret information on people. It’s one of the ways he stayed in power for as long as he did. Thank God, when he died, his secretary destroyed those private files. For days she shredded paper, and bless her soul for doing that. Nothing good would have come from all that crap coming to light. It was better off gone. Over. Done with. And the same is true for Bishop’s Pawn. Any and all records of that need to be gone, too.”
But something else was bothering me. “You said there were FBI employment records about Valdez that survived. Were they pay records?”
Veddern nodded. “We know he was given a 1933 Double Eagle. And that’s not in a record. Someone else from that time reported it a long time ago. Hence our interest when those words were mentioned recently.”
“He didn’t want cash?” I asked.
“He apparently needed to ingratiate himself with Castro. A lot of people don’t know this, but Castro fashioned himself as some great numismatist. Can you imagine? A murdering moron in green fatigues, collecting coins.” He shrugged. “I suppose everyone has to have a hobby.”
I got it. “And what better way for him to ingratiate himself than to present Castro with the rarest coin in the world.”
“Exactly.”
But something else swirled around in my brain, and I saw it was bouncing around inside Coleen’s head, too. She beat me to it and asked, “How did my father get a 1933 Double Eagle?”
I removed the coin from my pocket.
Veddern stared at the gold piece. “That’s another reason why I’m here. We didn’t even know, until now, that there was another coin out there.”
I could see that Coleen’s patience was nearing its end.
“I need to find my father.”
“I want to find him, too,” Veddern said. “We want to know how and why he has that coin.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
We both stood there.
I knew Coleen’s nerves were stretched beyond thin. But Veddern seemed to enjoy her predicament.
Which made me like him even less.
“We need to go,” she said again.
I looked at her. “Not yet. It’s important we hear what this man has to say.”
She stared at me with eyes that swam with fear and alarm.
I could only imagine the thoughts swirling through her brain.
Finally, she nodded, and I faced Veddern. “You had no idea there was a second Double Eagle?”
“That’s what sparked my branch’s interest in the first place. We were planning on being in the Dry Tortugas. Then the boat sank, so we decided to wait a few days and go down to the wreck. You and Stephanie Nelle beat us to it. Ms. Nelle’s mistake was trusting Jim Jansen. If she’d bothered to check with us, we would have told her to steer clear of him.”
Roger that.
“Then things just drifted from bad to worse.” He held out his arms. “And here I am, in nature’s steam room.”
“You get used to it,” I said.
Veddern stared out over the plaza. “I’ve been reading some of the old FBI files. Did you know the KKK had a huge rally, right here, on this spot, in 1964? I’ve seen the film. Scary as hell. In response, there were protest marches around the plaza. Blacks and whites walked in silence. ’Round and ’round. But there was a lot of violence. This plaza became the focal point for the entire war on integration.”
I realized what he was doing. The same thing I did to break a witness. Rarely did frontal assaults work, since they tended to telegraph the punch far too quickly. Guerrilla warfare fared much better. Circle around with your questions. Ask easy ones first. Then friendly ones. Be diversionary. Throw in some brittle chatter to distract. And only at the last minute, when their guard lowered, did you start asking what you really wanted to know.
“King called St. Augustine the most lawless community he ever visited,” Veddern said. “All the things that man endured. Riots. Rocks. Bricks. Beatings. Insults. And to him, this was the most lawless place of all.”
On civil rights, the past had not been kind to St. Augustine. Odd considering that the town’s claim to fame was history. It started in 1963 when three local black integrationists were brutally beaten at a KKK rally. One, a dentist, had his hands intentionally broken. The protest marches that followed turned into full-fledged riots with angry rednecks. Andrew Young was beaten while the loc
al police watched. The home King rented at St. Augustine Beach as his local headquarters was burned to the ground.
Emotions ran high.
Everyone seemed to sense what was at stake.
King intentionally chose St. Augustine as the place to remind America about the need for the Civil Rights Act, which in the summer of 1964 was bogged down in the Senate, frozen from passage by the longest filibuster ever. White, southern, supremacist senators wanted to stop that bill. King opted to take his stand right here. He decided protests were the way to break the stalemate, and his took a variety of forms. From his usual lunch counter sit-ins to a wade-in, where a group of black and white students tried to integrate a whites-only beach. When King tried to eat at the Monson Motor Lodge he was refused service and hauled off to jail. A few days later came the famous swim-in, when the motel’s owner poured acid in the water. For weeks people were attacked and beaten.
Images of all that hate circulated around the world.
And changed minds.
Twenty-four hours after the swim-in, the eighty-three-day filibuster ended and the Senate passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which Lyndon Johnson signed. To test the new law, Andrew Young and a few others reentered the Monson Motor Lodge for lunch. A nervous waitress seated them and served their food without incident. But later that night the restaurant was fire-bombed. A message to all the other local businesses that might have been considering obeying the law, too.
Veddern was right.
A lot had happened right here.
But I also noticed that the Plaza de la Constitución still contained a huge contradiction. Its largest monument was a towering coquina obelisk, topped by cannonballs, dedicated to the local Confederate war dead. To me it resembled a giant middle finger. Not a single reminder existed anywhere of what happened here in the summer of 1964. It would not be until 2011 that a civil rights memorial was finally erected, one that faced the old Woolworths where four black teenagers were arrested, and spent six months in jail, for simply trying to order a hamburger and a Coke. Not surprisingly, it took a change to the city code to make the monument happen, as memorials to events that occurred after 1821 were inexplicably banned.
