Saturday, October 28
I picked up the telephone on the first ring.
"Have you seen the Times yet?" It was Peter Martin, being his usual personable self.
I replied, "I'm feeling much better, thanks. And how are you?"
"Look, this story is spinning out of control. You ready to come back to work?"
I cradled the phone in my neck as I tucked a fraying blue oxford-cloth shirt into my favorite old jeans. Someone banged on the front door, and I hurried downstairs with the portable phone still at my ear. When I opened the door, Baker, in all his glory, came charging inside.
He looked wonderful, I must say. He circled me twice, his tail wagging and slapping me on my knees. He suddenly lunged for his stuffed hedgehog, which was lying on the rug, and paced about the room with the toy lodged deep in his mouth. The hedgehog was squealing, the dog was snorting, I was down on one knee, smacking him lovingly on his side.
"Hold on, Peter," I said into the phone, putting it down.
"What is going on there?" I heard him say.
"Kristen, this was really great of you," I said to the dog sitter, an adorable graduate student who lives down the street. "Let me grab you some money." Kristen had fallen in love with Baker in the local park nearly two years earlier, and told Katherine and I that if we ever needed a sitter, she would actually appreciate the chance. Ever since, she had proved to be one of the most reliable people in a life that seemed less reliable by the day.
"That's all right, Jack. I'll get it some other time. Here, I got you some bagels. I know you don't have any food here. By the way, you looked great on TV."
She seemed to be looking at me differently as she backed out of the door, and it made me uncomfortable. Television has a power that newspapers simply don't, an ability to convey celebrity on, quite literally, an ordinary jack like me. But before I could say anything, she was gone, Baker was sprawled on the floor with his fat face pressed up against his empty food bowl, and I was back on the phone with Peter.
"What's the Times have?" I asked.
Knowing he had my attention, he sounded more thoughtful now, a little less panicked. "It's kind of strange," he said. "They have a front-page story, quoting anonymous sources, saying that the FBI can't pin the gunman in the assassination attempt, identified as Tony Clawson from California, with a specific militia group. They ran a headshot of Clawson from some ID badge he wore at his job at Home Depot.
Scary-looking guy. These same sources said that no militia group in the country has yet to claim any knowledge of the assassination attempt, which probably isn't surprising. Why would anyone want to say they knew, and be charged with aiding and abetting or whatever? But here's what I think is the most interesting part: about halfway through the story, the FBI spokesman says they believe that the gunman was a militia member. The Times doesn't make too big a deal about that, but to me, that seems like the feds are backing away from how definitive they were right after the incident. This opens up a whole lot of questions."
I was with him about 90 percent, but given the interruptions, the early hour-it was, I think, about eight-thirty Saturday morning-and everything else, if he quizzed me on what the questions were that the Times story opened up, I fear I'd have failed miserably. Still, I had an innate trust in Martin's abilities. He might be nervous as a cat.
He may never have been around for a presidential assassination before.
He may even be in well over his head. But he possessed wonderful powers of observation and a vast capacity to understand the business of journalism, and combined, that placed him in the right far more than it didn't.
"So what are you saying?" I asked, hoping to keep the ball in his court.
"We need to be on this. We need to be on this right away." His tone changed here, becoming softer. "I know you're not going to like this, but Havlicek is on his way out to California from Boston. The editor wants him on this story, and I didn't want to fight it. I didn't know how you were feeling physically and guessed you wouldn't want to make that flight. And minimally, he'll be good to do the initial sweep on Clawson, then go through documents, do some scut work. I don't think the extra hands can hurt on a story this big."
I was fine about it. Steve Havlicek was in his late fifties, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter with a sweet personality that masked a near manic drive to land stories that he knew no one else could get. He was the chief investigative reporter in Washington before I was, and Martin, looking out for my interests, was nervous that I would feel threatened by him poaching on my turf. In fact, Havlicek was an old friend, a quasi mentor, and I welcomed the help.
"We'll work well together," I said, and just about heard a sigh of relief on the other end of the line.
"You have a line in with the FBI on this one?" Martin asked. "The president? Can you flip any of these guys, put them on your side?"
My call-waiting tone sounded, and I took a pass on it. I figured I'd get enough calls today.
"The FBI agent seems pretty standoffish. That woman Stevens. She's going to be tough work, but I'll stay on her. I'm meeting with her at some point today. I'll spread some other calls out from home this morning and give you a ring if I get anything back. Have Havlicek give me a call when he gets on the ground in California."
It suddenly struck me: the anonymous caller. Maybe I had just lost his call by not picking up the other line.
"One more thing, Peter," I said, and then caught myself, quickly deciding not to tip my hand yet, not even to Martin. I had no real reason to keep it secret, but my instincts told me to maintain my own counsel on this right now, until I knew more.
"What?" he said, urgently.
My mind raced to fill in the blank. "Never mind" was not going to be good enough with Peter Martin. So I quickly came up with this: "You remember the militia stories I did last year? I made some good friends out west on that one, including one guy in Idaho, a militia leader, who is especially well plugged in nationally. I might be able to squeeze him."
It worked, strangely enough.
"Jesus Christ, that's right. Maybe you ought to just get out there and see whether this guy has anything. I'm going to check the flight schedules, and I'll call you later."
I hung up the phone, wondering what I had just done to myself. My caller ID read "Private name, private number." I checked to see if the caller had left a message on my voice mail. I was in luck.
Indeed, it was the shamefully aloof voice of Samantha Stevens, special agent with the FBI, requesting an audience at three o'clock that afternoon. "If that works for you, no need to call back," she said.
"We'll just plan on meeting you at your house. See you then."
Immediately, I tapped out the number for the Record's library up in Boston, and luckily my favorite researcher answered the phone, someone who would get me exactly what I needed.
"Dorothy," I said, in a singsongy voice that I always thought she liked, but who really knew? Actually, I probably sounded like an ass.
"Jack Flynn here. Howaya?"
"Jesus, Jack, you're all over CNN. The networks are flashing your picture every other minute. One of the affiliates had a reporter in here last night interviewing people about you. I told them I thought you were a gifted writer, and was thrilled that you finally decided to confront your impotency problem."
Ah, that Dorothy, such a card. "You're a laugh a minute. Listen, here's what I need: can you pull me some good background stuff on one Samantha Stevens, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the pride of this great land?" I continued, "And while you're in the system, could you see if there's anything on another agent, a man by the name of Kent Drinker, an assistant director?"
"Coming your way. I'll ship it through the computer?"
"Yeah. I'll look for it in a while. You're the best, Dorothy," I said, hanging up the phone.
Impotency. How would she know? I mean, how would I even know? You have to try to have sex to know you're impotent.
In the journalism business, we look at shards of people's lives and pretend we see the whole. We spend a day with someone, maybe just an hour, flitting in at some inopportune moment, maybe a drunk driving death or an arrest on child sexual assault. We talk to neighbors, get some quotes about the time the suspect returned a borrowed rake with a sack of warm nuts from a gourmet food store, then write as if we understand the very fiber of his soul. We look at silhouettes and pretend we see real flesh. I'm as guilty as anyone else, but I'm smart enough, or have been around long enough, to at least know that what I'm doing might not be entirely right.
Which is exactly how I felt as I sat in my study and scrolled through the computer file that Dorothy had sent me from the Record library.
There was nothing on Stevens, not a blessed thing. But on Drinker, the stories were voluminous, most of them taken from the Los Angeles Times, and dating back several years. According to the accounts, Drinker worked as an FBI liaison to the U.s. Marshals' Witness Protection Program at the start of his career, rising steadily through the hierarchy. In an enormous promotion for largely thankless work, he was moved to Los Angeles, to take the number-two slot in the FBI'S regional office.
He wasn't there but a year when a story broke in the Los Angeles Times that the special agent in charge of the region, a veteran FBI man by the name of Skip Weaver, had been blocking the promotions of Hispanic agents in favor of promotions for less experienced, less qualified white agents. The paper quoted from a batch of highly sensitive internal personnel documents that it said it had obtained from sources familiar with the office. Shortly after that, the paper conducted a review of FBI arrests in the region and found that the bureau arrested Hispanics in greater proportion than any other racial or ethnic group.
This was enough to unleash a racial backlash the likes of which had not been seen there since the Rodney King riots. Black and Hispanic city councillors called for Weaver's immediate dismissal and presented the director of the FBI with a petition filled with 35,000 names. The city's race relations commission launched its own investigation. So did the FBI, but rather than investigate its personnel or arrest policies, it furiously probed into who had leaked the documents to the newspaper.
A federal grand jury was formed. Threats were made within the organization. Weaver virtually locked himself in his office, waiting for the culprit to be found. The reporter, a young man who thought his career had been made, was hauled before the grand jury. Next, he was brought into court and ordered to reveal his source. When he refused, the conservative-minded judge told him he faced jail time for contempt.
Federal prosecutors treated him nicely, but outside court, several FBI agents informed him he would be charged with receiving stolen property and thrown in prison. Unbelievably, he caved, and informed investigators that Kent Drinker had leaked him the documents. When he tried to explain that Drinker was only trying to repair a grave injustice, that a few good, qualified hardworking Hispanic agents were being discriminated against, no one was around to hear him.
So Drinker was immediately called back to Washington. He was told he could face dismissal for stealing government property. He was reviled by a large segment of the bureau. In law enforcement, there is the code of silence, and he had just violated it, he had trampled it. In many quarters there, he would never be forgiven. He was assigned a desk job, menial work, really. That was all nearly a decade before.
For several years, apparently, he committed himself to the pick and shovel work of rejuvenation, keeping a low profile, going along, getting along, as much as they would let him, doing whatever he was asked. Eventually he played a key role in helping to solve a terrorist bombing in Nevada. And his fortunes took their sharpest turn for the better about four years ago, when Hutchins came to the White House as vice president. From the depths of penance, Drinker was pulled to nearly the pinnacle of the agency, named assistant director-a move interpreted by the national press as a message that the new administration wanted an honest, open government. For the past four years Drinker had launched an increasingly successful campaign for approval among the rank-and-file agents.
So what did this tell me? Well, perhaps it explained why someone with as lofty a title as assistant director was helping with the street work of a major investigation, rather than supervising it from his office.
Maybe this was another example of him trying to curry favor among his underlings by working in the trenches alongside them. And perhaps it explained why he had been so quiet with me in the hospital room that day, why he let Stevens ask nearly all the questions. Because he had been burned by reporters before, perhaps he quite simply didn't like us as a breed.
The telephone rang, and I just about knocked it off my desk in my haste to pick it up.
"Hey, old boy. I have to get on a godforsaken jet airplane and fly all the way out to Fresno, California, just to bail your fat ass out one more time." It was Havlicek, and if Martin was apologetic to me about his assignment on this story, obviously he wasn't himself.
"Not what I heard," I said. "I heard there's an issue over your output up there in Boston, and they decided to put you on this story to work with the master for a while. They want you to kneel at my knee. Watch and learn. Watch and learn." Now that this macho turf ritual was over, I cut to the point. "What do you have?"
"Nothing yet," Havlicek said, his taunting tone changing to one of honest bemusement. "I'm on an airplane. I'll be on the ground soon.
I haven't worked in Washington for five years. Most of my people are gone from Justice. We're just trying to play catch-up with the Times for tomorrow. When are you on board?"
"Well, now. I have a couple of FBI agents coming over this afternoon, and I'm going to see if I can trade information with them, but it doesn't look real promising. I'll be working the phones all day, trying to find out anything I can on Clawson and the militia angle from here. If I get anything, I'll write it up, obviously, and we'll probably feed it into whatever you get. Otherwise I'll be in the bureau tomorrow."
"All right. I may give you a shout later today if I come across anything. Give me a call if you hear something worthwhile."
They arrived fashionably late for the interview, Stevens and Drinker.
After a day spent accomplishing frustratingly little from my dozens of phone calls spread around official Washington, they were an oddly welcome sight. Poor Baker was nearly beside himself at the concept of female companionship at home. What a miracle. So I invited them in and offered them what I had, which at this particular time was water.
"Hopefully," Drinker said, as we had taken our seats in the living room, "all of us are in a better frame of mind today."
That, I think, was the closest I would get to an apology from this duo, so I accepted it gracefully and said, "I'm sure we all are."
The brief informalities behind us, Stevens briskly took up where she left off the day before. "I talked to the president in-depth about this earlier today, and he assures me that he initiated the invitation to you. He said he is a fan of your work and had some specific things he wanted to talk to you about. So it appears we have cleared up those questions."
Her tone softened as she added, "I'm hoping you can run through with me just what it is you saw out there."
I regarded her for a moment. Her jet black hair had little wind-tussled wisps flowing in various directions, sexy, yet with a sense of casual innocence. It highlighted her translucent, alabaster skin. She was tall and slender, and her tan suit clung in some places and hung loose in others, making it appear that even when she tried being one of the boys, she was unmistakably a girl.
I began talking, and she scribbled furiously, turning the pages of her tiny notebook as fast as she could write, not even looking up at me or bothering to acknowledge my words.
"Very helpful," she said finally, when I had run out of things to describe. As witnesses go, I'm probably a pretty good one, considering that's what I do for a living. We met eyes a couple of times, and she never looked away. She even smiled once, when I did, when I talked about Davis screaming so loud that in the hospital, when I woke up, I had assumed that he had sustained some catastrophic injury, maybe even been killed. Drinker kicked in with a joke. "I talked to him yesterday, and he doesn't strike me as a real ruffian," he said.
We went over a few more points, though nothing big. The frost of the previous day seemed to be gradually melting away. In fact, as Drinker sat there mute, Stevens was adopting this odd air of familiarity; the banter growing easy, harmless. I didn't quite understand yet the difference in tone from the day before.
"Your house is beautiful," she said, looking around, in a signal that the interrogation had ended. "Great furniture. Great moldings."
"Thanks," I said. "My wife and I bought and renovated it a couple of years back."
"I know," she said. I shot her a quizzical look, and she smiled and shrugged. "Homework."
Finally, as the dog began snoring on the floor, I summoned the confidence to ask a question of my own.
"Do you mind if I ask something?" I said, adopting my reporter voice-confident and reassuring at the same time. "Can you guide me on the militia role in the shooting? There seems to be some discrepancy in public accounts on whether this was a militia-sponsored assassination attempt."
Stevens opened her mouth and began to pronounce the first syllable of what I expect was going to be an answer when Drinker firmly cut her off.
"We're not getting into these games," he said, looking at her, then at me. "Call our spokesman. You know who he is."
As they were leaving, as if on cue, Drinker again turned around in the doorway. "I don't mean to belabor the point," he said, his voice softer now, "but that telephone call yesterday in the hospital. You said it was a friend. But that came in on a direct-dial line. That friend couldn't have been transferred from the hospital switchboard.
For someone to have called you, you would have had to have given your number out. The telephone records show that you hadn't made any calls to anyone, because you get charged by the call, so they keep careful records. And the nurses at your station said you hadn't had any other visitors the night before, except for the Record's Washington bureau chief, Peter Martin. He's the only guy that would have known what number to call, because the hospital switchboard operator had orders from the FBI not to give your telephone number out to anyone who called on the main line. And Martin was in the room, so it wasn't him."
This all sounded confusing, but I think I knew what he was getting at.
Basically, I was cornered and screwed. He left the obvious question dangling as to who was on the telephone. I wasn't sure why he was so concerned about it, but I marveled at his ability to ferret out something amiss, the only fib I had told throughout this entire episode. I had nothing to lose, so I gave it my final, best shot at staving him off, at least for now.
"Last I checked, I'm a witness, not a suspect," I said. "My calls are my business. I'm more interested in what your concern is."
Neither agent said anything, so I added, "I guess Martin must have given out my number. You've put a lot more thought into this than I have. It was just a call from an old friend."
He didn't push the issue this time, much to my considerable relief. He bade me farewell, and behind him, Stevens threw me what I took to be a cool parting look without so much as a verbal goodbye. So that was that, and I stood there wondering what it meant, all of it, the questions, the persistence, and more than any of that, this intriguing agent with the beautiful hair.
Nightfall brought Baker's evening walk. I grabbed a tennis ball, which he quickly scooped up in his mouth, and some money, which I hoped to spend on dinner if I could find an outdoor table at a Georgetown restaurant early on a Saturday evening. We walked and walked, the fresh air and exercise acting like an intoxicant after a day spent indoors. We stopped at our usual park, down on K Street, on the Potomac River, to toss and fetch. With my ribs taped up, I couldn't throw nearly as well as Baker could retrieve, and he didn't do well feigning his disappointment. Eventually, he settled into the grass and chewed on sticks.
For dinner, I took a place at a patio table at a small French restaurant on Thirty-first Street, Caf'e la Ruche. I leaned down to tie Baker's leash to the bottom of my chair, fumbling with it because of the growing soreness in my chest. I looked up into the blue eyes of a fairly stunning waitress, who presented me a menu and cooed at Baker.
"Dining alone?" she asked in a way that was inexplicably flirty.
"No, actually," I said, rising to the opportunity, "I'm dining with my dog."
She smiled a big smile, and I thought that I still had it, whatever it actually is. We chatted about what was good and what wasn't. She left and brought me back a Miller, took my order, and left me with my beer and my thoughts.
When she brought my food about fifteen minutes later, she reached into her apron and pulled out an envelope, handing it to me. It was blank, but sealed.
"A gentleman asked me to pass this along to you a few minutes ago," she said, quite casually.
I looked around curiously, first at the other diners, to see if there was anyone I knew, perhaps a colleague from the paper or a friend or someone who may have seen me on television and was passing along a note of support or disdain. Nothing. I looked out along the sidewalk and down the street-again, nothing. Before I put my fork into my swordfish, I carefully tore the envelope open to see what was inside.
It was a typewritten, or rather computer-generated note, short to the point of abrupt.
"Meet me alone, at the Newseum, Sunday, 5:30 P.m."
Well, it provided the where, what, and when you hear so much about in journalism school, but it lacked the all-important who and why. I'd find that out, to be sure. I felt like I had stumbled onto the set of some James Bond movie. Again I looked around for the letter writer, but saw nobody that looked even remotely suspicious. I waved to my waitress, and she came bouncing right over.
"Can you help me out here?" I asked, attempting to sound casual, but my voice almost cracking from nerves. "I'm trying to figure out who this envelope came from. Are they still here?"
She put her finger up to her bee-stung lower lip and looked around thoughtfully. "I don't see him," she said.
"Was he a diner here? Where did he give you the envelope?"
"I was on my way into the kitchen, in a rush, and he just came up behind me and asked if I'd give this envelope to the guy outside with the dog. Tell you the truth, I didn't even bother to get a good look at him."
I was walking a delicate line here. I wanted to prod her further, but I didn't want to sound any alarms, though I'm not sure why not.
"Older, younger? Do you recall what he was wearing? Any idea at all what he looked like?"
She was starting to lose interest and was looking across the patio at another table, where a woman was waving her hand at her to take care of some dining calamity. "I really don't," she said, walking away. "I'm sorry."
Over the dozen years that comprise my reporting career, I have had countless numbers of anonymous callers. You try to read into their voices, get a mental picture of what they look like, where they're calling from, and why. It's nothing so glamorous as the famous Deep Throat of Watergate fame. No, I picture my callers as lonely people that life has left behind, semi-intelligent beings who wait with urgency for their morning newspaper, pore over every word of every story, and concoct terrifying scenarios in their own minds of what is happening to their world and to their own lives.
I had one caller leave messages on my voice mail at work for three months after TWA Flight 800 exploded in the sky. He told me, in the same detail night after night, that the CIA shot a heat-seeking missile at the plane from a rubber raft in Long Island Sound because an Iraqi spy was on board with a stolen briefcase filled with the intricate design details of the U.s. $100 bill. If the spy got away, the caller told me, he could have kicked the entire national and even international financial system on its side, so the CIA justified the deaths of a few hundred passengers because they were, in effect, saving the world as we know it.
Another time, an elderly-sounding man who told me he was from Cape Cod warned me that all Massachusetts State Police troopers were out to kill him because he once beat a speeding ticket in 1963 by proving that an officer parked on the side of the road had no basis on which to estimate his speed. From there on in, officers were required to follow speeding drivers to clock their speed-a decision that infuriated them, the caller told me. The spooky part about him was that an elderly gentleman had walked into a McDonald's restaurant in Hyannis during lunch hour one afternoon and pulled a gun. The man fired a wild shot, striking a blow-up Ronald McDonald doll in the head, causing it to explode and raising screams from dozens of children and their mothers eating lunch. Ironically, or maybe not, a State Police trooper buying lunch pulled his gun and shot the man dead. I never heard from my caller from that day on, and always had a nagging feeling that it was him who was killed that day.
But this caller was different. For starters, he had somehow found my telephone number at the hospital within hours of my arrival, though Drinker explained how that would be a virtually impossible thing to do.
He had spoken clearly, and made realistic, though cryptic accusations.
He was not bothersome, and seemed to have a goal in mind. And beyond even that, my anonymous caller had followed me from my house, on my evening dog walk, all the way to this restaurant, where he slipped the waitress a note containing a directive on how I might learn more about the assassination attempt on the president of the United States. He meant business, and he seemed to know how to conduct it. This was all just terrific. I sat there on the restaurant patio, Baker blithely sleeping at my feet, spooning rice and swordfish into my face, wondering if he was watching me now, wondering why.
The walk home, to say the least, was an anxious one, every crunch of the leaves sending my head turning in search of any mysterious presence. A man in a sweatshirt carrying a briefcase walked about ten yards behind me. I tried maintaining pace with a young couple up ahead, figuring no harm would come with witnesses around. A van approached and seemed to slow down as I walked up Twenty-eighth Street, the man with the briefcase still behind me. I braced for some sort of confrontation-physical or otherwise-but nothing. Suddenly I didn't hear his footsteps anymore. I turned around, and he was gone, as was the van. I kept my eyes peeled for suspicious cars, but saw nothing.
The couple ahead walked up the stairs to their house, leaving me all alone on what felt like an empty stage set, not a street. Baker acted uncharacteristically nervous, heeling close to my left knee.
As I arrived at my front door, that same van rounded the corner and slowly passed my house. I thought I spied the face of the man walking behind me sitting in the passenger seat. I hurriedly jammed the key into the lock and stepped inside.
"You're an idiot," I said to myself, even the sound of my own voice in the dark foyer raising the hairs on the back of my neck. I pulled the note from my pocket and read it one more time, then trundled upstairs to try to get some rest from this action-slash-melodrama that had become my life.