Caller unknown, p.13
Caller Unknown, page 13
Well, that had been the plan. Things had changed with the death of the first two children. Then Coughlin had insisted that David be taken out of the pool. Why had he done that? Had he begun to harbor doubts about Vermeulen? Was David’s elevation so he might ultimately replace Vermeulen himself? A brainwashed child in place of the leading scholar of his generation at St. Joseph’s? A man described as “quite brilliant” by the fathers there? No, however compromised the Maine mission, before that day came Vermeulen intended that some of the original plan would be carried out. It was no longer possible to imagine the world in flames. No more Kristallnachts, no more Nazi banners lining the streets, no jackboots. The scale of the operation had had to be curtailed.
Still, even as things stood, thousands might die thanks to Edward. That might be enough to show all those doubters he had not lost his touch. After Ed, there was still Shannon, Catrine, and Carl. It was a bonus that two of them, Edward and Shannon, were either entirely or partly from racial minority parents.
Reprisals, race riots, and an uprising against the government would follow. The National Guard and the army would restore order. Then become the order. Dictatorship established. The left wing and minorities subdued, then eradicated.
Edward would reach the dam in a week. The legend of Edward Constance, America’s most notorious left-wing terrorist, was already established in notes left behind at Winthrop Road and, if all went to plan, in the luggage he would leave at Northeastern.
But David’s call this midafternoon had brought yet another delay—he had fallen foul of some university functionary in mid-extraction. The guy had almost called security. David was going to have to wait until later that evening, when the said functionary went off duty, before going back into Stetson East. He was confident that Edward was zoned out enough to wait for him. An annoying but not terminal delay. Vermeulen withdrew to his quarters and awaited events.
Stu’s number had been tapped by Typhon for nine years. The listener in the basement started recording the conversation between Ed Constance and Gloria Gonzalez a few seconds in. He knew Vermeulen would want to hear it right away, so he reached out for the special phone connected to his private rooms.
Vermeulen showed a couple of minutes later. The Operator stared fixedly ahead, trying to avoid Vermeulen’s gaze as he listened to the tape.
After it finished, Vermeulen said, “So Edward has escaped. Where is David?”
“With Carl. They’re parked in the Back Bay area waiting for the building manager to get off duty at five.”
“Get them on the radio.”
The Operator made the connection on the two-way and handed the transceiver to Vermeulen.
“It’s me,” he said without prelude. “The target is no longer at your location. He’s gone back to Winthrop. Pick him up after dark and settle with his stepfather while you’re at it. Over.”
He cut the connection without waiting for an answer.
Vermeulen paced the room. “So, Constance kept a notebook, did he?” he said to himself. His expression was now something between sphinxlike and terrifying.
He took off his glasses and polished them on his tie. His ice-blue eyes stared away at the backlit map of the United States that stood against the wall in front of them. There were various colored markers winking on the display.
His mind made up, he went to a regular phone, lifted the receiver and dialed the dedicated number of Grant Fitzgerald at FBI headquarters.
There was a dull ringing tone for a few seconds before the phone was picked up and a gruff voice answered. “Who’s this?”
“You know perfectly well who it is,” Vermeulen answered.
There was a deep sigh at the other end. “How can I help?” Fitzgerald answered without enthusiasm.
“It seems we have a problem with one of your agents. The one we had assigned to Edward Constance before she got a little too nosy. You remember her?”
“Gonzalez? What about her?”
“It seems she shared her Texas number with our boy and, guess what, he called her just now. After nine years.”
“Why?”
“Let’s just say he’s scared and on high alert. He slipped through our clutches just as we were beginning the operation.”
“Ah,” Fitzgerald answered. “That’s bad.”
“I have a couple of people who can sort it out. Edward is in… how should I put it? A suggestible state. He’ll succumb again. But unfortunately there are other problems.”
“Oh?”
“Number one is that Stuart Constance appears, contrary to instructions, to have kept a little notebook. There are significant names and numbers in it. Your name and my name, for example, and now Gonzalez is aware of that fact.”
“That’s very bad,” Fitzgerald said. He sounded fully engaged now.
“Isn’t it? Gonzalez is now a major risk. She’s going to have a chat with her superior. I believe that would be Special Agent in Charge Hennessey, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s right; we assigned him down there at the same time as her.”
“I seem to remember Hennessey was quite reliable up in Maine.”
“He can be counted on. What do you suggest?”
“A little accident for Gonzalez. Tonight, please. After all, the border down there is pretty dangerous, what with all the narcos and people traffickers.”
“I think I can arrange that.”
“No, Fitzgerald, you will arrange it.”
“And Constance?”
“After my boys take him, we’ll assess him. He may no longer be any use to us.”
“You seem to be losing agents rather quickly, Vermeulen.”
“The program was sound. After all, it was devised by your cousins in the CIA. This part of Operation CHAOS can still go ahead, but with fewer participants. Edward just didn’t take to the program as well as, say, a few of the other homicidal maniacs who were on it.”
“Mind control is hardly the most reliable MO. We nearly got in trouble at the Manson trial.”
“But no one believed those crazies, did they? Now they’re all behind bars exhibiting the behavior everyone expects of them, thanks to the special oatmeal or whatever it is we provide for their daily sustenance. No, no one will ever believe them, just like the Weathermen and that poor heiress of yours, Patty Hearst. You see, Fitzgerald, the system works. All we need to do is sort out this little problem and we can be on our way again. Please don’t stand on ceremony.” And with that he hung up.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It was just after six. Ed slipped the Colt into a windbreaker and took the car keys from a hook inside the pantry door. He went to the garage. The Volvo station wagon, Stu’s former pride and joy, was showing its age now, the odometer nearly around the clock. Given that Stu’s profession was, basically, ripping down old buildings and replacing them with new, it seemed odd that he had kept an affection for the old jalopy. Ed unlocked it, turned the ignition and backed out slowly. He got out, then shut the garage door silently so as not to alert the neighbors. He left the house unlocked. He was not coming back and, as Stu had told him, he didn’t own a stick of it anyway.
Ed drove cautiously down Winthrop to the intersection with the freeway. Traffic was light into the city. He went past Harvard, then, as the road became Huntington Avenue, the faculty buildings and dorms of Northeastern loomed up. They were still packing up things from the freshmen’s fair on Krentzman when he passed. He watched that promise of a future he now would never have as it disappeared in the rearview.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It was a warm early evening in El Paso and the AC was running in the suburban ranch-style house Gloria Gonzalez, now Gloria Santiago, shared with her husband. They had decided to extend the holiday by a day. Happy Days was on the TV and Juan didn’t like interruptions. The phone call that afternoon had been enough. As a sales executive, his whole life was phone calls, and on his day off he switched off from them, and even from his wife. He had failed to notice Gloria’s preoccupation after the call, or how she had spent the rest of the afternoon.
He cursed when the phone rang again.
“If it’s that kid, tell him to call back tomorrow like a normal human being,” he said.
Gloria went out to the kitchen and picked up the receiver. She came back two minutes later. “Juan, it’s the office,” she said. “We got a tip-off. Child trafficking at Lejana. They’re calling in extra agents. Don’t wait up for me.” She strapped on her gun belt, then picked up her purse.
Juan waved her off. It was just getting to a really funny part with the Fonz.
The abandoned farm was called Casa Lejana. It was far out in the desert, surrounded by arroyo and scrubland. The Feds had been watching it for weeks. It was thought to be a hub for child trafficking across the sparsely populated borderlands with Chihuahua.
There were three black sedans at an intersection of the dirt road ten miles south of I-10. It was dusk, getting full-on dark. SAC Hennessey was not present, but his deputy, Fuentes, was. He ordered the agents to put on FBI-labeled bulletproof vests and baseball caps and proceed cautiously the last half-mile to the isolated ranch. The agents went to the trunks of their cars and started strapping on their vests; a couple armed themselves with carbines. Gloria made to do the same but Fuentes held up his hand.
“Not you, Gloria. Stay here and monitor the radio.”
Gloria put the vest back in the trunk with some relief. She wasn’t too sorry not to be hiding out in the scrub with the other five. Lying prone in a possibly snake-infested arroyo was not her idea of fun. She leaned on the side of the sedan as the five other agents crept into the now-total darkness toward Casa Lejana.
A crescent moon beamed down and a coyote howled far off. The sudden call had prevented her thinking about tomorrow, when she was going to seek a private meeting with Hennessey and reveal what she had learned from Ed. Her pulse accelerated at the thought. Her career depended on whether Hennessey believed her or not.
She shook out a Salem and was about to light it when she heard a car approaching from the direction of I-10. It was coming with no headlights. The only building out here was Casa Lejana. She eased the clip off the holster of her sidearm as the vehicle crested a low rise and came into view in the moonlight. She let out her breath when she recognized the outline of another government-issue sedan. A Crown Vic, just like the others. It was approaching with only sidelights, rocking up and down on the undulations of the track. It was just more agents joining the operation. She wondered why they hadn’t radioed ahead.
The sedan pulled up next to her. She was surprised to see that Special Agent Hennessey was the sole occupant. These days he was rarely seen on field operations. He got out as Gloria slipped her cigarette back into the pack.
“Hi, Gloria,” he said.
“Good evening, sir.”
“Have the others gone on?”
“Some twenty minutes ago.”
“Child trafficking, just like the old days,” he said.
Gloria thought he looked a little sad standing there in the moonlight. She cleared her throat. “Actually, sir, now you’re here, there was something I wanted to discuss with you.”
Hennessey looked down and pulled something out from inside his coat. She saw it was a Luger with a six-inch silencer on the barrel. He leveled it at her.
“I know,” he said and, with something like regret, shot her through the forehead.
Later, when they had rounded up the people smugglers, who had not after all gone by Casa Lejana, but who had passed very near the Crown Vic parking site, one was found to have a weapon of the exact same caliber as the one that had shot Gloria. There was powder residue on the trafficker’s fingers. He swore at trial that the gun had been planted on him by the arresting agent, but the jury was not convinced. He was just another profiteer of human misery who had turned his gun on a lone female agent when challenged. Though he was a foreign national he was sentenced to death under federal statute. Because of the then moratorium on federal executions, he was serving a life sentence at USP Terre Haute when he was fatally stabbed by another inmate in the showers.
The life of Gloria Gonzalez was honored on the Wall at Quantico and at the El Paso Field Office.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Vermeulen returned to his office in the ten-bedroom baronial in Mt. Lebanon. The medieval theme of the outside of the house—turrets, crenellations, and Gothic arches—was repeated inside in the monastic austerity of his personal quarters. The furniture was heavy oak and unforgiving—there was not a cushion, or throw, or even a mirror in sight. The diamond-paned casement windows were deep-set and narrow as if in expectation of a siege. The only embellishment to the suite was the stained-glass inlay of a monstrous creature, a being with a hundred serpents emerging from its head, feet, and talons, in one of the windows. Typhon. Father of Hydra and many other horrific creatures of mythology. And Vermeulen’s current creation.
He wondered at his pride. The original sin. It had been his weakness, even at St. Joseph’s. If he had been asked about his faith, he would have struggled to answer. Perhaps he had lost it many years ago. Christ would not have approved of what he had done in his name. But Coughlin had taught him well: the meek do not inherit the Earth.
The stained-glass window along with a number of unread sixteenth-century leatherbound Latin books on the occult were there as dressing should the place ever be raided—an unlikely event given the friendly relations between him and the local law enforcement agencies. He was aware that the British occultist Aleister Crowley had espoused what he called a Typhonian system of magic, and his works were also represented on the shelves, they too for misdirection if the worst happened. Typhon? Half-crazed occultists, nothing more. The books he had once cherished in the seminary were long gone. Not a smidgeon of his Catholic past could be seen.
The only gesture to modernity was an internal rotary phone: the same device with which the Operator had summoned him an hour or so earlier.
He sat heavily and stared at the granite blocks of the wall. The conversation with Fitzgerald weighed on him. It was true, things had not gone well. The funding for Operation CHAOS, the CIA’s plan to infiltrate and to discredit left-wing organizations in the USA under Johnson and Nixon had once been more than generous, but now the money had dried up. The operation was under congressional investigation and many old allies were running scared. Before he went, Director Helms had ordered all papers relating to MKUltra destroyed. So, at least the kids from the Lot and other sites would never be associated with it.
The deputy director’s words earlier had stung him. Only Edward, Shannon, Carl, and Catrine were left to carry out the mission. On Coughlin’s orders, David had been deprogramed years ago. But Vermeulen sometimes wondered if it was that easy to strip away the conditioning. David was a psychopath, through and through.
So four of the original seven were left operational—barely enough to stir the cataclysms that once would have changed the mindset of the entire country. The operations had all been scaled down from the original vision, bar Edward’s mission to the Hoover Dam. The dam might be enough, but Edward, it seemed, had grown a mind of his own, was telling tales to federal agents; maybe, if he had recalled his past, he might have stashed evidence somewhere that could compromise everything. From now on it would be a binary decision: terminate him if he could not be brought in, continue with the mission if he could. There were no shades to it.
Vermeulen had never entirely trusted Stuart Constance, despite the latter’s huge debt to Typhon. His refusal to take Vermeulen’s calls had proved Vermeulen’s instincts correct. It was good that he had doubled down on insurance: the phone tap on Winthrop Road had been in place for a long time and, in addition, in the last year a tracker had been fitted under the offside rear-wheel arch of Stu’s Volvo. It was linked to Rockwell’s Block-I GPS satellite, which had just been launched. Typhon had invested heavily in Rockwell and as a result benefited from privileged early access. Despite the downgrading of his operation, Vermeulen still got to play with all the new toys. The result was the pretty backlit map in the Mt. Lebanon headquarters, which would not have shamed NASA Mission Control in Houston.
Despite the high-tech setup right in front of him, or maybe because it was so new and therefore unfamiliar, the Operator was more focused on listening in for any further activity on the Winthrop line than viewing the tracker map. It was only an hour after Ed’s departure that he finally stretched, yawned and noticed the marker had moved on the backlit display and was now approaching Seabrook, New Hampshire.
He hastily picked up the internal phone.
“Constance’s vehicle is on the move, sir,” he reported.
“Where are David and Carl?”
“Brookline, sir.”
“Well, Constance has given them the slip. Tell them to follow him. Two cars. They’re to wait for an opportunity. If there’s any resistance, any whatsoever, they are to terminate him. Otherwise they’re to bring him to the rendezvous. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Also, get hold of Washington Street. Tell Smith to send an officer around to Winthrop Road. An anonymous tip-off. Possible gunfire noise from inside. See if he can arrange it to look like a homicide. That way if the worst comes to the worst the cops can pull Constance in and we can deal with him in custody.”
“Right away.”
The Operator was quickly on the radio to David.
“He’s heading north on the interstate. You’re to follow. Tracker’s working. Over.”
“Shit,” David answered. “We’re on our way.”
The Operator frowned. Comms would be a problem. David and Carl would soon be out of radio range. Though he could see what was going on, David and Carl would have to stop and phone in for information. No matter, he was pretty certain that Ed was heading to the Constance cabin up on Lake Tranquility. Where else could he go?
