That’s all I needed to know.
I reduced the throttle and began to descend. Most of the lakefront properties had docks and any one of them would do. I swung around and dropped out of the bright sky, the plane wobbling in the warm afternoon air currents. I kept the nose high as we gently kissed, then skipped off the flat water. We bounced a few more times then settled on the surface, the pontoons jolting us to a stop. I used the engine to glide across the lake, approaching one of the docks, then killed the prop and glided toward shore.
Coleen opened her door and hopped onto the dock.
I released my harness and climbed across the passenger seat, jumping over to the aluminum deck. A rope was there, tied to one of the vertical supports, and I used it to secure the plane. Then I reached back inside and retrieved the waterproof case, which I immediately noticed was much lighter. Those weights Valdez had mentioned were gone. That meant Jansen had opened the container. But something remained inside. I could feel it shifting back and forth.
“I need a phone,” she said.
We left the dock and headed for the house, which appeared to be unoccupied. No vehicles sat in the drive. No sign of anyone. Heat and humidity had settled all around us like a moist blanket. Buzzy, circling flies prospected our sticky skin. Coleen peered in through the glass of the back door.
“There’s a phone in the kitchen.”
Before I could say a word, she used the gun to break the glass, then reached in and opened the lock. Now burglary could be added to my growing list of crimes. I decided to stay outside and keep watch, but I could hear her talking on the phone. I laid the case on top of a picnic table, near a swing set. Time for me to find out what this was all about.
I released the latches.
“Don’t do that.”
I turned.
She had the gun aimed straight at me.
“You going to shoot me?”
“If you don’t close that lid, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
Chapter Fourteen
“I was nearly killed for what’s in this case,” I said. “I want to know for what.”
The gun stayed aimed at me.
I stared into her eyes, which were brown and hard, wondering what was torturing this woman. She was troubled, of that I was sure. But I wasn’t backing down. “I’m here for the Justice Department. And whether you like it or not, you’re not in control.”
“You have no idea what I’m capable of.”
“You’re a cop. That’s all I need to know. You don’t shoot people for no reason.”
And I was right.
She lowered the weapon. “All right, let’s both take a look.”
Sounded like a plan.
I turned my attention back to the case.
She exited the house and approached the picnic table. I opened the lid to see several file folders lying inside. They were definitely old, a faded green, edges tattered. Two words were printed in thick black marker on the cover of the top one.
BISHOP’S PAWN
They meant nothing to me. So I asked, “Do you know what that refers to?”
Two sounds broke the silence almost at the same time. A distant siren and the basso beat of rotors through air. I glanced up, stared out over the lake, and in the far distance saw a black dot in the afternoon sky.
Helicopter.
The siren had to be the local police.
“We need to get out of here,” she said.
She didn’t have to tell me twice.
I slammed the lid shut and snapped the latches in place. With the case in hand, we rushed around to the front yard. The house was set back from the highway, among trees at the water’s edge. A detached garage stood off to the side. Coleen ran toward a window in the garage’s side wall and gazed inside.
“There’s a pickup truck.”
“Do it.”
She smashed the window, opened the sash, and climbed inside. A moment later the garage door rose and I saw an old Chevy. I ran to the driver’s door and opened it, sliding the case across the front bench seat. Coleen climbed in on the passenger side. I knew what had to be done, so I reached beneath the steering column and found the ignition wires. This truck was plenty old enough that it could be hot-wired. I’d learned, as a kid, working on my grandfather’s onion farm, how to get a truck going out in the middle of nowhere. I located the three wires, tore them from their connectors, and found the two that triggered the starter.
The engine coughed to life.
I twisted them together, slammed the door closed, and settled in behind the wheel. Perhaps somebody had noticed our arrival and sent a welcoming committee, none of whom I wanted to meet. I backed the truck from the garage and we sped away. The house and the trees blocked our exit from the lake side, but the chopper was still a long way off. The sirens seemed closer but we managed to find the highway and head north without spotting anyone. I decided to slow my speed so as not to attract attention, as it was unclear from which direction the sirens were approaching.
But we passed no police cars.
I kept driving north.
I stopped the truck in a Dairy Queen parking lot, nestled safe among other vehicles.
“Coleen,” I said to her. “I’m not your enemy.”
“You saving my hide at Fort Jefferson doesn’t make you my friend, either.”
“But it ought to buy me something.”
She smiled.
For the first time.
“You said you’re a lawyer. Have you been one long?” she asked.
“About six years. I’ve only been a Justice Department agent, though, since yesterday.”
“Why do you think this guy Jansen wanted you dead?”
“I don’t know. But I intend to find out.”
Then a thought occurred to me. “They’ll know we used the phone in that house. Your call can be traced.”
“I didn’t make one,” she said.
“I heard you.”
“All show, just for you. I planned to take you down outside, then leave with the files. I was just about to do that with a smack to the back of your head when we heard the sirens.”
I stared back out the windshield. “Once again, what is Bishop’s Pawn?”
I’d sensed back at the house that the words were not unfamiliar to her.
“It was a classified FBI operation that ran from mid-1967 to the spring of 1968.”
“How do you know that?”
“My father told me. It was part of COINTELPRO.”
That acronym rang a bell.
Reading was my passion. I devoured books and, thanks to my eidetic memory, I never forgot a word. J. Edgar Hoover had always been a fascination. Lauded as a saint and savior in life, since his death in 1972 we’d come to learn that he was neither. His legal abuses had become legendary, COINTELPRO perhaps the pinnacle of FBI corruption.
The Counter Intelligence Program started in the 1950s to combat a supposed communist threat within the United States. But it morphed into something far more ugly, eventually infiltrating a variety of political groups. The Socialist Workers Party, KKK, Nation of Islam, and Black Panthers all were targeted. But so were more benign groups like the Puerto Rican independence movement, feminist organizations, and anything that advocated left-of-center positions, especially antiwar protesters. Its goal? To expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize any threat. To accomplish that it routinely relied on burglaries, opening people’s mail, forged documents, having people fired from their jobs, planting fake news articles, even encouraging violence between rivals. It wasn’t until 1971 that it was finally exposed, thanks to a group of citizens who burglarized an FBI field office in Pennsylvania, stealing every file and sending them to journalists. That led to a congressional investigation—the famed Church Committee, named for its chairman, Senator Frank Church—which officially identified all of the abuses.
Another siren could be heard, approaching from the south. A moment later a Martin County Sheriff’s car raced by on the highway, lights flashing.