“There was no body in that car?”
Lael shook his head. “Nope. Just one big bang. It’s been a few hours so they certainly know by now I wasn’t inside. The locals are wondering what the hell is going on. Oliver is probably shaking his head. The idea was just to buy me some time and slow Oliver down.” He pointed a finger at me. “I made some calls right after Reverend Foster called me. The bureau has an active investigation going on Oliver. An internal corruption probe. But the Justice Department is involved, too, separately, headed by a lawyer named Stephanie Nelle. You work for her?”
I nodded, deciding to be honest. “An FBI administrator named Dan Veddern was shot in St. Augustine. Valdez did it.”
“Shooting the head of the intelligence branch takes balls.”
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“It takes more than that to shock me.”
I said, “There are a lot of questions about why people in the FBI are so curious about a 1933 Double Eagle and a man named Juan Lopez Valdez, who made it to the Dry Tortugas from Cuba. Did you help the FBI get its hands on two 1933 Double Eagles?”
Lael smiled. “I found them during a COINTELPRO burglary around 1963, I think. I can’t really remember. They came off a mafia connection. We stole them to generate a civil war within that family, and we got one. They killed each other faster than we could have prosecuted them. Oliver kept the coins. Turning them in to the Secret Service would have raised a pile of questions that nobody wanted to answer. So we just held on to them. We collected lots of cash and valuables that way. It became a private reserve fund. I knew that Valdez and Foster were paid with those coins.”
“You recorded the transaction?”
He nodded. “Not Valdez. But I did Foster. Oliver wanted everything memorialized. His way of making sure Foster never went public. But the coin was an insult. Payment, yet not. He’d have to liquidate it somehow, which Oliver knew would be tough.”
“Was Foster an FBI informant?”
He didn’t immediately answer me. Finally, he said, “I’m going to take the Fifth on that one. Ask Foster.”
I added that to the list of questions for later. “Veddern said they were about to take you into custody.”
“Which is another reason for the big bang. I was tipped off by Oliver that Veddern was coming. His way of showing me we were all on the same side. Veddern’s problem was in underestimating Oliver. That’s a mistake I don’t plan to make. Oliver was the world’s greatest kiss-ass. All he wanted was Hoover’s constant approval. He told that SOB exactly what he wanted to hear, and did exactly what Hoover wanted. Then after Hoover died he turned on him, and managed to stay around for twenty-five more years. He knows where a lot of skeletons are buried, literally, and he still has friends in high places.”
“Where are you two going?”
Cie shrugged. “Far away from here. Hopefully far enough that Tom Oliver, or the FBI, won’t consider us a threat anymore.”
“They’ll go looking for you.”
“Sure they will,” Lael said. “But I’m real good at being a ghost.”
I was curious. “Was it as bad, back in the ’60s, as FBI history says it was?”
“Worse,” Cie said. “We had little to no oversight. Congress and presidents were terrified of Hoover. No one wanted to cross him. Ever hear of Jean Seberg?”
I listened as she told me about the actress, whoses donations to the NAACP, Native American groups, and the Black Panther Party placed her squarely on the subversive radar, so Hoover turned COINTELPRO her way. They created a false story that her white husband was not the father of her unborn child, but that instead it was the product of an affair with a Black Panther. The article appeared in both the L.A. Times and Newsweek. The stress and trauma from that supposed revelation caused Seberg to prematurely lose the baby. In defiance, she held a funeral with an open casket to allow reporters to see the infant girl’s white skin.
But Hoover didn’t stop there.
COINTELPRO conducted years more of surveillance, break-ins, and wiretapping on Seberg, all of which happened not only within the United States but in France, Italy, and Switzerland where she lived for most of her life. Progressively, she became more and more psychotic until, at age forty, she killed herself.
“Six days after she died in 1979,” Cie said, “the FBI confirmed publicly everything I just told you. Time magazine did a big article. ‘The FBI vs. Jean Seberg.’ I remember the outrage. People couldn’t believe the FBI would do something like that to a private citizen. Of course, Hoover was dead and gone by then. Oliver okayed the release of the Seberg file as a way to distance himself from Hoover. He was trying to survive the Church Committee, and he did. Little really changed, though. COINTELPRO was officially dismantled, but its activities kept going, just in different forms, and much more quietly.”
“This is something entirely different,” I pointed out.
“How do you figure?” Cie asked. “Same people. Same rules. Same thing. Do you think King was the only person they killed?”
I wondered how much this woman knew, but realized this was not the time or place.
“Can I take a look at those files?” Lael said.
I didn’t see the harm and it might lead to more information from him. So I handed over the backpack.
“This is a lot easier to carry than that case you were hauling at my house,” Lael said.
“A gift from the FBI.”
“What do you mean?” Lael asked.
“We switched it out before meeting with Veddern. Our FBI escort gave it to me.”
I saw Lael’s eyes light up and the look of concern he tossed toward his former wife.
“What did I do wrong?”
“Get your suitcase. Now,” Lael said to Cie. “Hurry.”
Lael himself sprang from his chair and gathered up a duffel bag on the far side of the room. Cie raced into another part of the house, emerging with a suitcase in hand.
I had no idea what was happening. “What’s going on?”
“They didn’t give you that backpack to be friendly. It’s tagged. It has to be. They can track it.”
I’d only seen such things in the movies or on television. “They really can do that?”
“Absolutely. We have to get out of here. You may have screwed up everything we planned.” Lael faced Cie. “What do you think? Leave it here?”
She nodded.
Lael unzipped the backpack and removed the files, stuffing them into his duffel bag. Then he tossed the backpack across the room and said, “Let’s go.”
We rushed out the back door and headed for a detached garage. Inside sat a shiny Chevy pickup. Lael tossed his duffel bag and Cie’s suitcase in the bed and we all climbed into the cab.
“You drive, rookie,” Lael said.
I noticed that Cie had brought her rifle.
I heard the sound of a car arriving outside, then the screech of tires as it braked hard on the loose ground.
Doors opened, then closed.
Lael motioned for silence.
We crept to one of the garage windows, this one offering a view toward the front of the house.
The two men from the plaza, the ones Coleen and I had coldcocked, were here.
Chapter Forty
“They’re Veddern’s men,” I whispered to Lael and Cie.
We stayed low and out of sight, not making a sound. All of the doors into the garage were closed. The two visitors seemed to be deciding whether to enter the house. A deep and leaden silence reigned.
“They know the backpack is still inside,” Lael whispered. “They’re going in to find it. You can count on that.”
“Which gives us time to get out of here,” I said.
“You got that right.”
I noticed that the garage door opened with an electronic motor. Which could take forever. I saw Lael was considering that dilemma, too.
“We’ll pop the release to the motor,” he said, “and I’ll roll it up fast. Once I have the door headed up, start the motor and I’ll hop in. Cie—”
“I know. I’ll be ready.”
Cie and I crept over to the truck, and I quietly eased open the driver’s-side door.