Murder in Foggy Bottom Page 9

  “Christ, how much more could be at risk than what we’ve got now? Talk to me, Joe. I’m here because the president of the United States wants answers.”

  “And maybe a dead undercover agent, too?”

  “You have someone undercover with some of these groups?”

  Harris nodded.

  “Which ones?”

  “Compromise our agents, Tony, and you compromise what might be the answer to this. If the president wants a briefing, I’m sure Justice will oblige.”

  “That’s encouraging.”

  “That’s necessary.”

  “I assume Justice approved these undercover operations.”

  “Assuming anything in this town is a tricky exercise, but you know that as well as anyone. Things okay with you, Tony?”

  “They were until yesterday. I’ll get back to you.”

  Joe Harris went outside to Pennsylvania Avenue before returning to his office in the Hoover Building. He was a smoker other smokers envied, able to limit himself to five or six cigarettes a day, none on some days. He lit up and walked to the corner of E Street, where hundreds of tourists were lined up for the FBI tour, one of the most popular in Washington. Not long ago, the tour had been suspended after the Bureau received what it considered to be credible threats against the facility. But it resumed when security, already tight, was further beefed up, and thousands of visitors filed through every day, learning that G-man stands for Government Man, and that the FBI stands for Federal Bureau of Investigation but also that the F stands for Fidelity, the B for Bravery, and the I for Integrity. The tour always ended with a dazzling firearms demonstration by a Bureau sharpshooter. Always a bull’s-eye. A shame things didn’t work that smoothly in real life.

  Harris agreed with most Washingtonians, at least those who cared about such things, that the buff-colored, concrete-aggregate building named after J. Edgar Hoover ranked high on the city’s list of ugly edifices, a prime example of the school of architecture known as New Brutalism.

  He snuffed the cigarette out, dropped it in a trash container on the corner, and cast a final glance at the tourists. Everyone in Washington, DC, was hot in summer, but there was no hotter-looking creature on earth than a tourist waiting in line for a tour.

  He welcomed the blast of air-conditioning as he entered the building and went to his office, where his secretary told him that the director wished to see him. “Where have you been?” she asked.

  “Outside for a smoke.”

  “It sounds urgent. Why don’t you just quit?”

  “This place?” He laughed.

  “You know what I mean.”

  FBI Director Russell Templeton was in his spacious office with top aides when Harris walked in. Harris liked working for Templeton better than he had for his predecessor, a much older man who, as far as Harris felt, was more of a political hack than a dedicated law enforcement officer worthy of leading the Bureau. What he especially admired was Templeton’s willingness to stand up to the attorney general, whom Harris lumped in with the former FBI director as but another of the previous administration’s misguided appointments.

  “How’d the meeting go?” Templeton asked once Harris had joined the others in a circle of chairs around the director’s desk.

  “All right. Nothing new. I gave Tony Cammanati the information about the missiles.”

  “What did he say?”

  Harris ran his hand over his head, on which stubble was reappearing. “He’s taking it to the president who, no surprise, wants this solved yesterday. I mentioned to him—general terms only—the ongoing investigation into right-wing hate groups.” Harris turned to the special agent to his right: “Scope?”

  The agent looked to Templeton for a signal that he could respond. Instead, the director gave the answer. “Scope is due to report in tonight.” He raised his eyebrows at the agent to Harris’s right, a silent call for affirmation.

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “How long has it been since he last gave a report?” Harris asked.

  “A week,” the agent replied in a pinched voice, leaning to his left to come closer to Harris. He was a small man with a narrow face and disproportionately large ears. “The Elephant Man,” they called him when comparing notes over a beer or on the golf course. He was a Bureau “handler,” responsible for training and maintaining special agents who worked underground, infiltrating groups of interest to the Bureau because of possible criminal activity. “He reports on a weekly basis.” He sounded defensive, as though Harris were challenging the reporting schedule.

  “Tonight,” Harris said.

  The Elephant Man nodded.

  “When do we bring the other agencies into the loop on the missiles?” Harris asked.

  “That’s not our call,” Templeton said. “I had a confirmation from the attorney general that we’re to release nothing about the missiles until directed to by her. She’ll get the word from the president.”

  Harris turned to his right again. “Has Scope reported anything in previous contacts that indicates he might know something about these missiles and whose hands they fell into?”

  “No.”

  Harris didn’t believe him.

  Templeton stood and stretched, straining the buttons on his blue button-down shirt. “I assume that by tomorrow, we’ll be getting together with the Company’s people and State. Naturally, we’ll cooperate fully with whatever agency the president dictates, but that doesn’t include Scope’s activities. Unless, of course, we’re ordered to from up top. We’ll meet here at seven tomorrow morning.”

  A representative from public affairs said, “The press? They know it was missiles that brought down the planes. The more we stonewall on this aspect of the case, the more we—”

  Templeton, who almost always spoke in soft, measured tones, snapped, “They think they know. Anyone leaks anything to that bunch of vultures will end up providing a human target for the firearms demonstration. See you at seven!”

  12

  Early Evening the Next Day

  Washington, DC

  Joe Potamos was hotter than Sixteenth Street’s pavement as he entered the Carlton.

  He’d come from the Post after an argument with his editor, Gil Gardello, over Potamos’s continuing assignment to develop human interest sidebars on the crash of the Washington-bound Dash 8. Of the thirty-six passengers aboard the plane, fourteen had been Washington-area residents.

  He was crossing the elegant hotel’s lobby in the direction of the bar when a voice stopped him.

  “Hey, Joe.”

  The voice belonged to The Christian Science Monitor’s Godfrey Sperling, a familiar face at the Carlton, whose early-morning interviews with DC’s political bigwigs in the Crystal Room were known as “Sperling breakfasts.”

  “How are you, Joe?” Sperling asked.

  “I’ve been better. You?”

  “Better than you, it seems. What are you chasing these days?”

  “Grieving widows and fatherless kids. It’s inspiring. You?”

  “The Speaker’s stonewalling of campaign reform legislation. I’m interviewing him here tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s great, Godfrey. That’s a . . . excuse me, I’m meeting somebody.”

  The brief conversation only served to raise Potamos’s internal temperature, despite the air-conditioning. There was a time when he, Joe Potamos, Frank Potamos’s prodigal son, hotshot political reporter on the nation’s second-most-important newspaper, would have been sitting down with Speakers of the House and other DC politicos with the power to block good legislation, or to ram through pork that benefitted no one except their hometown voters.

  But that was then.

  He muttered a few choice scatological comments as he entered the bar, where homicide detective Peter Languth, a drink in his hand, was talking to Nathan Yu, the bartender.

  “I was getting worried,” Languth said as Potamos took a stool next to him.

  “Worried about what,” Potamos s
aid, “that I wouldn’t show up and you’d have to pay for your own drinks?”

  Languth leaned away from Potamos: “Oooh, the tiger is loose. What’s the matter, Joe, that piano-playing girlfriend of yours play ‘The Party’s Over’?”

  “Hello, Nathan,” Potamos said to the barman. “Skim milk.” To Languth: “No, she just keeps playing ‘The Man I Love.’ ”

  Nathan placed a Rob Roy in front of Potamos, who raised it in Languth’s direction. “To my father, may he rest in peace. If he’d been more forceful, I’d be happily whipping up burgers swimming in grease and loving every minute of it. What’s new on the Canadian, Wilcox, who got it in the park?”

  Languth drew on his drink, a Black Velvet, dark porter with champagne. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, “Assailants unknown.”

  “Yeah, fine, but what’s your read on it?”

  Languth finished his drink, motioned for Nathan to refill it, and shifted his bulky body on the stool so that he faced Potamos. “Why’re you asking?”

  Potamos hunched his shoulders and leaned his elbows on the bar. “I’m a reporter, for crissake.”

  “Yeah, but why are you so curious about this stiff?”

  “I have a gut feeling about it, that’s all. He was killed with a knife in the side, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Not in the chest, not in the back, in the side.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “His wallet was intact, nothing taken, credit cards, cash, nothing.”

  “You okay, Joe?”

  “No. Where was Wilcox coming from when he got it? Where had he been that night?”

  Languth seemed to lack a neck, which made his shrugs less obvious. “I didn’t catch the case after he was found. Cox did.”

  “What did Cox say? Where had Wilcox been?”

  “I don’t know. No, maybe I do. Cox said something about the deceased coming from some affair at the State Department, something about fishing rights.”

  “Fishing rights?”

  “Yeah, fishing rights. A flap between us and the Canucks over fish.”

  Potamos grunted, finished his drink, and asked Nathan for another: “A little sweeter this time, huh?”

  “What’s new with your friend Bowen, Joe?”

  Focusing on the murder of the Canadian trade rep, Jeremy Wilcox, had cooled Potamos off. The mention of George Alfred Bowen stoked the furnace again. “You could’ve talked all night and not mentioned him, Pete.”

  “Yeah, I know it’s a sore spot with you, but you never really talk about it.”

  Potamos looked into Languth’s wide, flat face and tried to see inside his head.

  When Potamos was covering the State Department, he functioned in a world that didn’t include DC cops like Languth. But after his demotion to general-assignment reporting, with rape and murder and assault replacing diplomatic niceties, he found himself bonding with cops, including the plodding Pete Languth. In a sense, Potamos’s temperament was more in line with the gritty world of a police officer than the striped-pants, cutaway-coat crowd, and he quickly came to appreciate the way cops spent their days and nights, wallowing in criminal human garbage that DC’s more genteel citizens escaped from at night by fleeing to their suburban sanctuaries.

  Although they were markedly different in every way, and seemed always to be at odds with each other, it was Potamos’s appreciation of what Languth did for a living that initially forged a friendship of sorts. Languth loathed the press but soon recognized in Potamos a different breed of reporter, scornful of his profession’s abuses, often disgusted with its excesses, yet dedicated to being the best.

  They weren’t friends in a social sense, never got together simply to enjoy each other’s company. Their conversations always revolved around some aspect of their jobs. Languth was married with four grown children, Potamos twice divorced and with kids he seldom saw. Potamos enjoyed music and theater and books. Languth’s idea of high culture was an imported beer while watching “professional” wrestling on TV. What they did share was a distrust of people. They both made their living asking questions, and had come to the conclusion that people lie more often than they tell the truth. Maybe that was why Potamos liked the lumbering, plodding, sarcastic detective. Potamos believed him, even when he didn’t like what he was saying. Believing what people said in Washington, DC, was worth something.

  “Did you really hit the guy?” Languth asked.

  “Bowen? Yeah, I hit him,” Potamos said.

  George Alfred Bowen was one of the country’s leading political columnists and commentators. His syndicated three-times-a-week column was carried across the country in more than two hundred newspapers, and his program on CBS, As I See It, was for aficionados of Sunday-morning talking-head shows. He was one of three columnists at the Post whose politics weren’t compatible with the paper’s liberal management, but whose presence on its editorial pages provided the expected balanced approach to opinion.

  Bowen was a conservative Reagan Republican, no secret about that; he wore that credential on the sleeve of his double-breasted blue blazers. His was the arrogance of a fashion model in a group of senior citizens.

  He was sixty-four years old. His silver hair flowed past his ears and hung with studied casualness over his shirt collars. He was corn-silk thin, and tall, and his reputation as a connoisseur of fine wines and haute cuisine was as familiar as his political views. Because he was powerful, he saw no need to disguise what was an abrasive and insensitive personality, nor did he make an attempt. Indeed, that abrasive personality and high-energy, loud voice seemed to give him credibility. Those who demonstrated friendship did so because it was prudent; the women in his life, four ex-wives, gave credence to the Kissinger thesis that power was a potent aphrodisiac. Had he not been George Alfred Bowen, he might have had trouble finding someone with whom to have dinner.

  When Potamos joined the Post after six years with The Boston Globe, where he had made a name for himself covering that city’s often unfathomable political life, he was cautioned to stay clear of Bowen, and he did.

  Until that night almost two years ago when staying away from him wasn’t possible.

  Potamos had been covering Congress for the paper, and doing a good job of it. But when a reporter assigned to the Post’s State Department beat suffered a heart attack and was placed on disability leave, Potamos was asked to fill in for him. At the time, he’d been working on a story involving a Missouri congressman who was alleged to have accepted illegal campaign contributions from a Japanese businessman to sway opinion on the House International Relations Committee’s Asia and Pacific Subcommittee, which he chaired. Although Potamos now had a new news beat, he continued on his own time to delve into the congressman’s campaign-fund assertions.

  George Alfred Bowen had been chasing down that story, too. If Potamos had known that, he might have been expected to back off and leave the scoop to the preeminent political columnist.

  But backing off had never been Joe Potamos’s style. When he was told by his bosses that Bowen had what he considered to be a proprietary interest in the brewing scandal, Potamos just pushed harder and dug deeper until, through a friend in the House—a Greek-American representative from Boston—he nailed down the proof he needed and wrote the story.

  Potamos was in his editor’s office discussing the story when Bowen entered the newsroom. He usually walked with studied nonchalance. This night, he moved with purposeful strides, his praying-mantis body bent forward, mouth set in a hard, straight line, muscles in his cheeks working, eyes narrowed. He went directly to the managing editor’s office, ignored Potamos, and threw down on the editor’s desk an advance copy of Potamos’s story, which was due to hit the street the next morning.

  “What is this garbage?” he yelled.

  The managing editor held up his hands. “Calm down, George. Joe came up with the goods, that’s all. It’s a hell of a good story.”

  “It is trash,” Bowen said. “I have been w
orking on this story for months, and you know it. I’m this close to breaking it.” He demonstrated by holding two talonlike fingers an inch apart.

  “George . . .” the editor said, getting up and coming around the desk in an attempt to placate their star columnist. As he did, Potamos stood to leave. Bowen spun around and blocked the doorway. His face was red with anger, and he visibly shook. “You little greaseball bastard, you don’t know what you’re writing about. You don’t know anything.”

  Potamos hadn’t expected the outburst, even though Bowen’s temper was legendary. Being called a greaseball brought back an instant memory of high school. When another student had called him that, Potamos punched the student in the face, knocking him down.

  “You pathetic little hack,” Bowen said, voice rising. “Your story is junk. Your source is crap. You don’t mess with George Alfred Bowen!”

  Other staffers in the newsroom inched closer to the office. Potamos’s hands tightened into fists at his sides. His breathing was heavy; he snorted through his nose like a bull. He looked up into Bowen’s distorted, smoldering face. “Get out of the way,” Potamos said. Bowen placed his hands on Potamos’s chest and pushed. As he did, Potamos saw Bowen’s face disappear in a blinding white light. The next thing he remembered was being held down in a chair by two other reporters.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, opened his eyes and looked down at his right hand. It hurt. Voices buzzed around him like a swarm of hornets. “Get the police,” he heard someone say.

  “Hell, no,” someone else said. “No police.”

  “You okay, George?”

  Potamos looked to his right; the blurred scene came into focus. George Alfred Bowen was slumped in a chair. His half-glasses, tethered to him by a thin strap, were broken. A tiny trickle of blood came from his nose. People hovered over him.

  “You idiot!” The managing editor’s face was inches from Potamos’s. “You bloody idiot. What did you hit him for?”

  “Hit him? I—I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  Two security guards had been summoned from their position in the lobby.