Collateral Damage (39 page)

The white C-130 aircraft with the red stripe and seal of the U.S. Coast Guard set down on the single runway of the Marsh Harbour airport and taxied to the ramp. The surviving members of Team Charlie and our little band from Longboat Key stood sweating in the early morning sun. Llewellyn and his five men were sitting with their hands cuffed behind them, their backs against the wall of a small hangar,

“Mr. Algren,” Llewellyn called, “if you've got the juice to get hold of a coast guard plane, I'm ready to accept that you're who you say you are. Can you uncuff us?”

“I'm not convinced you're who you say you are, Mr. Llewellyn,” said Jock. “We'll sort it out when we get to Miami.”

Jock had made the call the night before. I didn't ask who he could call who had the power to send us a government aircraft, but then I'd long since given up trying to discern the breadth of his power. It seemed to be almost unlimited.

Bahamian customs was turning a blind eye to our little group and the cuffed men in our custody. We'd put our weapons in duffel bags, but I doubt anybody would have thought they were tennis rackets. We'd land at Opa Locka airport near Miami and our captives would be taken to a safe house in Miami owned by Jock's agency. They'd be kept there incommunicado until we figured things out.

Llewellyn had become very cooperative the night before as he began to perceive that Jock might be exactly who he said he was. He called the man overseeing his operation and told them that he had taken control of the situation at Doc's house, but that he would have to hold the men until daybreak. The Bahamians were getting a little squeamish, but everything
was under control. He was in charge and would bring the people he'd arrested out at first light.

We left before dawn, but not as Llewellyn had indicated to his superior. We took our rented boat back to the marina and used the other two boats to transport our men and our prisoners. The marina was deserted and we tied the boats to the docks and disappeared into the darkness. Two vans were waiting on the road that ran next to the marina, courtesy of Chief Constable Gilmore and Tom Llewellyn. We were taken directly to the airport.

The sun was well up by the time we landed at Opa Locka. The August heat beat down on us, a relentless fact of summer in Florida. We were met by two men from the Miami office of Jock's agency. Neither spoke a word, just nodded as Jock gave orders. One handed Jock a large envelope, and loaded the CIA men into another van and left the airport.

Because his plane in Marsh Harbour was too small to accommodate all the passengers, Doc had arranged for Tom Telson to bring the rented jet from Atlanta to Opa Locka to pick up the men of Team Charlie. They would fly back to Atlanta and check into hotels, taking a reluctant J.D. with them.

My phone call to Bill Lester the night before had not been exactly pleasant. I told him everything we'd discovered in Marsh Harbour. He was relieved that J.D. was safe and he understood the implications of the involvement of rogue CIA agents. Finally, I took a deep breath and told him about the bank account and the fact that J.D.'s name was on it.

His voice was cold. “When did you find out about the account?”

“Yesterday.”

“And you're telling me about this now?”

“I'm sorry, Bill. I knew J.D. wasn't involved, but I also knew that you'd have to take some action, give the information to the town manager at the very least. It would inevitably get out, and J.D.'s career would be over. The fact that she was innocent wouldn't be a factor in the story.”

A stony silence ensued. Then a sigh. “You're right. I couldn't report what I didn't know. But you ever do something like this again and I'll put your ass under the jail. Are we clear?”

“We're clear, Chief. And I'm sorry.”

“Forget it. You did the right thing. I'll square her disappearance with our people.”

He was going to tell them that J.D. had been on an undercover operation that he could not disclose and he was sorry to have worried them. They would be a bit pissed, but in the end would accept her disappearance as just another burp in a cop's routine.

When everybody was gone, Jock, Logan, and I went into a small office in the coast guard hangar. The air-conditioning was working overtime, blowing a steady stream of cold air into the small space. I had already sweated through my shirt and welcomed the relief the coolness brought. Jock sat at a desk and opened the envelope given him by the agent.

He studied the contents for a minute, shuffling through the pages. “Looks like the director came through. These are dossiers on the Thanatos teams and Nitzler.”

He passed me a sheaf of papers. “You guys take a look at the teams. I'm going to dig into Mr. Nitzler. I think his career is over.”

I began to read the pages, passing each one to Logan when I finished it. The report, written in dry bureaucratic speak, couldn't obscure the drama. The war in Vietnam was winding down. Nixon's Vietnamization of the war was in full swing. The only problem was that the South Vietnamese could not win. Their government was corrupt and the people had lost confidence in it. The Viet Cong, supported by the north with money, weapons, and regular troops, were in the ascendancy. The outcome was inevitable. The south would fall. The only thing the Americans could do was prolong the agony in hopes of salvaging some strategic position. Thanatos was born of desperation. It was an attempt to slow the advance of the Communists by assassinating their leaders. While it had some successes, it was in the end, a failure. The teams were disbanded, their members threatened with prosecution if they ever disclosed what they'd done during the last few months of their service.

I read on, absorbed in the futility of the operation, the needless deaths of good soldiers who'd joined the teams, angered by the perfidy of the intelligence agencies that were fighting a war they could not win, killing with no purpose other than to engage in a paroxysm of vengeful murder,
>as if saying, “Yes, you beat us, but many of your leaders won't live to enjoy their victory.” There was nothing about the massacre at Ban Touk. The only reference was that “a successful assault was made upon a refuge of senior Viet Cong commanders and two men from Team Charlie were killed in action.”

I reached the last page of the dossier. It was a list of names. All the men who'd been engaged in Operation Thanatos. “Shit,” I said, “Nitzler was the guy running the teams from Saigon.”

Jock looked up from the papers he was reading. “Yeah, it's here in his file. He was what the military used to call a barnburner, a man on his way up. He was young to have the job, but he ran Thanatos. Apparently the operation lasted less than a year, and Nitzler came back to D.C. a hero. The fact that the teams didn't accomplish a damn thing seemed to have no effect on his career. They killed a lot of people and that's what was important. Vietnam was just a body-counting exercise and the figures were always inflated.”

“There's more,” I said. “What?”

“Remember Opal? The team leader that Doc and the guys killed?”

“Right.”

“His name was Nigel Morrissey.”

“Damn,” said Jock. “That's obviously Nigella's dad. What are we missing?”

“We're only missing one piece of the puzzle,” said Logan.

“How do you see that?” I asked.

Logan held up his index finger. “If we drop the one missing piece into the puzzle, we'll see the whole picture. There has to be something that connects Nigella, Nitzler, and Stanley. Soupy and the Laotians are not a part of this. They were just part of the misdirection.”

“I think we can connect Nitzler and Morrissey,” I said. “They were both CIA and worked on Operation Thanatos. They were probably buddies, and now Nitzler is taking his revenge for the killing of his pal.”

“How does that connect Stanley and Morrissey's daughter?” asked Jock. “And how are Nigella and Stanley connected to Nitzler?”

Logan was quiet for a moment. “I would guess that Nitzler has some relationship with Nigella. She's the daughter of his buddy. I just don't see how Stanley and his drug operation work into the picture.”

“Maybe DEA has something,” said Jock. “Delgado had all day yesterday to work on Stanley and Nigella.”

“It's worth the call,” I said.

Jock phoned the DEA office in Tampa and asked to speak to Delgado. The conversation was short and mostly one-sided. Delgado did all the talking. Jock hung up. “He wants to see us as soon as possible. Says there's a lot we need to know and he can't talk about it over the phone. He's also sending one of his guys to the bank in Sarasota to pick up that check with the thumbprint. It'll be interesting to see who was cashing those checks.”

I looked at my watch. Not quite nine in the morning. “If Doc's plane's still in Marsh Harbour, can you square it so that he can bring it here to Opa Locka without worrying about customs and a lot of bureaucracy?”

“I'll talk to some people,” said Jock. “You call Fred Cassidy. See if he's left the Bahamas yet.”

“What about Nitzler?” I asked. “We've got to get to him.”

“Nitzler's in a safe place. My agency guys picked him up on his way to the office this morning. He's in one of our safe houses in Virginia. My director called the CIA director and told him that Nitzler was a security risk and that my agency would take care of it. Nitzler won't even be missed at the office this morning.

I reached Cassidy at the airport in Marsh Harbour. He was about to leave for Atlanta. He agreed to fly directly to Opa Locka and pick us up. Jock handled the bureaucrats and by eleven o'clock we were in a taxi in Tampa on our way to the DEA offices.

Dan Delgado, the special agent in charge, met us in the reception area and led us back to a small conference room. He offered coffee and Jock and I accepted. Logan asked for a bottle of water. A middle-aged woman brought the coffee and water and closed the door on her way out.

Delgado drew a deep breath and said, “Gentlemen, we have a big problem here. You've stepped all over one of our investigations.”

“What do you mean?” Jock asked.

“The Otto Foundation has been bringing drugs into the country and sending money out. The DEA office in Macon was on top of it and was about to bust the entire operation when you guys showed up.”

Jock said, “This goes deeper than the drug running, Dan. There's a tie-in to some murders and probably some rogue CIA types. We don't have the whole picture yet, but we're zeroing in on it.”

“You think the CIA was involved in the drugs?”

“I don't have any idea,” said Jock. “At least one very senior guy in the CIA is involved in the murders. I don't know anything about the drugs, except that we stumbled over Stanley's operation. Have you sweated anything out of Stanley?”

“No. He's our guy.”

“What do you mean?”

“He's a confidential informant for us.”

“I don't get it,” I said. “He's the guy in charge of the operation.”

Delgado shook his head. “Stanley runs the foundation charitable operations. Maude Lane runs the drug side of the operation.”

I sat back in my chair. Stunned. “Maude Lane? The grandmotherly type who works at the foundation?”

Delgado laughed. “Some story, huh?”

“That doesn't make sense,” said Logan.

“She's worked there for ten years,” I said. “Has the drug running been going on all that time?”

“No,” said Delgado. “Stanley approached the Macon police at the end of last year. Said he'd noticed some funny things going on with the bank statements. Apparently Maude Lane ran the bookkeeping side of the operation. Stanley had done an audit of sorts at the end of the year and couldn't account for money coming in and going out to people and corporations he'd never heard of. The police smelled drugs, because the Southeast Asian connections the foundation had, and called us in.”

“Did you know that Stanley had a prior conviction for dealing drugs?” asked Jock.

“Yes. He came clean at the first meeting. He really is a guy who turned his life around. He does a lot of good with that foundation and he's very proud of it.”

Jock said, “We ran a background check on him. He had some very professional help in setting up his new history. Do you know anything about that?”

“Yeah. I looked into it. Our agency set that up for him after he got out of prison. He gave us lots of leads that ended up with us disrupting a number of drug-importation operations on the West Coast.”

“What did your people find when you looked into the Otto Foundation?” I asked.

“It appears that somebody with a lot of computer savvy went into the foundation's computers and made some changes in the accounts going back a couple of years. They also hacked into the bank computers and brought them into compliance with the foundation records.”

“Why would they do that?”

“We think it's a smoke screen, set up so that if anybody started looking closely at the records they'd see that the funny money had been going in and out for several years. Actually, it started last fall.”

“When Jock and I confronted Stanley in his house in Macon, an Asian man speaking Vietnamese pulled a shotgun on us.”

“That was Jack Minh. He's one of our agents. His job was to protect

Stanley if any of the drug people decided to take him out.”

“Where does Nigella Morrissey fit into this?” Logan asked.

“Nigella,” said Delgado, “is Maude Lane's niece. Maude's brother, Nigel Morrissey, was killed in Vietnam, but he left a Vietnamese wife and infant daughter. They were evacuated from Saigon before the fall.”

“Maude's your missing puzzle piece, Logan,” I said.

“I think you're right,” Logan said. “Dan, how did a nice old lady like Maude Lane get involved in drug smuggling?”