Courier (18 page)

"Most of the people in this place would lose their jobs if anyone knew they were gay." Dina shrugged off her coat and sat down. "Including me. These women don't particularly want you here, but that doesn't mean they'll go to the cops. It just means they don't want you to hit on them, so keep your hands to yourself."

"Damn. Grabbing at random women usually works so well for me." Rick sat down and, for the first time in hours, relaxed slightly.

As soon as he did, the images of his housemates snapped into focus. In his head, he just kept repeating, goddamn it, all three of them – dead. Their friendship, the way they'd accepted his personal war, the sheer loss of potential in those brilliant minds. All gone.

He straightened up, took the pink rubber ball out of his jacket pocket, and concentrated on the steady rhythm of slow squeeze, hold, and slow release. Slow squeeze, hold, and slow release.

Eve put her head in her arms on the table and began to shake. When Rick and Dina both moved to comfort her, she put up a hand, palm out. Without raising her head, she said in a quavering voice, "Just give me a minute to fall apart. Then I'll be just fine, really."

Dina patted her on the shoulder and stood up. "I'm buying a drink for you anyway. The usual coffee, Rick?"

He nodded.

They sat without talking until Dina returned balancing the drinks. "Here, sweetheart, think of this as medicinal," she said as she put a glass of scotch in front of Eve. Then she put a steaming coffee mug in front of Rick, and a shot and a beer back for herself.

She sat down, knocked back the shot, took a sip from the bottle, sighed, and said, "OK, you've had your moment. Could someone please tell me what the hell is going on?"

Eve scrubbed her eyes on her sleeve, raised her head, and reached for the drink. "You know, I was about to ask that question myself." She looked at Rick and raised a quizzical eyebrow.

Rick kept pumping the rubber ball for a few more seconds, trying to make sense of all that had just happened. He began with a warning.

"I think you both can still walk away at this point." Rick looked hard at Eve and then at Dina. "After you hear the explanation, I'm pretty sure that people are going to try and kill both of you."

"Kill me?" Dina's eyes widened. "Then this isn't about the DC cops finally nailing you for all those speeding tickets?"

"Well, I've got those too, but the cops haven't worked out who I am yet, and a couple of thousand dollars in fines isn't a capital crime. At least not yet." His attempt at humor went flat, and his face tightened. "Three of my housemates are dead because they tried to help."

"Corey?" She looked at his face closely. "No, it's the computer guys, isn't it?"

He nodded.

After a pause, she asked, "Are you the good guys or the bad guys?"

"Shit, Dina, what kind of question is that after all these years?"

"Sorry, I shouldn't have even asked." She took a long drink from the bottle. "OK, if you're the good guys, who are the evil bastards?"

"I don't know. Let's start with the President and work our way down. I know that I haven't done anything wrong, but I've ended up with something that it appears a lot of people think I shouldn't have, and they're willing to kill people to get it back."

"So, give it back."

"I can't. Steve said last night that it's impossible to ‘unknow'unknow' something. I think that's why he and the others were killed." Rick paused and sipped his now-cold coffee. "And that's my immediate problem. If I tell you two what's going on, you're in just as much trouble as I am. I think I should just say thanks for the coffee." He looked at Eve. "And for saving my life."

"No big thing," she responded.

Rick continued, "And then I should just get out of your lives. They know who I am; it's a bit too late for me to pretend innocence. Anyway, I think they got a whole bunch of my buddies in Nam killed, and I'm not letting that go without some major payback."

Dina's voice lost its usual brash tone. "OK, now it's my turn. After all the time you've known me, do you really think I walk away from friends? Abandon people when they're getting pushed around by the government? Don't ever insult me like that again."

She sat back. "Listen, my dad learned how to practice law from the guys who fought to keep Joe Hill off death row for a murder he didn't do. Dad's first case was the miners in Harlan County after they were beaten by company goons. When those three kids were killed in 1964, he went down south and stood up for the Freedom Riders. He slept with a gun under his pillow every night. As far as I know, he still does. He used to say that you didn't take on a client – you took on their enemies." She shook her head. "As of now, those people are officially fucking with me, and they are going to regret it."

Rick looked at Eve. "What about you? I don't think anyone knows who you are." His eyes softened. "I would like to think you were safe somewhere."

"I'm not going to say this was all part of my future plans, but I'm afraid you're stuck with me, Trooper." She took another drink. "And I'm fairly certain that the people who are after you are the same assholes who are arresting and killing my guys in the Movement – or at least they're close cousins. The government isn't exactly welcome on a lot of the reservations these days."

She started braiding her hair like a warrior preparing for battle, pulling each strand tight.

He looked from one woman to the other. "OK. Let me start at the beginning – or at least what I think was the beginning. It took me a while to realize that anything was going on but random accidents. I did a film pickup out in Virginia for Joe Hadley–"

Dina interrupted. "The reporter who ended up in the Potomac?"

"Along with his crew." Rick nodded and started counting on his fingers. "That would be coincidence number one, since the crash happened right after I picked up the film. At just about the same time, I almost put the bike into a car that jumped a red light. I thought it was just another lousy DC driver, but now I'm pretty sure it was the first time they tried to kill me, and that's coincidence number two." He sipped his coffee. "Number three, the source that Hadley was interviewing had a gas leak explode in his house that night. There was nothing left but splinters. The cops ruled it an accident."

"Are you sure it wasn't?" Dina said sharply.

"Nope, and I'm not sure that Hadley's car didn't just blow a tire on the George Washington Parkway. It could just be coincidence or a run of crappy luck. It's not, but it's at least as plausible as Oswald being the only shooter in Dallas."

He continued. "Let's add some more ‘coincidences'. A black Impala that sure looked like the same car that I almost T-boned downtown tried to run me off the road at National Airport later that night. That's four, and it's quite a stretch, but you could still say it's all coincidence."

Rick held up five fingers. "Two Vietnamese cowboys in a 240Z – the same car that the shooter parked outside my house this morning – tried to run me down on Suitland Parkway. At some point, even a sweet idiot like me has to admit people are trying to kill me. Just because I'm paranoid–"

"Doesn't mean people aren't after you," Dina finished. "The question is, why? You're just a schmuck. Why would they be after you?"

"Ellsberg was just a schmuck until he got the Pentagon Papers out to the
New York Times
," Rick said. "It's all about the pickup I made out at that guy's place in Virginia. Hadley was determined to nail the Committee for the Re-Election of the President after he had to apologize for a story about loose cash in someone's safe last week. This was his big score – a bookkeeper from CREEP willing to spill his guts."

Rick thought for a second. "You know, I hadn't put this together, but the primary film of the interview got lost, and Shelley – the production assistant across the hall – told me she had found it. Then it turned out to be the wrong film, and she got canned." He shook his head. "I'll bet she found the right film and someone in the bureau covered it up. Anyway, the ‘A-roll' – the main interview – is gone, Hadley is gone, and the source is gone."

"Again, why would they be trying to kill
you
?"

"Because I still have the ‘B-roll'."." He took the silver can out of his inside pocket and spun it on its edge on the tabletop.

Both women looked blankly at the spinning can, so he explained. "‘B-roll' is the secondary film you shoot to make the story look better. Pete Moten, the soundman, gave me a silent camera and this can of film. Said it was important. I dropped off the ‘A-roll', but totally forgot about this and only found it in my bag after that Datsun made me take a detour through the woods on the way to Suitland."

Rick felt his face freeze. "That's where I screwed up. I asked my housemates to help me with the film. That's what got them killed."

"No way." Eve shook her head. "You didn't kill anyone. Don't take the guilt away from the people who did the crime, and don't make your friends look like dumb pawns in your game. They chose to do what they did, and they deserve respect for that choice."

"I wish I could believe that. Anyway, they developed the film in the basement, and it turned out to be pictures of pages of some sort of ledger. They printed them out." He pulled the papers from inside his jacket. "Here they are."

Dina grabbed the photos and began to study them.

"Corey identified it as a deposit ledger for CREEP and took off, scared out of his mind. Steve recognized that these numbers" – Rick pointed at a column – "were serial numbers for hundred-dollar bills."

"Yeah, but they're not consecutive. You can't prove where they came from," Dina said without looking up.

"Remember that those three are – shit, were – the best computer techs in the city. Apparently, the banks are just beginning to record all the serial numbers of big bills, where they go and when. So, they got into the banking computers and followed the money trail."

Eve looked doubtful. "How did they get inside a bank?"

"They didn't," Rick said. "They had this briefcase with a keyboard, and they hooked up over the phone. I didn't even know it was possible, but these were the guys who were inventing this stuff." He paused again and then rubbed his eyes. "Crap."

"OK, I see." Dina pointed at some of Steve's microfine annotations. "According to them, these are bills that went from the Federal Reserve directly to the accounts of the government of South Vietnam in 1968, '69… and '70." She flipped through the pages. "There must be five hundred thousand, seven hundred… Shit, there are millions of dollars here."

She tossed the papers on the table. "And you're saying that this is a deposit ledger for the committee? So, the South Vietnamese were taking the money we were giving them."

"And putting it back into the campaign." Rick finished her sentence.

She shook her head. "And no one would know because it was cash and because you didn't have to report who gave cash contributions to a campaign until the Election Law went into effect in April. This makes Watergate look like the ‘third-rate burglary' that Mitchell said it was. They were taking money from a foreign government. No wonder President Thieu thought he could blow up the peace talks every time it looked like Kissinger was close to a deal."

"And more American soldiers died." Rick's voice was low and cold. "They stretched out the war. Hell, they're bombing the crap out of Hanoi right now and losing more planes every day. People are dying just so the bastards in Saigon can go on stealing."

"On the committee, no one thinks they can nail Nixon for Watergate." Dina mused, "I mean, they'll gavel up the hearings and make accusations and hold people's feet to the fire. Maybe they'll even get to impeachment, but no one really thinks they'll get a conviction."

Eve asked, "I thought impeachment was a conviction?"

"No, it's like an indictment. The Senate has to vote to convict, and the votes just aren't there." Dina looked up. "But even Republicans won't stand behind the bastard over this. I mean, everything else can be explained away as just tough politics, but this is treason."

"Admittedly, I just finished law school, but I'm not sure that this" – Eve waved at the stack of papers – "is good enough to hold up as evidence."

"No, it's not. But this is." Dina's finger stabbed at one column of figures. "It's the bank's record numbers of the transactions. Along with these notes – I guess that handwriting is Steve's?"

Rick nodded.

"With Steve's notes, a good forensic accountant can nail these bastards."

"That's what he said he was trying to do – give some prosecutor a road map."

She sighed. "Unfortunately, there isn't a good forensic accountant on the whole damn staff of the Watergate Committee. Just a bunch of political lawyers. And they're so hamstrung by trying to be bipartisan, they won't investigate anything that isn't either printed in the newspaper or handed to them on a silver platter."

"I guess that's a dead end, then." Rick sat back. "All I can do is try to stay alive. It's just like Ia Drang. Everyone is dead, and I'm left trying to stay alive."

Eve smacked his forearm. "Whoa. Stop the self-pity express before you run off the rails completely. You're not in this alone, you know. You've got us and you've got Corey and–"

"Corey! That's it!" Dina snapped her fingers. "He's on the Banking Committee, right? The White House is sending everyone but the First Lady up to talk to the Joint Committee, but they're stonewalling Senator Patman and Banking. The White House even strong-armed the Republicans into denying him subpoena power, and that stopped him cold. Why? Because the staff guys at Banking and Commerce are probably the best money people on the Hill."