‘John?’ she called after me, surprised me, because I had not
expected her to remember my name.
I turned back.
She opened her mouth to say something; she did that awkward and curious smile again, and then she shook her head and laughed.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing.’
I shrugged. Inside I smiled. Wondered if she was playing the same cat-and-mouse game as me.
I walked back to my apartment, sat up most of the night figuring out what to say to Catherine Sheridan, and the following day - despite so many hours of concentration - I found that what I had planned to say didn’t matter at all.
SEVENTEEN
The call came from Lassiter. It was a little after half past four. Miller was brief in his responses, put down the receiver and gathered up his files, other notes and paperwork.
Roth rose from his chair and started toward the door, Miller right behind him.
One flight of stairs, down to the end of the corridor, Lassiter already standing there waiting, hands on his hips. Looked like Bradlee at the Washington Post.
‘For God’s sake,’ he started. ‘I don’t know what the goddamn is going on with you people . . . Jesus, anyone’d think this was some kind of R and R gig.’
Roth and Miller stepped into the room, Lassiter followed them, closed the door.
Miller started to speak but Lassiter raised his hand and silenced him. ‘Start from scratch,’ he said. ‘Everything from the point that the Sheridan woman was found . . . got your report, but fuck, you guys can’t type worth shit.’
‘The newspaper clipping,’ Miller said. ‘You got that, right?’
Lassiter waved his hand in a dismissive fashion. ‘Doesn’t mean anything—’
‘Didn’t until we found that the name Catherine Sheridan’s social security number tracks back to is actually the name of a South American mountain range.’
Lassiter shook his head. ‘Tell me what you actually have . . . tell me what you figure this thing is.’
‘Serial,’ Miller said. ‘No question. Sheridan doesn’t exist, at least not as Catherine Sheridan. We backtracked and there’s questionable aspects about all of them. We get the newspaper clipping, we find this double connection to South America, and then there’s the thing with the girl in the projects.’
‘The Joyce woman, right?’ Lassiter asked.
‘The Joyce woman. The phone number given to the pizza delivery people is the case number of her now dead boyfriend, Darryl King. We go back to the Sheridan house, we find some pictures under the carpet . . . Sheridan and some guy. We take the pictures to Natasha Joyce and she confirms that the guy in the pictures is the same guy that went down there to speak with Darryl King a couple of weeks before his death in 2001.’
‘And you’re going where with this?’
‘Track down the original arresting officer, name’s Michael McCullough. Seems that King was some kind of CI or something, ended up on a warehouse raid and got himself shot. God knows what he was doing there. And then we have the Sheridan woman herself. Things there that don’t make sense. Need to find out what this United Trust thing was where her money came from . . .’
‘So we have some connection to a retired cop who worked with this girl’s boyfriend five years ago, and some social security numbers that don’t tie up. That’s what we got?’
‘And we have photos of a guy we’d be very interested in talking to,’ Roth interjected.
‘Which are how old?’ Lassiter asked.
Miller shook his head. ‘Natasha saw the guy five years ago, and she said the pictures were unquestionably him, but when he was younger. I’m gonna have forensics run that program on them where they can make someone look five, ten, fifteen years older . . . give him a beard, a mustache, grey hair, whatever. Get a half dozen images together and put out an APB, see if we can’t track him down.’
‘Needle and haystack in the same sentence,’ Lassiter said matter-of-factly.
‘It is what it is,’ Miller replied.
‘And what it is,’ Lassiter said, ‘is a fucking nightmare. I have a report session with the chief of police tonight. Everything you do I am required to report to this Killarney guy from the FBI. Every report you file, a copy goes to him. A second copy is going to Judge Thorne for some fucking reason. Goddamned political agendas. That’s the way the chief wants this thing, and I don’t know what barrel they’ve got him over but he’s got no fucking choice in the matter. I have four dead women over eight months. That ain’t such a big deal in our books, but just you see if the press don’t jump all over this Ribbon Killer tag. Be selling fucking tee-shirts on the internet before the end of next week. Remember that shit with the sniper for God’s sake?’ Lassiter shook his head. He breathed deeply. ‘I don’t know what to say. I don’t have anyone else more qualified to head this thing up. They’re gonna wanna know what we’re doing about it, I’m gonna tell them we’re strenuously exercising all lines of enquiry, the usual shit. Hell, what can I do?’
‘Give us more people,’ Miller said. ‘I get these pictures printed up I’m going to need anyone and everyone I can get hold of to ask questions.’
‘You’ve got Metz and Oliver on the previous three women. They are giving it whatever time they can spare. That’s the best it’s gonna get. On this one you’re going to get an APB. That I can do. Beyond that I’m stretched every which way I could be. You know the routine as well as I do. Lots of noise in the press, a few questions at the chief’s session, the thing dies down for a little while. Happens twice, the noise gets louder, lasts a few days more. Third time, fourth time, now we’re in the shit. I gotta have something I can give them. You have to get me some kind of statement, something that makes sense to these people. Dead drug dealers and murdered women who don’t have the right social security numbers . . . ? This is not a fucking Christmas present, know what I mean?’
‘You know how it is, captain. You did this shit for years,’ Miller said.
‘Get your pictures done,’ was Lassiter’s response. ‘Use whatever resources we have down here. Get these things printed up and get them out in the squad cars. Do whatever you’re doing but do more of it and faster. Call me on my cell if you get anything tonight. Something tonight would be good. I get a call with some forward progress on this thing while I’m meeting with the chief and I’m gonna seem an awful lot smarter than I feel right now.’
Miller glanced at Roth. Roth shook his head; he had nothing to add.
‘So go . . . go do your worst,’ Lassiter said.
Roth and Miller left the room, closed the door, walked ten feet down the corridor before they spoke.
Miller paused at the stairwell, reached for his pager as it started to bleep.
He pressed the button, viewed the message, looked up at his partner and said, ‘Oh fuck . . . oh fuck almighty . . .’
A
nd what she asked me about was my mother and father, and I didn’t want to tell her. I didn’t want to have to explain it all over again. Seemed to me that I’d spent the last eighteen months explaining my life to everyone I met.
Catherine was different. I didn’t want her to be part of the past. I wanted her to be the present and the future. I lied to her about my parents, and I did not feel guilty about it.
So there we were - Thursday the 5th of March, 1981. It was all of twenty-five days before a disc jockey and former Yale student named John Hinckley III, the twenty-five-year-old son of a Denver oil executive, would wait patiently outside a Washington hotel where Ronald Reagan was speaking before a trade union audience. Reagan took a single .22 caliber bullet in the chest. It lodged in his left lung, a little less than three inches from his heart. One of the attending doctors later said that had Hinckley used a .45 it would have blown Reagan away. Reagan’s wife was driven to the hospital, and here Reagan uttered the first of his famous quotes.
Taken from a 1930s film, he said, ‘Honey, I forgot to duck.’ To
the surgeons inside the hospital, even as he was being anaesthet
ized, Reagan said, ‘I hope you guys are Republicans.’
The assassination attempt did Reagan no harm. The assassination attempt gave the American public the first real view of George Bush, Reagan’s Vice-President and former director of the CIA. Little did we know then, but he would play an increasingly significant part in the construction of the new America, the America of the 1980s and ’90s, an America that would be inherited by his own son, George W.
‘The fact that Ronald Reagan was shot in the chest with a .22,’ Don Carvalho told me later, ‘tells us something about the nature
o
f politics and political control in this country. Hinckley was given a small caliber revolver. They could very easily have secured a .45, a .38, something that would actually have done some damage, but no, he took a popgun to the party . . .’
I opened my mouth to say something but Don raised his hand.
‘I’ll tell you something about the secret service . . . you’ve seen
these guys, yes?’
‘On the TV, sure. I don’t know any secret service people if that’s
what you’re asking.’
‘You should go talk to one. They’re robots, man. Like automatons. ’ He smiled. ’They’re colloquially referred to as roaches.’
‘Roaches? You mean like a cockroach?’
‘Sure, like a cockroach.’
‘Why?’
‘You know how long a cockroach lives after you’ve cut its head
off?’
Don asked.
‘A minute, two minutes maybe?’
‘Nine days.’
‘What?’
‘Nine fucking days. Cut a cockroach’s head off and it survives
for another nine days, and you know what it dies of?’
‘No idea.’
‘Starvation ... it dies of fucking starvation because there’s no
mouth left. Is that fucking unreal or what?’
‘That’s sick.’
‘Well, that’s what they call the secret service. They’ll take a
bullet for the president. They’ll shoot themselves in the head if it means protecting the life of the president. It’s a special and particular type of individual that can live that kind of life. No relationships. No friendships outside their own unit, and that’s more like a working relationship than anything else. It’s a different world, John, a different world entirely, but irrespective of what you might think of such people there is something about that kind of thing that means something.’
I raised my eyebrows.
‘Believing in something,’ Don Carvalho said. ‘Believing in some
thing with such commitment and dedication that it becomes a way of life all its own. That is something I can appreciate. Not necessarily something I could do, not to that degree, but it is something I can appreciate.’
‘I don’t know that I could ever believe in something that much,’ I said, and in that moment realized how utterly naïve I sounded.
‘Sure you could,’ Don replied. ‘If nothing else you believe in
yourself that much. Everyone does.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Sure you do, and if you believe in yourself to any degree then
you have to have some kind of basic belief in the necessity to maintain the social structure that permits enjoyment of your own lifestyle.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘And with the purpose to maintain one’s own lifestyle comes a
responsibility to contribute in whatever way you can to ensuring that your lifestyle remains unthreatened by external hostilities, even the ones you are not necessarily aware of.’
‘Such as?’
‘Criminal elements. Influx of drugs into our society. Influx of
ideologies and philosophies that challenge the stability of our democracy.’
‘You mean Communism, right?’
‘Communism, extreme factions of Socialism, the heroin trade,
the influence of organized crime in politics and government. The extent to which the darker aspects of humanity can infiltrate ordinary peoples’ lives without them ever realizing that their lives are being influenced.’
‘And you want me to do what about this?’ I asked.
Don shrugged, smiled nonchalantly. ‘Think about it,’ he said. ’That’s all I want you to do. Just think about it.’
Which is what I did, and had actually been doing for the previous three weeks. The conversation that I had with Catherine Sheridan had been a precursor to these things - the rapid shifts of viewpoint that occurred after the attempt on Reagan’s life.
What happened on the 30th was instrumental in determining the decision both Catherine Sheridan and I would make. And that decision was something that would govern our lives for the subsequent twenty-five years. Someone once told me that you didn’t
join the Company, you married it, especially the ‘until death do us
part’ bit. First time Catherine Sheridan and I sat facing each other in that same coffee shop on the outskirts of Richmond where I’d first seen her, first time we actually had a conversation, it went in a direction that surprised me.
After the initial pleasantries, the things we felt obliged to say, as opposed to the things we wanted to say, she asked how I had come to Langley.
‘Professor at university,’ I told her. ‘You?’
‘My father was with this right from the start.’
‘He was CIA?’
‘In his blood,’ she replied. She leaned back in the seat, pushed her coffee cup to one side with the edge of her hand. ’He was there
in the beginning, came out of the military at the end of the war into the Office of Strategic Services. OSS went back to June of ’42 under Roosevelt.’ She smiled, fingertipped a stray lock of hair away
from her brow. ‘You know, at the beginning of World War Two we
were the only great political power without an intelligence service?’