Meanwhile, the scandal refused to go away. Usually things in Washington blow over as new news cycles demand new material, but the reporter David Banjax was clearly on a hot streak as he chronicled the life and times of Special Agent Nicholas Memphis, the hero and goat of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who now ran the Bureau’s sniper investigation. Banjax was given a quarter of the Times’s front page to tell the story of Nick and his first wife, Myra, whom he’d paralyzed and married. While some saw it as a human interest story that made Nick look like a prince, many others saw it as another example of Nick’s misjudgment, of his emotional cloudiness on the issue of snipers and sniper victims and the discipline and potential tragedy of the figure of the law enforcement marksman.
Then there was the issue of Nick’s “breaking” of the Bristol, Tennessee, speedway armored car robbery a year ago, in which, allegedly, the special agent had penetrated a violent mob, interdicted and destroyed a robbery attempt in progress, kept civilian casualties to a minimum, and apprehended the bad guys, all of whom now languished either in prison or in the graveyard (six had been killed).
But even that heroism, in Banjax’s telling, had its downside. Some sources gave all the credit to an unidentified FBI undercover operative who had done the actual penetrating and gunfighting. Nick had come along late and taken that man’s credit-so unfair to the unknown hero, who couldn’t be ID’d even now as, quite possibly, he was undercover in another caper. And looked at carefully, the episode itself had a sloppiness to it that made its ultimately happy disposition seem somewhat arbitrary, if not out-and-out lucky. If the conspiracy had been penetrated, why did the feds wait until the robbery itself to spring the trap? There were hundreds of shots fired at the jam-packed Motor Speedway venue, and only by the grace of God did they not kill or maim anyone. The public safety emergency also cost local law enforcement millions of dollars (to say nothing of the trauma of the wounds to several of its officers, plus the cost in medical and recovery expenses); couldn’t that have been avoided? It was also alleged by some, bitter at the Bureau’s high-handed treatment of the locals, that the real object of the Bureau’s enterprise, a professional killer who used the automobile as his weapon of choice, had escaped and still roamed the world, free as a bird. And finally there was the issue of a helicopter, shot down by an FBI sniper under Nick’s command. Again, only luck, or so it was charged, prevented a catastrophe; that crippled aircraft could have fallen from the sky onto a home or a bus or a school or a hospital just as easily as it fell upon the empty seats of the Bristol Motor Speedway, resulting in the capture of the pilot and all the personnel of the Grumley gang. Why didn’t Nick have to answer that?
Still another day, Banjax reached and interviewed one Howard D. Utey, former agent in charge of the Bureau’s New Orleans office, who’d also been Nick’s supervisor during the bungled attempt in Tulsa. Utey, now a professor of public safety and police science at a community college in Ohio, told how Nick’s poor judgment resulted in the botched shot in Tulsa and the escape of a wanted fugitive later in New Orleans during the furor over the assassination of a Salvadoran bishop, an event never really satisfactorily explained and occasionally brought up by enterprising reporters in search of an easy, sensational feature.
In short, Nick was emerging as the kind of bad-penny agent who had had a hand in a lot of disasters and yet, somehow, kept his career marching ahead, as if supported by men in high places with a secret agenda.
It was on just such a day when Ron Fields, Nick’s ever-more-grumpy number two, sat alone in the Cosi’s on I street, just down from the Hoover fortress, nibbling disconsolately at some garish salad concoction, when he looked up to see someone vectoring in on him with a raptor’s hunger. It was the girl agent, Jean Chandler, his partner in the raid on Carl Hitchcock’s abode that had broken the case wide open, or so they’d thought, weeks ago. He didn’t want to talk to her. He was depressed, he had a headache and a long afternoon ahead, and Nick had seemed even more uncommunicative that morning. Plus, spontaneous meetings between old stars like him and newbies like her were to be avoided, for a lot of reasons: he didn’t want it said he was mentoring her, which would mean he was ignoring the other juniors; still worse, he didn’t want rumors of an extra-hours connection, much less a sexual liaison, which scuttled careers fast in the Bureau’s puritanical halls. But at the same time he couldn’t be rude.
“Starling,” he said, nodding, “imagine seeing you here.”
“Isn’t this a little low-rent for a hotshot like the great Fields?” she said, somewhat insouciantly, for the AIC/SA relationship was an extremely tricky one, part colonel/lieutenant, part Hemingway/Mailer, part Jeter/Cabrera, part Conan/Andy.
He smiled tightly.
“I usually eat in the cafeteria,” he said. “It keeps me humble, which is hard given my natural state of magnificence.”
“Look, Special-”
“You can call me Ron, Starling, at least out of the office. We raided together, we’ve sat twenty-five feet apart in the same office for the past six weeks, despite the glass wall between, and I mean that literally not metaphorically, as I’m sure I’ll be working for you shortly, and we’ve worked the same endless hours. So I won’t wreck my career if I’m seen talking to you.”
She slid in.
“It’s said you’ve already wrecked it by hanging on with Nick. You could have gone to the director and unloaded on Nick. You could have watched as they sacked him and, if you played your cards right, replaced him.”
“Anyone can succeed by betrayal,” said Fields. “It’s time-honored, a beloved Washington tradition. I’m trying to do it the old-fashioned way, through ass kissing and dumb obedience. I do tricks. I’m the Lassie of the FBI, haven’t you heard? Now, I have to say, I have a suspicion you didn’t follow me for the classy banter; you’re here for a purpose. I’m a detective; even I could figure that out.”
“I wanted to talk about Nick.”
“You mean ‘Poor Nick.’ ”
“He is getting royally screwed. They say he’s finished and he’ll take you with him. Maybe me. Now, I don’t matter, because nobody’s shot at me yet, but you and he have been shot at a lot, and it’s no good that you guys get taken down in some political influence shitstorm.”
Fields made a show of being not impressed by her passion.
“That’s the way it goes in this town. He’s fighting the power: you got lobbyists for big rich, you got three departments who want to hang a ‘case closed’ sign on it and walk away, and you got the press. Those are tough odds. And in the end, we serve at the whim of the director. So far, he’s holding fast, but yeah, the pressure is mounting. If he decides to cut us free, wave good-bye as we drift out to the horizon, that’s the town. You have to get used to it.”
“I wish I could.”
“Seriously, you’ve done good work. Let me look around and see if I can place you somewhere. Oh, I know-in Fairbanks, going after Sarah Palin’s daughter for breaking curfew. How about the pirate porno squad, you know, enforcing those ‘fines up to $250,000’ for illegal showings of Debbie Does Dallas 32?”
“No, I don’t want to leave. I want to get this guy, whoever he is, Carl Hitchcock or not. I want to put him away. Or kill him. Maybe he’s one of the names in the notebook we haven’t cleared yet. I’d like to be there when he goes down.”
“Me too. That’s why I’m sticking.”
“Here’s what I’m asking: why can’t we do something? Do we just have to take it? Can’t we find our reporter? Who’ll tell our side and make Nick look good?”
“You’re so young, Starling. You must actually believe in justice or something fantastic like that.”