As he meandered behind his target, he realized the guy was a pro. Very aware of his surroundings, the man kept looking over his shoulder in Ivan’s direction. Ivan grew uneasy with the constant checking and jumped in a cab. It was one thing to identify someone following you on foot. But it took a specially trained person to realize someone in a car was following you. Ivan doubted the man was that special.
Ivan instructed the cab driver to follow the man on foot but not get too close. The driver let out an exasperated sigh but complied, staying far enough away that the man on foot never seemed to identify them as slowly following him along the streets of Washington. After ten minutes, Ivan realized his victim was headed into a hotel. He ordered the cab driver to stop so he could chase the man down. Throwing a $20 bill at the driver, Ivan dashed across the street in pursuit of the man.
Without a second to spare, Ivan managed to catch the man just before he stepped onto an elevator in The Liaison hotel lobby. He tapped him on the shoulder.
“Excuse me, Mr. Flynn,” Ivan said. “May I have a moment of your time?”
Flynn spun around to see the same man he spotted the moment he came out of the police precinct nearly twenty minutes earlier. He certainly wasn’t a fan since the man was well skilled in tailing someone. Flynn suspected he might be after him, but couldn’t conceive why. Maybe he was CIA or FBI. Flynn couldn’t be sure. The only certainty was that the man standing in front of him now had tailed him to this point and had impeded Flynn from getting on an elevator.
“What can I do for you?” Flynn asked, doing his best to act as if the man’s interruption was a completely delightful surprise.
“Well, I’m a big fan of your books, Mr. Flynn, and I wanted to give you something that you might find interesting.”
Flynn did his best to act as if this was all the conversation was about.
“Oh? What is it?” he asked.
The man held a folder leaned in close, speaking slightly above a whisper.
“This is a group of documents that shows how the CIA created the Bay of Pigs crisis. It wasn’t an accident. It was a well thought out and planned operation. And the American people have never known the truth about what happened during that time. I thought you might be the one to tell them.”
Flynn tried not to act too excited. First the JFK assassination, now the Bay of Pigs? If this was real, he’d have his next two book deals set. Somehow Flynn wondered if the man wasn’t trying to throw him off. Could the man’s information be trusted, especially since he spoke with a thick accent — an accent he struggled to place?
The man moved to hand the folder to Flynn before it slipped out of his hand and spilled onto the floor. He apologized to Flynn as the two men knelt down and scooped up the pages.
“Thank you for this. I appreciate it,” Flynn said as he stood up. “What’s your name again? I didn’t catch it.”
“It’s not important,” the man said. “In fact, it’s best that you not know me. Good bye.”
He patted Flynn on the shoulder before turning and walking away, leaving the folder in Flynn’s hands.
Ivan heard the elevator bell ring again, signaling its arrival. He didn’t turn around to look back at Flynn. He only smiled, reveling in his two-fold victory.
His cause didn’t like the idea of anyone getting close to figuring out who they were. They also preferred to use every other means necessary to persuade people rather than murder. Murder was messy and created more problems. More trails. More nosy people sniffing around in places they shouldn’t be. The CIA knew about them and that was more than enough.
Unfortunately, Emma Taylor required the messy kind of removal. Conspiracy theorists would use her untimely demise as a way of pointing out that her death had something to do with JFK’s assassination plot, based on her final tweet. But nobody ever believed those people anyway. They thought everything that happened was somehow related to an overarching government conspiracy to keep the public in the dark. Most of the time they were right. Yet Emma Taylor needed to be dealt with — and she was private enough of a person that her murder looked like a mugging gone wrong. At least, that’s how Ivan made it look.
But he couldn’t stop smiling as he walked away from his “chance” meeting with James Flynn. Not only did he deliver him papers that were sure to make him ditch his digging into the JFK assassination plot, but he also managed to swipe his phone and plant a bug on it. It was simple really. A surprise touch on the shoulder always gave him access to snatch whatever he was after. Then an accidental drop of the papers gave him all the time he needed to switch out Flynn’s phone cover with one embedded with a bug. All without Flynn knowing it. Even a trained CIA operative like Flynn couldn’t detect his sleight of hand. The tricks he learned growing up on the streets of Moscow served him well now.
If Flynn now decided to restart his investigation into who was behind the JFK assassination, Ivan would know about it immediately. Not that it would matter soon.
CHAPTER 5
Flynn waited until he was in his room with the door shut before he began thumbing through the papers handed to him by the mystery man. For most people, this would be a rare occurrence, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime event. But this happened to Flynn all the time. His public image made him a dumping ground for every tin foil hat-wearing nut job. Theories about Area 51 scratched out on a bar napkin were handed to him in an airport. Strangers accosted him with doctorate-level dissertations about how NASA faked the moon landing. Others emailed grainy pictures showing proof of life of everything — from Jimmy Hoffa to Sasquatch. It was enough to make most people crazy. But not Flynn. He enjoyed the ideas, knowing shards of truth were lodged in the bevy of theories. Just pull each string until someone sings. It just took patience and a relentless commitment to uncovering believable evidence to posit on the public.
The documents on the Bay of Pigs invasion were interesting, but nothing to distract him from his main pursuit. Perhaps it was a smoke screen, designed to throw him off the trail. If whoever this man was thought a conspiracy about the Bay of Pigs was going to derail his pursuit of JFK’s assassination, he had severely underestimated Flynn’s resolve. However, Flynn wouldn’t waste the information. He called his editor, Theresa Halston, and told her that he learned some interesting things about the Bay of Pigs invasion that might make for a nice cover story. He told her that he had to stay in Washington per the orders of local law enforcement and could use the time to dig into the story a little more. Flynn received an earful from a disgusted editor who vowed to call the detective and raise “holy hell” if he wasn’t released to leave immediately. He passed along the number on Detective Livingston’s card so she could follow up on her promise. Flynn smiled as he said good-bye before hanging up. If there’s one thing he appreciated about Theresa, it was her loyalty to her reporters.
Spending years serving as a spy, Flynn never could shake those habits ingrained in him by the agency. Protocol for speaking on the phone when you suspected your room might be bugged was to go into a bathroom and turn the water on. If there was an overhead fan, all the better. Anything to muffle your voice. But Flynn added his own precautions, starting with the purchase of a burner phone. He knew either a spy or a criminal came up with this brilliant idea. Even the NSA couldn’t track burner phones purchased in cash. Flynn purchased a new one each month, writing it off on his expense report. He reasoned with Theresa that it was actually a cost-saving method since he never saddled the magazine with his personal phone bill. With Theresa unconvinced, Flynn went on to say that it prevented the government from obtaining his phone records and putting his sources at risk. Apparently, that was enough to win her approval and add it to Flynn’s monthly expense account. Flynn knew just how much snooping the government did — and he feared what might happen to his sources if he ever broke a story that was big enough to truly upset higher-ups in the federal government.