Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [92]
As a result, a horrendous argument breaks out in the conference room in Los Angeles.
“We have the cop killer,” Galloway says right away. “Case closed.”
“Dick Stone is more than a killer.” Angelo has loosened the Rolex and is spinning it around his wrist. “He’s an anarchist who hates the FBI.”
Donnato: “That’s why we bust him and get Ana out.”
“What are we in there for?” Angelo yells. “FAN!”
“Stone is moments away from making her. If he hasn’t already.”
Angelo: “We don’t want to blow the operation on a lousy murder charge.”
Donnato gets up from the table to confront him. “Killing an officer gets Stone the death penalty.”
Angelo shrugs. “Stone being dead is not the mission.”
“What is the mission? Remind us.”
“Stone giving up his contacts.”
“He’ll talk when he’s in prison.”
“A former FBI guy? How does that work?”
“He gets protective custody.”
“Peter Abbott wants the big picture,” Angelo says impatiently.
“Peter Abbott sits at a desk in Washington while Ana Grey is at risk. He’s exactly the guy we should be worried about.” Donnato is incredulous. “Whose side are you on?”
“You’re asking me that? You are really asking me that? Think twice about walking to your car alone, buddy.”
Donnato: “Is that a threat?”
“I see we are taking our testosterone pills this morning,” says Galloway by way of warning.
They back off, but only to regroup.
“Anybody remember a case in the seventies called Turquoise? Ana flagged it from a conversation with Rosalind, who subsequently provided me with confirmation and pulled the abstract. We connected the Weathermen to a string of armored car robberies taking place in Arizona. Dick Stone went in as the undercover. Ana says there’s talk of some kind of buried turquoise up in Oregon. She’s wondering if there’s a connection with Stone and the old Turquoise case.”
“In reality?” Angelo says. “Or in his head?”
Galloway: “Pull up the complete files and court transcripts.” He mouths the dead cigar. “Let’s review. Angelo’s feeling is that whatever is taking place in the here and now, Dick Stone isn’t pulling this off alone. The cache of weapons indicates international connections. He’s up there on the food chain but answering to a higher power.”
“The higher power is someone in the Bureau,” Donnato says, barely keeping a lid on it. “Given the Toby Himes revelation, we’d better look closely at who’s in charge and why.”
They don’t tell me until later, but as a result of running his license plate at the midsummer festival, Toby Himes has become a “person of interest” to Operation Wildcat. More, the star quarterback. He lives in Stevenson, a tiny river town on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge, where he is employed as the town engineer. If he had come from there the night of the midsummer festival, it would have been almost a three-hour drive to see Mr. Terminate at Dick Stone’s farm. The black man and the biker didn’t meet to discuss hazelnuts.
Even more compelling: Toby Himes, the recipient of a Purple Heart, served in Vietnam in the same unit as Peter Abbott. Himes’s specialty was ordnance. Like Stone, he was trained to blow things up. A trap placed on Toby’s phone shows calls made to Peter Abbott’s private number.
Three names on the table and they all connect: Dick Stone, domestic terrorist, former FBI; Toby Himes, former military with training in explosives; Peter Abbott, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on the fast track to a political career.
The Abbott link is way too hot for an SAC in a field office to handle alone. But Galloway knows if he is going to follow this trail, it will have to be solo. And extremely treacherous. His equanimity in that meeting is a façade.
“What about our request for the hit on Herbert Laumann?”
“Not a word.”
“We knew it would take weeks,