Monument to Murder - Margaret Truman [101]
Their initial financial support of projects aimed at carrying out their vision was soon enhanced by donations from other wealthy men across the country. In effect, they created a government of their own with its own purpose—to rid the country of leaders whose visions for the nation clashed with theirs. They found willing accomplices within a small, rogue group of CIA operatives, and a complex web of financial fronts was established to further fund operations.
As always, plausible denial was a sacrosanct concept, both for the rogue element within the CIA and for this group of men. From the beginning, the actual dirty work was farmed out to individuals and organizations far removed from those who gave the orders. Members of organized crime were called upon from time to time to carry out hits on the group’s selected targets. In some cases, warped individuals with the wherewithal to eliminate a selected target, and who believed in the group’s brand of perverted patriotism, were utilized.
The wealthy cabal’s success in ridding the country of those they felt were taking the nation in the wrong direction began in spectacular fashion on November 22, 1963, in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza, when President John Kennedy was shot dead. Five years later, on June 5, 1968, the slain president’s brother, Robert Kennedy, a candidate for the presidency, was gunned down in the kitchen of a hotel in Los Angeles where he’d just given his victory speech after winning the California Democratic primary. In both cases, plausible denial was effectively implemented. Official reports on both assassinations concluded that the killers of the two Kennedys were lone gunmen acting alone. No conspiracy was determined. The group and its backers were free to continue their “crusade.”
As the years passed, it was decided that a more well-ordered assembly of on-tap killers was needed. That’s when three men in Washington, D.C., each a former CIA operative, established a clearinghouse, an employment agency of sorts to provide selected individuals to accomplish further assassinations as deemed necessary. Included among the three was a small, bald, bespectacled man known to his colleagues, and to those he recruited as paid assassins, only as Dexter.
• • •
Carrying the folder containing information on Robert Brixton, the man left Langley and drove to a parking lot in Maryland, where he used a special cell phone to make a call.
“Dexter?”
“Yes.”
“Morris,” he said, using the predetermined code name.
“Yes?”
“Can we meet in an hour? I have something for you.”
“Of course. Number Seven.”
Number Seven was on a list of meeting places shared by Dexter and his caller, the parking lot of a Roy Rogers fast food outlet on Belle View Boulevard in Alexandria, Virginia.
Dexter placed the cordless phone back in its cradle in his office in the building south of the Pentagon. Visitors to the building saw a small sign on the front, Z-STAT ASSOCIATES, which was registered as a legitimate corporation whose official source of business was providing consulting and administrative services to the CIA’s Office of Statistical Reconciliation.
He left the building and went to where the meeting would take place.
The man handed him the envelope. “There’s an urgency to this,” he told Dexter.
“He’s here in Washington?”
“The Hotel Rouge, on Sixteenth.”
“It will be taken care of,” said Dexter. “The usual fee.”
“That will be fine. Let me know when it’s completed.”
“Of course.”
The fee would be six hundred thousand dollars paid through the multimillion-dollar hidden fund at the CIA, provided by nameless, faceless rich men scattered across the country.
CHAPTER 37
Bob Brixton met for breakfast with Will Sayers. The rotund Savannah reporter, now Washington bureau chief, consumed a hearty platter of eggs, pancakes, bacon, and sausage as he listened to Brixton recount