FRANK SHEEHAN FLEW in from Chicago. Sheehan was one of Universal Security’s eight executive VPs. Five of them had clear-cut titles: Accounting and Financial Affairs, Sales, Management and Training, Government Relations, and Overseas. The other three worked for a department called Special Affairs. That was Sheehan’s department.
He was a big man who’d played football in high school and one season at Notre Dame. He believed in sports because it built character. He was twenty pounds heavier than his playing weight, but, in his own opinion, his six-foot-two-and-a-half-inch frame could handle it. Frank had once considered the seminary. But he was “too masculine.” Everyone told him so. Overall, he was quite glad that he’d listened. He joined the CIA instead. It filled many of the same needs the Church would have done even though there were times when the Agency seemed so flawed and full of failing that his faith was severely tested. But he understood, especially after a brief stint as assistant station chief in Rome, that he would have had to face exactly the same sort of spiritual crises if he’d been an agent of the Catholic Church. The great advantages of the CIA, aside from sex, had been that the job paid better and that he developed skills that were later transferable to private industry, which paid better still.
He’d been recruited from the Company to the company by the semilegendary Carter Hamilton Bunker,12founder and CEO of Universal Security. C. H. himself had sent Sheehan to L.A. to look over Mel Taylor’s shoulder and let him know how important this case was. “Show the flag, son, show the flag,” was what he’d actually said. There was something about his enunciation and his attitude that always made Sheehan feel like he was talking to God—not the Catholic God, which would have been blasphemous, just God as played by John Huston.
Sheehan had arrived without notice. Mel Taylor had not risen as far as he had by not doing his paperwork. The file on the case was up to date and well organized. Not everything was totally under control, but all the bases seemed covered.
“You know we never second-guess the man in the field,” Sheehan said to Taylor. “You’re in charge. I just want to keep the Boss up to date.”
Taylor interpreted that to mean If anything goes wrong, it’s your ass. His and his alone. “No problem,” he said. “Actually, I’m glad you’re here. And I welcome some review and oversight on this one.” He meant Now that you’ve looked, it’s the same as signing off on it, and it’s your ass too.
Frank took out the ninety-seven-dollar silver fountain pen his wife had given him on their twenty-fifth anniversary and the embossed leather pocket case that held a small notepad which she had given him on their twenty-third anniversary. He placed them neatly, and with a sense of formality, in front of him. “The only thing that stands out at all is this business with Joseph Broz and Magdalena Lazlo. The way I understand it, she came in, she invited him out for a cup of coffee, she asked him to come to work for her as a bodyguard. You decided not to tell him that we have a watch on her?”
“That was my decision,” Taylor said. There was no point in denying it or waffling. It was that way right there in the file he’d organized himself.
“Why was that?” Sheehan said mildly. Although large, he looked mild too. Like so many CIA and ex-CIA types did. Thicker in the middle than around the chest, wider at the hips than at the shoulders. Barbershop hair. Given to checked shirts when he barbecued on summer Sundays. Mild and ordinary. Which didn’t mean he was incapable of giving the order to fire someone, or in other circumstances, to have them terminated. He’d done both.
It was a decision that could destroy Taylor’s career. It violated several major corporate guidelines. Not Mickey Mouse rules either, but stuff that made very good sense. Still, any rule could be violated, if the reasons were good enough and the results were right.
“Let me be straight with you,” Taylor said. “We have certain restrictions on this case. The main one is that nobody will tell me what it’s about. Anybody inquires too vigorously what John Lincoln Beagle is working on, we’re supposed to report it, to your office and to the client. Not to his secretary. Not to his assistant. Just to him, direct. If I knew what it was that has to be kept secret, I could separate the wheat from the chaff. But I don’t. If it turns out you want to tell me, it would be appreciated, but we will soldier on in either case.” Taylor meant If something goes wrong because we didn’t know what to watch out for, it’s your fault. “The second thing is that the whole job is NTK.” While not SOP at U. Sec, a certain portion of their work was handled on a Need-to-Know basis and employees were expected not to talk about those cases even to other employees. Management and Training felt it was good for esprit de corps, Sales said the practice was good for the company image. “I deduce that the number-one imperative on this job is secrecy.”
“I haven’t looked at Joe’s file,” Sheehan said, “but if memory serves, he’s been with us a long time. That says something. Can we get his file up here? If there were a reason to fault or mistrust him, he wouldn’t be with us, would he? Seems like you could have used him as a double agent, as it were.”
“Frank, I have to tell you, everything about this case just says maximum secrecy.” Mel called Ms. Sligo, his secretary, on the intercom. She was a very efficient woman with iron gray structured through her hair and, having cleared her desk of actual work, was deeply engrossed in Premiere magazine. “Broz, Joseph, personnel file, ASAP,” Mel ordered.
“So the first thing he did was put in a request to have the house swept?”
“Yes,” Taylor said. “Fortunately, he asked for the same man who’d put the LDs in. So we were fortunate, he was already in the loop.”
“Quite a coincidence that.”
“Not at all. I picked Ray to do the installation because he’s our best man. Broz knows that too.”
“What if Broz somehow picks up on it, that Matusow misled him?”
“What’s the downside?” Taylor said. “He can come in and say Ray screwed up. OK. Then we go back and take out a couple of mics.”
There was a knock on the door. Taylor opened the door. It was Ms. Sligo, personnel file in hand. Taylor took it, closed the door, handed over the file to Sheehan.
Sheehan said, “You seem to be saying that you expect Joe to step outside the fold. Do you?”
“She’s a beautiful woman,” Taylor said flatly. “Beautiful women make men do all kinds of things. What about the initial interview? Where’s the tape? That story of batteries running down—that’s pretty thin, don’t you think?”
The first thing Sheehan looked at was Joe’s war record. “The old man”—C. H. Bunker, a descendent of the Bunker Hill Bunkers and a distant cousin of Ellsworth Bunker, who’d been the ambassador to Vietnam during the war—“likes war heroes. He likes Marine war heroes even better. He’s always making a point of that with Rob Bloch.” Block was the executive VP of Sales. “ ‘Tell them we’ve got more war heroes than Wackenhut or Pinkerton. Tell them we’ve got more war heroes than anyone except Arlington National Cemetery. Tell them we will put a man on the job who won the Silver Star, fighting for his country. If they don’t sign on the dotted line, tell them you’ll assign a Congressional Medal of Honor winner. If they don’t sign then, they’re un-American and we don’t want them.’ I think I’ve heard him say that a hundred times or more. That’s for starters, Mel. Plus Broz, he’s been with the company longer than you have.”
“I’m going to go out on a limb here,” Taylor said. What he meant was, I’m out on a limb already, so I might as well admit it. “I have my doubts about Joe Broz’s loyalty.” Taylor wondered if, for once, he had let a desire overcome his judgment. Desire did that. Had he let his private purpose, to let Broz have enough rope to hang himself, supersede the objectives of the job? In terms of going by the book, he had.
Sheehan kept reading. He saw what Broz had done after his military service and frowned. He flipped ahead, skimming through Joe’s record with U. Sec., and saw what he expected. He stopped and looked up. “When I saw his name, I thought this was the guy we were talking about. He’s handled some work for my department.” A lot of work fell under the jurisdiction of Special Affairs simply because it was too broad or too narrow or too different to fit neatly in one of the regular service categories. Just because a job was Special Affairs did not necessarily mean that it had a political dimension or legal problems, that it required extreme discretion or had a particular element of danger. But it could. “Even if you’re upper management and he’s just an operative, you better be right.”
“I know his file looks good, but that’s my feeling,” Taylor said.
“Interesting.”
“So maybe this is a little test for him. A little trap. Look, Frank, the way I saw it, the way I see it, we win both ways. If she asks him to go after Beagle, then he’s supposed to come in and report it. Form JO:C-l,13in triplicate—one for the office, one for the client, one for the operative. And if he doesn’t, the way that house is wired, we’ll know about it, guaranteed. I have a fallback plan to double-check them if for some damn reason I think we’re missing something with just the audio material. If he turns out to be loyal, everything is copacetic. If not, well then we kill two birds with one stone.”
“Well,” said Frank, “it’s your show. I just wanted you to know that the job means a lot to C. H. You’re to do whatever it takes.”
“You want me to put a couple of extra men on him? On them? Watch them?”
“Mel, let me tell you this as a friend. Nothing better go wrong on this job. If you treat it as the most important job of your whole life, you’re on the right track. If something fucks up, you’re in deep shit. I say that as a friend.” Which meant, I’m not your friend at all. If you screw up, I’ll see that you fry, because I hope that will keep my ass out of the fire.
Taylor understood exactly what Sheehan didn’t say. “I’ll double up on them. Nothing’s going to go wrong.” And if Broz turns out to be a traitor, he thought, I’ll ruin his ass. At this point Taylor just meant Broz’s career. Get him fired. Ace him out of his pension. In spite of the obsessive secrecy surrounding the job, there was no reason for Taylor to think that they were playing at a high-stakes table. Not yet.
12 Not a real name. But the reader can assume, in this case, that the character is modeled on a very real person with a résumé that includes Yale, the OSS, and the CIA prior to starting an investigation and security company.
13 All job files at U. Sec. include a job-objective section, so everyone, especially the client, is clear about what they are trying to do. A JO:C-l is required to be filed if this objective changes. The form asks who requested the change, why, and how this will affect billing. There’s boilerplate legal language on the bottom that says that this is a binding financial agreement.