Randy White - Shark River

No, I didn’t want to hear more. But I had to listen. Had Harrington really stumbled onto something? I said, “I don’t see what any of this has to do with me, but it’s interesting. Sure, I’m listening.”

“I thought you would. What I found in the safe were manila folders and envelopes sealed with thumbprinted wax-old-time security measures for stuff that was never, ever supposed to be opened. The President’s secretary, you may remember, was in her nineties when she died. She’d worked in the White House forever, way before World War II, and she still used the old ways to protect herself and her Presidents. In this case, the President she was protecting was the one I mentioned. He wasn’t the only one who needed protecting, though. There were other men involved, all of them highly trained and absolutely anonymous-until I opened those files.”

I felt an empty, rolling nausea in my stomach, and my voice sounded hollow when I said, “That means nothing to me.”

Harrington had become increasingly confident. “Of course it doesn’t. Just interesting reading, that’s all. So make up your mind. You really want me to continue discussing it on this phone line?”

I looked at my watch. Tomlinson and Ransom would be sitting in the Tarpon Inn, waiting. They’d have to eat without me.

I told him, “Give me half an hour. I’ll call you from a pay phone.”

Instead of taking the ferry across to the mainland, I fired up my little yellow Maverick flats boat and flew across Charlotte Harbor at sixty miles per hour, blasting a geysering rooster tail as I trimmed the Yamaha outboard, crossing ankle-deep bars and flats, translating my irritation into speed.

I’d call the man, but from a place he wouldn’t expect. It was way too easy for someone with the right connections to bug or place surveillance on every pay phone within several miles of the ferry landing.

So, instead, I ran across the bay to the little island village of Boca Grande, tied up at Mark Futch’s seaplane dock and walked the quiet tree-bordered streets downtown. I found a pay phone just across the street from the Temptation Restaurant and watched through the window as Annie served beers to a bar full of fishing guides.

I straightened my glasses and dialed the phone. Harrington answered immediately. He seemed much less formal, no longer on guard. “You on the mainland, Ford?”

“It’s what you told me to do, isn’t it?”

He chuckled. “Once again, bullshit. I’d be disappointed if you could be bullied that easily. But you are at a pay phone. That’s my guess. You’re too smart to call from anyplace else.”

“I’m flattered.”

“Not that I don’t believe you, but with all the technology these days, who knows? I’ve got a scrambler here on my office line that converts our voices from analogue to digitized, then back again. But know what I think? If I can have it electronically converted one way, any hotshot with the right computer program can have it electronically changed the other way. Which is why I maintain faith in the basics. Are you at a wall phone or in a booth?”

“It’s bolted onto the side of a building with chrome shielding.”

“Try to peek into the conduit that comes up from the ground. There should be a wire in there. An insulated wire, probably beige-colored.”

I looked and said, “A standard payphone, yes. A cremecolored wire comes up into the back.” I knew why he was asking, but made no comment. The man seemed to know his business.

“Plain old-fashioned telephone wire, something that’s easy to understand and monitor. Let me check my meter.” There was a pause. “Okay, my line’s secure here, and no trace of resistance on yours, no drop in voltage according to this little computer of mine, which means we can say anything we want about anybody we want and it goes no farther. Just between you and me.”

I replied, “Guess I’ll have to take your word for that.”

I was still watching the fishing guides through the window of the Temptation, but I was also maintaining a peripheral eye on the street, too. Watching for slow-moving cars. Watching for men moving on the tops of buildings.

If I’d been set up, I wanted to see it coming before it was too late to react.

There wasn’t much for me to see. It was a nice, balmy winter day with the smell of frangipani drifting above warm asphalt. A few blocks away, beyond the beach at the end of the street, was open ocean. A quiet afternoon. Boca Grande doesn’t get a lot of traffic. It’s way off the regular tourist track. A rich little tropical outpost with the atmosphere of a Vermont village.

Harrington started by saying, “If you’re the man I think you are, you have an impressive record, Doctor Ford. Or should I call you Commander Ford? If they gave out medals to people like you, I suspect there’d be a couple of important ones on your uniform. If they allowed people like you to have uniforms.”

Was he fishing, or did he really have proof? I said, “Then I’m not the man you think I am. What I don’t understand is, you said something about helping Lindsey. But you’re not talking about Lindsey. So what’s the point?”

“The point? The point is an operation called Sky Hook. Ever hear of it?”

The words jolted me. I hadn’t heard them spoken in years. There was now no doubt that Harrington had found some hard-copy files. Absolutely no one outside our small team was supposed to know that name.

I felt a deflating sense of the inevitable. Thought to myself, It’s finally happened, as I said, “I have no idea what you mean.”

“Then let me tell you all about it. Really fascinating stuff. An international spy ring, deep cover reconnaissance, espionage, sabotage, political terrorism-and at least three successful assassinations. You probably don’t know anything about those, either.”

He was wrong about the number of assassinations. There’d been at least seven, probably more.

I said, “It sounds like one of those movies. Something they dream up in Hollywood.”

“Oh, it gets much, much better. I’ll give you all the details if you want-maybe jog your memory about a few things. Later, when I’m done, you can decide if you’re willing to do a couple of favors for me. And Lindsey, of course. She’s my main concern.”

“Is this supposed to sound like extortion? Because it does.”

“No, what it’s supposed to sound like is diplomacy. You said yourself, that’s what I do. In the real world, Doctor Ford, this is the way diplomacy works.”

Harrington told me a few things I already knew, but much I didn’t know or even suspect. He said that Sky Hook was one of many operations successfully carried out by an illegal team of intelligence operatives. The organization was the brainchild of a President who figured out how to take the law into his own hands without really breaking the law. Harrington seemed to admire that. Said that sooner or later, they all try it. But he was one of the few smart enough to get away with it, plus he had staff members loyal enough to protect him afterward.

“In his memoirs, even on his deathbed, the President never gave away the secret. To give up the secret was to sentence certain people to death. He knew that. Clearly, his Chief of Staff knew it, too, because he’s the man who administrated the operation. Same deal. Took the secret to his own deathbed. Just like the old secretary. As far as I know, except for the file here on my desk, there is absolutely no other written record of this illegal organization.”

Standing in the pale February light, feeling the breeze freshening from off the Gulf, I thought about the papers locked away in my safety-deposit box on Sanibel. Locked away in the bank just down Periwinkle Way from the Timbers Restaurant and Bailey’s General Store. Harrington was wrong. Other written records did exist. For my own protection and security, I’d kept several original documents and copies of others. Mostly orders and directives I’d received. They were never signed, of course. Ever.