Isaacson smiled, then made an exaggerated search of the room with his eyes.
“I don’t see any members of the gentle sex who might take offense, so why not? Take a look at him, Sergeant. Nice-looking guy. Young. Not married. Lives very well. Meets a lot of interesting women. Would you suspect that he gets laid a lot?”
The Highway Patrol sergeant chuckled.
“I thought it was probably something like that,” he said.
[SEVEN]
On board Cessna Citation X NC 601 Flight level 31,000 feet Near Raleigh, North Carolina 2135 9 June 2005
“Did you read this?” Charley Castillo asked, raising his eyes from the personnel file of Kennedy, Howard C., each page of which was stamped SECRET in red.
Joel Isaacson and Tom McGuire were in the rear of the cabin, both lying nearly horizontally in fully reclined seats and both holding a bottle of beer. And both nodded.
“I decided I had the need to know,” McGuire said, mock serious.
Isaacson smiled.
“Something’s missing,” Castillo said. “Or I’m missing something.”
Isaacson raised his right eyebrow but again said nothing. “The FBI’s been leaning on me—or the boss—to tell them where he is. And he’s really worried that I will.”
“Uh-huh,” Isaacson agreed.
“There’s nothing in here that explains that,” Charley said.
“And there’s nothing in here about a warrant or an indictment, anything like that. What’s going on? Why’s it classi fied secret? It’s just a personnel record. Confidential, maybe, but secret?”
“There’s a story going around that the FBI internal phone book is classified secret,” Tom McGuire said. “They’re big on keeping things to themselves.”
“What does it say he did for the FBI?” Isaacson asked.
Castillo dropped his eyes to the file again.
“He was ‘assistant special agent in charge of the professional standards unit,’ ” Castillo read. “What the hell is that?”
“It’s what the cops call ‘internal affairs,’ ” McGuire said. “Think about it, Charley.”
“You mean he was involved with dirty FBI agents?”
“There is no such thing as a dirty FBI agent,” Isaacson said. “I’m surprised you, a supervisory special agent of the Secret Service, don’t know that.”
McGuire laughed. Castillo didn’t think they resented his having Secret Service identification, but sometimes they needled him. Castillo gave Isaacson the finger.
“What about their counterintelligence guy who was on the Russian’s payroll?”
“They couldn’t deny that one,” McGuire said. “The CIA bagged him. Think of him as the exception that proves the rule.”
“I never said, with Tom as my witness, what I’m about to say,” Isaacson said. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Castillo said.
“I, of course, don’t know what I’m talking about. But let me throw this scenario at you,” Isaacson said. “It probably goes all the way back to J. Edgar Hoover, but the basic philosophy of the FBI is protect the FBI, closely followed by make the FBI look good and never do or admit anything that could in any way make the FBI look bad. ¿Está claro, mi amigo?”
Castillo nodded, smiling.
“With that in mind, they don’t call their internal affairs unit ‘Internal Affairs.’ To have an internal affairs unit would be an admission that there was a possibility, however remote, that there might be, from time to time, one or two— maybe even three—FBI agents who are not absolutely one hundred percent squeaky clean and perfect in every way. On the other hand, it has to be faced that there are, from time to time, some agen