I stared absently at the house, a large two-story Tudor on about two and a half acres of very expensive real estate. It looked pristine. A redbrick sidewalk went from the street to an arched doorway, which led to a sixteen-room house. The big news that day in Dallas was about a fire in Kessler Park that had incinerated a 64,000-square-foot mega mansion. The Lipton spread was less than a third that size, but it was still impressive, or depressing, or both.
It was around nine in the evening. A supervisory agent from the Dallas office, Joseph Denyeau, came on my earphones. “We just got word from the director’s office. We have to back off immediately. I don’t understand it either. The order couldn’t be any clearer, though. Pull back! Everybody head to the office. We need to reconnoiter and talk about this.”
I looked at my partner in the car that night, an agent named Bob Shaw. It was pretty obvious that he didn’t understand what the hell had just happened either.
“What was that?” I asked him.
Shaw shook his head and rolled his eyes. “What do I know? We go back to the field office, drink some bad coffee, maybe somebody higher up explains it to us, but don’t count on it.”
It took us only fifteen minutes to get to the field office at that time of night. We filed into a conference room at the field office, and I saw a lot of weary, confused, and pissed-off agents. Nobody was saying much yet. We’d gotten close to a possible break on this case, and now we’d been ordered to pull back. Nobody seemed to understand why.
The ASAC finally came out of his office and joined the rest of us. Joseph Denyeau looked thoroughly disgusted as he threw his dusty cowboy boots up on a conference table. “I have no idea,” he announced. “Not a clue, folks. Consider yourselves debriefed.”
So about forty agents waited for an explanation of the night’s action, but one didn’t come, or wasn’t “forthcoming,” as they say. The agent in charge, Roger Nielsen, finally called D.C. and was told they would get back to us. In the meantime, we were to stand down. We might even be sent home in the morning.
Around eleven o’clock Denyeau got another update from Nielsen and passed it on to us. “They’re working on it,” he said, and smiled wryly.
“Working on what?” somebody called from the back.
“Oh, hell, I don’t know, Donnie. Working on their pedicures. Working on getting all of us to quit the Bureau. Then there’ll be no more agents and, I guess, no more embarrassing screwups for the media to report. I’m going to get some sleep. I’d advise all of you to do the same.”
That’s what we did.
Chapter 93
WE WERE BACK at the field office by eight the next morning. Several of the agents looked a little messed up after the night off. First thing, Director Burns was on the line from Washington. I was pretty sure the director rarely, if ever, spoke to the troops like this. So why do it now? What was up?
Agents around the room were looking at one another. Brows crinkled, eyebrows arched. No one could fathom why Burns was so involved. Maybe I could. I’d seen the restlessness in him, the dissatisfaction with the ways of the past, even if he couldn’t effectively change them all at once. Burns had started as a street cop in Philadelphia and worked his way up to police commissioner. Maybe he could change things at the Bureau.
“I wanted to explain what happened yesterday,” he said over the speakerphone. Every agent in the room listened intently, myself included. “And I also wanted to apologize to all of you. Everything got territorial for a while. The Dallas police, the mayor, even the governor of Texas was involved. The Dallas police asked that we pull back because they didn’t have full confidence in us. I agreed to the action because I wanted to talk it through with them rather than force our presence there.
“They didn’t want mistakes, and they weren’t sure that we have the right man. The Lipton family has a good reputation in the city. He’s very well connected. Anyway, Dallas was surprised that we listened to their concerns—and now they’ve backed off again. They respect the team we’ve assembled.
“We will continue our action against Lawrence Lipton, and believe me, we’re going to take that bastard down. Then we’re going to take Pasha Sorokin down, the Wolf. I don’t want you to worry about past mistakes. Don’t worry about mistakes at all. Just do your job in Dallas. I have the utmost confidence in you.”
Burns went off the line, and just about every agent’s face in the room wore a smile. It was quite magical, actually. The director had said things that some of them had been waiting years to hear; especially welcome was the news that he believed in their ability and wasn’t worried about mistakes. We were back in the game; we were expected to bring down Lawrence Lipton.
Minutes after the phone call ended, my cell went off. I answered, and it was Burns himself. “So how’d I do?” he asked. I could hear the smile in his voice. I could also almost see the cocky upturn of his lip when he grinned. He knew how he’d done.
I walked away from the group into a far corner of the room and told him what he wanted to hear. “You did good. They’re pumped to do the job.”
Burns exhaled. “Alex, I want you to turn up the heat on this punk. I sold you hard to Dallas as a key member of the team. They bought you, and your reputation. They know how good we think you are. I want you to make Lawrence Lipton very uncomfortable. Do it your own way.”
I found myself smiling. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“And Alex, contrary to what I said to the others, don’t make any mistakes.”
Chapter 94
DON’T MAKE ANY MISTAKES. It was a hell of an exit line, I had to give him that. Kind of funny, in a sadistic, hard-ass way. I was starting to like Ron Burns again. Couldn’t help myself. But did I trust him?
Somehow, I got the feeling that Burns wasn’t that worried about the mistakes, though. He wanted to catch the kidnappers, especially Pasha Sorokin—even if we didn’t know yet who he really was or where he lived. According to Burns’s orders, all I had to do was figure out a way to break Lawrence Lipton down, do it in a hurry, and not embarrass the Bureau in any way.
I met with Roger Nielsen on possible strategies—we had already resumed surveillance on Lipton. It was decided that it was time to put real pressure on him, to let him know we were in Dallas and that we knew about him. After Burns’s phone call, I wasn’t surprised that I had been chosen to confront Lipton.
We decided that I would go and see Lipton at his office in the Lakeside Square Building at the intersection of the LBJ Freeway and the North Central Expressway. The building was twenty stories high, with lots of reflective glass. It was practically blinding as I looked skyward in the Texas sunshine. I walked inside at a little past ten in the morning. Lipton’s office suite was on the nineteenth floor. When I got off the elevator, a recorded voice said, “Howdy.”
I stepped into a large reception area with half an acre of wine-colored carpeting, beige walls, and dark brown leather sofas and chairs everywhere. There were framed, signed photos of Roger Staubach, Nolan Ryan, and Tom Landry on the walls.