15th Affair (Women's Murder Club #15)(50)

I dressed to impress, meaning I put on my best blue gabardine pantsuit, just cleaned, a good-looking tailored shirt, and my smart Freda Salvador shoes, which I’d last worn to meet in DC with FBI honcho June Freundorfer.

Mrs. Rose topped up my coffee mug while I Googled the address Dixon had given me and found that it was the location of a CIA division called the National Resources Program, or NR.

I read and clicked and read some more.

And what I learned was that the NR was to the CIA at Langley, Virginia, what schoolyard pickup hoops were to the NBA.

The NR recruited largely untrained people with access to information: foreign nationals living in the United States who were willing to gather intel for cash and probably a feeling of self-importance. The NR also hired on Americans with overseas access to government workers, aircraft manufacturing plants, newspapers, and the like.

These part-time operatives came with a variety of backgrounds. Some were college students, some were corporate executives, entertainers, and young techies—like Jad. And like Bud and Chrissy, who had been secretly filming Michael Chan and Alison Muller.

And while these geeks had been spying on spies, Joe Molinari had been right in the thick of it.

My taxi driver buzzed the intercom.

I told Mrs. Rose I would call her in a few hours and hugged everyone at the door.

My driver asked, “Alexander Building, right?”

I said, “Right,” as the cab lunged from the curb and out into traffic.

Twenty-five minutes later, I was on the street in front of an early-1900s neo-Gothic, tan brick office building. I entered the lobby, stopped at the desk, and showed my credentials to the security guard.

He called upstairs to Agent Dixon’s office, then wrote my name on a peel-and-stick tag, handed it to me, and said, “Fourth floor. You can go on up.”

I followed his pointing finger to the elevator bank.





CHAPTER 77


I WAS ALONE in the elevator that whisked me smoothly to the fourth floor. The doors slid open and I stepped out onto a granite floor leading to a pair of glass doors etched with the eagle-centric, round blue logo of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The reception area was thickly carpeted in blue, and a cluster of upholstered chairs gathered around a circular glass coffee table. A gallery of gold-framed portraits lined the long wall behind the reception desk: all former heads of the CIA, including President G. H.W. Bush and our current CIA chief.

I gave my name to the woman behind the desk, signed a log, and took a seat. There were no magazines on the table, but I didn’t have to wait long.

Agent Michael Dixon entered the room through a door to the left of the receptionist, greeted me as Mrs. Molinari, and asked me to follow him. We walked past many open cubicles with young staffers inside and other offices with closed doors.

At the end of the hallway, Dixon opened the door to a wood-paneled conference room and showed me in. Christopher Knightly, the second of the two agents I’d met in my apartment, was standing at the windows, looking out over the city with his back to the door.

He turned and said, “Morning, Sergeant Boxer. Please have a seat.” And to the man I had assumed was his senior partner, “Thanks, Dixon. I’ll take it from here.”

I sat in one of the eight swivel chairs around the smallish mahogany conference table. I refused an offer of coffee or bottled water, although my mouth was dry. I was wondering if I’d made a monumental mistake in coming here.

Knightly pulled out a chair across from me and lowered his football player heft down into it.

He said, “You told Dixon you have information that may be of importance. That you know something about Worldwide Flight 888. What do you want to tell us?”

The inference was plain and almost laughable. This was the CIA, an arm of a huge intelligence-gathering agency with fingers in pies I couldn’t even imagine.

I was a cop. Just a cop. But if I’d had Christopher Knightly in the box, I could have fired questions at him for hours. So I assumed that attitude.

I said, “I’m working a quadruple homicide, and I’m fairly certain that this isn’t news to you. I want to know why Michael Chan was murdered and by whom. I want to know who killed the housekeeper and the two CIA computer techs in the room next to Chan’s at around the same time. I want to know why I was followed and beaten by four Asian men who had a Stinger missile launcher in an apartment they were renting in Chinatown. And I want to know what my husband, Joe Molinari, had to do with all or any of that.

“If you can’t give me answers and compelling reasons why I should keep what I know to myself, I’m going to let the press know that the CIA knew about WW 888 before it went down and may even have had something to do with that disaster.”

I was suddenly afraid that I’d said too much; that like a little terrier on the street going after a pit bull, I’d taken a bigger bite than I could chew.

If I was seen as a danger to national security, I might be taken into government custody. Or worse. I thought of the sweaty young man with the clandestine videos on his laptop, afraid for his life. I thought of Bud and Chrissy dead on a hotel room floor.

Knight gave me a patronizing smile and said, “We’re not going to hurt you, Sergeant. I’m not the bad guy.”

I exploded.

“So who is the bad guy? That’s what I want to know. Who’s the bad guy in all this?”