The Bishop's Pawn (Cotton Malone #13)(55)

“They were created during an FBI operation known as Bishop’s Pawn.”

There were those two words again.

“It was part of COINTELPRO.”

And the third word of the day.

“Hoover liked everything written down,” he said. “And I mean everything. There are reports after reports after reports. Millions of pages from those days. You can’t imagine how much paper. We’ve known for a long time that Valdez managed to get his hands of some of the classified documentation from Bishop’s Pawn. How? I have no idea. But he’s blackmailed us with it before. Years ago it was cheaper and easier to pay—”

“Than kill him?”

I couldn’t resist.

“Not necessarily. But he stayed in Cuba, which made that option more difficult.”

“For the FBI?” I taunted. “Come on? You guys have reach.”

“We do, which I hope you won’t forget.”

I received the message loud and clear.

“So we’re clear,” Veddern said, “if I had been around back then, I would have taken the SOB out. Absolutely. That’s the trouble with blackmailers. They never go away.” He motioned to everything around us. “Hence, once again, why we’re here in this oven.”

“Tell us more about Valdez,” Coleen asked.

“Why are you so interested in him?”

“I read the files. They’re enlightening.”

“I bet they are. How do you know they’re real?”

“You just said they were,” I said.

He pointed a finger my way and smiled.

“How about we dispense with the bullshit and you answer her question,” I said. “What about Valdez?”

“J. Edgar Hoover thought himself a master of the intelligence business. Before 1947 he was with the CIA and did a good job rooting out Nazi spies in World War Two. But after the war the FBI was supposed to get out of the intelligence business. Spies became the CIA’s problem. But Hoover couldn’t let it go. He kept his nose in the intelligence business. After the CIA cut Valdez loose, Hoover brought him on to root out homegrown communists. In 1967 Hoover switched him over to Bishop’s Pawn. Nearly everything we have on Bishop’s Pawn is gone, except for records that detail Valdez’s employment history.”

I considered the implications of what this man was saying, recalling articles and books I’d read on the King assassination. Everyone saw a conspiracy. The various theories ranged from the amazing to the fantastical. But this was no theory. If what I’d read was true, the FBI had been an active party to an actual conspiracy to commit murder.

Which reminded me about Bruce Lael.

“We just watched a man being blown up,” I said.

“Tom Oliver doesn’t like loose ends. But that’s the thing about conspiracies. By definition, they require participants. We were about to bring Lael in for questioning. This meeting was originally meant for him. We assume Oliver found out and decided to move first. I honestly didn’t think he’d make a move on Lael, but I’ve been wrong about Oliver before.”

“Arrest him,” Coleen said.

“There is a little thing called proof. We’re gathering it, as we speak. When you two appeared earlier, I had my agent on the scene bring you here instead of Lael. Of course, we’ve been looking for you both since we found out what happened on the Dry Tortugas.”

“How much of Bishop’s Pawn do you know about?” I asked.

“What you’re really asking is, Did the FBI participate in King’s death?” He shrugged. “I can honestly say I don’t know the answer to that question. I can also say that there’s not a single piece of paper I’m aware of in our files that even hints at such a thing. And I would know.”

“Because you’re the keeper of secrets,” I mocked.

“Precisely.”

“But you know that Bishop’s Pawn involves King’s death,” I pointed out. “Valdez blackmailed you before. So whatever you bought back then had to point that way.”

He nodded. “It did. The bastard sold just enough to keep them coming back for more. But those documents are long gone, too. I only know what I just said from speaking to an agent, a few years ago, who was there back then. Another keeper of secrets who’s dead now.”

I knew this guy’s type. He craved order.

And all he had right now was chaos.

“I do know Bishop’s Pawn was an atypical FBI operation, highly classified. Jansen, Lael, Oliver, and Valdez participated. My guess is James Earl Ray knew the least, on purpose, since the idea seemed to be for him to take the fall when it was all over.”

“Ray pulled the trigger?” I asked.

Veddern nodded. “No question in my mind. And pretty damn amazing, really. One shot, from a long way off. And he was no marksman. He’d barely fired a rifle and certainly had no sniper training. But he did it.” The guy cocked his fingers to form a gun, then bent his thumb signifying a shot fired. “Right in the head.”

It was a tacky gesture, but I assumed that came from dealing with bad crap all the time. People died in the law enforcement business. It was part of the job. Easy to forget that such was not the case with 99.9999 percent of the rest of the world.

“This whole thing is a nightmare,” Veddern said. “It’s been dormant a long time, but it just keeps coming back for more. We cannot have any public speculation that the FBI may have been involved with the death of Martin Luther King. If Stephanie Nelle had come to us, we could have handled this quietly. There are things involved she has no way of knowing. Instead, she sends you out there to generate a hurricane.”