at I was going to say when I met with him, but I had all night to figure it out.
The whole minute-by-minute sleepless night.
CHAPTER 76
I GOT OUT of bed before my baby girl woke up. I showered to get my blood running, and while Mrs. Rose buttoned down the corners of my household, I called in sick, asked Brenda to tell Conklin that I would talk to him after lunch, and then ordered a taxi to drive me to the CIA office on Montgomery Street.
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.