ONE
George Blum
George Blum didn’t take the seat that hadn’t been offered. His 235 pounds rested squarely on polished dress shoes. His FBI identification badge hung in the V of a dark suit jacket atop a crisp white shirt that billowed over a ponderous gut. Neatly combed silver hair crowned the stern gaze of a seasoned investigator who’d seen it all.
Before him, Assistant US Attorney Dennis Dalleck spoke into a telephone receiver with the confidence of a con.
“Hansen is a terrorist. He was a terrorist in college. He’s a terrorist now.”
Impossible not to eavesdrop on the conversation, Blum tried to at least give the appearance of not listening by looking at a plaque on the wall, a dark silhouette of Alexander Hamilton with the words, centered in bold script, Liberty University College of Law Federalist Society.
Located in Virginia, the evangelical Christian university sent more students to the present White House on work-study than Princeton. The Federalist Society touted its particular attention to the intent of the founding fathers. Blum thought Dalleck must have missed the lecture about not using the power of the state against political opponents.
Blum’s law classes had been at night. Five years of missed bedtime stories with his young kids to get ahead in the bureau.
Dalleck’s words were a melodious betrayal of the memorandum that Justice Department employees “may never select the timing of investigative steps or criminal charges for the purpose of affecting any election, or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.”
“Won’t be election interference if we do it right. We’ll get Hansen. Even California isn’t going to elect an acknowledged terrorist. I got my man here working on it.”
Dalleck ended his call and studied Blum across the smooth surface of a desk clear of the files and legal forms Blum was used to seeing in a judiciary office.
“You know they started it. They weaponized Justice,” Dalleck said as if to reassure Blum that it was all right to use the FBI to defeat a political opponent.
The country was evenly divided into two camps. Blum had seen the cycles–the arrogant left, the righteous right.
On the right, Dalleck’s side had the White House, the Supreme Court, and the House of Representatives. Allan Hansen stood in their way of full control of the Senate and the whole US government.
Faith in impartial and equal justice was crumbling under the grinding tread of us and them. When all you heard were your views echoed back at you–us against them–and every means justifies the end, it became hard to identify real threats.
Not that Blum minded helping to defeat the leading opponent of the Sentinel Act, which would grant the bureau more tools to collect electronic evidence about US citizens. But running a counterintelligence operation against a sitting US senator was touchy business. Blum had to keep the bureau’s fingerprints off the operation.
Dalleck ran his tongue over a thick lower lip. “The White House is disappointed in the way this procedure is going,” he said as if critiquing a gall bladder operation.
Blum got the message that this was not a rogue operation but was directed from the top.
The FBI had preserved its own culture and standards until this president accused the bureau of spying on his campaign and not going after his enemies. Now a sizeable portion of the public on both sides had lost trust in the FBI.
Maybe his bosses assigned him this dirty work to appease the president. Or maybe to make sure the FBI wasn’t identified as interfering in Allan Hansen’s campaign. Either way, it was dicey.
Blum’s caution was built on three decades of operations that had gone wrong. And what could possibly go wrong with the FBI sabotaging the campaign of a United States senator?
Blum rule number 1: The law of unintended consequences lurks inside an operation. Push on one side of the balloon, and the other side expands. Send in a giraffe, and out comes a tiger. Stings, broken doors, screaming women, crying men–he’d learned to slow down when the crazy meters jumped to red, and this was bouncing far right.
“You testified against the Oakland Four. How come Hansen wasn’t identified as the fourth conspirator?” Dalleck asked.
“He was given immunity for testifying against Jacob Gillium and Lauren Bastini,” Blum explained.
Dalleck rocked forward in his ergonomic office chair. “Berkeley! How could California have a senator from Berkeley? Hansen was part of the gang. Why don’t we have a record of his arrest?”
“Sealed and destroyed when he cooperated with the government.”
“But you don’t know for sure that the records were destroyed?”
And I don’t know your father wasn’t a goat.
Dalleck waved his forefinger around in a froth. “Keep looking. Maybe somebody took them home with them. Find them.” Dalleck tapped the back of his finger against his overbite and narrowed his eyes in concentration. “Where’s Lauren Bastini?” he asked.
“West Virginia. She makes honey.”
“Honey? What is she, a goddamn bee? Put more pressure on her!” Dalleck demanded. “Send some boys up to have a little talk with Ms. Bastini. Convince her to help us defeat this liberal cocksucker.”
He said liberal like the red hunters used to say Commie. The president had lost restraint and called his opponents Communists.
A career in the era of limits raised more Blum rules:
Number 2: Beware of true believers–those who would die for their cause.
The will to survive was the reason relative peace existed in a nation armed, alienated, and ready to shoot.
Blum rule number 3: Do not activate a dormant threat. Bastini might be seventy-three years old, but she could and would go hot if mishandled.
“What kind of pressure?”
Dalleck’s eyebrows arched over his golf course-tanned cheeks as if Blum had made a joke.
“What the hell do you think your assignment is? Go out there and tell Jacob Gillium and Lauren Bastini we’re going to put their asses back in jail unless they publicly say what we all know. Allan Hansen is a goddamn bomb-throwing Berkeley radical.”
For a moment, Blum focused on the federal government’s prosecuting attorney, who didn’t seem to know or care that FBI worked for all the American people, not for him and the minority of voters who’d put him in power.
Dalleck’s voice rose, and he pounded his fist on the desk. “I mean, Jesus! Blum! We must defeat Allan Hansen. He’s a danger to the nation. The lives of thousands, millions of Americans depend on us defeating him. Now, I want you to go back out there and squeeze these terrorists’ nuts until they say what we all know. That Allan Hansen was and is a terrorist.”
§…
Blum’s wife, Franny, liked it when he took her on jobs. He’d gone crazy for her, as had a few other agents when she’d booked evidence at the bureau many years and three grown kids ago.
They avoided the valet parking service at the movie star’s oceanfront home and parked a quarter mile down the Pacific Coast Highway in a restaurant lot.
Franny, dressed in five-pocket jeans and an Apolline cropped jacket, plump, if not fat, barely came up to his shoulder, but Blum had to hustle to keep up with her as they walked beside the busy highway cut between steep hillsides and cheek-by-jowl beachside homes.
They passed through an open gate and walked up a driveway lined with towering palms and flower beds. They were purposely one of the first to arrive. Still, six people were ahead of them in a security line. Blum overheard a woman in the line say that she just wanted to see if she looked as much like Barbara Stein as people said she did. Blum thought the heavily touched-up woman vaguely resembled the actress when she’d portrayed a good-hearted Las Vegas hooker. A gay couple behind them, hyped up like they were on amphetamines, kept jabbering about “Bababwa.”
Blum didn’t see Jake Gillium. He’d sent Gillium one of the thousand-dollar tickets to the fundraiser with a handwritten note: The senator would like to see you.
Highly unlikely that either Hansen or Gillium would recognize him. If they did, that would be more pressure to cooperate.
Thirty-five years ago, rail-thin, long-haired, calling himself Cliffy, Blum’s first assignment in the FBI Counterintelligence Program–COINTELPRO–had been to infiltrate an eco-terrorist group in Berkeley. A misguided bunch of yahoos the press called the Oakland Four thought they were defending the environment with crimes against businesses. Blum had tipped law enforcement that Lauren Bastini and Jimmy Tolver were going to firebomb the Monsanto Company’s Biotech Research facility in Berkeley.
In a shootout with the police, the bomb had ignited, killing Tolver and burning the skin off Bastini. Blum regretted the death and injury, but the operation had sent a powerful message to other eco-terrorists that the bureau meant business.
He had collected evidence that Allan Hansen, then a freshman at Cal, had been a coconspirator. Hansen had avoided prosecution by testifying against his roommate, Jake Gillium.
Now, not a far reach those thirty-seven years later, Gillium would want revenge against Hansen by confirming he’d been an active member of the terrorist gang. The object of this operation was to get pictures and, if possible, audio of the two together. They might even discuss Hansen’s past involvement in the Oakland Four.
“No cameras or cell phones,” announced a Latino man with SECURITY printed on a blue windbreaker.
The Blums presented their tickets and provided fake names and email addresses. Blum left a burner phone with a coat check girl and entered a separate line for men. A security wand did not detect a camera disguised as black reading glasses or the brown prescription bottle holding translucent-strip microphones, each with enough power to reach the recorder in the trunk of his car.
In a foyer, Hansen campaign workers sat behind a table greeting guests and giving them name tags. Large windows in the living room blended indoors and out with sweeping ocean views.
They stepped outside into the backyard, where a buffet table and bar were set up beside a large infinity pool. Beyond a seawall of large boulders, the late-afternoon sun reflected off calm blue water that rolled in low, foam-capped waves up a narrow stretch of sand.
A quick swipe of Blum’s hand on the sandstone sculpture of a seagull attached the first microphone that hardly appeared as a smudge.
A waitress offered them canapés from a silver tray.
“Hey, you look like you’re coming undone back there,” Blum said. He placed another microphone as he tightened the bow of her apron.
“Thanks,” she said with a curious expression as if he was trying to cop a feel, evidently excusing him because of his age and Franny smiling at his side.
A bustling woman was preparing silver trays of canapés in a makeshift kitchen inside an open tent. “May I help you, sir?” she asked as he ran his hand over the side of a tray of bruschetta.
“Oh, I was wondering if you had a business card.”
She smiled. “I’m busy, as you can see. Can’t talk now, but after things settle down, I’d be happy to give you a brochure.”
“Sorry. I shouldn’t be bothering you. I’ll look for you later.”
He put a microphone on a vase of flowers on a white-tablecloth-covered table where a bar had been set and another on a woven cloth atop a black piano in the living room.
The place was wired now. The camera in his glasses could be activated with a touch of a thin button in his pocket, but it wouldn’t make a difference if Gillium didn’t rise to the bait.
In the meantime, he and Franny enjoyed being in the home of a Hollywood star.
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