Free (1976) The R Document by Irving Wallace Page A

Keefe?’
    ‘You set up the meeting and I’ll be there.’
    ‘With an open mind, I hope. The fate of this whole damn republic can depend on what happens in California. I don’t like some of the things going on in California right now. Please listen to everything he has to say, Chris, and then make up your own mind.’
    ‘I’ll listen,’ Collins said firmly. He picked up the menu.
    ‘That orange sauce with the duck got to be pretty sour. Now, for a change, let’s have something sweet.’
    *
    The following day, exactly at noon, as he had done once every week for six months, Ishmael Young arrived in the basement of the J. Edgar Hoover Building after a drive from his rented bungalow in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Even though it was Sunday, he knew that in these critical times everyone in Justice, in the FBI, was on a seven-day week. Tynan would be expecting him. Young parked in the basement, with effort pushed out of the front seat of his secondhand red sports car, and met Special Agent O’Dea in front of the Director’s private-key elevator. Sometimes it was Associate Deputy Director Adcock who met him. Today it was O’Dea, the former track star with the crew cut.
    They rode the elevator up to the seventh floor, there parted company, and Young walked alone - carrying his tape recorder and briefcase - down a corridor that separated two rows of offices, and in moments he entered Director Tynan’s suite.
    Presently, in Tynan’s spacious office high above Pennsylvania Avenue, Ishmael Young rolled a heavy easy chair closer to the low-slung circular coffee table, faced it toward the sofa where the Director would soon sit, took out his papers, and made himself ready. By twelve fifteen, Tynan’s secretary, Beth, had placed a beer on the coffee table for the Director and a Diet Pepsi-Cola for his writer. Next, she brought in two containers of lunch delivered by a delicatessen nearby on 9th Street. She laid out the cream-of-chicken soup and cottage cheese for the Director, and the potato salad, pickle, and egg salad on an onion roll for his writer. Then she left. Finally, Tyson got up from behind his awesome desk, after telling someone on the phone that no calls were to come in except from the President, and he secured the office, locking both doors from the inside. Next, he went past Young into his dressing room and on to his bathroom. A minute later, rubbing his dried hands together, he emerged refreshed and dropped down on the sofa to gulp his beer.
    Vernon T. Tynan enjoyed these autobiographical sessions. Obviously, because they were about himself.
    Ishmael Young hated them.
    Young loved the FBI, but he hated Director Tynan. He loved the FBI not for its raison d’etre, but because it was flawlessly, smoothly efficient, which Young was not. He cherished all great organizations that worked - IBM, the Russian Communist party, the Vatican, the Mafia, the FBI - irrespective of what they stood for. He disliked how these mammoth machines manipulated and exploited people, but he loved how effectively these machines - bigger than life -painlessly got things done. He himself got things done mostly with a pencil, a typewriter, a mess of papers, in fits and starts, with nervous tension, and it was no way for a man to live.
    He had loved and respected the FBI as an organization from that time, before his first session with Director Tynan six months ago, when Associate Deputy Director Adcock had taken him on a tour of the Bureau to give him ‘the feel’. There had been the tourist part of the tour. Over a half million tourists came to see the exhibits annually. He didn’t blame them. It had been exciting: the criminal Hall of Fame displaying John Dillinger’s actual guns and bulletproof vest and his death mask; ‘The Crime of the Century - The Case of the A-Bomb Spies’, featuring Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list; the Brink’s Robbery Case exhibit; ‘The Sinister Hand of Soviet Espionage’,