FISHING TRIP

"I don't know what to say," Philip Jennings told Agent Aderholt.

"Mr. Jennings, Stan often called you his best friend. By your own admission, you were over at his place that night." Aderholt admitted to being off of his own game in this interview, Beeman and he had also been very close! Most assuredly Aderholt never felt permission to get Stan to draw his circle of guys closer - back in Oakland, one rarely made just one friend, one was adopted by a whole 'gang'. (Dennis's dad had often scolded him for using the term 'gang' so loosely, but Dennis did not want to be defined by his upbringing.)

Jennings just sat there at his kitchen table. Elizabeth had not planned to be away for Aderholt's visit, but Gabriel had thought it wise that she be elsewhere. Of the two, she had always been the most cool in 'the work', but this time there was no helping having Philip take the lead.

"I was," Philip told Aderholt. "If you're asking if I suspected that he'd do anything like that…..," he said with his voice trailing off.

"Did Stan have his revolver anywhere near him, I mean that you saw?" Aderholt asked.

"I knew he had one. He never flashed it around, if that's what you're asking. Last year, Henry - that's my son - Henry found out that Stan had carried one, and Henry got all excited. Started bugging Stan about seeing it, Henry wanted to try it out." Seeing that Aderholt was intensely interested in that information, Philip added, "don't get me wrong, Stan did all the right things. Stan let Henry get away with a lot - even brought pirated VCR titles from the FBI office for Henry. With the gun business, though, Stan was all business. Henry learned a valuable lesson about firearms…..," once again, Philip's voice trailed off.

"Mr. Jennings," Aderholt said sharply, "can I ask you some perhaps unrelated things?"

"Sure, ask away," Philip said, trying to leave the impression that he felt some relief in a change of topic from the gruesomeness of the last few days. Given how the real Mischa was eating himself out from inside, that was not a hard thing to fake.

"Did Stan ever ask you about the World Council of Churches?"

Philip's anti-interrogation training immediately picked up the change in cadence. That question, it was dangerous even if Aderholt had not known it. Back in Russia, his KGB instructor had said that the biggest advantage one had in withstanding the eddies and currents of interrogation, was that the interrogator was always at a disadvantage not knowing that one possessed training. When one feigned chaotic answers, that fit with the way the interrogator had been trained - trained to spot answers too perfect or consistent.

Still, Philip was completely in the dark about what Beeman and Aderholt had talked about, so it was also easy to get trapped in a lie. Or worse, plant suspicion into Aderholt's mind.

"I'm trying to think," Philip eventually said. "Not specifically, but we did once have Stan over for dinner, the same night that our pastor and his wife were over. Okay, not our pastor, not really, Paige's pastor. Paige had just been baptised - not something that Elizabeth or I were especially thrilled about, I mean, we're not religious, not really."

Aderholt interrupted, "don't lose track of my question, Mr. Jennings. World Council of Churches?"

"Okay, I'm getting to it," Philip said, being careful not to snap his answer. "I think that Stan and Pastor Tim had a bit of a tiff, Henry had blurted out that Pastor Tim had been arrested for anti-nuclear civil disobedience. Look, Agent Aderholt, you knew Stan, too. You could fill in those blanks…"

"Okay, I get it," Aderholt said. "Let's put it this way: did Stan ever try to engage you in a conversation specifically about Pastor Tim?"

"Look, Agent Aderholt, I'm not trying to be vague - could you tell me, tell me outright, what's going on here? Stan Beeman, he was my best friend - Pastor Tim, he's a huge influence on Paige."

Trying to recover his status as the guy asking the questions, Aderholt barged forward. "You know that Ethiopia is a Soviet, client State, Mr Jennings?"

"I do now. What are you implying?" Philip asked. "That Pastor Tim was a Soviet? His church agency, they did food relief programs in East Africa, my travel agency booked all the flights. We made a ton of money off of that."

Still, Mischa Andreiovich Petrov, knew what The Centre would say about this kind of conversation between him and the FBI, probably Gabriel, too. Philip had been trained to avoid those sorts of fishing trips - they were always the thin edge of the wedge.

With the FBI this close to two Directorate S Illegals, even if unaware, it would be time for the two of them to come home. Perhaps even the four of them.

JIG-SAW

Aderholt sat at his desk staring at the door to The Vault. He then looked over at Agent Brooks' desk, which only two weeks ago had been Stan's. Brooks had asked Aderholt a couple of times if he'd like to 'go for a beer', which was Brooks way of reaching out. But that's where his sensitivity ended, it didn't seem to bother him to move into Beeman's space, no not at all. "It's just a desk!"

With what was occupying Aderholt at that minute, he wished he was in The Vault. No not alone, but that's where he should be - with Stan. Trying to iron out the wrinkles in what Aderholt had soaked in about Philip Jennings.

Now? Without Stan to bounce things off, all there was was bounce.

Where did Mr. Jennings say he was brought up? Pittsburgh? Aderholt knew some of the guys at the East Carson Field Office there. It would be a slam dunk to verify Philip Martin Jennings' background.

But why do it? In Aderholt's memory, Stan had never once suspected Jennings of being anything, just that he might know stuff about Pastor Tim and the World Council of Churches that he was not letting on about.

Even so, Aderholt got out the FBI directory, looked up the number for the Pittsburgh Field Office. He then stared at the phone.

As things worked out, he left his inaction about calling long enough to be saved by the bell.

Department Head Wolf noisily came into the C.I. Office with all the efficiency he could manage, headed straight for the Vault, and said, "Aderholt, Brooks, you're with me." When he said it, he held up a file - opened the Vault door and then went in with Aderholt and Brooks in hot pursuit.

THE FORENSICS

Wolf waited for the two agents to sit, then he opened the file, pulled out the top sheet of paper, hardly looking at it as he began.

"I've just spent 45 minutes with the coroner on this one phrase - 'probable cause'." Wolf put the paper onto the table then looked at the two agents one after another. "That's the way he put it. 'Probable'."

Aderholt asked, "'probable'?"

Wolf said, "the forensics rule out homicide, nowhere near even criminal homicide. There's just no way that the scene in which Stan was found could have been staged. The coroner went to great lengths to explain that backtracking into 'probable', probably was the result of Stan's son, Matthew, panicking at the scene when he got home and disturbing it."

Wolf looked like he was going to explode. Aderholt's and Brooks's silence only fueled it.

Wolf said as evenly as he could, "I don't buy it, not one bit. Special Agents, they do not commit suicide. Not on my watch."

Aderholt didn't want to be the underling who got in Wolf's way about this, but he also felt a duty to get to the bottom of Stan's act. "Sir," he volunteered, "our guy at the scene had commented about Stan's revolver. Given Stan's left-handedness, it was clear he'd held it under his chin, but where it was found - on the floor - it had fallen to an unlikely place. Even so, it should have still been in Stan's hand. There was also blood on the trigger, how'd that get there? Stan's hand should have prevented transfer."

Wolf clasped his hands even tighter in front of him, "I asked that of the coroner. You know what he said?" Wolf hesitated, and put on an accent, as if parroting someone else, "'Agent Wolf, I've seen weirder'."

Brooks risked speaking, his own value to Counter Intelligence was not so much his intuitions as it was his work ethic. As such he rarely spoke at meetings like this, but this time he said, "I guess the coroner has wrapped this up."

Wolf barked, "no! Not for me. I'm not done with this." He then looked pointedly at Aderholt, "where are we with Pastor Tim and the World Council of Communists?"

"Alexandria police arrested him, right there at his church," Aderholt summarized. "Reed Street Church has a parishioner, a D.C. criminal lawyer. We now can't get at him without going through the most rabid lawyer office inside the beltway."

Wolf said, "just our luck, the Alexandria police blew it, big time." The division head then shifted gears, "what about the others. That assistant pastor, the secretary, the neighbours?"

"We've run out of people to interview. Anyone directly involved with the church won't talk to us, not now."

"The neighbours?"

"You mean the Jennings?" Aderholt filled in the name. "I've not talked with Mrs. Jennings. Philip, the husband, was closest to Stan. I mean, your predecessor, Frank Gaad, met the neighbours at a barbecue. Stan and Philip were tight. I'm told that Philip helped Stan through his divorce."

Aderholt paused, "was the last to see Stan alive. Apparently there was some dispute about Stan's son and the Jennings' daughter. Not big. More to the point, according to Matthew, he was probably the last to see Stan alive, was the one who found him the next morning."

The three sat in the kind of unique silence that only The Vault afforded. Then Wolf spoke up. "Why?" he asked.

Brooks spoke up, "why 'what' sir?"

Aderholt interrupted. "Sir, I've asked myself that question a thousand times. Look, I did not know him that well, but I knew him well enough to know this…."

".….. he'd have never off'ed himself while still following a hunch, assembling a jigsaw. I don't care if he was depressed about his marriage - while there was a puzzle in front of him, he'd stick it out until he solved it."

Aderholt returned to the idea of 'homicide', even though the coroner had seemingly ruled it out. Most certainly had ruled out a criminal homicide.

Aderholt said out-loud, to the surprise of both Wolf and Brooks, echoing Wolf: "why? The only answer is 'homicide', it truly is. You have to know Stan - I mean, it's not that he would not commit suicide… but that night, there had to be another hand in it."

Wolf put the paper away and closed the file. He looked at Brooks and Aderholt, "two weeks. You two, you do nothing else for the next fourteen days but this - the coroner be damned."

EXPERIMENTAL PROTOTYPE COMMUNITY OF TOMORROW

Special Agent Dennis Aderholt stood outside in the cold, right there at DuPont Circle in D.C. He'd just been inside DuPont Circle Travel asking for the whereabouts of The Jennings, all four of them.

They'd not been at home. Even though it was a school day, neither Paige nor Henry were at school. Both offices had told Aderholt that Mrs. Jennings had pulled then out, 'for the week'. A strange week to be pulling kids from school, given that it was near end of term.

So Aderholt had gone down to the travel agency to find out what was what.

An employee named Stavos, he had filled in all sorts of blanks. Had said that some weeks previous, the Jennings had promised their kids a trip to Florida, to the new Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, EPCOT. Aderholt had seen the airline ticketing, as well as the hotel reservation. If he got around to it when back at the office, he might even give the hotel a call.

Of course all this was strange. The 'strange' had started with Stan, and was now fully migrated to Aderholt himself. With every investigative step Aderholt now took, he found himself even farther from solving Stan's puzzle.

Aderholt thought, 'I guess I'm simply going to have to wait for the Jennings' return.'