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"Not true," Wohl said.
Larkin looked at him in surprise.
'The real story is that nobody in the Department, except one hardnosed Irishman, believed that the car thief could possibly be a car thief. We were wrong, and the FBI was right."
"One of your guys, the hard-nosed Irishman?"
Wohl pointed at Jack Malone.
"And I didn't believe him, either," Wohl said. "Walter Davis and I had a long talk to see if we couldn't keep something like that from happening again."
Walter Davis was the SAC, the special agent in charge, of the Philadelphia office of the FBI.
"You get along with Davis all right, Peter?"
"As well as any simple local cop can get along with the FBI," Wohl said.
"Did you almost say 'the feds'?"
"No."
"Out of school," Larkin said. "I hear that part of the problem is a Captain Jack Duffy."
"Out of school, did you hear what Captain Duffy is supposed to have done?"
"What he doesn't do is the problem, is what I hear. Phrased delicately, both Walter Davis and our SAC here…Joe Toner, you know him, our supervisory agent in charge?"
Wohl shook his head, no.
"…tell me that in the best of all possible worlds, Captain Duffy would be a bit more enthusiastically cooperative than he is."
"That's delicately phrased," Wohl said. "But I don't think it's Duffy personally. He takes his guidance from the commissioner."
"Okay. Confession time," Larkin said. "Joe Toner found out somehow that Dignitary Protection had been given to something called Special Operations, which was under an Inspector Wall. So, when I began to suspect that this vice presidential visit was going to present serious problems, I decided I was going to bypass Captain Duffy. I called the Dignitary Protection sergeant…you know who I mean, the caretaker sergeant?"
"Henkels," Wohl furnished.
"Sergeant Henkels. And I told him that I wanted to see the supervisor in charge in our office. There, I was going to make sure he found out that Denny Coughlin and I are old pals. The logic being that Henkels and the lieutenant were going to be more impressed with, and more worried about annoying, Chief Coughlin than they would about Duffy. In other words, they would enthusiastically cooperate."
"You think the danger this guy poses is worth really pissing off Duffy and the commissioner?"
"I would rather have both love me, but yes, I do."
"And if getting Henkels and Malone to circumvent normal channels incidentally got them in deep trouble, too bad?"
"My job is to keep the Vice President alive, Peter. If I have to step on some toes…"
"You can't simply cut Duffy out of the picture, even if you wanted to," Wohl said.
"Joe Toner's deputy has an appointment with Duffy at eight o'clock Monday morning. We will go through the motions. But what I hoped to get first from Malone, and then from you, was more cooperation than I' m liable to get from Duffy. This is not one of those times when it would be all right for you to say, 'Fuck the feds.' We've got to find this guy before he has a chance to 'disintegrate' the Vice President, and in the process probably a bunch of civilians."
Wohl's face was expressionless, but obviously, Mike Sabara decided, he was giving his response a good deal of thought. Finally, Wohl reached for his coffee cup, picked it up, and then looked directly at Larkin.
"How, specifically, do you think we could help?"
"Some cop in this town has a line on this guy. Either somebody in Intelligence, Sex Crimes, Civil Affairs, something else esoteric, or a detective somewhere, or a beat cop. He's done something suspicious. If we're lucky, done something really out of the ordinary, like buying explosives, maybe. Had some kind of trouble with his neighbors. Done something that would make a good cop suspicious of him, but nothing he would make official."
"If you gave Jack Duffy," Wohl replied, "or, better yet, the commissioner himself what you've just given us, it would be brought up at the very next roll call."
