Heat Lightning

Andreno, if we can pull this off today....”
    “Where’re we going to do it?” Jenkins asked.
    “Gotta be some place public or Warren won’t buy it,” Virgil said.
    “Be best if it was our choice,” Jenkins said. “We could set up in advance. With the security guys he’s got, if they pick location, they’ll spot us coming in to monitor the place.”
    Shrake: “How about Spiro’s on University, in Minneapolis? That’s fifteen minutes from Warren’s place, and he’s had projects on University, so he’ll probably know it. That might ease his mind a little. And the neighborhood is cut up, so we can monitor a little easier.”
    “All right. You guys set that up, I’ll wait for Andreno. Lucas wants us to push it, hard. Go for something right now.”
     
 
SANDY CALLED. “Where are you?”
    “John Blake’s office.”
    “I’ll be right down.”
    She had a file in her hand when she came through the door, and she passed it to him and he popped it open: anonymous stuff copied in a variety of fonts from different Web sites.
    “Something I find very interesting,” she said. “Starting in the sixties, Sinclair had a lot to say about the CIA. They were assassins, they were counterproductive, they destabilized progressive countries, they propped up right-wing dictatorships, blah-blah-blah. All the usual stuff, nothing specific. Nothing you didn’t read in the newspapers. It sort of tapered off in the eighties and the nineties. But then . . .”
    Big smile.
    “What’s the big smile?” Virgil asked.
    “Six years ago, a man named Manfred Lutz from Georgetown University wrote an article for Atlantic in which he said that Mead Sinclair basically made his reputation in the sixties counterculture by writing two lefty antiwar pieces, very well researched, very insightful, in Hard Times Theory magazine and another in Cross-Thought magazine, which Lutz says were small but influential magazines on the political left.”
    “I think I knew that,” Virgil said. “I saw those names somewhere.”
    “But did you know that Lutz claims that both Hard Times and Cross-Thought were CIA-sponsored vehicles?”
    Virgil took that in for a few seconds, then he said, “I didn’t know that. Was he saying that Sinclair was a CIA agent?”
    “No. Not exactly. He just lists Sinclair as among the people who benefited from publication in the magazines. Then, when that started a brouhaha, Sinclair apparently threatened to sue, and that shut everybody up. Sinclair’s position is that he didn’t believe that they were CIA vehicles, because they published too many progressive and hard-left articles, but even if they were, he didn’t know it at the time. They were leading left-wing publications who were willing to publish his articles, and to pay him for them, and that’s all he knew. He even joked that maybe they were CIA, because they were about the only left-wing magazines that actually paid anyone.”
    “Where can I find Lutz?”
    “He lives near Washington. I wrote his office phone number on the article,” she said.
    “You’re amazing,” Virgil said. “I’ll call him right now.”
     
 
LUTZ HAD A dark, gravelly voice with a New York accent. “How’d you find me?” he asked when Virgil identified himself.
    “One of our researchers did,” Virgil said.
    “How do I know you’re who you say you are?”
    “You could look up Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension online, call the number, and ask for Virgil Flowers.”
    “How do I know the CIA hasn’t put up a spoof?”
    “What’s a spoof?”
    Lutz thought about the question for a minute, then said, “Ah, hell. I stand by my story, even if you are the CIA. The CIA sponsored those magazines. Period. End of story. I’m not talking about a little clandestine support—I mean, they were CIA fronts. They cranked out these mind-numbing leftist proclamations and articles, mind-numbing even for the time. In return, they had entrée into all the left-wing intellectual circles of the time, both here in the U.S. and in Europe.”
     
 
AT THAT MOMENT, a man stuck his head in the door: he was chunky, square-faced, with short, curly hair and a bald spot at the crown of his head. He had small black eyes, fight scars under them, a nose that had been hit a few times. Virgil said to Lutz, “Hang on a minute,” and asked, “Mickey?”
    The man showed some completely capped white teeth. “Yup, Virgil?”
    “Sit down, I got a guy I gotta talk to.”
    “I gotta shit