The Almighty Part 16

75.

It is the wrong way to go. But there's a right way. When a story happens, it's your own. Do you get the idea, Harry?'

'Vaguely. How - how do you make it happen, Chief?'

'By having your own terrorist group to make news for you,' said Armstead quietly. 'The existing groups won't cooperate. So we buy our own. Our own does what we tell it to do. The news it creates is exclusively our own. That could keep us Number One in New York and make us the top-selling paper in the world. What do you think, Harry? Is it harebrained? Yinger wasn't. Is this?'

Dietz was shaking his head vigorously. 'Absolutely not, Chief. It is a big idea, the biggest. A perfect concept. I think you're on the right track, but -' He hesitated.

'But what?' Armstead wanted to know.

'Can it be done?'

'It has been done - with Yinger.'

'I mean, getting a terrorist group. Where do we start?'

'With Gus Pagano,' Armstead said instantly. 'There's where we start. Presuming we still have the goods on him.'

'We have.'

Armstead smiled complacently and held a flame to his cigar. 'Then that's where we start.'

All through the night, Edward Armstead slept and awakened with the notion that he was onto something earth-shattering, a big idea that Gus Pagano could make possible. The immediate question was: Did Pagano have any important criminal connections or would he be acquainted with only the underworld small-fry? Given the important criminal connections, the more vital question was: Could he be trusted?

Then Armstead remembered the file folder on Pagano that Dietz had left for him. Having read it, Armstead knew that Pagano could be trusted. Rea.s.sured, he had fallen into a sound sleep.

Early the next morning, Armstead received Pagano in his office. Armstead knew that he would have to be frank with Pagano, but at the outset he was satisfied to nurse the informer along. They were drinking the coffee that had been placed on the desk between them. They had little in common with each other except for the fact that Pagano was on the payroll of the Reco.d, so they talked about that: Armstead was becoming increasingly impatient with the pointless chatter, and made up his mind to be direct and candid. He drained his coffee cup and put it down.

'Gus,' he said, 'I want to discuss something important with you. But I must be a.s.sured from the start of your loyalty to me.'

Pagano's beaky countenance was bland. 'You pay good. That's my loyalty.'

'I can pay better,' said Armstead, 'much better.'

'You have my complete loyalty. You mean, can you say something to me that's strictly between us?

You can.'

76.

'Not enough,' said Armstead. 'I need more. I have to be absolutely positive that you are one hundred percent trustworthy.'

Pagano sat up, curious. 'Meaning what?'

'Meaning this.' Armstead reached for the folder on his desk and opened it. 'Whenever we hire anyone, we set up a dossier on him. And we keep it up to date. When we hired you as an informant, we set up such a dossier.' He glanced up at Pagano. 'And we've kept it up to date.' He dropped his gaze to the contents of the folder once more. 'The Acme Jewelers of Lexington. There was a stickup there two years ago. There was some shooting. Ring a bell?'

Pagano made no reply. He sat sullenly staring at the publisher.

'During the shooting, in the cross fire, a customer was killed, the widow of a well-known millionaire was killed, a guard was wounded, but the guard managed to kill the stickup man.'

'What are you saying?' said Pagano. 'I've never killed anyone in my life.'

'I never implied you had,' said Armstead with feigned innocence. 'I'm merely saying a stickup man named Restell shot a woman to death during a holdup, and in turn he was shot to death. I'm also saying Restell had an accomplice. The accomplice got away. He was never caught. Because this was a big-name killing, one of my father's better crime reporters followed through. The reporter spent a lot of time with the jewelry shop guard showing him photographs of criminals on parole or with records. The guard identified one positively as the accomplice. The picture was of a man named Gus Pagano.'

Pagano did not stir, did not even blink. He remained silent.

'We could have turned this over to the police,' said Armstead, 'got a minor story out of it, and the accomplice would have wound up back in jail. For a long time, I'm sure. But my father did not want to have the paper's good name tarnished by having one of its employees mixed up in a tawdry bit of violence. My father chose to confine the information to this private dossier. I hope to keep it there.'

Armstead waited.

Pagano wriggled to reach the cigarette package in his pocket. He shook a cigarette loose, and calmly lighted it. He blew out some smoke, squinted through the smoke, and offered a half smile.

'Mr. Armstead, you want to know if I'm one hundred percent trustworthy.' He skipped a beat. 'Mr.

Armstead, I'm two hundred percent trustworthy.'

Armstead's face was wreathed in a smile. 'Good. Very good.' He cast aside the folder. 'We will never refer to this matter again.' Satisfied, Armstead was prepared to plunge ahead with no further hesitation. 'Let's begin with this,' he said. 'Do you know any gangs?'

'Gangs?' Pagano showed his surprise and relief at what he evidently regarded as an unexpected and childish question. 'Mr. Armstead, I grew up with gangs - in the Bronx, Brooklyn, New Jersey -'

'No, no,' Armstead interrupted, 'not street gangs. I am speaking of international gangs.'

'I - I'm afraid I don't get you.'

Armstead tried again. 'Terrorist-type gangs who work abroad.'

77.

'Oh, those,' said Pagano, 'like those Red Brigade kooks in Italy? Naw, I don't know any of them.'

Armstead's heart fell.

Pagano was going on. 'But international, like you said -yeah, I do have some connections to one outfit. It's not in Italy, though.'

'I don't give a d.a.m.n where it is. All right, where is it?'

'In London. They're not exactly what you'd call terrorists.'

'What are they?'

Pagano was momentarily confused by semantics. 'Maybe you could call them top-level crooks.

When they need money, they get together and pull off a job.'

'A job?'

'Like a robbery.'

This offered a tantalizing possibility. 'Little or big robberies?'

Pagano was positive now. 'Oh, fat stuff, juicy ones.'

Better. 'And you have some connection with that gang?'

'Sure thing. It's through another Green Haven graduate -guy named Krupinski. For good behavior, he was a.s.signed to the farm outside the wall. Not being a rural type, he got bored. So one day he skipped out. Krupinski made it all the way to London. He needed money. He had some introductions. He contacted the Cooper gang. Being a good man with dynamite, bombs, Krupinski was a natural for them. They took him on. I had a postcard from him not long ago. He's still in London. Even invited me over.' .

'Did you consider going?'

'Naw. I got a legal pa.s.sport, you understand, but I don't want to live with foreigners. Besides, I have this steady job with you. Why go with them?'

Armstead lifted himself from behind the desk and went thoughtfully to the coffee table. He found a cigar in the humidor and readied it, as he returned to his desk. 'Gus, who's in it?'

'What?'

'This London gang. Who is in it?'

'It's a loose outfit that gets together every once in a while to plan and pull off a big job in England or in France. They're not amateurs. They've got savvy, and what you call credits. One of them goes way back to the Brink's robbery in Boston. There were seven of them wearing Halloween masks.

They hit the Brink's building, the vault, for almost three million. A couple of them had a part in the Glasgow-to-London night mail train robbery. That took nineteen members of two gangs to pull off.

That's the one that involved Ronnie Biggs - the guy who was caught, and escaped, and used a French plastic surgeon to fix him - he got away to Brazil, where he was abducted by British security people and taken out of the country, then returned to South America. That was a seven-million-dollar job.'

'Not bad,' said Armstead, impressed.

78.

'There was better,' said Pagano, warming to his subject. 'There was the - I don't know if I can p.r.o.nounce it right - the Societe Generale bank heist in Nice, in France, where they used the city sewer system to get into the bank, spent the weekend inside, emptied 317 safe-deposit boxes, made off with twelve million dollars.'

Armstead was definitely impressed. 'And you say some members of the Cooper gang in London were in on those -uh, jobs.'

'Absolutely. A realbig-time crowd.'

'How many are there in this Cooper gang?'

'About a dozen, Krupinski told me last year. He was over here for a week to see his old lady who was sick. Headman is this Cooper, an American now British. Krupinski says he's a wizard brain.

Then there's another dozen of them either on the lam in other countries or still serving time in jail.

They're all pros at forging, safecracking, bombing, robberies. They're not interested in politics.

Only in money. Lots of it.'

Armstead smiled. T have lots of it.'

Pagano also smiled. 'Yeah, I heard.'

'And I'm not interested in politics, either,' said Armstead.

Pagano's eyes held on the publisher shrewdly. 'What are you interested in?'

'News.'

Pagano tried to make sense of it. 'News,' he echoed. 'You've got me kind of lost. I don't know what you mean.'

'I mean I'm interested in making news - creating it - for my newspapers and television stations. I need exclusive news for my papers and TV news network.' He paused. 'A gang could create that kind of news for me.'

Pagano tried to absorb it, and wagged his head slightly. 'That's kind of -' He did not want to sound disrespectful. '- far out.'

'You mean crazy?'

'I don't know. I suppose there is a business side to it. But it's far out.'

They were down to bare bones, Armstead decided. Now he would go all the way. 'You gave me the original idea,' he said to Pagano, 'with the lead about Yinger's tunnel. That led to Yinger's escape. It was a set-up happening, an invented one. And I had it all to myself. Yes, it was good business, the best. It doubled the circulation of my newspaper here in New York, and it upped the circulation of my other newspapers around the country, and it hyped the attention given the story on television stations everywhere. That gave me the idea of setting up and creating more news. Do I make myself a little clearer, Gus?'

'Yeah,' said Pagano, with slight uncertainty. 'I'm catching on.'

'You see,' Armstead tried to explain, 'there's not enough hard news around, exclusive news. Usually my compet.i.tors have the same thing to sell that I have. But we here want our news alone. Since it's not around, we might have to invent some of it. That's my big idea.'

'For that, you need a gang?'