Joe clamped on his hat and shook Coon’s hand in the anteroom, careful not to make eye contact with the citizens and lobbyists still waiting for a session with the governor.
Coon had aged since Joe last saw him. His chest and neck were thicker and his boyish face was cobwebbed with stress lines. He wore a dark blue suit, a red tie, and loafers.
He said, “Long time, Joe.”
“Yup.”
“Even longer would have been better.”
“Good to see you, too, Chuck.”
“Follow me. I have a feeling you’re not going to like what I’m about to show you.”
4
Joe and Special Agent Coon spent the ten minutes it took to drive from the capitol to the Federal Building updating each other on their families. Although he was the same age as Joe, Coon had started his family later in life and was going through situations Joe found strangely nostalgic. Coon’s oldest daughter was in her second year of high school and had turned sullen, spending all of her time with her friends or texting with them in her room. Joe laughed, saying it sounded familiar. Coon’s son was in the eighth grade and was a struggling point guard for the McCormick Warriors.
“He assumes he’ll get bigger, faster, and quicker,” Coon said. “How do I tell him it may not happen?”
Joe shrugged. “Just go to the games and cheer him on. Believe me, he’ll be the first to know.”
Joe outlined what was happening with Sheridan, Lucy, and April. As he did, Coon shook his head.
“Three teenage girls,” he said. “And I thought I had trouble.”
“They’re not trouble,” Joe said. “But they’re weighing on my mind right now.”
Inside the ugly federal building in central Cheyenne, Joe surrendered his weapon, cell phone, badge, cuffs, and bear spray, and argued with the officer to keep his hat. Coon intervened and told the security officer it was all right. Joe traded his possessions for a VISITOR laminate that he clipped on the breast pocket of his uniform shirt. They rode the elevator together — Joe’s normal life was without elevators — and he followed Coon through a large room filled with cubicles and out-of-date computers to the supervisor’s corner office.
Joe liked Coon, and they’d been involved in several situations over the years, although from different angles. Coon was professional, straight-up, and generally by-the-book. He’d chosen to stay and work in the Mountain West and not use the smallest state FBI office as a stepping-stone to a more high-profile post, unlike his predecessors. When Joe sat down, Coon outlined the agreement he’d reached with the governor’s office: Joe would go to Medicine Wheel County and report directly to Coon, and he’d advise Rulon; Joe’s role was not law enforcement or investigation but information gathering; Joe was not to represent himself as either an agent of the FBI or the governor’s office; Joe was to extricate himself immediately if the situation turned dangerous.
Joe raised both of his hands shoulder height and dangled them and said, “Do I look enough like a puppet to fit the bill?”
“Very funny,” Coon said. “The idea here is Medicine Wheel County locals are used to seeing their game warden poking around. Your presence won’t stir them up. And if they get an idea to check out your credentials, they’ll find out that you are indeed a Wyoming game warden of many years.”
Joe lowered his arms to his lap. “This is unusual,” he said, “you working with the governor instead of against him.”
Coon said, “I know it appears that way sometimes, and believe me, I have higher-ups who don’t exactly like your governor. But I’m trying to mend some fences here. This antagonism between the national government and the states out here can’t last forever. And if we can work together on this, everybody wins.”
“Gotcha.”
“So, who is Wolfgang Templeton?” Coon asked rhetorically from behind his desk. “Answer is: we’re not sure.”
For the next half-hour, Chuck Coon leafed through a file on his desk and hit the highlights. When Joe reached for his spiral notebook to take notes, Coon said it wasn’t necessary, that the file in front of him was a redacted copy and that he’d give it to Joe to take with him to study when they were done. Joe sat back and listened, shaking his head several times.
Wolfgang Peter Templeton was born on a country estate between Porters and Pickerel lakes in eastern Pennsylvania to a father who was a college dean and a pediatrician mother. He’d been sent to private schools and appointed to West Point. Templeton had served as an officer in the army and was decorated for heroism for acts during the invasion of Grenada in 1983 when he was a commander in the army’s Rapid Deployment Force, consisting of the 1st and 2nd Ranger Battalions and the 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers. His niche was Special Ops. After twenty years in the service, Templeton had retired from the military and founded one of the first hedge fund companies in New York City and was wildly successful and an influential leader in global high finance and an annual participant in the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Templeton had married Hillary (Rothschild) Swain of Sagaponack in the Hamptons, New York — she was one of two heirs to the Allegheny Group, a consortium of defense contractors. The wedding had taken place at St. Patrick’s Cathedral with a massive reception at Tavern on the Green that was covered by theNew York Times. He was a Republican and rumored to have political ambitions and had given the green light to an exploratory committee in his home state of Pennsylvania, with his eye on the U.S. Senate.
Coon slid four eight-by-ten photographs across his desk, and Joe caught them. In the first and most dated, Templeton wore combat fatigues and cut a striking figure on a beach — probably Grenada. In the second, he wore a tuxedo and stood arm in arm with a beautiful woman — Swain, no doubt — in a flowing white wedding gown. In the third, he stared straight at the camera lens from behind a desk with the Manhattan skyline visible through the window behind him. The last photo was of Templeton at a lectern with other well-dressed men and women, obviously signaling the morning opening of the New York Stock Exchange.
Templeton was lean and angular, with an almost old-fashioned regal bearing, Joe thought. He had a strong jaw, an aquiline nose, large hands, and wide shoulders. His eyes exuded intelligence, competence, and warmth. In the most recent photographs, Templeton wore a thin mustache that gave him a rakish air, like a 1930s movie star.
In 2001, Coon read, Templeton divorced and suddenly sold his firm for millions just prior to 9/11 and seemed to vanish. There were short items noting his sudden departure in the Wall Street Journal and Investor’s Business Daily, with one of the journalists speculating that Templeton, like Icarus, had perhaps “journeyed too close to the financial sun” during his meteoric rise. Joe thought perhaps that was when he’d first heard the name — while reading the Wall Street Journal in his dentist’s office.
Coon paused and looked up at Joe and said, “I feel like I’m reading about the interworkings of an entirely different planet.”
“For the first time in my life, I feel like James Bond,” Joe said.
“The bureau had no interest in Templeton during his military career, his rise in business, and his decision to move on with his life,” Coon said, nodding at the materials on his desk. “In case you were wondering.”
“I was,” Joe said. “Then why the file?”
“This was all assembled later, after 2006,” Coon said, thumbing back. “The backstory was put together by staffers in Washington.”