Death of Secrets (16 page)

So it had been today, too. Nathan’s numerous cases combined
with outside developments to keep his mind going all day. But now a rare free
moment surfaced, giving him time to think.

What he thought of was the fact that he'd heard nothing from
Michael since checking him into that hotel.

Nate picked up the phone and gave him a call on the new,
temporary phone. True, he'd warned the Congressman and his young friend – about
using it too much. But the one thing he could be sure of was that no one had
tapped the NSA's phones. He felt safe making the call.

He dialed and got no answer. Frowning, he left a voice mail.

He busied himself for about an hour, reading reports of new
developments in the computer security field. Then he tried again, and still got
no answer.

Nathan set down the phone and took off his black glasses to
twiddle them between his fingers. Idly he rubbed at a small scratch on the left
lens. All kinds of things could explain Mike's failure to answer the phone.
They might be out getting dinner. They might be out for a walk. He chuckled as
he admitted – with his fingers crossed on his friend's behalf – that they might
even be in the middle of an intimate moment and not inclined to answer the
phone.

But they could also be in trouble, and that had Nathan worried.

"I should have opened a file," he said aloud, not for
the first time. His friend's reluctance to have official involvement really
bothered him. Nathan Jacobs worked for the U.S. Government. He was a part of
the intelligence community. With evidence that some kind of intelligence
operation or crime was almost certainly being committed, his duty was to report
it. But that would splash Vincent's name, and that of his new friend, all over
the newspapers, possibly ending his political career.

He chewed on his lower lip. "I put them there," he
said aloud, adding a profanity on the end. That made him responsible. And that
made up his mind.

Jacobs pushed his chair away from his desk, put his glasses
back on, and walked out of the office. He told his secretary that he'd be
available by mobile phone if needed, and walked out of the Hoover building,
heading for the Holiday Inn in McLean.

***

Franken’s lips stretched tight over his mouth. The kid he was
about to talk to knew something about Kathy Kelver and her dead body, of that
he was certain. The punk had been away from his apartment when he had been
called to the scene the first time, but he was home now, and he was going to
talk. Franken grunted.

He stood for a minute or two outside the townhouse, looking
down at the basement entrance. There was a small, ground level half-window
through which he could see that the light was on, and someone was moving around
inside. The curtain was pulled, so he couldn't make out a face, but at least he
knew he wouldn't be waking the guy up.

Franken went down the stairs leading to the lower entryway, and
knocked on the door. There was a moment when the activity in the apartment
ceased, and he envisioned the man sitting there, wondering who was at his door.
Eventually, though, a face appeared at the door, tugged aside the curtain to peek
out, saw his uniform, and opened the door a crack.

"Yes?"

"Detective Sam Franken, Metro PD. May I speak with you for
a moment?"

All he could see of the man so far was his face – narrow, dark
circles under the eyes, and hollow cheekbones. He looked gaunt.

The door shut again, Franken heard the sound of a chain lock
being opened, and then it opened again all the way. "What do you
want?" the man asked.

The rest of his body matched his face. The man was rail-thin
and looked like he couldn't afford food. He wore only the thinnest fuzz of hair
around his head, as if he was a new recruit and the Marine Corps barber had
been especially zealous. He was clad in a T-shirt and camouflage pants.

"May I come in?" Franken asked.

"Do you have a search warrant?"

Franken shook his head. "No, but then I don't want to
search the place. I just need your help with a homicide investigation."

The man – he really looked more boyish – stuck out his hand.
"Let me see your badge."

Franken sighed, then unclipped his badge from his belt and
passed it over. TV cop shows made everyone an amateur lawyer. "Look up MPD
in the book and call to check the number if you want," he grumbled.

In the end, it wasn't necessary. The youth stepped aside to
allow Franken to enter the house, and closed the door behind him. Then he
leaned up against it and crossed his arms over his chest. "What
homicide?"

"First, can I get your name please?"

Terrance Gilmore introduced himself, and Franken noted down his
name and description. Then the youth repeated his question.

"The one outside your door two nights ago," was the
detective's answer.

Gilmore's eyes widened, then narrowed. "I thought that
turned out to be a false alarm."

Franken shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. But I thought you
were gone that night. I knocked on your door and got no answer. How'd you know
it was a false alarm?"

The man looked left, then right, then at his feet before
saying, "You know, it's a neighborhood, people talk. That's just what I
heard."

Franken looked at him long and hard before going on.
"Somebody got shot right on your doorstep and died from it. Were you
expecting anyone?"

A shake of the head. "He wasn't any friend of mine."

He almost laughed. He'd never told the kid the victim was male.
In fact, none of his neighbors had seen the body either, just Kathy, so none of
them would have reason to know it was male.

"How do you know the victim was male?"

Again the eyes went wide, this time not narrowing nearly so
quickly. "I… uh, you know… that's what my neighbors told me."

"Funny your upstairs neighbors never saw the body either.
It was gone by the time we got there and woke them up."

"Well, you know, the girl who found it. Someone must have
known her, and spread the word. I just heard it through the rumor mill."

Franken shook his head, grumbling to himself about punk kids
and their attitudes.

"Look, Sonny Jim, whoever killed that man knew for a fact
that he was coming to see you. They were so sure of it they staked out a duck
blind a block from this place and blew him away at long distance when he came
to your door to knock. So if they know you know him, and I know you know him,
how come you don't know you know him?"

"I don't know! I don't know anything about this, and I've
decided I don't want to talk to you about it anymore. Unless you have a
warrant, get out of my house!"

Inside, he was laughing, but outside he wore a stern
expression. "Not that easy, son," he said, and took his handcuffs
from his belt. Before the youth could react, he had cuffed one of his wrists.

"You have the right to remain silent. Should you choose to
waive that right, anything you say can and will be used against…"

"Hey wait a minute!" The kid protested his voice high
and on the edge of panic. "You can't arrest me, I didn't kill him, I
swear! You've got to believe me! I can't go to jail, my parents would kill
me!"

At that, Franken almost lost control and laughed. "Then
tell me who did," he managed to get out without cracking a smile.

"I don't know!"

"But you knew the guy who died."

"OK, OK," the boy whined. "Yeah, I knew him, but
I'm not guilty of anything, you can't arrest me."

"Why was he coming to visit you?"

"Just personal business."

Franken swore. "Don't give me a line of bull! Something
serious is going down here and I want to know about it. Either you sit down on
your ratty couch there and tell me what you know, or I haul you in for murder
and you tell me at the station."

Deflated, the boy walked over to his couch, still carrying the
handcuffs around one wrist. He plopped down, rested his elbows on his knees,
and held his chin in both hands. "He was supposed to bring me a flash
drive."

"Who's the dead guy?" Franken asked, to get things
started.

"I don't know," the boy responded. Seeing the look on
Franken's face he immediately added, "I don't know, honest! I have no idea
who he was! He was just supposed to bring me a flash drive."

Franken pressed on. "What was on it?"

"I don't know, really. I'm telling the truth, I don't. I
was just supposed to bring it to someone else."

Franken scowled. "So he brings it to you, and you bring it
to someone else, and then I suppose that someone brings it to someone else yet
again. Why not just have the dead guy bring it to the final guy?"

"Because the final guy is really paranoid," the kid replied.
"He was really afraid of someone finding him. I never got told who or what
or why, but he was very specific that I was to just carry the flash drive and
not ask questions."

"Who is this final guy?"

This sounded more and more to Franken like a job for the
Foreign Counter Intelligence office at the FBI. But he planned to learn what he
could before handing it over to the feds.

"Come on, you must know something!"

The boy shook his head desperately. "Honest, I don't! I
only know him over the Internet."

"Ah, so you do know him."

"Just his online alias."

"Which is?" Franken asked, leaning forward.

"Jakarta."

Carlos picked up his phone. He knew Nathan Jacobs; knew that
they shared a tendency to behave like workaholics. So he fully expected to find
the federal employee in the office on Sunday.

Carlos grinned, wondering what his old employers would think if
they knew who was handling security for Electron Guidewire. But they didn't.
There were a lot of things about EG they didn't know.

And he meant to keep it that way, which was the purpose of his
phone call. He dialed the number for Nathan Jacobs' office, planning to tell
him about the recent attempted electronic break-in at EG. Since they were the
client for GigaStar, they deserved to know about security threats to the
program. But even to him, it felt a bit crazy. Alerting the government to a
possible investigation at the company when they were trying to hide something
from them seemed backwards. But any good martial artist could tell you that
victory was easiest to attain when you could turn your enemy's force against
him. By channeling the NSA into wondering about external threats, he hoped to
keep them from looking at the internal problems – such as the entire GigaStar
team being dead.

Carlos snarled when Jacobs’ voice mail picked up, informing him
that the Director was away from his desk, and to call the cell phone in
emergencies. He did just that, punching in the new number and waiting for a
response.

Jacobs picked up on the third ring. "Nate Jacobs
speaking."

"Jacobs, this is Carlos Saglieri with Electron Guidewire.
D.W. Tilman asked me to give you a call."

"Sure, Carlos. What's up?"

"We had an attempted break-in here," he said. To the
Jacobs, the words "break-in" didn't mean the same thing they would
have to a street cop. To him, "break-in" meant an electronic break in
– computer hacking.

Immediately the casual attitude on the other end of the phone
went away. "OK, give me the details."

"It was Monday, about 11:00 p.m. We don't really know that
much about it. He got out as soon as I got on. I was doing the nightly security
check myself because the shift manager for the security guards – who normally
does one every hour throughout the night – had called in sick. So I logged in
and noticed there was another connection to the server, but as soon as I
started a trace route on him, the connection broke. Next I went to check the
log, and saw that it had been modified just seconds after I logged on.
Obviously the guy was watching his back, keeping an eye out for a check. When
he saw me, he covered his tracks and left."

Both men knew that hackers generally tried to hide the fact
that they had ever been in a system by modifying its log files – deleting the
entry for their connection. The only problem was that the system would still
preserve a record of the fact that the log file had been altered and at what
time. That always enabled security forces to get an approximate time when the
hacker had been in their system, even if it didn't provide any useful information
about who he was.

Only one of them, however, knew that the break-in had gone on
much longer than Carlos was letting on. Far from catching the hacker in the
act, Carlos's check had only noticed the intrusion long after the hacker was
done. And what he'd done, they knew in hind sight, was to disable the building
alarm system, so that little bastard Eric Harrison could get in and steal the
GigaStar backup flash drive. It was extremely fortunate for Carlos that Kathy
had picked up that flash drive instead of its intended recipient. If it had
gotten to the hacker who'd arranged the physical theft, no doubt he would have
broken the encryption by now. As it was, Carlos was 90 percent certain that the
flash drive was still encrypted and the code for GigaStar safely secret.

"Why'd you wait so long to warn us about it?"

"It took us this long to figure out how he got in,"
Carlos lied.

"OK," Jacobs said, still not entirely happy that they
had waited so long to report the trouble. "We'll send a guy. Have any idea
what he was trying to steal?"

Carlos smiled quietly to himself. He was pretty pleased with
himself for coming up with this. It was only a remote chance that it would ever
be needed, but if it ever was, this was the perfect insurance policy.

"We don't think he was actually taking out, to tell the
truth. It looks like he was putting in."

"What?"

"Yeah, it looks like he was putting some unauthorized code
on our system."

"Carlos, that's pretty serious. We buy a lot of the
programs you guys write there. You know the one I’m thinking about right now.
I’m going to have to send someone over; are you going to be averse to letting
him go over your source code?"

"No, we understand," Carlos replied. "The
security issues are obvious. We've looked on our own, but haven’t found
anything yet. Your guy might have a fresh perspective."

"Right. OK, I'll have someone out there tomorrow. And if
the hacker comes back, let us know quicker, OK?"

"Will do, Jacobs. We'll give your agent total
cooperation."

Carlos laughed when he hung up the phone. He added, "Well,
almost total." But only the walls could hear him, and his office was the
only one in the building that actually wasn't bugged.

***

Looking out the rear window, Colleen muttered, "Jeez, that
was close."

Kathy looked back to see what she was talking about and saw a
big freight truck behind them, driver angrily shaking his fist. She was about
to comment when a radical turn threw her into Michael’s lap. She scrambled back
up to a sitting position and closed her eyes, unable to stand the sight of cars
coming at them and whizzing by at such high speed.

Michael wrapped his arm around her shoulders and squeezed
gently. He offered as much assurance as he had to give, but in truth he was
frightened too. Less of the high speed chase, though, than of the men who’d
been chasing them. Those guys were professionals.

When he looked up from the top of Kathy’s head, Mike saw they
were pulling into a giant parking garage. They followed the arrows up a couple
stories before finding the spot the driver was looking for. As the window
between driver and passengers came down, he said, "Um, I think you picked
a bad time to park."

"You all need to do exactly as I say," the driver
said, not looking back at them. He eased the car into a parking spot and popped
his door. "Out, now and fast. We’re switching cars!"

The three piled out of the limo and found the side door of a
Chrysler minivan open and waiting for them. They hurried in as the driver went
around to the other side. Their driver sped recklessly out of the garage as
Kathy squeezed her eyes closed once again. They shot out the exit.

About thirty feet down the street, Michael could see the Chevy
Suburban heading through the entrance. After several twists and turns, he started
to feel like they'd escaped. He tapped on the driver’s shoulder. "I think
we lost them."

The man only nodded. "Probably, but I’m going to make
sure."

The van followed a dizzying series of twists, turns, and high
speed corners. When they pulled into another parking garage, Mike was
thoroughly disoriented. Kathy, of course, felt even worse, since she’d had her
eyes closed the whole time.

"OK, folks," the driver said. "We’re going to
make one more car change, and a driver change as well. Please exit the vehicle
and get in the one to our right. But before you do, I’m going to ask all of you
to give me any cell phones, beepers, or any wireless devices you might
have."

"What?" Colleen asked. "Why?"

"They’re traceable," the driver replied. "Any
transmission on one of those could lead anyone looking for you right smack to
you. Where you’re going, we’re very conscious of anything being traceable.
Please cooperate, you’ll get them back when you leave. I’m just going to hold
them at a separate location while you’re with Jakarta."

Colleen couldn’t help but suck in a little breath at that. This
was the first time their driver had directly mentioned his name. It was really
true. She was going to meet him. And that thought made it easier to hand over
her phone. Mike did likewise, but the look on his face wasn’t pleasant. He
tapped on the keyboard to lock it before passing it over.

Once he set those on the passenger seat next to them, their
driver got out and opened the sliding door. Colleen, Mike and Kathy piled out
onto the pavement.

They met their new driver and were not impressed. His bulk made
bucket seats an inconvenience, and his clothing was at least one size too small
to cover it all. He waved at their new conveyance.

This one was a black Ford full sized van. With one little
special feature, Colleen noticed as soon as she stepped in. There were no
windows in the back, and a curtain pulled across the driving compartment kept
them from seeing out the windshield. "Um, what’s with the curtain?"
she asked, poking her head into the driving compartment.

"Please keep to the back of the van," their new
driver replied. "The man we’re going to see is very concerned with
privacy, and would rather you three didn’t know where we were going."

"That’s crazy!" Mike protested. "No way!"

"Well, it’s either that or I leave you here. We’re being
very courteous about this, you know. Be thankful I don’t blindfold you. But I
am asking you to cooperate. If you don’t, the meeting is off."

The two girls and the Congressman looked at each other, and
then gave a collective shrug. Reluctantly, they all stepped toward the van's
door.

***

Franken drove his unmarked car down Wisconsin Avenue on his way
to downtown D.C.. Try as he might, he'd failed to get much more information out
of the kid. Just that he'd been at his door, ready to let the guy with the
flash drive in, when suddenly he collapsed and started spewing blood from his
chest. Gilmore had been so terrified that he'd stood there, frozen at the door
instead of going out to help, for nearly two minutes. And that was what had put
the whole plan out of whack.

While he was standing there watching, Kathy Kelver had come
upon the dying man and been handed the flash drive. Gilmore might have gone out
and asked for it, except that almost immediately she'd run off. Instead, he
just stood there, horrified at how a simple chance to earn a bit of illicit
money had gone so horribly wrong. That probably saved his life.

Almost right on Kathy’s heels, a van had pulled up in front of
his door and someone had hauled the dead body inside. Then more men had fanned
out of the van and started cleaning up the mess. Gilmore said he nearly passed
out at that, and Franken believed him. According to the kid, he'd fled out the
back door of his apartment, and not come back for almost a day.

Gilmore gave him one single other piece of useful information.
He'd been supposed to take the flash drive to a parking garage, where another
man would meet him and take delivery. Franken was now on his way to that very
garage, just to see what could be seen. He had no illusions about finding a big
sign saying "Drop flash drive here, follow directions below to find
Jakarta." But on the other hand, one never knew what might pop up.

The drive to the garage took him longer than he would have
liked, with traffic being on the heavy side. But eventually he found the place,
showed his badge, told the attendant he was just driving through to
investigate, and went on in.

The dark, gloomy atmosphere of garages always bothered him.
Each little light was like an island of safety in the midst of a sea of
darkness offering plenty of breeding ground for crime. A mugger could work
unhindered here, and the victims would never even be able to identify him. To Franken's
eye, conditioned by years of police work, each Honda and Chevy snuggled tight
into its spot represented something for a hood to hide behind. The yellow lines
were all faded from years of being driven over, and idly he wondered how people
knew for sure which spot was theirs.

A black van with a small crowd standing outside it caught his
eye. He looked over, looked away, swore under his breath, and looked back. Then
he blinked, and looked for a third time. Sure enough, that was Kathy Kelver
getting into that van.

It was just too much to buy. The same girl who had taken the
flash drive intended for Gilmore, now standing around a parking garage Gilmore
had been supposed to bring the flash drive to? He stopped the car.

The entire party looked at him and none of them, Franken saw,
were all that happy about his presence. There was much shifting of feet and
looking away. Well, that was too bad for them. Something big was going on here,
and he wanted to know what it was.

Kelver, naturally, was the first to speak to him. "Officer
Franken! What are you doing here?"

"I was about to ask you the same thing, Miss Kelver."

"Are you tracking me down to ticket me for a false
alarm?"

He had to smile at that. The girl knew how to crack jokes under
pressure, and that was something. "No, I'd just mail that to you. No, no,
I'm here because I don't think it was a false alarm. I think it was a murder. I
think the flash drive you claimed that guy gave you before he died was
eventually supposed to end up in this garage, and I'm wondering why I now find
you here."

Kathy’s eyes widened. "It was supposed to come here? Gosh,
I wish I had it with me." After all, Colleen had it, not Kathy. "Did
you find out what was on it?"

Franken peered at her face. He stepped up closer to her and looked
again. "Didn't you tell me you were studying to be an actress,
Kathy?"

She nodded.

"I predict great things for you in that field."

"What do you mean, Officer?"

He snarled. "Because you sound so innocent, but it's way
too much to believe that you just happen to turn up in the same place that
flash drive was supposed to come to."