Paranoia (32 page)

“Well, you’re safe, though.”

“Is that a question or a proposition?” Something about me seemed to amuse him. “Never mind. I have kryptonite.”

“What does that mean?”

“Let’s just say I wasn’t named Distinguished Engineer simply because of my distinguished career.”

“What kind of kryptonite are we talking about? Gold? Green? Red?”

“At last a subject you know something about. But if I showed it to you, Cassidy, it would lose its potency, wouldn’t it?”

“Would it?”

“Just cover your trail and watch your back, Cassidy,” he said, and he disappeared down the hall.

PART SIX
D
EAD
D
ROP

Dead Drop
: Drop; hiding place. Tradecraft jargon for a concealed physical location used as a communications cutout between an agent and a courier, case officer or another agent in an agent operation or network.

—The International Dictionary of Intelligence

57

An early night for me—I got home by nine-thirty, a nervous wreck, needing three days of uninterrupted sleep. Driving away from Trion, I kept replaying that scene with Mordden in my head, trying to figure it all out. I wondered whether he was planning to tell someone, to turn me in. And if not, why not? Would he hold it over my head somehow? I didn’t know how to handle it; that was the worst part.

And I found myself fantasizing about my great new bed with the Dux mattress and how I was going to collapse onto it the second I got home. What had my life come to? I was fantasizing about sleep. Pathetic.

Anyway, I couldn’t go right to sleep, because I still had work to do. I had to get those Camilletti files out of my hot little hands and over to Meacham and Wyatt. I didn’t want to keep these documents around a minute longer than I had to.

So I used the scanner Meacham had provided me, turned them into PDF documents, encrypted them, and secure–e-mailed them through the anonymizer service.

Once I’d done that, I got out the Keyghost manual, hooked it up to my computer, and started downloading. When I opened the first document, I felt a spasm of irritation—it was a solid block of gibberish. Obviously I’d screwed this up. I looked at it more closely and saw that there actually was a pattern here; maybe I hadn’t botched it after all. I could make out Camilletti’s name, a series of numbers and letters, and then whole sentences.

Pages and pages of text. Everything the guy had tapped out on his computer that day, and there was a lot.

First things first: I’d captured his password. Six numbers, ending in 82—maybe it was the birth date of one of his kids. Or the date of his marriage. Something like that.

But far more interesting were all the e-mails. Lots of them, full of confidential information about the company, about the acquisition of a company he was overseeing. That company, Delphos, I’d seen in his files. The one that they were preparing to pay a shitload of money in cash and stock for.

There was an exchange of e-mails, marked
TRION CONFIDENTIAL
, about a secret new method of inventory control they’d put in place a few months ago to combat forgery and piracy, particularly in Asia. Some part of every Trion device, whether it was a phone or a handheld or a medical scanner, was now laser-etched with the Trion logo and a serial number. These micromachined identification marks could only be seen under a microscope: They couldn’t be faked, and they proved that the thing was actually made by Trion.

There was a lot of information about chip-fabrication manufacturers in Singapore that Trion had either acquired or had invested heavily in. Interesting—Trion was going into the chip-making business, or at least buying up a stake in it.

I felt weird reading all this stuff. It was like going through someone’s diary. I also felt really guilty—not because of any loyalty to Camilletti, obviously, but because of Goddard. I could almost see Goddard’s gnomelike head floating in a bubble in the air, disapprovingly watching me go through Camilletti’s e-mails and correspondence and notes to himself. Maybe it was because I was so wiped out, but I felt lousy about what I was doing. It sounds strange, I know—it was okay to steal stuff about the AURORA project and pass it to Wyatt, but giving them stuff I hadn’t been assigned to get felt like an outright betrayal of my new employers.

The letters WSJ jumped out at me. They had to stand for the
Wall Street Journal
. I wanted to see what his reaction to the
Journal
piece was, so I zoomed in on the string of words, and I almost fell out of my seat.

From what I could tell, Camilletti used a number of different e-mail accounts outside of Trion—Hotmail, Yahoo, and some local Internet-access company. These other ones seemed to be for personal business, like dealing with his stockbroker, notes to his brother and sister and father, stuff like that.

But it was the Hotmail e-mails that grabbed my attention. One of them was addressed to [email protected]. It said:

Bill—

Shit has hit the fan around here. Will be lot of pressure on you to give up your source——hang tough. Call me at home tonite 9:30.

—Paul

So there it was. Paul Camilletti was—he
had
to be—the leaker. He was the guy who had fed the damaging information on Trion, on Goddard, to the
Journal
.

Now it all made a creepy kind of sense. Camilletti was helping the
Wall Street Journal
wreak serious damage on Jock Goddard, portraying the old man as out of it, over-the-hill. Goddard had to go. Trion’s board of directors, as well as every analyst and investment banker, would see this in the pages of the
Journal
. And who would the board appoint to take Goddard’s place?

It was obvious, wasn’t it?

Exhausted though I was, it took me a long time, tossing and turning, before I finally fell asleep. And my sleep was fitful, tormented. I kept thinking of little round-shouldered old Augustine Goddard at his sad little diner chowing down on pie, or looking haggard and beaten as his E-staff filed past him out of the conference room. I dreamed of Wyatt and Meacham, bullying me, threatening me with all their talk of prison time; in my dreams I confronted them, told them off, went off on them, really lost it. I dreamed of breaking into Camilletti’s office and being caught by Chad and Nora together.

And when my alarm clock finally went off at six in the morning and I raised my throbbing head off the pillow, I knew I had to tell Goddard about Camilletti.

And then I realized I was stuck. How the hell could I tell Goddard about Camilletti when I’d gotten my evidence by breaking into Camilletti’s office?

Now what?

58

The fact that Cutthroat Camilletti—the jerk who pretended to be so pissed off about the
Wall Street Journal
piece—was actually behind it really chafed my ass. The guy was more than an asshole: he was disloyal to Goddard.

Maybe it was a relief to actually have a moral conviction about something after weeks of being a low-down lying scumbag. Maybe feeling so protective of Goddard made me feel a little better about myself. Maybe by being pissed off about Camilletti’s disloyalty I could conveniently ignore my own. Or maybe I was just grateful to Goddard for singling me out, recognizing me as somehow special, better than everyone else. It’s hard to know how much of my anger toward Camilletti was really selfless. At times I was struck with this terrible knife-jab of anguish that I really wasn’t any better than Camilletti. I mean, there I was at Trion, a fraud who pretended he could walk on water, when all the time I was breaking into offices and stealing documents and trying to rip the heart out of Jock Goddard’s corporation while I rode around in his antique Buick. . . .

It was all too much. These four-in-the-morning flop-sweat sessions were wearing me down. They were hazardous to my mental health. Better for me not to think, to operate on cruise control.

So maybe I really did have all the conscience of a boa constrictor. I still wanted to catch that bastard Paul Camilletti.

At least
I
didn’t have any choice about what I was doing. I’d been cornered into it. Whereas Camilletti’s treachery was of a whole different order. He was actively plotting against Goddard, the guy who brought him into the company, put his trust in him. And who knew what else Camilletti was doing?

Goddard needed to know. But I had to have cover—a plausible way I might have found out that didn’t involve breaking into Camilletti’s office.

All the way into work, while I enjoyed the jet-engine thrust and roar of the Porsche, my mind was working on solving this problem, and by the time I got to my office, I had a decent idea.

Working in the office of the CEO gave me serious clout. If I called someone I didn’t know and identified myself as just plain-vanilla Adam Cassidy, the odds were I wouldn’t get my call returned. But Adam Cassidy, “calling from the CEO’s office” or “Jock Goddard’s office”—as if I were sitting in the office next to the old guy and not a hundred feet down the hall—got all his calls returned, at lightning speed.

So when I called Trion’s Information Technology department and told them that “we” wanted copies of all archived e-mails to and from the office of the chief financial officer in the last thirty days, I got instant cooperation. I didn’t want to point a finger at Camilletti, so I made it appear that Goddard was concerned about leaks from the CFO’s
office
.

One intriguing thing I’d learned was that Camilletti made a habit of deleting copies of certain sensitive e-mails, whether he sent them or received them. Obviously he didn’t want to have those e-mails stored on his computer. He must have known, since he was a sharp guy, that copies of all e-mails were stored somewhere in the company’s data banks. That’s why he preferred to use outside e-mail for some of the more sensitive correspondence—including the
Wall Street Journal
. I wondered whether he knew that Trion’s computers captured
all
e-mail that went through the company’s fiber-optic cables, whether Yahoo or Hotmail or anything else.

My new friend in IT, who seemed to think he was doing a personal favor for Goddard himself, also got me the phone records of all calls in and out of the CFO’s office. No problem, he said. The company obviously didn’t tape conversations, but of course they kept track of all phone numbers out and in; that was standard corporate practice. He could even get me copies of anyone’s voice mails, he said. But that might take some time.

The results came back within an hour. It was all there. Camilletti had received a number of calls from the
Journal
guy in the last ten days. But far more incriminatingly, he’d placed a bunch of calls to the guy. One or two he might be able to explain away as an attempt to return the reporter’s calls—even though he’d insisted he never talked to the guy.

But twelve calls, some of them lasting five, seven minutes? That didn’t look good.

And then came copies of the e-mails. “From now on,” Camilletti wrote, “call me only on my home number. Do not repeat do NOT call me at Trion anymore. E-mails should go only to this Hotmail address.”

Explain
that
away, Cutthroat.

Man, I could barely wait to show my little dossier to Goddard, but he was in meeting after meeting from midmorning to late afternoon—meetings, I noted, that he hadn’t asked me to.

It wasn’t until I saw Camilletti coming out of Goddard’s office that I had my chance.

59

Camilletti saw me as he walked away but didn’t seem to notice me; I could have been a piece of office furniture. Goddard caught my eye and his brows shot up questioningly. Flo began talking to him, and I did the index-finger-in-the-air thing that Goddard always did, indicating I just needed a minute of his time. He did a quick signal to Flo, then beckoned me in.

“How’d I do?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

“My little speech to the company.”

He actually cared about what
I
thought? “You were terrific,” I said.

He smiled, looked relieved. “I always credit my old college drama coach. Helped me enormously in my career, interviews, public speaking, all that. You ever do any acting, Adam?”

My face went hot.
Yeah, like everyday
. Jesus, what was he hinting at? “No, actually.”

“Really puts you at ease. Oh, heavens, not that I’m Cicero or anything, but . . . anyway, you had something on your mind?”

“It’s about that
Wall Street Journal
article,” I said.

“Okay . . . ?” he said, puzzled.

“I’ve discovered who the leaker was.”

He looked at me as if he didn’t understand, so I went on: “Remember, we thought it had to be someone inside the company who was leaking information to the
Journal
report—”

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently.

“It’s—well, it’s Paul. Camilletti.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know it’s hard to believe. But it’s all here, and it’s pretty unambiguous.” I slid the printouts across his desk. “Check out the e-mail on top.”

He took his reading glasses from the chain around his neck and put them on. Scowling, he inspected the papers. When he looked up his face was dark. “Where’s this from?”

I smiled. “IT.” I fudged just a bit and said, “I asked IT for phone records of all calls from anyone at Trion to the
Wall Street Journa
l. Then when I saw all those calls from Paul’s phone, I thought it might be an admin or something, so I requested copies of his e-mails.”