The Buck Stops Here (37 page)

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, the only words I could think of to utter.

I knew that a part of my rejection of God had come not from blaming Him for what had happened in my life, but from not trusting Him in what was yet to happen. I think I had felt safer doing this investigation completely on my own. After all, if I were to trust Him in these matters, then I would have to trust Him regardless of the outcome. And that was hard.

Yet now, in the silence of His house, surrounded by symbols of His deity, it was so simple to let go and give all of it over to Him.
For I know the plans I have for you
, the verse in Jeremiah said,
plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future
. Somehow, trying to take everything into my own hands was a rejection of that verse and of all the promises in the Bible. God held my future in His hands. That was where I needed to place my trust.

I closed my eyes again and asked God to wash away all of my sins.
Make me white as snow, Lord
, I prayed, and as if in response a song came to mind:
Oh! Precious is the flow that makes me white as snow, No other fount I know, nothing but the blood of Jesus
.

Almost as if a dam were breaking inside of me, I thanked Him for that blood, for that sacrifice. Silently, I poured my thoughts out to my Creator, tears of repentance spilling down my cheeks. I thanked God that I didn’t have to do anything to receive His forgiveness except to ask for it. The blood He shed on that cross was my absolution.

Finally, knowing that time was running tight, I concluded my prayer and stood. Gathering my belongings, I slipped from the stately building and back out into the morning sunshine, feeling whole for the first time in days. I knew that part of my change of heart had come from last night’s meeting with Sandy Norris. Compared with the burden that had been placed on her and her family, mine felt relatively light.

I thought about that as I made my way to my hotel room. Of all the “ignorant” and insensitive things people had said at Bryan’s funeral, some of them were nevertheless true.

At least he didn’t suffer
.

He’s with God now
.

You’ll see him again in heaven
.

In light of all that was going on, I needed to add one more oft-expressed thought, especially in these last few minutes before I would speak to James Sparks and learn the truths I sought:

God never gives us more than we can handle
.

“Oh, God,” I whispered as I reached my room. “I really hope that one’s true too.”

Forty-Four

The phone rang at 10:15, and even though I was waiting for it, it startled me so much I nearly jumped out of my chair. Hands shaking, I answered it to hear Gordo on the other end of the line.

“Callie?” he said. “It’s Gordo. I’m here with James Sparks.”

“Any problems getting in?”

“No.”

“How’s his demeanor?” I asked.

“A little belligerent. You ready to talk to him?”

“Sure,” I said. “Give him the phone.”

I heard some rustling and then the voice of Sparks.

“The only reason I’m even talking to you,” he said, “is because I’ve been told that my life may be in danger.”

“That’s correct.”

“I have a hard time believing it.”

“What would you give to know for sure?” I asked. “What’s it worth to you to find out what’s really been going on there with your friend Les Watts?”

He exhaled slowly.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “What do you want?”

“I want what I’ve always wanted,” I said. “The truth about my husband’s death.”

He was quiet for so long that I was afraid he had hung up on me.

“James?” I said finally. “You still there?”

“You tell me what you know,” he said, “and then we’ll see.”

It was a gamble, my going first. But since a man’s life currently hung in the balance, I knew he had me. I had to tell him about the ricin either way.

Plainly and directly, I talked about the asthma inhaler that I took from Les Watts’ carport. I said that it was a simple FedEx package with no note, addressed to Watts and sent from a nonexistent address in New Orleans. Inside the package was a yellow asthma inhaler that looked just like the one Sparks regularly used—except I had had this one chemically analyzed, and inside was a deadly poison known as ricin.

“Ricin?” he said. “What’s that?”

“I don’t know a lot about it,” I replied. “But if I hadn’t taken that inhaler, and it had made its way into your hands, you would be dead by now.”

I wished I could see his face. He was quiet for a long time and when he spoke he sounded utterly defeated.

“I didn’t think it would come to this,” he said softly.

“Who is it, James?”

“It was just about money. I can’t believe—”

He stopped himself. The line was silent between us, so finally I spoke.

“At this point,” I said, “I can do whatever you think is best. I can turn this over to the police, I can bring in the FBI, I can do whatever it will take to save your life. Les Watts can be arrested. If you won’t tell where that inhaler came from, maybe he will.”

“Les Watts doesn’t have a clue who’s at the other end of those communications. He uses a dead drop.”

I knew that a dead drop offered a way for people to communicate without ever having to meet face-to-face; an item would be left at a predesignated spot by one person and then picked up from there later by the other. Chances are, Sparks was telling the truth and Watts really couldn’t reveal the source.

“Who sent it, James?”

“I don’t think that’s relevant to you, Mrs. Webber. But, by the way, thanks for saving my life. I guess if you’re going to turn that inhaler over to the proper authorities, you’d do best to contact the NSA. As soon as possible, actually.”

“I’ll do it the moment we hang up,” I said, my stomach clenching. I didn’t know what would happen to Sparks from here, but as soon as I reported what I knew, he would become, yet again, the NSA’s problem—for whatever that was worth. “Right now, tell me about my husband’s death, James. I think I have offered a fair trade.”

“Fine. I’ll tell you what I can.”

I held my breath and waited.

“As you know,” he began, “four years ago I was in prison at Keeplerville, serving out my sentence for violating export restrictions. I had just eight months to go and I would be a free man. Then one day I was transported out of there with no explanation and brought to a house in Virginia, way out in the country, where the NSA was waiting for me.”

“Including Tom Bennett?”

“Especially Tom Bennett. They explained that there was a…national crisis, shall we say, looming on the horizon. They needed my particular expertise. In exchange they were offering me my freedom and something more: Break the code and get my record completely expunged. I would walk away a free man with no history. I would be able to make a new start.”

“Why there?”

“Secluded location, fairly close to D.C., I guess.”

“What was the crisis?”

“Can’t tell you that. But the situation required the breaking of the very code I had helped to create. The NSA had already been trying to break it for two months, but they had gotten nowhere. Tom Bennett had gotten nowhere. Do you understand that? The great water walker himself could not break this code.”

“But he thought you could?”

Sparks laughed.

“Not the usual way,” he said. “He remembered my work with the key escrow problem. He thought I might have built in a back door when we originally designed it. After studying the code extensively, he was pretty convinced the back door was still there.”

“So you agreed to give them the back door in exchange for your freedom.”

“Well, yeah. But it wasn’t that simple. Like I told you before, I hadn’t been working alone. During my incarceration, the back door had been changed.”

“Changed?”

“My…colleague…on the outside had altered it somewhat. I made the deal for my freedom with the NSA, but once I got in front of the computer and started working, I saw that I wouldn’t be able to give the NSA what they had bargained for. All I needed was to make a phone call and I would have it, but of course our location was so secure and isolated, there were no phones.”

“No phones?”

“We had an internal network between the computers set up in that house, but no communication with the outside. The only way to get messages in or out was through an NSA pouch. I knew I couldn’t go that route because my person on the outside would be caught.”

“Why were you protecting them?”

“Why do you think?”

My mind raced. Love? Money? Blackmail?

“I think you were blackmailing them,” I said. “I think you took the fall for selling the encryption program to the terrorists all by yourself because you were the only one that the FBI had absolute proof on. I think you offered this person your silence in exchange for money. I think that money has been accruing somewhere for you since you went to prison the first time.”

And if that were true, I realized, then the colleague in question would have to be Phillip Wilson. After all, who else of the original team had any real money, other than Tom?

“You are one sharp lady, Mrs. Webber,” Sparks said. “You ought to be a detective or something.”

“Is it Phillip Wilson?” I whispered.

“Phillip Wilson couldn’t program his way out of a hole in a bag,” Sparks said derisively. He didn’t, however, deny it. “It doesn’t matter who the other person is. I needed to talk to them, and there wasn’t any way to do that. I stalled for a few days, but I knew my time was running short.”

I closed my eyes, trying to picture it all in my mind. While Bryan and our friends and I had been making our way to the river and setting up camp, not two miles away Tom Bennett and a team from the NSA had been holed up in that isolated vacation rental house, trying to break a secure encryption code and avert a national crisis. Unbelievable!

“So what happened?” I asked.

“I bided my time, behaved myself. Security got a little lax. No one thought of me as a real flight risk, you see, since they all knew I was about to go free. One afternoon I found my opportunity and took it. I knew there was a boat down in the boathouse, and I slipped away. All I was doing was going to a phone. All I was doing was going to get a little information, and then I was going to slip back into the house and do what they had brought me there to do. No one would ever even know I had been gone.”

“Except for what happened in that boat.”

“Yeah. Just as I was going for the phone, some fat old guy tackles me and tells me I murdered someone. I never saw your husband in the water. I swear, I never knew I hit anybody.”

And all the pieces of the puzzle began to slide into place. When he was arrested, Sparks hadn’t told the police his name or anything about himself. Stuck in an impossible situation, he made his one phone call to the NSA and then simply remained mum while wheels quickly spun all around him. The NSA removed his information from the police computers and then fabricated a different identity for him, one that explained his presence there on the river as a drunken boat driver with a long history of priors. When Officer Robinson ran Sparks’ prints the second time, the record that came up on the screen was the fictional one. All of the information there had been bogus, as were the “facts” Sparks gave to my lawyer in his depositions.

“If you weren’t convicted of involuntary manslaughter,” I said, “then exactly what charge are you serving time for now?”

“Felony murder. I caused an accidental death while in the commission of a felony.”

“The felony being escape?”

“Yes. I killed your husband while ‘escaping’ from custody. That left me faced with a long sentence in a maximum security prison.”

“So how is it that you’re now serving sixteen years in minimum security?”

“How do you think?” he asked. “When all was said and done, the NSA still needed my back door. Of course, by the time I was able to negotiate a new deal with the NSA, I had gotten a message out to my partner in crime, and I had obtained the proper code. My complete freedom was no longer an option they could offer me, of course, but they did the best they could. A shorter sentence, easy time, all in a prison within driving distance of my sweet mother. And, oh, by the way, the code I gave them in the end actually worked. This scum bag who killed your husband is also the hero who helped to avert a national crisis. Not that anyone else can ever know that, of course.”

I was scribbling notes furiously as he talked. Some hero. It was his dirty dealings with terrorists that probably created the national crisis in the first place.

“Why was your partner in crime willing to help you at that point and give you the changed code?”

“Could be the proof I have of that person’s involvement in the original deal.”

“What proof?”

“That’s none of your business. But don’t worry, it’s out there.”

“Fine,” I said. “There’s just one thing I don’t understand. Why does Tom Bennett hold himself responsible for the death of my husband? You’re the one who was driving the boat.”