“Or we get older, baby,” she murmured. “Or we get older.”
Darcy looked away and drifted off into some private reverie, and I went back to reading the file while the girl returned and served coffee. I skimmed the printout as I finished my first cup, but after only a few pages I was lost.
“What the hell is this stuff?” I asked, glancing up at Darcy. “It looks like some kind of email, but it doesn’t have anything to do with Karsarkis.”
“It’s email all right. At first I thought it was Carnivore product they had been collecting on Karsarkis, but now-”
“What’s Carnivore product?” I interrupted.
“Carnivore is a program developed by the FBI to monitor email. It’s like a wiretap placed on an email account. The problem with it is the software has to be physically installed on the servers of the provider that has the email account you want to tap. It’s so easy for the target to shift providers that the process only works if the operation is entirely covert and the target has no reason to suspect he might be tapped. That would obviously be a problem in monitoring Karsarkis.”
“I guess I’ll start being more careful what I put in my email.”
“You should. In God we trust. All others we monitor.”
I chuckled. “You just make that up?”
“Nah. It’s an old Cryptocity line.”
Cryptocity was the way people in the know referred to the NSA headquarters complex at Ft. Mead in Maryland, just north of Washington. It was the closest I had ever heard Darcy come to admitting she had indeed been an NSA spook, but I didn’t comment.
“So what is this stuff?” I asked instead, tapping my forefinger on the printouts Darcy had made from the disk.
“Well…”
Darcy hesitated and I watched her carefully. She seemed to be weighing up something, but I had no idea what it was.
“I think this
“I’m sorry, Darcy. You lost me.”
“Let me ask you something before I say any more, Jack.”
Darcy pursed her lips and looked out across her pool. She took her time and I didn’t rush her.
“Karsarkis is here in Thailand, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” I said. “He is.”
“And the feds know it and they’re after him?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What brand?”
“What do you mean?”
“What brand of feds. Is it the FBI? The Secret Service? Who’s out here after Karsarkis?”
I hesitated briefly, then I decided there was no reason not to tell her, so I did.
“The US Marshals.”
Darcy nodded slowly as if I had justif I had confirmed her worst suspicions.
“They don’t intend to bother with extradition.” She made a statement out of it, not a question.
“I don’t know that,” I said. “Not for sure.”
“But you think you do. You think they’re here to kidnap Karsarkis, don’t you?”
“Maybe,” I answered carefully.
Darcy nodded again and for a moment she studied a grove of banana trees over my shoulder.
“What you’ve got there,” Darcy said after a moment, inclining her head at the sheets of paper stacked on the table, “is the product NIA obtained from intercepting email between somebody who is out here and somebody who is back in Washington.”
“You mean the Thais have the FBI’s software and they’re using it to tap the marshals’ email?” I laughed out loud. “Damn.”
“I told you not to underestimate them, Jack.”
“So then they know all about the kidnapping plan.”
I thought I was beginning to see why the NIA was trying so hard to enlist me in bailing out Karsarkis’ sorry ass. If the marshals kidnapped the world’s most wanted fugitive from right under the Thais’ noses and spirited him back to Washington, the loss of face would be almost unthinkable; and if there is one thing the tolerant Thais absolutely cannot tolerate, it is loss of face. On the other hand, if Karsarkis were pardoned, then there would no longer be any need for a kidnapping and the whole problem would just go away. Neat.
“Now that you know what you’re looking at, read it again, Jack.” Darcy seemed to think for a time, then her expression hardened and she exhaled audibly. “Read it all again and tell me what you think it really says.”
The girl returned and refilled out coffee cups and I read the last dozen pages of the file again in silence.
This time I started to get a queasy feeling about halfway through. I glanced up at Darcy but she was looking away, apparently consulting the banana trees again. Then I went back and read it all a third time. I shifted in my chair, stretching my legs first one way and then another, but I couldn’t seem to make myself comfortable.
There was nothing explicit in the emails, of course. Whoever had written them had been very careful. There wasn’t a single sentence there I could quote to prove anything, certainly nothing that made it clear in so many words; but now I had no doubt at all what it was that I was really reading.
After the third time through I gathered all of the pages into a stack, squared them up at the edges, and put them back into the manila file. Then I moved my coffee cup to one side, clasped my hands together, and placed them on top of the file.
“You read this stuff the same way I do, don’t you, Darcy?”
“Yeah, baby, I do.”
I studied Darcy’s face, but it gave nothing away.
“Maybe this is a fake,” I said. “Maybe the NIA put it all together just for my benefit.”
“Maybe.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“No, I don’t,” Darcy said. “What motive would they have for that?”
“Well, for starters…” I trairdquo; Iled off and thought about it.
“I don’t know,” I finally said.
Darcy smiled without humor. “Neither do I.”
“So you think this is all the real stuff.”
“I’d say so.”
I could tell Darcy was weighing her words carefully.
“The form looks right,” she said, “and the text feels right. But there’s no way to be absolutely certain, Jack. There’s just no way.”
I nodded and we sat together in silence for a while as I considered what I knew now that I hadn’t known a few minutes before.
“Even if the email is genuine, isn’t there the possibility of some other interpretation?”
“Sure,” Darcy nodded. “I guess there’s always that possibility.”
“But you think we’ve got it right, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Darcy spoke as if from behind a mask, “I do.”
I nodded slowly and looked away.
The intercepted emails left everything clearly understood without making it explicit. Whoever sent the emails and whoever received them were both operating on exactly the same understanding. They both knew there was only one possible outcome to the manhunt for Plato Karsarkis.
None of this was about arresting and extraditing Karsarkis anymore. It wasn’t even about kidnapping him. Washington didn’t have the stomach any longer for trying to lock him up. Karsarkis had already shown them how pointless that was.
No, this time it was different.
