“Did she give you one of her special phones?”
“How’d you know that?”
“She’s done it before, keeping tabs on naughty boys like Charlie. No disrespect to the dead, of course. They’ve got GPS tracking and she receives the signal, so she always knows where you are. Remember that veep she busted in Africa? Same deal. So if you’re still carrying, better ditch it.”
No wonder she got so upset when Sam switched off the phone. And when he switched it back on, the Russian thugs had closed in on the York within minutes. Fortunately, the phone was still back at the Shangri-La.
“Keller?”
“I’m here. Don’t worry, I ditched the phone.”
“Not that I don’t believe you, but you do realize that helping you isn’t exactly a risk-free proposition?”
“Go ahead and report this call, Plevy. I’d do the same. Cover your ass all you need. All I want is a Web site password. Mine’s blocked.”
“Whoa, now. You think I’m stupid enough to report you but let you go snooping around the database under my name?”
“Yeah, well …”
Sam didn’t have an easy answer, and his hopes faded. There was a pause of a few seconds with nothing but static, which Sam supposed was better than a flat refusal. Unless, of course, Plevy had grabbed his cell phone and was punching in the home number for one of Nanette’s assistants.
“You don’t need my password,” Plevy said at last. “I’ll give you Ansen’s.”
“How do you know Ansen’s?”
“I know yours, too. The whole department’s. Dumb-ass Gary left them up on his screen about a week ago. Seemed like the sort of thing a good auditor ought to file away for future reference. Not that it would do me much good, since we change them every month.”
“If I need anything more …”
“No, no, Keller.”
“Just as a hypothetical.”
Plevy paused, still calculating. “What kind of hypothetical?”
“I don’t know. Someone I could send up a flare to, if all else fails.”
“If you have to, shoot a message to my personal address. Better still, send it to my sister’s. Hold on, I’ll get it.”
Plevy returned a few seconds later and spelled out an AOL e-mail address.
“Put my name in the subject line, she’ll know not to look. Which means she’ll look anyway, so be as vague as possible.”
Like brother, like sister, Sam supposed.
“Thanks, Plevy.”
“Don’t says thanks. I was no help at all, officially and otherwise. Unless you turn out to be right, of course.”
Ansen’s password worked fine. The first thing he found was Nanette’s corporate bio.
She had been with Pfluger Klaxon for four years, having come to the job after six years with the Bureau of Diplomatic Security of the U.S. Foreign Service. Before that she had spent two years as a risk-assessment manager with Intermax, a global security consultant, right after graduating with honors from Brown.
Sam checked her Foreign Service postings. The first one was to Paris. The second was far more interesting: three years in Moscow.
The corporate bio was predictably glowing. Three particular programs were cited. The most intriguing was a 2007 project in Dubai in which Pfluger Klaxon, “in close cooperation with customs officials and local police,” had financed the formation of a special squad at the port of Jebel Ali to ferret out the shipments of counterfeits. Probably when she met Lieutenant Assad, just as Sharaf had guessed.
Sam scrolled back through archived press releases until he found the retirement notice for her predecessor. It mentioned that a search had commenced for his replacement, and a boilerplate job description noted, “Pfluger Klaxon’s chief of corporate security is a vice presidential position subject to an internal audit every four years by an outside consultant, reporting to the Chairman of the Board. Additionally, the vice president for security must file quarterly reports to the audit committee of the Board, with copies to the corporate legal officer, ethics officer, and audit officer.”
The audit officer was Sam’s boss, Gary Grimshaw. If Gary was lax enough to leave departmental passwords up on his screen, then a smooth operator like Plevy could probably easily find Gary’s copies of Nanette’s most recent quarterly reports.
Sam called up his personal account on Gmail and dashed off a message to the AOL address for Plevy’s sister, keeping it as vague as possible:
“Need N’s last five quarterly reports, copies filed to G.”
That would cover her time on the Jebel Ali project. He pecked around awhile longer on the off chance the audits were available online, but to no avail.
He then searched a State Department Web site for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Press releases were archived for the previous six years, long enough to include Nanette’s last two years on the job. Three stood out.
