“Who the hell do you think…” Pointing a finger at Claire’s face, he said, “Now you listen to me, lady. I was sent here by the attorney general and I’m not leaving until I-”
Claire slapped a file folder on Drexler’s desk, the sound like a bomb exploding.
“What’s that?” Drexler said.
“That’s the end of life as you know it, Aaron.”
“What are you-”
“When the bottom fell out of the market in 2008, you lost almost a half a million dollars.”
“So what? Everybody lost money during that time.”
“That’s true, but everybody didn’t do what you did to recover their losses. At the time your portfolio turned to dust, you were a member of the Pentagon’s legal staff assisting the Justice Department in their case against Ames Incorporated, and-”
“Again, so what?”
Ames Inc. was a company that had received a multimillion-dollar contract to design and install improved body armor on army personnel carriers, and a whistleblower informed the Pentagon that Ames was screwing its Uncle Sammy. Ames was charging for work that had not been performed, for overtime that had not been worked, for materials that had not been used, and anything else they could think of to increase their profit margin. The Justice Department had a strong case against a colonel at the Pentagon and a couple of executives at Ames, but Justice also wanted to nail Burton Ames, the company’s founder and CEO-a man reportedly worth three billion dollars who owned multiple mansions, a private jet, and a yacht the size of a light cruiser.
Burton, naturally, claimed he had no idea what his executives were doing with regard to the Pentagon contract; he just wasn’t a hands-on manager. Bullshit, the federal prosecutor said. Unfortunately, the case against Burton Ames was complex and hardly a slam-dunk but the prosecutor felt, if he presented his evidence clearly and cleverly, he could convince a jury to put greedy Burton in a cell for a few years. However, when the prosecutor got to court it became apparent that Burton’s lawyers knew his strategy and every weakness in his case. Burton Ames walked out of the courtroom smiling, and the prosecutor ended up with egg all over his face.
The prosecutor knew someone on the legal staff at the Pentagon had helped Ames’s lawyers. He knew, in fact, that the person who had done this was Aaron Drexler. He knew it-but he couldn’t prove it. Drexler was placed on administrative leave while the prosecutor attempted to get enough evidence against him to convict him for abetting Ames but gave up after four months when he couldn’t find any. And then, in the ultimate irony, Drexler sued the government, saying the prosecutor’s investigation had destroyed his reputation and ruined his career at the Pentagon, and Drexler was awarded three hundred thousand dollars in damages. Then, to add insult to injury, Drexler obtained a job at the Justice Department-the same organization that had been trying to convict him. The daughter of the last attorney general-the one who preceded Robert Scranton-had been in the same sorority with Drexler’s wife, and Drexler’s wife was able to convince the AG that her brilliant husband was the innocent victim of a Pentagon witch hunt.
“I’ll tell you so what, ” Claire said, answering Drexler’s question. “The only reason you’re a free man today is because one very pissed-off prosecutor couldn’t prove you tanked his case against Burton Ames. Well, Aaron, I can prove it.”
“Bullshit,” Drexler said. He was obviously thinking that if Justice couldn’t find any evidence against him after four months of digging, it was highly unlikely the NSA had been able to find anything in the few days he’d been at Fort Meade.
Aaron Drexler did not yet fully appreciate the NSA’s capabilities.
“When the government was preparing its case against Burton Ames,” Claire said, “they got warrants for his computers, and in those computers they found several encrypted e-mails. They asked the NSA to decode the e- mails but we said we couldn’t. The truth is, Aaron, we could decode them but we didn’t want to because doing so would give away the fact that we had that ability. In other words, putting you in jail just wasn’t worth it to us, as that would have meant revealing some of our secrets. Well, Aaron, now it’s worth it.”
Claire didn’t tell Drexler that she had been unaware at the time it was happening that the NSA had been asked to assist Justice in the Burton Ames case. That work had been assigned to another division and it wasn’t something she would normally see. But when her tech, Henry, started rooting around in Aaron Drexler’s past, he found the correspondence between Justice and the NSA and decoded the e-mails.
Claire opened the file folder and passed four sheets of paper to Drexler. “That’s selected bits of text we took from the encrypted e-mails you sent to Burton Ames, including one in which you said you would help him for half a million dollars. On the next page is an electronic banking transaction depositing half a million dollars in a numbered account at a bank in Nassau. On the following page is a proof that you’re the owner of that account.”
Drexler smirked and shook his head. “This is a bad bluff. There’s no way you can prove who owns this account. Nassau banking laws don’t allow them to give you that information.”
“You’re correct. That is, if we were to ask the bankers they wouldn’t tell us. But we didn’t ask them. We just looked inside their machines.”
“That’s not legal.”
“Legal is for wimps, Aaron. Finally, we can also prove that money from that same account in Nassau was used to purchase your vacation home in Tampa. I guess you figured that, since three years had passed, no one would notice that you suddenly had the money to purchase a second home.”
“You can’t prove-”
Claire raised a hand, stopping him. “Aaron, please stop telling me what I can’t do. That file contains all the information the federal prosecutor wished he’d had three years ago, and when I give him this information you’ll lose your current job at Justice and be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law by a guy who has a major hard-on for you. You will go to jail, Aaron.”
Drexler looked at her for a long time, saying nothing; then the arrogance drained out of his face like air escaping from a pin-pricked balloon. “What do you want?” he asked.
“What do I want?” Claire repeated. “I want you out of here, Aaron. I also want to know who sent you and what you were asked to do.”
“I don’t know who sent me. I was called and told I was going to be assigned by the attorney general to do a review here at the NSA. My job was to find out if the NSA had intercepted a radio transmission on April 19th that contained the words messenger and carrier and to identify who had knowledge of the intercept.”
“Why did you agree to help them?”
“Because they knew some of the same things you know. They didn’t know what was in the encrypted e- mails, but they knew about the Nassau account and my place in Tampa. I don’t know how they found out, but they did. So I agreed to do what they wanted because they weren’t asking me to do anything illegal.”
“But you must have some idea who called you.”
“No, I don’t. I swear. But it has to be someone at the Pentagon because they knew all about the Ames case.”
“How were you supposed to contact them?”
“I was given a phone number.”
It turned out to be the untraceable Fort Myer cell phone number, the same number that had been calling Hopper.
Claire rose and looked down at Drexler. He was no longer the supercilious jackass he’d been when she first walked into his office.
Drexler was finished. Her tone softened somewhat when she said, “You know something, Aaron? It just might be a good thing for you that we had this conversation. If you had heard the intercept they wanted you to find, there’s a very good possibility you would have been killed.”
“Killed?” he said.
“Oh, not by us, Aaron. By the man who sent you here.”
Eleven P.M. Claire was parked in a van in front of St. James Church with four of her agents, all men, and the van had magnetic signs attached to the side panels advertising a cleaning company. Everyone, including Claire, was dressed in blue coveralls. Claire sat in the passenger seat of the van, feeling tired but at the same time relieved that Drexler was out of her hair.
Her cell phone finally rang. “It’s safe,” the caller said, and hung up. This meant the priests were asleep-and wouldn’t wake up for at least six hours.
