When we got downstairs Callie was fixing breakfast while watching Good Morning America, which was doing a segment on the political convention that was starting a week from Monday in New York. The president had the nomination sewed up, of course, but had yet to name his vice-presidential running mate. The current VP had decided for health reasons not to run again.
The reporters had an inside tip, they said, that the VP nominee would be a woman.
By the time Callie and Kelly had had their breakfast, the admiral was back with the rental car. He tossed me the keys, and Kelly and I were soon on our way. Just to be on the safe side, he passed me the Colt.45.
Jake Grafton stood on the porch of the beach house and watched Tommy Carmellini and Kelly Erlanger disappear around the corner onto the highway. He went back into the house and climbed the stairs. Carmellini’s and Erlanger’s bags, such as they were, were still in the guest room. He searched everything in both bags, then spent an hour going through the room and adjoining bath.
When he finished he found Callie — she was on the screened-in porch reading files — and asked her to accompany him.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“The library. I need something to read.”
The first place I stopped was a bank in suburban Virginia. I left Erlanger in the car. Even though we made love that morning, I took the ignition key with me — maybe I’m not as good in bed as I hope I am. Inside, I visited a safe deposit box I kept at that bank under another name. I won’t bore you with details, but back when I was in the burglary business, I opened a couple boxes in the metro area under fake names and kept IDs and cash in them, just in case. We live in interesting times. I also had boxes in Los Angeles and New York, but that’s another story.
When I walked out of the bank, my new name was Zack Kobert Winston Jr., and I had a driver’s license and a couple credit cards to prove it. The credit cards were no good, but they looked nice. I also had three thousand in cash in my pocket.
I told Kelly about my new name. She looked at me sort of funny. “Who are you, anyway?”
“A civil servant, the same as you.”
“Right.”
She eyed me one more time, then got busy with the radio. By the time we hit 1-66 westbound, she had a jazz station tuned in.
I rolled down my window and stuck my elbow out. After all that had happened, who would have believed I made this same drive this past Tuesday? Erlanger apparently felt the same way. She didn’t say much, merely listened to the music, lost in her own thoughts.
To tell the truth, I was kinda hoping she was thinking about our romantic interlude earlier that morning. I sure was. I liked the way she kissed. Some girls sort of peck at you, but Kelly opened her mouth and glued herself to you. Just thinking about her kisses made me sigh. I glanced at her from time to time, but she was looking out her window. She had mentioned a boyfriend at one time; I drove along wondering about the state of that relationship. Was I merely a warm body who happened to be available?
By the time we reached Strasburg it was nearly one o’clock, and we both needed a pit stop. I parked in front of the Hotel Strasburg, a ramshackle white Victorian building that looked as if it predated the Civil War. We used the facilities, then ate lunch in a period dining room with real tablecloths. The food was delicious. Kelly wasn’t very talkative, so I asked about her past to get her mind off the mess we were in.
She grew up in Illinois, she said, attended Vassar and majored in Russian. She was recruited by the CIA while she was still in college, decided that she could make more money working for the government than she could in a company trying to do business in Russia, and took the plunge. That was six years ago.
“Was it a good decision?” I asked.
“Well, if I was working in the private sector I would probably be doing a lot of traveling, translating, negotiating, and whatnot. With airline travel being what it is these days, I’d just as soon stay home. With the agency I don’t travel at all except on vacations. I also work on more interesting material, I suspect, than I would in the private sector.”
“Going to stay with the agency?”
“My sister has been after me to resign and move to Santa Barbara. She owns a bakery. Right now that looks pretty good. Maybe, if I get out of this fix alive…” She gave me a wry grin. “I’m just a paper-pusher. People killing each other — I hate it. It’s against everything I believe.”
“Yeah,” I said.
The grin disappeared and she said with conviction, “The world shouldn’t be like this.”
Platitudes usually stop a conversation, and that one did. Some of the air leaked out of my romantic balloon.
We skipped dessert, slurped down coffee, and hit the road again.
Sarah Houston — her name was prominently displayed on the access pass that hung on a chain around her neck — was one of the upper-level wizards at the NSA. She spent most of her days with mathematicians creating codes for the U.S. government and military and breaking foreign government and military codes, and those of corporations, criminals, terrorists, and private citizens around the world who thought their communications should remain private. It was heady, cerebral stuff, and the people engaged in it were among the smartest in the world. Mental chess was a common office pastime, with moves being shouted across the room or exchanged in the corridors or break room. The former Zelda Hudson fit right in — she usually had three or four games going at any one time and won her share.
Yet her specialty was computers, so she regularly consulted with people who were designing state-of-the art software for data-mining other people’s networks. She paid a call that Saturday morning on a man in one of those offices and flirted with him a little while they discussed the problem he was currently working on. He had designs on Sarah’s body and was campaigning for a weeklong vacation together in August on Fire Island. When he mentioned the trip again this morning, she told him she was thinking about it.
As it happened, they were sitting in his secure space when the telephone rang and a colleague asked him to come to his office for a minute. He said sure, hung up the phone, and glanced at Sarah, who was looking at a printout of software code.
“I’ll be right back,” he said, and left her alone in the office with his computer logged onto the network. It was a violation of the security regs, but what the hey, they were friends, with a relationship that he wanted to go someplace special. And it was Saturday, with only a few people in the office.
The instant the door closed behind him, Sarah attacked the keyboard. Two minutes later she was back reading the printout, and she was still at it when her friend returned, five and a half minutes after he departed.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “He needed the help now.”
“No problem,” Sarah Houston said, and smiled.
When she got back to her office after lunch she logged onto the network. She now had access to the deepest data-mining and surveillance capabilities of the NSA network, which she had granted herself. She began tapping in telephone numbers. The first three numbers she typed belonged to Dell Royston: his home, office, and cell.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The sheriff’s office was in a substantial, three-story cut-stone courthouse with oak floors. There wasn’t a soul in sight that Saturday. Our footsteps echoed on the wide staircase and in the empty hallways. When we found the door labeled SHERIFF, I half expected the door to be locked and was relieved when the knob turned in my hand.
The sheriff was a pleasantly plump fellow pushing sixty. He had his feet under his desk and was working on a report when the receptionist showed us into his office. I stuck out my hand. “Zack Winston, Sheriff, like the cigarettes. Sorry to bother you, but we’re looking for my girlfriend’s uncle, who might be lost in this county.”
The sheriff looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “You lost him?”
“He wandered away from our camper when we made a pit stop in the northern part of the county last week.” I looked at Kelly. “It was last Tuesday, wasn’t it?” She nodded.
“And you waited until now to report a missing person.”
