“Have I ever?”
“Of course not.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Jake Grafton’s cell phone rang as he walked the two blocks from the Rosslyn subway stop to his condo. He checked the number, then answered it.
“Hello, Robin.”
“Good evening, Admiral.” Robin Cloyd was a data-mining expert who had been working for NSA. She had been temporarily transferred to the CIA and assigned as Jake’s office assistant. One of the many things she did for the admiral was hack her way around the Internet, which was, of course, illegal. Robin worried about that, but she did it anyway because Jake Grafton asked her to.
Robin was a technical genius, a tall, gawky young woman who lived in jeans and sweatshirts because the rooms where she spent her working life were filled with computers and heavily air-conditioned. She also wore glasses, large, thick ones, because she didn’t trust the doctors who did eye surgery. “After all,” she remarked to Jake when she interviewed for the job, “I only have two eyes, and why take a chance?” Why, indeed? Jake hired her on the spot. That was four months ago.
“I’m into three of their computers now,” Robin said, “Winchester, Smith, and Wolfgang Zetsche — so I see all the e-mails they send back and forth to each other. They’re using a fairly sophisticated encryption code, one that —“
“Right.”
“You don’t care about the code.”
“Not really.”
Robi n sighed audibly. Nontechnical people have no appreciation for logical beauty. “Anyway,” she said, “Jerry Hay Smith is the most interesting. He’s writing a book about the conspiracy and incorporating the unencrypted e- mails.”
Grafton snorted in derision. “How much has he written?”
“About forty thousand words.”
“Oh, Lord!”
“It’s interesting reading. I don’t think there’s much truth in it, but it is certainly exciting.”
“Send it along with all the e-mails and your analysis. I need some bedtime reading.”
“Yes, sir.”
When he got home, he found the morning paper on the kitchen counter, where his wife, Callie, had left it. He took it with him to the den and dropped into a chair. The trial of Sheikh Mahmoud al-Taji in London was the lead story on the front page. The British were trying to deport him for giving incendiary sermons in his London mosque about the duty of Muslims everywhere to serve Allah by battling infidels. His defense was that he was not a terrorist but was merely exercising his religious and free-speech rights. He had not, according to the press, actually advocated mayhem or murder. The British government argued that his speech went too far and was the equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theater. British Muslims were demonstrating outside the courthouse.
A verdict was expected in a few days, and if it went against the sheikh, his lawyer promised an appeal. “The government has the right to prosecute terrorists,” he said, “not legal immigrants commenting on the issues of the day, even if they use a pulpit to state their views.”
Grafton read the entire article, then leafed on through the newspaper.
After my conversation with Grafton, I rode the Washington subway— the Metro — back to my stop on the edge of Metropolis, where I parked my car every morning. I couldn’t stop thinking about Marisa Petrou and her father, Abu Qasim.
When Qasim and the head of the French intelligence agency, Henri Rodet, had plotted to murder the G-8 heads of government at the Palace of Versailles, Marisa Petrou had posed as Rodet’s mistress. She was nominally the daughter of one Georges Lamoureux, a high officer in the French diplomatic service. Grafton thought she was really the daughter of Abu Qasim and had been taken in, or adopted, by Lamoureux, a friend of Rodet’s, when she was ten. We didn’t have any proof of that, naturally, but when Grafton voiced an opinion it was usually a fact. He sometimes got these insights, and — but I digress.
One of our difficulties was that we didn’t know what Qasim really looked like. Sure, I had seen him a couple of times, and so had Grafton, while he was disguised as an old man. I even got a photo that the wizards at the FBI enhanced so we could see what he might look like without the makeup and wig. Wasn’t any help. Oh, we searched, followed every lead, rumor and lukewarm tip we could squeeze out of anyone, as did every other police and intelligence agency in the civilized world, but Qasim had disappeared as completely as if he had dissolved in the human solution.
One of the things Qasim did to hide Rodet’s role in the plot was stage a fake kidnapping and slice up Marisa’s face. I had seen her, unconscious, bleeding and tied to a chair, moments after he finished the job. She was a hell of a mess; it took a plastic surgeon a couple of months to put her back together again as best he could.
I know Grafton is Grafton and I’m just a grunt in the spy wars, but still … a father doing that to his daughter? What kind of animal was Abu Qasim? Or was Grafton wrong? Maybe she wasn’t his daughter but was a female holy warrior determined to get to Paradise on virtue, or fanaticism if virtue didn’t work.
The people on the subway, the pedestrians on the sidewalks — I watched them walk along, looked at their faces, wondering … Oh, we read about twisted, drugged-out freaks in the newspaper every so often, the refuse of humanity, who murder wife and kids for reasons that only the Devil could understand. But slice them up?
Maybe I have a low tolerance, but I can only visit a sewer for a few minutes before I need fresh air.To get some, on the way home I stopped by the lock shop I own with a guy named Willie Varner. Our ten-year-old van was parked out front and the light was on, so I unlocked the door and went in.
“Hey, it’s me.”
“Back here.”
I went into the workshop in the rear of our space. Willie was a dapper black man twenty years my senior, slender and trim. What he didn’t know about locks wasn’t worth knowing.
“Wanta see something cool?” he asked as I examined the project he had on the bench. “This little thing will open any card-reader lock I’ve ever played with,” he said with a touch of pride in his voice. “Gonna call it the Varner mechanism and get me a patent.”
He demonstrated his creation on a hotel-room lock he had mounted on a board held by a vise. Normally this lock opened when a properly programmed plastic card was inserted in the reader slot. He inserted a card-sized probe that was wired up to a PalmPilot and stood watching. In about five seconds the green light on the lock came on and there was a click. Willie pulled the probe from the slot and turned the door handle, which opened. It was that easy.
“Whaddaya think of that?”
“I didn’t know you knew anything about computers.”
“Don’t.” He waved the PalmPilot. “I had a local lady geek program this for me.” I see.
“Gonna put her and my name on the patent app. Both of us gonna make some money outta this.”
He opened a small refrigerator that he had plugged in under the bench and pulled out two beers, one of which he passed to me. When he was seated and sipping, I said, “Willie, I wish you’d asked me about that thing before you started working on it. The agency’s got gizmos that do the same thing.”
He stared. “You’re jivin’ me, right?”
“Honest.”
He swore a little. Drank some beer and swore some more. After a while he smacked the workbench with the flat of his hand and said, “I knew it was too good to be true! Invent something, make some money.” Then he glowered at me. Sooner or later he’d decide his misfortune was my fault, and it turned out to be sooner. “You’re like a little black cloud, Carmellini. When the sun starts shinin’, you show up and rain on ever’thin’.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You come around a little more often, we could talk about stuff, partner to partner, but you’re off alla time
