Savich and Eve walked into the FBI conference room on the thirteenth floor of the Federal Building a half-hour later, straight-up noon. Half a dozen FBI agents were seated around the long conference table along with Lieutenant Virginia Trolley and Lieutenant Delion of the SFPD, and the U.S. Marshal Carney Maynard. Savich gave a little finger wave to Sherlock and Harry, who were eating pizza out of the same box. Pepperoni, Savich knew; it was Sherlock’s favorite.
There were stacked pizza boxes, a ton of paper napkins, and cans of soda scattered across the table. SAC Cheney Stone swallowed the last of his Hawaiian pineapple pizza slice and waved to them. “Come on in. Help yourselves, lots of pizza left, and probably still warm. Savich, there’s a couple of slices of veggie pizza for you if this crew hasn’t scarfed them all down. Tell us how you made out with the Cahills.”
Savich looked over at Marshal Maynard as he sat down. “Deputy Barbieri did an excellent job, sir, rattled them good. She got Cindy Cahill so angry she spit out a name—Sue. We’re thinking she might be the operative who was the Cahills’ handler.”
“Sue?” Maynard said. “Sue is a foreign operative?”
Savich nodded at Eve as he picked up one of the three slices of Veggie Heaven pizza.
Eve said, “Well, Cindy implied she had a close—maybe an intimate—relationship with her, before she tried to deny that Sue exists.”
Savich said, “Harry, you’ve been looking for their contact for months, haven’t you?”
Harry said, “We thought there had to be someone working closely with them. Their backgrounds didn’t fit high-level espionage. They’ve been talented grifters, that’s all, who’ve been busy rolling drunks and using Cindy’s charms to cheat some lonely men out of their money. This was way out of their league.”
Savich nodded. “So now this Sue is our best bet for the one who made contact with the Cahills, maybe recruited them.”
Cheney asked, “So this woman might be the shooter? You think the CIA knows about this and they didn’t bother to tell us?”
“We can ask the CIA if they have a file on her,” Harry said. “But so far the CIA hasn’t even told us what it was the Cahills managed to steal. Only that it was in the area of cyber-security, quote/unquote. Maybe now we have something to trade them.”
There were smiles around the table.
Eve said, “We might have gotten more out of them, but their survival instinct kicked in and they backpedaled like crazy and hollered for their lawyer.” She sighed. “It was my fault, I handled it wrong, pushed them too hard.”
Savich said, “You did good, Eve, lots better than Harry would have done. He’d have scared the crap out of them. This is good pizza, guys.”
Sherlock, a slice of pepperoni pizza halfway to her mouth, said, “No last name? Only Sue, and Cindy Cahill just spit it out?”
Eve nodded.
Harry turned to Eve, his eyes narrowed. “What did you do? Swing your blond ponytail in Cindy’s direction and watch her explode?”
“Close,” Savich said.
Harry said, “Maybe she was making up the name Sue, playing you.”
Eve could see he wasn’t happy about having this sprung on him. He’d worked this case for more than a year, and he’d never gotten a name out of them.
Eve took a big bite of her pizza slice. “Tell you what, Harry, you can listen to our recording of the interview, make up your own mind. Sorry there’s no video showing my ponytail.”
Cheney asked, “Harry, your team never came across this name Sue in your investigation?”
“No, and believe me, our agents”—he nodded to several agents across from him—“we checked through their known associates for months, in and out of jail. Clive Cahill isn’t stupid. He’s always used prepaid cell phones we can’t trace to him, for example. If he was making contact with some foreign corporation or government or intelligence service, whatever, we have no record of it.”
Ten-year veteran Agent Burt Seng said, “The whole operation was skillfully done until the Cahills screwed up and ended up with a dead body on their hands, and got caught. To get any of the confidential information off Mark Lindy’s encrypted computer, somebody in the operation had to know a good deal about the information security system Lindy used to access the project he was working on. Not just his user IDs and passcodes, but enough about the access algorithms and the project itself to know what was valuable and how to get to it without alerting the security oversight team.”
Savich said, “It means this Sue was super-careful. She had to pay the Cahills some upfront money, but you haven’t been able to find any stashed funds, right?”
“Not a dime,” Burt Seng said. “This ‘Sue’ name, though”—he turned to Agent Griffin Hammersmith—“you ever hear of a foreign spy with the name Sue?”
Griffin shook his head. “I’m thinking it’s got to be a code name. Maybe it isn’t even a woman, who knows?”
Eve said, “Cindy didn’t shout it out like it was a code name. It sounded like she knew this Sue person, and well.”
Cheney was tapping his pen on the tabletop. “Savich, you agree with Barbieri?”
Savich said, “Yes.”
Cheney said, “I’ll call the CIA operations officers who worked on the Cahills’ case, see if they recognize it.”
Savich said, “I’m thinking I might throw out Sue’s name to Siles, see his reaction, see if he recognizes the name. I told the guard not to let either Clive or Cindy Cahill have any phone calls until after we visit Siles today.”
Cheney said, “Okay, let’s shift gears for the moment.” He turned to Agent Seng. “Burt has been waiting to give us follow-up on what he and Sherlock found out about that Zodiac Judge Hunt saw.”
Burt Seng wiped his hands on a napkin, then clicked on the overhead to show a Google map of Sea Cliff. He pointed. “Judge Hunt’s house is there on the point of land. You can see there are big boulders scattered all over the beach. Since Judge Hunt told us about the Zodiac, we can forget about whether the shooter drove down Sea Cliff Avenue, parked his car or motorcycle near China Beach Park, and made his way down to the beach.” Burt grinned. “Man or woman, this Sue came in by water.
“If you’ve ever been on an inflatable with an outboard motor, you know it’s capable of speed. He could have motored the Zodiac right up to the beach. He didn’t care if Judge Hunt saw the Zodiac, since he planned to kill him. He walked around the ocean side of the bluff and positioned himself in the mess of thick rocks that stud the beach.” He nodded to Sherlock as he put the photo of the Zodiac on the overhead.
“Now, a female Sue adds a new wrinkle to this,” Sherlock said, “since Mrs. Moe, the owner of Bay Outings in Sausalito, says she rented a Zodiac to a man at two o’clock on Thursday afternoon under the name Bently Ames.”
Burt said, “Mrs. Moe never questioned it was a man. She described him well. Here’s our sketch.” He projected the drawing on the overhead and passed around a sketch of a man described as five-foot-nine or -ten, on the slender side, wearing loose jeans, sneakers, an oversized blue Windbreaker, dark opaque sunglasses, and a Giants baseball cap.
“Bently Ames never took off the sunglasses or the cap. He had a flat voice, Mrs. Moe said, no particular
