It didn’t.
He glanced around the waiting room, hoping there might be a video camera trained on the locker area. But there were none.
There were forty-eight lockers. He’d start in the middle, and work his way outward. He’d check two or three at a time, then go away, make sure he wasn’t being watched, and take two or three more.
Not ideal, but the best solution under the circumstances.
He’d plant video bugs so the Art Room could watch his back.
Should’ve let Charlie take this one, he thought to himself as he scouted out the best places to put the bugs.
Dean followed thao Duong back to his office, circled the block, then found a cafe nearby to hang out. The place dated from the days when the French ruled Vietnam; its facade, woodwork, and furniture were all modeled on a Pa ri sian cafe. Dean wondered if the familiarity had provided any comfort to the French diplomats and soldiers watching the last vestiges of their empire slip away in the late forties and early fifties.
A half hour later, Chafetz told him a young man had just walked into Thao Duong’s office and received an envelope.
“Follow the messenger and see where he goes,” the runner told Dean. “The locator bug is still working on Thao Duong, so we’ll know if he leaves the building. This looks more interesting.”
Dean left a few dollars — American — to pay for his coffee, then went to get his motorbike. As the young man who’d made the pickup came out of the building, a blue motorbike pulled in front and stopped. The kid hopped on and sped away.
Dean managed to get close enough to read part of the license plate for Rockman. But the bike’s driver knew the city far better than Dean, and was considerably more aggressive in traffic; within four or five blocks Dean had to concede he’d lost him. Dean headed to the riverfront area and with Chafetz’s help found the Asia Free Trade Shipping building, but there was no trace of the messenger there, either.
“she’s asking what you’re doing,” the translator told Karr as he opened another locker.
“Does she work here?” Karr asked.
“I don’t think so. See, most—”
“Tell me how to ask that in Vietnamese.” Thu De Nghiem gave him the words. Karr repeated them to the woman as best he could. He also continued to work the lock with his pick. The others — he was now on number thirteen — had been easy; this one seemed to be gummed up with something.
The woman’s tone became more high-pitched. Karr prodded his tool in the lock, then finally heard a click.
He turned to the woman. “My key always sticks,” he told her in English, though by now he was reasonably certain she didn’t speak it.
“She says she’s going to report you to the authorities,” said Thu De Nghiem. “She thinks you’re a thief.”
“I
“Younger,” said Nghiem, who was looking at a feed from Karr’s bug.
Karr opened the locker and saw a large manila envelope, similar to the one he had found beneath Thao Duong’s desk.
He gave it a big smile and took it with him to a nearby seat.
The woman followed; her harangue continued uninterrupted.
“You remind me of my mother,” Karr told her.
She kept right on talking.
“Yo, Thu,” Karr said to the translator. “This lady reminds me of my mother. What are the words?”
“For what?”
“You look very much like the picture Dad has on the bureau back home,” Karr declared, in first English and then Vietnamese. “Are you my mom?”
The woman mumbled something, then fled.
“Did I get the accent wrong?” Karr asked the translator.
“She thinks you’re a nut,” said Nghiem. “I promise you, she’ll be bringing back the police.” Karr laughed and peeked into the envelope.
“Wow,” he said.
“Mr. Karr, do you have a problem?” asked Rubens, coming on the line.
“No problem at all,” said Karr. He pulled out his PDA and popped the camera attachment on. Then he held it inside the envelope far enough to get a picture of the bundles of hundred-dollar bills sitting there. “No, I have no problem at all. At least none that a hundred thousand bucks can’t solve.”
55
Thao Duong’s hard drive, downloaded by Tommy Karr to the Art Room the previous eve ning, contained an unremarkable assortment of agricultural reports and bureaucratic memos, each laboriously worked over: Robert Gallo, who was in charge of examining the drive, found at least nine drafts of most of the reports.
There was one file, however, different from all the rest.
Not only were there no other versions; it was encrypted, albeit in a simple encryption performed by the word pro cessor that had created the file. Gallo used a software tool to “break” the encryption. The result was a solid block of numbers, which Gallo at first assumed was another encryption.
He applied a range of software tools to try to parse the block without getting anything that the translator could recognize.
Giving up, he forwarded the file to the cryptology section; the people working there had better tools and worked with encryptions all the time, unlike him. He also posted it on an internal intranet “blog” or continually updating log used by the Deep Black team to communicate their progress and problems. A few minutes later, Johnny Bib turned up in Gallo’s office, hovering over his shoulder.
“Call home,” said Johnny.
“Huh?”
“Ding-a-ling,” said Johnny Bib.
Gallo couldn’t figure out what he meant.
And then he did.
“They’re phone numbers?”
Rubens rubbed his eyes, trying to clear away some of the fa-tigue making them blur.
“There are contacts in New York, Washington, LA, all cities where the senator has been,” Gallo told him. “None of these numbers are red sheeted. FBI has nothing on them, and neither does the CIA. If there’s a network there, we have zero data on it.”
Money and a network of connections in most major American cities — this looked a hell of a lot like what they were looking for, Rubens realized.
“Have you built call lists for these numbers?” Rubens asked.
“Didn’t want to do that without your OK. ’Cause it’s, like, in the States.”
“Go ahead and do so,” Rubens told him. “I’ll forward this information to Ambassador Jackson and see if we can get additional information from the FBI. Keep me informed.”
