ROGUESTATE, page 34
Bridger shifted in his chair and said slowly, “Perhaps there is an accommodation we can come to.”
Harper shook his head slightly and said, “I told you what I want.”
“I don’t know where Damon Layne is!” he said stridently.
“Then tell me how to find him,” countered Harper.
They locked eyes and Bridger creased a grin. “How about money. I can make you a very wealthy man.”
Before either of them understood it, Harper wrapped one hand around Bridger’s neck and jammed the lawyer into the chair. “Money! Is that what you think this is about? Money?”
These people always thought money could replace honor!
The rent-a-cop decided to do his job; he might have had better luck tackling a concrete bridge abutment. Harper’s front leg kicked, forward catching the man in the groin, and he followed up with a crushing left hook to the temple. The rent-a-cop sailed back to the floor like a burst balloon. The room shuddered unsteadily behind Harper’s eyes. He let his rage propel him forward—to enable him to gut it out.
Bridger sputtered at the sudden release on his neck. Harper rammed the Beretta’s barrel past his teeth and said savagely, “Layne worked on a project calledSpanish Poppy . I want to know why he was involved in an attempt to kill my family last summer.” Harper pulled the lawyer to him and shoved him effortlessly across the room. Bridger’s flaccid jowls and soft muscles were no match for the warrior standing in his office.
The lawyer spun around to face Harper and said, “I don’t know where he is.”
Harper stuck the Beretta in his back pocket and delivered a palm heel strike to Bridger’s ribcage. Bridger’s eyes blossomed in tears as he looked down his chest. He gasped for breath and fire lanced up his side.
“I’ll break all your ribs first, then I’ll start working on your fingers. You see, Layne and I probably had many of the same instructors.” Harper hit Bridger again and sent the lawyer sprawling.
Bridger sensed fear similar to Saturday night. He managed to get back to one knee and said, “All right! Don’t hit me anymore!”
Harper paused his advance and waited.
“I have a file on Layne,” heaved Bridger. It was getting very hard to breathe. “We had storage depots. I suppose he might still use them if he needed something.”
“What kind of depots?”
Bridger staggered to his feet. “Spanish Poppyrequired money, explosives, weapons. We used a CIA depot in Georgetown.”
The deceit and the rot went deeper than Harper cared to imagine. “How do I get to the file?”
“Untie me…” gasped Bridger.
Harper sat down at the terminal and said, “Tell or I’ll break something else on you.”
Bridger gave him the file pathname.
Harper emailed the file to a blind Hotmail account he maintained. They were amazingly simple things to establish and quite anonymous.
“You’ll never get out of the building.”
Harper smirked. “Then I might as well kill you now.”
Bridger backed away, using the wall to keep himself upright. “I’ll hunt you down, then we’ll see who lives or dies,” spat the lawyer defiantly.
Harper delivered an uppercut to Bridger’s jaw. It snapped his head back and Bridger joined the unconscious rent-a-cop on the carpet. Harper shook his head sadly and explained, “If we meet again, you’d best bring an army.”
* * * *
Plum Point, Maryland
Eduard Gurov watched two black FBI forensic vans descend on theGay Chance . Flashing lights cut the lazy evening, and local police pressed into service blocked off the entire marina. He did not know to look for another boat floating two miles off Plum Point.
His attention was riveted to the two senior agents moving from van to van. He had no identification for the woman, but he recognized Cecil from his personnel photograph. It surprised Gurov to find the man smaller in stature than he expected. The gray hair and piercing blue eyes were visible from Eduard’s vantage point.
He tapped the leather holster holding his Makarov. Cecil Bixby might be at the end of his career with the Bureau, but Eduard knew one thing about the man—he was a hunter. He could sense the bridled energy through the binoculars. Parvez Hyder was little more than a conduit to the true prize.
The tongue of fire licked out through the port side of theGay Chance. The night opened in a deep and malevolent roar as the half-full fuel tanks ignited. Yellow, orange, and red flames framed the scene about the small marina.
A second finger billowed out the aft deck snapping the deck in half as theGay Chance rolled over in the frothing water. The window Eduard sat behind blew inwards, knocking him backwards against the sparse furniture of his rented room. Tiny, razor sharp shards ripped through the night’s shattered calm as he rolled to avoid the cataclysm.
The ground shuddered under the blast and pieces of theGay Chance sallied into the air. The brilliant flash retreated behind a curtain of black, oily smoke. The terrible roar swallowed the screams, as theGay Chance broke apart. Lesser fires flickered up and down the marina and the dazed Bureau agents slowly picked themselves up.
Cecil rolled over and stared dumbly at the burning ship. Blood dribbled down his nose and out of his eardrums due to the concussive shock. Temporary deafness kept him from hearing the dieing and wounded. He struggled to his uncertain feet and staggered towards the blast epicenter. He found two men down and quite dead. They had been blown clear and simultaneously broken apart. It was terrible thing to see their misshapen and lumpy bodies.
Someone caught Cecil and turned him around. Their words were little more than a buzz in his ears. He shook his head and touched the side of his face. A blanket was wrapped around his shoulders as he was led away like an infirmed man.
Ellen fared better than Cecil. One of the forensic vans had acted as a shield between her and the explosion. She stepped around the van to watch theGay Chance vanish below the waves. It occurred to her that someone had tried to kill her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Moscow, Russian Federation,The Times of London,November 16, 2000 –Osama bin Laden, the suspected terrorist mastermind behind the bombing of the USS Cole in Aden Harbor that left 17 US sailors dead, may be just as big a problem for the Putin Government as it is for the Clinton Administration.
Russia’s Defense Minister, Marshal Igor Segeyev accused bin Laden of being instrumental in Afghanistan’s Taliban government of offering substantial aid to the Chechen rebels in the form of food, medicine and munitions. In addition, the Putin government is quite upset with Kabul for recognizing an independent Chechnya and accepting diplomatic credentials for an independent Chechen Embassy in Kabul.
Washington D.C.
Thursday, November 16, 2000
10:00 A.M. EST
Mary Kirsten sat in Dwayne’s office. She concluded the person Cecil had been helping out was Dwayne, but she had not had a chance to confirm the facts. Cecil was being treated for injuries received two days ago at a no-name town called Plum Point on Chesapeake Bay. The Bureau had him sequestered at Johns Hopkins where he was treated for burns, lacerations, and a cracked wrist. The rumor mill suggested Cecil was a less-than-cooperative patient.
Mary never claimed to understand all the quirks and kinks thePhreaks were capable of producing. She acted more like a den mother to group of rambunctious, digital rascals. It kept her fresh, and often they surprised her with their sheer audacity and cunning. Time and experience had not taught them the stifling concepts of it-can’t-be-done—they only knew it could. Her favorite was a seventeen-year-old girl named Terri Finley who suffered from a deformed spine and had missed out on the childhood most teenagers experienced.
The surveillance blanket surrounding Irv Fredricks was a dichotomy of bored agents wondering what fool had sent them on this errand, and a young girl many thought to be living a sub-human quality of life because she was confined to a back brace. Oddly enough, Irv despised the federal agents tethered to his every movement by invisible strands, for he hated everything about Washington and its spend-and-waste politicians. However, he would fervently fight for Terri’s right to life. Ironically, the girl, whose right-to-birth Irv fervently believed in, discovered the vile secret he and Ron Babcock had hatched.
Terri created a net of email traps, Internet ambushes, and sniffer programs. Irv Fredricks never had a chance as a bits-and-bytes python slowly wrapped itself around everything Irv did. Her reach was extraordinarily thorough as she sifted through each exchange—no matter how ambiguous. Along the way, her path led to a series of email addresses and the digital identity of another person.
To the Bureau agents trailing after Irv, it appeared to be a wild goose chase. Irv expected the Bureau to be underfoot. He did not break the speed limit, and he used his seat belt. He obviously knew they were watching him and he made no attempt to elude his minders. The phone taps revealed nothing, and the mail intercepts told them even less. He received a fair amount of hate literature and right-wing magazines, but most of it was pre-printed, mass mailings and commercial magazines. They had no smoking gun, much less a burning cross.
Remote microphones had been secreted throughout Irv’s house, inside his car, and around his office. Hours of useless video and voice recordings were made. Irv drove them nuts doing nothing, and the word from Washington was to keep watching. The Bureau found itself chasing gut instinct and collecting a library of worthless evidence.
Terri did not focus on a single individual—she scooped up the entire town and ran it through a program she created called CANNIBAL. Privacy advocates, outraged over the Bureau’s CARNIVORE system and the manner in which the Bureau circumvented US law, would have been apoplectic had they understood CANNIBAL’s reach and scope. CARNIVORE was like a kid playing T-ball next to hall of fame slugger Kirby Puckett when compared to CANNIBAL.
The digital landscape was literally gobbled whole and spewed back out into categories only a seventeen-year-old could appreciate. She ignored most of the data returned, because she expected whatever she was looking for to be anomalous, and she doubted anyone besides a government was sophisticated enough to embed data inside the everyday Internet noise.
Ron Babcock’s encrypted single-cipher messages to spurious email addresses beckoned like a neon sign on a dark road. It did not matter that Terri could not read the encrypted messages. She suspected it was version of PGP, and if Mother Mary wanted to know what the messages said, she could get her friends at the NSA to set a couple of mainframes loose on the problem.
Babcock’s scheme was quick-witted and audacious. It certainly fooled CARNIVORE, which was not that difficult as far as Terri was concerned. She viewed it as little more than a bureaucratic camel assembled by a bunch of over-the-hill has-beens. However Babcock’s little scheme was no match for CANNIBAL. Terri took great pride in her own program, and she never shared with Mother Mary the source of her information. She wrapped everything up in a simple email and sent it off.
Mary Kirsten held a sanitized version of Terri’s email in her folder. Once the professionals at Quantico knew where to look, they savaged the digital highway with relish. No one asked Mary how she came across the information. It was enough that it came from her. Senior officials knew vaguely about thePhreaks , but only a handful knew who thePhreaks were. Officially, none of those people worked for any agency other than the Bureau.
She decided against going to Fort Meade and the NSA for help in breaking down Babcock’s messages. While she never asked Terri how she exhumed the information when others had failed, she suspected the answer would cause Justice Department lawyers to have nightmares and Constitutional scholars to experience severe cramps. Turning over the encrypted emails might cause an aspiring programmer to probe the source, and Mary had no desire to reveal methods and assets to anyone beyond her tightly-held circle. She owed herkids that much.
Dwayne stared at the name at the top of Mary’s memo and asked, “Who’s Ron Babcock?”
Mary shrugged. “Don’t know.” Her focus was the data.
“How certain are you about this?” muttered Dwayne. “I mean, this guy has never registered a blip on our radar.”
Mary thought about a brilliant mind trapped inside a crippled seventeen-year-old’s body and replied, “I know the data doesn’t lie, and that once we found these emails, the boys at Quantico went nuts.”
“CARNIVORE, right?” asked Dwayne.
Mary smiled briefly. It was best Dwayne believed what he wished, but Mary knew CARNIVORE’s limitations.
Dwayne read her face and glanced back at the memo. “These email accounts are all over the place.”
“We think there’s a prearranged list,” explained Mary. “However, we can’t prove what was sent by Babcock. For all we know it could be a grocery list.”
Dwayne nodded absently. He was building a circumstantial case, and he needed much more than coincidence to convince a judge to issue warrants. “The timing between the messages and the bombing attacks seems to align.”
Mary nodded. Dwayne was a plodder—slowly stepping through the evidence. Even a plodder can be brilliant once in a while, and Dwayne had known where to look. Terri discovered an anomaly and a pattern, but what exactly had they found?
“Do we have the locations for the recipient of these messages?” asked Dwayne.
“Quantico is working on it. You have to realize it could be several people. There isn’t a single repeated address or even domain for that matter in the list,” she cautioned.
Dwayne looked up from the memo. Irv would know they were watching him, and if he embarked on a campaign to terrorize the government, he would ensure there was a mechanism to control the action. “How about the email the Senate Majority Leader received?”
“What about it?” asked Mary.
“Doesn’t it correspond to these other emails?”
Mary shook her head. “That one was sent through a remailer account in Switzerland. It is totally blind and quite unscrupulous. We would need to physically get to the server in order to track that message.” A remailer account enabled anyone anywhere to send a message with absolute anonymity. The catch was it had to be sent in the clear—no encryption.
“Yeah,” murmured Dwayne, “but couldn’t you track the activity to the remailer website?”
Mary shook her head. “It uses a proprietary secure shell that we don’t have a backdoor built into. Besides, that site uses gateway URLs to create more blind alleys, and it moves around.”
“What do you mean it moves around?”
Mary shrugged. “Our best guess is it is funded by either Columbian drug money or Middle Eastern terrorists. Regardless, there is enough money to relocate the server every seven to ten days. We never know where it is going to pop up next. They obviously can afford to employ some very smart people.”
“You’re saying these people would have been sympathetic to the email sent to the Majority Leader?” queried Dwayne.
“Most definitely.”
Dwayne scowled. He had Irv and then the man slipped away from him. “I’ll need the physical locations as soon as possible.”
“I’ll make it a priority,” replied Mary.
Feldman hardly waited for Mary to vanish down the elevator lobby before he darkened Dwayne’s door. He rapped on Dwayne’s open door and said, “Come on.”
Dwayne frowned. “What’s up?”
Feldman flicked an evidence bag, explaining, “You seem to have kicked over a hornet’s nest, and the Director wants to see you before we go much further.”
A jolt of adrenalin coursed through his body as he considered the implications of Feldman’s words. Meeting the Director again unsettled his coffee-laden stomach. The embattled Director resided inside a maelstrom of competing political interests, stretching from the White House to the AG to the Congress.
The FBI Director confronted a White House that generated scandals faster than regulations and maintained a Hoover-like control over the Congress using cherry-picked Bureau files. No one wished to confront the Bureau or the White House over the files in light of the bloody impeachment fight where a speaker-elect was derailed and a Congressional Chairman smeared. Those were the public bodies. The White House ran the President’s party like a mafia crime family using a battery of political hit men capable of launching politically lethal fusillades.
The Attorney General had developed stonewalling to a high art. During the President’s second term, she had successfully deflected every subpoena and document request from Republican controlled oversight committees. The razor-thin margins in the House emboldened the AG to ignore the law and adopt her trademark phrase: “It would be improper for me to comment on an ongoing investigation.”
The Republican Congress, battered by the Presidential bully pulpit, became the poster child for spinelessness. Oh, they would sputter and stammer angrily for the cameras, but when push came to shove there was remarkably little substance behind the bluster. No one had the stomach for a second impeachment battle, even though the evidence continued to mount.
Inside the Bureau, the Director waged a rear-guard action with his senior management. The traditional bad guys like kidnappers, bootleggers, and bank robbers were the measurement applied to the administration and the President who appointed him Director. He had his allies on the right and left who conversely congratulated him on his integrity and applauded his decision to not break ranks completely with the Justice Department.
Privately, the Director was sitting on a number of investigations. He was awaiting a new administration and a new Justice Department. He intended to resign if the Texas Governor became President and complete his term should the Vice President prevail. He had few friends in official Washington, and he constantly fought the established bureaucracy inside the Bureau. It was a daunting job, and he was burned out.
