At all costs

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

In her haste to make an 8:00 A.M. meeting, Bonnie Jerome had time only to change out of her Nike walking shoes and into her pumps before scurrying down the hall to get checked off somebody’s list for attending her umpteenth mandatory security briefing. Spies were everywhere, the speaker had told her, and the spies knew who she was. In fact, they knew who everyone was. If you worked for the FBI-from a file clerk to the director himself-they had your picture and a dossier. People like Bonnie and the technicians who worked for her were just as likely to be approached by a foreign agent as was anyone else-perhaps even more so, given that technical types had no arrest powers.

Mentally, she’d checked out of the briefing once the guy got to the part about foreign spies seducing unsuspecting sources at the popular Washington, D.C., nightspots. The thought of it made her smile. If last night’s conquest-a hunky Georgetown student named Jonathan-was a spy, then he’d earned every secret he’d taken home with him.

The meeting finally ended, precisely three hours after it had begun, and now she could get back down to the business of being a computer geek. What she and her people did for the FBI could just as well have been done for any other agency in the government; or even the private sector. They made sure that the complex knot of computer systems-both hardware and soft-ran as smoothly as possible, thus keeping the world safe from the Red hordes, or whatever was the perceived threat du jour. In a town that was perpetually fissured by politics, Bonnie truly didn’t care about any of it, so long as her cats remained well fed, her rent was paid on time, and these woefully out-of-date pieces of crap they called computers continued to process the information they were designed to digest. Her compartmentalized Top Secret clearance granted her access to just about everything the system had to offer, but none of it held her interest. Whatever she saw during the course of a day was forgotten by happy hour.

At least, that was usually the case. Today would be different. Just a few minutes after returning to her desk, she discovered in her inbox an urgent message directly related to the content of information within the system, rather than on the function of the system itself. She could think of only one other time it had happened-a security breach in one of the older systems in the network, the warning for which surfaced as an error message to one of her programmers. In that case, Bonnie had merely bumped it to the security people and was done.

This morning’s message was different, however, and it came attached to a cover note written in hot-pink ink on a lime-green sticky.

Bonnie-This popped up as an error message at 0321 hrs. this a.m. Thought you’d want to handle it. I’d do it, but I’ve got kids to put through school.

— TR

He signed it with a dippy, ridiculous smiley face.

TR would be Ted Rosencranze, her assistant in charge of midnight shifts. Pulling the sticky off the printout, she read further. Apparently, someone over at EPA had tapped into a computer file that had been tagged by one of the old Justice systems for surveillance, back in… she checked the date again… 1983! Somehow the tag was forgotten, or maybe it expired. Anyway, for whatever reason, it was never transferred to the new system. The instructions were quite specific and, as such, rather unremarkable: in the event that these files were accessed by anyone for any reason, the case agent was to be personally notified right away.

At first, Bonnie didn’t see what the big deal was. This message contained nothing that Ted couldn’t have handled on his own. Then she looked more closely and saw the name of the case agent.

“Well, I’ll be damned.” She paused for a moment to figure out what she should do. Finally, she shrugged and reached for her Bureau phone directory and thumbed through the pages until she found the entry she needed. After one more short pause to collect herself, she lifted the handset and punched in the extension.

A cheerful yet stuffy-sounding woman picked up after the first ring. “Deputy Director Frankel’s office,” she said.