Marine One

22

I DIALED TINNY. He answered his cell phone on the second ring. After some preliminary conversation where I told him of the meeting and we insulted each other and challenged each other's heritage, I asked, "You got anything new for me? We're in the last strokes of discovery and trial is right around the corner."

"Yeah, one thing, but what was the meeting about?"

"Case isn't going to settle."

"Never figured it would. Hackett wants this to go to trial and grandstand. It's his biggest moment on the world stage."

"No doubt. But the point of this is that Kathryn told me to tell you to clear your time. She wants you dedicating your time exclusively to this case. Same for all of our experts. It's balls-to-the-wall time, Tinny. And you've got to help me get to this Secret Service guy and prove who was going to be at Camp David. Everything may turn on that meeting and the timing."

"You're killing me. I can't just quit working on all my cases. I've got thirty or forty things I'm working on. I can't just tell them to sit there while I do this."

"You have to."

"Man, I don't know. I can clear a lot of it. There might still be a couple I'm going to have to do things on, but I'm with you. I've got to rent a damned car too."

"What happened to your Vette?"

"Some asshole covered it in paint."

"Construction?"

"No. I mean covered it. I was at Mercedes' eating breakfast. I come back out to my car and somebody has poured gallons of black paint all over it. Windshield, everywhere."

I felt a chill. "Who did it?"

"No idea, or I'd be over at his place right now helping him check in to the ER."

"You think it's related to our case?"

"No idea. Could be. It's a message from somebody."

"You been messing with anyone's wife?"

"Naw, man. I don't do that."

"Then what do you think?"

"Could be our case. Could be one of our State Department friend's boys. Or maybe Hackett knows who I am and had one of his goons hit me for pissing all over their little scam with the bogus witness. Hard to say."

"I don't like it," I said. "They may be talking to me."

"Pretty indirect if they are."

"Call me tonight so we can go over some things."

"Catch you later-"

"Wait, you said there was one thing you wanted to tell me about."

"Yeah, there's somebody in Annapolis who is talking about you."

"No doubt."

"On a cell phone. I'm working on it, and I probably shouldn't tell you anything 'cause this is premature. I'm tracking it down, but somebody is having a lot of conversations with somebody else from New York. At least it's a 212 area code. But you're the subject. Hard to know exactly what they're talking about, 'cause they're assuming somebody's listening. They talk in shorthand or code that I can't quite get. But somebody wants things to go badly for you."

"Male or female?" I asked, my mind racing. "Male, probably white."

"What do you make of it? Could it be a journalist?"

"I don't know, I can just tell that there's something going on, where you're the subject, and they're trying to hide something."

"I don't follow you."

"That's all I got right now. One other thing. I… you know I ain't afraid of nobody. Well, one of those cases I got to keep an eye on is about an Asian gang member here in D.C. He's headed for trial on murder charges, and it's ugly. But the last couple of weeks I've noticed an Asian guy now and then. Has a sort of sophisticated look. Doesn't look like a gang guy to me. Could be the head cheese, but they never show themselves. This guy is different. I've seen him maybe twice, maybe three times. Don't know what to make of it, but I got to keep an eye out. Lots going on, Michael."

"See him around your car?"

"No."

"You've seen him like… he's following you?"

"Can't say. I see somebody I'm not looking for more than once in a couple of weeks in D.C.? I figure something's up. I have no idea who this guy is. Could be an IRS agent for all I know. I'm just telling you what's going on."

"You think he's one of Hackett's investigators?"

"Possible, but I doubt it. But watch yourself. Lots of things going on that we don't know about, Michael. And for what it's worth, I'm getting a feeling Collins had nothing to do with this accident."

"Feeling? What the hell am I supposed to do with that?"

"Don't know. Just a feeling I have. You ever feel a shadow?"

"I don't know. I guess you feel a coolness that wasn't there before."

"Just like that."

"Shit, Tinny."

"I got to go. Hey, by the way, you had any e-mail issues?"

"Meaning what?"

"I don't know. This phone conversation with somebody in Annapolis, they mentioned e-mail. I don't know what he's talking about, but I just wanted you to be aware that there may be something out there. Maybe someone is going to spam your server, I really don't know. Just beware. Call me in the morning." He hung up.

I didn't like the idea of somebody spamming our server or crashing our e-mail server or worse yet slipping some worm or virus into our system. That would be a disaster. I called Ralph, our outside IT guy. He answered his cell on the first ring. "Hey, Ralph, Mike Nolan."

"Hey. What can I do for you?"

"How secure do you feel we are? Could someone cram a virus or worm or something into our system and ruin our databases and the like?"

"Anything's possible. If there's somebody out there malicious and smart enough. They can ruin pretty much any computer system, particularly those that aren't hardened against attack, which yours isn't."

"Set us up. I want to make sure no one can sabotage us."

"I can start doing some things. I'll check out the whole system."

"This morning. I want you over there within an hour."

"I've got stuff backed up to two weeks from now."

"Within an hour or I'm gonna get somebody else. I've got to get this done, this is not negotiable."

"Mike, come on."

"I'm serious as a heart attack. You've got to be there in an hour or I'm going to get Dolores on the phone and get the next best guy. I don't have any time to mess with this. If somebody is going to attack our computer system, if I don't stop them now, when I know there may be something coming-"

"All right, all right, I'm on my way. I'm going to forward all the hate e-mails I get from other clients to you."

"Please do. See you there."

When I walked in and closed the door behind me, Dolores was startled. "Good morning, or rather afternoon, Mr. Nolan. You don't look so good, did you get some lunch?"

"Actually I didn't. Would you mind having the deli deliver a turkey sandwich for me? Whole wheat."

"No problem, sir. Anything else?"

"No. Messages?"

"There were two or three reporters sitting here in our waiting area all morning. I finally told them that you weren't coming back all day and they took off."

"Where'd you hear that?"

"I made it up. I was tired of looking at them."

"Well done."

"Thank you."

"Is Ralph here?"

"Yes, sir, he's back in the server room."

"Thanks." I left my briefcase and jacket behind her at the reception area and walked to the back of the office. I went into the computer room, which was across from the coffee room, and found Ralph sitting on a folding chair with his laptop in his lap and a cable hooking him up to our server. He seemed to be running two or three software scanners at the same time. I looked at his screen and had no idea what he was doing.

"Hey."

"Hi, Mike, how's it going?" he said without looking at me. "Good. So can you upgrade our security?"

"Sure, but something's going on here."

"Meaning?" I asked, still staring at his baffling screen. "Look at this."

It meant nothing to me. It could have been a finger painting. "I have no idea what I'm looking at."

He pointed to the lower-left corner of the screen. "This is a graphic representation of your e-mail and Internet traffic. It's sort of like looking at a galaxy in the distance through the Hubble telescope, where they look at certain invisible light ranges and make them visible?"

"Not sure what that means. What you got?"

"Well, this area right over here should be symmetrical." He took his mechanical pencil from his pocket and pointed. "See this thing right here, this little dent?"

"Yeah. What of it?"

"It's a tunnel."

"A tunnel? To what?"

"Well, every server, yours included, has a system set up to channel access to and from the Internet, control access to e-mail accounts, etc. This line over here represents the symmetry that should be on the screen, but there's this one section that's missing, like a piece that has been chipped away. Or actually a better way to look at it is sort of what it is. It's like you have a country with borders set up, and somebody has built a tunnel underneath the border. It allows people and things to go in and out through the tunnel without being noticed. They don't cross the border, they don't go through the firewall or the virus scan or the other security software."

"What does it mean?"

"Somebody who really knows what they're doing has access to your server and has built a tunnel."

"Can you tell what it's been used for?"

"Not really. It's like a real tunnel. Things go through it coming in, and things go through it going out. And unless the things are actually in the tunnel when you're looking, you won't be able to trace them. But…" He raised his hand and pointed his finger toward the ceiling as if he had one piece of information that was much more significant. "Sometimes there are wires through the tunnel, just like in a real tunnel. They have to sometimes have air and light, and they need wires or things that you can follow. This one has a wire. It may be traceable."

Ralph worked on the keyboard for some time, then turned toward me with the laptop still perched on his knees. "It's a tunnel, like I said. Somebody has attached a stairway from your e-mail to the tunnel." He could see my puzzlement.

"What it does"-he thought-"what it does is take every e-mail that you send or receive and duplicates it and sends it through the tunnel."

"So I don't get them?"

"No, you get them. What you'd see is just what you'd always see. But somebody else sees it too."

"Somebody else is reading my e-mail?"

"At the very least."

"Who the hell is doing this?"

"Impossible to say."

"How? Would they have to get into the firm physically? Has someone broken into the firm?"

"No, they wouldn't have to be here physically. I said it's like a wire. It isn't a physical wire. Every computer is easily identifiable on a net, and they identified yours, and that's the one that is being used. I can tell you that this is from outside the firm."

"Shit, Ralph. Can you fix it?"

"Sure." He started typing away on his computer. "Are there any others? Would this be like an individual's e-mail site or log-in address?"

"Yeah, it is individual, but I checked all the others. Yours is the only one that has this."

"Does it have access to my computer? Can it get in and see my outlines and my Word documents and the like?"

"Only if you send them as attachments in e-mail."

"How sophisticated is this? Is this hard to do?"

"Top one percent of computer geeks might know how to do this."

I jammed my hands in my back pocket and started pacing back and forth in the room. I stared at his screen for a minute or two, considering. I said, "Tell you what. I've got another idea. Just leave it like it is."