Orchid Beach

CHAPTER

48

After work, Holly drove out to Jackson’s house, with Hurd Wallace following in his own car. She looked in her rearview mirror from time to time, wondering if she were doing the right thing. Hurd, she admitted to herself, had been her prime suspect, and she had not gotten used to the idea that he might be on her side of this thing. She had made the decision, late in the afternoon, to bring him inside the investigation, and she had made it on little more than some newly informed intuition.

She turned into Jackson’s driveway, drove down the narrow lane and parked next to one of the FBI vans. It appeared that the whole team would be present. She waved Hurd inside and came upon a scene that was, by now, all too familiar. Harry Crisp was on the phone, the agents were drinking beer and watching sports on television and Jackson was out back, grilling something. She stuck her head outside and told him there’d be one more for dinner.

Harry hung up the phone. “Who’s this?” he asked, clearly uncomfortable with the new face.

“Harry,” Holly said, “this is my deputy chief, Hurd Wallace.” She introduced all the other team members.

“Forgive me, Holly,” Harry said, “but I’m a little confused at this turn of events. Isn’t this the guy…”

“Yeah, he is, or rather, he was. I’m satisfied that he’s not my mole, and I want him brought fully into this.”

“I understand your suspicions,” Wallace said, “but I assure you, I’ve never given any departmental information to anyone on the outside. I just want to help.”

“Okay,” Harry said, waving him to a chair. “Have a seat. Looks like dinner is ready.”

Jackson came in with a huge platter of grilled fish and set it on the table. Nobody said grace.

When the food had been consumed and the dishes stacked, Harry got down to business.

“Okay,” he said, “let’s start with our black bag job. Bill and Jim went over the fence at Westover Motors last night and nearly got eaten by a very large German shepherd.”

There was laughter around the table.

“We tranquilized the thing,” Bill said. “I expect he felt a little woozy this morning, but we removed the dart, so nobody will be the wiser, except the dog, and he’s too hung over to talk.”

“Then they got the bug installed, and it was a good job,” Harry said. “We’ve got a recorder on the frequency, and we check it every few hours. Same with the walkie-talkie frequencies that Palmetto Gardens is using.” The driveway chime rang, and Harry stopped. “That’ll be Rita,” he said.

“Who’s Rita?” Jackson asked.

“You’re about to find out.” Harry stood up and walked to the door in time to meet a young woman at the door. She was no more than five-two, slim but shapely, with big, curly hair, dressed in tight jeans and a sweater.

“Jackson, Holly, Hurd, this is Rita Morales, from our office.”

Everybody waved, and so did Rita. They made room for her at the table.

“You eat?” Harry asked.

“McDonald’s,” she replied. “Smells better here.”

“No more McDonald’s,” Jackson said. “The best grub in town is at my house.”

“How’d it go today?” Harry asked.

“I’m hired. I start tomorrow morning. I have to be at the service gate at seven.”

“Do you know where you’ll be working?”

She shook her head, making her curly hair shake. “They wouldn’t say. Said I’d be assigned somewhere tomorrow morning, and it wouldn’t necessarily be the same assignment every day. They put me through a kind of indoctrination this afternoon at the employment office, along with three other women.”

“What kind of indoctrination?”

“Everything is strict: we wear a uniform, we don’t speak unless spoken to, we don’t hobnob with any other employees. We can’t make or receive phone calls, and no cellulars are allowed; they said we’d be searched.”

“Don’t take a badge or a gun in there,” Harry said.

“No kidding, Harry? I thought I’d wear an FBI jacket and body armor.”

“All right, all right, I just don’t want you to get your—”

“Tit in a wringer?” She turned to Holly. “You see what a woman has to put up with in the Bureau?” she said. “They’re all Neanderthals.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth, Rita,” Harry said. “What else?”

“That’s about it. You’ve finally turned me into a domestic servant, Harry. What’s next? Turning tricks?”

Harry turned red. “Rita, I wouldn’t send you in there if anybody else could do it.”

“Well, that’s a ringing endorsement of my abilities,” she replied.

“Jesus, I just can’t win with you, can I, Rita?”

“No, Harry, you can’t.” She turned to Holly again. “The director himself assigned me to keep Harry as humble as possible. It isn’t easy.”

“All right, I’ve got some news,” Harry said, anxious to change the subject. “I heard from my guy at the NSA again today. They’re monitoring Palmetto Gardens again, and guess what?”

“Okay, what, Harry?” Rita asked.

“The last time they monitored the place all they got was commodity trades. This time, they got exactly the same thing.”

“This is news?” Bill asked.

“No, you don’t understand,” Harry said. “They got exactly the same thing—the same trades.”

“Why would they make the same trades over and over?” Bill asked.

“The trades are on a loop. They’re playing a tape over and over.”

“Sorry,” Bill said, “I still don’t get it. You’re saying that they’ve got this satellite station set up just to play a tape on a loop?”

“That’s what it sounds like, but that’s not all that’s happening,” Harry said. “The NSA processed the transmissions, and they’re getting microbursts between the trades.”

“What’s a microburst?” Jackson asked.

“You know what a microdot is?”

“You mean, when they photograph a page and reduce it to the size of a dot?”

“Exactly. A microburst is the audio equivalent of a microdot. You take a string of words or a message, and you speed it up, I don’t know, a thousand times, or something, and what you get is a microburst of sound. It’s received…wherever it’s received, and it’s slowed down again so the message can be heard.”

“So what are the microbursts saying?”

“We don’t know. They’re encoded.”

“Isn’t that what the NSA does? Break codes?”

“Yeah, but it’s a lot more complex than it used to be. Now that everybody has got computers, codes can be constructed that are much, much more sophisticated than, say, the Enigma codes the Germans used in World War Two. And, of course, they can be changed daily, with a few keyboard entries on the computer. The government is trying to limit the development of codes, or to make the encoders include a key that guys like us can use to break them.”

“But Palmetto Gardens isn’t giving us any keys, are they?” Bill asked.

“Right. So it’s going to take time to break down these microbursts and see what they mean. All we’ve got right now is meaningless strings of numbers.”

Holly spoke up. “What are you getting from the bug in Barney’s car?”

“Chitchat, mostly. One good piece of news: Cracker Mosely seems to be scared enough of you not to tell Barney everything you asked him yesterday. Barney questioned him closely, and all he said was that you threatened to call his parole officer if he continued to do security work. Barney has made him a radio operator.”

“That puts Cracker right in the middle of the security office, instead of out in a patrol car, doesn’t it?” she asked.

“That’s right, Holly.”

“So the next step is to pick up Cracker again the first chance we get and really turn him.”

“Good thinking.”

“I can’t have my people pick him up, though. We’ve still got our mole.”

“We’re surveilling both gates,” Harry said. “Anybody sees Cracker—and we’ll give you a photograph—call me, and we’ll get him alone for a few minutes and threaten him beyond his wildest nightmares.”

“Good,” Holly said.

“Yeah,” Jackson echoed, “real good. And at some point, I hope to get an opportunity to tell him that I was the one who put you onto him.”

“I’ll see if I can arrange that,” Harry said.