Red White and Black and Blue

Chapter Twenty-three

The first name that leaped out was Nicholas Giannopolous.

Blabbedy-blah Nicholas Giannopolous this, blabbedy-blah Nicholas Giannopolous that. Nicholas Giannopolous illegal penetrations of computer systems at the State University of New York at Albany; Nicholas Giannopolous illegal hacking of confidential files at Shenango Life Insurance Company; Nicholas Giannopolous illegal privacy violations of personnel records at Burton Hendricks Elementary School, Rotterdam, New York. What an accomplished technician Bud was!

Then my name started appearing. Donald Strachey impersonating a collector of funds for a scholarship in memory of deceased SUNY student Gregory Stiver; Donald Strachey impersonating a representative of the British Broadcasting Corporation in order to gain entree at SUNY and procure private university information under false pretenses; Donald Strachey impersonating a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in order to obtain confidential personnel information at Hall Creek Community College, Hall Creek, New York.

Then fifty or sixty pages of transcripts of telephone conversations between me and Timmy, me and Bud Giannopolous, me and Jenny Stiver, me and my pal at APD, me and Millicent Blessing's secretary, me and Tom Dunphy, among others.

I flipped through the pages and now understood that my car had not been wired, and my computer had not been penetrated. It was my cell phone. My cell had been hacked.

I said, "Where did you get this stuff, Mr. Louderbush?"

"It was shoved through the mail slot at my home in Kurtzburg last night. There were two other copies besides this one. One is safely stowed away. The other I had sent by courier half an hour ago to Tom Dunphy."

His wife watched me with contemptuous eyes.

"Any idea who gathered this all up?"

"None whatsoever. Do you?"

"None offhand."

"It's quite a bundle for an ambitious federal prosecutor to sink his teeth into," Louderbush said. "A federal prosecutor or a reporter from the Times or the Times Union who's interested in illegality and corruption over at the Shy McCloskey gubernatorial campaign. It looks to me as if there's Pulitzer Prize potential here."

"It's all pretty innocuous, really."

"Impersonating a federal agent?"

"It's not treasonable in this case, although the law does frown on it."

"And are you recording our conversation as we speak, Mr.

Strachey?"

"I might be."

"Ah. I might be, too."

I noted that the missus's handbag was aimed right at me.

"So, is it safe to say," Louderbush went on, "that we have arrived at a point of stalemate?"

Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson

My impulse was to call Timmy, but when I felt for my phone the thing seemed toxic in my pocket and I let go of it. I couldn't call Dunphy either. As I walked up State Street, the phone sounded its fluty little tune. I saw that it was Dunphy calling me; he must have received a report from the Clean-Tech listeners, and he would be instructing me to fly to Brazil for an extended period. I tossed the phone in a trash barrel in front of City Hall, then thought better of that and reached in and retrieved it. Bud Giannopolous would want to have a look at it.

I made it to Crow Street, not panicky but hyperalert, and picked up my car. I remembered vaguely where Giannopolous lived, in an attic in the Pine Hills section of Albany, ten minutes away. The big frame houses looked a lot alike on Giannopolous's street, but I was able to pick out his place from the wire antennas and satellite dishes on the roof. His building looked like a CIA safe house in Bethesda.

I would have been followed, but I didn't care. Somebody already knew about Bud, and about me as a client of Bud's, so what were they going to do next, say boo?

I parked the car on the street and buzzed Bud's intercom.

"Yo."

"Strachey."

"Abandon hope all ye who enter here."

"You're telling me."

The door clicked open, and I climbed the two wheezing flights. Somebody on the second floor had been smoking pot for breakfast and I took a deep breath.

Bud had a headset on when he opened his door, and I said, "Houston, we have a problem."

He gave me a little oh-no-bother wave of the hand as I stepped into a room that was piled high with Bud's poli-sci and world affairs book collection on one wall and a long table heaped with computers and other electronic gear against another. A dormer window looked down on the backyard of the house next door, where a man had a motorbike upside down and was fiddling with its front wheel. A poster on the rear wall of Bud's room showed a picture of some pita bread and a bowl of dip and bore the words I am hummus, nothing is alien to me.

"Can I speak freely in here?" I asked him.

"If not here, where?"

Bud was roughly five-feet-two and bore a striking resemblance to the one-time emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie: ginger-skinned, high forehead, noble brow. Both Bud's bearing and his costume were more casual. He wore no medals and bore no scepter, and his outfit was non-imperial: ripped jeans, flip-flops, a faded T-shirt with an image on it of a squid wearing a hat that looked like a satellite dish. Nor would a crown sit easily on Bud's spiky little dreads.

"We may need lawyers," I said. "Or at the very least PR firms."

"Nah. What's up?"

"My cell phone was hacked."

He seated himself on his throne, an oversized wheeled office chair with cracked plastic armrests, and I perched on a bench. Stacked next to me were hundreds of techie magazines and computer catalogs, and the piles shifted ominously as I brushed against them.

"Not a big deal getting into cell phones," he said. "I've done it. All you need is an asset at whichever phone company it is who will give you the PIN code for anybody's phone."

"I guess this is against the law?"

He chuckled. "I would certainly hope so. What are we here, freakin' Hamas?"

"Well, in this instance there may be consequences-have been already." I retrieved the envelope from the Price Chopper supermarket bag the Louderbushes had provided for me and watched while Bud read through the transcripts and other documents.

"Holy Moly."

"Yeah."

"This is the product of a consummate professional."

"Do you recognize a professional colleague's work signature?"

"Well, no. It's not that easy. I'd need more samples, and I'd need to study them over time."

"I'll have to have a new phone, I guess. And number."

"I can fix you up."

"Are you and I going to go to prison, Bud?"

"Ha ha ha!"

Why was I not reassured? "I guess you can see from the transcripts what I've been working on. The Shy McCloskey 206

Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson campaign hired me to prove that Kenyon Louderbush has had abusive sexual relationships with young men. This information-it's true, by the way-is supposed to drive him out of the gubernatorial race. I just met with Louderbush and his wife, and they handed me this bundle. They now consider me-and the McCloskey campaign-neutralized."

"Wow."

"So I'm in a bit of a pickle. I haven't talked to the McCloskey people about it yet."

"Kenyon Louderbush. My respect for that sorry old right-wing hack just went up."

"Not for his mixing sex with violence."

"No, that's creepy and disgusting. But I'm impressed as shit with his technical abilities-or somebody's. Any idea who did this stuff for him? It's ballsy and it's state of the art."

"I thought you said anybody could do it with inside technical data from a phone company. Verizon in my case."

"That's the easy part. It's doing it without the account holder becoming suspicious that's tougher. You haven't had any dropped calls or heard any weird beeps or clicks lately?"

"None that I noticed."

"Very nice work on somebody's part."

"Louderbush doesn't know who did it. This appalling packet was sent to him anonymously. Or so he claims. He could be lying. He's an experienced liar."

"This other hodge-podge of stuff-people you misrepresented yourself to in person supposedly. Can't you backtrack and find out who they talked to about you? It obviously wasn't law enforcement, or you would have heard 207

Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson from the feds by now, or at a minimum the attorney general's folks. Impersonating a BBC representative-that's a good one. I'll have to remember that. Can you do Telemundo?"

"I plan to backtrack, yes, and find out what I can. But now my cover is blown with these people-or some of them. It's hard to tell how many of my misdeeds were gleaned from the hacked phone calls and how many from interviewees ratting me out."

"Meanwhile, how can I be of assistance?"

"Can you hack into Louderbush's phone calls?"

"I can try. It may depend on which phone company he uses."

"I want to know who he's talked to in the past week and, if possible, what was said."

"Who he talked to, sure. Otherwise I can only get you voice mails. If you're talking about the next two weeks, I can maybe do better."

"Do what you can. Thank you."

A loud bang rattled the house, and then we heard a low whoosh.

"What's that?"

"The guy next door works on motor bikes in his yard. I hope he's all right."

We looked out the window, and the motorbike repairman was fine-and trotting through an open gate and out toward the street.

I followed Bud down the stairs and out the front door. My car was ablaze, the flames rising high and licking the lower branches of a handsome maple tree, with oily black smoke 208

Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson billowing and a frightful stench spreading across the neighborhood.