The Red Horseman

4

On Monday morning at seven-thirty Toad Tarkington opened the door to the DIA computer facility and signed the log. “Richard Harper, please,” he said to the receptionist when she came over to examine his pass. She had a cup of coffee in her hand and was polishing off the last of a doughnut.

“I’m sorry, but he doesn’t work here anymore.”

“Say again.”

She shrugged. “He doesn’t work here now. He’s gone.”

“Did he quit or what?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t come in last Wednesday. Or maybe Wednesday was his last day. Anyway, I heard someone say he transferred to another government agency. Can someone else help you?”

Toad Tarkington leaned his elbows on the counter and gave her a shy grin. “He was in one of our baseball pools and won a hundred bucks.”

“Maybe he’ll call you.”

“He doesn’t know he won. We don’t roll for the numbers on the grid until Friday.”

She smiled and shrugged. “I’m sorry. Maybe if you call personnel…”

“I’ll try that,” Toad said. “In the meantime, I need a little work done. I need someone to check the CIA data base.”

“Mabel can help you. Right over there.” She pointed.

Mabel’s terminal was in a corner. Toad removed a sheet of paper from a manila envelope stamped top secret and laid it in front of her. On it were two names: Paul R. Tanana and Rodney D. Hicks. “Please see if these two are on the CIA data base,” Toad asked.

Mabel apparently knew her way around a computer. Thirty seconds later she spoke. “No.”

“Nothing?” Toad asked.

“Nada.”

“Not employees?”

“Nope.”

“How about the FBI data base? Can you access it?”

“It’ll take a bit,” she murmured as she whacked keys. Toad watched the words and letters on the screen come and go, come and go. Last week when Harper played with the computer Toad had other things on his mind. Today he was interested.

All this high-tech…before it came along you would have just looked in the telephone directory.

The telephone book!

Toad spotted a directory under the desk and reached for it. He should have done this yesterday.

“I don’t have any Roger Hicks,” Mabel told him. “I have a Robert Hicks and a Rose Hicks and two R. Hicks.”

Toad flipped pages. “Could you print out what you have on the R. Hicks entries?”

“Sure. And you don’t have to look in the phone book. We have access to the phone company’s files. If they have an account with the phone company, we’ll see it. Maybe if you could tell me what you’re looking for?”

“Whatever I can get,” Tarkington said. He put the phone book back on the bottom shelf of the desk. “Check Tanana, then the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. And how about the Visa and MasterCard lists. I’ll take anything.”

But he already knew what the answers were going to be. When Mabel gave him the printouts there it was in black-and-white. Each man had both Visa and MasterCard credit cards, but they had never made any charges on the cards. These accounts were less than a month old. The driver’s licenses were real, but the addresses weren’t. Burke, Virginia, had no such street as Wood Duck Drive, where Tanana’s license said he lived. Hicks’ address was equally bogus. The telephone company had never heard of either man.

So the identities were fake.

“Anything else?” Mabel asked. She was still on the right side of thirty and had a cute, intelligent face.

“Well,” said Toad Tarkington, and grinned conspiratorially. “There is one little thing. Richard Harper won a hundred bucks in our baseball pool this weekend and we don’t know where to get in touch with him. Could you check him on the CIA data base?”

“That isn’t official business,” Mabel told him primly.

“I know. But I’ll bet Richard would like the hundred.”

“Commander, we’re not supposed…”

Toad gazed into her eyes and gave her an undiluted dose of the ol’ Tarkington charm that had melted panties on three continents. “Call me Toad. All my friends do.”

Mabel swallowed once and lowered her eyes. “Okay,” she said and turned back to the keyboard. She punched keys.

“Here it is,” she told him. “He transferred to the CIA computer facility at Langley. His office phone number is 775-0601.”

“Lemme write that down,” Toad said, and did so on a piece of scratch paper he snagged from beside the terminal. “Thanks a lot, Mabel. I’ll tell Richard he owes you a lunch.”

“You were right,” Toad told his boss. “Tanana and Hicks are fake identities.”

Jake Grafton just nodded.

“How’d you know?”

Jake shrugged. “They wanted us to see that ID.”

“And the analyst who worked on the photo of Herb Tenney, Richard Harper, now works at the CIA. As of this past Wednesday or Thursday.”

“So he was probably the leak,” Jake said.

“Yessir.” Toad found a seat. “What are we going to do now?”

“I don’t know,” Jake said.

Toad frowned.

“If you have any suggestions, let’s hear them.”

Toad shrugged. “I’m just the hired help around here, Admiral. You’re the guy getting the big bucks.”

“Someone thought this out very carefully,” Jake said after a moment. “They wanted to scare us, and they did, but there was the possibility that we could be induced to impale ourselves on our own swords. So they came equipped with fake identities and bogus Langley passes. And they drove leisurely from my house to your house to give me time to call you or catch up.”

“I didn’t check the passes,” Toad said.

“Oh, they’re as fake as the driver’s licenses and credit cards. You can bet on it. And if I charged off to the front office with this wild tale about CIA employees threatening us and demanded that General Brown go after someone’s head, I would have merely discredited myself, made myself look like a fool. And put General Brown in a difficult position.”

“Too bad we didn’t take photos of those clowns.”

“Umm.”

“So what are you going to do?” Toad asked again.

“I’ll have to think about it. If I go to General Brown I’m going to have to tell him about that Herb Tenney photo, and I don’t know that that’s a good idea. We still don’t know a goddamn thing.”

“The CIA’s reaction to the photo proves that they helped Keren depart for eternity.”

“If those two worked for the CIA. What if Tanana and Hicks were Mossad agents trying to make me suspicious of the CIA?”

“We’re going to have to tell General Brown just to cover our fannies,” Toad said.

“Maybe. And that may make General Brown overly suspicious of the CIA, which might have been the Mossad’s goal when they gave us that photo. If it was the Mossad. The whole thing’s a mare’s nest. A military that stops believing its intelligence service is fumbling around in the dark. As if we had a lot of light now…”

Toad was thinking of Judith Farrell. Grafton had implied before that Farrell might have been intentionally trying to harm the United States, but Toad had automatically rejected it. Now he began to consider the possibility seriously.

“I’ll bet someone at Langley would like to know where we got that photo,” Jake muttered.

But if that was the case, wouldn’t that be the first priority? Why the simple intimidation attempt? It didn’t compute. If it were the CIA. But the Mossad angle was even more unlikely.

What was wrong here? He was missing something. It was right in front of him and he couldn’t see it. But what?

His eyes came to rest on Tarkington, who was staring at him. Toad looked away guiltily.

What? He went over it again, from Judith Farrell’s meeting with Toad all the way through this morning’s verification of the false identities of the agents.

Toad said something.

“What?”

“It’s like Rubik’s Cube, isn’t it?” Toad repeated.

Rubik’s Cube had a solution, although the solution was complex and one needed a good sense of spatial relationships to figure it out. Jake Grafton had spent a miserable week wrestling with a cube some years back when Amy gave him one for Christmas. Finally his next-door neighbor showed him how the trick was done.

The problems Jake had learned to solve had much simpler solutions: one usually became apparent when you backed off and looked at the forest instead of the individual trees.

Okay, Jake thought, by the numbers — One: if someone at Langley knows about the photo, why isn’t he trying to discover where and how I acquired it?

Maybe he is but I don’t know about it.

Unlikely, Jake decided. He and Tarkington were the only people who knew the answers. And Rita and Judith Farrell. But they don’t know about Rita. They might know about Judith Farrell or have an agent in the Mossad, but that would be a complex solution, only acceptable if there are no simple ones. There must be a simple explanation.

Two: the person who sent the goons on Friday night isn’t curious.

Why not? Because he already knows.

How?

Jake Grafton’s eyes focused and he looked again at Toad, who was watching him askance.

“No,” Jake said.

“No?”

“Not like Rubik’s Cube.”

The admiral pulled around a sheet of paper and picked up a pencil. On it he wrote “This office is bugged.”

Toad came over and looked at the words. “You think?” he murmured.

Jake nodded. He got up, removed his jacket and draped it over the back of his chair, loosened his tie and began to look. Toad started on the other side of the room.

In five minutes they had ruled out the obvious, a microphone behind a painting or under a desk. “Let’s go for a walk,” Jake suggested.

“It’s nothing obvious,” Jake told Toad as they walked toward the cafeteria. “Nothing conventional. If it was, the sweeps would have discovered it.” The office was swept for listening devices twice a week at random intervals.

“Maybe it’s the telephone. We’ll have to take that apart. And how about the window vibrator?” Toad suggested. This device used elevator music to vibrate the glass pane and foil any parabolic listening device aimed at the window. “What if it isn’t a real vibrator?”

“Perhaps our eavesdropper has a parabolic antennae aimed at the window,” Jake said, “and is unscrambling the tape with a powerful computer, like a Cray?”

“That’s a possibility,” Toad admitted after he thought about it. “Are you sure about the bug?”

“No,” Jake told him. “But a listening device would explain a lot. And not some simple piece of Radio Shack junk. Something computerized, something so sophisticated we don’t see it for what it is.”

“If they’re using that window as a sounding board, about all we can do is put another music source near the window, like a portable radio, and complicate the signal. But I think we should search that office until we find a bug or can swear there isn’t one.”

“Go down to the maintenance office and get tools. Screwdrivers, pliers, wrenches, and a voltage meter.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“And a pipe wrench.”

They started on the telephone. They disassembled the plastic box and tested the microphone in the headset and in the desk unit to see if it really went dead when the phone was on the hook. It worked as they thought it should.

Next the light fixtures were removed from their sockets and examined, then reinstalled. The soundproof ceiling tiles were taken down and the overhead and tile framework examined. They moved the furniture and rolled back the carpet. Nothing.

The heating and cooling duct vents were dirty but innocent.

Toad pointed toward the polished walnut molding that framed the door and window and edged the walls.

Jake examined the trim. He rated it because he was the deputy director of the DIA. The nails that held the wood in place were covered with varnish.

He shook his head at Toad and pointed toward the radiator.

The old steam radiator was no longer in use, but the steam pipes were still installed. They used the pipe wrench on the ring nuts.

And there it was.

With the nuts off the steam intake and outlet pipes, they wrestled the radiator out a half inch or so, just enough to reveal the insulated wire that went through the inlet pipe.

So the whole radiator was a sounding board. Inside the cast-iron unit there must be a sensing unit, more likely two or three of them. The signals went out through the wire to God knows where, and there the readings were tape-recorded. An analysis of the tape using the known vibration characteristics of the radiator would produce an electronic signal that could be processed into speech.

There was nothing for an electronic sweep to find. Yet whoever had installed this unit had merely to run the signal through his computer to hear everything said inside the office.

Jake used the pipe wrench to pound a hole in the wall. The pipe made a left turn inside the wall.

“Come on.”

Out in the corridor Toad was ready to pound another hole in the drywall when Jake stopped him. “Let’s find the telephone switchboxes. They probably have it routed through the phone system. Go call the telephone repair people and get someone up here on the double.”

The telephone switching boxes were in the basement. The system technician opened one of the boxes and Jake drew back in amazement. Hundreds of wires. “How do you know which is which?”

“Well, sir, just tell me the phone number and I’ll show you the connection.”

“I don’t know the phone number.”

“Well, everything coming into this box has a number.”

Now Jake understood. Somewhere in the building there was a tape recorder or recorders — a monitoring station — hooked up to a telephone. All the eavesdropper had to do was telephone the proper number, punch in a code and the monitoring station would obediently belch forth all its data, which could then be processed by a computer into speech.

The technician was still talking. “…they built this building during World War II and have been hooking up telephones ever since. The last big telephone update we did we added more lines and used the old ones where we could. But there’s no blueprints or diagrams or anything like that. It’s fucking spaghetti.”

They could establish what line it was, of course, by trial and error. Some of the lines were undoubtedly not supposed to be hooked up. But why bother? “Thanks, anyway,” Jake said. “I appreciate you showing us this.”

Back in Jake’s office Toad Tarkington cut the wire going into the radiator.

“They know everything,” he said disgustedly.

“Apparently.”

“They even got the conversation about binary chemicals.”

“Yep. And one of those goons alluded to it Friday night. He said what a terrible thing it would be if Amy died of heart failure. I should have known right then. Goddamnit!”

The more he thought about the situation the angrier he became.

“Goddamn those bastards!”

General Albert Sidney Brown didn’t get angry, he went ballistic. He listened to Jake tell him about the bug in the radiator with an air of disbelief and growing bewilderment, but when Toad used the pipe wrench to disassemble the radiator in the general’s plush corner office and he saw his wire, he went into an apoplectic rage. He spluttered, his face turned a deep crimson. When he recovered slightly he began to curse. He gave a rich performance at a full-throated volume that would have done the crustiest drill instructor proud.

Only when Brown began to wind down did Jake signal to Toad to cut the wire. If the CIA had someone listening he wanted them to know they had just pissed on and royally pissed off the very upper echelons of the American military. If they cared.

Then the general got on the phone. Sixty seconds after he hung up, the DIA’s security officer, an army colonel, was standing in front of Brown’s desk. The general led him to the radiator and showed him the wire.

By this point Brown’s mood had coalesced into cold fury. “I want to know how many of these goddamn listening devices are in this agency’s offices. I want all the sensors and wire and telephone equipment removed. And take out these”—he whacked the radiator with Toad’s pipe wrench—“fucking antique radiators. I want to know why these bugs weren’t detected by your staff. I want to know what it’s gonna take to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again. And when you have finished with all of that, you and your entire staff are going to stand in this office and swear me a blood oath that there are no more goddamn bugs in any of our spaces.”

The colonel left in a hurry. Brown then eyed Jake Grafton without warmth. “You and I are going to have a little chat, Admiral. And not in this damned building. Get your hat and let’s go see if we can find someplace private.”

They ended up in an exclusive restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia, after a silent ride in Brown’s limo. Brown apparently knew the owner, who admitted him after he pounded on the door. After listening to Brown’s request she escorted the two officers to the far back corner of the empty dining room.

“I know you don’t open until five, but could we please get coffee?”

“Of course, General,” the lady said. “Make yourself comfortable and we’ll bring it out in a few minutes.”

“I appreciate your hospitality, Mrs. Horowitz.”

She smiled and left for the kitchen.

“Well?”

Jake told his boss everything, from Judith Farrell’s meeting with Toad to the discovery of the bug. The recitation took thirty minutes and was broken only by the delivery of a pot of coffee and two cups. Brown listened without interruptions.

When Jake finished the general said, “Admiral, I’ll lay it on the line with you. You should have reported the contact by a foreign agent to me as soon as possible. You fucked up.”

“Yessir.”

“You fuck up again, you’ll be a civilian by noon the next day.”

Brown refilled his coffee cup and stirred it with a spoon. A slow grin twisted his lips. “Tell me again about sticking the pistol in that CIA weenie’s face.”

When they had finished dissecting Jake’s adventure, General Brown began to talk of the CIA and the personalities of the men who ran it. Finally he became philosophical:

“All intelligence services are bureaucracies, of course. The output is always mangled to some extent as it goes through the pipe. But when the people in the intelligence business start editing the raw data to support their policy recommendations, the output becomes fiction. It’s worse than worthless — it’s fantasy as fact, so it’s just plain dangerous. Policymakers think they’re getting the big picture and they’re making the decisions, but in reality the decision-making function has been appropriated by the person editing the data. The elected policymaker is being manipulated. He becomes a mere rubber stamp.”

“Do you think that is what’s happening at the CIA now?” Jake Grafton asked.

Brown grimaced. “Historically the heads of intelligence services have usually stood right by the throne. Often in Europe the spymasters were the second most powerful men in the government. But not in the United States. The cloak-and-dagger boys have always put the fear of God in our elected politicians, and rightfully so. Are they manipulating our government, now, here?”

He leaned across the table toward Jake. “They missed the collapse of communism. The biggest political event on this planet since World War II and they missed it. Apparently not a soul at Langley ever predicted it or suggested it as a possibility. They said the Soviet economy was three times larger than it was. They said the Soviet military was much stronger, more capable, more combat-ready than turned out to be the case. They sat there looking at a society in meltdown and never saw a wisp of smoke. The fact is that for the last five years you could have gotten a better picture of what was happening inside the Soviet Union by reading the New York Times than you could from reading the CIA intelligence analyses. But was that intentional?

“These damned CIA briefings and intelligence reports give me a queasy feeling,” Brown continued after a moment’s pause. “Nothing I can put my finger on — the stuff is too slickly written for that. Maybe that’s the trouble. Maybe it’s too slick, every mousehole carefully papered over. I don’t know. I just get this feeling. I’d really like to see the raw intelligence, all of it.

“What I think…what I think we’re looking at in Russia is merely an interlude between dictatorships, like the 1917 republic after they toppled the czar. The problems are too big, the people are bigots intolerant of dissent and diversity, they are too easily swayed by demagogues spouting bullshit and hate, they readily swallow any hint of a conspiracy, they despise anyone with a ruble more than they’ve got. The average Russian can’t conceive of a loyal opposition: the concept doesn’t compute. That’s the background for the biggest economic experiment ever tried on this planet, the conversion of a centralized socialized economy into a free market one. But the CIA downplays all that. The folks at the CIA aren’t worried. And no one over at the White House seems to be in a sweat. Our politicos have bigger fish to fry, like squabbling over Clinton’s tax increases and waggling their fingers at the Japanese.”

Brown rearranged the salt and pepper shakers. “I’m not sure what the National Security Adviser thinks. At the CIA briefings sometimes he acts like he smells a rat, other times he sits there like he was getting the gospel in Sunday school.

“What’s happening in the former Soviet Union right now may turn out to be the seminal event that determines the course of human life on this planet for the next century. The old union is in the midst of total social and economic collapse. Nothing works. Nothing! No one knows how to make a decision. All look to central authority, which is corrupt, incompetent, self-absorbed. The republics constitute the most highly polluted nation on earth. It’s one giant petrochemical sewer, thousands of square miles of soil so radioactive that humans can’t survive on it, social systems that have completely collapsed. Doctors are poorly trained and incompetent — they routinely misdiagnose ailments, sick people go to unbelievably bad hospitals where they are butchered by quacks, there isn’t enough medicine, equipment, food, clothes, anything…

“I could go on for hours.” He picked up a pepper shaker and tapped in on the table, hard. “I think the pollution is what did in the Communists. Too many people are getting sick. Best guess is at least a million people in the old union are sick with radiation poisoning. Lack of basic sanitation and immunizations causes epidemics of diphtheria, dysentery, polio, influenza — fifty percent of their conscripts are rejected for military service. It’s estimated only one in fourteen of the people in uniform could pass a flight physical.

“You can only run a society for the benefit of the elite at the top for so long before the whole thing implodes.” He shrugged.

Jake Grafton found himself leaning forward and lowering his voice. “So what about those nuclear weapons?”

“CIA hasn’t told us the whole story. You can bet your pension on that. Reality has a feel, a texture, that’s unique. It’s seasoned with insanity and random chance. This stuff the CIA’s selling hasn’t got that feel.”

“You sure?” Jake pressed.

“I wish I was. But no, I ain’t sure. The key is money. If nuclear weapons are leaving Russia, someone is paying big bucks for them. CIA is looking and says they can’t find the trail.”

“Perhaps we should do some looking on our own,” Jake suggested.

“How?”

“Well, we need to draft a computer expert.”

“You say that like you have one in mind.”

Jake did. He just nodded.

“CIA, Treasury, and State won’t like it.”

“If we find the trail their objections won’t matter much.”

“If it’s there to find,” Brown said without enthusiasm.

Jake decided to change the subject. “What are you going to do about the bugs, General?”

Albert Sidney Brown pushed back his chair and stood. “I’m going to write a report to the president and send copies to everybody on the list. The CIA will think I’m a patsy if I don’t. But just the bugs. Nothing about Nigel Keren or Mossad photographs or intimidation efforts. You were right about that. If we run those shitty rags up the flagpole now, you and I’ll be diving headfirst into a foxhole to keep from getting squashed.”

The whole mess was pretty bizarre, Jake Grafton reflected later. It was like climbing a mountain: the higher you got the worse the visibility became, the thicker the cloud. And if it was like this at his level, presumably the president, the man at the top, couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. No wonder the government stumbled from crisis to crisis!

That night Jake and Toad searched the Grafton house from top to bottom for bugs. They didn’t find any, which merely increased Jake’s sense of unease. Then they went over to Tarkington’s house and turned it inside out. Rita helped. And they found nothing.

“So what are we gonna do, Admiral?” Toad asked when they had finished and were drinking beer in the kitchen.

Rita flipped on the radio and cranked up the volume.

“Do?”

“Yessir. About Herb Tenney and going to Russia with him and all of this.”

“I dunno,” Jake said. “Any suggestions?” He glanced at Rita Moravia, who stood with her back against the sink, trying to look deadpan. She wasn’t supposed to know about the Russian trip, which was still highly classified. Her hair was pulled back and held with a clasp tonight. Tall for a woman, she had the sleek look of solid, healthy muscle. She colored slightly when she met the admiral’s eyes. Feeling a touch of amusement, Jake’s gaze returned to Toad Tarkington. “What would you suggest?”

“I’d like to go over to Langley and sweat somebody.”

“Who?”

“I’d start with Herb.”

“He wouldn’t tell you jack, even if he knew anything to tell.” Jake sighed. He drained the last of his beer, then sat the glass out of the way. “Got a phone book?”

“Sure.”

“Let’s go calling. There is a fellow who works at Langley that I’d like to talk to.”

There were fourteen Richard Harpers and eleven R. Harpers listed in the Washington metro telephone directory. Rita did the calling while Toad listened on the living room extension. She worked for a pizza company and they had lost a delivery address.

“This won’t work if his wife answers,” Rita pointed out.

“I don’t think he’s married,” Toad told her. “He isn’t the type.”

“Oh, and what type is that?”

“Sensitive, warm, loving, wholesome, handsome, sharing, caring—”

“Shut up. It’s ringing… Hello, Richard Harper please… Mr. Harper, did you order a pizza about a half hour ago? No? Well, a Richard Harper on Gordon Street ordered a large pepperoni and olive and our driver can’t find the house…”

She fell silent as the man on the phone talked. From the living room Toad signaled no. Rita made her excuses and thanked him for his time.

They got lucky. They found him on the fifth call. An address in Chevy Chase.

“Let’s go,” Jake said.

Richard Harper wasn’t going to invite them in. Toad shoved the door open and pushed past him. Jake Grafton followed. “It’s two in the morning,” Harper squeaked.

“I know,” Toad Tarkington said. “But I wanted you to meet my boss, Admiral Grafton. Admiral, this is Richard Harper, late of the DIA and now with Central Intelligence.”

Jake stuck out his hand. Reluctantly Richard Harper took it. While Harper was still wondering how to handle this intrusion, Jake dropped into a chair and turned on the light on the reading stand beside him. “Let’s all sit down and visit a minute.”

Harper moved toward a chair, but he didn’t sit. “This won’t take long,” Jake assured him. Harper perched on the front edge of the seat.

Jake displayed his green military ID card and his DIA office pass. Harper refused to touch them. Jake made a show of replacing the cards back in his pocket, then began. “There’s been a security violation at the DIA and we’re trying to find the leak. We have to do this after office hours since people don’t want to talk about their colleagues at the office. You understand?”

Harper nodded reluctantly.

From Toad’s attaché case Jake removed a tape recorder — borrowed from Rita — and placed it on a low table between himself and Harper. He pushed the play button and made sure the tape was turning. “This is Rear Admiral Jacob L. Grafton. It is now two oh seven A.M. on June eighteen. I am interviewing Richard Harper. Mr. Harper, last Monday did you conduct a computer search of CIA records at the request of Lieutenant Commander Robert Tarkington at the DIA computer facilities?”

“Now wait a minute—”

“No, you wait a minute, Mr. Harper. Someone revealed classified information about that computer search to persons without access. Top secret information has been compromised. This is an official investigation. If you fail to cooperate you can be dismissed from government service and prosecuted. Do you understand?”

Harper’s face contorted. A tear rolled down his cheek. “I’ve already been fired.”

“Say again.”

“The CIA fired me this afternoon. They found out about my record.”

The two naval officers exchanged glances. Jake reached over and turned off the tape recorder. “Maybe you’d better tell me about it,” he murmured.

The recitation took most of an hour. Periodically there were tears. Richard Harper was twenty-seven and had been fascinated with computers since he was in high school. Just for the challenge of it, he became a hacker, a person who breaks into industry and government computer files for the sheer joy of outwitting the security devices that guard the files. He had been caught once while he was in college and received a suspended sentence. The second time, when he planted a virus program, he had gone to jail.

The computer industry refused to hire him. Computers were his life and he was blacklisted. He had managed to secure a temporary appointment at DIA by lying on his employment application. He knew the FBI would learn the truth sooner or later, so when agents of the CIA approached him about supplying them with information about DIA projects, he had agreed if they would give him a permanent computer job. A month went by, he supplied all the information they asked for, including Toad’s bizarre request, and they had him start work at Langley last week. Then today they pretended to have just learned of his previous convictions and fired him. It wasn’t fair. He had quit the DIA, the CIA had canned him, the FBI would eventually learn of his record. Computers were his whole life yet he couldn’t work in computers.

“Do you have a computer setup here at home?” Jake asked.

It was in the guest bedroom at the back of the little house. There Jake and Toad were treated to a proud recital of hard disk capacity, extended and expanded memory, CPU speed, and all the rest of it as they stared at screens, keyboards and the innards of computers that were scattered everywhere.

“How good a hacker are you?” Jake asked.

“I’m good. Real good. If I hadn’t done that virus way back when… And it was nothing, just tidbits of zen philosophy that popped onto the screen at holidays and all. It didn’t hurt anyone and…”

Back in the living room, Jake told Harper, “I have a job for you. I can’t promise a permanent job at the DIA until we get a final FBI check and go over it line by line. But I can pay you by the hour on a temporary basis if you can do this job. It would be here at home, on your own equipment.”

Harper was enthusiastic. Yes. He agreed before he even knew what the job was. Jake felt as if he were throwing a rope to a drowning man. He thought he had the authority to hire Harper on a temporary basis, but if it turned out he didn’t he would pay him out of his own pocket.

“I want you to find a river of money,” Jake said, intently watching Harper’s face, “a subterranean river flowing through the world banking systems. The task won’t be easy. I’m not even sure that you will be able to recognize the river when you see it. The mouth of the river is in Moscow, but I don’t have any idea where it begins.”

“Banks?”

“Banks.”

“I’ll need computer access telephone numbers, user names and passwords. If I go after that stuff myself they’ll be on to me in hours.”

“I thought—”

“Hackers get into computers by conning the phone number and codes out of somebody. I can do that. But I can’t do it three dozen times and get away with it. The National Security Agency has that stuff. They monitor bank transactions on a daily basis.”

“If NSA has it, we can get it,” Jake said, glancing at Toad.

“You give me that stuff, and if the money is there, I’ll find it,” Harper said confidently. Too confidently, Jake Grafton thought.

“Don’t be so quick to make promises. And I don’t want anyone to know you’re looking.”

“Maybe you’d better tell me what I’m supposed to be looking for so I’ll know it when I see it.”

Fifteen minutes later Harper knew everything Jake did, which was precious little. So Jake devoted another hour to discussing the possibilities and the probabilities. “The problem,” he told Harper, “is that I don’t know who I can trust. I’ve got to trust my boss, but who else? I can’t call friends in the FBI, in the CIA, people I’ve known for years. If there is a small cabal in the CIA, only the people involved know it is a cabal. Everyone else thinks they are doing their duty when they report conversations, fill out reports, do what they are told to do. That’s the problem.”

“How do you want me to report to you?” Harper asked.

“Well, written reports would be okay. Mail them to my wife. She’ll see that I get them wherever I am. I may be out of town for a few weeks.” He gave Harper his address.

When Jake and Toad left at four in the morning, Rita was asleep on the front seat of the car.

Under the streetlight Toad said, “I have a real bad feeling about this, Admiral. If Harper steals money or screws up some accounts, you and I will end up in prison.”

“I hope they give us separate cells,” Jake told him. “A rear admiral ought to rate a private cell.”