Virtual Destruction

CHAPTER 37

As Paige parked her MG on the road outside Michaelson’s farmhouse, Craig checked the bullets in his revolver. He placed the weapon beneath his dark suitjacket in its shoulder holster before looking up to see astonishment cross her face.

“Don’t leave the car. Jackson will be here with you. He’s our backup in case anything goes wrong.”

“Is there going to be shooting?” asked Paige.

A sudden memory flashed through Craig’s mind — Miles Skraling, the NanoWare exec, locked behind a door and the sound of a single pop! gunshot. “There’s no telling what Unteling is going to do. No telling what she’s already done, but we’re going to find out.” He forced a smile. “Don’t worry, it’s standard procedure. Just like your radiation dosimeters.”

He turned to Goldfarb as he climbed out of the cramped MG. “Ready?”

Goldfarb holstered his own weapon and pocketed a flip phone to keep in communication with Jackson. “Let’s go, boss.”

They set off on foot down the dirt drive toward Michaelson’s farmhouse. As they rounded the corner, the farmhouse and barn came into sight, sitting in a wide open area. The tall dry grass rustled with the sound of witches’ brooms.

The long black limousine sat outside Michaelson’s house. The driver sucked on a cigarette as he lounged against the car, flipping through the glossy pages of a magazine. He looked bored, expecting no one to come up the long driveway.

Craig waved Goldfarb back to put some distance between them, spreading out to make themselves a harder target to hit. Deep down he didn’t really think it would come to shooting, but he knew the instant he let down his guard, things would go to hell.

The limo driver flicked his cigarette away, then hurried to stomp it out before the dry grass could catch fire. He still hadn’t noticed the two FBI agents. The driver bent to rummage inside the limo. Craig felt his pulse quicken. Was he reaching for a weapon?

Craig touched his fingertips to the outside of his shoulder holster, tensing as the driver straightened. Craig suddenly heard the booming bass of a car stereo. He relaxed.

The limo driver spotted them, jerked backward with surprise, then grinned in embarrassment. He strode around the front of the limo and called out. “You guys lost?”

They were still a good twenty yards away. Craig flipped out his badge. “FBI.”

The driver’s eyes widened. “Hey, man, is this a bust or what? I thought that lady was too uptight!”

Craig nodded to the peeling white farmhouse. “What’s going on in there?”

The driver backed up. He looked nervously at Goldfarb still circling around and wet his lips. “Hey, I just gave her a ride from the airport — she paid half in advance, cash. I’m getting a bonus just for waiting here while she’s inside.”

Craig tucked his ID back into his pocket, keeping his hands free, his arms loose. “Did she say what she needed to do?”

The driver fidgeted in uneasiness. “She’s collecting some stuff to bring back with her. Said she had to get some old records.”

“I’ll cover the back,” Goldfarb said in a low voice, rustling through the grass alongside the house.

Craig turned back to the driver. “Isn’t it unusual to drive fifty miles from the airport to a farmhouse, then wait around to take them back?”

The driver looked incredulous. “Unusual? Man, what planet are you from? This is the San Francisco area!”

Craig shook his head with a weak smile. “Never mind,” he muttered. “Just pull the limo to the end of the driveway. The farther the better.”

Craig turned for the front door of the house, leaving the bewildered driver behind. As he approached the old home, he drew his weapon from his shoulder holders. Better safe than sorry. The last thing he wanted to do was to spook Diana Unteling, but he didn’t know how she would react if she had killed Michaelson, and was now destroying evidence…

Holding his revolver upright, Craig stepped on the creaking porch. Unteling had left the door ajar, and he expected it to squeak as he pushed, but the hinges remained mercifully silent.

Inside the front hall, he paused a moment before continuing. Nothing. He moved inside, past Michaelson’s brag wall of framed photographs with famous people and into the kitchen. As far as he could tell, nothing had changed from when he and Paige had been there — the dishes were still dirty, trash cans still full, scattered crumbs still on the cutting board.

Craig felt his heart rate increase. There were too many similarities between this and the NanoWare case. But this time, would the bullet have my name on it?

The ceiling above him groaned. He stopped. The master bedroom?

Entering from the back door, Goldfarb silently joined him at the base of the stairs. Craig nodded for Goldfarb to lag behind, then started up.

He took the stairs slowly, one step at a time.

The sound of a book hitting the floor made him freeze. He heard muttering coming from the bedroom. Rounding the corner in the hall, he saw Diana Unteling kneeling at an oak nightstand beside Michaelson’s bed, where she had popped the bottom out of the lower drawer. The bed and floor around her were strewn with stacks of papers, each bearing a thick red border and the letters SRD, Secret Restricted Data, stamped at the bottom and the top.

He saw no sign of a gun. Craig lowered his weapon and stepped into the room. “Hello again, Mrs. Unteling.”

Unteling spun around on the floor, scrambling to her knees. Her short blond hair flopped back, and her ice-blue eyes glinted in the dim light filtering through the drawn shades. Her face filled with fright, then darkened with anger as she recognized Craig. “You — what are you doing here!”

Craig looked at the papers she had assembled. “I’d ask you the same thing, Mrs. Unteling.”

“That’s none of your damned business.”

“Dr. Michaelson’s house is under Federal jurisdiction until the investigation is complete. My search warrant is still valid.” Craig heard Goldfarb step up the stairs, but the other FBI agent stayed out of sight, behind him.

“Damn your investigation! I have a perfect right to get my possessions back from here.” She bent and hurriedly started brushing the stacks of classified material into piles. She looked up as he watched. “What are you going to do, shoot me? These are mine, you know.”

“Last time I looked,” said Craig softly, “classified documents belong to the government, not to individuals.”

Her gaze bore into him like twin icepicks; she clutched her hand into a fist, so tightly it seemed as if she would break a fingernail.

“What’s in the memos, Mrs. Unteling?” he asked. He tried a long shot. “What’s going to happen when your husband finds out about you and Michaelson?”

As Craig stared back, a crack appeared in her glacial features, until slowly her hardened expression melted, and her face grew slack.

She looked around the room. Pictures, snapshots and open photo albums were scattered on the bed, parts of the “classified documents.” But he could see that most of the photos showed her and Michaelson — standing in front of a dacha, toasting each other while dressed in elegant dinner clothes, dressed in parkas with a world of white around them. Cute pictures, love letters, all incorporated into red-bordered documents. Classified information. What sort of game had they been playing?

Unteling plopped down on the big bed with her eyes closed. She slowly shook her head. “Another week or so and we could have taken care of all this. But Hal wouldn’t return my calls. The bastard! Now look at the mess he got me into.”

Goldfarb stepped into the room and looked around, his dark eyes wide at the sight of the classified documents. Craig holstered his weapon and motioned with his head for Goldfarb to call for Jackson. As Goldfarb quietly spoke into his flip phone, Craig talked to Unteling.

“Looks to me like you did a pretty good job of getting yourself into a mess.” She said nothing, and neither did he, prompting her with his continued silence.

“I loved him,” she said dully, finally. “I really loved him.” She shook her head. “Most people hated the son of a bitch, let his Neanderthal ego to grate on their nerves. But no one could go up against him one on one. He was just too damn smart. And that’s what drew me to him.”

“Then why did you kill him?” said Craig.

She laughed, a short high giggle. “Kill him? Sometimes I wish I had. It would have made life a lot easier back then, back when I was his executive assistant at Livermore, and my husband’s Coalition was taking off. Some of Hal’s outrageous demands didn’t endear anyone to him.

“But you know what? He got things accomplished that way. He made things happen, when other people failed. Hal Michaelson didn’t care who you were or what position you had, if you got in his way, he would bull right through you. When he left Livermore for Russia, I jumped at the chance to go along, to be at the center of history in the making.

“Besides, I had to get away from my husband for a while. Fred wanted me to give up my whole career so I could help him with his Work. Capital W. Everybody loved Fred, but he was just so… so vanilla. Calm and comfortable, without a spark of passion in his whole body. He didn’t have a clue.”

Craig picked up a stack of photos showing Hal Michaelson and Diana Unteling. The photos were not those of friends; there was something much deeper present, a longing of unspoken intimacy. “That’s when you started your affair.”

“If you thought Hal was relentless during a Congressional testimony, it was nothing compared to his stamina in bed. The guy didn’t know how to do anything slow. It wasn’t his nature.”

Craig tossed the photos on the nightstand and picked up two of the classified documents Unteling had found. Each message had a cover sheet — but the inside document was a personal letter, one from Michaelson to Unteling; another from Unteling to Michaelson.

Goldfarb waited at the back of the room, listening to the testimony. Diana Unteling watched Craig flip through the classified memos and laughed; but it was a tired laugh, worn out, defeated.

“That was our game, the only absolutely certain way that we could communicate with no one else catching on. We were each Classifiers. We could stamp whatever we wanted on the documents.”

“Pretty elaborate precautions just to hide an affair,” said Craig.

“Just an affair?” Unteling looked at him bitterly. “Mr. Kreident, I am the wife of the nation’s number one protector of morality. My husband’s Coalition for Family Values went national, and he decided to move the whole organization to Washington D.C. Can you imagine what a field day the press would have if they found out I was cuckolding my dear husband? That would have done far more harm to his Coalition than any assault by a hate organization.

“Fred worked on this for years, and my entire family life was wrapped up in promoting it. My son went into a seminary, even after I encouraged him to study engineering, his first love. Millions of people’s lives have been turned around because of Fred’s outreach program. Just think what could have happened if word had gotten out — that the Coalition director’s wife was fucking Hal Michaelson.”

She paused. “I was offered a job back at DOE headquarters after the on-site inspection work, and exchanging classified memos with Hal seemed to be the only way to keep the affair quiet.”

Diana Unteling looked up sharply when Craig didn’t say anything. “I don’t expect you to condone what I’ve done, Mr. Kreident, but the very least you can do is to keep it out of the papers.”

“I’m not a press agent, Mrs. Unteling,” Craig said. “I don’t write news releases. Maybe if you tell me why you were present in Dr. Michaelson’s lab the night after his body was found. We have the CAIN booth records — that and the threatening message you left on his answering machine.”

She looked defeated. “I was looking for these memos! I thought I could destroy them before they were discovered. I didn’t think at first that he might have kept classified material at home. When I found them missing from his repository, I thought you had already confiscated them.

“But when you came to talk to me, I knew you were lying. You didn’t have them. You didn’t have any idea what the memos contained, or your attitude would have been entirely different. Then I thought I knew where Hal might have kept them, and it would be only a matter of time before you did go through his house with a fine-toothed comb.” She shrugged. “I needed to find them first.”

She stood, ignoring the documents now and brushing aside any pretense of innocence. “But no, the killer wasn’t me, Mr. Kreident. I wanted Hal to live… even if only so I could cut off his balls.”

Craig told Goldfarb to start gathering the classified documents and photos together. “I’ll need to get a statement from you, Mrs. Unteling. And fingerprints as well.”

Unteling set her mouth, but her shoulders sagged. “My fingerprints are already on file with my security clearance, Mr. Kreident. But I suppose this statement will affect my confirmation hearing.”

“We’ll have to give the Senate committee everything in your records. Now if you’ll come with me, I need to take you to our Oakland office.”

As they left the old farmhouse, Jackson stepped from the blue Ford Taurus, having driven up after Goldfarb’s call. They held the back door open for her. As she ducked to get in the car, she stared at Craig, then disappeared inside. Jackson slammed the door.