The Buck Stops Here

by Mindy Starns Clark

  She hesitated for a moment.

  “Have you ever heard of the four horsemen of the Infocalypse?”

  “The…what?”

  “The four horsemen of the Infocalypse: terrorists, organized crime, drug dealers, and pedophiles. Back then, for every hundred people who used cryptology to maintain their privacy or their business security, there might have been one person using encryption to hide an illegal act, especially terrorists, organized crime, drug dealers, and pedophiles. Considering that, the question then becomes, is it worth it? If bad people can use encryption to hide things like terrorist communications, then does that become the price of privacy? It wasn’t until we had our working encryption program that we began to understand a fundamental paradox: How can you get an encryption program into the right hands and keep it out of the hands of criminals? You can’t! Eventually, that was the question that tore our little group of five apart.”

  “What happened?” I whispered, hanging on her every word.

  She went on to explain that when they finally had the program up and running, Tom began to insist that it couldn’t be released until there was sufficient legislation about the use of cryptography. Apparently, the pros and cons of secure encryption were the subject of serious debate among computer experts, businesses, and the government.

  “On the one hand,” Beth explained, “you’ve got your businesses and your civil libertarians pushing for strong encryption. On the other hand are the police and other law enforcement agencies pushing to severely restrict encryption. Tom kept insisting there was a third choice, some sort of compromise, that would allow some leverage to both sides of the debate.”

  “Like what?”

  She took off her glasses and cleaned them on the hem of her shirt.

  “It’s kind of hard to explain. Have you ever heard of key escrow?”

  I shook my head.

  “Okay, if I want to give someone a secret message, I use a ‘key’ to encode it, then I send them the message, and they use that same key in reverse to decode it. Right?”

  “Yes,” I said, remembering that I had watched Tom take a secret code, figure out the key, and then decode it just a few weeks ago.

  “Computer encryption works the same way, only there’s a lot more back and forth to it and it gets really complicated. But with key escrow, the keys that code and decode the messages aren’t just known to the sender and the receiver. They’re also given to a third party, who holds them in escrow. No one may see the keys or use them unless the police or the government suspects a crime. Then, kind of like getting a warrant for your house, the cops get a warrant for the keys that are in escrow, they decode your messages, and then the truth is revealed. If the encryption was merely hiding private business, there’s no harm done, but if it was being used to hide something illegal, like drug dealing or kiddie porn, then they have the evidence they need to get a conviction.”

  “Sounds fairly straightforward.”

  “It has its problems,” she said, “particularly with regard to who holds the key in escrow. Let’s say I do. What stops me from using it to spy on the person it belongs to or selling it to someone else so that they can use it? It all boils down to who can trust whom, and who watches the ones who are watching. Argh! It’s like this endless cycle of what-ifs. We never did come up with a good solution.”

  “So what happened to the group?”

  She returned to her keyboard and began typing again.

  “We got mired in the debate. We developed a perfectly usable encryption program, but Tom refused to release it until we could find a way around the question of how to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.”

  “Why did he create it in the first place if he wasn’t going to release it?”

  She laughed sardonically.

  “Some of the others yelled that exact question to him on a number of occasions. We had some serious arguments.”

  “And?”

  “And Tom admitted that he really hadn’t thought that far ahead. You have to understand that it all began as a head game.”

  “A head game?”

  “Secure computer encryption was just a mathematical riddle for Tom, a puzzle to solve. He solved it, all right, and then he rounded up a crack team and paid them to implement his solutions. Once we did, however, he understood the bigger picture and realized that he didn’t want to distribute it after all for fear of it ending up in the wrong hands. The finished program was primarily his intellectual property, so without his cooperation, it couldn’t be released. He disbanded the company.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Well, by then I was pregnant with the twins, so I was ready to pull out anyway. Tom moved to California and went in a different direction, still computer-related, of course, but nothing to do with this stuff. As you know, he became successful fairly quickly. No surprise there. Tom’s always been outstanding at everything he does.”

  “What happened to the other members of the team?” I asked.

  She shrugged.

  “Phillip took a job in his father’s import-export business. He’s filthy rich now, so no big loss there. Armand gave it up and moved back to the swamps with his family. Now he’s involved with environmental protection.”

  “Environmental protection?”

  “He works hard to save the swamps, which from what I can tell involves a mixture of politics, lobbying, public education, and science. He even wrote a book about it, which gets him on talk shows sometimes.”

  “What about his computer skills?”

  “Nowadays he creates computer models for swamp projections. You know, like he can put a part of the swamp up on the screen and show it to you as it is now and then how it’s going to look ten, twenty, fifty years from now, all with or without intervention. Armand was always a genius at creating object-oriented frameworks to implement sophisticated numerical algorithms.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” I said, as she had again become way too technical for me. I thought of my conversation with James, where he said that first there were five, then three, then two. “Is that the order in which the group broke up? First you, then Tom, then Phillip, then Armand?”

  Beth looked at me oddly, and I’m sure she was wondering why I would ask such a strange question.

  “No, actually,” she said. “The whole group disbanded at once. Tom called us into his office one day and said he was closing down the company and letting us all go. Considering the conversations we had been having, it didn’t exactly come as a surprise to any of us. For security reasons, we had to turn our work over to him—digital files, notes, everything. Once he secured everything, including all copies of the encryption program, he gave us each a severance check and sent us on our way.”

  “Well, it sounds like everyone pretty much landed on their feet,” I said. “What do you think went wrong for your ex-husband?”

  I felt a flash of guilt for my dishonesty. If I were a better person, I would come clean with her right now about who I was and how she and I—and he—were connected.

  “James,” she said, shaking her head. “James couldn’t give it up. He had worked so hard on the program only to see it buried in the end. I’m not justifying his actions, but I understand the path he went down that led to them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “James did the unthinkable. Partly for money, and partly, I think, to get back at Tom. He somehow reconstructed the encryption program and then sold it to a group of terrorists. He put it directly into the hands of the types of people Tom had dreaded the most. James sold us all out for a few million dollars. Who knows what the eventual ramifications of that one simple sale have been—or will be.”

  I didn’t reply, silently willing her to continue.

  “He was caught, of course,” she said. “We were already divorced by then—and I had no illusions about his character—but that was the final blow. He went to prison for five years. During the course of the FBI’s investigation, the rest of us wer
e afraid we might end up in prison as well.”

  “What about the terrorist group that bought the program? Were they ever caught?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “And James acted on his own when he sold the program to them?” I asked, knowing full well that he hadn’t—or at least he had claimed to me that he hadn’t.

  “Yes,” she replied. “But the FBI didn’t know that. We went through horrible months giving depositions, proving our innocence. Still, poor Tom felt so culpable, especially once the program began circulating on the internet and showing up in all sorts of places he had never meant for it to go.”

  “Just what he had feared,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Thanks to James, the program Tom created ended up in the hands of the bad guys after all. As far as Tom is concerned, it was ultimately his fault.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “In a way, Callie, it was. Tom solved the riddle of secure encryption in a way that had never been done before. That encryption was then used to commit crimes. Forever after, he will believe that there is blood on his hands.”

  Thirty-Two

  Beth gave me a lift back to my hotel after our meeting, and once she had driven away, I walked straight to the parking garage and took out my car. I retraced yesterday’s route to the Fat City Parcel Service, glad to see that the parking lot of the small strip mall was nearly deserted. This would be easier for me to pull off if the person behind the counter wasn’t busy.

  A bell tinkled over the door as I stepped inside. Though the exterior looked old fashioned, the interior was quite up to date, with copiers, printers, computers, and other machines all around the room. I went to the counter and told the woman behind it that I needed to find out who sent a particular package.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I got a package on Friday that was sent from here, but I don’t know who sent it.”

  I handed her the label, knowing I was taking a big chance. If the package had been reported as missing or stolen, then my inquiry just might get me in a heap of trouble.

  The woman adjusted her glasses to read the label and then looked at me in surprise.

  “This went to Albany, Georgia,” she said.

  “I know, but I was driving through New Orleans today, and I thought I would clear up this little mystery while I was here.”

  She nodded, her glasses sliding down to the end of her nose as she did so. Without another word, she placed the label on the counter and typed in the tracking number. From where I stood, I could see her computer screen at an angle, and I watched it closely for some sort of alert to pop up.

  “Okay, I have that information here,” she said. “Before I give it to you, I just need to see some ID, Ms. Watts.”

  My pulse surged.

  “Um, Les Watts is my father,” I said quickly. “I don’t really have any proof of that. My name is different than his.”

  “I’m sorry, then. The only person I can give this information to is the recipient listed on the mailing address.”

  “I understand.”

  Frozen to the spot, I considered my options. I could pull out some money and try to bribe her, but I had a funny feeling that this woman couldn’t be bought. Instead, I knew I needed to distract her, and I looked around quickly, making my decision.

  “Before I go,” I said, “I wonder if you could sell me some bubble wrap? I’ve got some things in the car that are jingling like crazy, making all kinds of noise.”

  She looked up to her right, where a huge roll of bubble wrap was mounted on a dispenser over a work area.

  “Sure,” she said, going over to it, reaching up, and pulling some off. “How much you need?”

  I told her that about ten feet should do, so as she pulled and then cut, I leaned casually forward on the counter until I could read the screen. From what I could see, the return address was someone named Pearl Gates at 152 Klegmont Lane in Kenner, Louisiana.

  “Here you go,” the woman said, handing me the bundle of wrap.

  “Thank you,” I said earnestly, taking it from her. “How much do I owe you?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “We go through tons of that stuff here.”

  Once outside, I had to force myself to walk, not run, to my car. I drove away immediately, my heart suddenly pounding. Maybe that had been a stupid risk to take, but I was glad I had done it. Now I had a name and an address for the origin of the asthma inhaler.

  Or so I thought. I drove about 15 minutes to Kenner, and then I tracked down Klegmont Lane. I held my breath as I turned onto the street, which featured a row of identical brick ranch-style homes, each with a carport and a scraggly front yard. The house numbers were on the mailboxes, and I counted off as I drove. When I reached number 152, however, I found nothing but an empty lot.

  I drove up and down the street several times to make sure, but there was no question. On one side of the street, Klegmont had a 151 and 153, but on the other side of the street was 150, an empty lot, then 154. There was no house at 152.

  Puzzled, I parked and got out, knocking on several doors until an old lady finally answered at 154. She kept the chain on the door, and while a dog barked in the background, she eyed me suspiciously.

  “Help you?”

  “I’m looking for 152 Klegmont,” I said.

  “This is 154,” she replied, closing the door.

  “No, wait,” I told her. “That lot next door. Has that always been empty?”

  “It has since I lived here.”

  “And how long is that?”

  “Thirty-six years.”

  I tried not to let my frustration show on my face.

  “Do you know if there’s another Klegmont Street in Kenner?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “How about the name Pearl Gates?” I pressed. “Do you know her?”

  She surprised me by chuckling.

  “Well, not yet,” she said, “but I hope to once I cross over.”

  “Cross over?”

  “To the Pearly Gates!” she cackled. “Sorry, hon, but I think somebody’s playing a trick on you.”

  Then she shut the door in my face.

  I felt like an idiot. Pearl Gates. Pearly Gates. I had a feeling that was someone’s idea of a sick joke.

  As I got in my car and drove back toward the French Quarter, my mood grew more and more dark. Pearl Gates. Death. I wasn’t sure when I was going to hear from Hydro in Hammond, who was examining the substance inside that inhaler. But when I did, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it turned out to be lethal.

  Somebody ought to tell James Sparks to be careful.

  Thirty-Three

  Sin is a funny thing sometimes. It can enter into a person’s heart so quickly, so easily. So simply. Once there, it lodges like a stick caught in a drain, where leaves and dirt and other detritus catch on the stick and start clogging up the passageway until, after a while, nothing gets through. God starts to seem far away. Isolation sets in.

  I knew what I was doing. I knew I needed to get on the phone and call someone and say, “Look, I’m afraid James Sparks’ life may be in danger.”

  Back at the hotel, I even sat with my hand on the telephone for a while, thinking about it, thinking about calling the warden at the prison and leaving an anonymous tip or something.

  And yet I didn’t want to. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I didn’t really know for sure what was in that inhaler. Maybe because I didn’t want to alert Les Watts to the fact that I was onto him.

  Maybe because the man who killed my husband deserved whatever awful thing he had brought onto himself.

  That’s the other funny thing about sin: Justification becomes an art form. So far in this investigation, I had justified stealing, lying, even suggesting to Gordo that he break the law by bugging. Because of all that sin clogging up my heart, I felt far, far away from God.

  But where did it end? Was I really going to sit idly by now while a man’s life mig
ht be hanging in the balance? Did it make any difference that I felt that man deserved to die?

  Even in my worst moment, I knew that it didn’t. I pictured Sparks’ mother, Tilly, and the way she dutifully went to the prison every Sunday to visit her son. Could I be accountable to her for his death? If his death paid a debt to me, who then would pay that debt to her?

  Finally, my heart heavy, I called Tom. He was the only resource I could think of who might be able to get a message to Sparks without setting off a big chain of events that would send all of the rats scurrying back into their holes.

  Tom and I hadn’t spoken since Saturday when I was driving to New Orleans. A lot had happened since then, none of which I was ready to discuss with him. I dialed his number on the scrambled phone, resolving to keep things short and simple.

  “Yes?” he said, answering the phone, and just the sound of his voice made my heart quicken a bit.

  “It’s me.”

  “Callie?” he gasped. “Are you okay? This is killing me here, not knowing what’s going on.”

  “I need you to do something. It’s probably urgent.”

  “Of course. Anything. Whatever you need.”

  Without actually admitting that I had stolen it, I explained that I had “come into the possession of” an asthma inhaler I felt certain was meant for Sparks. I was having the inhaler analyzed, but I had a feeling that what was inside might be lethal.

  “Sparks needs to know that his life is in danger,” I said. “I don’t want to tip anyone’s hand, but I also can’t hold on to this knowledge in case they try to kill him in some other way.”

  Tom sounded more shocked than I had expected him to be. After all, Sparks had played with fire—why, now, was it any surprise that he was about to get burned?

  “But that’s all in the past,” he said. “Who on earth would want him dead now?”

  I really hadn’t wanted to get into it, but I ended up telling him about my conversations with Sparks, about his claims that when he sold the program to terrorists, he hadn’t been working alone.

  “That’s a lie!” Tom said angrily. “Of course he was working alone.”