1 - Artscape: Ike Schwartz Mystery 1

by Frederick Ramsay

  “Well, you’re right, Dr. Harris, but as his deputy, I have to do this. Sheriff, there’s something else you should know—something that will make this easier.”

  “What? There’s more? Look Sam, in case you hadn’t noticed, I am a computer ignoramus. I just want to know if you can get me what I need.…What should I know?”

  “I, um…don’t know how to say this, but I can get your guy—absolutely.”

  “Now you can, five minutes ago you said iffy. What happened?”

  “Well, as your deputy, I am required to inform you of some things that I…um, the truth is, I installed a root kit last week and with the right password I can tell you the activity level of every computer in the net.”

  “A root kit? It sounds like something a plumber would use.”

  “In a way I guess it is.” Sam looked at the floor.

  “There is something about root kits I should know?”

  “They are hacker tools, Sheriff, not routine additions to systems—illegal maybe—depending on policy and federal restrictions.…I’m sorry, Dr. Harris, but I have this interest in forensics and I told myself that as your IS guy, I should have the capacity to find out things, if the need ever—”

  “Well, it has. You haven’t been using the college’s facilities to hack.…” Ruth’s eyes began to signal early storm warnings.

  “Oh, no, ma’am, I just, you know…to keep my hand in, I sometimes…see, anyone can hack, if they know how. I thought we ought to be prepared if one of our people took it up, that’s all.”

  “It’s all right,” Ike cut in. “Given the history of college hackers and…very sensible.” He did not know what he was talking about but the last thing he needed was an angry Ruth Harris.

  Sam looked relieved. “How about I secure the data and begin processing it in anticipation of a warrant?” she said. “Then, when it comes, I will have everything you need. It’s going to take that long anyway.”

  “You can’t get it now?”

  “No, sorry, but I can start now. Whoever sent this letter knew what we were up to. I haven’t counted the words but I’m guessing it’s two hundred and forty-seven.”

  “Why two hundred and forty-seven?”

  “Well, we printed out a big mailing this weekend, a letter to all of the students scheduled to enroll in the fall, about the collection not being on campus. That letter ran two hundred and forty-seven words. To speed up the printing, we sent it to all the departmental printers over the weekend. Whoever wrote this letter knew a little something about our setup and I think ran this letter through with the others.”

  “That explains the wording. The writer tried to force the word count. So, we can’t trace it after all.”

  “No, I didn’t say that. There are more features on the log that he might not know about. The first is character count. The log tells us source, pages, words, and characters. It’s unlikely he got the same number of characters as the form letter, but even if he did—there’s spaces.”

  “Spaces?”

  “Yes. The log keeps track of spaces, like between words. The probability that he got that right, too, is astronomical.”

  “Not that it would mean anything to me, but what is the third feature?”

  “Keyboard logger.”

  Ike began to feel the same way he did when he tried to read Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. “And it does what?”

  “It logs the keystrokes into the main log. If I can narrow down the choices, I can have it type the letter over again—if you want me to. It all depends on how much the writer knew about our system and how to beat it, but I’m sure whoever it was didn’t know everything. We’ll find your writer.”

  “Ruth…you satisfied?”

  “No, but I’m too tired to argue. How about you bribe me into silence by taking me out for a cheap dinner and then take me home.”

  “Happy to. Deputy Ryder, you may proceed.”

  “One last thing. Dr. Harris?”

  “Sam?”

  “About the picture IDs. When do you want me to start putting that online? I thought you would want to start next term. If we do, we will have to have the locks and card swipe units installed and that, with the wiring and all, could take all summer.”

  “What picture IDs are you talking about? What locks?”

  “It was all in the committee report you approved. We are to issue picture IDs to the students and the swipe stripe on the back will activate the new locks on all the building doors so that we can keep track.…” Sam’s voice trailed off.

  “Report? You mean the Information Services Committee report had that as a proposal?” Ruth’s face was thunderous.

  “Yes ma’am, toward the back.”

  “Thank you, Sam. I’ll let you know about the IDs.”

  Sam left, closing the door behind her.

  “Don’t look so smug, Schwartz, I had no idea, and by damn I will not allow it.”

  “Right.”

  “Oh God, what can happen next? I have to tell you, I have been in contact with Mr. Dillon Senior, or more accurately, he has been in contact with me.”

  “And?”

  “He’s mobilizing. Called his friends in Washington, the FBI, everybody. They will be all over the place by tomorrow or the next day. I know what you said before. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. I was about to call the Bureau anyway. He saved me the trouble. We may have a kidnapping to go with the robbery. That makes it an automatic call to them.”

  “Kidnapping? Is that why your people called to ask if anyone was missing? You think one of our women is missing?”

  “It’s possible. We think the car parked in the lane, the one you can see in the television picture, got there before the robbery and the people in it were taken. That or.…” He let the words hang in the air.

  “Or they are dead like Captain Parker. What next?”

  “Well, we wait for Dillon to respond to the letter. We keep digging around hoping to find a lead. We go on about our business.”

  They sat across from each other. Ike’s earlier happy state of mind had been replaced hour by hour by a sense of gloom. He felt tired and depressed.

  “Well, at least now we know what the robbery was all about in the first place,” he said as much to himself as to her. “I mean, up until now, the whole thing made no sense. Paintings worth millions, a king’s ransom, but not sellable. I guess that is progress. And who knows, maybe Deputy Sam will turn up something. Didn’t you say something about dinner?”

  “Hamburgers and beer, my place. Now.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The call came just as Tom headed to bed. He’d stayed up to watch the late news and catch part of Saturday Night Live. His wife had been asleep for an hour. He scowled. Only business would prompt a call this late. A glance at the caller ID confirmed it. He took the call and cursed his luck that he’d pulled duty officer. Seven and a half hours later and someone else would be on the spot. He went upstairs, put on his jacket, kissed his wife, and told her he would be back soon. She searched his face for the signs that would tell her if he was in danger and seeing none fell back to sleep with a mumbled, “G’night, babe.”

  Tom unlocked the drawer in the highboy, retrieved his badge and gun, pocketed the first, holstered the second, and let himself out the door into a chilly May night. He shivered a little, climbed into his car, and headed downtown.

  In all his years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Tom Phillips had visited the director’s office only once, when the late Mr. Hoover, too old by then for the job, had received him and five other elementary school students, finalists in a national essay contest. Different days, different ways.

  He drove downtown, parked in his spot, and rode the elevator to the lobby. The guard at the desk, a man who had
been at that post as long as Tom could remember, checked his ID as if he were a stranger and logged him in. Tom took the second bank of elevators to the director’s office, knocked and let himself in. The director waved him into an overstuffed chair. He waited while the director finished talking to someone on the phone.

  This was the new FBI and the man across from him no J. Edgar Hoover. Just as well, he thought, although, as bad as the press and the liberal establishment wanted to paint him, Hoover had his moments and no other man could have built the Bureau the way he did. Just stayed too long at the dance.

  “Phillips, what do you know about the robbery in Picketsville, Virginia?”

  “Only what I read in the papers and what came in on the dailies. We haven’t been called in yet, have we?”

  “We have now, and that could be a problem.”

  “Sir?”

  “It’s big, Phillips.”

  The director had a habit of enlarging operations. “It’s big” was one of his favorite expressions. Next, Tom guessed he would say, “I can’t stress this enough.”

  “I can’t stress this enough. I got a call from the White House. Some big shot friend of the President is on the warpath, got the President’s attention. I said we’d go when the locals call or the jurisdiction changes, but going into Senator Rutledge’s territory uninvited and unannounced could create problems. He could kill us in the committee hearings if I did.”

  “Well, sir?” Tom peeked at his watch. One o’clock in the morning and he still did not know why he had been called and what he was supposed to do. “I guess we could put a group on standby.”

  The director leaned back in the black leather chair and gazed at the ceiling. Tom stared at the ceiling too.

  “No. I called you in here to put operatives in the field. But we have to be mighty careful on this one.”

  “Because of the President?”

  “No, not for him, for us.”

  “Sir?”

  “We are in this mess up to our eyeballs, Phillips. One of our guys did the job.”

  “Sir?”

  “Call me Chet.”

  “Yes, sir. You said one of ours?”

  “Did you know an agent named Grafton?”

  “Yes, sir, slightly. We never worked a case together. He was in the covert section. I always worked the field.” The director returned his gaze to eye level. Tom noticed for the first time that he suffered from a mild case of amblyopia. His left eye was fractionally off center.

  “Yes, yes, I know. Look, he was a screw-up and a drunk and we dumped him. He gave us some sad song and dance about a sick wife and whatnot, but with the budget cuts and all, we cleaned house. No big deal. But this Grafton guy turns up working with whoever pulled that heist in Virginia.”

  “Sir, are we sure it was him? I mean, it’s a pretty big jump from out-of-work FBI agent to crook.”

  “Is it? You’ve got some learning to do, son.”

  “Yes, sir, but I don’t see the problem. If we fired him, the publicity will be bad, but shouldn’t come back on us too much.”

  “You’re kidding, right? They told me you were on the ball.” The director’s eye apparently bothered him enough that now he squinted at Tom, an expression that made him look like a full-figured Popeye. “I told you, this is big. How do you think it is going to look when the press finds out that someone with Grafton’s assets and knowledge of Bureau operations ended up with some Mafia types in the biggest robbery in the century? We are in deep shit here, Phillips.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Deep. And it gets deeper.”

  How much worse could it get? And did it qualify as all that bad? He guessed it must or he wouldn’t be here in the middle of the night.

  “You put a team together to help with the investigation and at the same time extract Grafton before anyone gets near him. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “Yes, sir, I believe I do. But if we are to work with the locals, that may be tough. You said it was worse than just Grafton. Something else?”

  “I want the team in the open. They will have two jobs. They are to do everything they can to slow the investigation down. Then find and cancel Grafton.”

  “Cancel?”

  “You know what I mean, Phillips. Grafton gets whisked out of there before anybody can say hot damn—that’s best case. Worst case, he comes out smelling like dead fish, whatever. Clear?”

  Tom stared at the man across the desk. Had he heard him right? Tom felt his shirt getting damp. He did not like the direction this conversation was headed. The director disappeared into the relative shadows beyond the pool of light from his desk lamp.

  “Look, we have a double whammy here. Grafton is only problem number one. You’re right, bad publicity we can ride out, but there’s the other.”

  “And that is?”

  “The locals are Agency. The sheriff down there is CIA.”

  “What? How can that be? They’re not domestic. They can’t be.”

  “They can and they are. My guess is that they pulled the robbery—one of their games to draw attention from something else. They’re hip deep in the Middle East and are still trying to save their cookies from all the aid and comfort they gave Bin Laden in the old days. Remember the arms deal to the Arabs a couple of years ago? This is part of that or I am the Little Mermaid. And I told the President so.”

  Tom did not reply. The director was off on a rhetorical odyssey and Tom must wait until he finished. Meanwhile, he studied his boss, the man who held his future in his hands. After Hoover, a variety of men had held the job. Some of them were good, some were not so good, and one or two were disasters. “Call me Chet’s” appointment had come as a surprise. After Ruby Ridge and Waco, the embarrassment of misreading the intelligence in the Phoenix memo and hundreds of Al Qaida operatives and sympathizers in the country before September eleven, the post looked like a political graveyard. The President brought this man in because he thought a nonpolitical type might be able to bring a fresh look to the Agency.

  Fresh indeed. His years as the CEO of a couple of Fortune 500 corporations meant he intended to run the Agency like a business. He created lines of accountability, reorganized departments, subunits, all the way to the library, and dozens, no hundreds of employees, some with decades of service, were let go, the biggest housecleaning in the Agency’s history. Tom had to admit the place did run better, and for those, like him, who had survived the storm, it was a good thing. For the likes of Harry Grafton, it was awful. Most of the personnel had been offered early retirement. Tom had nearly jumped at that. He had the years, and the bonus out would have cleared his debts and allowed him the chance to move to the Outer Banks at last. The offer was still on the table and looking better all the time. The director wound down.

  “Phillips, I want him out of the way. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir, but—”

  “No buts, Phillips. Look. I want you to get him one way or the other. Nobody touches him and we bring him in. However, if the CIA.…Do you have any idea what those guys would do to us in the Oval Office if they get him first?”

  So much for closer working ties between the nation’s intelligence communities. “Sir, I don’t think—”

  “Even the spinmeisters downstairs couldn’t get us right. No, if it looks like the CIA will get him.…” The words hung in the air like day-old fish.

  “What?”

  “Friendly fire, Phillips. It happens all the time. Collateral damage, that sort of thing. You know the drill.”

  A lack of previous law enforcement experience may have left some gaps in his grasp of the finer points of the Bureau, but this new guy was either on a steep learning curve or corporate America operated as ruthlessly as the rest of the system. Tom swallowed hard. There were times, he knew, when an agent had to be bro
ught in. If he compromised an operation, or jeopardized the lives of others, certainly, but eliminate someone to avoid a public relations fiasco? Tom didn’t think so.

  “About the CIA, sir,” he said, hoping to redirect the conversation. Tom knew, orders or no orders, he would not set in motion any operation that could end in the death of an agent, ex or otherwise. Early retirement started to look better and better.

  “Don’t ask me how or why, but the sheriff down there is one of theirs. They must have been setting this up for years. Look, the guys in intelligence link this robbery to the mess in New York three months ago.”

  “Terrorists? Grafton is working with terrorists?”

  “Yes and no. Our information sources say this job was contracted out to the New Jersey Mafia. He might or might not know who is behind it. Either way it doesn’t matter. He has to go. Put your best people on it. Okay, that’s all.”

  ***

  Sooner or later, the scuttlebutt went, the director’s chickens were going to come home to roost. Business acumen and efficiency notwithstanding, this man had become a loose cannon, and Tom was sure he heard chickens flapping nearby. He thought about his options. For the moment, he had no choice but to put together a team and send it to Picketsville. As soon as he finished, he would fill out retirement forms and send them through. There would be no problem in the first instance because he intended to assemble the most inept team possible. That would guarantee no one would be caught, much less killed.

  Chickens at twelve o’clock, he thought.

  Back at his desk, Tom opened a drawer and removed the pint of rye hidden under some folders. Strictly against Agency rules but often a necessity. He emptied some cold coffee out of a Styrofoam cup and poured himself a double, logged in on the computer, and began to search for agents with little or no possible competence. He knew they were there, assigned to library or document work, their field evaluations so weak they were never considered for that work again.

  He found them. Next, pick a leader. He studied his roster. “Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Moe, who’s the dumbest one to go?” His finger stopped on Dennis Kenny. Perfect. Kenny was a likable thirty-something who did not fit anyone’s idea of an agent. He was on the bubble and he knew it. He would jump at the chance to shine. Perfect. He clicked on the phone number and picked up while it rang. Six rings and a sleepy Dennis Kenny answered.