Hellfire (Sisters In Law Book 2)

by John Ellsworth

  "Yes, we can only pray he leads us to his friends."

  "Then go back to your car. You've got a long night ahead of you."

  "Yes, we'll take it from here."

  "And you'll update me on all movements of this man."

  "Yes. We will be his new skin."

  "Fine, thank you, Rolf."

  The man named Rolf opened the passenger door. No light flared inside the car. He began walking back up the sidewalk and toward the corner of the block where Hussein lived. He then crossed the street and disappeared from Christine's view.

  So the surveillance was in place.

  Now to pray it was enough.

  37

  Friday night, the marshals came for Althea at her condo. She lived in a gated community. The gatekeeper--when the black Crown Vic pulled up at his window--asked no questions once the badges were flashed. "Gentlemen," he said, and immediately raised the gate.

  Althea thought it strange when her doorbell chimed without a call first from the guard. No one was expected. It could only be a neighbor, she thought, even though she knew none of them because she had only lived there since returning from Washington, D.C.

  She used the peephole. A black face and a white face peered back at her. Then a badge was displayed. The security chain in place, she cracked the door and looked out.

  "Yes?"

  "U.S. Marshals, ma'am. You're Althea Berenson?"

  "Yes."

  "The same Ms. Berenson who recently lived in Washington?"

  "Yes, why?"

  "May we come in?"

  She slid aside the security chain and stepped away from the door. The officers came inside.

  "Please, come in and have a seat," she offered.

  "No ma'am," the black officer said. "We have a warrant for your arrest. We're here to take you to jail."

  Althea was a strong woman and had been around the block. She knew that whatever it was about, it was all about leverage from then on.

  "May I call my lawyer first?" she asked.

  "No, ma'am. After you're booked you'll be allowed to make calls to your attorney or family member. Please turn around and cross your wrists behind you."

  She did as she was told and the handcuffs were firmly put in place.

  "Now, ma'am, I'm going to place right here on your dining table a copy of the search warrant we're going to execute tonight. It will be here for you when you make bail and return home."

  "Search warrant? What are you searching for?"

  "Contraband," said the white, smaller officer.

  "Contraband means what?"

  "Evidence of a crime."

  "What crime am I accused of?"

  "We have a criminal complaint charging you with multiple counts of theft and multiple criminal conspiracies. You will receive the complaint after you're processed into the jail and we then talk to you."

  "I won't be talking to you. So you can save your criminal complaint and your efforts to fool me into making a statement. Ain't gonna happen, Gents."

  "All right, then. We are going to take you downstairs to our car. We'll be passing a group of marshals on their way up. They'll be searching these premises. Is there a storage room apart from the condo that you use?"

  "You mean here on the grounds somewhere?"

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "Well, there's a storage room off my porch. At the far end."

  "Do you keep computer parts in there? Hard drives? Old computers? Floppies?"

  "No. It's got some interior paint I saved, some ant powder, maybe an old roller or two. Stuff like that. But no computer parts."

  "Your computer is here?"

  "Yes, it is. Right there on the coffee table."

  "Is that the only computer you own?"

  "Yes, it is."

  "Is that the only computer you use?"

  "Yes, it is."

  "Do you use cloud storage with your computer?"

  "I do. Dropbox."

  "Will you give us that password?"

  "I would if I knew it. It's been so long since I had to enter it, I don't remember it."

  "Any other external drives, thumb drives, CDs or other magnetic data repositories?" asked the white marshal.

  "No--no. Why, what you looking for?"

  "We're looking for the documents you stole from Blackguard, Inc. while you worked for them in D.C. Mind telling us what you did with those?"

  "No comment."

  "No comment because you don't want to tell us?"

  "No comment."

  "All right, then. We're done here. Let's go now, Ms. Berenson."

  They took her into the hallway, down to the elevator, and downstairs to the waiting Crown Vic.

  "Don't tell me," she said at the car. "I get in back, you two up front. I've seen this movie before."

  "Correct," said the black officer. "Easy now, don't hit your head."

  "Wait! I didn't bring my purse!"

  "You won't be needing your purse, Ms. Berenson."

  "But it has my blood pressure pills!"

  "The prison nurse will cover all that once you're booked in. You wouldn't be allowed to take drugs with you into your cell anyway. Not drugs from the outside."

  "If I have a heart attack or stroke, I'm suing. Can I get your cards?"

  The white officer, in the passenger seat, held up a business card.

  "Here you go. Oops, you're handcuffed. Maybe you'll just have to wait and read the police reports to get our ID's. Is that all right?"

  "Now you're being facetious. That's sarcasm, officer."

  "Yes, it is. I'd suggest you sit back now and enjoy the ride. We're an hour away from the jail, so you can relax."

  "All right, I'll relax. Or try to."

  "Yes, try to. All any of us can do is try, Ms. Berenson."

  After booking she was allowed to make no calls. She objected and demanded to speak with her attorney. She was ignored.

  * * *

  Lonnie Riffer, Ph.D.--"Doctor Riff"--held a Ph.D. in computer forensics from a university in Zurich, Switzerland, where he was born and grew up. He had been hired by the U.S. Marshal's service for his expertise in extracting usable evidence from computer systems. This included computer hard drives, storage modalities, systems analysis, on- and off-site storage including cloud computing, as well as the analysis of how data had been put to whatever use by its interloper. He was a six-footer, lithe and blonde, and wore a scruffy blonde beard and eyeglasses with blue lenses that would have made Elvis jealous.

  Doctor Riff went into Althea's townhouse with a team of five marshals and marshal's office employees and directed the seizure of all electronic storage media. He then spent all night tracking data acquisition and distribution under the seventeen user accounts maintained by the defendant. Yes, seventeen, he told his associates, the most he'd ever seen one individual maintain. "She was a walking User ID," he laughed. "I still don't know if I have them all. But I will, definitely."

  Doctor Riff debriefed with U.S Attorney Racquel MacAdams on Saturday morning at her office on Dearborn.

  "So here's the preliminary shakeout," said Doctor Riff. "I located seven Dropbox accounts and inventoried them all. You'll be receiving my report of those items after Labor Day."

  "Tuesday?"

  "Thursday at the latest."

  "What, essentially, are we talking about?"

  "Lots of Blackguard material such as employee handbooks, system analysis recipes, fire drill plans, even a menu from May's cafeteria offerings."

  "God-Almighty!"

  "Yes. But most important, I came across a private key, the kind commonly used between two computers to access and store data."

  "Did it unlock anything?"

  "It did. A certain European moving and storage company has an off-site data dump. As near as I can tell, it's a room full of servers, maybe thirty, all told. Their system had been hacked. They had no clue. And the data from one server had been redistributed to a sister machine and was made accessible there. Then the empty server w
as accessed remotely, of course, over the next two weeks by a machine with Althea Berenson's credentials."

  "Accessed for what purpose?"

  "She used their data server to store Blackguard documents there."

  "Describe, please."

  "You name it, she has it stored there. Action items, photographs, schematics, conversations--written and verbal--communications between officers and agents of Blackguard--including the owners themselves."

  "The DuMonts."

  "Yes. But the dates are what blew my mind. This stuff she stole and squirreled away goes back to 1973 and the Vietnam War."

  "Blackguard started operating during Vietnam."

  "Exactly. After the fall of Dien Bien Phu the call went out for CIA intervention. The CIA didn't have the horsepower, so it called on America's largest security company. At that time Blackguard was totally domestic and it wasn't known as Blackguard. DuMont Investigations and Security was its name way back when. Anyway, the two brothers reformed the company, named it Blackguard, and went international. They basically put into effect all CIA schemes and plans during the remainder of the war. All of that stuff--Vietnam to this year in Syria--all of it has been accessed and stored off-site on this server in Europe."

  "Must be a huge server."

  "Oh, but she's much smarter than that! The documents have been segmented. Ten percent are on the server we discovered, another ten percent are on a second server we found, this one at a startup pharmaceutical in Hong Kong, and it goes on and on. Slowly but surely we're tracking them down. But it will be months, probably, until I know I have them all located."

  "Is there a master list of the data? Foolish question?"

  "Great question. You have raised one of the key problems with all this. We don't know what's been taken or not. So no, there's no master list. Which means we'll probably never know how completely the government's classified data has been compromised."

  "So she's hit us hard."

  "Harder than hard. Even if you were talking wartime explosives, this one's a hydrogen bomb."

  "Who else knows about this?" asked MacAdams, her mind already veering off to damage control.

  "So far it's closed door. Just two staff members who're helping me. One's a cryptographer; one's a security expert. They're both geeks; they don't know anyone to tell."

  "And they have clearances?"

  "Yes, both top secret clearances. Just like yours truly."

  "You."

  He smiled happily. "That's right."

  "All right. Look, this goes no further. My first inclination is to take this personally to the Attorney General. No, it's not an inclination, that's what I'll be doing. In fact, I'll see if I can track him down this weekend."

  "Yes, good."

  "You keep a lid on everything. Don't go back on those servers or do anything else. Got it?"

  "You're shutting me down?"

  "Just until I can talk to the AG. He might want the FBI in on this."

  "Roger that."

  "Lordy, here we come!"

  * * *

  She located the AG at half past noon by phone. He was out on the waters of Chesapeake Bay in the family spinnaker and would be back around three. So she waited. She went downstairs to the corner and retrieved Buffalo Coffee with a sesame bagel. She bought a Trib. She went back up to her office and called her daughter. She chided her for wearing too much makeup to the "Welcome Back to School Holiday Dance" at her high school last night. She sprayed her computer screen with cleaning solvent and carefully wiped it away with a diaper she kept on hand for that purpose.

  Finally her phone rang on the private line.

  "Racquel? Anders Livingston here. What national security matter did you call about?"

  "I did say it was matter of national security, sir, because I believe it just might be."

  "All right, cut to the chase. We're getting ready for burgers and wine coolers here."

  "You know Blackguard."

  "Of course I know Blackguard. And what--what, woman?"

  "Their data has been mined and scattered around the globe."

  "They did this?"

  "No, an employee did this. A woman we've just arrested. We got her computer, tracked down logins and trails over the last few months, and found Blackguard's data on a server in Europe. We found more of it on a server in Hong Kong."

  "Whose servers?"

  "People--companies--that know nothing about the data they're storing. These were soft firewalls. High school level stuff, I'm told. Anyway, Blackguard's entire history as demonstrated by company documents has been compromised."

  "You don't mean classified stuff?"

  "I do. I mean all of it."

  "Holy shit, woman. All right, slow down. Where are you, MacAdams?"

  "At my office. Downtown Chicago."

  "I'm calling in the FBI's Emergency Response team. Our national security is on high risk status as of now--three-twenty-four p.m."

  "Copy that, sir."

  "You wait there, MacAdams, the FBI is on its way. And get your computer people on site. Are these U.S. Marshals?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Good. Call them into your office. No talking to anyone about this. As for me, I'm calling the President at Camp David. He's going to have a miserable holiday."

  "Sorry for that. Please give him my--"

  "Sit tight, MacAdams. That's an order!"

  "Yes, sir."

  38

  FBI agent Bernard L. Janssen had flown in from Washington to take the suspect into custody himself. Why would the DOJ send a high-ranking FBI agent to Chicago to effect a mundane arrest in a government theft case? Because, as the President had passed along, this was anything but a mundane arrest. From what they had been able to gather, the suspect, Christine Susmann, was the mastermind behind the Althea Berenson theft of Blackguard documents. She had to be arrested without delay and, most important of all, she was to be held incommunicado. It was key that she not be allowed to speak to anyone, especially any lawyer she might wish to call. She was to hit a dead end.

  So Janssen was uncomfortable when Christine invited him into her home that Saturday night. Uncomfortable because he knew they were about to play hardball with the woman, hold her without bail and without communication with the outside world.

  It just had to be done that way. At least until they could get a tape measure around the tonnage of documents that had been made off with. They still didn't know how inclusive the theft was. Which was the most critical item on their checklist of all the items hastily put there by the President, the AG, the Director of the FBI, and the D.C. AIC Bernard L. Janssen.

  He accepted her proffer of chilled water and thanked her for the courtesy.

  "Why we're here, Ms. Susmann, you already can guess."

  Christine sat cross-legged on the white sofa across from Janssen and two of his subordinates.

  "Actually I can't guess. I'm thinking it has something to do with the al-Assad case, maybe."

  "What's that?" Janssen asked.

  "The girl--young woman--whose family was murdered? You've heard about that case and her success in getting a plaintiff's verdict on the liability issue?"

  "Actually, I haven't heard," said Janssen, gulping down a mouthful of the chilled water. He wiped his mouth with the back of his shirt cuff.

  Christine was perplexed. She had finally decided to turn over the surveillance of Hussein and Sevi to the Chicago PD and already the Illinois Bureau of Investigation had swooped in and was working the case day and night. Christine was satisfied with that call; the matter threatened to involve the deaths of hundreds of innocents and Christine had wasted no time calling in the cops when Sevi's life was taken over by Hussein. Yet, that wasn't what the FBI visit pertained to. So, she decided to decry all knowledge and information about any other matter the FBI might like to know about even though, deep down, she knew certain documents had been lifted from the Blackguard servers; she just didn't know the full extent of it.

  "Well, my c
lient is being held against her will by a Syrian terrorist. He is threatening to set off a bomb in a populated area. The IBI has taken over that case. So my guess is, you're not here about that."

  "Actually, no. This is the first I've heard about that. But that's not why I'm here."

  "Then, how can I help?"

  "Actually, Ms. Susmann, I'm here to arrest you."

  39

  Jamie knew his mom was a moving target. She played hard and she fought hard. Likewise, those she opposed hit back hard.

  When the FBI took her away, he didn't freak out; in fact, it came as no surprise.

  To him, her arrest was just another result of her being on the front lines fighting the good fight and standing up for what she believed. Besides, she had told him long ago, when first adopting him, that her job would keep her in jeopardy some of the time and that he shouldn't be surprised at the odd things she would sometimes ask him to do or the aberrations that would sometimes come their way.

  So when she was arrested he kept all this in mind and waited for his mother's mother--his grandmother--to show up at the house to keep an eye on him and his sister. Her name was Rosalind Albright and she was a retired baby doctor from Orbit who always responded to Christine's requests for help in a flash. This time was no different and, because of the arrangement, Jamie and his sister felt fully supported when mom was led away. Just another day, they said, knowing full well she would soon extricate herself and be back home.

  To stay busy, Jamie turned back to his software. While he wasn't worried about his mother, he was worried about Sevi's sudden disappearance from the house. She was his good friend and he wouldn't rest until he knew she was okay. He doubted she had the same ability to care for herself as his mom had. The IBI was tracking her, he had been told, and that should have been enough. However, Christine was updating Jamie on the IBI's efforts and it was turning out that the IBI wasn't enough. They kept losing Sevi.

  The problem the IBI ran into was that the Muslims they were concerned about were slippery. Consequently, the cops were thrown off the trail, or they simply lost the scent altogether, repeatedly. When they lost their quarry, all they could do was cross fingers and pray that this wasn't the time the bomb was being taken to a school and set to explode.