by David Duffy
“Not just me?”
“Sorry, shug. I love you, I think, and I love my job. Don’t ask the order.”
I was willing to accept whatever order she stated. We held hands across the counter.
She said, “Do you know why I left?”
“You said you would. You gave me fair warning. That’s one reason I didn’t try to stop you.”
“I wouldn’t bring that up—not a point in your favor.”
Honesty’s not always the best policy, I guess. “You told me if I fooled around with the law, you’d stop fooling around with me—or words to that effect. Your job and career were too important, and I had to respect that. I heard you loud and clear. It’s just… Fate is hard to explain.”
“Don’t give me that fate bs. You’re pigheaded and there’s an adage about old pigs and new tricks. But that’s not the reason—or the whole reason.”
She was watching me, waiting for the answer she seemed certain I knew. Except I didn’t. I’d taken her threat—or promise—at face value. When she followed through I blamed only myself—and fate.
She watched and waited another few moments before she shook her head. “Men are just too obtuse for words. I was scared to death you were going to get hurt—or worse. I still am. That kind of fear was new to me. I couldn’t live with it. So I ran away. There—I’ve said it.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond. I stroked the back of her fingers.
“What changed?”
“I spent most of the last month thinking. Every day, by the pool at the Gage Hotel. I’d go out there to read, swim, sleep, but mostly I just thought things over. I figured out two things. I love my job and I love you, like I said. I couldn’t telecommute forever, so, if I stayed away, I’d be unemployed, lonely, and still in love. That prospect didn’t have a lot to recommend it. If I came back, I could get back to the office, see you, and work on trying to overcome the fear. I was hoping against hope that maybe you’d help. Then I saw your recent set of bruises. So much for that idea.”
“I told you, I didn’t go looking for them.”
“But they found you. They’re always going to find you. I’m still not a hundred percent sure I can deal with that, but I’m going to give it my best try.”
“I couldn’t be happier. I mean that. I’ll try too. But…”
“But what?”
“I’ve still got to finish this job Foos got me into. And the guy who gave me the bruises is still out there. I saw him last night, in Queens, just before I came home. He’s circling around the Leitz family—that’s Foos’s friend.”
“And you can’t leave it alone, of course.”
“I told Leitz I’d help. He’s got more problems than maybe he knows. I’d be leaving him hanging. Foos too. And there’s the not insubstantial matter of my fee.”
“I told you before, only two things men care about—sex and money. How much fee?”
“Million dollars.”
I thought I could surprise her, and I did. “A million dollars?! You’re kidding, right?”
“No joke. Plus use of a painting, four months a year. A Malevich.”
“Who’s Malevich?”
“You’re not going to like him. Russian. The guy who got those Marfa steel boxes and neon lights rolling—fifty years earlier.”
“You’re right about not liking him.”
“The painting in question cost Leitz eighty million.”
“This guy owns a painting worth eighty million dollars?”
“One of many.”
“Jesus. Who is he?”
“Financial rocket scientist. Hedge fund manager.”
“And why is he willing to pay you a million dollars?”
“To find the guys who are trying to derail a big deal he’s put together, or that’s what he thinks. It’s worth sixty or seventy billion. My fee gets lost in the rounding.”
“Sixty or seventy billion?! Wait a minute—is that the TV deal? It’s been all over the papers.”
“That’s right.
“Well dammit, shug, what are we doing sitting here? Let’s get working.”
“I thought sex and money only got men’s attention.”
“Us country girls have a deep-rooted respect for cash.”
“What about the trouble? Nosferatu might be downstairs now, for all I know.”
“The guy who beat you up?”
I nodded.
“For a million bucks, I’ll take the chance. But…”
“Having second thoughts?”
“Not on your life. Just you go down first.”
CHAPTER 17
Nosferatu was nowhere to be seen, and we walked to the office hand in hand. A clear, cold day, with a whipping wind. Halfway there, Victoria shivered and I put my arm around her. She burrowed in close and stayed there until we reached the lobby.
Upstairs, the expanse of the Basilisk engendered a small intake of breath.
“Jesus. Is that all computers?”
“Yep. Servers.”
“How many are there?”
“Never counted. Twelve rows, maybe twenty-five racks to a row, ten servers to a rack. That’s…”
“Is this the Big Dick thing your partner in crime boasts about?”
“A small piece of it. Probably the only noninvasive piece out there.”
“It invaded me as I remember.”
“Sometimes the end justifies the means.”
“That’s a matter of opinion. So you really could’ve found me, if you’d tried.”
“In less time than it takes to fly to El Paso.”
“Shit. And it’s legal?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Don’t think I’m not going to look into that.”
We emerged from the server farm. Pig Pen heard us coming. He looked Victoria up and down, as he does with all newcomers. I was afraid he was going to whistle, a trick his boss taught him, but instead he announced, “Bohemia Bombshell!”
“What did he say?” Victoria said, turning.
“Sounded like ‘Bohemia Bombshell.’ It’s a compliment, I think.”
Pig Pen used to greet female visitors, almost always Foos’s Eastern European models, with “Cutie! Hot Number!” Apparently he’d been expanding his vocabulary.
“He’s a parrot. What’s he know about Bohemia? Or bombshells?”
“African gray, to be precise. Don’t sell him short. He gets his vocabulary from his boss, the radio, and his own bird brain, in that order. I’m responsible for foreign languages. C’est vrai, Pig Pen?”
“Russky.”
“See what I mean?”
“Wait a minute! He can… converse?”
“Sure. Why not? He’s smart, and he thinks he’s human. Visitors always pique his curiosity.”
“I don’t believe this.”
Pig Pen was clutching the mesh in his office door. Victoria walked slowly in his direction.
“Bohemia Bombshell,” Pig Pen said.
“I’m from the Bayou, parrot. Can you say, ‘Bayou Bombshell’?”
He looked her up and down again. 1010 WINS played in the background.
“Guess you’re right about bird brain,” she said.
“He’ll figure it out if he wants to,” I said. “Foos says he’s up to almost three hundred words. He can provide a complete report on the morning traffic interspersed with commercial appeals for food. How’re the bridges and tunnels, Pig Pen?”
“Twenty minutes, Holland. Ten, Lincoln.”
“GWB?”
“Ten, upper. Five, lower.”
“See what I mean? East River crossings?”
“Usual backups.” He fixed on Victoria. “Tiramisu?”
“Tiramisu?”
“His latest infatuation. Used to be pizza. Victoria is an aficionado of Italian food, Pig Pen. I’d keep at it, if I were you. You might get lucky.”
He climbed up the mesh to eye level and stared straight at her. “Bayou Babe. Tiramisu?”
“Now you’re talking,” s
he laughed.
“Bayou Babe.”
“Where’d he get his name? Wait a minute. Let me guess.” She sniffed the stale marijuana smoke in the air. “Late drummer for the Grateful Dead?”
Foos’s boom box rumbled across the space. “Give the lady a cigar.”
“Bayou Babe. Cigar,” Pig Pen said.
* * *
“It’s rare that I’m happy to see a member of the prosecutorial profession return to the fray, but in your case, I make an exception,” Foos said.
“Owing, I believe, to our mutual friend here,” Victoria responded, “who I understand has been somewhat out of sorts.”
“Total flow-breaker. I kept telling him not to worry, but…” He shrugged.
“I also gather you and your cyber-serpent declined assistance.”
“As I told him, only a complete fool would take sides.”
“You got that much right.” She nodded at the server canyons. “He says that thing’s legal, but he’s a socialist. You’re probably a socialist too, but at least you’re an American. How about it?”
“It’s entirely legal, and that, Ms. Bayou Babe, is the whole problem, in a nutshell.”
He turned and retreated to his office. Victoria looked at me. “Is it me, or is he like this with everyone?”
“Pretty much everyone. He’s fanatical on the subject of privacy. You—or more accurately your employer, the U.S. government—is Public Enemy Number One, in his view.”
“I know. That foundation of his…”
“I’m on the board, remember? So’s Pig Pen.”
“Christ. Why am I not surprised?”
“The problem, Foos will be quick to tell you, is not the Basilisk. It can retrieve, sort, analyze, and match data faster and more efficiently than anything else, but it can only do that because the data got saved to be searched and analyzed in the first place. The real problem is the Big Dick—and all the information it collects and keeps on you and me and everyone else—all in the name of marketing, public safety, antiterrorism or whatever other excuse the Dickers come up with.”
“Now wait just a minute. Who are you to talk? You used to do much worse. Your government spied on everybody.”
“True enough. My bosses would have killed for this kind of capability. That’s why I’m on STOP’s board—I’ve been where this leads.”
“But you have no problem using it for your own ends?”
“Like the man said, it’s legal. Why shouldn’t I?”
“I can’t win.”
“Play your cards right and maybe you’ll get a demonstration of the beast at work.”
We went to Foos’s door. He was packing his messenger bag.
“Happy now?” he asked.
“Pure state of bliss, no thanks to you. I saw Nosferatu last night, outside Leitz’s brother-in-law’s building in Queens. The brother-in-law wasn’t there. Nosferatu had a key.”
He straightened, thinking for a moment. “That can’t be good.”
“Nope. But there’s that issue of perspective.”
“Always. Let me know if you need anything. Got a meeting.”
“What are you two talking about?” Victoria said.
“He’ll explain, I’m late,” Foos said and grinned at Victoria. “Going over to the ACLU. We’re looking at ways to collaborate.”
“Okay if I give her a little demonstration of the beast at work?”
“She’s a Fed, Turbo. Strictly limited access.”
He lumbered out the door.
“I’m beginning to understand one thing,” she said, “why you two get along.”
“How’s that?”
“You are both socialists. Neanderthal socialists.”
“Sharing had to start somewhere. C’mon, demo time.”
“Cuckoo time, you ask me,” she said, but she followed me to my office. Pig Pen took a shot as we crossed the open space.
“Bayou Babe! Tiramisu?”
“It’s still breakfast time, parrot. Nobody eats tiramisu for breakfast.”
That stumped him, but I guessed not for long.
Victoria took the chair I placed beside mine, and I opened my laptop and worked the keyboard. The Basilisk hissed. It took Walter Coryell’s name in its jaws and retreated into the darkness of its cave. A few minutes later it reemerged to spit out its findings.
The Leitzes all had their problems. Marianna and her husband. Julia and her obsession over her work. Thomas and his financial irresponsibility. Coryell was different. Maybe because he was only an in-law. Coryell was a fraud.
He and Julia maintained a joint checking account. She deposited $12,000 every month, he deposited $4,000. No small amount, certainly, but it suggested he was making around $100K annually. Julia said he was very successful. I couldn’t find anything that looked like a year-end bonus or dividend payment from his company. She, on the other hand, was bringing home a salary of $300,000 and banked a year-end bonus/profit share of $2.5 mil. Those all-consuming deals paid off—at least financially.
More to the point, Coryell didn’t leave any spending trail. I’d partly guessed the Internet entrepreneur story was bull. Now I was looking at the credit card records of a man who supposedly traveled frequently on business—who hadn’t paid for a plane ticket, hotel room or rental car in years. Nor were there any lunches, dinners, Broadway shows, operas, baseball or basketball games—none of the things you’d expect a successful businessman to be spending his, or his company’s, money on. He had his own car—a two-year-old leased Volvo—garaged near the family’s apartment. Gas purchases indicated he didn’t drive a lot, other than back and forth to their house in Ancramdale in Columbia County—and he didn’t go there much either.
“That’s it?” Victoria said.
“All there is,” I agreed.
“This thing’s a bust.”
“You weren’t listening. The Basilisk isn’t the threat. The Big Dick, the databases—they’re what’s evil. And the fact that the Dick has so little information on our man Coryell tells us something, quite a lot, actually.”
“Like what?”
“Like maybe he isn’t who he’s supposed to be. Like maybe the existence of another credit card in another name hooked up to another Social Security number, out of reach of preying eyes like mine.”
“You mean, Jekyll and Hyde?”
“Jekyll and Hyde with plastic.”
“Shit.” She got up and walked around the office. “We never thought of that. Why are you interested in this guy?”
“Client’s brother-in-law.”
“And if he leads a double life…?”
“Somebody bugged Leitz’s computers, maybe connected with the TV deal, I don’t know. But whoever did it knew the layout. Coryell’s the one member of the family I can’t get a fix on. It’s like he’s part of it, but not. Never around, didn’t go to Leitz’s wedding. No one in the family wants to talk about him. I bring him up, they change the subject. Even his wife.”
“That doesn’t mean anything necessarily…”
“True enough, but I saw the guy who beat me up outside Coryell’s office last night. He’s almost certainly involved in the bugging, and he had a key to the building.”
“But Coryell wasn’t there.”
“Right.”
“Still circumstantial.”
“The only reasonable doubt I have to satisfy is my own. And maybe Leitz’s.”
“You have motive?”
“Still working on that.”
“Show me what else this Big Dick can do. Christ, listen to me, I’m talking like you two.”
“You heard Foos. Strictly limited access for Feds.”
“I’m just kibitzing. Come on.”
She smiled, and my heart backflipped again, just as it had last night. I would have looked up anything or anyone she wanted.
“Let’s check something.”
I went back to work on the keyboard. In less than a minute I had the vehicle identification number for Coryell’s Volvo.
A few minutes after that, the service records from the Manhattan dealership, appeared on the screen.
“What are we looking for?” Victoria asked.
“Mileage. The Volvo’s two years old. Say it gets twenty miles a gallon, average. Coryell’s gas purchases total eight hundred gallons, if we figure three bucks each. The car should have sixteen thousand miles on the clock. Service records say thirty-one thousand two-fifty at the last appointment, a month ago. Who’s buying fifteen-thousand-miles worth of gas? And who’s driving the car?”
“Wife?”
I told the Basilisk to rifle through Julia Leitz’s purchases and extract the gas charges. They totaled $1,172—maybe twenty-five tankfuls, one every other month.
“Add eight thousand miles for her, which is generous, and we’ve still got seven thousand miles, give or take, unaccounted for.”
“Someone used cash.”
“Maybe. Pattern suggests credit, but I can get the Basilisk to match that up with their ATM withdrawals if you want.”
“You can do that?”
“Take a few minutes.”
“Jesus, that thing’s pure poison.”
“Where do you think it got its name?”
“Okay, seven thousand miles. Still not all that much.”
“Twenty-two percent of the total on the car.”
“Then tell me this, smart guy: Why doesn’t his wife notice?”
“She’s not paying attention.”
“Oh come on! That’s just male…”
“Uh-uh. She’s smart. Tough too. But she’s totally focused on her work, family’s an afterthought. Her siblings told me that and I’ve met her. It rings true.”
“She got kids?”
“Two.”
“What kind of woman—”
“Spy school lesson—value judgments only get in the way.”
“You suggesting I butt out?”
“Not at all,” I said quickly. “Let’s look at phone calls.”
I worked the keyboard, and the Basilisk went back to its cave. It returned almost immediately with two lists of numbers—those Coryell called and those calling Coryell. They had one thing in common—they were short.
“Once again, not what you’d expect from a supposedly successful businessman,” I said.