The Enemy Inside

by Steve Martini

  “I thought it was our government. But I’m not so sure anymore,” says Ives.

  “Why would they kill the lawyer,” says Harry, “when they went to all the trouble of prosecuting Betz? Why not just kill them both if the mission is to shut them up?”

  “That’s a good point,” I say.

  “The answer to that may have died with Olinda Serna,” says Alex.

  “What?” Harry looks at him.

  “It’s how we got on to Serna,” says Ives. “She and Betz knew each other.” It sounds as if we are about to go full circle.

  “Betz and Serna used to work together.”

  Harry and I look at each other.

  “Back in the day when she worked campaigns before she went on Senate staff and later became the hotshot lawyer, I was told she and Betz were an item. They lived together. He handled the money. Her name was on the campaign finance statements. She was paid. He was a volunteer. They ran a business. At least that’s what I was told. He did most of the legwork, the collections,” says Ives. “I also heard that a lot of the checks that came in went through his fingers. Campaign contributions and maybe other things I don’t know about. Some of this is in Tory’s files. He would have more details,” says Alex.

  “These campaigns. Do you know who they were for?” asks Harry.

  “Members of Congress. She was working in D.C. at the time.”

  “Aren’t campaigns usually handled in the district, back home?” I ask.

  “Apparently not this stuff,” says Ives.

  “Which members of Congress?” says Harry.

  “I don’t know. Again, that’s probably something Tory would know. I think he’s got the records.”

  “What about the trip to Switzerland?” says Harry. “You told us before that you and Graves went to Switzerland looking for something?”

  “We did. Tory had some information. A contact, he said, in Lucerne. We went there to meet with him. But when it was time to see the man, Tory went alone. He told me it would be best. The guy might be less nervous if he approached him by himself.”

  “What else did he find out?” says Harry.

  “Just what I told you. If there’s anything more you’d have to get it from Tory. When he came back from the meeting he was very tightlipped. It was strange. Tory seemed to have changed about that time. Before then, he shared a lot of what he knew. After that, he seemed to play everything close to the vest. Kept it to himself like maybe he didn’t trust me. Not just me but others as well.”

  Tory Graves, the name keeps popping up. He is climbing up the list of people I want to meet.

  “So what do we have?” says Herman. “A dead lawyer. Another woman and her significant other burned to death in front of us. Some guy doin’ time for cheatin’ the taxman. And lots of money moving around overseas. What’s the connection?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell him. “But one thing’s for sure. It’s not safe for Alex to remain here any longer.”

  “Listen, I can take care of myself,” he says.

  “Yeah. You proved that the night of the party,” says Harry.

  “I wasn’t expecting anything. They surprised me.”

  “Yeah, and they’ll do it again,” says Herman.

  “Besides, the longer you stay here, the greater the risk for your parents,” I tell him.

  “I hadn’t thought about that,” he says.

  “You should. The three of you will be safer if Alex is someplace else,” I tell them.

  “Why can’t we just go to the police?” says his mother. “Aren’t they supposed to help in cases like this?”

  “They might believe us. Or they might not,” I tell her. “Either way, their only recourse will be to put Alex back in jail. If they believe he’s in danger, they’ll go to court and tell the judge he’s a flight risk, and the judge will probably revoke his bail. If they put him back behind bars, I can’t vouch for his safety.”

  “Oh, God!” His mother doesn’t want to hear this.

  “It’s OK. It’ll be all right,” I tell her. “We’ll find a place for him where it’s safe.” Even as I say this I know it’s an idle promise.

  “Where?” says Harry.

  “I don’t know. I’ll work on that.”

  “You know what it sounds like to me?” says Herman.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “Sounds like they couldn’t afford to kill Betz cuz maybe, just maybe, he hid a pooper in the chute.”

  Ives and his mother look at me as if this is some foreign regional dialect and I’m the local interpreter.

  “I think what Herman’s saying is that Mr. Betz may have hidden documents or other evidence as security against a violent end,” I tell them.

  “Pooper in the chute, how quaint,” she says. “So what you’re saying is that if he died unexpectedly, this information, the pooper as he calls it, would be revealed—made public? Is that it?”

  “That’s it,” I tell her.

  “And cause quite a stink,” says Herman.

  “It’s only good,” says Harry, “if the other side knows about it but can’t find it.”

  “Maybe they did,” says Herman, “know about it, I mean.”

  “That would be very smart.” She nods approvingly as she looks over at Alex, the weight of this night’s anxiety hanging heavy on her brow, the thought, I am sure, running through her mind at the moment: “Why can’t the lawyers, if they know so much, secure one of these bulletproof ‘poopers’ for my own son?”

  SEVENTEEN

  Lang-Jian Cheng sat behind the large ornate desk in his office at the Central Military Commission in Beijing. Wrinkled and bald, with a fringe of gray that wrapped his head above the ears, General Cheng was a career soldier in the People’s Liberation Army.

  He was head of Second Bureau, China’s overseas foreign intelligence unit, where he was known as “the Creeping Dragon” by subordinates. He was renowned for his practiced patience, his willingness to wait for just the right moment before acting, often to the consternation of younger and more aggressive officers.

  This morning, Cheng was busy reading the latest intelligence communiqués along with the daily briefings from the bureau’s burgeoning overseas offices and operations.

  He smiled after reading one of them. There were reports that an American CIA station in Central California had christened Cheng “Long John,” apparently in reference to the pirate in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island. It tickled his fancy, since he had earned this alias by thoroughly penetrating America’s high-tech industries in Silicon Valley. The place was believed to have so many of Cheng’s spies working there, gathering information and sending it back to Beijing, that some in the US intelligence community now referred to it not as “Chinatown,” but as “Cheng’s Town.”

  For a moment he considered framing the report for his wall, and then thought better of it. He put it facedown on the pile of documents already read and reached for his coffee.

  If the truth be known, they would realize that Cheng’s network was far more pervasive, so much so that it had drilled into the very core of the American government in Washington.

  The FBI didn’t know it because it was wielded through a Western intermediary, a man Cheng knew he could not always trust. But then, Cheng wasn’t sure he could always trust his own children, let alone his subordinates, such was his nature and the nature of the Chinese power structure. Trust was a weakness he couldn’t afford.

  He sipped his coffee as he considered the man code-named “Ying.” He was not in the strictest sense what you would call a “Chinese asset,” a spy who was handled by agents out of the Chinese embassy in Washington or one of its consulates in the far-flung United States. In fact, Cheng’s people knew only his code name and nothing more. Because of his unique position Cheng protected him and dealt with him directly.

  Their dealings were grounded not in ideology, but pragmatic common interest—the seeds of which were money and power. The money came from Chinese inv
estments made through the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges. These were certain coveted military-industrial stocks normally not made available to Western investors by the Chinese government. Profits taken from these were deposited in Ying’s numbered accounts in private banks in Hong Kong, none of which were accessible to American taxing authorities or law enforcement. There was nothing they could do.

  As far as Cheng was concerned, the Americans had no one to blame but themselves. Their open society was riddled with leaks, leakers, and unlocked safes. If it continued, China and Russia would have to erect walls just to keep out the growing number of disgruntled American defectors with their computerized mountains of top-secret information.

  American technology, which had exploded in the 1980s with the personal computer, had grown so fast and in such a turbulent fashion that US industrial security was a joke. America’s ineptitude invited other enterprising powers to steal everything that wasn’t locked down. Even their own government didn’t know how many priceless jewels they possessed. Under such a system, how could anyone protect them?

  He picked up the next report and began reading. Before he had completed three lines of Mandarin characters Cheng was reminded that the West and, in particular the United States, had far deeper problems than industrial or even military espionage.

  America’s greatest dilemma was not with China, Russia, Pakistan, North Korea, or the stateless terrorists of the Middle East. Its most serious problems were internal, part of the nation’s own political genetics.

  Reflections of this could be seen in the partisan divisions and the take-no-prisoners domestic political warfare that had become part of the daily news cycle in modern America. This constant infighting was largely intended for the acquisition of personal power by a handful of political celebrities fawned over by the American media. The process consumed vast financial and political resources, none of which took the country any closer to a single perceptible national goal. In Cheng’s view a sound dictatorship was far more efficient.

  To American politicians partisan disputes were a purely domestic matter. It was no one else’s business, and certainly beyond the purview of any foreign power. Yet, what they failed to realize were the foreign intelligence implications of this conduct, the toxic opportunities that it afforded to America’s adversaries abroad.

  As far as Cheng was concerned, democracies started wars they could not finish because they lacked the long-term political will that would allow them to complete what they had started. A war begun in one regime would result in failure and defeat when the troops were withdrawn in the next. The Fates often hung on the whim of voters who had no idea of the consequence of their votes and whose actions were often rooted in lies from ambitious politicians willing to deceive in order to attain higher office. But in Cheng’s mind, democracy was not a rational method for making sound policy.

  In modern China, lies, as an instrument of maintaining power, were unnecessary because there was no one to lie to. The people had no power, as long as they were controlled by the government. And once you fell from power, lies were futile.

  In America, politicians and the media, including the news outlets that pretended to cover government affairs, downplayed this near full-time exercise in deceit by calling it “spin.” This seemed to excuse it from the more serious lies committed by ordinary citizens who would pay dearly if they tried to deceive the state.

  Cheng found the justification for this American anomaly interesting. The rationale was that if you punished those in power with prison every time they lied, no one would run for public office. Cheng found it surreal that in the United States, supposedly the gold standard of modern law and justice, with its hundreds of thousands of lawyers, millions of statutes, and armies of judges, there was not a single penal law punishing officials who intentionally and repeatedly lied to their people on important issues of state.

  You could no longer shock the average American, no matter the scope of the scandal or the damage that it caused. They had come to expect this from their leaders.

  EIGHTEEN

  For a lawyer worth his salt, defending a case in any court of consequence, there are two things that will generally keep you up nights: unexplained coincidence and the serpent of surprise raising its ugly head in the courtroom.

  The fact that, of the countless millions of vehicles garaged in Southern California, Ives managed to smash into the one occupied by Serna, an object of inquiry in one of his stories, would test the limits of serendipity to the mind of any normal juror.

  The only answer we have for this is the theory that Ives was drugged and that the accident was staged by others—a preplanned murder. But here, there’s a problem. Between now and trial there is more than a fair chance that the D.A. and his investigators will kick over a rock and discover what Ives was up to, that he was working on a story involving Serna.

  Even if they don’t, it is likely from what Alex has told me that Tory Graves, his boss, being the hard-core muckraker that he is, will not hold the story. He will publish whatever he has before we can get to trial. If this happens, the prosecutor could easily jump on our theory, turn our own shield into a weapon, and beat us to death with it.

  As I think about this I am searching the Internet looking for something, some clue as to how an external force might take control of a vehicle moving at high speed. This might give us some lead as to how Ben and her boyfriend died, and perhaps how Serna was murdered.

  Something catches my eye, an online article: “How Stuff Works: Are Modern Cars Vulnerable to Hackers?” I read it and search further. I find more, another item: “Hackers Reveal Nasty New Car Attacks.” And more: “How Modern Cars Can Be Hacked.” On top of this is a mountain of other material, recent news articles concerning how carmakers are on the verge of developing driverless vehicles, the dream of the future. Maybe we should be more cautious about what we dream of.

  As I read on, the small hairs on the back of my neck begin to stand up. High-tech controls have been growing under the hood and inside the passenger compartments of automobiles for more than two decades. They operate the cruise control, setting the car’s speed. They can activate anti-collision avoidance systems, throwing on the brakes. Computer sensors fire airbags. They are used to lock car doors. There are literally scores of tiny “electronic control units” installed in modern passenger vehicles, and more were being added every year.

  Most people, like me, paid no attention. Government safety agencies encourage these developments. Sometimes they mandate them. The problem is, as with everything else that is high tech, there is a downside—loss of human control.

  One of the articles talks about a high-tech black-bag government agency that had already found ways to crack these systems, to hack them from outside the car, ways to turn them into weapons. There are sensors that, if they are hacked, can be used to turn off airbags, cut off the engine, or bleed the brakes so they no longer work. Some software could actually take over the navigation system of the vehicle involved. You could lock the doors so that the occupants could not escape, screw with the antilock brakes so they no longer worked, turn off the power steering, or limit the car’s turning radius.

  And then in the middle of one of the articles, the bombshell. Among the top-end luxury cars was the automated self-parking systems now available on some of the latest models. People love these because the built-in sensors control automated front-wheel movement and make it possible for them to parallel park between cars by pushing a button and merely touching the brake when the car was done. The system was only supposed to work at slow speeds, three or four miles per hour, and in reverse. But according to the article it was now believed that the black-bag computer nerds working for the government had been able to turn this to the dark side. They had managed to trick the car’s speedometer and transmission so that you could hijack the parking system to control the car’s steering and do it remotely at high forward speeds. The theory was that this could be used to turn a vehicle into a veritable death
trap. It made it possible to orchestrate head-on collisions. I am beginning to think this is more than theory.

  I print out the articles, and as they pile up in my printer I turn my attention back to the crisis at hand. The question prosecutors will try to answer if they find out that Alex was working on a story involving Serna. Could they cobble together a theory as to why he might want to kill her? Give the cops an hour and they will come up with a dozen theories, warp their evidence around the best one and run with it. This is likely to be more plausible and certainly more satisfying to the jury than our own—that some other dude did it, but we don’t know who it is.

  The answer to this riddle may lie in whatever revelations lurk in the details of the dirt dug up by Tory Graves. This is the surprise package we don’t want exploding under our case in front of the jury.

  Harry and I have managed to stall the preliminary hearing in Ives’s case, the question of whether he should be bound over for trial in Superior Court. The outcome of these proceedings is preordained. Alex will have to stand trial. But we have waived time in the interest of delay, the perpetual strategy of every criminal defendant and their lawyer. But in this case we had a better reason than most, something we chose not to share with the judge or his clerk when we did the little dance in chambers to waive time.

  If pushed to the wall and asked to produce our client, Harry and I will have to say that we don’t know where he is. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it, at least until our asses are thrown in jail, at which time Harry says he reserves the right to reconsider.

  Alex’s parents actually don’t know where he is. We have kept them in the dark. We thought about posting a sign on their front lawn telling whoever wants to kill him that they don’t know where their kid is, just as a precaution. But we didn’t.

  This morning I made two phone calls. The first was to Tory Graves in D.C. He took the call, then dodged about on the phone for a while telling me how busy he was. Graves did not seem terribly concerned about Alex or his current predicament. In the end he agreed to see me, but only after I suggested that we might need to subpoena him as a witness unless, of course, I could find out what I needed to know in some less formal way. That seemed to soften his hide. It also fed his curiosity. He wanted to know what I was after. I told him it was better discussed face-to-face. We scheduled a meeting on his turf.