“And?”
“Maybe it’s nothing. It’s just that most security codes set up firewalls to stop people from outside getting in. There are internal surveillance programs, but, you know, there are ways around everything. You can disable the surveillance once you’re in, but if you start out already inside the firewall, you can work behind the wall. Or you set it up to keep sending false positives while you go about your business. A lot of things can happen once the barbarians are inside the gates. You can run a doubler program that says you’re in one place when you’re in another, cyberspace-wise. Any number of things. There’s a printout I put together for my computer fraud class that I included in what I sent you.”
“I appreciate it,” DeLuca said. “Did you turn this into another class assignment?”
“Naw, but I asked a couple of graduate students to check into it,” Ford said. “I came up with another connection you might be interested in.”
“Which is?”
“I ran the name Leon Lev through the system, but all SIPERNET gave me was ties to some Albanian hoods running a bunch of Italian restaurants in New York City, so I called our friend Mike O’Leary at the Bureau. He said there was a KGB goon named Leon Lev who worked out of the Moscow directorate in the eighties. Remember that Marine guard at the U.S. embassy who got caught bonking a Russian woman who turned out to be a spy, back in 1984? Lev was the guy who hooked them up. They used to call that a ‘honey trap.’ I don’t know if that’s what they still call it, but apparently that was his job, and his boss was Vitaly Sergelin.”
“The Russian oil bazillionaire?”
“Now, but then, he was one of the top guys in the KGB. A colonel. He and Putin were like Hope and Crosby, and his whole deal was trying to crack the U.S. embassy.”
“So he and Koenig would have known each other,” DeLuca said.
“I don’t know if they knew each other, but they would have known of each other,” Ford said. “After perestroika and all that, when the Soviet Union fell apart and there was a big scramble to privatize what used to be industries controlled by the state, there was a major power grab for the oil business, and Sergelin came out on top, but not without a number of horseheads in the beds and various people not-so-mysteriously disappearing, and O’Leary said Lev was Sergelin’s main boy, until he had to more or less split town when he started leaving too many bodies around. O’Leary said they lost track of Lev after 1996 or so. Do you know what he’s doing now?”
“Apparently he owns a number of whorehouses in Juarez,” DeLuca said.
“Well,” Ford said, “you know what they say about the cream rising to the top.”
“Or the scum sinking to the bottom,” DeLuca said.
“Scum would actually be on the top, too,” Ford said. “Sludge would sink to the bottom.”
“That must be why it’s so hard to tell the cream and the scum apart,” DeLuca conceded.
DeLuca wondered if it was purely a coincidence when, half an hour later, his phone rang.
“Lieutenant Carr calling for General Koenig—will you hold?” the voice on the phone said. Nothing about, “Are you in the middle of something right now?” But then, generals rarely asked if they were interrupting anything. Something about Carr had rubbed him the wrong way from the first time he’d met him at Cheyenne Mountain. He’d struck Dan Sykes the wrong way, too, literally, defeating him at an intraservice full-contact karate tournament a year earlier when Dan had failed to wipe the sanctimonious smirk off Carr’s face, too eager, Sykes admitted, for the opportunity to hit an officer. DeLuca waited. When Koenig came on the line, his tone was oddly solicitous.
“Agent DeLuca,” he said. “Glad I caught you. I had a briefing with General LeDoux. Er sagt daß Sie pflegten in Deutschland als Übersetzer zu arbeiten.”
“Not exactly as a translator,” DeLuca said. “We worked at a listening station on the border. Near Mannheim. You were in Berlin, as I understand.”
“Es war alles soviel einfachere, als wir wußten, wem der Feind war und wo er lebte, nicht war?” “It was all so much simpler when we knew who the enemy was and where he lived, wasn’t it?” the general had asked. “Listen, I wanted to hear where you are with this. As you now understand, there were things I wasn’t permitted to speak to you about when we met at The Mountain. Now that you’re read on, I wanted to follow up and see if there was anything else you needed to ask me.”
“I appreciate that, sir,” DeLuca said. The question was, did Koenig want to give DeLuca information, or was he trying to get information from DeLuca? Counterintelligence agents were the only members of the military permitted by the Army’s own justice code to mislead or lie to a superior officer as part of an investigation, which was part of why officers hated talking to CI agents. It was DeLuca’s understanding that he was under no obligation to keep Koenig informed, no matter how much interest Koenig showed. His reports went to LeDoux, who was free to disseminate them however he chose. It was possible that Koenig’s offer was to be taken at face value. It was also possible that a game of chess had begun, and it was DeLuca’s move.
“I do have some questions,” DeLuca said. “My first would be what information you think Sergeant Escavedo might have copied. You said before that she might have been taking work home. I gather you don’t think that now. Colonel Oswald said there was Darkstar data that was accidentally archived. Who was responsible for that?”
“Unfortunately,” Koenig said, “no one was responsible, unless you want to blame the people who wrote the program that automatically sorted the data for storage, in which case, since I headed the unit that wrote the codes, I’m responsible. I’m not going to make a scapegoat out of anybody who worked for me, Agent DeLuca. If you need to put that in your report, please feel free to do so.”
“I don’t see where that’s going to be necessary,” DeLuca said. “So it was an automated data dump that she caught—did she catch it because it was in error?”
“We think so,” Koenig said. “Major Huston tells me she probably found the file and thought, ‘What’s this doing here?’ And then looked in it, like any good soldier would. The mistake was where it was sent, because apparently it hadn’t been encoded properly. She shouldn’t have been able to open the file.”
“And what was in it?”
“Well,” Koenig said, “we’re not entirely sure, other than that it had been sealed in October of 1990, so it wouldn’t have been anything terribly current. We think it might have been the specs on a prototype we were test-bedding that actually never worked, so the danger of that leaking could be described as minimal. That specific data. But the fact of the program itself is one we’re still shutting down. My fear, and Major Huston’s, is that Sergeant Escavedo may have had some contact with former Soviet assets.”
Again, DeLuca wanted to take the general’s statement at face value. At the same time, one of the most obvious tells, interrogating a suspect, was when the suspect tried to cast suspicion on someone else. People who were truly innocent rarely had any idea who might be guilty, whereas people who were guilty always had a reason to divert suspicion.
“Were you aware that Sergeant Escavedo had a Russian roommate?” Koenig said. “A woman of questionable virtue, as they were once described.”
“I was aware of that,” DeLuca said, wondering if he should be admitting as much. “They met through a sign posted on a laundromat wall, apparently.”
“And you believe that?” Koenig said.
“I’m looking into it,” DeLuca said. “Why was Escavedo transferred to the MEPS center in Albuquerque? Up to that point her service record appeared to be outstanding.”
“Two reasons,” Koenig said. “According to Major Huston, he was afraid Sergeant Escavedo was developing a drinking problem. He’d found an empty bottle of vodka in her desk. We have zero tolerance for substance abuse at CMAF. The other reason was the rumors surrounding her about her sexuality. My personal opinions about don’t-ask/don’t-tell are irrelevant here, by the way. As you�
��ve seen from the photographs, Sergeant Escavedo was an attractive human being. When some of the men in The Mountain learned that she was gay, they expressed a great degree of discomfort, working with her. You can sit there and tell me that they weren’t mature or politically correct or whatever you want, but things inside The Mountain are different from things outside The Mountain. If it was Lackland or Kirtland or Peterson or anywhere else where people didn’t work in such close quarters, it might not have made a bit of difference. The mentality inside The Mountain is more like a submarine than anything else. Discomfort means people can’t do their jobs. We just lost a lieutenant named Reznick who decided to make an issue of it—what people do with their private lives is their business and none of mine, but when it compromises the security of this nation by causing problems at STRATCOM, we put a stop to it. They can resolve these things however they want, in the courts or in the media, that’s up to them, but inside The Mountain, anything that compromises efficiency has to be dealt with promptly.”
DeLuca recalled that Major Huston had specifically said Escavedo didn’t have a drinking problem. Perhaps he’d chosen not to reveal that, the first time DeLuca had asked, but if so, why not?
“To me, it’s a matter of family values,” DeLuca said. “If those people wanted to all go live on an island somewhere, I’d be the first to buy them a ticket, and if they want to serve their country, that’s fine, too, but if they want to flaunt their lifestyle in front of my children, that’s a whole different issue.” This was, in fact, entirely the opposite of DeLuca’s actual personal view, but he wanted to see what Koenig said.
“I’m looking at a picture of my kids right now,” Koenig said, “and I couldn’t agree with you more.”
DeLuca didn’t have to check his notes—he recalled, quite clearly, that General Koenig’s office inside The Mountain did not contain any family photographs, something he’d found odd at the time. Koenig’s screen saver was a picture of a windswept beach, and it hadn’t scrolled through a gallery of photographs, the way some computers did. Every computer screen DeLuca had seen in Iraq had pictures of kids as screen savers. DeLuca had thought it odd that Koenig didn’t have any pictures of his family in his office. But perhaps Koenig was calling from his office at Peterson.
“How’s the weather there, by the way?” DeLuca asked.
“It was snowing, last I checked, but I’ve been at CMAF since this morning, so I don’t really know,” Koenig said. That answered that.
“Do you ski, General?” DeLuca asked. Joyce Reznick (who was probably cleaning latrines at a post somewhere in the Aleutians right now) had said Escavedo had gone skiing with an older man who owned a house. DeLuca was fishing, but the more lines you had in the water, the more likely you were to catch something.
“Haven’t the time,” Koenig said, clearly growing irritated at the small talk and struggling to remain cordial. Evidently DeLuca’s good opinion mattered to him, now. It hadn’t before. “We have a house in Aspen, but we never get there.”
“So what do you think happened to Darkstar1?” DeLuca asked. “Or Darkstar2, for that matter?”
“I think it’s dead,” Koenig said. “For the same reason that Darkstar2 went black. Right now we’re looking back at launches from former Soviet assets. That was where I was going when I told you Escavedo had Russian contacts. Personally it’s my belief that both D1 and D2 were taken out by Russian ASATs, before they became operational. I don’t know how they knew what to target, but they had more ASAT capabilities than anyone else, second to us, and plenty of reasons to not want Darkstar to become operational. You can take all the conspiracy theories I’ve been hearing and shove ’em all—the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. It’s a fight for the high ground.”
“Are you thinking it was a tactical laser?” DeLuca asked. “‘When we lose a satellite, we look for hosings first, kill vehicles or kinetics second, and full power directed-energy last.’ Your own words, sir.”
“Probably,” Koenig said.
“We recovered three scraps of paper from a wood stove that Escavedo apparently tried to burn,” DeLuca said. “Three different subjects. Shijingshan, Qadzi Deh, and Congressman Bob Fowler. Mean anything to you?”
“Fowler is on the House Armed Services Committee,” Koenig said. “What were the other two?”
“Shijingshan is a suburb of Beijing. Qadzi Deh is a glacier on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border,” DeLuca said.
“Nothing rings a bell,” Koenig said. “Would you like me to look into it?”
“That’s all right,” DeLuca said. “I just wondered if you had any projects regarding any of the above.”
“Negative,” Koenig said.
“What about Vitaly Sergelin?” DeLuca asked. “You think it’s the Russians. Is it possible that he’s connected? Or is he too busy running his oil company?”
“Vitaly Sergelin is running a lot more than just an oil company,” Koenig said. “It amazes me when people think the KGB somehow magically disappeared after perestroika. Just how is that supposed to work? You’re the most powerful secret institution in the Soviet Union, and then after a few sham elections, you’re reduced to nothing? As far as I can tell, all they did was print new stationery. Sergelin is exactly who I would suspect. He was directing the Soviet ASAT program at the time that everything fell apart over there. I’m sure any investigations into his recent activities would bear fruit.”
Koenig was again trying to direct DeLuca’s investigation. Why? DeLuca was surer now than he’d been before. Koenig was involved in some way. The question was, in what, and how?
“I’d appreciate it if you kept me informed,” Koenig said. “Lieutenant Carr will put you through if you call—I’ll leave standing orders with him to that effect.”
“Will do,” DeLuca said. “By the way, just for your own records, Cheryl Escavedo was not gay. I’m pretty sure of that. Right now we’re trying to track down who sent her flowers, but we have a number of witnesses who saw her with an older man. I’ll keep you in the loop, though.”
“Thank you,” General Koenig said. “That would be fine.”
He hung up without saying good-bye.
If this was a chess game, DeLuca wanted Koenig to feel like he was under attack. In a real chess game, DeLuca might have offered a poisoned pawn, hoping his opponent would take the bait. At the moment, DeLuca understood that he himself was, in this case, the bait, but he needed to make the threat real and offer something of value if he was going to press his opponent into making a mistake. Maybe Koenig wasn’t his adversary after all.
But he was certainly acting like one.
DeLuca called the office of Congressman Robert Fowler. He expected to talk to an aide, but when he explained who he was, he was put on hold for a minute, and then the congressman himself came on the line. DeLuca expressed his surprise.
“I always have a minute for a member of the armed services,” Fowler said in a cheerful hail-fellow-well-met-and-don’t-forget-to-vote-for-me-in-November sort of way. “If you’re calling with information about the investigation, however, I’d rather you come in in person, if you can.”
“I wasn’t aware of any investigation,” DeLuca said.
“This isn’t about prisoner abuse, then?” Fowler asked.
“No, it’s not,” DeLuca said, vaguely aware now that Fowler was part of a committee looking into the subject. “Let me cut to the chase because I know you’re busy. I’m in the middle of an investigation myself and your name came up. Something I thought you should be aware of, though I’m not at liberty to disclose in full what it’s about. Have you, by any chance, been contacted by a person named Cheryl Escavedo?”
“Cheryl Escavedo?” Fowler said.
“Sergeant Cheryl Escavedo.”
“Not to my knowledge, but I could ask my staff. Why would you like to know?”
“We found a printout she’d left behind with your name on it, and thought maybe she was going to try to contact you,” DeLuca said.
“Well,” DeLuca said, “again, I’m limited as to what I can say, but I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have been contacting you about your investigation. Just to put it in context, your name was mentioned along with two other things, places, actually. One was a suburb of Beijing and the other was a mountain pass in Pakistan. And bad things happened recently in both places. I’m not saying you necessarily need to take any extra precautions, and we’re way too early along in the investigation to reach any conclusions, but I just thought, you know, you have a list of three, and bad things happen to two of them, you should tell the third.”
“Just what are these ‘bad things’ you’re referring to?” Fowler said. “I take it this is my own personal orange alert call, so I think I need to know what we’re talking about.”
“Well,” DeLuca said, realizing how foolish he was going to sound. “In one, in China, there was apparently an earthquake. The Pakistan incident was similar.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line.
“You’re calling to warn me about an earthquake?” Fowler said. “Well, Agent DeLuca, I’m planning on taking my family sailing this weekend. We keep a boat in Cape May, so where we’re going, I don’t think earthquakes are going to be much of a problem. But thank you for your call.”
“Congressman,” DeLuca said quickly, before Fowler could hang up on him, “I realize how idiotic this sounds, all right? I wish I could tell you more—if I could, I might not sound quite so much like a man with his head up his ass.”
“I work in Washington, D.C.,” Fowler said. “I’m used to that. To tell you the truth, Agent, I was afraid you were calling to threaten me, but if you were, you probably wouldn’t have threatened me with earthquakes, because not even the Army can cause those. The only person I ever knew who could make the earth move was Jerry Garcia, and he’s dead.”
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