Suspicion

by Joseph Finder

  Danny stared in mute terror. “I don’t even know how long four hundred months is.”

  Poskanzer didn’t even hesitate. “Thirty-three years.”

  He swallowed. “This is bullshit!” He tried to summon indignant outrage, but instead it came out like a plea. “This is total bullshit.”

  Poskanzer bowed his head for a moment, as if praying or lost in thought. Then he lifted his head and said, “Do you remember that time we got onto the roof of Low?”

  Danny nodded. “Roofing”—getting onto the roofs of campus buildings—was a venerable Columbia tradition. You had to pick locks and shimmy through windows, and there was always a chance of getting caught, which could mean being thrown out of school. But that just gave it an illicit thrill. In their freshman year, he and Poskanzer had once sneaked onto the roof of Low Library in the middle of the night. The view was spectacular. Far below, the quad twinkled and sparkled.

  Danny nodded, wondered what his point was.

  “That was cool,” Poskanzer said.

  “It was.”

  “I hated freshman year. My roommates were assholes. You were one of my few friends.”

  Danny was moved. He’d had no idea. He nodded and smiled. “I’m honored.”

  “Listen to me. I could take your money. I’d be happy to. Well, my firm would be happy to. But we’re friends, you and me, so I’m not going to lie to you. Fighting the US government is an incredibly expensive undertaking. We’d need a retainer of two hundred fifty thousand dollars, to start.”

  “Jay, I don’t have that kind—”

  “And they know that, believe me. The fact is, a competent defense may end up costing you a million, maybe even two million, by the time all is said and done.” Danny recalled one of the DEA guys saying something like that. “Also, it’ll tie you up for years. And then, like I said, the odds are way against you. You’d have a nine-in-ten chance of going to prison. For up to thirty-three years.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Look, if you were my brother, my dad, my best friend, I’d tell you to cooperate. But you’re also a single dad. You’re Abby’s only parent. You gotta think about that. You’d be ruining your daughter’s life. I mean, have you appointed a guardian for Abby?”

  “A . . . guardian?”

  “In case you end up in prison. In case you have to go away. Because that’s probably what’s going to happen to you. Unless you cooperate with them. You really want to spin that roulette wheel? I don’t think you do.”

  “I don’t believe this!”

  “Go get a second opinion, Danny. And a third, and a fourth. Ask any lawyer experienced in dealing with the feds. They’ll all tell you the same thing—only maybe they’ll soft-pedal the odds against you. Plenty of lawyers would be happy to take your money and bankrupt you. But I don’t want to do that. I’m advising you—as a friend—to cooperate. You want to fight, I’ll fight for you. But I can’t recommend that course of action, not with a clear conscience.”

  “But . . . say I do cooperate. Then what happens to me?”

  “You sign a deal with the government . . .”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. Let’s say I do whatever they want. I become a confidential informant, or confidential source, whatever they call it. Wear a wire or record my phone calls with the guy. And let’s say this leads to Tom Galvin’s arrest. Then what happens to me?”

  Poskanzer hesitated. “You . . . you’re a free man.”

  “Have you ever watched any of those videos of the Sinaloa cartel beheading snitches with a chain saw?”

  Poskanzer shook his head.

  “If information I provide sends Tom Galvin to prison, and if he really is working for the Sinaloa cartel, who the hell’s to say I don’t end up in one of those videos?”

  There was a long, long silence.

  “I don’t think you have a choice,” Poskanzer said. “I’m really sorry, but I don’t think you have a choice.”

  Danny took the elevator down in a daze. He barely noticed the other passengers. Somehow he found himself in the lobby of the Hancock Tower and then out the revolving doors.

  He had no doubt that Jay Poskanzer was giving it to him straight. If a lawyer like him—arrogant, brilliant, and with a chip on his shoulder the size of Nebraska—didn’t see any point in taking on the Department of Justice, what use was there in trying to fight a battle he couldn’t win?

  Poskanzer was right, he was a single father. He had to think about Abby.

  Standing outside the office building, blinking in the bright sun, he took out the business card that one of the DEA guys had given him and dialed the number.

  PART

  TWO

  17

  Special Agent Yeager was holding a BlackBerry against his ear when Danny returned.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” he said. “Yeah. Yeah.”

  He glanced at Danny quickly, like he was a dead mouse his cat had just brought in. “Well, that’s not going to happen,” he said into his phone.

  Yeager waved Danny in without looking at him again.

  When the door clicked shut behind them, Yeager ended his call and stuck out a hand. He shook Danny’s hand with a paw like a broken-in baseball glove.

  “You’re doing the right thing.”

  Danny said nothing. Like I have a choice.

  “Let’s get your signature on the dotted line so we can get moving,” Yeager said, guiding Danny down the hall. A burnt-toast smell lingered in the air as they passed a break room: microwave, small cube refrigerator, a Keurig coffeemaker, a jumbo box of coffee pods from a discount shopping club. Boisterous laughter came from behind a closed door across the hall. A staff meeting of some sort.

  The agent with the shoe-polish hair, Slocum, was sitting at the table in the same conference room where they’d met before. This time he was sorting through a sheaf of papers arrayed in front of him like playing cards in a game of solitaire.

  “Well, look who’s back,” said Slocum. “Have a seat. Get comfortable. This is going to take a while. We need to take a complete personal history.”

  “For what?”

  “For our debriefing report to headquarters,” Yeager said. “We gotta make a case for how we think you can help us.”

  “What’s to debrief?” asked Danny.

  “Standard procedure for all sn—uh, confidential informants,” said Slocum.

  “You almost said snitches.”

  “Old habit.” He smiled nastily.

  “Kind of hard for me to be a snitch if I don’t actually work for the cartel,” Danny pointed out.

  Slocum let out a long sigh.

  After forty-five minutes and a stack of multipart forms, they’d finished the biographical questions. Then they asked him to sketch out a floor plan for Galvin’s house, or at least as much of it as he’d seen. They asked him to recall as many details about Galvin’s home office as he could: door placement, windows, how many computers, what kind of electronic equipment. Every single item on top of Galvin’s desk. Danny was quietly pleased at how much he was able to recall. The two agents took turns. One asked the questions while the other went for coffee or water or a potty break.

  “Why do you need to know all this?” Danny asked at one point.

  Slocum, the bad cop, said, “Why don’t you let us ask the questions.”

  “Did you ever see him place a call on a landline?” Yeager asked.

  “Actually, no. Just his mobile phone. His BlackBerry.”

  “And you’re sure it was a BlackBerry? It didn’t look bulkier or different in any way?”

  “I didn’t get that close a look.”

  “Do you have his cell number? Of his BlackBerry, I mean.”

  Danny nodded. He took out his iPhone, went into his contacts and read off Galvin’s number.

  “Did you notice whether he did
any texting?”

  “I don’t think I could tell the difference between texting and making a call,” Danny said. “Why? What do you need to know all this for?”

  “We need to know who he’s talking to and what he’s saying,” said Yeager.

  “So tap his phones.”

  “Brilliant idea,” said Slocum, getting up. “Why didn’t I think of that?” He shook his head in mordant amusement and walked out of the room.

  “What makes you think we haven’t done that?” said Yeager. “The problem is, the cartels have gotten too smart. They never discuss business over phone lines that aren’t encrypted.”

  “Did it ever occur to you guys that maybe the reason Galvin doesn’t talk cartel business over the phone is because he’s not doing any cartel business?”

  Yeager seemed to be suppressing a smirk. “We’ve picked up an encrypted signal going out over one of his landlines, probably in his home office.”

  “So?”

  “There’s a reason he’s using encryption.”

  Danny shrugged. “You guys can’t break it?”

  “Not so simple. You’ve been reading too many spy novels.”

  “No such thing as reading too many spy novels.”

  They asked for his iPhone and installed a couple of apps on it. One was ChatSecure. It used an encryption protocol called Off-the-Record. It allowed them to send and receive text messages securely.

  “We’ve given you a Gmail account to use.”

  “I already have one.”

  “Don’t use it. Not for messaging us. Use this one.” He wrote on a yellow Post-it: JayGould1836@gmail.com.

  “If you want to use Google Talk for messaging, use that account.”

  “Jay Gould,” Danny said. “You’ve done your homework.”

  “And 1836—”

  “Is the year he was born, yes, I know. And what makes you think Galvin’s going to open up to me?”

  “We don’t think that,” Yeager said. “Of course he won’t.”

  “So what do you need me for?”

  “For this.”

  Slocum’s voice, triumphant. He’d appeared in the doorway, a white cardboard box in his hand instead of a cup of coffee. He swooped in and put the box on the table in front of Danny. It looked like a bakery box, like it was intended to hold pastries, maybe a half dozen cupcakes. He opened the flaps and pulled out a little sculpture. A cheesy-looking repro of Rodin’s The Thinker, the kind of thing you’d find at a flea market. It even had a fake patina of green over black to make it look like the bronze original in the Musée Rodin, oxidized from decades of Paris rain. It was meant to be used as a bookend. It was a curio. It was a piece of crap.

  “What’s this?” Danny said.

  “A gift,” Slocum said. “You’re going to give it to Galvin as a token of your gratitude for the generous loan.”

  “A . . . bookend? Is it at least part of a pair?”

  “What you see is what you get,” Slocum said. “It’s a room bug. There’s a GSM listening device built in. Transmits over cellular service.”

  Yeager said, “Since we can’t decrypt the phone signal, our best hope is to plant a listening device in the room itself. Listen to his end of the conversation at least. We’ll monitor it for thirty days. Then we’re required to report back to the court.”

  “A single bookend,” Danny said. “Why would I give him a bookend? That’s weird.”

  Yeager shrugged. “It’s a . . . a thing. A piece of art or whatever. It’s what the technical boys came up with.”

  “You guys are serious about this? I’m supposed to give him this garage-sale, flea-market piece of junk as a thank-you gift? You think he’s going to put something like this on his desk? You must think he’s some goombah out of The Sopranos. The guy has sophisticated tastes. He’s not going to put this on his desk. This is an embarrassment. It’s not even a good copy.”

  “He won’t want to offend you,” Yeager said. “He’ll keep it on his desk in case you look for it next time you visit.”

  “He barely knows me. He’s not afraid of hurting my feelings. He’ll toss it before I pull out of his driveway.”

  “Possibly,” conceded Yeager. “Or not.”

  “You got a better idea?” said Slocum, a challenge.

  Danny shrugged. “At least make it an eagle.”

  “An eagle.” Slocum gave a scornful laugh.

  “The Boston College mascot.”

  “That’s a thought,” Yeager told Slocum. “Not a bad idea.”

  “That’ll delay us a couple days at least,” Slocum replied. “The tech boys have to locate an eagle and then fit it.”

  “It’s worth the wait,” Yeager replied.

  “Forget it,” Danny said. “He isn’t likely to put it on his desk anyway.”

  “I’m inclined to agree,” Yeager said. “This is going to take some rethinking in any case.”

  “Why do you need me anyway?” Danny asked. “Don’t you have a team that can do some sort of covert entry into the Galvins’ house one night when they’re out and plant listening devices?”

  “That option was considered and discarded,” said Yeager. “Galvin’s house is never unoccupied, even when the family’s gone. There are always servants. Plus a state-of-the-art security system.”

  “And you guys can’t get around that?”

  “It’s not feasible,” Yeager said. “No way to do a B&E without detection in that house. Plus, the moment they suspect an intrusion, they’ll have the place swept and sterilized. Whenever you do an operation like that, you have to be extremely careful about the law of unintended consequences.”

  “Meaning what?” said Danny.

  “Sometimes things go to shit,” said Slocum.

  Danny swallowed hard. “You don’t want me doing this. It’s way too risky. Talk about unintended consequences. You want a professional. I don’t have the right skill set.”

  “Actually, you’ve got the single most important qualification,” Yeager said. “Access. The man seems to trust you.”

  “My only ‘qualification,’ as you put it, is that my daughter’s a friend of his daughter’s. But frankly, if what you say is true, I don’t like the idea of her spending time over there anymore.”

  Yeager leaned over and placed his catcher’s-mitt hand on Danny’s wrist. “Absolutely no changes. This is crucial. It’s extremely important that you don’t alter any patterns. If you suddenly won’t let your daughter go over to the Galvins’, he’ll get suspicious.”

  “And what happens if he catches me planting some bug in his office—what then? What if he somehow discovers the transmitter? What happens to me? What happens to my daughter?”

  “So don’t get caught,” said Slocum.

  Yeager said, “Nothing’s going to happen to your daughter.”

  “And what if the word gets out that I’m cooperating with the goddamned DEA? If you guys have a leak? What if someone blabs to someone and Galvin gets wind of it? And he finds out I’ve planted a bug inside his house?”

  “Don’t borrow trouble,” said Yeager. “We’ll worry about that if and when it happens. But it won’t. Everything will be fine.”

  “What happened to the law of unintended consequences?” Danny said.

  Both DEA agents fell silent for a long moment. A smiled played about the corners of Slocum’s mouth.

  “There’s absolutely no reason to worry,” Yeager said.

  But even he didn’t sound convinced.

  18

  The text came two days later.

  On his laptop, actually. A tritone sounded, reverbing fuzzily like a vibraphone. A window opened on his laptop’s screen, asking whether he’d accept a digital fingerprint, an encryption key. The window was full of gibberish, a block of meaningless characters.

  The sender was
AnonText007@gmail.com.

  He clicked yes, and then a text message popped right up: 7 p.m., IHOP, Soldiers Field Rd, NE corner pkg lot.

  A meet had been set for the parking lot of the International House of Pancakes in Brighton.

  Danny had already begun to hope the DEA had lost interest in him. That they’d finally realized it wasn’t such a good idea to press such a rank amateur into service. Too risky. Too many unintended consequences.

  With a sense of foreboding he typed OK, and clicked SEND.

  • • •

  He knew he couldn’t tell Abby about the DEA.

  She was a teenager, a member of the Oversharing Generation who documented their every move on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. She could never be expected to keep a secret like this. Her best friend’s father was a financier for a Mexican drug cartel? Her own dad was being blackmailed into gathering information on the Galvins? She’d be incredulous, then outraged, and most of all buzzing with excitement. Her need to tell Jenna would be an uncontrollable reflex.

  Lucy was a different story. She was the soul of discretion. He trusted her absolutely. She’d never gossip; she knew how to keep a secret.

  But when he called her that afternoon, he found himself unable to tell her the astonishing latest.

  “Luce, baby, I’m going to be late for dinner tonight.”

  “What about Abby?”

  “Home, as far as I know. Not at the Galvins’.”

  The complexities of their living arrangements had been worked out over time. With her son, Kyle, away at Bowdoin, Lucy was an empty nester. She disliked rattling around her Brookline condo, making dinner for one. She preferred spending time as a family with Danny and Abby on Marlborough Street.

  She wasn’t Abby’s mom, and she wasn’t a substitute. She was Daddy’s girlfriend, not an authority figure. Yet in a sense she was Abby’s girlfriend, too: kind of a big sister. What might have been awkward in another family seemed to work fairly well, maybe because Lucy was a psychiatrist and knew where the land mines were and how to sidestep them.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll fix something with Abby, then. What’s up?”