Something to mull over. Even later, after watching more about the Norwalk virus story, and more talk, we decided to tell the NSA that Bobby had been murdered.
LATE that night, I went back out-way back out-up I-10 into Baton Rouge. I found a pay phone in a bar parking lot and, using LuEllen’s anonymous calling card, called long distance to Glen Burnie, Maryland. The phone rang seven times before Rosalind Welsh picked it up. She sounded as though she’d been asleep, and I realized that it was after two in the morning, Eastern time. “Hello?”
“Rosalind. Bill Clinton here. Remember me? Hope I didn’t wake you up, but I guess I must have.” At that moment, honest to God, a rat walked past the pay phone on its way to the bar, as confident and casual as a cat heading home. “Jesus,” I said.
“Who?” Welsh was struggling up out of the sleep. “Jesus?” I heard a man’s voice say, “Who is it?”
“Did you get remarried?” I asked cheerfully.
“What do you want?” she snapped. “This is the man with the mask?”
“Who is it?” the man asked, and I heard her say, “Never mind; it’s for me.”
“You remember me, now,” I said. “You’re awake.”
“I’m awake.” But not happy.
“You remember that guy Bobby who caused you all the trouble? And you went looking for and got your ass kicked? And is causing all this trouble with these pictures and the Norwalk virus thing, and all of that?”
Long pause. “Yes. Where is he?”
“He’s dead,” I said. “He’s been dead for a couple of days.”
“What?”
“Did you see the news stories about the black man killed in Jackson, Mississippi, and the Fiery Cross that was burned on his front porch?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“That was Bobby. He was murdered. Somebody killed him for his laptop, which has all that stuff on it that you’re seeing on TV. We think maybe-maybe-it was you, that you’re running some kind of an operation against the government. Was it you guys, Rosalind?”
“You’re crazy,” she shrilled. “We don’t do that.”
“What is it?” the man shouted in the background. “Let me talk to him.”
“You’re talking to Bill Clinton, here, Rosy-I know what you do,” I said. “Now, I would suggest, for your own health, that you stop chasing us innocent computer folks around the country, and find out who killed Bobby. If you don’t, we’ll start fucking with you again. Remember the last time we did that? How your Keyhole satellites went nuts and all the GS-80s started pooping in their Italian pants? You don’t want that again.”
“Listen, Bill,” she said earnestly. “Do you have any proof…?”
“Nothing you would believe,” I said. “But if you check out the dead black man in Jackson, it won’t take you long to figure out who he was, all on your own. The FBI are already involved; all you have to do is give them a hint.”
“Bobby DuChamps?” she asked. That surprised me. They’d actually gotten a name.
“Almost,” I said. “His name was Robert Fields. Get it? And listen, Rosalind, really: have a nice day.”
I hung up feeling that I’d been mean to her, but sometimes, with security people-she was NSA internal security-it’s the only thing that works. Hate will wake you up, if not set you free.
“YOU do it?” John asked, when I got back to the motel. He and LuEllen were watching the end of a movie called XXX, about a boy and his GTO.
“All done. Can’t tell what will happen next, but maybe some of the feds will… what?” I looked at LuEllen.
“Reorient themselves,” she suggested.
“That’s good,” I said. “Reorient themselves.”
JOHN was in one room, LuEllen and I in another. We were beat. We’d been flying, driving, hacking, and getting shot at for twenty hours and needed some sleep. We arranged to meet at eight the next morning, and LuEllen and I said good night to John and crawled into bed.
Just before we went to sleep, LuEllen said, “Think about Carp’s trailer. Ten o’clock in the morning is the best time to hit an open target like that. Think about it in your sleep.”
I did that.
THERE’S no better source for burglary supplies than your local Target store. You can get cheap, disposable entry tools, plastic gloves, Motorola walkie-talkies, backpacks, and everything you need to change your appearance. Like khaki shorts.
Everybody knows what a burglar looks like-an ethnic minority, probably, lurking in the bushes until the coast is clear. After dark, on a moonless night. Wearing a ski mask. Which is why most professional house-breakers go in at ten o’clock in the morning or two o’clock in the afternoon, during the workday, when school is in session and the house is probably empty. And they always knock first.
We synched the walkie-talkie channels on the way over to Carp’s, and I changed into the shorts, tore the price tags off a pair of wraparound sunglasses and put them on, along with a Callaway golf hat.
We first made a pass outside the park, but could see no activity over the wall near Carp’s. Then we went in and cruised down his street. There was a door on the back end of the Carp mobile home, the one we hadn’t seen the night before, that Carp had gone through, and it was hanging open an inch or two.
The front door, where John and I had spilled out onto the lawn, was closed, as we’d left it. Just around the corner, and about four houses up, an old guy was mowing his tiny lawn with a tiny electric lawn mower. He glanced at us as we went past and LuEllen said to John, “When we pull into the place, go straight ahead and get out on another street, so you won’t drive past that guy again.”
John nodded. “All right.”
LuEllen looked at me. “Ready to try it?”
“I didn’t see anything that said no.”
John would be waiting outside the park. If we called and said, “Dave, come on,” he’d come in through the park, taking his time. If we said, “Hey, Dave, hurry it up,” he’d come down the outside street, and we’d jump the wall.
IN OUR shorts and golf shirts and over-the-shoulder pack, LuEllen and I were an unremarkable, almost invisible, couple knocking on Jimmy James Carp’s door, knocking just loud enough to attract somebody inside. There was no answer and I tried the door. It opened and we waved at John. As he left, we stepped inside as though we’d been invited.
The place was dark, with curtains and shades on all the windows. I hit the lights and found that we were in the kitchen. The place was a mess, with dirty dishes stacked around a sink. An overflowing garbage bag sat on the floor between a small dinette table and the line of cupboards on the opposite wall. The garbage bag was jammed with pizza boxes, corn-curl sacks, instant dinner cartons, and microwave popcorn bags, and that’s what the place smelled like: like every kind of stale cheese you can think of.
The next room along was the living room, with the furniture arranged to focus on a large-screen TV. Most of the furniture had a patina of dust, and the room was littered with paper: the New York Times, the LA Times, tabloids, popular science magazines, a facedown copy of Penthouse. An all-in-one stereo sat on a corner table, with a couple dozen CDs. On the wall, somewhat askew, was a full-color framed copy of the Praying Hands.
There were two bedrooms along a single hallway in the back: the first was a woman’s room, not much neater than the rest of the place, and even dustier. The second bedroom belonged to Carp. A dozen computer books and manuals were scattered on the floor around the bed, all but two on IBM hardware. One of the others dealt with encryption, and the last one was an O’Reilly’s Guide to the C++ language.
I moved the pack to the back door, closed and locked the door, and we started tearing through the room. We didn’t take long: we’d done this before. In two minutes, I had a ream of paper-old bills, new bills, bank statements, notes, employment records-a dozen floppy disks, and a half-dozen recordable CDs. I was loading it into our backpack when LuEllen, who’d moved back out to the front room, said, “Hey.”
I p
oked my head out of the bedroom. “What?”
“Laptop,” she said.
“What?” I went out, and sure enough, a Toshiba notebook sat under the edge of the couch. The power supply was still plugged into the wall. It looked exactly like somebody had been lying on the couch with the laptop on his stomach, while watching TV, had shut down the laptop and then pushed it under the couch so it wouldn’t be stepped on. I know that because I’d done it about a thousand times. We pulled the plug and took it.
“Bobby’s?” LuEllen asked. “Is that too much to expect?”
“Yeah, that’s too much,” I said, as we put it with the pack. “Baird said Bobby’s was an IBM. And this one doesn’t have a built-in optical drive. It’s a travel machine like my Vaio. Bobby’s was probably a lot heavier, with a bunch of built-in stuff. He didn’t travel.”
We’d been inside for five minutes at that point and my internal egg timer was telling me to get the fuck out. Same with LuEllen. “Unless you’ve got something special to look at…”
“Let’s go,” I said. That’s when we heard a car’s tire crunching on the gravel outside.
LuEllen touched my arm and moved to a window. She could see out through a crack in the blind, and she hissed at me, “Two guys,” and then, “Coming to the door.”
I couldn’t see out, but I glanced at LuEllen’s face: she seemed pleased. She liked this shit, because it cranked her up, and she lived for the crank.
She pointed to the bedroom, and we tiptoed to the back door, hardly daring to breathe. The thing is, houses give off vibrations-footfalls, weight shifts, voices. Mobile homes, which are more lightly built than regular houses, are the worst. At the back, LuEllen put her hand on the doorknob, and we waited. The idea is to open your door at the same time the other person is entering the other one; the noise and vibrations cancel each other out.
But they didn’t come in. They knocked, loudly. We heard them talking, and then one of them crunched around to the back, and a second later, knocked on the door where we were standing. The knob rattled-LuEllen lifted her hand when she realized what was happening-and then the guy crunched back around the house.
I moved to the window and peeked out. Two guys: one black, one white, both wearing short-sleeved dress shirts and khaki slacks. They looked like hot, out-of-shape office workers, both too fleshy and with careful, thirty-dollar haircuts. The white guy, blond, pink-faced, chubby, had a tidy spade-shaped soul patch, the kind worn to demonstrate cool; he was probably taking saxophone lessons somewhere. The black guy was wearing a pink cotton shirt, and he looked terrific.
They were talking, nervously, I thought, then they looked up and down the street, as if checking for somebody they might interrogate. Then they got in the car, bumped back onto the road, and left. I read their license number to LuEllen, who wrote it on her arm with a ballpoint pen. Then she put the Motorola to her mouth and said, “Dave, come on.”
We went out the back door and walked sideways across the narrow lawn, then up the street, carrying the backpack. John came up behind us, slowed, and we got in. The old guy had finished mowing his lawn and was sitting in a lawn chair drinking beer out of a brown bottle. He never turned his head as we went by.
“Goddamnit,” I said.
“Nothing?” John asked.
“Two guys came by and knocked on the door. We got their tags,” LuEllen said.
“Ah, shit. I didn’t know. I was outside.”
“Ford Taurus. Could have been a rental.”
“Cops?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “They were indoors people. Office workers. Maybe we’ll find out from the tags.”
“Damn,” John said. “We waste our time and almost get caught at it.”
“No, no-we got a laptop,” I said. “We found a laptop.”
“What?”
He checked my face to see if I was joking. “Jimmy James left it behind when he ran last night. It’s not Bobby’s, but it might tell us a lot about Jimmy James.”
I STILL had the stew-can antenna. Before we started messing with Carp’s laptop, we went back to the truck stop and warehouse, went online, checked with a few friends for entry routes, and then went into the Louisiana auto registration database. The two guys’ license tag went back to Hertz. Hertz was an old friend. I was in the Hertz database two minutes later and pulled out the name William Heffron of McLean, Virginia. He was using a credit card issued to the U.S. government.
“McLean,” LuEllen said. “Weren’t we there when…”
“Yeah. It’s about a foot and a half from Washington.”
Chapter Ten
WE SPENT THE AFTERNOON at the Baton Noir. A small but pleasant swimming pool hung off a second-floor deck, and LuEllen put on a modest black bikini and went out to sun herself before the gathering insurance salesmen and lawyerly deal-makers. John began reading through the paper we’d taken out of Carp’s, and I did the laptop.
Among the paper John found dozens of bills, mostly unpaid, indicating that Carp owed upward of $30,000 to various credit card companies. Most of the bills had been sent to an address in Washington, D.C.
He also found Carp’s online service account numbers and e-mail addresses, and increasingly unpleasant letters both to and from a lawyer concerning his mother’s estate. In the latest of those letters, Carp accused the attorney of looting his mother’s bank accounts. John’s impression was that when the lawyer was finished, Carp got the aging mobile home and a few thousand dollars-but he also got the impression that there wasn’t much more than that anyway.
“But he’s really pissed,” John said. “If I were that attorney, I’d be watching for guys in clock towers.”
“He’s desperate for money,” I said. “His mother’s estate must have seemed like a dream come true, and it turns out to be a mirage.”
I GOT started on Carp’s laptop by working my way around the password security. I plugged my laptop into his via a USB cable, ran a program that took control of his hard drive from my laptop, deleted his password file, and I was in. It ain’t rocket science.
One thing I found immediately was that Carp had dozens of documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee: CIA briefings on Cuba, Venezuela, Korea, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and a half-dozen Middle Eastern countries, including some negative assessments of the leaders of Israel, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. None of it was encrypted.
In another file, I found letters to Senator Frank Krause of Nebraska, the head of the committee. There was no indication of whether any had actually been sent, and several showed signs of incomplete editing. All of them were written to object to Carp’s firing, which had happened three months earlier. The other side of the correspondence wasn’t on the computer, and John couldn’t find it among the papers, so it was hard to know exactly why he’d been fired. Judging from Carp’s side of the issue, it may have involved his political views, which were unstated. There was a draft of a note to someone else, another staffer, complaining about the unfairness of his firing, which referred to “crazy feminist politics.”
The letters suggested that his employment involved office computer support-he kept the committee’s computers running, helped with basic software issues and security problems. In an e-mail file, I found a couple hundred complaints and questions typical of an office system: questions about ethernet connections, lost e-mail, distribution lists, password changes, equipment upgrades.
LuEllen came back, carrying a Coke, looking for her suntan cream. The pool was getting crowded, and she was moving from display to exhibition mode.
As she was about to leave again, I hit the mother lode: a file of photographs and short films, two of which we’d already seen on television-the military execution and the blackface film. Nothing about the Norwalk virus.
“This is the Bobby file,” LuEllen said. “This is it.”
We paged through the photos, looking at the captions. John, who’d spent most of his life in politics of a kind, was fascinated. “You could do an unbelievable a
mount of damage with these things,” he said. He wasn’t enthusiastic, he was awed. “Some of the biggest assholes in the Congress would go down… if this stuff is real.”
“What are they doing in Carp’s computer?” LuEllen asked.
“Must’ve transferred it from Bobby’s,” I said. “A backup, or something, before he started messing with the other files.”
“Okay,” John said, still looking over my shoulder. “Oh my God, look at this. This guy’s a cabinet guy, he’s what? HUD? HEW? Something like that.”
We talked about the effect of the photos for a while. LuEllen thought they’d be revolutionary, but John shook his head. “You read those books about people finding the body of Christ and it ends Christianity, or somebody finds out that the President likes to screw little boys, and that leads to an atomic war. It doesn’t work that way,” he said. “Nothing is simple. Stuff like this ruins careers, it might change the way things work for a while, but the world goes on.”
“You’re an optimist, John,” LuEllen said. “I’m going back to the pool. There are a whole bunch of guys from Texas up there.”
“That’s a blessing,” John said. “Wouldn’t want to miss that.”
I went back to the computer and John finished with the paper. A half hour later, sitting in a dwindling pile of scraps, he said, “Ah, man.” He was holding a slip of paper, shook his head and passed it to me. It was a phone bill for cable repair service, made to Robert Fields. Bobby’s address was right there. “Took it out of Baird’s file,” I said.
“Gotta be,” John said.
LuELLEN had come back, glowing with the sun, took her bikini-ed self into the bathroom to clean up and dress, and when she came back out, turned on the TV. A little while later, changing from Oprah to CNN, she said, “Look at this.”
The Norwalk virus story was exploding: the President, in person, was promising a full investigation. If the so-called test had actually taken place, he said, the persons responsible would be prosecuted. He added that the government had no evidence of such a test and suggested that this “supposed revelation” might be a new kind of terrorist attack intended to discredit the American military and shake up financial markets.
The Hanged Man’s Song Page 10