18 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – June 2018
Michael Dunne’s mother Gloria worked at the Carnegie Library in McKeesport for more than two decades. She began as a clerk, and by the time she retired she had become the head librarian. The library was the emotional center of her life when Dunne was a boy, along with the church. Her husband had slipped away into drinking and time-wasting with his jobless friends after the mill closed. McKeesport and the neighboring steel towns were being leached of prosperity and self-confidence, but the library was still indomitable in its stone castle atop Union Avenue. Mrs. Dunne would take her son there every Saturday to sit under the dome in the big reading room while she wrote her plan for the next week. When Dunne got his first library card, she told him never, ever to lose it.
Maybe it was the guilty feeling we all carry from childhood, or perhaps the loneliness of middle age, with no family around. But Dunne decided that he wanted to spend some of his new money to help the library where his mother had worked, maybe buy some books in her name, or donate a bench where people could sit outside and look at what was left of McKeesport. He made an appointment to see the new librarian, Edith King, and drove down there one morning in the week after his return from the fishing trip.
The building was as forbidding as Dunne had remembered it. It was a small Gothic fortress set on a grassy hill, built back in 1902 by Andrew Carnegie himself in the first trickle of what would be an ever-widening stream of philanthropy. Mrs. King was waiting for him in the same head librarian’s office that his mother had occupied. It looked tidier, without his mother’s notes stuck to bulletin boards and her stacks of newly acquired books waiting to be filed. Where his mother had kept her clunky IBM Selectric typewriter, Mrs. King had installed a sleek computer monitor and keyboard.
The library was nearly empty; that was the first thing Dunne noticed. Two old men were sitting at the big table in the reading room, with their heads slumped down on the wooden desktop. They looked like the homeless people who haunt most public libraries. Dunne saw one other person, a middle-aged woman sitting at a computer, earbuds dangling from her head, lost in an electronic world.
Dunne took a seat in the librarian’s office, across from Mrs. King’s tidy desk. She was a black woman, hair shaved close, wearing a dress of colorful African cloth, wanting to be helpful but not sure how. She had the strong, empathetic, but unyielding face of a school principal or guidance counselor.
“Did you ever meet my mother, Gloria Dunne?” he asked. “This used to be her office, twenty years ago. She’s the reason I’m here.”
“Goodness, yes,” answered Mrs. King. “Your mother was retiring when I transferred here from Duquesne, after their library closed. And we went to the same parish, until she passed.”
“She loved the library,” said Dunne. “She told me once that it was the only place in this town that hadn’t gone broke.”
Mrs. King laughed. “People in McKeesport still read, a few of them, at least. And we have a Friends of the Library group that helps pay the bills. They’re mostly from Pittsburgh. God bless them.”
“They have guilty consciences,” said Dunne. “They’re prospering, and McKeesport is dead.”
“I’m a librarian, not a politician,” Mrs. King answered firmly, wanting to close off the subject.
“Right. Well, I wanted to do something to remember my mother. Give some books or make a donation.”
“You can join Friends of the Library. It’s a 501(c)(3) organization, tax deductible. I’m sure they would be pleased to accept your donation.”
Dunne reddened, not quite the shade of his hair, but close. Somehow, the tax-exempt status of the prosperous do-gooders got on his nerves. He suspected that the “Friends” were all Democrats who thought the world ended when Barack Obama left the White House.
“I want to do this myself. These ‘Friends’ wouldn’t have been friends of my mother’s. They would have looked down on her. Just like the trustees did when people wanted to make her librarian.”
Mrs. King studied her visitor. She was used to escorting out drunken hobos and disciplining unruly children. Pissed-off white men were not a problem for her. She was calm and direct.
“You seem quite angry, Mr. Dunne. I’m not sure the library can help you with that. But do go see the president of the Friends. His name is William Hundley. I can give you his phone number.”
“I am angry,” said Dunne, ignoring her advice. “I just moved back home, and it upsets me. I’m sorry, but it’s true. This valley is like a country that got defeated in a war. Maybe I’m crazy, but it doesn’t seem right for this place to be destroyed and people pretend that everything is fine just because Carnegie Mellon University is designing a bunch of fancy software.”
“I understand,” she said gently. “Many people are angry, just like you. But if you had grown up in my neighborhood in the Hill District, where the only white faces we saw were policemen and steelworkers who were making five times what my daddy made, you would understand that some of us think the world has gotten better, not worse.”
Dunne’s eyes flared for a moment. How predictable, that this black woman was telling him his anger was just a white man’s rage against loss of status. But then he softened. She was sitting in the same place his mother had. She’d made it to head librarian, probably against protests from people who thought she wasn’t “smart enough,” just as his mother had.
“You said you went to the same church as my mom. Was that Pius the Fifth? She loved Father Steve.”
“Father Steve is gone. So is Pius the Fifth. It was closed in 2010. Now it’s Corpus Christi Parish.”
“I’m not following.”
“The Catholic church is like the rest of this valley, Mr. Dunne. The jobs left, the people left, the churches closed. Once this town had Holy Trinity for the Slovaks, St. Stephen’s for the Hungarians, St. Mary of Czestochowa for the Polish, Sacred Heart for the Croatians, Pius the Fifth for Scotch-Irish white folks like your mother and a few black folks, too, like me. But it’s all gone now.”
Dunne shook his head. It was the call of the dead. He gazed about the tidy librarian’s office, and through the glass partition to the shelves of books in their assigned Dewey decimal positions, impervious to time and politics.
“He felt guilty, didn’t he, Mr. Carnegie, when he built this library? He was trying to make amends.”
“I suppose so, maybe. I don’t know.”
Dunne pulled out his checkbook and scribbled in the blank spaces.
“Here’s a check for five thousand dollars,” he said. “Do something good with it.”
“I can’t accept it,” she said. “I told you.”
“Yes, you can. It’s made out to Friends of the Library. Give it to Mr. Hundley, with my blessing.”
Mrs. King took the check gratefully, and escorted Dunne out of her office. But he didn’t want to leave the building yet. He wandered over to the stacks and began looking for some of the books he had read as a boy. A few were still there. In one, a dusty history of the D-Day invasion, he even found his name atop an old dog-eared card.
* * *
Roger Magee did as he had promised, and a week after the fishing trip, he sent Dunne an encrypted note on Signal. It was brief and to the point:
Here’s what you asked for, courtesy of your Feeb friend Bogdanovich. The last known location of the cell phone and computer IDs was in London. The address is 84 Dover Street in London. Fancy digs. I checked. Most of the floors in the building belong to a law firm called Clissold Partners. They’re registered in the Channel Islands. Very hush-hush about their clients. Their email drop address is [email protected]. Don’t ask me for anything else.
Dunne pondered his next step. A fancy Mayfair law firm hadn’t been the address he had expected for the free-speech agitator Jason Howe. But there was so much about this case that he didn’t understand.
The Clissold office could perhaps be monitored through electronic or physical surveillance, but it wo
uld be expensive and as likely to draw false leads as good ones. Dunne decided to knock on the front door, present a calling card, and see who answered.
Dunne sent his message via email, unencrypted, to [email protected]. The message read:
To the Managing Partner, Clissold Law Firm. I am seeking information in a complex legal matter involving an American named Jason Howe. I am advised that your firm can be helpful in this matter. Please contact me at this email address. Yours sincerely, Michael Dunne, Paladin LLC.
Dunne received an answer forty-eight hours later. It was from a man named Tom Goldman, who identified himself as a partner at the law firm. He invited Dunne to meet him in four days on a yacht that was moored in Sardinia. The name of the yacht was Cosmos. The message said Dunne would have no trouble finding it, for it was the largest boat in the harbor.
19 Geneva – October 2016
When people want to forget a mistake, they busy their minds with images drawn from work, sports, television – anything that will dull the visceral scene they’re trying to suppress but can’t. It comes back when they’re taking a shower, or driving a car, or some other moment when the mind is blank. The scene intrudes with such sharp, sudden intensity that it brings a wince, or a few desperate words of regret. Or just a shudder and a curse. People can try to repress the memories with alcohol, or drugs, or physical exhaustion, but they’re simply pushing them into the unconscious where they haunt dreams or bleed out in moments of panic. The bad memory doesn’t go away; it just hides.
Michael Dunne couldn’t undo his mistake with the woman he’d met in a reggae club and then stalked all the way to the click of a camera shutter. He had confessed the security breach to his boss and received a professional reprieve. He had offered to make a similar confession to his wife and been told no, let the matter rest for now. Do your work; finish the job; save penance for later. Let’s get on with it; that was the tribal code. And so he did.
Adrian White returned from Urbino. He had installed cameras to monitor everyone who entered and left Digito Urbino, the front company they were targeting. The computer firm occupied the upper two floors of an ocher-washed building near the Centro; it was centuries old but modernized with new windows and lifts. The heavy power cables had been fed in underground from a new switching station. The office was above a local bookstore and near the university, so hundreds of young people streamed past every day.
At the front entrance was a thick metal door with a buzzer and videophone; a back door opened onto a narrow alleyway lined with trash bins, scooters, and bicycles. Adrian had covered each door with a camera, to monitor the faces of everyone who entered or left. Arthur Gogel had hacked the computer firm’s own CCTV surveillance cameras, so they had that record, too.
The surveillance feeds were sent to Dunne in Geneva and Hoffman at Langley. By tapping public and private databases, the team began identifying faces and building a registry of names. The regular traffic in and out included a dozen European and American hackers and left-wing activists, a half dozen young computer scientists. But the monitoring didn’t identify any known intelligence connections.
The team found records that four months before, the Urbino municipal government had approved a request for new electrical transmission lines that could carry four hundred kilowatts per day to the building. That was enough to power a farm with twenty servers, the techs back at Langley estimated. Extra systems for coolant had been added, too.
* * *
One morning just after ten, Arthur Gogel summoned Dunne to the monitors. “You better check this out,” he said. “I think it’s your guy.”
A tall young man with a tuft of blond hair had entered the bookstore beneath Digito Urbino. He was so thin and small-hipped that he kept tugging at his trousers to hold them up. The young man spent five minutes browsing in the bookstore, and then exited to the adjacent metal door, rang the buzzer, and went upstairs to the computer work area. A surveillance microphone and the company’s own video camera both picked up the same words.
“This is Jason Howe,” said the thin figure on the screen. He had an ethereal look, an almost angelic sweetness in his face. “Buzz me in now.”
Ten minutes later, a white Range Rover deposited a man in his early forties, dressed in a finely woven beige suit, near the door. He had long, lustrous hair, a thin beard, and wore a white shirt that was open at the neck. His eyes were masked by thick black glasses. He might have been a tycoon visiting from Milan, or a professor from Bologna or Rome, with the stylish grace that Italians sometimes call la bella figura.
The only anomaly was that he was carrying a leather computer bag. Before he reached the metal door, an assistant emerged to greet him.
“That’s Lorenzo Ricci,” said Dunne. “The hacker-in-chief.”
“He looks like a movie star,” said Arthur Gogel.
“To these people, he is,” said Dunne. “He’s the engineer prince. According to the traces he took a doctorate in computer science at Georgia Tech, before he went wiggy.”
* * *
Dunne requested an urgent talk with George Strafe. It was five p.m. Geneva time before Strafe responded on the special-handling encrypted phone. Dunne wanted to move quickly, himself, and he needed Strafe’s blessing.
“The eagle has landed in Urbino,” said Dunne.
“Our American friend?”
“Yes, sir. Along with Ricci and some computer-science guys we’ve been tracking. It looks like a convention.”
“Time to move in, then. If you’re asking for my permission, you have it. What’s your operations plan?”
“I’m Edward Spitz, a whistleblower software engineer. I’m going to meet one of Howe’s colleagues. Tell him I can help them. Then I could send in one of my team, if you like.”
“No way. You’re my guy. I trust you, assuming you keep your pants zipped.”
“Just what I wanted to hear,” said Dunne. “I’ll leave tomorrow morning. Any last advice?”
“The usual, squared, cubed. Do. Not. Get. Caught. Make sure your identity is backstopped. If anything bad happens, keep your mouth shut until we figure out how to get you out. Remember, these people are very smart, in addition to being immature little creeps. Don’t take anything for granted.”
“My identity is solid. Social media tells the whole legend. Microsoft’s databank has fifteen years of history on me. I hate the government. I’m Snowden’s big brother. They’ll like me.”
“Do you want an abort signal, if something’s going down wrong?”
“Why would we abort this? It’s a makeable putt, totally. I know I fucked up with the woman, but I can do this.”
“It’s your ass. No abort signal, then. Just remember: When you shake the tree, you never know what’s going to come down. If it feels hot, get out.”
“What’s your collection priority? So I don’t waste time.”
“Order of battle. I want to know what they’ve got, hardware and software. How did they pull all their fancy tricks, turning off malware and creating perfect fakes? What capabilities do they have? What game are they playing? Who are they playing it for? How do we neutralize them?”
“What buttons do I push when I get inside?” ventured Dunne. “Are we collecting intel, or sabotaging them, or something else?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet. We’ll buy them, maybe. Control them. Or just run this shit ourselves. I don’t know yet. First you’ve got to get inside and see what they’ve got.”
“Should I look for the code that took out our malware beacons in Europe?”
“No. Don’t look for anything now. They’ve stopped unwiring the beacons anyway. Just get inside and chill.”
“One more question: Will I have backup?”
“Nope. Just you. Your guys will monitor everything, but I don’t want any other footprints. After this case is finished, you’re going to have to carry your balls around in a wheelbarrow.”
* * *
Dunne spent that evening reviewing his ope
ration plan. He and Hoffman had decided that the most pliable access point was a hacker and would-be new age philosopher named Jacob Rosenberg. He had gone to college with Howe at Stanford, joined the Chaos Computing Club during a summer trip to Germany, and was deeply embedded in the Wiki underground. He hung out at a bar in Urbino called the Morgana. He liked to drink alone.
Dunne sent Rosenberg an encrypted message on Signal, in his Edward Spitz cover identity, promising Microsoft exploits, zero-days that the company hadn’t patched. He offered to come to Urbino. Rosenberg didn’t say no.
Adrian White knocked on Dunne’s door that night as he was packing. The train left the Geneva station the next morning at 5:39. Dunne was trying on some of his cover wardrobe. He had added an earring, and some fake tattoos, and packed some computer science magazines in his backpack. His body looked less muscular in a baggy black T-shirt. The red curls looked just punk enough when they were disheveled.
“There’s some new stuff you ought to look at,” said Adrian. “We just processed it.”
He led Dunne back into the main workspace. Gogel had mounted a spacey, futuristic poster for Radiohead, his favorite band. It was time to leave Geneva. Everyone had gotten too comfortable.
“Look at this,” said Adrian, sliding into a chair next to Dunne before a bank of monitors. One screen displayed a headline promising a leaked document about an Iranian plan to assassinate the U.S. secretary of state.
Dunne clicked on the link and studied a Farsi document and its English translation, which talked about the purported assassination at the United Nations General Assembly later that month. Next to the document was a photograph of a senior officer of the MOIS, the Iranian intelligence ministry. It linked to an audio recording. Dunne clicked and heard a voice in Farsi, sounding like a hundred SIGINT intercepts he had listened to over the years. It was followed by an English translation.
The Paladin Page 11