“But you’re going to pursue it?”
“I’ve been paid for a couple days of my time. I got shot at by somebody I probably don’t even know. I’ll take a little peek and then go home.”
“Go home now,” she said.
“You’re worried about Daddy-in-law?
“He’s preparing for the election. He doesn’t need unsubstantiated rumors flying around, Oak.”
“Hell, Bobbi. This’ll be his fourth term, won’t it? All he has to do is sit back and watch the landslide roll in.”
“Go home.”
“You aren’t curious?”
Roberta Galway sighed and reached down for her purse. It was a voluminous thing, crafted in soft brown leather, with a capacity similar to a small oil barrel. From its depths, she pulled a thick manila envelope and handed it to him. “You get this over my better judgment and certainly against agency policy, but for some unknown reason, I trust you. When you’re done, destroy it, will you?”
“I will. You read it?”
“Yes. There’s nothing even remotely suspicious in any of it.”
“One thing I forgot. . . .”
“I ran Tracy Dinmore for you, too.”
She thinks of everything, like having one’s own computer with artificial intelligence. Bobbi’s wasn’t artificial, however.
“You’re a doll. When do you want that lobster?”
“Maybe Friday. Call me, but on my cell phone. Find a place out of the mainstream, will you? I shouldn’t be seen with an ex-agency man.”
That was true. Seeing her also made him think about Bob Corridan, probably the closest friend Malone had ever had. His death had left a gap in both Bobbi’s and Oak’s lives.
Malone watched her walk away, a nice shifting movement in the blue skirt, while he waited for the waitress to take care of the paperwork. He and Bobbi had known each other for a long time, like nine years, but early on there had been a professional distance, and then of course, she married Bob. Now, who knew what the environment was supposed to be. He was pretty sure he liked her a lot.
Then he hauled his suitcase outside, flagged a cab, and went to the Library of Congress. It was a good quiet place to read.
*
Alicia Hampstead had been something of a battleaxe when she was teaching seventh grade math in Mountain Home, Idaho. She was a real disciplinarian, especially with the Air Force brats from the air base. She could never understand why the offspring of military people demonstrated the least self-control.
Education was becoming very frustrating for her in a number of ways, and she was looking for a change of any kind, when change came to her. It came in the form of a classroom full of Apple computers and a directive by the board of education to explore computer aided instruction.
She did, and she found it fascinating. At the close of the school year, she resigned to enter graduate school in computer science at the University of California at Berkeley.
And two years after that, Alicia Hampstead was making $85,000 a year, plus bonuses, as a Comptroller of Information. And five years after that, now making $180,000 a year, she had access to a supercomputer as well as a company based IBM BladeCenter chassis and servers. She had multiple databases at her rose tinted fingertips.
At 38 years of age, Alicia Hampstead was a bundle of energy. She had nice, even white teeth that, often as not, gripped the eraser end of a pencil as she was lost in thoughts of improved access time or simplified system design. Occasionally, she let her mind dwell on one of her three idols. Two were men, and one was a light blue-gray machine. Hampstead wore her blonde hair short to facilitate its maintenance, and she rarely applied more than lipstick to a face that was heart-shaped, though elongated enough to detract from true beauty. She had vivid blue eyes, long lashes, and a smooth skin. She also wore a size 38 double-D bra, and that had been one of her problems in a classroom full of snickering, pubescent boys. Unfounded rumors about her sexual antics were rife in undeveloped minds, and though she tried to ignore them, they had grated at the time.
It was not a problem in her present surroundings. Her domain consisted of five rooms—the anteroom, her office, the computer room, a maintenance and programming room for her assistant, and a storage area all on the sixth floor of the building. Her staff consisted of Doyle Katt, an Iraqi veteran in a wheel chair who had lost both legs, but not his humor, his mind, or his profane vocabulary. Katt served as computer operator, computer serviceman, and computer programmer.
Though her title was only Information Manager, Hampstead was for all purposes the entire Intelligence and Information Directorate. She reported only to two people who told her who she could reveal information to, like to “October.” They also told her what the limits of her responsibility were, and the limits were high. They trusted her to do the right thing on behalf of the organization. Well, both organizations, though one was unknown to the other.
More than anything, Alicia enjoyed the sense of authority, of control, that her responsibilities provided. She was accustomed to making decisions of her own, and then reporting them to her superiors. Not once had she been reprimanded for an action taken.
Hampstead had many problems on her agenda, but she spent Wednesday morning on the most pressing one. The man brought into the organization by the Recruiter, whom she had never met, who she knew on the phone as “October,” and who knew her as “May,” needed information. And Alicia was the clearinghouse for information.
He had called again at noon, but she had not yet pinpointed identification, though she felt it was beginning to emerge. She told October to call back at 1:30.
“Tall and skinny,” was not much of an identifying characteristic to begin with, but it was enough with the databases and the suppositions she had to work with. One of the suppositions, based on tall and skinny’s reaction to a shot at the park as reported by October when she pressed him for detail, was that the man had action-oriented experience with one of the defense department or intelligence agencies. Another supposition was that Dinmore, in a clandestine rendezvous outside of Washington, was likely meeting someone with intelligence or operational skills similar to what Dinmore supposedly had.
Alicia, of course, could rely on her computer terminal on the teak credenza behind her desk. The credenza also held a laser printer and a lead glass rose vase with one sprig of Babies’ Breath and one delicate yellow rose. On the other side of her matching teak desk, two armchairs upholstered in yellow fabric rested on the earth toned carpet. One wall of the office was composed of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed to capacity with the books and journals of computerese.
Hampstead had started her search right after October had called the day before, and she had worked though part of the night, stopped for three hours of sleep in one of the yellow chairs, then resumed at 7:00 a.m., just before Katt reported for work. She kept the bare essentials and a change of clothing in her office for nights like that.
The online applications inventory had a unique program provided by one of her idols. It contained the access code generator and decryption program which allowed her to enter the databases protected by randomly generated access codes. Alicia Hampstead, former junior high math teacher, could romp about in the data storage of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, both houses of Congress, the General Accounting Office, and almost any other governmental agency. Silently and undetected. Her highly classified program also instructed the host computer to log neither her access nor her time on-line.
Beginning with the assumption that Dinmore, as an intelligence bureaucrat, would seek help from other bureaucrats, Hampstead had culled military and intelligence personnel records for male persons who fit a profile of taller than six feet, less than 170 pounds, and between twenty-five and sixty years of age. She did not know what October looked like. If he was short and fat, lots of people would look tall and skinny to him.
Unfortunately, her working file ended up w
ith more than 10,000 names in it by midnight. Then, on a hunch, she went back through the same agencies and pulled out the names of personnel who had retired in the past ten years. That jumped the file to over 20,000 names.
But, it was a file, and with a file like that, the comparisons she could make were many.
She culled it for any indication in the records that suggested clandestine activities even though those references were often vague, current or previous, but the new file created still contained over 14,000 records. A lot of men had engaged in a covert mission or two in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Panama, Grenada, the Middle East, or Central America.
At 10:00 in the morning, she decided on another course, entered the telephone company’s computer system, and got a copy of the calls placed from Dinmore’s house in Maryland in the last two months. There was nothing of value that she could see. She entered the Treasury Department’s computer and checked the in-house telephone log. That was more promising.
In the last two months, Dinmore had made 367 calls from his office. Comparing the called numbers against her online Washington directory, Hampstead identified the offices called, but though many calls were made to various intelligence and administrative offices, she could not settle on a perceived pattern.
She tried running a comparison of Dinmore’s long-distance calls against the last known phone numbers in her file of active and retired military and intelligence operatives.
Bingo.
Tracy Dinmore had made one call—four minutes and forty-four seconds—to an N.O. Malone in northern California. She called up the detail in Malone’s record. She printed two copies of the record on the laser printer.
Then, to put him on-site. With swift, sure movements of her fingers, she tapped the keys and found a menu of directories for airlines. Using a time-span of the past week, she worked her way through five airlines before locating a manifest that included N.O. Malone.
Double bingo.
October called exactly at 1:30. “It’s me.”
“The name is Nathan Oakley Malone. Six-four, one hundred and sixty-two pounds, scar on left temple in the hairline, blue eyes, blond hair, no other visible distinguishing marks, but the record is five years old. There is no photograph. Belonged to the operations directorate for the CIA from ’95 to the end of ’08, though no specifics. Before that, six years in the army, infantry, then intelligence. He left active duty as a major. A whole raft of decorations, from the Army’s Purple Heart, Silver Star, and Distinguished Service Medal to the CIA’s in-house, unpublicized Intelligence Star and Distinguished Intelligence Cross. He flew into LaGuardia two days ago, and he flew to Washington this morning.”
“All right. Any background for me?”
“There are no particulars, but from reading the file, I would think you might consider him dangerous. Perhaps even extremely dangerous.”
“Okay. You have any idea where he is now?”
“I’m starting to check the hotels. You just get on an airplane and get back here, then call me.”
*
As it turned out, Malone decided he had jumped to the wrong conclusion. Patrick Corridan’s reelection might actually be in doubt. The campaign was not going to be a shoo-in, at any rate.
The biographical information on the sheet provided by Dinmore and in the CIA dossier was straightforward and generally known. Corridan was sixty-seven, five-ten, 175 pounds, and had gray hair some would call distinguished, hazel eyes, and no visible scars. He was a Vietnam era Navy vet—a lieutenant then, a graduate of law school at Berkeley, and had practiced corporate law in San Jose for twelve years before his election to a United States Senate seat. He had dabbled around in politics before that—city council, county government, and a state senatorship.
After twenty-two years in the Senate, he was senior on a number of important committees, Armed Services, Senate Intelligence Oversight, and Appropriations being the three prime bodies. Beyond Dinmore’s data, the restricted CIA analysis called him “friendly” to national security interests. He was a supporter of Department of Defense projects and budgets, and seemed to condone most of the arcane activities of Central Intelligence, Defense Intelligence, and the rest of the services.
Not a bad man, Malone thought.
Corridan’s problem was that, in Democratic Party circles, he was considered too friendly toward DOD budgets and toward judgmental errors in intelligence activities. Unnamed sources were quoted as saying that Corridan had gone out of his way to divert attention from Poindexter and North in the opening stages of Irangate. The fiasco with intelligence estimates regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq hadn’t bothered him a bit. He did not go public, but he did use his considerable influence in private calls to various people. According to the analysis, Patrick Corridan had been targeted for defeat at the polls by everyone from Republicans and Tea Partiers who thought he wasn’t far right enough to a subset of Democrats who had determined he wasn’t far left enough.
The rumble from reliable sources had it that the Democrats were putting heavy money behind one Charles Lee Vahrenwald, a California state senator now working in Sacramento. The National Committee had sent in their top strategy and finance consultants to aid Vahrenwald in the California primary race. Malone supposed that Corridan might feel a little put out by his own party. Damned ingrates.
Corridan’s constituency was home ground to Malone, of course, and though he kept up on politics to some extent, he could not recall one media report about overly paternal national interest in Corridan’s reelection. The media naturally tended toward blindness when Democrats should have been at the center of attention. If what he was learning was true, no doubt there were subterranean stirrings taking place in regard to the Democratic primary election.
Without having thought about it much, and because he was an avowed Independent voter, Malone assumed he would have voted for Corridan. That was before the new administration took power, of course. And that election was one of the reasons leading to his decision to retire on December 31, 2008.
There was a long list—two sheets—of names identified as people with whom Corridan routinely associated. They ranged from senatorial staff to social contacts in Washington and back in the home district. Quite a few of them were lobbyists, of course. In the more than three hundred names of Corridan associates, Malone could not find a James Lattimore Mears or a Lanette Eleanor Dixon.
Bobbi Galway had located a probable Mears, James Lattimore, in Scottsdale, Arizona, probable because he had the same Social Security number Tracy Dinmore had noted in his brief biography. The CIA computers, however, had come up with nothing more than the Treasury Department official had provided.
Mears was forty-four and operated an inherited Ford/Nissan dealership in Phoenix. He was briefly described as six-one, dark hair, brown eyes, a graduate of the University of Arizona at Tucson, with a master’s degree from the University of Phoenix, a former Navy SEAL with one year in Iraq during Desert Shield. He was married, had two children, and had declared earnings of $198,000 in the previous year.
He was a Republican, a Rotarian, and an Episcopalian. He was treasurer for the local United Way. He played second base on the Mears’ Autorama softball team on Thursday nights.
Hell, Malone might even vote for him.
He would not vote for Lani Dixon. After reading the Agency report on her—which had more background than Dinmore’s, Malone realized he had met her back when she was Lani Kemper. His immediate image of her was dressed in a floor length aqua velvet gown, surrounded by a dozen admiring tuxedoes. It had been an embassy reception for an incoming French ambassador, but Lani Kemper had been the star. At the time, she was married to an Assistant Secretary of State and had every right to be there.
Malone remembered the dress well. It molded and shaped and cupped tawny flesh with precision. The gown’s narrowly vee’d décolletage revealed the inner orbs of her breasts. Her bare shoulders were dusted with the fringe of long, dark red tresses. She had green eyes that lau
ghed and darted and teased. Her mouth laughed and pouted and teased.
The reception had taken place six years before, but he recalled it clearly. He had chatted with her briefly, but she had shown absolutely no interest in a Central Intelligence Agency analyst, which was how he had normally been identified in those days.
Checking her record now, he could see why. Lanette Eleanor Powell Baumgartner Kemper Dixon was on husband number three, and each succeeding husband was located in a social and/or power stratum a bit higher than his predecessor. David Wainwright Dixon II did not have a name that would be known outside of “in” circles in Washington, and he did not have a job that offered more than academic prestige. He was a professor of economics at Georgetown University. One had to be in the know, or to have a CIA printout, to realize that David Dixon had a lot of clout. Whatever his cover title, Dixon was one of the brains in the joint brain bank at the Georgetown Center for Strategic Studies.
Interesting also was the fact that the Dixons had addresses in the Georgetown area as well as in Scottsdale, Arizona.
All of which proved nothing, Malone thought. Lani Dixon adroitly used spouses on her stairway toward the power elite.
He could not figure Dinmore’s angle. Dinmore had told him on the phone that there were, “three principals involved in the deal.” That assumed one “deal” and three people connected in some way. One would think that Dinmore was also involved in the “deal.”
Malone could not make any of the connections.
He sat alone at a reading table in the reference room, the file and a stack of Who’s Who books in various fields and geographies spread around him. A matron with a stern visage sat at the end of the table reading a world almanac of some kind. He had used Dinmore’s biographical sketches as the basis for his own notes, adding the Marriott stationary sheet for Dinmore himself. Jotting notations on the sheets from the information Bobbi had given him, he now had six pages and three photographs that told him very little. Bobbi’s data was in his back pocket, and he would burn those pages later.
Solid Oak Page 3