Authors: David Jacobs
“Why?”
“The same as you, probably. Looking for Pete’s case-book, notepad, anything he might have left behind. A clue, a lead. Something, anything.”
“And?”
“Nothing so far. I haven’t been here long, I just got here a little while ago before you.”
Kling reached inside his jacket. Jack motioned with the gun. “Careful—”
“Quit kidding, Bauer. You’ve got my gun and you patted me down. You know what I’m reaching for.” Kling sneered—was the sneer for Jack or himself? He pulled out a half-pint bottle of vodka. An off-brand, two-thirds full. “Lucky it didn’t get broken, huh?”
“Lucky,” Jack echoed, expressionless. Kling’s hands shook as he unscrewed the cap. He held the bottle in both hands to steady it. He raised it to his mouth and drank deep, his throat working. When he lowered it the bottle was one-third full. Some color had returned to his face; his eyes glittered. He carefully recapped the bottle and stowed it away in his breast pocket.
He looked up at Jack from the bottom of his eyes and smiled a sickly smile. “Pathetic, huh? You’d never know to look at me that I used to be a hotshot like you once. Not so very long ago, either. Four years.”
“The Sayeed case,” Jack said.
Kling nodded with perhaps too much vehemence. “The beginning of the end for me. Sure, I hit the bottle pretty hard before then, but I had a handle on it. It wasn’t till afterward that it slid out of control and had a handle on me. Now I’ve got to have it all the time. Like medicine.”
Jack was uncomfortable. “Look, Kling, this isn’t an AA meeting. I’m not interested in your personal life, except how it impacts the investigation. Otherwise, keep it to yourself.”
Kling smirked, looking wise. “That’s what I would have said if our positions were reversed and I was in your shoes.”
His gaze turned inward, as the memory flow began. “It all ties into Sayeed. Yesterday…and today. It figured to be an open-and-shut case. Classified data from the Argus Project turned up in Pakistan. Sayeed was a Pakistani. The time
frame of his trip home to Islamabad fit the window for the secrets leak. His uncle is a big shot in ISI, the Inter-Service Intelligence directorate, the military-intelligence outfit that’s the real power in that country.
“There was more. Sayeed’s comings and goings at Ironwood and off-duty. Massive downloads of classified files from the lab’s mainframe computers to his personal computer and laptop. Tracks that couldn’t be wiped clean from the archives no matter how hard he tried—and the record shows that he tried plenty of times once the investigation began, on his own computer and on coworkers’ computers that he logged onto. It added up to the fact that Dr. Rahman Sayeed was the spy who passed Argus data to ISI. It was all there and I proved it, by god, I proved it!”
“Why did the case go sour?” Jack asked.
Kling’s face twisted like he’d smelled something rotten. “Lots of reasons, but they all boil down to one word: politics. There were bigger factors in place more important than nailing one atom spy.
“Washington was suffering one of its periodic fits of trying to make nice with Pakistan. Because they had nukes and Washington didn’t want them spread to Islamabad’s allies throughout the region. Because we needed their cooperation to fight the war in the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan where the Taliban and al-Qaeda were hiding out. Because the pressure groups, ACLU, and all the usual suspects raised a big stink that Sayeed’s rights were being violated because of where he was from and not because he’d been caught red-handed stealing secrets he had no right to. It got picked up overseas and turned into something big and the Administration and State Department couldn’t take the heat.
“Sayeed hired himself one smart defense lawyer—Max Scourby—and that SOB turned the trial into a circus and me into the clown in the center ring. He painted it that we
were the bad guys and Sayeed was some poor persecuted martyr. Scourby played the trial like a virtuoso, dealing the graymail card, threatening to subpoena all the big shots in Ironwood and have them spill their guts about all the secret projects they were working on in the lab. Divulging intelligence damaging to vital national security interests. That was enough to make the government fold right there.
“Then Scourby got me on the witness stand and tore me apart, made me look like fifty-seven different varieties of horse’s ass. I helped him do it because, jerk that I was, I let him get under my skin. I knew he was trying to get me mad with his artful insinuations and snotty asides and smirks and winks to the jurors. I knew it but I blew my stack anyway and reamed him out good from the witness stand, and when I was done the case was sunk and my career along with it…”
Kling fell silent, brooding, and bitter. Jack prodded him to get him back on track. “But you came back to Ironwood all the same, you wound up working for OCI,” he pointed out.
“Not until later, much later,” Kling said. “That was Morrow’s doing. He got Hotchkiss’s job. Hotchkiss was his predecessor as OCI chief. Morrow was his number two man.”
“I know about Hotchkiss,” Jack said.
Kling fired back, “Then you know that he played his cards close to the vest and kept Morrow in the background as much as possible. Maybe he had an intuition that the Sayeed case could go sour and wanted to contain the damage. It finished Hotchkiss—hell, killed him—but Morrow was clean, none of that Sayeed dirt clinging to his skirts, so he got the top slot when Hotchkiss was forced into retirement.
“That’s how I saw it then but I was wrong. Morrow was a lot savvier than I figured. Hell, he reached out and contacted me to offer me a job in OCI. It wasn’t much but I jumped at it. I’d slid so far down the ladder that anything would have
looked good. I was poison in the national security field. The jerk who’d torpedoed the biggest atom spy case since the Rosenbergs. Nobody in the private sector would touch me, either. The big corporations have no use for losers.
“Out of the blue came Rhodes Morrow with a job offer. I took it. It wasn’t until later, months later, that I realized it was all part of a plan.”
“A plan?” Jack prompted.
“Oh yeah. Morrow was better than me, better even than old Hotchkiss. Or maybe he just had more time to sift the facts and chew them over and dig deeper into them.
“He knew Sayeed was guilty but he took it one step further. By focusing on inconsistencies in the case, little odd details that didn’t add up, he discovered that Ironwood was penetrated not by one but by two spies,” Kling said.
He grinned wolfishly. “That’s right—two spies. Sayeed was one but not the only one. There was another.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Nobody knows. But Morrow was getting close. Closer every day. Two spies planted in the heart of one of Uncle Sam’s most advanced weapons research facilities. Two moles. Each buried deep, burrowing away. Each working separately, pursuing his own agenda. Maybe they were unaware of each other’s existence, maybe not.
“Sayeed was working for Pakistan’s ISI. They were too greedy for product and burned him, revealing his existence. He was the little mole. The other spy—call him Big Mole—was slicker. But not slick enough to stay hidden forever. Morrow figured out that Big Mole was a long-term penetration agent placed deep in the INL hierarchy. Someone with virtually unlimited access to all top secret classified data. He might be in research or security but he had to be one of the higher-ups. Someone who’s been at Ironwood for a long time, longer than Sayeed.
“Sayeed joined six years ago. Big Mole’s tracks go back
much farther than that. Before Argus, even; back to the days when the lab’s top priority was overhauling the PAL codes.”
“Explain,” Jack demanded.
“I’ll tell you but you won’t like it. PAL: permissive action link. The digital codes that have to be input before a nuclear missile can be fired. An integral part of the fail-safe system to ensure no intercontinental ballistic missile is launched by mistake or design without proper authorization. The lab was assigned to overhaul the PAL codes and harden them against interference. Ironwood’s last big project before Argus.”
“My god,” Jack said softly.
Kling looked pleased—he knew he was getting through. “Scary, huh? It scares me, too. Just like it scared Morrow. He thought the PAL codes were Big Mole’s real target. That he was trying to crack them long before Sayeed was hired to work on Argus. That the Argus flap threw a scare into him and caused him to lay low for years. Now Big Mole feels safe enough to start up again where he left off.”
“I don’t buy it.” Jack didn’t want to believe it; the implications were too frightening. “Morrow tells you but not his bosses?”
Kling sat up a little straighter. “Sounds crazy. Morrow confide in a drunk like me? Sure, crazy like a fox. INL security is shot all to hell. Somehow Big Mole knew what was going on in OCI as soon as Morrow did. Morrow stopped inputting his notes on the mole hunt into his office computer for fear that the whole lab network had been compromised. He didn’t have any hard evidence, only a pattern of omissions and disinformation. That and the instincts of a lifelong spy catcher that a rat was loose in the corncrib.
“The Sayeed affair worked to Big Mole’s advantage by burning up the territory. INL’s contracting authority had a bellyful of bad publicity and botched spy hunts. No way were they getting back on that horse. Morrow wasn’t stupid.
He saw what happened to his mentor Hotchkiss—yeah, and to me, too. He knew that the only way he’d get any action was by delivering Big Mole tied up in a nice neat package.”
“Who did he suspect? He must have had a few prime suspects in mind.”
“The key is in the chronology, Bauer. The window of opportunity. Big Mole had to be working steadily at Ironwood for the last eight years or more. Morrow started out with a list of persons of interest. On the scientific side, Nordquist, Carlson, Fisk, and Romberg. In security: McCoy. They were all in place during the PAL overhaul eight years ago.
“Since then the list has gotten smaller. And you know why.”
“The Ironwood kills,” Jack said.
Kling pointed a finger at Jack and mimed pulling a trigger. “Bingo. The chain of deaths that brought you here. See how it all ties together.
“Yan was the first. Dr. John Yan. Not a suspect, didn’t fit the chrono. He came in five years ago to work on Argus and then Perseus. But Morrow noticed some anomalies in Yan’s download files. Classified data was being downloaded from the mainframe to Yan’s computer at times when Yan was out of the lab. Someone else was using Yan’s password to access the files. Before Morrow could get around to asking Yan who that someone might be, Yan was dead. Heart attack, they said.
“That was six months ago. Fisk was the next to die. He’d worked on the PAL overhaul, Argus, Perseus. The grand old man of Ironwood. He was in his early seventies—Nordquist had the contractor waive the mandatory retirement age so they could have the benefit of his mathematical expertise. Fisk fell in the bathtub, cracked his skull, and drowned. That was two months after Yan. Morrow must have guessed the truth even then. Although he didn’t let me in on it until later.
“Freda Romberg was the third. That really blew the case wide open, at least as far as Morrow was concerned. She’d been at Ironwood the longest, close to twenty years. The deaths of Yan and Fisk must have got her thinking. She called to make an appointment to see Morrow. She wouldn’t say what it was about over the phone, but anytime a top researcher contacts the head of OCI it’s got to be important. In hindsight it looks like she’d gotten suspicious and discovered something she wanted to bring to Morrow. Morrow was away from his office at the time but his secretary took the call and made the appointment for later that day. Romberg was working alone in the LRF at lunchtime when the robot arm crushed her to death. Equipment malfunction, they said.
“That prodded Morrow into taking active measures. He had a two-part plan. Officially he started making noises that there was a possibility that the three deaths weren’t accidental but deliberate. He didn’t say it was murder, he only offered it up as a possibility for further study. He caught a lot of heat from management. The contractor didn’t want to rip the scab off the wound by setting off a new round of investigations, bad publicity, and headlines. Morrow tried to make his point without making waves but there was a lot of pushback from the governing directors on the board. He took his suspicions to the local representatives of the CIA and FBI—Lewis and Sabito—but they weren’t buying.
“Unofficially Morrow opened up a second front for direct action. He roped in me and Peter Rhee, brought us into the picture. I guess that’s what he’d had in mind all along when he hired me, bringing me in as a sideman. He knew I was clean and Rhee, too. Rhee was a new hire, brought in after Sayeed. Morrow arranged for the three of us to get together after work in a bar in the Hill. He didn’t even trust his own office to be spy-proof. Why not meet in the SCIF? Same
reason! Everybody that uses it is logged in and out and he didn’t want to tip that the three of us were in cahoots.
“At the meet he laid it out for us. Gave us the briefing about Big Mole. He deputized us as his special investigators in the mole hunt. It had to be a completely off-the-shelf operation. Conducted in secret outside office hours. Confined to the three of us. He gave us the assignments and Rhee and I carried them out. We were his legmen.”
“He didn’t bring anyone else in OCI in? McCoy, Derr, any of the others?” Jack asked.
Kling shrugged. “If he did, he didn’t tell us. This spy hunt was no one-sided affair, though. Big Mole wasn’t sitting still while we were looking for him. He’s not alone. He has help on the outside. Killers on call. Yan, Fisk—and don’t forget Ernie Battaglia. He was a retired ex-cop turned SECTRO Force security guard. I knew him to say hello to and pass the time of day with. Nice guy. He was the next to die, ten days after Romberg. Killed in a hit-and-run accident—run over while he was out walking his dog. The car—stolen car—was found abandoned downtown by the city cops. The driver was never found. The cops figured some punk kid boosted the car for a joyride, then got scared after tagging Ernie and dumped the car fast.