Invasion of Privacy (12 page)

Carlos Cantu returned to the icebox to put away the bodies. Forty years old and taking bribes to make ends meet. Not quite the way he’d expected things to turn out.

He slid the trays into their lockers and cleaned up the room, remembering the sunny afternoons at Royal Stadium, the burnt-orange jerseys running up and down the field, eighty thousand wildly cheering fans filling the stands, the old siege cannon firing after every touchdown.

The good ol’ days.

Cantu laughed dispiritedly. He’d been too much of a runt to play, but he’d enjoyed being a trainer. It had been his dream to become a doctor, but he’d dropped out senior year to look after his mother, who was ill. Time passed. His mother died. He’d never stopped wanting to be a doctor, or even a physical therapist. Somehow he never managed to get a degree.

Finished cleaning up, Carlos turned off the lights and locked the door. He checked that all the offices were empty and that he was the last to leave. On his way out he stopped at his desk. Unlocking his file drawer, he took out a zip-lock bag containing a wallet, a gold bracelet, and a wristwatch. He’d lied to Tank. It had been his job to bag the informant’s valuables. Dutifully he placed the man’s wallet and bracelet into an evidence bag and sealed it. He kept the watch for himself. It was a Patek Philippe. Swiss. Perpetual calendar. Eighteen-karat gold. Crocodile strap. Retail price $126,000, according to a site on the Net. He hoped to auction it off for no less than half that amount.

He turned it over in his hand. There were initials engraved on the back of the case.

“To H.S. Thanks, I.”

Mary Grant was coming to life before his eyes. Image by image. Pixel by pixel.

Not a picture of her. Ian Prince had no practical interest in her physical appearance. Standing in the center of his office at a few minutes before ten p.m., he was looking into her true self, her life as defined by her activity online.

Ian was having Mary Margaret Olmstead Grant
indexed
.

The office was large and airy, the size of a tennis court, with wooden floors and a vaulted ceiling. Windows offered a vista across the Meadow toward Great Tom. Ian’s gaze was not on the illuminated belfry, however, but on the holographic images that rose from knee level and formed a circular tower around him—a patchwork quilt of the web pages Mary Grant visited on a regular basis.

There was her home page at Amazon and her log-on page at Chase. There was her Facebook page and her Shutterfly account. Mapquest and Google. WebMD and Pandora. Citicards and Wells Fargo. There was the
Austin American-Statesman
and the
New York Times. Huffington Post
and
Drudge Report
. Yet another showed the portal to her health insurance company. Some of the pages were recent, as reported by the tap put on the Grant family’s online access earlier in the day. But more had come from her browsing history.

Another panel showed pages linked to her Social Security number. These included her credit report, mortgage information, home equity line of credit (from Sacramento), and federal tax information as reported to the IRS.

It was simplicity itself to retrieve the information. All ONE servers were powered by software containing a collection filter that Ian alone was able to access. The filter looked for all manner of personal data, everything from phone numbers to credit card numbers to Social Security numbers, and once found, stored it permanently. Ninety-one percent of all traffic on the Internet passed through a server, router, or switch manufactured by ONE.

He touched a screen hovering in front of his nose. The portal to the
Austin American-Statesman
opened. He noted that she’d been reading the article about her husband. Nothing strange there. He touched the screen and it shrank to its original size.

Next he looked at Mary Grant’s account at Chase Bank. Until he had a password, he could not go deeper. Likewise, he could not access her detailed credit card records or her insurance accounts.

Ian touched the screen and the page shrank to its original size.

For now, Mary Grant’s index was a precaution. If and when she became a threat, he would obtain her passwords. It would not be difficult. He would dig deeper. The circular tower would grow to contain hundreds of web pages. He would know everything Mary Grant had done in the past and everything she was doing in the present.

Most important, he would know everything she would do in the future.

It was late. The girls were asleep. Or at least Grace was. Jessie no doubt was on her laptop, doing whatever she did until all hours. Mary padded downstairs to Joe’s office. She had on her sweats and one of Joe’s Georgetown T-shirts. He was in her thoughts constantly, so much so that she felt almost as if he were still alive, only in a different form. Every doubt, he extinguished. Every fear, he allayed. She had only to say “I can’t,” for him to counter, “Of course you can.”

Mary set down her mug of tea and her iPad. Seated at his desk, she dug the boarding card out of her pocket. Her eye found the seven-digit code below his name. 7XC5111. Joe’s frequent-flyer membership number.

She called up the American Airlines web page, then selected “Rewards Program” and entered Joe’s number. A box asked for his password. She typed it in and was directed to Joe’s page.

Hon, she said to him, you’re so easy.

Mary had warned herself to be ready. Where there was smoke, there was fire. If Joe hadn’t told her about one trip to San Jose, there would be others, to either San Jose or elsewhere.

The page listed Joe’s recent trips. She began counting at the top of the page and continued through two more. Twenty-seven flights in all. She had her agenda open and ticked off each trip against her record. Many flights matched perfectly. She recalled Joe’s comments about the cases he was covering at the time. She had no qualms with those.

But many did not. There were two in November. One in December. Three in January. And so on through July.

Not just fire; a five-alarm blaze.

The phone rang. The call was from the funeral home. “Mrs. Grant, this is Horace Feely. I’m sorry to disturb you so late, but there seems to be a problem.”

Mary turned her chair away from the desk. “I’m listening.”

“To be brief, we’re unable to take possession of your husband. Usually
the medical examiner releases the body after the autopsy has been performed. However, there seems to have been a delay.”

“What kind of delay?”

“In performing the postmortem. At the FBI’s request, the medical examiner has exercised his right to keep your husband’s body until such further time as decided. I would count on a week minimum.”

“A week. But—” Mary bit back her words. Anger wouldn’t change anything. She thanked the funeral director and hung up.

She put down the phone. No one had informed her that an autopsy was to be performed on her husband. What could a medical examiner find that the surgeons hadn’t? It was all part of the scheme, she realized. First Don Bennett refusing to help her retrieve Joe’s message, then Judge Caruso telling her to halt her inquiries, and now a delay of at least a week in performing the postmortem.

Not a scheme.

A conspiracy.

But for what? she asked, only to laugh derisively at her naïveté. Weren’t conspiracies always about the same thing?

Mary turned back to the desk and tallied her findings. Beginning in November of the past year, Joe had made sixteen trips to San Jose without her knowledge. Twelve while the family was in Sacramento and four since the move to Texas. For these most recent trips, the notations in the agenda read “Bastrop,” “San Antonio,” “fieldwork,” and so on. Never once was there a mention of San Jose.

Sixteen trips were enough.

Mary put down her pen. The conclusion was there to see plain as day. Joe had not come to Austin to work on municipal corruption cases. He’d come to follow a case that had begun in Sacramento, a case that required him to fly to San Jose, California, on a frequent basis and that had ended with him being shot by an informant while sitting in his car on an abandoned ranch in the middle of nowhere.

Mary powered down the iPad. For an hour she sat drinking her tea, contemplating her new reality. There were lies and there was deception, and then there was this: a secret life.

An idea came to her. Joe hadn’t called just to say he was in trouble. He knew she wouldn’t be able to help. He’d called to tell her the truth.

Joe knew about the conspiracy, too.

Darkness.

A penlight illuminates a patch of wall. Trophies on a shelf. A basketball. The pale light stops on a poster of a football player, #52 of the San Francisco ’49ers. Then closer. An autograph: “To Billy Merriweather, Your friend, Patrick Willis.”

The light moves again. Now it is on the boy’s face. He lies asleep on his bed, sheets pulled to his chin. He is nine or ten. Blond. We are closer now, close enough to see the fuzz on his cheek. A hand approaches the boy’s face. The hand holds a knife. It is a stiletto, the blade long, slim, razor-sharp. The blade traces the chin, the nose, and stops a breath from the boy’s closed eye. As frightening is the tattoo visible on the man’s hand. It is a skull with vipers squirming to escape the empty sockets.

A man whispers, “Die.”

End.

All this in six seconds.

Repeat.

Darkness.

A penlight illuminates a patch of wall. Trophies…

“How many times are you going to watch that?” asked Shanks.

“You don’t like it?” asked the Mole.

“I liked it fine the first twenty times.”

The two men had exchanged the white work van for a custom-built Mercedes Airstream and were parked in a commercial lot a mile from Mary Grant’s house.

The Mole put away his phone. He’d made several more Vines, six-second clips that he uploaded to the Net. All were similar in content. Only the actors differed.

He’d filmed the first inside John Merriweather’s brother’s home. It showed a sleeping couple and his straight-edge razor. A second came
from inside the home of Merriweather Systems’ cofounder and second largest stockholder. The last was his favorite. It came from the home of John Merriweather’s daughter. Like the Vine he’d just watched, it featured a child—in this case, a six-year-old girl with black hair and a delicious birthmark on her cheek. It had been a warm night and the girl had been sleeping on top of her covers. At the very last moment he’d touched the birthmark with the tip of the blade.

“They worked,” he said. “The Merriweather deal went through, didn’t it?”

“Is that what they were for?”

“Don’t fuck with me,” said the Mole. “You know good and well. Briggs loved ’em. Said they even scared the hell out of him.”

Shanks moved to the rear of the van and lay down.

The Mole watched the Vine again. He was thinking of the girls inside the house. He wanted to film a Vine with them.

At seven a.m. the sun bore down on the tarmac of Ben Gurion Airport on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. It had been a hot summer in the eastern Mediterranean. The last rain had fallen one hundred days earlier. In the north, the olive groves of Judea were withering. The River Jordan had dwindled to a trickle. The forecast for the days ahead offered no relief. Once again in its tortured history, the state of Israel was under siege.

Inside the private air terminal, a group of ten men milled freely in the air-conditioned lounge. Most were in their forties and fifties. All were slim, tanned, and fit. They dressed similarly in dark blazers, open-collared shirts, and pressed slacks. The habit of wearing a uniform was too deeply ingrained to discard altogether. They spoke in hushed tones, never raising their voices. This, too, was a habit. In the secret world, even a whisper could be too loud. The men knew a thing or two about listening.

The transit bus arrived. The men filed out of the building and climbed aboard. None availed himself of a seat as the bus drove across the airfield, darting in between Lufthansa jumbo jets and El Al 787s taxiing for takeoff. All stared intently out the windows, as if memorizing the surroundings.

The bus continued to the southern edge of the field. Its destination was a gleaming white Boeing 737 parked at the far corner. The plane bore no insignia apart from a stylized Roman numeral I painted on its tail. A blond flight attendant welcomed the men aboard with a broad smile and a personal greeting. “Good morning, General Gold…Colonel Wolkowicz…Major Aaron…”

The men were impressed, even if no one commented. It had been years since they’d been addressed by their rank, and never by a buxom blonde with a pleasing Texan drawl.

Once aboard, all were free to sit where they chose. The plane offered thirty seats, two to a row. Each seat was its own private sleep station, with a recumbent lounger, desk, and entertainment center.
Aft was a lounge with couches, desks, a kitchen with gourmet food, and a fully stocked bar.

The flight attendant passed through the cabin taking orders for preflight libations. Nine of the men ordered orange juice—again the habit of lifelong soldiers. Only David Gold ordered a beer, but he was the group’s leader and not subject to group norms. The beer was a Lone Star. Of course it was.

Gold looked around him. At Aaron and Wolkowicz. At Stern and Silverman. The past seemed to well up around him. He saw them as they’d been in their newly issued khaki uniforms, hair shorn, standing at attention inside the barracks at Glilot. How long ago was it? Twenty years? Thirty?

Even then they had been brilliant. Top graduates of his country’s university’s electrical engineering and computer science programs. He had not been able to spare them the rigors and indignities of basic training. Nor had he wished to. Though they would never lift a weapon in their country’s defense, they required toughness nonetheless. The task of listening demanded unimagined stamina.

“You are now members of Unit 8200,” he had announced all those years ago, “the most important unit inside the Israel Defense Forces. It is your job to keep our country safe.”

Started in 1952 with a roomful of surplus American radio equipment, Unit 8200—also known as the Central Collection Unit of the Intelligence Corps—was responsible for every aspect of the nation’s signals intelligence operations. It was the unit’s job to monitor all security-related intelligence from television, radio, newspapers, and, more recently, the Internet. In the United States, the National Security Agency performed a similar function. In Great Britain, the surveillance corps went by the name GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters.

No one, however, could spy like the Israelis. In terms of engineering skill, operational creativity, and sheer audacity, they had allies and enemies beat by a mile.

For years Gold had led the unit, turning raw recruits into the savviest band of surveillance artists the world had ever known. But that was then. A man had to make a living. He had to support a family. A life on a government salary held little appeal.

So when David Gold left the army, he took his recruits and their
skills with him and founded a company to sell those skills to the highest bidder. He named the company Clarus. And it flourished.

The flight attendant closed the forward door. Minutes later she requested that they all take their seats and attach their safety belts. The plane trembled as it began its transit to Runway 29er. The captain welcomed his esteemed cargo aboard and announced that flying time to Austin, Texas, would be seventeen hours, including a refueling stop in Tenerife, Canary Islands.

The plane was lightly loaded and took off steeply into a royal-blue sky. The men gazed out the windows and took a last look at their home, the land of Isaac and Abraham. The plane banked to the west and in minutes was cruising at an altitude of 41,000 feet over the Mediterranean Sea.

The executives from the Clarus Corporation relaxed and retreated deep into their thoughts. They would not be coming home for a long while. Yet not one regretted his choice.

They were all about to become enormously wealthy.