The Value of Valor
“Good night, Peter. Get some sleep sometime, will you?”
“I will if you will.”
Peter sat at an empty desk in the computer room at FBI headquarters in Quantico. He began to punch commands into a keyboard, then thinking better of it, turned off the machine, got up, grabbed his coat, and hurried out.
Finding a phone booth nearby, he fished in his pocket for the necessary change, dropped it in the slot, and dialed a number from memory.
“Yeah?”
“Is that any way to answer your phone, Gustav?”
“Depends on who’s calling,” a man with a heavy Russian accent responded. “For you, Pietro, I will revise my approach. What the hell do you want, Yankee?”
Peter laughed. “Ah, that’s much better. I need a favor.”
“Naturally, why else do you ever contact me?”
“As I recall, I’ve always been there when you’ve needed a thing or two.” Peter knew he didn’t need to remind Gustav that if it weren’t for him, the expert computer hacker would either be in a gulag in Siberia or a federal penitentiary in the States.
“Yeah, yeah. Will my debts never be paid?”
“Time will tell, my friend. Will you help me?”
“If I am able. What do you need?”
“Access to the telephone company’s records where the queries won’t be traceable.”
“Child’s play.”
“I also want to test out that fancy new program you’ve been perfecting to cross-reference the phone numbers with names and locations where the calls were placed.”
There was a muffled curse on the other end of the line. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Gustav, this is me you’re talking to. No bullshit.”
After a short pause and another muffled curse, Gustav asked, “How soon can you be here?”
“I’ll see you in an hour.” Peter hung up the phone and made his way to his rental car, sitting alone in a corner of the FBI parking lot.
Fifty-five minutes later, he knocked on a plain wooden door in a nondescript neighborhood on the outskirts of Georgetown. The door was opened by a beefy, middle-aged man with beady brown eyes hidden by thick lenses, stringy gray hair, and a bushy gray beard.
“This way.”
“Ah, Gustav, I see you’re still a man of few words.”
Lynn Ames
“What is there to say? I know better than to ask why you need to interrupt my nice little life at all hours of the night.”
“The social niceties have always escaped you.”
The big man shrugged. “I’ve never seen any reason to waste time on useless chatter.”
Peter laughed. “Yeah, I’ve noticed.”
Gustav led the way through the cramped apartment, newspapers strewn everywhere in the tiny living room and dirty dishes piled on the stained coffee table.
“You ought to get yourself a housekeeper, Gustav.”
“Bah. I like things just the way they are. This way, I know exactly where everything is.”
Peter made a show of examining his surroundings, simply raising his eyebrows when he returned his focus to his host.
“You want to make small talk or you want to get what you came for?”
“It’s your life, my friend. Show me the way.”
Gustav led the way down a hallway, turning right at the end and gesturing for Peter to precede him through a narrow doorway. Stepping through the entranceway was akin to stepping into another world. Here the room was pristine, the surfaces absolutely free of clutter. There were five workstations in the large, cave-like room, each with a monitor, mouse, and keyboard. Behind the desks was a massive mainframe computer that spanned the width of the space. The room was pitch black with the exception of the eerie glow from the monitors and the glowing red and green lights from the mainframe.
Gustav pointed to the workstation directly in the middle of the group.
“I have set that one up for you already. I have taken the liberty of patching you directly into the system and past the usual security questions. You need only type in the individual or group you want information on, and it should give you access to everything you need.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“How does the cross-reference piece work?”
Gustav sat down at the workstation. “I don’t suppose I should ask how you know about that.”
Peter shook his head and smiled.
Gustav shrugged, turning his attention to the keyboard. “I didn’t figure you’d tell me, but I had to try. Okay. Say I look up my own records at the phone company.” He punched in the query. “See, when the numbers for incoming and outgoing calls come up, I’ve modified their own program by hacking into the computer system of the company that
The Value of Valor
distributes that huge book with all the names and addresses listed by phone number.”
“You’ve merged the two databases.”
“Oh, my friend, I’ve done much more than that. But for your simplistic mind, that explanation will work. If I type in this command string…” His fingers flew across the keyboard. “…the names and addresses pop up next to the numbers. Here, I’ve written the command code down for you. If you need anything, I’ll be out there,” he gestured to the living room, “watching your American television. Fascinating.” He closed the door behind him.
Peter sat down, dropped his coat on the next chair over, and bent to the keyboard. The man really was a genius and way ahead of his time.
Peter typed in “Wheeler, Alton Franklin.” He hit the enter key. After several seconds of silence, the mainframe began to hum and whir, and the monitor began to flash. A minute later, the screen was covered with a series of entries.
Peter began with January 21, 1989, the day after the presidential inauguration, and worked his way forward to the present. Scanning down the list, he saw routine calls to and from powerbrokers in the House and Senate, calls to the president’s office, several to his wife…Peter’s eyes were drawn to the middle of the screen.
There was a call to Robert Hawthorne, placed several days earlier.
Peter made a notation of the entry. It wasn’t necessarily unusual for the vice president to call the man running the political side of the party, but he was curious to know about the nature of the call, and he would cross-reference that piece of information with the vice president’s schedule and other factors.
Peter continued scanning the records on the screen. The very next entry after the call to the chairman of the DNC was a call to a phone number in Beijing, China. It was placed two hours after the call to Hawthorne. Alarm bells rang in Peter’s head. The time lapse made Peter wonder if the vice president had gone out for a little while, perhaps to a meeting with Hawthorne. The call was made to a man named Bruce Gendreau. Peter wrote the name down on a piece of paper and kept looking. He saw nothing else of interest after that call.
Returning to the main query page, he moved his cursor to the “search for” box. He typed in “Vendetti, Michael.” Again the computer searched through millions of records in the course of minutes, stopping when it accessed the requested file. This time, Peter began searching in January 1988, about the time when the then-governor hired Kate to be his campaign spokesperson. At first glance, nothing caught Peter’s eye all the way up until Inauguration Day. His eyes drifted farther down.
Lynn Ames
“Huh. Mr. Hawthorne again, popular guy,” Peter mumbled to himself. He made a note of a series of phones calls Vendetti placed to Hawthorne, all on January 22, 1989, the day after Jay’s accident.
“Interesting.” The calls, six of them, were all placed within a five-hour period and were of a short enough duration that Peter felt he could safely assume Vendetti had been handled by Hawthorne’s secretary. After that, there were no more records of any calls to the chairman.
On a hunch, Peter decided to expand his search. He retraced his steps to include Vendetti’s phone records from May 1987 forward. “Bingo.”
Beginning in June of that year and ending six months later in December, Vendetti called Hawthorne or received calls from him no fewer than half a dozen times. As press secretary to the governor, Vendetti had cause to talk to many people, but that many calls to the chairman of the DNC
would have been highly irregular.
As Peter was about to shut down the program, he had a thought.
Quickly, he typed in “Hawthorne, Robert.” After several seconds, far less time than it had taken with the other two searches, a screen came up. On it was one line: “User not authorized to access information.”
“Really,” Peter muttered out loud. “What are you hiding, Mr.
Hawthorne?”
Peter closed out the query, leaving a blank computer screen before joining his friend in the living room.
“Ah, you are done then?” Gustav asked from a reclining position on the dirty couch.
“Yep. Thanks, Gustav, you were a big help. Your new program works like a dream. Instead of peddling it on the black market, you ought to think about going legit and selling it to the government.”
“Yes, working with your government—I am sure that will get me far in life,” the big man said sarcastically.
Peter smiled as he shrugged into his jacket and opened the front door,
“Farther than a ten-by-twelve prison cell.”
“Very funny,” Gustav said, as the door clicked shut.
Peter stopped at a pay phone and dialed the number the president had given him. It was answered on the second ring.
“President Hyland here.”
“Mr. President, I’m sorry to disturb you so late.”
“Peter? No, no problem. I was just going through some briefing papers for my first trip abroad. Do you have something?”
“Are we secure, sir?”
“Yes, Peter. The number I gave you is unrecorded and undocumented.”
“And the room?”
The Value of Valor
“Yes, this is my bedroom—I assure you there are no microphones in here. My wife would kill me.”
“Very well, then. Sir, do you have a list of the CIA station chiefs?”
“Yes, it’s in one of my briefing books. Can you hold on a second?”
“Yes, sir.” Peter heard the president put the phone down. He heard a door open, then silence. Several minutes later, he heard the door close again.
“I’m sorry about the wait, Peter. The dang thing was in my office here in the residence. I’m looking right now.” After several moments of silence, he asked, “I take it you want to know the name of the station chief in China.”
“Yes, sir. It wouldn’t happen to be a fellow by the name of Bruce Gendreau, would it?”
There was another pause as the president apparently continued scanning the list. “Yes, as a matter of fact, it is. Why?”
“I followed your hunch, sir, and checked into the vice president’s phone records. Seems he made a phone call to Mr. Gendreau; the call was made the same day you heard from your contact over there.”
“Well, I’ll be.” The president’s voice was filled with wonder. “I mean, I know that’s where I told you to look, but I didn’t hold out much hope of finding a smoking gun that easily.” It was almost as if the president was talking to himself. “I know the man is dumber than a box of rocks, but still…”
“Mr. President?”
“Yes?”
“Can you think of any reason the vice president would be calling Robert Hawthorne?”
There was silence on the line for several heartbeats. “I can make excuses for why he might. What’s the time frame?”
“Two hours before the vice president placed the call to China.”
The president whistled. “Now that is interesting.”
“I thought so, too.” Peter debated whether or not to tell the president about the calls between Vendetti and Hawthorne and the fact that Hawthorne apparently had friends in high enough places to have access to his phone records curtailed. He decided against it for the moment.
“How should we proceed, Peter?”
“I haven’t worked that out yet, sir. Let me think about it and I’ll get back to you tomorrow, okay?”
“Fine. I’ll make sure Vicky knows to get you in whenever you’re ready.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Good night, Peter.”
Lynn Ames
CHAPTER SEVEN
he alarm went off at 4:30 a.m., as it did every morning. Kate, T having fallen asleep a scant hour and a half earlier, fumbled for the off switch and rolled over instinctively toward the spot where Jay would have been. This time of day, when she was in that vulnerable state between sleep and wakefulness, was perhaps the most difficult for Kate.
Her body and soul, unencumbered by the constraints of a conscious mind, yearned for her lover, reaching out blindly for the warmth and security that told her she was cherished. The moment when her mind caught up with the rest of her and remembered that Jay was gone was nothing short of agony—an agony that Kate had lived every day for the last five weeks.
Wearily, she rose and made her way to the bathroom. After splashing some cold water on her face and brushing her teeth, she threw on her running clothes and sneakers, made her way to the kitchen, fed Fred, and let him out into the backyard. It was the same routine she had followed for years, even before Jay came into her life, yet now it was as if each individual action took more out of Kate than she had to give.
Her feet pounded the pavement on the Mount Vernon bike trail that wound its way along the Potomac River. She tried to focus on the day ahead—the two televised briefings she would conduct for the press, the meeting with staff to go over the details of the president’s upcoming trip abroad, and the daily policy briefing with the president and senior advisers.
She knew she would come into contact with Michael Vendetti at least a handful of times, as she did every day. This day was different, though; this day, Kate had reason to suspect he might have killed her lover. She had no idea how she would handle the situation, but she hoped she wouldn’t strangle him with her bare hands before having all the facts.
It was still dark outside, but Terri was used to waking before the sun.
She switched on the small lamp on her bedside table, the resultant light casting an ethereal glow over the tidy room. As was her custom when she had the time, she turned on the small television set on her dresser. Every home on this part of the reservation was connected to a large satellite
The Value of Valor