Invasion of Privacy: A Novel Read online

  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.

  27

  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.

  28

  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 be
en 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.

  29

  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.

  30

  Up at first light.

  Mary was a sailor’s daughter, trained to rise without lingering. By the time her feet hit the floor she had a dozen tasks lined up and ranked in order of importance. She brushed her teeth, washed her face, and combed her hair. She avoided her eyes. It was not a day for soul-searching and self-pity. Joe wouldn’t have it. It was a day for action.

  Finished in the bathroom, she padded down the hall and checked on the girls. Jessie lay on top of her sheet, legs splayed, phone within reach of her hand. She was like a secret agent who never slept without her gun hidden beneath her pillow.

  Mary left the room and continued down the hall. Grace lay solemnly beneath her sheet, her breathing measured, her position unchanged from when Mary had tucked her in.

  Squirm. Struggle. Knock off the sheets.

  If she wanted Jessie calmer, she prayed that Grace be more forceful. One child fought too much, the other not nearly enough.

  Gently she pulled back the sheet. She saw it and her breath caught. There on Grace’s thigh, where she’d hit the side of the trampoline enclosure, was a bruise the size of a tennis ball. Or was it something else? Something that had weakened Gracie’s system so that she had vomited when she’d taken her new medicine?

  The disease was known as acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL. In its most basic form it was a cancer of the white blood cells. Some mutation in Grace’s DNA caused her body’s bone marrow continually to produce malignant immature white blood cells, which crowded out the normal blood cells in the marrow before spreading to other organs. The overall cure rate in children was 80 percent, but the doctors worried that Grace might have a more aggressive variety of the disease, one that had the potential to go crazy really fast and be fatal in weeks or even days. Though the illness had been under control, Mary could never stop worrying. Every bruise was a cause for concern. The perpetual uncertainty was a mother’s worst nightmare.

  Mary rearranged the sheet as it had been. Grace didn’t move a muscle.

  Mary kissed her fingers and touched her daughter’s forehead. “Love you, mouse.”

  —

  In the kitchen Mary brewed a pot of coffee, then powered up the desktop and entered the address for the local paper. She was anxious to learn what new information the FBI had revealed about Joe’s death and in particular whether they’d released the name of
the informant. To her bewilderment, there was no mention of the shooting on the front page. She had to go all the way to page nine to find an article about Joe, and even then it was unsatisfying. There was no news about the informant’s identity. The only new material discussed Joe’s career at the FBI. One line in particular gnawed at her. “Grant was passed over for promotion to headquarters earlier in the year and transferred from Sacramento to aid in the Austin residency’s criminal investigations.”

  Mary fumed. Who were they to say Joe was passed over? Again she felt Don Bennett’s hand at work. She shifted in her seat, recalling his pat explanation: “The investigation is closed. I told you what happened.”

  Liar.

  Mary checked the New York Times and Washington Post websites. Neither offered further insight into her husband’s death. Worse, both carried the same line about Joe’s being passed over for promotion. It was a smear, pure and simple, a purposeful effort to besmirch his reputation and shift blame for the shooting away from the Bureau and onto him.

  Mary opened her drawer and took out the boarding pass stub for the flight from Austin to San Jose. In the past Joe had traveled frequently with a fellow agent named Randy Bell. Randy had been over to the house dozens of times. He was a kind, avuncular man ten years Joe’s senior. It was only then that she realized that Randy hadn’t called to offer his condolences.

  She still had his number programmed into her phone. Six a.m. in Austin meant four a.m. in Sacramento. She made a mental note to call him in a few hours.

  She spent a few minutes reading e-mails, checking her bank balance. Thoughts of the future elbowed their way to the front of her mind. Worries about money, about Grace, about…well, everything.

  A knock on the sliding glass door made her jump. Carrie Kramer stood in her running gear, pointing at her watch. Six a.m. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays was their designated run time. Once the sun rose above the treetops, it grew too warm for anything but a brisk walk.