Invasion of Privacy: A Novel Page 13

  “Not today,” said Mary as she unlocked the sliding door.

  “What do you mean? It’s six. Let’s motor.”

  Mary thought of Grace and the blasts and the boarding pass and the call she needed to make to Randy Bell. “I can’t. There’s too much—”

  “Three miles before it gets hot. Come on. You need to do this.”

  Mary put aside the iPad. Carrie was right. Running cleared her mind and kept her sane. Today she needed that respite more than ever. “Give me a second.”

  She returned in five minutes. She looked at Carrie and laughed. Both were wearing blue shorts, white T’s, and white caps, ponytails pulled through the hole. “Twins,” she said.

  “And the girls—still sleeping?”

  “No one opens an eye until eight,” said Mary lightly, refusing to worry about Grace until she got back. “You’re right. I need to do this. Let’s go out the front.”

  “Twenty-nine minutes,” said Carrie.

  “You’re on.”

  31

  “We’ve got some action,” said the Mole.

  He and Shanks sat in the work area of the Mercedes Airstream. The interior was a hive of high-definition monitors and state-of-the-art surveillance equipment. The van was engineered for use by law enforcement and built by Guardian TSE (“technical surveillance equipment”), one of hundreds of companies owned by ONE Technologies. Images from the camera the Mole had installed the day before lit up the screen. The men watched the women leave the house and start their run.

  “Which one you want?” asked Shanks. “Me, I like the one with the yellow shoes and the nice ass. You can have the one with the big rack.”

  “Not my type,” said the Mole.

  “Ah, yeah. I forgot. You don’t like ’em that way.”

  “What way is that?”

  “Ripe.”

  Another screen listed all online activity performed by the computers inside the house on Pickfair Drive, each device identified by its specific fifteen-digit IP number. The Mole checked the recent sites visited. Austin American-Statesman. New York Times. Washington Post. He clicked on each and was rewarded with links to the articles Mary Grant had read, the time spent on each site. It appeared that she was checking on her husband. Nothing mysterious about that.

  Afterward she’d accessed her e-mail account, but the site was encrypted and he was unable to see whose mail she read or to whom she’d sent messages.

  So far this morning, Mary Grant was being a good girl.

  The Mole stood and moved into the driver’s seat.

  “What are you doing?” asked Shanks.

  “We’re taking a ride. I’m not going to sit inside this van forever.”

  The Mole left the parking lot and drove past the Grants’ house, stopping a half block farther on. Shanks put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t.”

  “Move your hand before I cut it off.”

  “If Briggs finds out—”

  “If?” said the Mole. “That’s the point of this exercise.”

  Shanks looked at the Mole. Little guy. Five-eight, tops. One hundred and fifty pounds dripping wet. He could tear a runt like that apart limb by limb. Yet the Mole sent a shiver down his spine as surely as if it were the Reaper staring him in the eye. He pulled his hand away. “All you, man.”

  The Mole chuckled, his tongue dashing over his lips.

  —

  The sliding door at the rear of the house was unlocked. The kitchen appeared empty. The Mole slid the door on its track and stepped inside. Head cocked, he listened. He loved this moment most: the thrill of trespass. He crossed the room and peered around the corner. He saw no one. He turned and made a circuit of the kitchen, an eye open for Mary Grant’s cell phone. He picked up a tablet, but it was locked and would take far too long to break into.

  Another scan of the countertops. No phone.

  He returned to the hall. A bowl by the front door held car keys, chewing gum, mints, but nothing of interest. He climbed the stairs. A door on either side of the hall. The nearest was ajar. He nudged it open. A blond head peeked from beneath the covers. Golden hair. Flushed cheeks. His breath hitched. It was the younger girl, Grace.

  Half against his will, he stepped inside, forgetting all about Mary Grant’s phone. He wanted a trophy. He held his phone in front of him, slipped his knife free, the stiletto. He moved his hand into the frame, making sure the tattoo was visible, and began filming.

  The hand moved the blade toward the girl’s cheek, her ruby lips, her fluttering eyelids. He smelled her breath.

  Across the hall, a footfall. The floor groaned beneath a person’s weight.

  The Mole hurried out of the room. A look toward the master bedroom. He saw a phone on the nightstand. Inches away, a shadow passed beneath the door. It was the other daughter.

  Still, the Mole did not flee. He clutched the stiletto tightly, asking himself if the moment had come. If, finally, he would act on his desires. His fingers tingled with anticipation.

  All she had to do was open the door.

  The shadow moved and he walked down the stairs and left the house.

  32

  “You won.”

  Mary bent over, hands on her knees, breathing hard. Sweat dripped from her brow onto the ground.

  “Today doesn’t count,” said Carrie, bent over double right next to her.

  “Thanks.”

  “Was I right?”

  Mary stood up, finally catching her breath. They’d done three miles in twenty-eight minutes. Not their best, but far from their worst. “Yes,” she said. “You were right. I needed that.”

  “What time do you leave tomorrow?”

  “We’re not. They’re keeping Joe longer to do an autopsy.”

  “Oh?” said Carrie. “Is that normal?”

  “The funeral home director says it is. There’s nothing I can do about it. To tell you the truth, I’m relieved. The girls don’t love Boston.”

  Mary walked up the front path and entered the house. In the kitchen she poured them both a glass of water. Carrie drank hers down and set the glass in the sink. “Have you started thinking about what’s next for you and the girls?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Did Joe leave much?”

  “There’s his pension and life insurance.”

  “What about savings?”

  “With two kids, on a government salary? At least we’ll still get his health coverage. Either way, I’m going to have to go back to work.”

  “What about med school? You told me you wanted to be a doctor. This could be your chance.”

  “Four years before internship and residency. Yeah, right.”

  “So you’ve thought about it?”

  “Long enough to know it’s not going to happen.” Mary looked at Carrie, then looked away. She would consider her options at a future date. After she figured out what had happened to her husband.

  “If you need something in the meantime…you know, something to tide you over. Mark’s making bank these days. Maybe he can get Jess something at Apple next summer. You know, an internship.”

  “That’s sweet, but we’re okay.” Mary gave Carrie a hug and squeezed her tight for a long time. “Thanks.”

  Carrie checked her watch. “Gotta run. You okay?”

  Mary nodded and gave her bestie another hug. Carrie left through the sliding door.

  Mary went upstairs and showered, reminding herself to call Randy Bell as soon as she got out. She remembered he liked his scotch. Maybe she’d catch him hungover and in a mood to spill about his and Joe’s trips to San Jose.

  Finished, she towel-dried her hair. Once or twice she heard a faint noise and stopped to listen, but then it was gone. She brushed her hair and got dressed for day two of widowhood. No black for her. She chose tan shorts and a navy T. Joe would have liked it this way. She went into the bedroom and heard the noise again. Someone was moaning.

  Grace.

  She ran down the hall and opened the door to her daughter�
��s room. The girls lay on top of the bed, Jessie pointing at the bruise on Grace’s thigh and laughing. “She looks like a Minion, Mom. All yellow with a big black dot in the middle.”

  Grace knocked her sister’s hand away. “Tell her to stop teasing me.”

  Jess kept pointing. “No, not like a Minion. It’s like grackle poo. Even worse.”

  Grackles were loud, obnoxious birds the size of crows that clustered in the hundreds at shopping malls and parking lots around the city.

  “Jess, please,” said Mary. “Be nice.”

  “Grace has grackle poo on her leg.”

  “Mom.”

  “Jessie, stop bothering your sister.”

  “She called me fat.”

  “I did not. I was just watching a video when Jess came in and started bothering me.”

  Mary sat on the bed beside Grace. “Does it hurt?”

  “No,” said Grace. “It’s nothing.”

  Mary fetched an ice pack from the freezer. When she returned the girls were friends again, shoulder to shoulder, watching a video on the laptop. Gingerly she placed the ice pack on Grace’s leg, but Grace paid no attention.

  “What are you guys doing up so early?” asked Mary.

  “You woke me up,” said Jessie without looking at her. “I heard you walking around Grace’s room.”

  “You did?”

  “Then I heard you shut the sliding door.”

  “But Carrie and I went out the front.”

  “Whatever.” Jessie turned her attention back to the video playing.

  Mary dismissed Jessie’s comment as…well, just Jessie. She craned her neck to look at the computer. The girls were watching some kind of animal in a crib. It had its paws on the railing and seemed to have a silly expression on its face. “What in the world is that?”

  “A sloth,” said Jessie.

  “A what?”

  “A two-toed South American tree sloth,” said Grace between giggles. “Isn’t he cute?”

  Mary turned away to wipe at a tear, drawing a breath and telling herself to relax. When she looked back at the laptop, she was smiling. “Yes, he is cute,” she said, trying to get in the spirit of things. “You just want to cuddle him, don’t you?”

  Jessie sprang up onto an elbow. “Can we get one? Please!”

  33

  After Mom and Jess left, Grace looked up sloths on Wikipedia. She was fascinated to learn that they slept twenty-three hours a day and that it took them an hour to walk one hundred yards. They really were as slow as everyone said. She decided that she loved sloths, even if her mom had said that there was no way on God’s green earth they were ever getting one.

  Grace closed the laptop and sat up. The sudden movement made her wince. Her leg felt as if it were glued to her hip. It didn’t want to move. She looked toward the door to make sure it was closed and no one was watching, then she stood up. It took her a while, and it hurt a lot. She was glad no one could see.

  She went into the bathroom and pulled up her nightgown. She prodded her thigh and gasped. Bruises didn’t usually hurt so badly. Maybe it was the other thing. The thought frightened her so much she wanted to cry. She bit on her finger to stop. It wouldn’t be fair to Mommy to tell her. Not now, with Daddy gone. Mommy had enough problems.

  Grace limped back to her bed. She spent a minute talking to her father, asking if he was all right. He didn’t answer. She thought that was because he wasn’t in heaven yet. She didn’t really believe in heaven. At least, not like in the Bible. She believed in something else. Something just as good. It was warm and welcoming and somewhere up in the night sky. She knew her dad was there and he’d talk to her when he could.

  Grace needed to ask him about the bruise. The doctor said she was all better, but Grace had read lots about the disease that had tried to kill her. She knew that not all girls got cured. Someone had to be one of the two out of ten who didn’t make it.

  She took another look at the bruise. She told herself it was from the trampoline. It wasn’t cancer. God wouldn’t do that to their family. Not after taking Dad.

  She decided not to tell Mommy about her leg. She didn’t think she could take it right now.

  34

  “Mine.”

  Fort George C. Meade sat on five thousand acres of rolling Maryland countryside twenty-six miles northeast of Washington, D.C. First opened in 1917, it was chosen as the home of the National Security Agency in the 1950s because of its proximity to the nation’s capital. With the Cold War at its peak and the Cuban missile crisis fresh in American minds, Fort Meade was deemed close enough to Washington for easy commuting and far enough away to survive a nuclear attack. Now Fort Meade was home to more than forty thousand employees, many of whom held a top-secret security clearance.

  The fort had its own post office, fire department, and police force. Electrified fences ran the length of the installation’s perimeter. Security cameras and motion detectors covered every square foot. To block any electromagnetic signals from escaping, protective copper shielding wrapped every one of the more than 1,300 buildings inside the compound.

  Waiting at the checkpoint as his identification was examined, Ian Prince looked through the rows of fences at the rectangular black glass office building a half mile away that housed the headquarters of the nation’s most secretive intelligence organization.

  “Mine,” he repeated to himself.

  It was the NSA’s mandate to collect and analyze all signals communication and data relating to foreign intelligence, by overt and clandestine means. Thirty years ago that meant intercepting suspicious radio, telephone, and satellite traffic. Today it meant all that plus policing the Internet, not just monitoring all forms of online traffic for clues to evil intent but protecting all United States government communications and information systems from foreign interference and disruption. On this sunny, humid day, Ian and his colleagues had come to offer ONE’s assistance with both objectives.

  “Here you are, sir,” said the guard, returning Ian’s ID and those of his passengers, Peter Briggs and Dev Patel. “Welcome to Fort Meade.”

  Ian noticed the guard’s quizzical gaze. “Anything wrong?”

  It was not his first trip to Fort Meade, or his second, or even his tenth. Since October 2001 he’d been secretly visiting three or four times a year. Each time he got the same dumbfounded look.

  “I wasn’t expecting you to be driving,” said the guard. “I thought you’d have a chauffeur.”

  “I always drive,” said Ian, giving a salute.

  “Yessir. Have a good day.”

  The gate rose. Simultaneously the steel Delta barrier sank into the ground. Ian headed down a long winding lane toward the black building, officially known as OPS2A. He remembered the feeling of awe he’d experienced on his first visits, the visceral thrill of being so close to the most powerful data-collection apparatus in the world. It was then that the idea had first come to him.

  Over time his awe had tempered as he and ONE became the NSA’s partner, albeit a silent and secret one. Today, as he closed in on his dream, as the changing of the guard grew near, he felt only pride. A father’s pride. One day soon this would all be his.

  —

  The Emperor was waiting inside the conference room when Ian arrived.

  “Good to see you, Ian,” said General Terry Wolfe of the United States Air Force, director of the National Security Agency, chief of the Central Security Service, and commander of the U.S. Cyber Command. He was known throughout the intelligence community as the Emperor. “Has it been six months?”

  “Seven,” said Ian. “December, I believe.”

  Wolfe greeted Patel warmly, addressing him as Dr. Patel. Briggs waited outside.

  “Time flies,” said Wolfe, leading them to the table. “Must have been before all that Merriweather nonsense.”

  “It was,” said Ian. “That’s all behind us, I take it.”

  The “nonsense” was the lengthy investigation conducted by the FBI into allegation
s of bribery and extortion surrounding ONE’s acquisition of Merriweather Systems. The same allegations Gordon May had made two days before on the airstrip in Reno, though there had never been any mention of complicity in the plane crash that took John Merriweather’s life.

  It was in response to these charges that Ian had deemed it necessary to hack into the FBI’s central computer system. He’d been able to gather enough information to put a stop to the FBI’s queries. But the price had been high. His work had not gone unnoticed by the Bureau’s Cyber Investigations Division and Special Agent Joseph Grant.

  “The FBI says it is. Who am I to argue?” Wolfe took his place at the head of the conference table and motioned for Ian to sit at his right.

  The director of the NSA was of medium height and medium build, with thinning hair, a puffy, pleasant face, and timid blue eyes that blinked often behind rimless eyeglasses. Not so much an emperor as a middle-aged father who’d been up late the night before helping a child with his homework. In his tenure at the helm of the NSA, he had turned a once sleepy, unheralded intelligence agency into the nation’s most vaunted fighter of terrorism. When General Terry Wolfe wanted something, both Congress and the military came running, checkbooks at the ready.

  Ian opened the bottle of mineral water placed before him, waiting for any mention of Semaphore. The word was not spoken.

  With Wolfe was Bob Goldfarb, director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the nation’s foremost computer research hub. Goldfarb was old and gnomish, with as much hair sprouting from his ears as on top of his mottled head.

  “Hello, Bob,” said Ian. “Long time.”

  “Exaflops,” whispered Goldfarb. “Can it be?”

  Ian answered with a cryptic smile. All good things to those who wait.

  “Shall we get down to brass tacks?” said Wolfe. “Are we to understand that you’ve solved the heating problem?”