Invasion of Privacy: A Novel Page 8

  Ian walked to his desk and sat down in his chair. He sat solemnly, aware of the occasion.

  It worked.

  Two words that unlocked the future…and might unlock the past.

  His assistant’s voice came over the speakerphone. “Mr. Briggs to see you. You have calls from Mr. Roarke in New York and from Ms. Taggart in Hollywood. You need to leave in fifteen minutes to make it to your meeting downtown.”

  “I’ll roll the calls as soon as I’m on the road. Tell Briggs to give me five minutes.”

  Briggs could wait. First Ian needed to share the news of his triumph.

  He turned the chair slowly and gazed at the satchel in the corner of his office.

  It was a black satchel, old, worn, the leather creased and scarred, but still sturdy. A satchel built to last, but then, so was the British Empire. A strap and a lock secured the case. Above the lock, the initials PSP were embossed in gold leaf. They’d found the satchel in the parking garage next to his father’s car.

  After all these years, he thought, after the endless queries, the fruitless leads, after exploring shadowy path after shadowy path, all to no avail, just maybe there was a chance.

  His eyes rose, catching a shadow. A man was standing next to the satchel. He was tall and upright, dressed in a navy chalk-stripe suit, a maroon necktie done with a perfect dimple, lace-up shoes polished to a regal shine. “Lobb of London. Only the best, right, son?”

  Peter Prince’s black hair was cut short, parted immaculately on the left and shining with brilliantine. He was a gentleman, to look at. A man of authority. He was not a man who walked out of his home one morning and vanished without a trace. He was not a man who left his satchel beside his car.

  “It worked,” said Ian proudly to his father. “I fixed it.”

  Peter Prince dipped his gaze. His eyes narrowed, searching the room.

  Ian raised a hand in greeting. A smile pushed at the corners of his mouth. “Dad…over here…”

  “Five minutes, my ass!”

  Ian spun back toward the door as Peter Briggs stormed into the office.

  “You going to keep me waiting all day, then?” Briggs said. “Think I came over just to gossip? I know how to use a phone, too. We’re not all of us idiots who don’t know what Everest stands for. Christ!”

  “What is it?” Ian asked.

  “Urgent.” Briggs sat down in a guest’s chair, snapping his fingers in the air. “You all there? This one requires your attention. Semaphore.”

  Ian glanced over his shoulder. His father was gone. There was only the black satchel by itself in the corner. “What about Semaphore? ‘Tied off,’ you said. ‘Bank it.’ ”

  “The wife. She’s asking questions.”

  “Excuse me. ‘The wife’? What do you mean?”

  “The agent’s wife. Mrs. Joseph Grant. She’s got quite the bee in her bonnet.”

  The mention of the dead agent’s wife was like a dash of cold water. “How so?” asked Ian, his attention squarely on Briggs.

  “She doesn’t believe her husband could have been killed by an informant. Claims there are discrepancies in the FBI’s story. Wants to know what’s what.” Briggs helped himself to a fistful of almonds from a bowl on the desk, flicking them into his mouth one at a time. “You know the type. Nosy. Doesn’t know when to let well enough alone.”

  “Are there?”

  “Discrepancies?” Briggs shrugged. “Don’t know. Doesn’t matter. It’s the call. He must have said something to her.”

  “Not that I recall.” Ian had listened to Joseph Grant’s message several times and was sure he hadn’t mentioned anything about Semaphore or ONE. “Anyway, I erased it from her phone. No evidence there.”

  “She’s a woman. She doesn’t need evidence. She has intuition.”

  “And the rest of it…besides the woman?”

  “Tied off.”

  Ian averted his gaze. He was beginning to despise the term. “We can’t afford any problems. Nothing that might put things in jeopardy.”

  “I understand,” said Peter Briggs.

  “I know you do,” said Ian. “So it’s just the woman?”

  Briggs nodded.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Mary Grant.”

  “Her full name.”

  “Mary Margaret Olmstead Grant.”

  Ian wrote the name on his ledger. “Go ahead, then. But easy does it. Nothing heavy-handed. Level one and that’s it. We don’t want to stir things up.” Ian stood, signaling that the meeting was over. “She can’t find anything anyway. It’s ‘tied off,’ right?” He looked hard at Peter Briggs.

  “Bank it.”

  —

  Ian stared at the name on the ledger.

  Mary Margaret Olmstead Grant.

  He knew what it was like to lose a loved one under mysterious circumstances. He knew about the power of unanswered questions. He knew about curiosity hardening to obsession. He also knew better than to take anyone for granted. Not even an ordinary housewife.

  Ian called his assistant and asked her to push back his schedule fifteen minutes. He typed Mary Grant’s name into the Search bar and got three hits: Facebook, Austin real estate registry, and a Shutterfly account.

  The Facebook account was under the name Mary Olmstead Grant, the private information available to her friends. Still, as a beginning it was promising. There was a picture of a tropical beach, two children walking at water’s edge. He guessed it was somewhere in southern Mexico, Costa Rica, the Philippines, or Thailand. A photograph of a woman he assumed to be Mary Grant was inset in the landscape. It was an odd photo, showing only half the woman’s face, purposely cropped to disguise her identity. Still, he could see that she was blond, pretty, and vivacious. Her eyes held the camera.

  She listed her work as “household engineer.” She had studied at Georgetown. She lived in Austin. She liked Stevie Ray Vaughan, Cold-play, and Alfred Brendel. She also liked the American Cancer Society, Sacramento Children’s Hospital, and the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. She had forty-three friends.

  Again, not much, but a beginning.

  A private woman proud of her upbringing, not wanting to lose her maiden name and all that it meant to her. An intelligent woman with an education. A woman who had traveled the world. A woman who had been touched sometime in her life by cancer, either her own or a family member’s. A woman who valued her privacy and was not comfortable sharing personal information with strangers. A woman who chose her friends carefully.

  Ian’s concern grew. A formidable woman, he sensed.

  He drew up yesterday’s work log to locate the number Joseph Grant had called minutes before his death. He noted that Mary Grant was not currently a ONE Mobile customer. (This had not prevented him from using the competing carrier’s equipment to gain access to her phone. Traffic between wireless carriers demanded cooperation on the most intimate technological levels. He had nearly unfettered access to his competitors’ servers, routers, and relay stations.) ONE Mobile had strong market share in Sacramento. Perhaps she’d been a client and switched carriers upon her arrival in Austin.

  He logged into ONE Mobile’s Sacramento database and plugged in her name.

  Bingo. In fact Mary Grant had been a customer of ONE Mobile during her residence in Sacramento.

  He pulled up the customary information: date of birth, home address, banking details (Mary Grant was an autopay customer), and Social Security number. He smiled inwardly. This last piece of information was crucial. A person’s Social Security number was a skeleton key that could unlock troves of personal, often confidential data.

  He continued for a few minutes longer, downloading phone records for the prior two-year period. Digging deeper, he found a record of her voicemail password: 71700. He guessed it was either an anniversary or the birth date of a family member, most probably one of her children.

  The Shutterfly hit yielded only two photos, but to Ian they were important. Both showed two girls seated together.
One was dark-haired and olive-skinned, the other fair and sickly pale. Mary Grant’s daughters.

  The real estate registry showed that Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Grant had purchased a home on Pickfair Drive in northwest Austin ninety days earlier for the price of $425,000.

  All of this was information to be stored away. Nothing useful now, but it might come in handy later. He saved the pages to a new folder in his ONE Platinum account before placing a call to Investigations.

  “This is Ian. I have a Social Security number for you. Give me a full workup. And make it a priority.”

  16

  “Mr. Briggs,” called the guard. “Your badge.”

  Peter Briggs stormed past the porter’s lodge of Brasenose and continued to the elevators. He was fed up. There was only so much you could take of hanging around a bunch of grown men who grew sexually aroused talking about petaflops and hard drives and GPUs. He was certain that Patel had been sporting some wood as he brushed up against Titan.

  Briggs got off at the third floor and headed for the operations room. A dozen men sat at desks positioned along the perimeter of the office. Not one of them gave a flying fig about petaflops or hard drives or GPUs. Briggs was certain about that.

  “Fire under control in K.L.?” he asked.

  “Damage localized to a chip storage area.”

  “Plant back on line?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Outstanding.”

  Running security for ONE was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. Briggs had a thousand employees under his command, safeguarding the corporation’s offices and manufacturing facilities in twenty countries around the globe. His responsibilities broke down into three areas: physical plant and manufacturing, cybersecurity, and personal protection.

  Cybersecurity was giving him the biggest headache these days. ONE’s servers were under attack from hackers day and night. Most came from China or eastern Europe. The Chinese attacks emanated from a military unit charged with gaining industrial espionage secrets from Western companies. The eastern European attacks came out of Bulgaria and Romania, the work of organized criminals contracted by smaller technology companies to steal ONE’s R&D. Between the two, ONE defended itself against more than five thousand attacks a day.

  As was his habit on entering the ops room, he checked an electronic world map that broadcast the location of the company’s top executives.

  Today he noted that ten were in Austin, four in Palo Alto, two in Mumbai, two in Guangdong, one in Berlin, and one in Nepal.

  “Get the plane ready for D.C.,” he said to Travel. “Party of five plus crew. We fly at dawn. Boss wants the Kraut. Tell her to be at the airport at five a.m. and to make sure she has her bag of nostrums.”

  Travel looked up. “Bag of what?”

  Briggs patted his shoulder, pleased to be in the company of a man with a vocabulary nearly as limited as his own. “Never mind, lad. Just call Katarina and get the plane arranged.”

  “Yessir.”

  There was a new symbol on the map that Briggs hadn’t seen that morning. The symbol was a silhouette of a jet, and it appeared whenever company execs were en route or due to embark on a flight. He touched the jet and its flight information appeared on the screen.

  ONE 7 / N415GB

  JER–AUS 7.31.

  0700MST–1900CST.

  ONE 7 was a Boeing business jet with tail number N415GB, departing from Jerusalem at 0700 hours local time and arriving in Austin at 1900 hours tomorrow night.

  The Israelis were coming.

  Briggs couldn’t help but feel his pulse quicken. Ian was right. They could not afford any more slipups. Not now, with Titan up and running. Not with the Israelis on the way.

  Briggs continued to his office. First there was ONEscape, the browser, then came software, and after that hardware: servers, routers, switches—the machines that made up the Internet’s backbone—then ONE Mobile, the wireless phone carrier, and now, just a few months back, Allied Artists, the country’s biggest movie and television studio.

  But all of it was but a prelude for the Israelis. Ian had called them his Praetorian Guard and talked about a “new Jerusalem.” Briggs knew better than to ask about a new messiah.

  He sat at his desk and pulled up the report from his contact at the FBI. Semaphore. It was the case that wouldn’t die.

  “Go easy,” Ian had said. “Nothing heavy-handed.”

  But Briggs hadn’t gotten where he was by going easy. He hit speed dial for Firemen.

  “I need a team to do a little scouting work for me. A local job.”

  “Level?”

  Level one, or L1, was a simple look-and-listen on a target’s phone and Net usage.

  L2 added wireless surveillance, plus eyes on the subject for defined daily intervals.

  L3 amounted to a digital cavity search—all of the above plus twenty-four-hour surveillance and infiltration of the target’s home or office with the goal of installing malware to take full operational control of all the target’s digital systems: tablet, laptop, desktop, mainframe, and mobile communications devices.

  “L2,” he said.

  “How soon do you want work to begin?”

  “Immediately.”

  “Have anyone in mind?”

  In the end there was really only one team he could trust with the job.

  “Get me Shanks and the Mole.”

  17

  Showtime.

  Tank Potter parked at the back of the office lot and checked his appearance in the mirror. Hair freshly washed. Eyes marginally red. Shirt clean and pressed. All in all, not too bad after twelve hours in the clink.

  He reached into the bag on the seat beside him for a box of Band-Aids. His hand shook as he freed one from the box and shook more as he struggled to peel off the wrapping.

  Reinforcements needed.

  He dropped the bandage and delved under his seat for his backstop, ducking his head below the dash to take a pull of tequila. His hand was rock-steady as he peeled off the wrapping and affixed the Band-Aid to his forehead.

  “Thank you, JC.” Jose Cuervo, not the other guy.

  For a minute he looked at the Statesman’s headquarters. Thirty days and all this was history. It didn’t come as a surprise. Every paper in the country was slashing its staff, and he was no Pulitzer winner. Even so, he’d thought it would be easier.

  A last helper to calm the nerves and he was good to go.

  He stashed the bottle, then rummaged in the glove compartment for his Altoids, counted out five, and popped them into his mouth. Fortified, he climbed out, feeling capable, calm, and only mildly hungover.

  —

  “Potter!”

  Al Soletano stood outside his glassed-in office in the center of the newsroom, hands on hips, his face flushed a shade past fire-engine red. Tank raised a hand in greeting as he made his way down the main aisle. The newsroom was a sea of vacant cubicles. A plague zone, he thought as he entered Soletano’s office.

  “Sit.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “I said sit.”

  Tank sat down in the visitor’s chair.

  “How you feeling?” Soletano was short, with a gut, a tonsure of black hair, and a voice that could be heard in all six neighboring counties.

  “Not bad, all things considered.”

  “Your head?”

  “It hurts, but I’ll be all right.” Tank had spoken to Soletano as soon as he was freed from the holding cell. He had a story ready. He’d been in a fender bender, banged his head, and spent the night in the emergency room.

  “You don’t have to be going fast to do some damage.”

  Tank touched his bandage gingerly. “You can say that again.”

  “Say, buddy, do me a favor. Hand me my glass of water, would you? I’m thirsty.”

  Tank looked to his right, where a glass of water sat on the desk’s corner. The glass was full to the brim. He looked back at Soletano, leaning against the wall, not making the slightest effort. Tank clenched
a fist, then picked up the glass. Water spilled onto Soletano’s desk. He set the glass down.

  “I’m waiting.”

  Tank stared at his hand, willing it to stop shaking. Standing, he picked up the glass and walked over to his editor. Halfway there, a spasm shook his hand and water sloshed onto the floor.

  “And that’s after the snort in the parking lot,” said Soletano. “By the way, where’d you get hit? I didn’t see any dents—or any new ones, at least.”

  Tank said nothing.

  Soletano approached him and ripped the bandage off his forehead. “I hear you met one of my friends last night. Lance Burroughs. Young guy. Detective.” He circled his desk and picked up a piece of paper. “Your arrest report,” he said, by way of explanation. “You blew a point thirty-four. That’s four times the legal limit. I have to be honest, Tank. God knows I love to tie one on as much as the next guy, but point thirty-four…that’s enough booze to knock out Godzilla.”

  “It’s been a stressful few days.”

  “And nights. A federal agent murdered in our backyard and I’m buying the story from a stringer out of Dallas. It’s embarrassing.”

  “At least you’ll have practice for when the suits finish the deal,” said Tank.

  The suits were the private equity guys from Wall Street who’d been running around the place for the past month figuring ways to cut costs.

  Soletano didn’t take the bait. He stood, arms crossed, shaking his head. “You used to be a decent journalist.”

  The tone hit Tank hard. He’d been a damned sight better than that.

  “There’s another conference later this afternoon,” he said. “I’ll be there. Did you read the release? Bennett is stonewalling us. Once we find out the informant’s identity, we’ll have a beeline to what the feds were looking into. I mean, Dripping Springs, for Chrissakes. That tell you something?”

  “Maybe the CI’s from Dripping Springs?”

  “It tells me that it’s a pretty big case if they’re meeting their CIs twenty-five miles away to make sure they’re not seen.” Despite the air conditioning, he was beginning to sweat. “You know how many FBI agents have been killed in the line of duty in the past twenty years?”