The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller
Page 21
“That’s classified,” Kline said with as much finality as he could muster.
“So you won’t tell us?” the older agent said, surprise in his voice.
“I can’t tell you.”
“We could bring you down to FBI headquarters and keep you there for a couple of days. Ask the DA to file obstruction-of-justice charges, and then ask you the same question,” Chaudry said. “Would that make it easier for you to answer?”
Kline said nothing, thinking about this threat. He was pretty sure national security would trump an obstruction-of-justice charge if they faced off in front of a judge, but he was also pretty sure that a court battle over this would mean the end of his career—not that he had much of a career left.
“An internal reporting project,” Kline said. “How information gets disseminated throughout the organization.”
“That’s it?”
“She was working on something else. But I don’t know the details.”
“Something having to do with Garrett Reilly?”
Kline stared down at the coffee sitting in front of him, at the ripples on the surface shimmying back and forth in the cup. He thought of the prisoner’s dilemma, the problem in game theory where criminals are pitted against each other by the police, prompted to rat each other out and get the best deal for themselves. If both prisoners squealed, they would get equally bad, but not terrible, sentences. If both prisoners kept their mouths shut, then the day would be saved. But if only one prisoner ratted out the other, then he or she would get a light sentence, and the other prisoner would spend the rest of his life in jail.
Had Alexis told them everything she knew? Had she turned Kline in, offered him up as the ringleader of this disaster?
It was possible, but Kline didn’t think it was probable. Alexis was stubborn—stubborn and loyal—which was why her attempt at blackmailing Kline had been so heartrending for him. No, he thought, maybe this is the moment for something else entirely.
“General Kline?” the female agent said. “Was she working with Garrett Reilly?”
Maybe this was the moment to start acting like a general again, not some sulky child who had had his favorite toy taken away.
“She was.” Kline watched as Chaudry’s eyes widened. “But she was doing it on my say-so. Everything that happened is my responsibility.”
• • •
When they let him see Alexis, she was sitting on the edge of her bed, sipping a glass of water, dressed in a white hospital gown, closed up in back, and she had a series of purple bruises and jagged cuts on her cheeks and forehead. She looked awful, but Kline tried not to let that show on his face. She brightened at the sight of him, and he nodded to the space on the bed beside her, silently asking if he could sit there. She nodded yes, and he sat on the edge of the hospital bed, his left leg grazing her right. She put her glass of water down on a steel tray at the side of the bed and turned to him, her face full of emotion.
“What did you tell the FBI?” Kline asked.
“Nothing.” Alexis swallowed. “You?”
“Everything. The truth.” Kline thought about this. “Well, I told them it was all my idea.”
Alexis winced. She let out a long breath. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, I am too.” Kline reached for her hand and held it tightly in his. “But we are in this together now. We are in it deep. And somebody out there is trying to bring us all to our knees.”
SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND, JUNE 21, 9:15 A.M.
AmeriCool Environmental Services prided itself on being a computer-savvy company. They had their own in-house IT team, and when they installed HVAC systems—giant air-conditioning units that could cool entire buildings in the middle of a Virginia summer, or heat pumps that could keep South Boston warehouses warm during a brutal New England January—they guaranteed their clients that 90 percent of the problems they encountered could be fixed remotely, through online monitoring systems in the company’s Maryland headquarters. This promise of modern technological solutions had allowed AmeriCool to nab new customers up and down the East Coast at an astonishing rate. AmeriCool was poised to be the number one HVAC company in the United States. They were growing by leaps and bounds.
Except for when their Internet went down.
When the Internet failed, groans went up from IT, curses from scheduling, and window-rattling rage from the executive suite on the second floor of their ever-expanding offices in a business park in suburban Silver Spring. AmeriCool had its own warranty contract with the local cable company, for immediate technical response and ASAP repair service, but in reality, no matter how much attentiveness their Internet provider promised, most days it took hours for service to come back online. And hours meant lost revenue and pissed-off customers.
But not today.
Today, a miracle happened. At 9:05 a.m., AmeriCool’s Internet service went dark. Completely, absolutely dark: no e-mail, no websites, no Skype, no cloud connection, no backup, no IMs with clients, no remote monitoring of HVAC units in New York or Philadelphia. At 9:06, the IT department scrambled to check the source of the problem. At 9:11, IT told Todd Michaels, the VP in charge of technology, that the problem was most probably outside their offices. At 9:12, Michaels called down to the receptionist and told her to get their cable-company service rep on the line to start getting service back. At 9:13 a.m., eight minutes after the initial disruption, Jenny, the receptionist, looked up the direct line to Infinity Cable Service and was even dialing their number when the repairman walked into the lobby.
She’d never seen him before, and she knew most of the Infinity repairmen. But he was wearing the usual blue work uniform, with the plastic laminated company badge, and he was carrying a banged-up toolbox in his right hand and a laptop bag in his left. The name on the badge was Robert Jacob Mullins, and the repairman introduced himself as Bobby. He was young, and Jenny thought he looked handsome—kind of shy, with a wide grin and thick black hair. He asked about her necklace—her dad had given it to her as a college-graduation present—and she blushed. She wasn’t sure why.
“We didn’t even call,” Jenny said. “How’d you know our service went out?”
“The office beeped me five minutes ago, and I was in the neighborhood. They got an emergency alert from our system. They said you guys had a service guarantee. That puts you top of the list.”
“Wow. Cool.”
“I’m new, though. Can you show me where the uplink box is?”
Jenny called the IT department, and Luke—company wags called him the Great Bearded One—waddled up from in back to show Mullins the small server farm and Internet connection box. Luke brought Mullins to a glorified maintenance closet that was stuffed with racks of computer servers and had coaxial cables running every which way out of a large, black junction box. Cool air blew down from a ceiling vent in a steady gust, and LED lights blanketed the room in a crystal-white glare.
“I shouldn’t have to log into the system,” Robert Jacob Mullins said. “Everything should be outside of your firewall. But if it isn’t, and I need to log in, could you just give me a temporary admin password?”
Luke stared at the Infinity repairman. “How come I’ve never met you before?”
“I just started last week.”
“And you might need to get inside our firewall? I’ve never done that before.”
“Temp password is all. To make sure your speeds are maxing. You can lock me back out again five minutes later.”
Luke stroked his red, unkempt beard.
Mullins shrugged. “You know what, I don’t blame you. Security first. No problem. I can do it back at the office—it’ll just take me a little longer. I’ll be back in forty-five minutes.” Mullins grabbed his work box and started for the door, but bearded Luke put his fleshy hand in the air.
“I’ll get you a temp password. Just get us back online. E
veryone’s going batshit crazy right now.”
“Okay, will do,” Mullins said with a generous smile. “Much appreciated.”
Luke went off to create a temporary password, and the man who claimed to be Robert Jacob Mullins popped open the uplink box for the company’s Internet connection. Instead of working on the cables, he simply switched on the timer on his wristwatch and stared off into space. He thought about how soul killing it would be to work in an office such as AmeriCool’s, surrounded by dull careerists and striving executives. These people were beneath his regard. His mind wandered to Garrett Reilly and the events of yesterday. The bomb hadn’t killed the young army officer in Arlington, that much the TV had told him, but it, along with the Newark police raid, had sent a powerful message: I know you, know all about you, and can find you anywhere.
He wondered how Garrett Reilly was feeling right at this moment, as events encircled him and began to choke off his options; he hoped that Reilly was thinking of him as well. He hoped that Reilly was obsessed with him, spending all his waking hours figuring out how to stop him. And while Reilly struggled to stay free, to stay alive even, the main purpose of the plan would gain speed and would soon become unstoppable. There would be a pleasing symmetry to that. With that happy thought, and the passing of 180 seconds, he stepped out of the maintenance room and hunted down Luke.
“Actually, I am gonna need to get into your system. I gotta restart our download-speed monitoring program.”
Luke handed the repairman a printout with a username and log-in password. Luke pointed to an unused port on the back of a server computer. “Use that port on the network switch.”
“Five minutes, tops,” Mullins said.
Luke grunted something unintelligible and disappeared back into the IT offices. Mullins removed his laptop from its carrying case, plugged an Ethernet cable into the server, and logged on to the AmeriCool computer network. He didn’t bother pretending to do any cable repair work; now he just needed passwords and access codes. He ran a search for a specific client company—Advanced Worldwide Credit Processors—that used AmeriCool to regulate the climate of their server farm in Hoboken, New Jersey. AWCP—as industry insiders called it—was responsible for 27 percent of all credit-card transactions on the East Coast of the United States. Anyone who could hack into AWCP’s servers could potentially bring all those transactions to a halt—every single one of them.
Mullins found everything he needed in a file named “AWCP—PSSWDS+USRNMS” and copied the information onto his laptop. The whole process took three minutes. Then he unplugged his computer from the network and waved good-bye to Luke.
“All good,” he said as he walked toward reception. “You’ll be back online in two minutes. Just gotta go outside and flip a switch.”
He stopped briefly at the receptionist desk and asked Jenny if she was single. She said she had a boyfriend, sadly, and she seemed to blush again, ever so slightly. Mullins shrugged, said, “Okay, maybe next time,” and ambled out of the lobby.
• • •
Ilya Markov walked out of the AmeriCool offices, took the elevator to the first floor, then walked across the parking lot to the cable switch box, a six-foot-tall, green steel rectangle plopped onto a base of beige concrete. He opened the box—he’d cut the padlock half an hour earlier with a bolt cutter—and simply reconnected a single coaxial cable to the line that fed AmeriCool. That was why their Internet had gone down, and that was all it took for it to start working again. They would be up and running immediately.
Ilya preferred that nobody at the cable company know that their systems had been compromised, so he yanked out a handful of copper wiring that appeared to connect phone service to a separate building in the business park. Copper wire was still big with thieves, and stealing some would help explain why the junction-box padlock had been snipped, diverting attention from what he had actually done.
He stuffed the copper wire in his pocket, closed the junction-box door, and walked casually back across the parking lot, lighting a cigarette as he went. The smoke was fine and slightly gritty on his throat. He felt calm and satisfied. Now he needed to get to a separate Internet connection and log on to those servers in Hoboken.
The plan was coming together, and it would soon unfold in locations up and down the Eastern Seaboard, all at the same time, in a finely tuned choreography. He paused for a moment and hoped that Garrett Reilly would appreciate that choreography as much as he did.
• • •
Inside the offices of AmeriCool, cheers went up from IT and scheduling, and sighs of relief were breathed in the executive suites. Vice President Michaels told everyone to get on the phone to clients and make sure all their systems were running smoothly, and he even stopped by Luke’s office to pat him on the back and congratulate him for getting them up and running so quickly.
“Not a problem,” Luke said. “Easy as pie.”
GRANT PARK, ATLANTA, JUNE 21, 1:11 P.M.
Congressman Leonard Harris felt as if he were on autopilot: he was no longer in control of his arms or legs. He was walking down the street, one foot in front of the other, the hot Georgia sun beating down on his shoulders, yet he was simultaneously floating above the sidewalk, propelled by a force he didn’t understand. It was the strangest feeling. Of course he did understand the force behind it, but his brain refused to acknowledge it. What his brain said was he was going to see her science-fiction collection. That’s all. Just look at the books. Nothing wrong with that.
They had met yesterday, at the food trucks, just like the day before, and the day before that. At first, Harris had looked for the girl with the wonderful lips out of the corner of his eye, pretending to be looking for an open seat, a place to eat his lunch undisturbed. He had sighted her across the tables, then made a show of surprise when he happened to sit nearby and looked up from his food, staring into her smiling face. They talked about books mostly, politics a bit, where she’d gone to school—Emory University—and even the Braves and their pitiful pitching staff.
He felt that he’d been charming at that second meeting because she laughed at every joke he made. He’d walked away from the encounter feeling as good about himself as he’d felt in the last ten years. Of course he went back the next day, and made no pretense of surprise when he sat next to her with a tray laden with barbecue ribs. They talked and talked—he couldn’t even remember about what—and they agreed to meet again today, same place, same time.
Rachel Brown said she was twenty-nine, had grown up in Florida in a broken home, with a father who left and a mother who was too busy raising three other children to pay much attention to what Rachel did. Harris had been moved by her story—she was exactly the kind of person who could pull herself up from poverty and make something of her life. She was a model constituent, even though he noted that she did not live in his district. That was a shame.
He’d showered that morning with special attention to his underarms, and he’d shaved carefully, slowly scraping away the night’s growth of facial hair. He’d dressed more casually as well, in a short-sleeved shirt that hugged his waistline. He was proud that he had not grown paunchy with age. He’d spent the morning thinking about what they would talk about, laying out possible topics, trying to see if they could branch out into something new—her past, his family background, places they both had visited.
He didn’t feel that anything was wrong with the relationship. She was a single woman, and he was a married man, and that was how it would stay. He was faithful to his wife, a good husband and father, and she would undoubtedly soon find a young man to spend her life with. She had let drop yesterday that she was on the rebound, relationship-wise, and was disenchanted with all the boys who wanted to date her.
“So frigging immature,” Rachel Brown had said. “Like children.”
He had shaken his head knowingly at that. “Around you they probably lose their sense of propriety.”
“I get bored in the afternoons, just lying around my apartment,” she said.
“You should get out more, see some people.”
“I’m seeing you.” She smiled that amazing smile. “Does that count?”
More was stirring where there definitely should not have been any.
“When it’s hot like this, I just can’t sleep. I toss and turn,” she said.
He pictured her naked in bed. “Me too.” That was a lie. He turned the air conditioner on, full blast, all summer long.
“In the middle of the night, I read my sci-fi novels. I feel like I’m escaping to another world.”
“Sure.”
“Where are you headed this afternoon?”
“I have a staff meeting at four. Nothing until then.”
“You want to take a walk? My apartment is five blocks from here. I could show you my collection.”
At that exact moment his autopilot kicked in. Some part of his brain, some grown-up, married, middle-aged part of his frontal cortex, said no, do not take a walk with Rachel Brown, do not see her science-fiction collection at her apartment five blocks from the food trucks. That is a mistake. A huge mistake.
But some other part of his brain—some primitive, hungry, aggressive region that he didn’t even know the name of—disengaged his frontal cortex, turned it off completely. No matter how obvious the consequences of what he was doing, he did it anyway. He walked out of the food-truck parking lot, following behind this young woman, talking to her about the weather, how the Grant Park neighborhood had changed, how he hated neckties. It was as if she had thrown an invisible lasso around his neck and were dragging him, like a steer to slaughter—only the slaughterhouse was her apartment.