Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 10/01/12

by Dell Magazines

We looked together toward a loud guffaw, prompted apparently by a sports blooper filling the screen above the taps and bottles.

  "Eat," I said. "We have a tough afternoon ahead of us."

  We were on our refill of coffee when Fontel and Mr. Hercules pushed away from the bar. They walked out through the lobby slapping each other's shoulders, shaking hands on the move, grabbing toothpicks. I noticed Fontel was hatless and, sure enough, after a few moments, he returned. He walked back to the bar and, after a glance at his watch, nodded for the gal to draw him another big one.

  "I've seen enough," I said.

  Fontel was looking up dreamily at a college football recap when we joined him at the bar. He glanced aside as we entered his space, returned to the frenetic highlights, and then did a double take back to Dale.

  "Yo, Pete, this here's Mr. Rocky Difile, the operations fella I told you was comin' down from the head office."

  From the uncomfortable once-over I got as we automatically shook hands, I was sure Fontel had hoped to stay out of my purview.

  "How'd your meeting go, Captain?" I said, looking pointedly at his twenty-two-ounce beer.

  Recovering his equilibrium, he shrugged and said, "It'll take a little more persuadin', but I think them boys at Hercules'll take us on."

  "What makes you so sure?"

  "Chemistry, Mr. Difile. Chemistry's my speciality."

  "Well, speaking of chemistry—alcohol and driving don't mix. Why don't you hand over your car keys to Mr. Lassiter and have that young lady behind the bar call you a cab."

  "Beg pardon?" He was honestly stunned. He looked at Dale for guidance.

  "And let me have your cell phone while you're at it."

  "Dale?"

  "He's the man, Pete. Don't worry 'bout it. Just do what he says an' we'll sort it out later." Dale was torn but had bowed to the inevitable, trying to file down its sharper edges for his old pal.

  Still, the big man did not reach into his pockets. He would only look at Dale, and his face was settling into a stubborn, enough-is-enough expression you would give an exasperating relative.

  I shifted over a step so that I got between them and he couldn't avoid me.

  "Captain, I'm sure you don't want to have a scene in front of your favorite food-and-drink servers, do you? I have authority in this matter, and I assure you, you will not go out the front door with those keys or that phone in your possession."

  "I kin hold my beer, Mr. Difile." He could not hold back the yeasty odor of it, though.

  He tried to stare me down, but he did not have enough force of character. I held out my hand.

  "This is bullcrap, Dale!"

  Dale said nothing, and the clubbed fingers fished out the keys and detached the phone from his belt and thunked them on the bar. He turned away from both of us and his eyes drifted back up to the gridiron out of habit.

  I scooped up his stuff.

  "We'll talk again, Captain—in the office, first thing tomorrow."

  He looked down at my shoes, willing them to walk away.

  Outside, the wind and rain were dealing out bad hair to anyone without a hat. Dale started for his sedan, but I grabbed his arm and pointed to the marked car that Fontel had parked in a handicap spot. I handed him the keys.

  "Why are we usin' his car?"

  "I want to simulate one of his ‘drive-bys' when we go to GlobalSoft."

  He probably felt I was adding insult to injury, but it was too wet and wild to stand and argue.

  I had to clear the passenger seat before I could get in.

  "What's that smell?" I said.

  "Barbecue. But it's a mite aged."

  Dale kept his own counsel as he drove us through the downpour and into the spider web of roads and highway that interconnect city and suburbs. He glanced aside at me sadly every now and then as I rummaged unproductively through the detritus in the patrol car.

  Gradually, the tasteful new shopping centers and the curious blend of modern and traditional communities gave way to pine forest, meadowlike lawns, and half-hidden cathedrals and prisms of glass and colored metal. We were in a region now where the physical surroundings were metaphors for the vast intellectual properties within.

  We turned up a steep drive flanked by GlobalSoft's 3-D blue-and-white logo. The car crossed over a culvert that had a loud bottled roar to it, and I saw whitecaps when I glanced down. Ahead, through the busy sweep of the wipers, I could see a big old pine tree or two leaning away from rain-loosened roots. The landscape was ripe for the domino theory of hurricanes. I hoped the ground tenders had cleared enough space between the forest and the architecture.

  The prow of GlobalSoft's stylistic ark breasted the swaying trees. In the foreground was a manned booth and barrier. As we approached, a sharp-looking kid in a yellow slicker and plastic-covered cap came out. He had a fat manila envelope that he held under the shelter of the eaves. It was hard to see his face clearly through water wipe, but when he realized there were two of us, he casually leaned into the booth and came out with a clipboard in place of the envelope. Nodding respectfully to Dale, he stooped to peer carefully at his passenger, as if to make sure I wasn't holding his boss at gunpoint.

  "Jeff Hurley, this here's Mr. Difile from the head office. We should be down on your list for a one thirty."

  "Yes, sir," he said in a military manner.

  He handed in the protected clipboard for Dale's signature and stayed in a half crouch, his expressionless eyes still on me. He looked to be in his mid twenties, ripped, white walled, and clean shaven.

  "How long do you stay out here in the booth?" I said.

  "Just started a two-hour turn, sir."

  He took back the board and activated the crossbar, and we drove on.

  "What did you do, put out a memo to everybody that I was in town?"

  "No, suh—only the main office and the day shift here."

  "Same effect. Anyway, I hope all our employees are as vigilant as Hurley."

  "I do try to hire for alertness—when I can. Jeff's a little more motivated than most. He was a jarhead like you. Did the Desert thing. I reckon he'd still be in if his little gal weren't so sickly and wantin' him nearby."

  We took a visitor's spot under a huge, crescent-shaped portico. The tall sheets of lobby glass were reflective, and I felt watched from within. Sure enough, another of our guards opened the front door before we could reach for the handles. Dale looked to see if I was impressed.

  The guard took our coats and showed us to an echoing, marble space where we could square ourselves away. In five minutes, we sat neatly combed before the desk of Ted Timmons, the chief operating officer.

  He looked young for the job, and casual, being totally into GlobalSoft's dress code—blue dress shirt, no tie, khaki trousers, sports jacket over the back of his chair—which was supposed to encourage thinking outside the box, I venture. When he talked to us, his eyes kept straying to papers spread out on his desk like a hand of cards. Here was that rare man who thought he could multitask. Either that or we had been relegated to the status of a formality, and I knew that formalities were as exchangeable as a pair of, well, tan slacks.

  Dale introduced me as Rocco Difile and surprised me by accurately encapsulating my law enforcement career and meteoric rise through the ranks of the company. Maybe he had done some checking after all. Timmons listened politely and then asked if, as a policeman, I had ever investigated computer crimes. I told him that I had lobbied for just such a special task force at my last command and had been gratified to see it put in place on my way out the door.

  "So you never saw it in action."

  "No, but our company has its own qualifications in that area."

  Something sour was at work in his lower tract.

  I kept running with the ball he'd tossed.

  "I understand one of your premarket designs has shown up in rival hands. Your people are probably hard at work examining the firewalls and encryption used in your systems. It so happens our head office has been u
pgrading its own IT department, adding personnel your people will be able to consult with."

  "That's kind of like closing the barn door after the fact."

  "It's a response that not every security firm is prepared or willing to make, Mr. Timmons. Over the past year you must have noticed the attention we've devoted to the issue in our newsletter."

  "Fine. But what else can you do for us besides regurgitate congressional reports?"

  "Have you considered the possibility that you have ongoing espionage taking place on the premises? That it might not be just your systems but also your personnel that need to be scrutinized?"

  His stacked spine told me I had hit a nerve, but he was not ready to abandon the party line.

  "That's crap," he said. "We don't hire lowlifes. Even the temps have their backgrounds thoroughly examined. We have checks and balances and need-to-know clearances. Every man and woman operates with sophisticated IDs and passwords."

  "They're easy enough to get around."

  "Really?" He reacted as if I were trying to unload a case of snake oil onto his desk. Of course, he was no more irascible than many executives I had sat down with, but I wondered how Dale had kept him from going over his head until now.

  Strangely, none of his ire seemed actually directed at our easygoing district manager. The anger seemed buffered, and I wondered if the granting of gigantic tax breaks obligated even world-class émigré businesses to adapt the antiquated, nonabrasive manners of their new patrons.

  "Let's take a little walk, Mr. Timmons," I said, rising to my feet. Dale took the cue but remained deferentially half seated, an encouraging look on his face. Timmons got up, his eyebrows converging like strokes on a caricature. Behind him, long rags of cloud and rain hung down into the parkland vista like a mobile backdrop.

  I asked him to take me to the workstations of people who were not in the office that day. The first cubicle we visited was plastered with a historical foldout of NASA's various flight programs and a couple of laminated Buck Rogers cartoon strips. I sat before the monitor, glanced at the underside of the keypad, and reached down to hit the power button on the hard drive. While it was booting up, I asked Timmons about the employee: full-time, male, mid forties, a decade with the company, part of a team of software engineers working on a satellite communications subcontract for the government. (As he spoke, he was frowning at me over Dale's shoulder.)

  "Trust him?"

  "Completely!" he said, but I think he already knew he had set himself up.

  When the man's log-in appeared, I said, "What do you use for IDs around here?"

  "Initials plus the first six letters of the last name, all lower-cased."

  "Same for everybody, right?"

  The employee had a beat-up desk nameplate that read "Jack C. Preuss, Astronaut's Assistant." I typed jcpreuss in the ID box and entered the elaborate password he had taped under his keypad. I pulled up his list of files and sat back so Timmons could see the screen clearly.

  "I'm sure you take the precaution of changing passwords fairly often. That's good, but some people just don't trust their memories."

  Timmons was a tad more receptive from that point on. He was no dummy, probably had no illusions about the careless, devious, and greedy ways of his fellow humans, yet maybe he had let himself be lulled by the litany of company values—each one led off by a letter of the GlobalSoft moniker—rising up everywhere on vertical wall banners much like those the samurai had carried into battle.

  "Assuming we had a thief on board," he said, "how would you go about catching him or her?" He was holding something back; otherwise, he would have had the police in by now instead of bitching to us.

  I answered indirectly at first, careful to scratch only the surface, to tantalize him with a sense of the expertise needed to counter the criminal acquisition of proprietary information.

  Companies were already vulnerable to open-source collection of stuff they put out themselves. In a free, capitalistic society, annual reports and analysis by trade journals could be very revealing. On the other hand, a trained eye keeping track of simple things, like who among the lower-paid employees was spending significant time in the company library, could head off harmful access to nonpublic information. Obviously, support personnel were more likely to fall into this category. Having passed through the fire of an expensive background check, they might subsequently fall prey to substance abuse, financial setbacks, or simple resentment, which made them receptive to outside recruitment.

  I asked if the company faxed heavily to overseas destinations, did they have foreign students among the temps they hired, were there any joint ventures or mergers with foreign business partners in the offing, and was he aware that some of our most valued international allies felt perfectly justified in illicitly rifling our technology? I hinted at the humongous checklist of other pertinent questions that we had compiled amidst the confusing clamor and crosscurrents issuing from a proliferation of official counterespionage agencies (I rattled off a half dozen acronyms), who should have been working together but weren't. I stressed that we had hired or were hiring former agents from the key organizations, skilled men and women who were actually cooperating in the nourishing atmosphere of our home office to track and effectively stymie the myriad threats to our valued clients.

  While the mental picture of our crusade still glowed, I said, "We can certainly offer our talents to investigate this situation in retrospect, but we need to get something straight. Yours is a privately owned company, right? So, hypothetically, if something bad happens in the family, figuratively or literally, management might not react the same way as in a publicly owned corporation."

  Timmons sat back and swiveled halfway toward the outside weather show.

  "Who is it you suspect, sir? Why is the company reluctant to initiate a criminal investigation?"

  He swiveled back with tented hands.

  "This is confidential, yes?"

  "As long as we're not being asked to abet anything unlawful."

  "Three days before the diarrhea hit the wind tunnel, the owner's son, who is a software engineer involved in product development, called in sick. That was two weeks ago, and he hasn't been back since. This past weekend, he was seen in London by a European businessman we are closely associated with."

  "Whose company was he in?"

  "He was at a dance club with two young females."

  "Has he played hooky like this before?"

  "Never. We have no conclusive proof of his collusion, yet, but his behavior gives us a bad, bad feeling."

  "And you wish to suppress any hint of scandal."

  "Yes, we have some new contract talks coming up with the government that we don't need tainted."

  "I take it this breach did not affect other government deals?"

  "No, otherwise, the place would be crawling with Feds."

  "Hey, they're getting sensitized to any form of technological bleeding. And I have to tell you, you'd be taking a chance in not disclosing this development during the upcoming negotiations."

  "What they don't know can't hurt them."

  "So what if we investigate and establish that the young man is indeed involved. What then?"

  "That's being pondered as we speak."

  When we left Timmons, I felt we had inserted a wedge into his corporate psyche. He said he would let us know very shortly if we were to help with their internal investigation and made an appointment with Dale to discuss more sophisticated security measures beyond the teasers I had handed over gratis.

  "So what do you think?" Dale asked me as he started up Fontel's car. He was still a bit bewildered by the dragon's teeth I'd sown.

  I said, "I think we're close to making a better kind of deal. And you can use it for a template."

  What I actually thought was if GlobalSoft decided to use us to backtrack the theft, my first call to the head office would be like yelling "Action!" on the set of a Keystone Kops movie. But you do have to start somewhere.

 
Jeff Hurley raised the barrier as soon as he saw us coming. He had the clipboard ready so that Dale could sign us out. He did not stoop to peer into the car as he waited for the signature; he affected a deferential but detached air.

  I got out of the car and came around to where he was standing. Squinting against the thick spatter of rain must have put a scowl on my face.

  I held Hurley's eye and sidestepped into the booth. His indifference vanished with a visible jolt. The manila envelope was in the lowest slot of a small vertical desk. He filled the doorway as I reached down and slid it out.

  "That's private stuff, sir."

  "Really? You were about to hand it off to us when we arrived earlier because you thought it was your Uncle Pete in the car, right?"

  A short beat, then, "No, sir."

  "Well, that's the way it looked to me. What would I find if I opened this up? Skin magazines? Betting sheets?"

  He was trying to keep his cool, though I think he considered taking it away from me.

  "Hell," I said. "I hate suspense." I pinched the clasp and opened the flap. As I unsheathed the printed pages, a GlobalSoft logo emerged and a watermark that read: "Confidential."

  When I looked up at his face, all I could think was, Is this an armed post? I didn't know. None of the interior guards had been armed. If he was carrying, the holster was under the slicker, which might have open-bottomed pockets. His hands were down at his sides, but they looked ready to go.

  I was piercingly sorry I had left my Glock disassembled in my golf bag. Numbers from our latest report on workplace homicides popped unbidden into my head. I found my hair was too wet to stand on end.

  "Hurley, you are relieved, but I want you in the office first thing in the morning. Let me have your company cell. Are you driving your own car?"

  Bravado is a tricky thing with a short half-life. Somehow, I should have established whether there was a gun, but I didn't want to call attention now to its possible presence. I had no right to ask Hurley to surrender it anyway.

  A strange, almost relaxed expression softened his face, which could have signified a number of things. Had he somehow been in contact with Uncle Pete after we arrived? Did they have a plan B?