The Merchant of Secrets

by Caroline Lowther

  Bailey was the expert at tracing flows of money, but the psychological bent was not her strength. She dealt with fraud, embezzlement and that type of crime but sorting out Qureshi’s motives was a different issue. She thought he was motivated only by greed but I disagreed. There was simply too much else going on with U.S. relations with Pakistan to justify such a limited conclusion. The drone program in Pakistan had hit an all- time high in 2010, measured in lethal strikes. By 2011, even before the capture of Bin Laden, the Pakistani Parliament was reviewing its relationship with the U.S. precisely over the issue of drone warfare in their country, which they believed violated their sovereignty and ignored their territorial boundaries. It could not be ruled out that Qureshi might be a player in some strategic initiative on behalf of Pakistan. Their desperation for Iranian oil would in and of itself be a reason to acquire U.S. intelligence, to sell to the Iranians in exchange for energy.

  By 4:00 Bailey and I were done for the day. Bailey was ready to dive-in to the investigation to seize assets in the U.S.. I left the documents from the State Department with her, keeping only a few cryptic notes on a pad of paper and the portable drive on which the information was downloaded the night before. The documents were safer in her office.

  Occasionally I stopped thinking of Qureshi to wonder if Todd was searching my office at that very moment, confiscating my laptop to take a mirror image of it before laying it back on top of my desk so that I wouldn’t know that it had been taken. But other than those thoughts of Todd I was happy beyond belief to be moments away from the protection of a Joint Task to which Todd would have no access. It was the legal equivalent of working on Mars. He couldn’t touch me.

  CHAPTER 9

  Back at the office when I returned to give my boss, Mr. Flumm, the information gathered at the Defense Intelligence Agency the night before, Todd was waiting and wasted no time in pulling me into the security office. Unfortunately the alcohol from the night before was still in my system.

  The security department was on the first floor of the building, Todd’s office was in the corner with a large metal lock installed on the door with a number pad to open it. Inside, his window overlooked the entrance of our building so that he could spy on everyone coming and leaving work. The building across the courtyard blocked the sunlight into the room, making his office feel like a dungeon. Once inside his domain Todd closed the heavy door behind him, trapping me inside. Assuming his natural state as a predator, he did little to conceal his ruthless intent and came at me at full force. “Well I guess you know why you’re here?”

  He was ready to devour me. Legally though, it would make it so much easier for him if he could elicit my admission of guilt before pouncing, but I wasn’t going to be that easy.

  “No, I don’t,” I replied.

  Then he leaned back in his chair, assuming an authoritative position, tapping his fingers lightly on his desk and trying his best to make me nervous. Unfortunately for him, he was unable to see the phone gripped in my right hand with my boss’s number indicated on the screen. I looked downward for a split second which was enough to trigger his recognition that I was holding something. As I touched the number on the screen Todd jumped-up from his seat and leaned over the desk to get a good look at what I was doing. Then seeing the phone, lunged forward to snatch it from me but he was blocked by the large metal desk between us and couldn’t reach far enough to get it.

  “Mr. Flumm, I’m in Todd’s office, can you come down?” The words were out of my mouth before Todd could react. He slowly leaned back in his chair and sent a steely glare in my direction. Flumm knocked on the door. Todd reluctantly opened it, letting the light from the hall illuminate the office.

  “What are you doing with my employee, Todd?” Flumm, asked, bursting forward with hands on his hips.

  “Well I have some information from Ft. Meade that your employee was out there last night, met up with a friend of hers Keisha, and logged into two Top Secret databases,” he retorted, trying to apply the pressure to Flumm. He examined Flumm’s face to detect a reaction but was unrewarded when Flumm’s austere poker face was all he got in return. Flumm didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

  “I was at Ft. M last night, but I was doing work on a joint task with Treasury” I said, driving a knife straight into Todd’s plan of attack.

  Then upon hearing the words “joint” and “task” the joy started to drain from Todd’s face. He was an animal in a hunt for prey, and now seeing the prey move in another direction, sensed he might lose it in the chase. Todd knew if it were true, he would have to obtain special releases to be able to investigate my activities while I was working on a Treasury Department project and that was highly unlikely. The IRS wouldn’t allow Todd to snoop around their offices. Turning to Flumm, he practically shouted, “Did you know about this?” taking his anger out on my boss now too.

  Flumm had been around the company for three decades and was completely unfazed when Todd came on strong. “It must be a project that developed in the last couple of days when I was out of town,” Flumm replied, shrugging off Todd’s accusations.

  A visibly agitated Todd twirled a pen between his fingers trying to think of something fast before the prey could escape, but he was coming up empty. After a couple of moments of strained silence Flumm then took control. “Well I guess this is all a misunderstanding, have a good evening Todd,” Flumm said, and turned to me and said “let’s go back to my office,” as he dashed down the hallway with me trailing behind him. Todd held his steely glare until we were out of sight.

  Flumm and I silently road the elevator back to our floor. Even in a secure building and among coworkers with security clearances, nobody talked in the open. His office was small and stark; an empty white-walled room except for a modular desk, swivel chair, a bookshelf and two chairs for visitors. There was no hint of the individual who spent the greater part of his life in that room, it was the perfect bureaucrat’s assigned space.

  His phone was ringing as we arrived but he wasn’t paying attention to it. Joint task force work had the added importance to Flumm of elevating his status within the organization, and created the possibility of a promotion for which he had been systematically denied over the course of his career. For years he had watched younger more inexperienced staff rise through the ranks to positions above him and it hung heavy in his mind. He hadn’t done anything particularly memorable and this might be his last chance before retirement.

  “So what’s this all about? What project is this? ” he asked excitedly as the sad melancholy of middle age temporarily disappeared from his face . He smiled and leaned forward on the desk, balancing the weight of his upper body on his elbows. His skin was the color of lunchmeat and his teeth were stained yellow. He dressed in white shirts every day and almost without exception, he wore his favorite brown and grey tie. Years before, he had grown weary of the morning routine of dressing for work and no longer made an effort with respect to his appearance, what was left of his grey hair was matted down in a comb-over, in an unsuccessful attempt to conceal a bald top. It was so greasy that nobody in her right mind would want to touch it. I felt sorry for his barber. And yet, he had an endearing quality about him.

  “It’s with Treasury, tracing money flows from a foreign national currently living in Northern Virginia,” I replied. Flumm had been hoping for something more grandiose and was clearly deflated by my mundane delivery.

  “The State Department informed us that he had been working as a journalist in Pakistan,” I said, “but also suggested that the journalism thing is covering for some other type of activity, mainly brokering safe passage through the mountainous routes from Pakistan to Afghanistan now in under the control by the Haqqani.”

  Flumm asked more questions, none that I could answer, and so he stopped asking. “Okay, just keep me informed on what you’re doing,” he said, dismissing me.

  ‘Thanks,” I said and left to go home to my apartment.

  CHAPTER 10

&
nbsp; Two weeks had passed with no word from Bailey on the progress of our investigation so it was time to give her a call. “Hey Bailey, it’s Caroline. Any new developments in the Qureshi investigation?”

  “No,” she replied without a trace of enthusiasm in her voice. “We had a team scheduled for a trip to the U.A.E. but our Director cancelled it because of budget cuts.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “No I’m not Caroline” she said defensively, “You really didn’t provide me with enough information to get task order funding.”

  “Bailey without funding, we can’t get what we need. The funding is how we take the next step!” I anxiously replied, but she was unresponsive. Without even a small budget the investigation was officially stuck in neutral.

  “Okay Bailey, thanks for the update,” I said in resignation, and hung up. Suddenly my elevated sense of purpose came tumbling down and my hopes for putting Qureshi through the rigors of Unites States’ criminal justice system had collapsed.

  I called Sara.

  “Hi Caroline,” she replied, “great to hear from you. I’m busy at the moment but can you stop by for a cup of coffee Saturday morning? We need to catch- up.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Is 11:00 okay?”

  “Perfect. See you then,” she replied, and hung up.

  Back at work, my team at the office was busy responding to spear phishing attacks; emails sent by hackers to an employee of their target company using another employee’s name in the email header to create the illusion of a legitimate email so the targeted employee would open it . A division of a major U.S. software company that had been hired to provide network security to large defense companies; the companies that build combat aircraft, bombs and tanks, was itself hacked in spear phishing attack. The employees opened trustworthy- appearing emails with attachments containing a virus which by-passed the company firewalls and permitted the hackers to access top secret defense industry files. Then they took over the computers without the employees knowing it, and used them to invade others companies. They turned the computers belonging to a group of employees of the first target company into robots and used them to invade other networks by creating “botnets”, short for “robot networks.” We were working almost around the clock to close the security gaps and track the viruses back to their originating source but the sheer number of attacks was far greater than our resources to fight them.

  When Saturday came I drove to Sarah’s without expectation of anything other than catching up with a friend. She poured the coffee while we sat at the kitchen table and talked. I told her about my new relationship with Colin and about my fears of getting caught but was thinking about quitting my job anyway, so I didn’t want to give up on a really good guy. I told her about the bar, the kiss in the parking lot, and the night that lasted until dawn.

  “You’re glowing,” she said. “I think you’re really falling for Colin. Isn’t he gonna move back to England?” she asked, out of concern that I might be setting myself up for a heartache.

  “He’s here for another year,” I assured her.

  She offered to give me a tour of the upstairs to see what the decorator had done to the master bedroom and bath. I followed her up the staircase past the chandelier hanging in the foyer, and an enormous gilt-framed mirror on the wall. The master suite was surprisingly feminine in shades of pale blue and green.

  “This is pretty feminine for a guy,” I said.

  ‘No,” she replied “he sleeps in the bedroom across the hall, he works late at night and doesn’t want to keep me awake so he sleeps over there.” She pointed to the other bedroom painted in brown. My adrenaline shifted gears and I sensed that the investigation just got new life. The room was immaculate except for a small collection of pictures of Sara on the dresser. The closet had 4 suits 4 pairs of shoes, and a modest collection of shirts and ties. The bathroom was empty except for some shaving cream and a razor. No hair products, skin creams or other things that a man so interested in his own appearance would have had spread out over the counter top and in the shower.

  “Sara, it looks like he barely lives here,” I said.

  “Oh I’ve tried to get him to buy some new clothes but he just prefers to wear the same clothes over and over again.” I looked at her, she looked back at me, and we both knew that we had stumbled upon something.

  “What kind of business is he conducting late at night?” I asked as I was hurrying down the stairs to my car.

  “I don’t know, I can’t understand what he’s saying, he’s not speaking in English.”

  “Is he using your landline, or his own phone? Where’s his computer by the way?”

  “He uses his own phone,” she replied “and doesn’t use a laptop here, just his smartphone with a key pad.”

  “Do you have any of his papers? Bank statements? Correspondence? Anything like that? “

  “No, he keeps everything in a locked briefcase that he takes with him,” she replied.

  “Where is he now?”

  “At the club. He went there to meet someone, and then he’s going to get the oil changed on the car.”

  At my request she wrote down his email address and the license plate number from the car on a piece of paper. Sara was getting very worried but she knew she could rely on me, the bonds of childhood last forever.

  I drove to the club in Washington D.C. and pulled my vehicle behind a bush to stay out of view from the widows. I set my phone at the camera setting to be ready when Qureshi came into view. A homeless man approached my vehicle and I lowered the window to give him a $50 bill. It made him happy and he left. It didn’t take long for Qureshi to emerge from the back entrance of the club. He slid his gym bag in the back seat of his luxury car before stepping in and closing the door. He pulled out of the parking lot nearly running over the same homeless man who now cautiously approached his car. It was difficult to decipher where he was going; Sara had said that he was going to a garage to get the oil changed but instead of taking the American Legion bridge in the direction of her house he took the Key bridge to Arlington, Virginia, turning onto George Washington Parkway in the direction of McLean, and finally coming to a stop at a car dealership.

  I pulled in to a coffee shop conveniently located across the street from the dealership and went inside to get a cup of coffee. Oil changes take a while so I figured there was plenty of time. I returned to my car and started shifting around in the driver’s seat to get comfortable for the wait, when suddenly, Qureshi’s car slipped discretely out of the rear entrance of the dealership. The next step of the investigation was certainly in that building so I picked up the phone and called Sara.

  “How often does he get his oil changed?”

  Sara replied “I don’t know, but he takes very good care of his car”.

  “What do you mean?”

  ‘Well, he goes to get it fixed a lot,” she said.

  “How often?” I asked.

  “About every two weeks.”

  That was it. Qureshi’s connection to whatever he was doing, worked at the dealership.

  The next Saturday Qureshi emerged from the club just as he had done the week before, but with a different gym bag. It didn’t make sense for a guy with only 4 suits and a handful of shirts to have a complete selection of gym bags. He continued on schedule, driving back over the bridge and to the same car dealership. Like the time before, he remained a couple of minutes and discretely drove away from the back entrance. It was time for me to get an oil change.

  I pulled into the service area and asked the attendant behind the desk for service. ‘I need to get my oil changed, do you have time?”

  ‘Okay, the attendant said, but leave your keys because we’re backed-up and won’t be able to get to your car for about an hour.”

  Backed up? An hour? As if I didn’t already know that Qureshi’s “oil change” was a sham he just confirmed it. Nobody seemed to be actually working except one man, small in stature, working diligently to rotate tires on a
car on the rack. When my oil change was finally finished, a tall man in a mechanics’ shirt approached with the keys.

  ‘Thanks Joe” I said, looking at the nametag on his blue uniform. There was a controlled smile. Something told me his real name wasn’t “Joe”.

  “Have a nice day’ he said, in a thick, Southeast Asian accent.

  Quickly I asked “Where are you from?” Although not expecting him to tell the truth, I was trying to extend the exchange between us long enough so that I could pinpoint his country of origin by his accent but the question clearly displeased him. He stared down at me with intensity, in a cue for me to leave.

  CHAPTER 11

  Sara provided the Club membership roster to find people who might have information on Qureshi’s activities. I struck upon the name of our very own Deputy Director, Mr. Mulally, which wasn’t too much of a surprise; it was a popular gym at an exclusive club where members make private deals in secrecy guarded by uniformed bouncers at the door.

  The next day,Mulally was at the company cafeteria. He denied knowing anyone by the name of Roger, at the club to which he belonged. “No,” he replied firmly, and walked away.