The First Billion

by Christopher Reich

  It was a standard “look and listen” job. Two of the men, known in agency lingo as the “ears,” planted ultrahigh-frequency wireless listening devices in strategic locations throughout the house. Under the dining room table. On top of the refrigerator. Behind the headboard of Gavallan’s bed. Each bug had been assigned its own frequency, so that there would be no risk of one transmission interfering with another.

  A third man, “the eyes,” installed the cameras. They were very small and designed to replace the screws securing the faceplates of standard electrical outlets. Where this proved impractical—in the study, for example, where it was crucial that the lens be granted an unobstructed view of any materials Mr. Gavallan might be reading—he drilled a hole the circumference of a surgical needle into a gilded picture frame and inserted an even smaller model. Afterward, he applied a coat of colored translucent epoxy over the pinhole, making it invisible to the naked eye.

  The last member of the team walked straight to Gavallan’s private office and installed herself at his desk. She was the only person that morning engaged in a function outside the scope deemed legal by the court order issued the previous day by the Eighth Circuit Court in Washington, D.C. In her belt she carried a set of Czech-made titanium alloy skeleton keys, a dozen picks, and two dummy credit cards. She didn’t need any of them. Giving a gentle pull, she discovered the desk to be unlocked. Methodically, she withdrew the papers, set them neatly upon the desk, and photographed them with a digital camera. Once she was finished with the top drawer, she returned the contents to their place and attacked the two larger drawers to her right.

  When the team departed twenty-two minutes and fifty-one seconds later, a total of eleven bugs and six wireless cameras had been planted throughout the house. Two hundred twelve photographs of the suspect’s most confidential documents waited to be enlarged and scrutinized. Mr. John J. Gavallan, subject of federal warrant SJ-74A001, under investigation in connection with thirty-two counts of international fraud, larceny, and racketeering, could not crap without the FBI knowing exactly how much tissue he used to wipe his ass.

  Walk in the park.

  Roy DiGenovese waited until the Mercedes 300 SL had exited the office car park, then put the Ford in gear and pulled into traffic. He was not particularly worried about losing his mark. Gavallan was a steady driver, fast, aggressive, but safe. He used turn signals and didn’t run red lights. A bakery truck pulled away from the curb, momentarily blocking Gavallan’s car from view. DiGenovese didn’t mind. He knew that when traffic picked up, all he’d have to do would be slide to the left and peek down the road. The white Mercedes, with its slot back and flat roof, would be there as usual, exactly three car lengths ahead of him, sticking out like a sore thumb.

  “Zebra base, this is Zebra two, come in.”

  DiGenovese calmly picked up the walkie-talkie. “Roger, Zebra two.”

  “Went off like a charm. Target is wired for sound and light. Copy.”

  “Roger that, Zebra two. Rendezvous at the ranch at 1600. Drive on, Airborne.”

  DiGenovese put down the walkie-talkie and checked his watch. It was 8:07. In and out in under twenty-three minutes. “Outstanding,” he murmured, remembering the long hours he’d put in on the case, the endless calls overseas, the numbing arguments with one after another federal magistrate to obtain his precious search warrants.

  Setting up surveillance on Gavallan’s residence was the final step in the casting of an all-encompassing electronic net over the suspect. Phone taps had gone into effect last night. Calls in and out of Black Jet, as well as his home, were screened for a succession of keywords and names. Mercury, Moscow, Novastar, Andara, Futura, and Kirov, Baranov, Tustin, and a hundred others. At the first mention of any of them, sophisticated computers at the National Security Agency would track and record the conversations.

  Better yet was the second-generation Internet eavesdropping software being installed even as he drove. Nicknamed “Daisy,” in deference to the flak brought down on their heads by its predecessor—the ineptly titled “Carnivore” system—the FBI’s newest cybersurveillance tool was housed in a black metal box no larger than a Palm personal assistant and powered by state-of-the-art software developed by the Bureau’s in-house programmers. Installed at Gavallan’s and Black Jet’s wireless and Internet service providers, Daisy monitored every E-mail he or his executives received, their RIM Blackberries, cellular phones, or digital pagers for the list of keywords that DiGenovese and his superiors in D.C. had deemed likely to indicate conversations of a criminal bent.

  All Gavallan had to do was breathe one word of his wrongdoing anywhere in his home, office, or car and DiGenovese and his superiors would know it. It was only a matter of time before the man slipped up.

  DiGenovese waited a few more seconds, then edged the Ford over to the left, tilting his head to see around the bakery truck. A train of unfamiliar cars clogged the lane in front of him. The white Mercedes was nowhere to be seen. Panicked, DiGenovese craned his neck to the right and left, his eyes darting over every inch of the roiling cityscape. “Fuck,” he muttered, chastising himself for his daydreaming. Signaling, he pulled into the fast lane and accelerated. He made it ten yards before a red light stopped him cold. Slamming his hand on the wheel, he swore again, this time loudly. He glanced to his right. There was Gavallan, a hundred yards away, trawling down Hope Street.

  DiGenovese leaned on the horn, then jumped into the intersection, cutting off an oncoming taxi. He threw a hand out the window, showing his badge. Horns blared, voices shouted, fists threatened. In fits and spurts, he edged across the cluttered intersection. After what felt like a lifetime, he was barreling up Hope, the Mercedes no longer in sight.

  He found Gavallan three blocks away, parked catty-corner to a playground next to St. John’s Hospital. The guy was seated in his car, still as a bird. If DiGenovese wasn’t mistaken, he was watching a couple of crips playing some early-morning roundball.

  “Go figure,” DiGenovese whispered. “Go fuckin’ figure.”

  The score was 16–8, with Flint pulling away.

  Gavallan sat at a distance watching the two soldiers battle each other on the basketball court, the men rolling this way and that in their graphite low-profile wheelchairs, chasing down rebounds, clearing the ball, making fast breaks. Flint was the quicker of the two and, with his arcing hook, a better shooter. A close look revealed he was missing both legs below the knees and most of his left hand. Jaworski had the better bank shot and was speedier off the mark, but he was going to fat and his stamina was weakening down the stretch. A sliver of shrapnel no bigger than a needle had severed his spinal cord at the twelfth vertebra. He hadn’t walked or made love in eleven years.

  Gavallan watched another five minutes, until Flint had roundly defeated Jaworski, then started the car and headed back to the office. Passing the hospital’s entrance, he felt a jab of shame bow his shoulders. “Man of the Year.” The words made him wince. And for the first time, he acknowledged that he might soon have to write a letter explaining why due to financial circumstances, wholly of his own making, he would be unable to meet the terms of his commitment to the hospital.

  He drove faster.

  He wanted to be back in the office.

  Byrnes might have called.

  6

  Standing on a granite pedestal opposite Gavallan’s desk was an imposing four-foot statue of a shaman carved from the wood of a Canadian maple by the Haida tribe of the Queen Charlotte Islands, south of Alaska. It was a strange-looking creature, with an abbreviated torso, narrow neck, and large, grotesque head that was all bulging eyes, flattened lips, and flared nostrils.

  “The shaman is a mystical and omnipotent medicine man,” the dealer in Indian curios had explained to him when he’d first seen the statue three years before. “He knows all, does all, and judges all.” Gavallan had locked eyes with the carving and decided at once that he had to have it.

  Since then, whenever something unforeseen came up i
n his life—good or bad, important or trivial—he consulted the shaman. When the markets caught fire or fell in the dumps, when his putts rimmed out or his drives sailed a mile, when his emotional entanglements threatened to suffocate him if his commitment to his business didn’t, he consulted the shaman.

  The statue didn’t offer any answers. He didn’t speak in tongues or send telepathic messages. He just looked back, bored, impassive, and generally disdainful of all things human, counseling faith in the grand scheme of things while reminding Gavallan that he wasn’t as important a shit as he sometimes got to thinking.

  Sinking into his chair, Gavallan gazed imploringly at the shaman. He didn’t need any reminders about his human frailties this morning, no rejoinders about hubris, arrogance, or cocksureness. He simply needed its help.

  Returning to the office, he’d found no messages waiting from Grafton Byrnes. Nothing on his E-mail or voice mail. No chits left with Emerald, Gavallan’s secretary of seven years, to call him back at the Metropol or the National or any of Moscow’s better hotels. Nothing. The harried executive in him told him to wait until noon before reacting and to concentrate on other matters. The concerned friend urged him to get on the horn with Konstantin Kirov, tell him of their plans to disprove the Private Eye-PO’s accusations, and demand his help in tracking Byrnes down. Respect for his friend’s judgment and Gavallan’s innate discipline won out. He would wait.

  “You take care of my buddy, okay?” he said, holding the shaman’s eye.

  Opening his satchel, Gavallan withdrew the copies of the documents he’d signed at Norgren’s and filed them in his drawer along with the other markers routing his path to perdition. He folded the receipt for the two-million-dollar check in two and slipped it into his pocket. Then he leaned back his chair, kicked his feet up onto the desk, and laughed.

  It was not a joyful laugh, nor one with any hint of amusement hidden inside its rolling baritone folds. It was a sad laugh, a mocking laugh, one tinged with doubt, disdain, and wonderment at his own folly. Oh yes, he was cutting it close this time. He was hanging it out there in the wind real far. He’d always been one to enjoy the roll of the dice, to crave the giddiness of a measured risk, but this time he had overextended himself. This time he’d bet on events that he could not control, only witness. This time he’d been plain old stupid, and it was about time he admitted it.

  Gavallan felt a wave of reckless anger build inside him, a steady roar expanding in his chest, filling his lungs, and scratching at his throat. If his rage was directed at himself, it was no less explosive for it.

  In response, he made himself absolutely still. He slowed his breathing and laid his palms facedown on his desk as if he were about to stand. But he didn’t move, not a muscle. Instead, he closed his eyes and began to count. He’d taught himself this trick years ago, when he was young and wild and given to bouts of unbridled fury. As a teenager he’d gotten into frequent fights. Not the clawing, awkward wrestling bouts of high school rivalries, but knock-down-drag-out, bare-knuckled exchanges with older, stronger men, the winner losing a tooth and the loser going to the hospital for stitches and X rays.

  Gavallan didn’t know from what spring the violence inside him flowed. His father was distant, but kind; his mother a fixture in the household; his sisters adoringly attentive. He himself was for the most part an obedient, dutiful, and undemanding youngster. Yet there was no doubting the wild streak, the inclination toward anger, the predilection for the nervy, rash act. Twice he was arrested for disorderly conduct. The first instance was when he beat the tar out of a Texas A&M lineman who’d stood up his oldest sister for her senior prom; the second and less valiant occasion occurred when, shit-faced in a Matamoros bar, he picked a fight with the biggest Mexican in the room just to prove he could whip him. He did, but he’d ended up with three broken knuckles, a cracked rib, and an eye swollen to the size of a grapefruit. Only through the benevolence of a local police officer had both acts been expunged from his record.

  Aware of this flaw in his character and unwilling to allow it to defeat him, Gavallan had decided to isolate it and raze it from his behavior—or, at the very least, to keep it hidden from public view. Deep down, he knew his anger to be primal and lurking, and impossible to extinguish altogether. But slowly, and with an iron discipline new to him, he’d altered the way he acted.

  He had always harbored ambitions, dreams of a life that would take him far away from the twelve-hundred-square-foot cinder-block home where he had grown up sleeping in the same bedroom as his three sisters, away from the unrelenting heat and humidity, from the mosquitoes that preyed on a man from dawn till dusk, from the bleak horizons of his parents’ timid expectations.

  By the age of fifteen, he knew what he wanted. He wanted to see the world as a pilot in the United States Air Force, and to be an officer and a gentleman in the best sense of the words. He wanted to be honorable, truthful, dependable, and courageous. He wanted to be respected not only for his skills as a pilot but for his integrity and character, and he expected to earn that respect. He wanted a wife and two children, and it was very important to him that he fall truly, madly in love. One day he hoped to wear a general’s star on his shoulder.

  To others, his dreams appeared fanciful or, worse, illusory. He had no money, no connections, no guidance but his own. But never did he doubt that he would gain his ambitions. He set forth a plan and he did not alter from it. He knew what he had to do. He must work harder than the rest, he must expect unfairness and some degree of intolerance. He must never complain. He must present the world a façade of unrelenting good spirit, equanimity, and drive. Above all, he must harness his rage.

  To a large extent, Gavallan succeeded. He tempered his behavior. He fought down his rage and played up his humor. He showed the world what it most liked about itself.

  Most of his ambitions were realized, though for a price beyond his reckoning. But deep inside him, the anger still burned, the rage still flickered, and he knew he must be ever watchful. For if he wasn’t, one day it would surely rise up and destroy him. In the blink of an eye.

  Reaching the count of one hundred, Gavallan exhaled audibly. For now, the anger was gone; the struggle for control won for another day. Happier, he turned and glanced at the pictures on his wall, wanting to share the victory, however minor. There was Gavallan and his father shaking hands on graduation day at the Air Force Academy. The old man looked as stern as ever, paying no mind to the fact that he was wearing his son’s dress cap on his head. He never got over his boy’s leaving the service, or the less than satisfactory general discharge that had made it official. Until the day he died, he insisted to his friends that his son had left the cockpit over the lack of decent pay.

  “Money,” sniffed Gavallan. “If only . . .”

  The true cause of his sudden, and not altogether voluntary, separation from the United States Air Force could be found on a ninety-minute videocassette kept shut in the bottom corner of his flight locker alongside his jumpsuit, his flying scarf, and his old Omega Speedmaster. The tape was dated February 25, 1991, and titled Day 40—Abu Ghurayb Presidential Complex. It had been made with an infrared camera mounted on the underside of his F-117. The tape was a copy, a pirated bootleg, and his possession of it was a jailable offense. The original was kept in a more secure location, most likely somewhere deep inside the Pentagon where the United States Armed Forces hid its dirty laundry.

  Gavallan’s eyes dodged his father, only to land on himself. There he was, a twenty-six-year-old superman gussied up for combat, strapped into his G suit, helmet in hand, standing beside the cockpit of his Desert Storm mount, an F-117 he’d christened Darling Lil. Look at that smile. Top of the world, eh, kid? The photo had been taken in a hangar at King Khalid Air Force Base in Saudi Arabia. A giant American flag hung from the rafters behind him. Beat that, Tom Cruise!

  Another photo showed his mother and three sisters standing at the base of Big Tex, the 150-foot cowboy, at the state fair in Dallas ten years
back. Mom, meek and gray, with her haunted smile, the woman who’d gifted him the name of Jett, not out of any premonition of the future, but because of her long-held crush on an unknown actor who’d visited her hometown of Marfa, Texas, one teenage summer, to stand before the cameras as Jett Rink, impetuous wildcatter who struck it rich in the glorious Technicolor Texas epic Giant. James Dean did a number on Marfa. Look in the phone book. You’ll find a dozen men aged forty and up carrying the ridiculous name of Jett.

  Above the photos hung two wooden plaques with attached miniature replicas of an A-10 bomber. Flowery script declared: “Captain John J. Gavallan, USAF, Squadron and Wing Top Gun at Red Flag ‘89 and ‘90.” Red Flag was the annual competition staged at Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas, where a pilot’s proficiency was measured during several days of demanding flight exercises. As always, the mementos triggered a desire to fly, a yearning so strong he could feel it.

  Trade your company, your career, to do it again? a skeptical voice demanded.

  Any day, he answered.

  To be at the stick of a jet was like nothing else in the world. To soar like an eagle and dive like a tern, while enveloped in the sky’s royal blue cape. If there was magic in the world, Gavallan had found it in the cockpit of a jet aircraft.

  Dismissing his longing, he continued on his nostalgic tour. There was only one place left to visit. Like any sentimental fool, he’d left his heart’s graveyard for last.

  Opening the bottom drawer of his desk, he rummaged through a dozen photographs, most framed with simple silver settings, a few loose, the dates and places written on the backs. Leaning to his side, he picked up one photo, then the next. With each, he stared into the woman’s bold, ebullient green eyes, imagining the touch of her pillowed lips, sighing, smiling, longing, always wishing he could reshape the past. Flipping over the snapshots in turn, he read the inscriptions penned on the back: Manhattan, Valentine’s Day; Chicago, Xmas Eve; Hong Kong, Easter Sunday. The script was looping and feminine, but never less than purposefully legible. Lingering over the words, he felt happily vulnerable, close to her again.