by Doug Raber
Fifteen minutes later, Evans dropped her at the MARTA station, and Sarah was out of the car almost before it came to a stop. A quick “Thanks” and “Goodbye” had been answered with a “See you next week, maybe.” As Charles drove off, Sarah walked into the Avondale station. They’d have to be pretty quick to identify me if they were following Charles’s car. Nevertheless, she kept her eyes open and tried to believe that she wasn’t being followed, right up to the time she boarded the next train to downtown Atlanta.
* * *
Day 25: Tallahassee
Sarah reached the airport at 8:15 that evening and headed directly for the Delta counter, where she tried to put on her most innocent face. “Hi. I really feel dumb. But I stopped for a beer between flights, and then I fell asleep in the waiting area. So I missed my 7:45 flight to Tallahassee. Is there any way I can still get there tonight?”
The agent rolled his eyes and then smiled indulgently. He said there was a flight at 9:22, but she’d have to hurry to make it. He issued a revised boarding pass and pointed her to security. Most of the day’s flights had departed, so the line moved quickly. When she reached the gate, she was able to board immediately.
Before the plane reached the runway, Sarah was sound asleep, and she didn’t wake until the plane landed. She shook out the cobwebs as they taxied to the terminal. She hadn’t made any reservations, so she headed toward the ground transportation area, where there would be hotel information. Professor Granger had suggested the University Inn, and a quick call confirmed that they had an available room.
A little while later, she was checking in at the front desk. “Good thing you didn’t try this a couple of weeks ago,” said the clerk. “Last-minute bookings just don’t happen during football season, at least not here at FSU.”
Sarah awoke to the warm feeling of sunlight on her face. It was almost 10:00 a.m., and she felt good. She pulled on a pair of lightweight nylon running pants and a sweatshirt, donned her running shoes, and put some money in her pocket. She ran along Tennessee Street just past the other end of the FSU campus, maintaining an easy pace and enjoying the weather. When she spotted the Waffle House, she decided to stop.
When she finished her breakfast, it was almost 11:30. She didn’t want any difficulty finding Granger’s building later on, so she walked through campus on the way back to the hotel. She had no difficulty locating Granger’s laboratories.
After showering and changing into fresh clothes, Sarah walked over to the chemistry building. Granger showed her around, happily introducing her to several graduate students and postdocs. After talking for more than an hour, Sarah had the information she needed.
Walking back to the hotel, she felt remarkably relaxed and satisfied. The day had gone well, and she had almost forgotten her worries about chickenpox. Or was it really smallpox? The answer to that question would have to wait, at least until she got back to Washington and figured out her next steps. For the moment, she decided she would just focus on her chemistry story.
She got back to the hotel at about 4:00 p.m., booted up her laptop, and spent a couple of hours typing in her notes from the interview. Then she set up a rough outline of her story and sent the electronic files to both her work and home e-mail addresses. That way, her work was safe, even if something happened to the laptop on the trip back to Washington.
With the assistance of the hotel staff, Sarah got a last-minute reservation for one at a nice restaurant. She had a delightful dinner of blue-corn fried catfish and jalapeno-seasoned collard greens, a distinctively southern meal.
After dinner, she checked her e-mail, found nothing that needed her immediate attention, and decided to go to bed early. Her flight departed at 7:20 the next morning, so she requested a wakeup call for 5:30 and crawled under the covers.
* * *
Day 26: Arlington, Virginia
Just past noon on Sunday, Sarah’s plane was making its final approach into National Airport, banking hard as it followed the contours of the Potomac River. When Georgetown University appeared on the left, she looked out the window on the right of the plane, to see her apartment building came into view on the Virginia side of the river. She was never quite sure where she wanted to sit when she was on a flight that approached the airport from the North. It was always exciting to see the buildings in where she lived, and she always tried to pick out the balcony of her apartment, but it meant giving up the views of the nation’s capital that could be seen from the left side of the plane. Whichever side of the plane she was on, it was always a thrill.
The landing was uneventful, and in just a few more minutes, she was on the escalator to the Metro platform, where a Blue Line train would take her the few miles north to the station by her apartment. By one o’clock, she had unpacked her duffel and thrown her dirty clothes into the hamper. There wasn’t a lot of food in the house, but a quick taste test showed that the milk in the refrigerator was still okay, and she had a bowl of cereal for lunch.
Sarah booted up her desktop computer and logged onto her e-mail account. Always worried about making sure her files were backed up and safely stored, she downloaded the e-mail attachments she had sent from Florida to the computer’s hard drive. Then, to be doubly safe, she decided to put them on her external hard drive as well. She turned on the power strip for the external drive and reached for the cable to insert it into the USB port of the computer. It was already plugged in! How the hell did that happen? I unplugged it before I left! Her memory was clear. She had removed the USB cable when she did her final sweep of the apartment before leaving on Friday.
Sarah was so stunned, she couldn’t move. She could barely breathe. She put a hand on her desk to steady herself. Someone has been in my apartment, and they’ve been looking at my files. She opened the computer’s “event viewer” to see if there was any information on how the computer had been used. Most of the entries didn’t seem significant to her, but one of them caught her eye. It was an entry for her virus protection program. The event was logged for the prior day at 3:47 p.m. Holy shit! There’s no question about it. Someone used my computer yesterday afternoon while I was in Florida.
Sarah’s first thought was the phone call with Sue Parkinson before she left for Atlanta on Friday. Was the FBI after her because of the FDA stuff? The FDA file was encrypted, but she checked the drawer in her desk, anyway. Her checkbook and calculator were still where she had left them, but the little book of postage stamps that had fallen off to the side the previous week was now sitting neatly on top again. Shit! They searched everything. And they tried to cover it up.
Her panic increasing, Sarah began to imagine other possibilities and other problems: Would the FBI start following her? Would they monitor her phone calls? And would all this stop her from following up on the chickenpox–smallpox story? From what Charles had told her, it seemed that they might already be doing some sort of monitoring of calls to the CDC. And if someone had broken into the apartment to check her computer, how did they know she was away in the first place? Damn! Sue told the FBI agent I was gone for the weekend. That’s got to be it.
The more Sarah thought about it, the more she moved toward a conclusion. She had to find a way to become less visible as she moved forward on both of her stories. It didn’t matter which one was the reason people were checking on her. She had to find ways to communicate without being monitored, and find a way to move around without people knowing her every step.
She reached for her cell phone to call her father. He’d spent his entire career selling electronic equipment, so he knew what it could and couldn’t do and how people might be able to misuse it. Sarah dialed the Florida number, and Richard Lockford answered on the third ring with a happy “Hi Sarah!”
“Hey Dad! It’s been weeks since we’ve talked. How are you? How’s Mom?”
“I’m just fine, sweetheart. We’re both fine. Mostly, I’ve been playing golf and relaxing. Your mom even played nine holes with me yesterday, even though she claims to hate the game. This parti
al retirement thing is a pretty good deal, and I don’t have any business meetings for at least another week. “I tried calling you yesterday, but I didn’t get any answer at the apartment. Were you out having fun, or were you off on business?”
“On business, Dad. I just got back. My schedule was tight, and Tallahassee isn’t very close to you.” Sarah’s parents had bought the house in South Florida about 10 years earlier. Now they were spending nearly half the year there.
“Anyway, I’m sorry I didn’t get to see you and Mom for Thanksgiving. I hope you’ll be coming up here again soon, even if it means that you’ll be working.” She paused briefly and started again hesitantly. “Dad, how can you make phone calls so that nobody can eavesdrop or trace them back to you?”
Immediately, the tone of Rich Lockford’s voice changed to one that was halfway between that of concerned parent and all business. “Are you okay, Sarah-Boo?”
“Huh? Of course I am!” The answer had come out a little too quickly. His use of the nickname had surprised her. He hadn’t used it since she was a kid.
She continued her fiction. “I’m working on a couple of stories for the paper, and one of them is about government corruption. So I’m thinking that I need to be extra careful that my activities stay private.”
“Look, Sarah, there are a number of things you can do to be safe. So listen up.” He was all business now, and he knew that she would be writing notes furiously in one of her notebooks. “First of all, it’s hard to be invisible these days. Ever since September 11, the U.S. government has been more like Big Brother than ever before. Part of it is from advances in technology, and I suppose I’ve been partly responsible for helping that trend, but a big part is also a lack of trust. The last several administrations in Washington sometimes have just acted as though anyone who isn’t one of their paid political supporters should be treated as a suspected terrorist. Even in downtown D.C., they’ve been putting surveillance cameras all over the place. And your cell phone probably has GPS capability, so it might be possible to track you wherever you go, every step you take.”
“Then I’ll just turn off my cell phone when I’m not using it.”
“No, that isn’t enough. The only way to shut down that capability on some of the newest phones is to actually remove the SIM card. That’s the subscriber identity module. It’s a kind of smart card, maybe an inch square and as thick as a credit card.”
“I know what a SIM card is, dad.”
“Yeah, I suppose so. Anyway, it’s not hard to take out. Usually, you just have to take off the back cover of the phone. When the tracking stuff was designed, the manufacturers introduced it as a way to locate someone who’s been injured, or lost, or maybe abducted. But sometimes it can make it a little tough to maintain your privacy.”
Catching himself before he went off on a political rant, he returned to the thread of the conversation. “If you want to be less visible, first off, don’t drive your car. Everything from satellite photos to planted tracking devices can be used to follow every move you make. Second, don’t use your own telephone, either land line or cell phone. What you really need is a prepaid cell phone. You can get one online or in a cell-phone store, but usually that means providing ID of some sort. Sometimes they don’t care as much at one of the kiosks at an airport or train station, so you could try that approach. And third, remember that every time you pay with a credit card or an ATM card, there’s a record of what you bought. And a record of where you bought it, and when. Some of these things are getting pretty close to the real-time tracing that they like to show in movies and TV shows.”
His tone changed once again, but Sarah couldn’t quite figure out the implications. He was calm but wary. “One other thing, Sarah. Just in case you need to do a lot of traveling, keep your passport handy. It’s a really good form of ID. My advice is that when you get home from your trip, you should get your passport out of the file cabinet and keep it with you.”
“Dad, what are you …?”
Sarah only got out part the question before father interrupted. “Oops, sorry Kiddo, I gotta go! I told some of the guys over at the club that I’d meet them for a game of cards before dinner. Talk to you soon. Or I’ll shoot you an e-mail.” And with a click, he was gone.
Once again, things had become more confusing instead of less so. Most of Rich Lockford’s advice had been reasonable, even if Sarah wasn’t yet sure how she would go about following it. But his last couple of statements didn’t make sense, and the way he ended the phone call was uncharacteristic. Did he think she hadn’t yet returned home from Florida? No, that wasn’t it. He knew she’d been traveling, and she specifically told him she was home again. He even recognized her number when he answered the phone.
Even more confusing, he had told her to get her passport out of the file cabinet when she got home. But she kept her passport in a dresser drawer. She didn’t even have a file cabinet. Her father knew that.
Then it hit her. He was talking in a sort of code. He was already worried that someone might be listening to their call. And the “file cabinet” wasn’t even a regular file cabinet. Ever since she was a little kid, he’d had that big safe that he referred to as his “file cabinet.” It was fireproof, and it had a combination lock. Her father had given her the combination and taught her how to open it years earlier. After her parents sold the house in McLean, Virginia, they’d built a log home on a big plot of land out in West Virginia. The more she thought about it, the more certain she was. For some reason, her father was telling her to get out to the house in West Virginia and get something out of the safe.
* * *
Chapter 8
Intelligence
In the exercise of assigned responsibilities, the USD(I) shall … (4.1) Serve as the senior DoD intelligence, counterintelligence, and security official below the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense.
—Directive Number 5143.01, Donald H. Rumsfeld, 2005‡
Day 22: Staking the Claim
Robinson Edwards sat at his desk in the Pentagon, drumming his fingers on the legal pad in front of him. There were some things that even the USD(I), the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, didn’t want to enter on his computer. He believed it was the most secure computer network anywhere in the world. It was backed up frequently to prevent any loss of information, whether important or mundane. Consequently, Edwards decided this had to be a completely black operation. It could be disclosed only after he brought it to the successful conclusion that would save thousands, if not millions, of American lives. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. We will be thankful.
A printout of a memorandum was sitting on Edwards’ desk, next to a legal pad with his notes. The notes would soon go through his shredder, but the memo would remain in his files. It was a copy of Directive No. 5143.01, which spelled out the responsibilities of his office. It was signed by Donald Rumsfeld, who had been Secretary of Defense in 2005. There was no question in Edwards’ mind that he had all the necessary authority to do what had to be done. Nor did he have any doubt that the Defense Secretary Walker would fully support the plan, at least those parts of the plan that Edwards would tell him about. Edwards didn’t earn his three stars by being indiscreet. He knew how to take charge. And how to take action.
He glanced down at the memo, reviewing the potential trouble spots. He found what he needed.
4.19. Coordinate with the USD(P) regarding intelligence and intelligence-related matters that affect antiterrorism, counterterrorism, and terrorism consequence management policies as well as special operations intelligence elements and special operations-related activities funded through the MIP.
Edwards put a mark next to item 4.19. Given the urgency of the matter, and knowing where the Secretary would throw his support, he decided that coordination could wait a while. Of greater importance were two specific terms in the item: “special operations” and “terrorism consequence management.” Those words encompassed what needed to be done—and gave him the authority to
do it. Nevertheless, he was unable to completely dispel a sense of unease about this whole thing, wondering if others in the chain of command might fail to recognize his immense authority.
He moved his eyes down the text of the Directive.
4.11.2. Develop, coordinate, and oversee the implementation of DoD policy, programs, and guidance for personnel, physical, industrial, information, operations, chemical/biological, and DoD Special Access Program (SAP) security as well as research and technology protection.
That would be hard to argue with. The phrases were clear. “Develop … oversee the implementation … operations …” No subordinate would dare to challenge him on those official responsibilities. Another checkmark in the margin of the document.
4.16. Develop, coordinate, and oversee policy and policy implementation for all other sensitive intelligence, counterintelligence, security, and special technology programs and activities within the Department of Defense.
More solid support for his plans. “Develop, coordinate, and oversee … counterintelligence … programs …” These were the exact words for what he was planning, and his plans fit perfectly with the definition of counterintelligence in the Directive’s appendix.
E2.1.2. Defense Counterintelligence. Information gathered and activities conducted to detect, identify, exploit, and neutralize the intelligence capabilities and activities of terrorists, foreign powers, and other entities directed against U.S. national security.
It couldn’t be more clear-cut. Item 4.16 gave him the authority to undertake programs in the area of counterintelligence. Anything that included “activities conducted to … identify … and neutralize the… activities of terrorists.” Another check.
The last checkmark went next to the phrase that Edwards thought would trump any possible objection or concern that might remain. The one thing he knew for certain was that the Secretary would have his back, even if he didn’t ask explicit permission beforehand.
