Total Control

by David Baldacci

  Then her problem was suddenly compounded as she caught sight of another pair of headlights coming down from the direction her parents had come. She watched in steadily growing fear as the black sedan moved down the street, its tires slowly crunching over the path just left by the Caddie. The people who had dogged her parents from Virginia. With everything else happening, she had forgotten about them. Sidney slammed the Land Rover's accelerator to the floor. Slipping in the snow for a moment, the four-wheel drive system kicked in and the massive V-8 took hold, propelling the little tank forward like a cannonball. As she bore down on the sedan, Sidney saw the driver react. His hand went inside his coat. But he was a millisecond too late. She flew past her parents' house, veered across the road and, with a crush of metal, slammed into the smaller vehicle, pushing it across the slippery road and depositing it in a steep ditch. The air bag in the truck inflated. With a furious effort, Sidney ripped it off the steering column and slammed the truck into reverse. The sound of metal wrenching free was clearly heard as the two vehicles uncoupled.

  Sidney turned the truck around and then stared in disbelief. Her swift attack had taken care of whoever was following her parents. It also had another result. She watched in dismay as the Cadillac turned off Beach Street and roared off back to Route 1. Sidney rammed the accelerator down and headed after them.

  The man struggled out of the car and stared in shock at the rapidly disappearing truck.

  Sidney saw the taillights of the Cadillac just ahead. At this point, Route 1 was a two-lane road. She pulled up behind her parents and blew her horn repeatedly. The Cadillac immediately accelerated. Her parents were by now probably so scared they wouldn't even stop for a state trooper in a marked car, much less a lunatic blowing her horn in a smashed-up truck. Sidney momentarily held her breath and then careened onto the wrong side of the road, mashed the gas pedal to the floor and pulled alongside her parents' car. She saw her father react to the Land Rover appearing on his left. The Caddie shimmied from side to side as it sped up, and Sidney had to keep the accelerator close to the floor to keep up, as the damaged Land Rover was son planted the bulky Caddie squarely in the middle of the two-lane road, daring their pursuer to overtake them. Sidney rolled down her window and steered her vehicle halfway onto the dirt-and-gravel shoulder. Thank God the roads hadn't been plowed yet or she would have had no shoulder to travel on. As she inched up to the passenger side of the Cadillac, her father swung back onto the right side, forcing Sidney to go off the road entirely. As the Land Rover bounced and swayed over the rough terrain, Sidney looked at her speedometer; it hovered near eighty. Fear rattled through every nerve in her body. She looked up ahead� They were coming to a steep curve. She was about to run out of road. She smashed the accelerator flat to the floor. She only had seconds left. "Mom!" She screamed over the fury of the wind and the wall of pouring snow. "Mom!" Sidney leaned as far out the driver's window as she could while maintaining some control over the truck. She took one deep breath and screamed as loud as she ever had in her life. "MMMOOOMM!"

  She saw her mother peering through the whipping snow, her eyes wide with terror, and then Sidney finally saw recognition and then relief in them. Her mother quickly turned to her father. The Cadillac slowed down immediately and allowed Sidney to move back onto the road ahead of them. Her face and hair covered with snow, Sidney motioned with one hand for them to follow her. In the near-blinding swirl of white, the two cars raced down the road.

  About an hour later, they veered off at an exit. Within ten minutes the Land Rover and the Cadillac pulled into the parking lot of a motel. The first thing Sidney Archer did was jump out of the truck, race to her parents' car, throw open the rear door and grab up her daughter in her arms. Tears were pouring down Sidney's face as fiercely as the snow. She gripped her sleepy daughter with fingers that promised never to let go again. Amy had no way of knowing how close she had come to losing her mother this night. If the blade had veered one inch the other way? If Sidney's mother had recognized her daughter a second too late? But the little girl would never know that. Sidney Archer certainly did, however, and it made her squeeze her daughter to her breast as tightly as she possibly could the car and planted a bear hug around his daughter. The big man was shaking severely too after this latest nightmare. His wife joined them and they stood in a small circle, clutching each other tightly, each of them silent. Though the snow soon covered their clothes, they didn't budge; they were just holding on.

  The man had managed to free his vehicle and then ran over to the Pattersons' house, where it was still quiet. A minute later the house was quiet no more as the sideboard was slowly raised off the floor and then violently hurled away with another crash and splintering of wood. Scales painfully stood up with the aid of his colleague. The look on his battered face made it abundantly clear that it was indeed fortunate for her that Sidney Archer was not presently within his deadly reach. As he went back to retrieve his knife he noticed the piece of paper Sidney had dropped--Jason's e-mail message. Scales picked it up, studying it momentarily. In another five minutes he and his associate had made their way to the damaged car. Scales picked up his cellular phone and punched in a speed-dial number. It was time to bring in reinforcements.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  At two-thirty in the morning, a highly agitated Lee Sawyer drove to the office through a snowstorm that threatened to hit blizzard status by that afternoon. The whole East Coast was being assaulted by a major winter storm system that threatened to hang around until Christmas.

  Sawyer went directly to the conference room, where he spent the next five hours going over every aspect of the case, from the files, his notes and memory. His main goal was assembling the case as he now understood it into some semblance of logic. The problem was that not much made sense, chiefly because he was not certain whether he was confronted with one case or two: Lieberman and Archer together, or Lieberman and Archer separately. That's really what it boiled down to. He jotted down some new angles that occurred to him, but none of them seemed all that promising. Then he picked up the phone and dialed the lab asking for Liz Martin, the technician who had performed the Luma-lite exam on the limousine.

  "Liz, I owe you an apology. I've been letting this case get to me a little bit and I took it out on you. I was out of line and I'm sorry."

  Liz smiled. "Apology accepted. We're all under pressure. What's up?"

  "I need your resident computer expert skills. What do you know about computer tape backup systems?"

  "Funny you should ask. My boyfriend's a trial lawyer and he was just telling me the other day it's the hottest topic in the legal sector right now."

  "Why's that?"

  "Well, tape backups are potentially discoverable in litigation. For example, an employee writes an interoffice memo or e-mail that contains damaging information about the company. The employee later erases the e-mail and destroys all hard copies of the memo. You'd think it was gone for good, right? Nope, because with tape backup, the system might well have saved it before it was erased. And under the rules of discovery, they may have to turn it over to the other side.

  My boyfriend's firm advises clients that with documents created via computer, if you don't want someone else to ever read it, then don't create it."

  "Hmmm." Sawyer thumbed through the papers in front of him.

  "Good thing I still opt for invisible ink."

  "You're a relic, Lee, but at least you're a nice relic."

  "Okay, Professor Liz, I've got another one for you." Sawyer read her the password.

  "That's a pretty good password, isn't it, Liz?"

  "Actually, it's not."

  "What?" That was the absolute last response Sawyer had expected to hear.

  "It's so long that it would be easy to forget a portion of it or otherwise get it incorrect. Or if you were communicating it to someone else orally, they could easily get it wrong in the transmission, transpose a number, that sort of thing."

  "But because it's so long, it
wouldn't be capable of being broken, right? I thought that was the beauty of it."

  "Certainly. However, you don't have to use all those numbers to accomplish that goal. Ten would've been ample for most purposes.

  With fifteen numbers you're pretty much invulnerable."

  "But these days you've got computers that could crank those combos through."

  "With fifteen numbers you're looking at well over a trillion combos and most encryption packages come with a shut-down feature if too many combos are tried at one time. Even if it didn't have the shut-down feature, the fastest computer in the world doing a numbers crunch still wouldn't pop this password because the presence and placement of those decimal points make the possible combinations so high that a traditional brute-force assault wouldn't work."

  "So you're saying--"

  "I'm saying whoever put together this password went way overboard.

  The negatives far outweigh its imperviousness to being cracked. It simply didn't need to be this complex to avoid being penetrated. Maybe whoever put it together was a novice about computers."

  Sawyer shook his head. "I think this person knew exactly what he was doing."

  "Well, then it wasn't solely for protection purposes."

  "What else could it be?"

  "I'm not sure, Lee. I've never seen one like this before."

  Sawyer didn't say anything.

  "Anything else?"

  "What? Uh, no, Liz, that's it." Sawyer sounded very depressed.

  "I'm sorry if I wasn't much help."

  "No, you were. You gave me a lot to think about. Thanks, Liz."

  He brightened. "Hey, I owe you a lunch, okay?"

  "I'm going to hold you to that one and this time I get to pick the place."

  "Fine, only make sure they take the Exxon card. That's about the only plastic I have left."

  "You really know how to show a girl a good time, Lee."

  Sawyer hung up and looked down at the password again. If half of what he had heard about Jason Archer's mental prowess was true, then the complexity of the password had been no accident.

  He looked at the numbers again. It was driving him nuts, but he couldn't shake the feeling that they somehow seemed familiar. He poured himself another cup of coffee, took out a scratch piece of paper and started doodling, a habit that helped him think. This case seemed to have been with him for years. With a start he looked at the date on the e-mail message Archer had sent his wife: 95-11-19.

  He wrote the numbers down on the scratch paper: 95-11-19. He smiled. Figures a computer would kick it out like that, more confusing than anything else. Then he found himself staring at the numbers more intently. His smile faded. He quickly wrote them down another way: 95/11/19 then, finally, 951119. He quickly scribbled again, made a mistake, scratched it out and kept going.

  He looked at the finished product: 599111.

  Sawyer's face turned whiter than the paper he was writing on.

  Backwards. He read the e-mail from Jason Archer again. All backwards, Archer had said. But why? If Archer were under so much pressure that he had mistyped the address and not finished the message, why take the time to type two phrases--"all wrong" and "all backwards"--if they meant the same thing? The truth suddenly dawned on Sawyer: unless the two phrases had entirely different meanings, both quite literal. He looked at the numbers comprising the password one more time and then started to write furiously.

  After several mistakes he finally finished. He numbly drained the last of his coffee as he took in the numbers in their true (unback-ward) order: 12-19-90, 2-28-91, 9-26-92, 11-15-92 and 4-16-93.

  Archer had been very precise in his selection of passwords. It had actually been a clue within the password itself. Sawyer didn't need to consult his notes. He knew what the numbers represented. He took a deep breath.

  The calendar dates of the five times Arthur Lieberman had changed interest rates on his own. The five times somebody out there had made enough money to buy a country or maybe lost that much.

  Sawyer's question had finally been answered. He had one case, not two. There was a connection between Jason and Lieberman. But what was it? Another thought struck him. Edward Page had told Sidney he hadn't been following Jason Archer at the airport. The other person he could have been dogging was Lieberman. Page could have been shadowing the Fed chairman and walked right into Archer's switch. But why follow Lieberman? With a scowl, Sawyer finally put the message aside and looked at the videocassette recording of Archer's exchange at the warehouse, which was sitting on the table. If Sidney was right about Brophy knowing far more than Jason Archer, what the hell had been passed off in that warehouse?

  Could that be the connection to Arthur Lieberman? He hadn't looked at the tape in a while. He decided to fix that oversight right now.

  He popped the tape in a VCR that rested under a large-screen TV in one corner of the room. He poured some more coffee and hit the control; the tape started. He watched the scene twice through. Then he watched it a third time, in slow motion. A frown spread over his features. When he had watched the tape for the very first time in Hardy's off'ice, something had made him frown then too. What the hell was it? He rewound the tape again and then hit the start button.

  Jason and the other man were waiting, Jason's briefcase was visible.

  The knock on the door, the other men came in. The old guy, the other two in sunglasses. Real cute. Sawyer looked at the two burly men again. They looked oddly familiar, but he couldn't...

  He shook his head and continued to watch. Here came the exchange, Jason looking extremely nervous. Then the plane going over. The warehouse was on a flight path to the airport, he had learned. Everyone in the room looked up at the thundering sound. Sawyer jerked so hard he spilled most of his coffee on his shirt. Only this time it wasn't from the sound of the plane.

  "Holy shit!" He froze the tape. Then he planted his face a bare inch from the screen. He grabbed the phone. "Liz, I need your magic, and this time, Professor, it'll be dinner." He quickly told her what he wanted.

  It took Sawyer two minutes, running fiat out, to reach the lab.

  The equipment was all set up, a smiling Liz standing next to it.

  Sawyer, puffed hard, handed her the tape, which she put into another VCR. She sat down at a control panel and the tape began to play. The screen it appeared on was a good sixty inches across.

  "Okay, okay, get ready, Liz. There! Right there!" Sawyer almost jumped off the floor in his excitement.

  Liz froze the tape and then hit some buttons on her panel. The human figures on the screen grew until they spanned the whole screen. There was only one person Sawyer was looking at. "Liz, can you blow this part up right here?" His thick finger stabbed at a specific section of the screen. Liz did as he asked.

  Sawyer shook his head in silent amazement. Liz joined him in looking at the startling scene. She looked up at him. "You were right, Lee. What does it mean?"

  Sawyer stared at the man who had identified himself to Jason Archer as Anthony DePazza on that fateful November morning in drizzly Seattle. More specifically, Sawyer zeroed in on DePazza's neck, which was clearly visible, since he had jerked his head up when the plane had gone over. In fact, Sawyer and Liz were both staring at a clear break in the neckline, real and false skin.

  "I'm not sure, Liz. But why the hell is the guy with Archer wearing some sort of a disguise?"

  Liz stared wistfully at the screen. "I used to be into that when I was a thespian in college."

  "Into what?"

  "You know, costumes, makeup, masks. For when we put on a performance.

  I'll have you know I was one wicked Lady Macbeth."

  Sawyer looked at the screen, his mouth wide open as the word she had just uttered pounded through his head: Performance?

  Chewing on this new information, Sawyer hustled back to the conference room. Ray Jackson was sitting there with several documents in his hand, which he waved at his partner. "By fax from Charles Tiedman. Page's handwriting samp
les. I've got copies of the letters I found in Lieberman's apartment. I'm no expert, but I think we've got a match."

  Sawyer sat down and looked over the letters comparing the writing.

  "I agree with you, Ray, but get the lab to give us a definite."

  "Right." Jackson started off to perform that task, but Sawyer abruptly stopped him. "Hey, Ray, let me look at those letters one more time."

  Jackson handed them over.

  Sawyer only really wanted to look at one of them. The letterhead was impressive: Columbia University Alumni Association. Tiedman hadn't mentioned that Steven Page had attended Columbia. Page had evidently, at some point, been active in alumni affairs. Sawyer did some rough arithmetic in his head. Steven Page was twenty-eight when he had died five years ago. That would make him thirty-three or thirty-four today, depending on his birthdate. So he probably would have been a 1984 graduate. Another thought suddenly flared into Sawyer's head.

  "Go ahead, Ray. I've got some calls to make."

  After Jackson went off with the documents, Sawyer dialed information and got the number for Columbia University's information office. Within a couple of minutes he got through. He was told that Steven Page had indeed been a 1984 graduate of the university, in fact a magna cum laude graduate. Sawyer looked down at his hands as he prepared to ask his next question. Every finger was quivering. He did his best to keep his emotions under control as he waited for the woman on the other end of the line to consult her records. Yes, Sawyer was told. The other student was also an '84 grad; indeed, this one had graduated summa cum laude. Quite impressive, the voice said, to achieve that at Columbia. He asked another question and was told he would have to talk to Student Housing for the answer. He waited, his nerves humming with electricity. When he finally got someone at Student Housing, the question was answered within a minute. Sawyer quietly thanked the