"Yeah, in high school. With Jason Phipps. But my dad caught us one time and beat the holy bejesus out of me."
"I'm sure I can get you into something. And if you have no health insurance, I know some people who will help out on that end."
"So, what are you? Are you with the government? I'm not under arrest, am I?"
"No, I'm not connected with the government. I'm private."
"What happened to your ear?"
"Somebody hit me. But I was an unwilling victim. If I run into the guy again-and I hope to-I'll try to put him behind bars."
"In jail."
"You bet."
"So, let me get this straight. You're not one of Kenyon's other boyfriends?"
"No. There are others?"
"Two, I think. But I only know the name of one, Scott Hemmerer. I met him at a bar on Central Avenue one time.
He had a big shiner, and I'd had a few, and I asked him if Kenyon Louderbush had socked him, and he just about fell off his chair."
"Do you know how I can get in touch with Scott? I'd like to talk to him."
"Yeah, he works at Dunkin' Donuts on Lark. But he's not there now."
"How do you know that?"
"I heard he was in the hospital."
Chapter Twenty-seven
I phoned Bud and made arrangements for his cousin to pick up the recording of my conversation with Trey Bigelow and get it onto a couple of disks that would be stored in two separate locations.
I called Albany Med and learned that there was a Scott Hemmerer who was a patient in an orthopedic unit there, but I wasn't about to descend on him just yet.
Timmy called to check up on me, and I said, "I'm at the Comfort Inn in Colony. Would you mind coming out here for a few days? It's better if we stay away from the house, because I'm closing in on what's actually going on in this thing, and I have a bad feeling the Serbians are going to turn up again.
And this time they're going to really mean business."
"Oh please. Worse than your car and your ear?"
"You know how the Balkans are."
"I'm having dinner with Myron and some big donor he's reeling in. I can get to the motel around nine. But how did everything change so fast? I thought Louderbush had brilliantly checkmated you and McCloskey."
I described my visit with Trey Bigelow and his list of grotesque revelations.
"Are you surprised?"
"No. After Stiver died-or Louderbush killed him-the only thing that really changed with this guy was, he switched MOs.
Instead of seducing young academics, he began trolling online for down and out, low-IQ kids who were going to be even more malleable. He's got Bigelow now, and apparently there have been-and are-others. In one narrow but critical sense, it's Eliot Spitzer all over again. The compulsion, the hubris, the delusionary sense that he'll never get caught, and if he does he can somehow boogaloo his way out of it."
"But it doesn't sound as if Louderbush is going to end up with his own show on CNN."
"You never know. But this guy is not merely horny and hypocritical. He is deeply sick and deeply dangerous."
"He'd've made an interesting governor."
"Not gonna happen. I'm going to save the state of New York from Louderbush, and I'm going to save Louderbush from himself. Even in the unlikely event he ever got elected, he'd never last through the first year of his term. The guy is way, way out of control."
"He's not going to go gentle into the good night you have in mind for him, I'll bet."
"No, I'm counting on his staying in character, and I'll bet everything I've invested in this case that he will."
I was having a beer and a burger down the road from the motel around seven when Bud reached me on my-his cousin's-cell and said, "I have some interesting tidbits for you. The cyberwars are heating up. Can I bring these shiny nuggets to wherever you are?"
He closed the door to my room behind him at seven thirty, and we both sat on the edge of the bed while Bud opened his laptop and showed me what a fellow hacker had sent him: 229
Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson some hacked files from yet another hacker who had once stolen the "incredible babe" girlfriend of hacker number two and now was going to be made to pay for his treachery.
I said, "I'm just glad all you cyberhackers are good Americans, and none of you are working for Muammar Qaddafi or the Syrians or anything."
"No, we're all patriots at heart. What we do is as American as Hostess Fruit Pie."
"So, these files are what? The e-mail correspondence between who and who?"
"Between my hacked hacker colleague-let's call him Todd, since that's his name-who is known in the community for being totally bottom-line oriented-and a current client of his.
Plus of course e-mails from his client to other parties which Todd made a point of hacking into and then saving for a rainy day. Todd is a man who is always available to the highest bidder, and on top of his amorality, he's good. One of the most talented in the field. His client this time is a name you may or may not know. His name is Sam, and right there is his e-mail address."
"Sam."
"Sam has regular correspondence with men in high places, as you'll see." Bud clicked and scrolled this way and that.
"Now here's a note to Sam from Stanley Weaver, CEO at BravuraCorp, the-what? — third largest bank in the United States?"
"Third or fourth."
"Quote: If this nutcase Louderbush wins the Democratic primary, we are so so fucked. It'll be four years of McCloskey making life all but impossible for free enterprise to function.
Can't you do anything for Merle? We'll help out naturally. Jay Goshen says you're working on something for him."
"There's a reply?"
More scrolling. "Quote: Louderbush is a fag who beats up his boyfriends, and we're going to get this out. McCloskey has some clubfooted Albany PI working on it, and we're making sure his attention doesn't wander. This guy can't be bought, we've heard, but somebody who knows him told us how to keep him interested. i.e., push him around. I'm letting McCloskey's guy do the heavy lifting here, and then we'll sink McCloskey with some stories on how he's a dirty trickster unfit for office. Give me a week or two and Merle will be home free.'"
"I'm trying to remember who Jay Goshen is. Is he the head of Herkimer House or Trevalian Brothers? I know it's one of the big brokerage firms."
"Trevalian."
"How many of these Sam-to-Wall-Street e-mails are there?"
"Forty or fifty. Some of the other names that crop up-at least as copies-to-are CEOs and CFOs at just about every major Wall Street bank and brokerage and law firm."
"Law firms. Well. I'm trying to zero in on which particular mischief Sam is creating here that's actually illegal. The campaign laws are so loose that candidates can get away with just about anything short of armed robbery. Even embarrassment doesn't count for a lot these days. The electorate is too cynical to care."
Bud raised a wait-a-minute finger and clicked and scrolled around some more.
"How familiar are you with the town of Hummerston, New Jersey?"
"I grew up in Jersey. But I've just barely heard of Hummerston."
"It's off Interstate 80 about thirty miles west of the G-W bridge. In recent years the town has built up a sizeable Serb community. Mostly people fed up with the racist, right-wing government in Serbia, but some, too, who are happy with the old Balkan ways of dealing with people with whom one disagrees. That is, rip their ears off, and so forth. Apparently these guys volunteered to help out the New Jersey state Republican organization, and Sam heard about them."
"Wow. Actual Serbians. Who'd have guessed?"
"You're lucky, Strachey. Those guys who went after you in the Outback parking lot didn't lop your ear off and make you eat it."
"No, they were under instructions to spur me on, not frighten me off. Somebody who knows me told Sam this is how I would respond to harassment. I wonder who. Any indication in any of this as to who that might ha
ve been?"
"No, but I'm still working on collecting voice mails. That particular morsel could be buried in there somewhere."
"So Sam hired these bad Serbians to rough me up? There are e-mails to that effect?"
"Just generalities. My guess is, Sam told them to do what they had to do to get the job done but what the limits were this would have been done by phone-and then the e-mails 232
Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson were just to set the operation in motion and confirm that such-and-such had been carried out. You'll see the oblique and possibly coded language. A lot of it's in broken English, but some borders on literate. There's one guy who seems to use an alias, John Jameson."
"Do you have some other names and addresses in Hummerston?"
"I do. There's a night club called Belgrade Grotto. Liquor and coke-and dancing, both folk and pole. These fellows appear to own it. It's their Bada Bing club."
"I'd like to download all this and have it available to me as I continue to carry out my duties for the McCloskey campaign."
"I brought you four disks, each identical, with this material on each one. I've also included two CDs of your interview with the unfortunate Trey Bigelow."
"Thank you, Bud. There's lots of good reading here to keep me spellbound into the night."
He smiled at me with quiet satisfaction, his dark eyes bright with pride.
I said, "Most of what you do is against the law, isn't it?"
"Do you really want to get into that? Your own qualms and so forth? Okay. Sure. I'm a fucking archcriminal, no doubt about it."
"You don't worry about being prosecuted and being sent to prison?"
"Oh, yeah, I do. Prison sucks, I'm sure. But I pick and choose. I don't do military secrets, and I don't do Tom Cruise.
I know what everybody else in the community is doing, and I stick with that. It's okay. Everybody does it is a weak moral argument, I know. But law enforcement goes along. Cops have better things to do, like terrorism and clubbing persons of the colored races for backtalk. Once in a while some doofus-y kid hacker fucks up a country's banking records or whatever. He's immediately clapped in irons, and I understand that. I don't want my bank statements arriving in my mailbox in Burmese any more than you do. But basically all a hacker has to do to remain at large is, don't do sabotage. I'll concede that political dirty tricks, so-called, can be a problematical area. But in this case I'm going to turn the raw material over to you, and it's going to be your set of practical and ethical quandaries from then on."
"How did you get into this line of work, Bud? Where did you study?"
"I went to Simon's Rock, but my gift for electronic information gathering may be genetic. I'm half Ethiopian and half Greek, and my Ethiopian mother was a spy for the anti-Mengistu coalition during the Marxist reign of terror after the monarchy was overthrown in 1973. She worked for the State Bank of Ethiopia, and she provided data on the regime's finances for the Tigreans and the Eritreans and for the CIA.
My father's parents had a restaurant in Addis Ababa, but in those disastrous years nobody could afford to eat in it, so they got out and went to Greece.
"At some point in '81, Mom realized she was being watched and had probably been found out and was likely going to be arrested and shot. So my parents got out of bed one night and disguised themselves as peasants and commenced to walk to Khartoum, six hundred miles away.
They nearly died from starvation and exposure and exhaustion, but they made it. My Uncle Getachew took the same route a month later. Thanks to a Baptist Church organization, they all ended up in Washington, where my parents now work for the Marriott Corporation. I was born in 1985 and my sister Yarukanesh two years later. She's quite respectable. Went to Brown and is a research scientist at the NIH. Don, what do you think? Am I unworthy of that amazing family history? Should I be embarrassed?"
"No, I think you just like living on the edge. You've found your own dangerous way of living among secrets."
He nodded. "I think you got me on that one."
"But aren't there less morally ambiguous ways of living this kind of life?"
"Like what?"
"I don't know. Cybersecurity?"
"What? For banks? For Wall Street greed pits?"
"What about antiterrorism? That's not so morally unclear."
"No, not usually. I could actually see myself doing that under the right circumstances. If antiterrorism meant more than just the police work end of it. Anyway, are you really the man to be lecturing me on questions of professional moral ambiguity? I know as much about the way you operate as you know about me, don't forget."
I thought about that. "I'm not sure what my excuse is. My mother only walked as far as Safeway. Generally of course she drove."
"There you go. You stand naked in your casual means-to-an-end-ism."
"God, Bud, you sound just like my boyfriend."
"Well, you were starting to sound just like my girlfriend."
"Then I'll stop. One more question, though, about these files. Is the Sam who is so busy behind the scenes orchestrating the election outcome for the Wall Street titans a man named Sam Krupa?"
"Yes, his name comes up in a couple of spots. My sense was that he was trying to keep his last name out of it. But some of the CEOs on a few occasions do refer to his full name. Who is that? The name sounds familiar."
"Years ago he was a political dirty trickster for Richard Nixon. More recently, he's believed by the political cognoscenti to be the man who-working for the same Wall Street gang trying to control the current gubernatorial election outcome-brought about the downfall of the bankers' archenemy, the crusading reformer Eliot Spitzer.
Chapter Twenty-eight
I left word on Timmy's voice mail that I would be out late.
I said I'd leave a key card for my motel room at the front desk, and he should come on in and not wait up for me.
I drove over to Staples and bought four large padded envelopes. Then to Target for a cheap wash cloth. At ampm, I bought a bottle of Snapple iced tea, then went into the men's room and flushed the contents-way too sweet for me-down the toilet. When I topped off my rented Honda's tank, I also filled the Snapple jar with gasoline and capped it. Something was missing, so I went back inside and asked for some matches with the pack of Lucky Strikes I purchased, and then tossed the cigarettes in the trash and kept the matches.
The Honda came equipped with an excellent Garmin GPS. I had looked up the address online, and I keyed in the Belgrade Grotto in Hummerston, New Jersey. The driving time was given as three hours, ten minutes.
I left Colonie at nine and was actually in Hummerston by eleven forty-five-traffic was light-and I drove in and out of the parking lot of the Belgrade Grotto. A few cars were still there, although it looked as if closing time was probably going to be twelve. Among the vehicles was a black Lincoln Navigator with a green dump sticker on a rear side window.
The club was a featureless single-story cinder block rectangle with a couple of blacked-out windows about seven feet up.
Some grotto.
I picked up a coffee at an all-night 7-Eleven and then sat in the car and sipped it and read the Hummerston Courier from cover to cover. The health department had warned Mikey's Eats about reusing its cooking oil more often than the department recommended, and the Tarantella twins had just turned three.
Just after one, I drove back over to Belgrade Grotto. All the cars were gone and the place was quiet. There were a couple of security lights blazing out in front, but the rear of the building was dark. I parked down the road at a disused gas station that had been turned into a used car lot. The place was deserted, so there was no chance anybody would be making an offer on my rented Honda in the next ten minutes.
I made my way in the darkness behind a muffler dealer and a porn shop back to the Belgrade Grotto. A few cars drove by out on the highway, but none slowed down or stopped.
The Grotto had a mailbox next to the road. I flipped it open and inserted an
envelope containing one of Bud's four disks. On the front of the envelope, I had written From Sam Krupa. Copy to USCIS, the immigration service. Handwriting?
Fingerprints? I didn't think either was going to be a problem in this particular situation.
A car approached and I sank back behind a portable sign that said KARAOKE THURSDAY. After the car went by, I made my way to the rear of the Grotto. I assembled my petrol bomb-a bottle of gasoline with a gas-soaked rag as a wick and then smashed a window just above my head with a steel bar that lay nearby. An alarm went off- whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop! I ignited the bomb and tossed it through the window, and it exploded with a frightful ka-bang!
I trotted back behind the porn and muffler shops to my car, tripping once but catching my balance, and got into the Honda and drove off.
By the time I hit the Garden State Parkway, I was no longer shaking, and after I got on the Thruway, with Albany a straight shot north, I stopped at a service area and left with a large bottle of cold water and a slice of pizza. The pizza smelled of gasoline, however, from my hands, and as I pulled back onto the highway I tossed it out the car window.
Littering! That, I was ashamed of, and I almost went back and picked up my garbage. But the pizza was biodegradable, after all, and I was bone tired.
Timmy stirred but didn't awaken when I came in at four thirty-five. I showered and crawled into the second bed in the room. I lay awake for fifteen or more minutes, and then I was far away from it all. **** Just after nine Wednesday morning, Timmy brought some coffee back to the room, and I woke up.
"Donald, I think I heard you when you came in. What time was it?"
"Late. After midnight."
"Where were you?"
"Making a mail delivery. Did you look at Bud's disk?" I had left a CD and a note for Timmy suggesting he examine the contents on my laptop.
"It's all incredible. Except it's not. They're the same people who brought Eliot Spitzer down. They're monstrous. They destroyed the US economy with their recklessness, and they're so morally bankrupt-or in such total denial-that they can't stand the idea of mending their greedy ways and abiding by regulations meant to protect ordinary investors and promote even a semblance of economic justice. And Sam Krupa, that evil old Republican troll! Wouldn't you just know."
Red White and Black and Blue ds-12 Page 17
