Goldman was sitting in a yellow plastic booth, looking at his watch, when Rosenberg arrived. His usually bland, genial features had a harder set.
“Glad you could make it,” the lawyer said frostily. “We have less than thirty minutes until the system crashes. Twenty-seven, no, twenty-six minutes.”
Rosenberg shrugged. “I’m here. What’s the drill?”
“You remember the script?”
Rosenberg yawned. “Of course. Unless you changed it in the last two days.”
“Play it back.”
“The heat sensor glitches and says the floor is much colder than it actually is. The cooling eases up. The data-recovery servers get hot. One of the server racks on the third floor gets fried. Emergency service alarm. I’m on call. Poof! I go to the third floor where the trouble is, and while I am ‘fixing’ things, I stick the drive into a port in the server stack. Assuming I get in the door.”
“I have credentials for you. You’re Joseph Zelwig. You’re on the four p.m. shift, normally, but this morning you’re on call for emergencies.”
“Okay. I guess. This feels more like burglary than computer science.”
“Focus, Jake. This isn’t the time to discover your conscience.”
Goldman handed the goateed engineer a Data-Save identification card, and then gave him a black plastic device that was hot to the touch.
“Put this in your pocket when you go through the portal. It will neutralize the electronic security.”
“So you say, but it’s my ass.”
Rosenberg was sweating. He wiped his brow with the sleeve of his sweatshirt.
“What about the data-port lock?” asked Rosenberg.
Goldman handed him a small key with four tiny teeth that fit the plastic caps that covered the USB ports in the server farm.
“Calm down, Jake. It’s all cool.”
“Show me the map of the servers.”
Goldman removed a four-page document from his briefcase and handed it to Rosenberg.
“It’s on page two. Just like we rehearsed: Take the stairs. Wear your ID around your neck. Don’t ask directions. Your rack is on the third floor, aisle two-D. Floor three, two-Delta.”
Rosenberg studied the floor plan. He closed his eyes and recited the location from memory and handed the sheets back to Goldman.
“How do I exit? Remind me.”
“East door. Opposite side from where you entered. You forgot something in your car. You’re coming right back.”
“What about security cameras?”
“Forget about them. They will be wiped.”
“Shit,” said Rosenberg, shaking his head. Goldman looked at his watch.
“Move out, my friend. Now. Chop-chop.”
* * *
The alarm was already buzzing when Rosenberg entered the data center through the west door. He flashed the badge, but in the chaos people barely looked. Junior managers were gathered outside a conference room trying to reach senior managers.
People were cursing as they tried to reach colleagues or summon extra help. “Backup power activated!” shouted one of the managers. A woman wearing a Data-Save T-shirt kept repeating, “Check the sensors, check the sensors,” as if she didn’t believe the readings.
“This has never happened before,” said a man in a white shirt and tie, speaking loudly into a cell phone.
Rosenberg joined a queue of people heading upstairs. Others, in the confusion, were heading downstairs, away from the malfunction. When Rosenberg reached the third floor, he found people checking servers one by one. They knew the servers were failing, but they didn’t know why yet. “The floor is hot,” someone called out from a distant stack, but there was no response.
Rosenberg recalled the floor plan he had memorized a few minutes before, and headed to 3-G, then 2-F, then 2-E, and then he was at the designated stack, the lights still glowing and pulsing. The area nearby was empty. Most of the outages were a few dozen yards away, past the wall of black metal racks. He pulled up his hood and put on his plastic gloves.
Quickly, now. Quickly. Rosenberg found the control monitor for aisle 2-D. Using the key Goldman had provided, he unlocked the small plastic insert that blocked access to the computer’s USB ports. He looked left, then right. He heard footsteps in the next aisle over, coming his way. The beeps of the alarm system were getting louder.
Do it now, Rosenberg told himself.
He took the flash drive from his pocket and inserted it in the open USB port. He heard voices in his corridor now, coming his way. He left the drive in for a count of five seconds and then removed it.
Someone was calling to him. Rosenberg pretended not to hear as he moved away from the control monitor, but the call was insistent.
“Is this row down, too?” a woman was asking. She looked frantic. She was more flustered than he was. Rosenberg relaxed.
“No. I just checked,” he said. “They’re okay. I’m going to make sure about 2-C.”
“Okay, okay,” the woman said, continuing down the dark corridor lined on both sides by needy machines. “I’ll check 2-A.”
Rosenberg made his way back to the stairwell. He went up to the fourth floor, where the alarm buzzers weren’t ringing, and then walked deliberately around two sides of the building to the east wing, and descended the stairs to the east door.
“Wrong way, Charlie,” called out a man entering the data center, just as he was leaving.
“Be right back,” answered Rosenberg. “Forgot something in my car.”
He walked several hundred yards down Mt. Herman Avenue to a Wendy’s and called Goldman.
“Done,” he said.
“Good boy. Any feedback?”
Rosenberg laughed, letting the fear and tension go.
“People are so stupid, Tom. I mean, that’s the secret, right? It isn’t the electronics. It’s the fact that people are so goddamn stupid.”
39 Erie, Pennsylvania – June 2018
The wind raked the lakefront, bowing the trees on Presque Isle and rattling the empty, boarded-up storefronts downtown. A handsome new hotel and conference center capped the bayfront, and if you kept your eye on its towers and the fancy condos nearby, you might think nothing had changed from the days when Erie was one of the industrial diamonds of Lake Erie, along with Buffalo, Cleveland, and Toledo. But its manufacturing companies had mostly gone away. The big paper plant had closed, a planned steel mega-mill had never been built, and the electrical factory that once made locomotives and refrigerators had transferred production to Mexico. What was left was basically an insurance company, a university, and a lot of decent people who were too stubborn to move.
Dunne’s FBI-furnished apartment was in an old brick ten-story building on State Street. His rooms were on the eighth floor, overlooking the lake. The apartment was cheaply furnished like a motel suite and had the commercial tidiness of a recent maid’s visit. The room smelled of air freshener, not quite covering the musty odor left by a previous occupant. The refrigerator was empty, but a half-drunk bottle of vodka was nestled in the back of the freezer.
Dunne unpacked his suitcase and set up his computer. The FBI had given him his own portable Wi-Fi hotspot as part of its mobile phone package, but Dunne knew the Bureau would monitor it, so he had bought his own. He was tired, and he needed to relax. He put on a tweed jacket and a pair of jeans, and walked to a brewpub that he had noticed on the way in. Even though it was early summer, there was a chill in the air; Dunne turned up the collar of his coat and dug his hands into the pockets.
Inside, the bar was warm and noisy, filled mostly with students from the nearby university and by other drinkers who wanted craft beer instead of Budweiser. Dunne took a seat at the bar and ordered a pint of a local Belgian-style wheat beer called White Rascal.
“Cheers,” said Dunne, tipping his glass to a big bearded man to his right, and then to the left, to two women, each with a sleeve of tattoos. It was the bearded man, who had finished off several pints of amber ale and w
as starting another, who wanted to talk.
“This country is fucked up,” he said.
“I guess,” said Dunne. He preferred to talk about sports or movies, or nothing at all, when he was in a bar with strangers. But apparently that wasn’t to be.
“I’ll be honest with you,” said the bearded man in an unbidden, confidential voice, leaning unsteadily toward Dunne. “I voted for the president. Most people here did. ‘Make Erie great again,’ okay? This is the town that elected him, basically. You understand that, right? This is fucking ground zero.”
“I don’t think about politics much,” said Dunne.
“Well, then, listen to the voice of Erie, Pennsylvania, my friend. Blue-collar town, heart of the Rust Belt. The Democrats thought they owned Erie. But they spent their time kissing the asses of rich Mexicans and Chinese and all that.” He burped.
“Hey, friend, let’s chill. I’m from Pittsburgh. I voted for the president. But my only politics right now is beer. Is that cool?”
“Listen, man. It’s all cool. But you didn’t let me get to the punch line.” He took a massive swig of the amber ale, which dribbled down the black hairs of his beard.
“Okay, what’s the punch line? Then I’m watching sports on TV.”
“The punch line, my friend, is that the president hasn’t done shit for Erie. It’s worse now than before. And you know why that is?” He burped again.
“No, man, why is that?”
The bearded man leaned toward Dunne. He had a nasty twinkle in his eye, like a kid who was about to drop a firecracker on a frightened dog to impress his buddies.
“Because the blacks and Jews and Mexicans won’t let him, that’s why.”
“Fuck you,” muttered Dunne. He tensed for a moment, fists clenched under the bar, but the big inebriated man slumped back into his chair, cackling. Dunne didn’t want to have to talk to the police. He picked up his beer and moved to the other end of the bar in front of a television set showing the Pirates game. The two tattooed women moved away, too.
“Racist prick,” called out one of them.
The bearded man rocked in his chair, trying to get out of it to do something, he didn’t seem sure what. Just then the manager came over and spoke quietly to him. He had a bushy beard, too, and seemed to know the loudmouth ale-drinker, addressing him as Al. The gist of the conversation was that Al needed to shut up or he would have to leave the bar.
Al ordered another beer, but the bartender said no, and he lurched out, cursing in every direction. The bar patrons ignored him.
Dunne listened to country music from the speakers near an empty dance floor, half watching the baseball game. The Bucs were losing. A Cleveland game was playing on another television down the bar, but for a Pittsburgh fan, watching the Pirates play badly was better than watching the Indians win.
* * *
Dunne awoke the next morning, showered, and then shaved for the first time in more than a week. When he was dressed, he arranged his workspace in the living room of the FBI flat: His computer sat on the small desk; beside it was a legal pad and a felt-tip pen; three phones, all with their location services turned off, were lined up on a side table; a pillow softened the hard back of the desk chair; a cup of coffee purchased at a café down the street stood unopened.
The orderly workspace reminded him of his old desk on the third floor in Arlington, in the brief period before the walls fell in. He thought to himself: I want to go home.
Dunne took from his backpack a photograph of his daughter Luisa when she was three. He put it behind his computer. He had another photograph that he never displayed but always carried with him. It showed his ex-wife Alicia in Paris, just after they were married.
Dunne placed the photograph of his former wife on a windowsill above the desk. He put his head down on the desk and let himself think.
* * *
Dunne had been working at his desk for an hour when a cell phone began to ring. It was the one the FBI had given him as part of his informant identity. He didn’t want to talk to anyone, and he was going to let the call roll over to voice mail, but that had problems, too. At the last minute, he answered.
“This is Bogdanovich,” said a gruff voice. “Thought I should check in.”
“What’s up, Rick?” asked Dunne. It couldn’t be good.
“I received a message from your old boss this morning. George Strafe. He said you were in trouble. The Chinese were coming after you. Some stunt you pulled in Taiwan, he said. He wanted to know where you were.”
Dunne took a deep breath. He wondered how quickly he could get across the Canadian border if he needed to.
“What did you tell him?”
“I didn’t tell him shit. I never trusted Strafe. He illustrates why FBI agents don’t like CIA officers. The CIA lies for a living.”
“Why did Strafe contact you, Rick?”
“He knows we’re friends. From way back. He said he’d heard you’d moved to Pittsburgh, after you got out of prison. He wondered if we were in touch. I told him you’d stopped by to say hello, but that was it.”
“Thank you. And you’re right about Strafe. He’s untrustworthy.”
“You are in some serious shit, my friend. I don’t know what’s going on, but it scares me.”
“I know,” said Dunne. “I’m working on it.”
* * *
The essence of Dunne’s plan was simple: Even as he was running away from his adversaries, he would run toward them. “Active defense” was his new vocation, and it was the kernel of what he needed to do now. If he waited in hiding, hoping to escape detection, they would eventually find and destroy him. If he made himself visible, he became a target himself but also gained the initiative and the opportunity for surprise. The hunter might appear to have control, but not if the prey was armed and prepared.
As Dunne considered the vulnerabilities of the team arrayed against him, the personality that surprised him most was Adrian White. He had regarded White as someone like himself, a member of the CIA’s blue-collar workforce, a man who like Dunne had a modest chip on his shoulder, but who focused on doing his job rather than taking credit for it.
How had White fallen into the orbit of a group of liars and manipulators whose primary mission seemed to be personal and collective enrichment? And how long had he been a knowing adversary? Had White been manipulating Dunne in Geneva, steering him toward the dance club and the seductress who tempted him? Had he laid a path of entrapment in Urbino, counting on Dunne’s loyalty to his superiors?
White was clever and self-interested, but he wasn’t a venal, calculating man. This vestige of decency might make him pliable.
Dunne scratched some ideas on his pad, barely legible even to him. His advantage was that his adversaries really wanted to find him. In their eagerness, they would make mistakes. He spent several hours assembling the elements of the operation in his mind and on paper.
He grew tired and restless, the plan not quite settled, so he took a run along the lakeside. His eyes caught the splash as the water broke against the sandy bank and scanned the spread of the thickening summer foliage, whose limbs and leafy branches began to cover the inlets and nooks.
Dunne’s mind wandered to the spots where his dad took him fishing when he was a boy, trailering their little boat up to Lake Erie or renting a bigger craft lakeside, loitering in the coves and shallow bays waiting for smallmouth bass and the occasional rainbow trout. Once the fish were hooked, his father would reach out with his net, and they were soon gutted and on the grill, and his father would pop open the first of too many cans of beer.
* * *
Dunne packed his phones and laptop in a backpack and retrieved his Ford Explorer from a pay-parking lot. He drove east for five minutes, then north toward the lake, to make sure that he was clean, and then headed west on I-90 for two hours to the Cleveland airport. He parked at the short-term lot, turned on the location services for his phones, and linked his laptop to the Wi-Fi connection.
&
nbsp; Dunne had two old cell phone numbers for Adrian White and two email addresses, one a classified agency account and the other a Gmail in-box. Through all four channels, he sent the same imploring, uncertain, enticingly vulnerable message:
Adrian: Bad things keep happening to me, and I don’t know why. Have you been double-dealing me? I thought you were my friend. Maybe you could meet me and get me out of this jam. Can I trust you?
When the messages were gone, Dunne turned off the location trackers and the hotspot and put the phones in a Faraday bag that would block signals, in or out.
Dunne had an inventory of items he needed to gather quickly, on the fly. He drove back to Erie by a different route, moving east along I-80 and then turning north to Meadville. He visited the local college theater to ask if they had any old disguises for sale: wigs, prostheses, tummy pads. The manager sent him down the road to a community theater that had been in business for nearly a century. They were happy to part with some of their dusty props, especially to someone who paid cash.
Dunne stopped at a Costco just outside town and bought some supplies. The clerk looked at the unusual array in the basket.
“Big project?” asked the clerk.
“Repairing some damage,” answered Dunne. Before he left Meadville, he took one of the phones from the Faraday bag and used it to search for cabins near Niagara Falls. He called a small, remote spot and booked a cabin for the following night.
* * *
Adrian White responded that evening: He texted just after ten p.m., to the burner phone Dunne had used.
I can meet you tomorrow. Tell me where. I think I can help.
Dunne hadn’t hated Adrian White before, but he did now as he read those deceptive words. White and his friends thought they were setting a trap, but they were entering ground they didn’t control.
Dunne answered carefully. He drove to Conneaut, just over the Ohio border, and, an hour later, sent his response using a second prepaid cellular phone, this one with a 415 area code, which he had purchased on his stopover in San Francisco.
The Paladin Page 25
