Deadline (10 page)

“Mrs. Gushue, why don’t I come see you tomorrow and we can have a chat,” said Jack. “I’ll tell you what I know about the case. It might help you decide whether you should contact the police.”

“I don’t want my name in the paper.”

“No ma’am,” said Jack. “I promise not to put your name in the paper.”

“All right then,” she said. “Call me tomorrow morning and see if I’ll have time to meet you in the afternoon.”

As soon as he hung up, Ed’s phone rang again.

“Hello,” said a man’s voice on the other end of the line. “Who’s speaking, please?”

“Why?” Jack said. “Who’s this?”

“This is Senior Agent Thomas Endicott of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service,” the man said. “I am investigating the disappearance of a BlackBerry belonging to the Government of Canada. This is a national security investigation. Please identify yourself.”

Jack stammered, suddenly uneasy. He stalled. “Why don’t you give me your switchboard number, so I can be sure I know who I’m talking to.”

“Sir, this is not a game,” said Endicott. “Please identify yourself immediately. You are in possession of a cell phone that is at the subject of a national security investigation. You need to identify yourself and arrange to hand it over to one of our agents in the area immediately. If you fail to co-operate, you are liable to prosecution under the anti-terror provisions of the Security of Information Act. It carries serious penalties – we’re talking about prison time – for obstructing a national security investigation. I ask you again to identify yourself and confirm your location.”

Jack swallowed.

“I ask you again, how do I know you’re a CSIS agent?” he said. “I think the Ottawa Police Service might want this BlackBerry. You can get it from them, can’t you?”

Endicott barked back. “Look, kid, this is not a game. Identify yourself, or the agents will arrest you instead of just taking the phone.”

Jack was confused. This didn’t make sense.

“I’m not telling you anything until I know who you are,” he said. “Why don’t you give me a CSIS switchboard number?”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“Look,” said Endicott. “Let’s try this again. Believe me, the last thing you want to do is face charges under the Security of Information Act. Please identify yourself and confirm your location.”

Jack stood at the urinal, looking up at the ceiling. There was a hole in the drywall, in the corner, where two walls met the ceiling. It looked as though somebody had cut it out to run a wire and had not bothered patching it.

“What do you mean, confirm my location?” he said. “Do you know my location? Are you tracking me?”

He looked at the phone. The screen said Unknown Caller. He could hear the voice talking still, but he had stopped listening. He flipped the phone over and took out the battery, cutting off the voice. He looked around him, his mind racing. Someone was coming for him, and he didn’t know who. He jammed the BlackBerry deep inside the hole by the ceiling, so that nobody would see it without a flashlight and a good reason to go poking around in a dirty hole, then sprinted upstairs into the bar. He caught the waitress’s eye, paid, and left. Once he was outside, he broke into a run.

Five minutes later, two middle-aged men entered the bar. One of them walked around the room, scanning all the customers, then followed the sign pointing downstairs to the bathroom. His companion sat at the bar and ordered a coke. He smiled at the waitress.

“Tell me, we were supposed to meet my friend here, but I think we got our wires crossed, and he might have left just before we got here. Did you see somebody leave about five minutes ago? I just was talking to him on his BlackBerry.”

“I’m sorry,” said the waitress. “Lots of people coming and going.”

Balfour got bored of watching the dot blinking, so he restarted the video, and left the tracking map open in another window. When it stopped blinking, he shut down the porn, checked the time of the last ping, and sent another message.

To:
74X93B4


From:
58K42E6


Subject:
BB location


BlackBerry no longer transmitting. Last transmission at 8:47 p.m.


As soon as he sent it, he got a call.

“We lost him,” said the voice. “It looks like he turned the phone off. I’ve been thinking about this, and I think it’s likely that the suspect has a second BlackBerry or some kind of mobile phone. Can you write a program that would match up the known movements of this phone with other phones that were in the vicinity at the same time?”

Balfour leaned back in his chair and thought about it.

“Hello?” said the voice.

“I’m thinking,” he said. “You’re talking about a co-location phone. That makes sense. It should be possible to find him that way. We can go through the raw feeds from the transmission receivers for the past 24 hours. It might take a while, but it should be possible.”

“Well, you get on it, and message me as soon as you get anywhere,” said the voice.

“Roger that,” said Balfour.

He set to work, drilling down through the tracking program to the raw data feeds from the transmission towers that handled the signal from the BlackBerry over the previous 24 hours. It took some doing, but he was able to download massive database files.

He wrote some code for a database program and ordered it to search for other phones that were present that appeared more than once in the files. The program whirred quietly for a moment, then spat out a list of 3,276 numbers.

Balfour cursed and sat up in his chair. His mind set to work. If there were hundreds of thousands of numbers in his lists, then thousands of them would be doubled. Some people who worked in Centretown during the day lived in Hull, or went there for dinner, so it was natural that there would be some overlap. He needed to separate the wheat from the chaff, but if he only looked for numbers that matched all the transmission towers, he could easily miss the right phone.

He’d have to figure out a way to order them by signal strength, so that only those phones that were in close proximity to the missing BlackBerry would show as matches.

He picked up his BlackBerry and sent a PIN.

To:
74X93B4


From:
58K42E6


Subject:
This could take a while


I’m doing everything I can. Will let you know as soon as I have a match.


As Jack ran down Murray Street, toward King Edward and his apartment in Sandy Hill, he realized that he was making himself stand out and slowed to a brisk walk. He suddenly felt alone on the near-empty street, so he turned left onto a side street, doubled back, crossed Dalhousie, and walked up to Rideau, where there were always people about. He wandered toward Sussex Street, lost in the crowd, and tried to work out what had just happened.

Somebody badly wanted to get their hands on Ed Sawatski’s BlackBerry. It wasn’t the police, and Jack doubted very much that it was CSIS. As a reporter, he had occasionally called sources back through a switchboard to confirm they were who they said they were, and officials always agreed to that as a security measure.

Whoever it was, they seemed to have the tools to track Sawatski’s cell phone, which would make them cops, or the phone company. But it wasn’t the cops. And maybe the guy was just bluffing, trying to convince him to cough up a name and his location because that was the only way they could get a line on the thing.

His mind spun in circles as he tried to figure out who would want the BlackBerry. Ed’s boss, Jim Donahoe? The Ministry of Justice surely wouldn’t like having one of its cell phones go astray, and it might have secret stuff on it, but they would likely just ask the police to find it. And the police would likely just ask him if he had it. Flanagan hadn’t even done that. It seemed unlikely that they would not bother to ask and then suddenly try cloak and dagger stuff.

It occurred to him that the Liberals would enjoy looking at a smart phone full of emails to and from an aide to the justice minister, but Pinsent’s shop barely seemed able to get their leader to give a coherent speech, much less run phone-snatching operations.

In any case, it didn’t matter much. Jack resolved that in the morning he would tell Flanagan where he had left the BlackBerry and he would let the cops worry about it.

He started when his own phone rang. It was Sophie.

“Hi Jack,” she said. “I just wanted to hear a friendly voice. The Sawatskis are with Ed now and it’s so depressing. His mother keeps crying and whispering to him and he’s just staring at the ceiling, and his dad just keeps patting his hand.”

“Lord Jesus,” said Jack. “I can’t believe this is happening. Do you want me to come down there now?”

“No,” said Sophie. “I think I’m going to go home soon. The Sawatskis are going to sit up with him, but I think I should go into the office tomorrow, so I should try to get some sleep.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” said Jack.

“Um, I was wondering, though,” she said. “Do you have any idea what happened to Ed’s BlackBerry?”

“No,” said Jack, lying without thinking. “I don’t. As far as I remember he had it when I saw him last. But, God, we were so drunk. I wish I could tell you more. How are you? Is someone going to stay with you?”

“No. Marie-Hélène offered, but I think I’ll be okay.”

“Call me later. I could pop by. It’s not far. I’m worried about you.”

Rupert Knowles, principal secretary to the prime minister, sat in his office on the third floor of the Langevin Building, fiddling with the remote control in his hand. He had an image frozen on the 40-inch TV next to the door of Greg Mowat’s face at the moment he stopped walking and turned to Ellen Simms earlier that day. Mowat wore a poised, serene look, like a pastor about to begin a sermon. He hit play, and Mowat started to talk.

“If we’re discussing Mr. Stevens’s resignation, the first thing we should do is look at what he’s done for the country,” said Mowat. “Under his leadership we have run a scandal-free government. We’ve cut taxes, rebuilt the military, got tough on criminals, managed the economy through a very challenging time, and made life better for Canadian families. I’m very proud to have worked for Mr. Stevens. He is an inspiration to us, personally and professionally. If he has, as you say, decided to step down, I think this is a good time to reflect on all he has done for the country, and not a time for personal ambition.”

Knowles hit rewind, went back to the beginning, and froze the screen again at the moment when Mowat’s face took on the expression of pleasant anticipation. He stared for it a moment longer and went to the office door.

“Suzanne,” he said to the middle-aged receptionist he shared with the prime minister. “Could you ask Ismael to come in for a moment?”

He sat down and waited for Balusi, staring at the screen.

“Hey,” said Balusi, as he entered. “What’s up?”

Knowles gestured to the screen. “I want to ask your opinion about something. Sit down.” He nodded to the couch against the wall.