False Witness (49 page)

She dialed her brother's number in northern Georgia and before long had a nice little family squabble going. She made a face at Drew to show her embarrassment, put her hand over the phone, and told Drew she'd be right back, that she just needed a little privacy. She walked around the corner, ended the call, and accessed Drew's call history. She scribbled down the numbers, dates, and times, then meandered back to where Drew waited patiently.

Twenty minutes later, they followed a waiter through a maze of other patrons, winding their way to a small table in the back, next to a wall lined with mirrors. It wasn't exactly the intimate atmosphere Jamie had planned for this meeting. The ambient noise level seemed just below a dull roar, with the clanging of dishes, background music, and conversation buzz from other tables making it hard to talk at normal levels. Plus, the tables on each side were so close that Jamie could have reached out and held hands with her fellow diners.

Copeland's Cheesecake Bistro knew how to pack them in.

Jamie picked at her food and dodged Drew's “Are you okay?” questions until the waiter had cleared away the main course. She waited for one more “Are you
sure
you're okay?” inquiry before she started her cross-examination.

“I just can't stop thinking about the way the triads used that jamming device as an explosive,” she said. “It's hard to imagine that an explosive small enough to be implanted in somebody's neck could do that much damage.”

“It's those cop shows on TV,” Drew replied, his soft brown eyes watching Jamie intently. “Most people think you've got to be strapped with tons of explosives to blow up a building. The truth is, it only took twelve ounces of Semtex inside a terrorist's cassette recorder to blast Pan Am flight 103 out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland.”

“Still, it shows a level of sophistication,” Jamie said. She hesitated, played with her water glass for a moment, then looked straight across the table. “Wonder why they didn't check me for GPS devices. Wonder why they didn't use a jammer on me.”

She watched Drew carefully. The bedroom eyes—sexy, relaxed—glimmered slightly with apprehension.

“Good question,” he said. “They probably assumed that since they nabbed you unexpectedly in the middle of the day, you wouldn't be wired.”

He answered quickly, she noticed.
Too quickly?

“Didn't they capture Hoffman unexpectedly too?”

This time Drew hesitated. His thirst apparently called, and he took a sip of Coke. “Yeah. But he knew they were after him.”

“Another thing that's been bugging me is the kidnapping itself. It keeps coming back, replaying itself in my mind. I'd really forgotten all about it, probably suppressed it, until I tried to sleep that first night. Every time I closed my eyes, I was in that stairwell again.

“And the thing is, Drew, I distinctly remember pulling out my gun and firing two shots, right into the gut of the man who grabbed me from behind. But nothing happened.”

This time Drew tried a quizzical look. “You probably had the safety on. When you're under that kind of pressure, if it's not habit, you don't usually remember things like not releasing the safety.”

“I thought about that possibility. But I distinctly remember squeezing the trigger. It clicked back. Would it do that with the safety on?”

“No,” Drew admitted, “probably not. But you don't always remember things right when you're under that kind of stress.”

Jamie took a deep breath and leaned back in her chair. This was going exactly as she thought it would. Not the way she hoped, but definitely the way she expected.

“And so I called the Jacksonville coroner's office on Friday afternoon. At first, they just gave me the runaround. But I was very persistent. Told them I had been the victim in the kidnapping that resulted in three men being shot—one Russian guy and two others. Told them I worked for the district attorney's office in Gwinnett County, which isn't exactly true, but I did clerk there last summer. They finally told me what I knew they would say.”

She leaned into this next part. She watched the blood slowly drain from Jacobsen's face. He was good at conducting interrogations, but not so good on the receiving end. “There were no autopsies, Drew. No bodies. No three men killed. How does that add up? I thought autopsies were mandatory whenever the cops shot and killed somebody.”

In response, Drew just stared back. The bedroom eyes had run out of answers.

84

Jamie waited him out, a technique she had learned in trial practice class.
Do
not
speak when the witness is struggling to find an answer.

“What are you saying?” Drew eventually asked. He spoke softly, avoiding any hint of indignation.

“You know exactly what I'm saying.” Jamie felt the anger crawling up her spine, stiffening her neck, reddening her face. “The mob didn't kidnap me; the feds did. It was all a big setup, and you went along with it. My own government knocks me out, ties me down in the back of some truck, and then puts me in fear for my life.”

Jamie felt the tears stinging her eyes. Tears of anger. Frustration. She knew the importance of this algorithm, a national-security risk of enormous proportions, but what could possibly justify this? “My own government violates every constitutional right I have.” She paused, boring into him. “And they use someone who pretends to be my friend. For what? So you could bring Hoffman out of hiding? So the federal government could get its precious algorithm and start spying on other people's lives, violating more constitutional rights?”

Drew had his hand out now, palm down, trying to get Jamie to settle down. He looked around, obviously concerned about the eavesdroppers. “Jamie,” he said, his voice nearly a whisper, “it's not that way. Is that what you really think? Is that how you really feel?”

She laughed. Shook her head. “Like you really care how I feel.”

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“Sorry? That's it? A little remorse and it's all better? They killed my dog, Drew. Kidnapped me. And you're
sorry
?”

As her voice rose, Jamie's rant drew a sea of staring faces. Conversations at tables around her halted. Jamie didn't care.

Drew kept his voice low, his tone urgent. “Jamie, we didn't have anything to do with Snowball or the first time the mob came after you. That part was real. That's why we had to take action. This threat wasn't going away.”

She pushed away from the table and stood, aware that she had drawn a crowd of onlookers. “Good luck in the FBI, Drew. You should fit right in.”

She turned and stalked toward the door. Drew followed and quickly caught up with her, mumbling apologies, telling her she had it wrong. When she was outside, heading down the walkway toward the parking garage, he reached for her arm.

She shook it loose with a look of disdain. “Don't you
dare
touch me.”

“Jamie, I know you're upset. You're entitled to be. But listen to me, just for a minute.”

She crossed her arms, staring him down.
One minute. Clock's starting.

“I did this for you, Jamie . . .”

You're off to a bad start, buster.

“I cared about you. Worried about your safety. These guys play for keeps. This wasn't about bringing Hoffman out of hiding. It was about getting you out of harm's way.”

“Did it ever occur to you and your friends that you could just ask? That maybe I would have been fine with leaving the area for a few days? That maybe you didn't have to stage a kidnapping and put me in fear of rape—of
rape
, Drew, a woman's worst nightmare—before I might cooperate with you?”

With others milling about the sidewalk, Drew tried his softer tone again, always the cop, worried about who might overhear. “Okay, it was stupid. And yes, part of the motivation for the feds was getting Hoffman to play out his hand so they could get the algorithm. But that wasn't why I went along.

“Sure, maybe you would have gone away, Jamie, but for how long? A week? A month? A year? Don't you see—you would never have been out of danger until we busted these guys.”

“If that was the plan, why didn't you just ask me to go along? Why not let me in on the scam? After all, it was
my
kidnapping.”

Drew shook his head, his eyes pleading. “You would never have gone along. You would never have deceived your own client. The plan could only bring Hoffman into the open if he really thought the triad had captured you.”

She gave him a rueful smile. “No, you're right, Drew. I would
never
have betrayed someone that close to me.”

The comment rendered him speechless, as she knew it would. He took a deep breath and stared at the ground for a moment. “What are you going to do?” he asked gently.

“I haven't decided yet.”

This time, when he looked back at her, he had the look of a defeated man. His handsome face reflected a deep sadness, a regret that he couldn't possibly find the words to express. For the first time since she pieced her theory together, Jamie felt a tinge of sympathy.

“If you want to pursue this,” he said, “and file a lawsuit or disciplinary proceedings or whatever, I'll testify for you. Against myself, if I have to. I won't try to cover this up.”

To this, Jamie didn't respond. She would take it under advisement. “You'd better go back in there and pay.” She forced a thin smile. For now, she had finished venting. She was still furious of course, but what else was there to say?

Drew sighed deeply, brushed a hand through his hair, and focused somewhere past Jamie, at some distant spot on the sidewalk. “The day before the kidnapping, I found some pictures in an envelope on your car windshield. They were pictures of you—pumping gas, entering the law school, getting out of your car at home—and every one of them had your head in the center of thin red crosshairs.”

Jamie could see the tears building in his eyes as Drew faced her squarely. “I care about you, Jamie. I took the pictures to the FBI. They came up with the plan.”

His tears didn't melt her—she wasn't even sure they were real—but they softened her anger a little. The red flare of emotion had burned itself out, replaced by a smoldering frustration.

But her suspicions only grew.
“We didn't have anything to do with Snowball,”
Drew had said.
“That part was real.”
Maybe they didn't. And maybe those pictures were authentic as well—placed on her windshield by the mob rather than the FBI. She wanted to believe him, but she couldn't just take his word for it. He had already lied more times than she could count.

Whom could she trust in cases like this? Drew said he cared about her; therefore, he lied to her. It was all so very sad.

“I need to be going,” she said.

“Can I at least walk you to your car?”

“I'll be fine.”

“Can I call you sometime?”

Jamie thought about her watch. The GPS chip that Drew had allegedly planted there. The lies, the hurt, the fear he had put her through.

“Maybe I'll call you,” she said.

And they both knew it would never happen.

85

Wellington couldn't get enough church on Sunday. He went to the morning service. Then after lunch, he drove across the suburbs to the Hoffmans' funeral. Yet he still felt the need to be in the pew on Sunday night. After all he had been through, and given all he was facing in the coming week, he needed as much inspiration as he could get.

It hit him halfway through the Sunday night service. The answer came precisely the way he knew it would—a flash of insight when he was barely thinking about it. It had been blindingly simple all along.

The pastor was preaching from Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the Bible. One hundred seventy-six verses, to be precise. Wellington was seated in the third pew from the front, the fourth seat from the aisle, participating in the second worship service of the day.

Each set of five numbers in the algorithm is not a code; they're place markers.

The first number in each set—what was the range? He couldn't remember exactly, but it was pretty small, something like one through fifty or sixty. The ranges for the second and third numbers in the series were larger, if Wellington remembered correctly, something like one through about a hundred and fifty. But the fourth and fifth numbers in the series were small again, even smaller than the first number. He was pretty sure that none of the fifth numbers were larger than twenty.

He didn't have the code with him; in fact, he had hidden his hard copy in the middle of one of his two-hundred-page class outlines and had camouflaged the electronic version so deep in one of his computer files that nobody would ever find it. But Wellington knew without even looking that his hunch would prove correct. The first number represented the book of the Bible. The second number, the chapter. The third number, the verse. The fourth number, the word in that verse. And the fifth number, the letter in that word. The system could be versatile, kicking out either letters or numbers, even spelling out mathematical functions. And the Bible he had been given was important, not because of what verses might be underlined or what the margin notes might say, but simply because the decoder would need to know which particular translation to use.

He was antsy now, anxious to get home, pull out the Bible Stacie had given him, and plug in the letters and numbers. He tuned out the preacher and started leafing through his Bible looking for the longest verse, the longest word. He found a verse, Esther 8:9, that contained sixty-five words. He found a word, the name Maher-shalal-hash-baz, that contained eighteen letters.

This was it! He was sure. He started counting the minutes until the service ended. After the final praise song, he left the building as if it had caught fire. He hustled home, breaking the speed limit by an unprecedented ten miles per hour. He pulled out the encrypted math formula, cross-referenced the numbers against the Bible, and felt the air rush from his emotional balloon. Something still didn't make sense. Sometimes, this method would generate meaningful results, illuminating part of the formula. But on other sets of numbers, it just generated more gobbledygook. Frustrated, he rechecked his work, paying careful attention to the parts of the formula that remained a mystery. After fifty minutes of frustrating agony—so close but not quite there—it hit him! The reason for the underlining. One last twist from the brilliant mind of Professor Kumari.