Heart of a Killer (18 page)

He nodded. “Without a doubt. And they should; at that point there would be a life to save.”

“Would they stand by, passively, while she took her own life? Maybe with her daughter already there, prepped for the transplant?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “That’s coming too close to the line.” Then he laughed. “Although Bud Jenkins probably would.”

“Who’s Bud Jenkins?”

My mother answered the question. “He’s a colleague of your father’s, a heart surgeon, very talented. But very opinionated.”

My parents thinking someone else was opinionated was chock-full of its own ironies, but I avoided pointing them out. The rest of the dinner was fairly uneventful, actually borderline pleasant. I even let them order me a brandy that they described as their favorite, and which probably cost more than my monthly rent.

It was delicious, burning a very pleasant path straight down to my core. I ordered another, which my parents seemed to note with delight, as if the brandy was the long sought after tool they could use to transform me into someone of whom they could heartily approve.

I got up to leave before they were ready, mainly because if I stayed I would order another brandy and be too drunk to work and think about Sheryl’s case when I got home.

I apologized for my abrupt departure, and shook hands with my father and kissed my mother on the cheek. I said truthfully that I had work to do, and that I had to drive to the prison early in the morning to see my client.

“I’ll bet she’s always happy to see you,” my mother said. “She’s completely dependent on you.”

Her comment sort of stopped me in my tracks, and it took me a moment to answer. “In some ways I’m dependent on her,” I said. “Actually, I think I’m falling in love with her. Good night.”

I wish there was a way that I could have both left and heard the rest of their conversation. I’m sure they were stunned by what I said. Hell, I was stunned by what I said, and even more by the realization that it was true.

I was falling in love with my client, whose death I was trying to arrange.

Just another day at the office.

The only thing Sheryl was certain of was that she was not certain of anything.

That was what she told the prison chaplain when he came to see her, asking if she wanted to talk.

He nodded and smiled, as if that made perfect sense and was all part of some grand plan. “Certainty. That’s a tough one,” he said. He was probably younger than Sheryl, so she thought that being wise beyond his years wouldn’t be that difficult.

“What are you grappling with?” he asked.

“Two things,” she said. “I don’t want to die, and I want my daughter to live. Not necessarily in that order.”

She felt some relief in showing her weakness and vacillation to this man. She felt it was safer doing so with him than with her mother, or Jamie Wagner. She didn’t want them to hone in on it, feeding her doubts and pressuring her to change her mind. Because she wasn’t going to change her mind, no matter what anyone said.

They talked some more, and Sheryl admitted that she had put herself in this position. “I’ve made bad choices in my life,” she said. “Pretty much every one I’ve ever made was wrong.” Which of course, led to an ironic question, which he asked.

“If you are so poor at making choices, what makes you think that this one is right?”

She wouldn’t answer that, couldn’t answer that, and extricated herself from the conversation. But after he left she thought about how she had never really believed in God, never thought much about the concept either way. But some really smart people, much smarter than her, did.

She couldn’t really figure out where He would come down on it, though if He existed she guessed she’d know soon enough. She just figured that what she was going to do was good, and right, and if there was a God He’d probably approve of it for just those reasons.

Of course, if there was a God, He just demonstrated a hell of a sense of humor in sending Jamie Wagner. He was everything Sheryl never wanted, everything she always scorned. A Harvard guy, rich family, probably went to operas and played touch football at family outings in Connecticut.

But scorning didn’t seem to cut it anymore, or get her anywhere she wanted to be. She liked him; he was funny and smart and he understood her. She even thought she understood him, and she liked to keep him off balance.

He made her feel like she hadn’t felt since high school, or maybe ever. And maybe it was just a coincidence that he showed up, or maybe God had sent him to test her, or just play with her mind a little.

That God must be a funny guy.

The meeting was held at 8:00
A.M.
at the Department of Homeland Security. Present were the directors of both Homeland Security and the FBI, the White House chief of staff, a total of nine staff members under those three men, and Mike Janssen.

Janssen hated attending meetings like this; he would much prefer to have been video-conferenced in, since by definition coming to Washington was taking time away from doing his job.

The reason he came was that not being present in the room would make his job harder. Janssen felt that stupid decisions often came out of meetings among panicked people, especially those not out in the field. He saw himself as a counterbalance, someone who could bring reason to the process.

Reason-bringing, in Janssen’s experience, was far more effective when done in person. It was a dynamic that Janssen couldn’t fully explain, but which he had seen time and again. Someone physically present in the room had far more influence over the process than someone brought in through technology.

Since he was the one that was going to have to live with the decisions that were made, it seemed easily worth his time to make the trip to Washington. And the traveling itself was not exactly a major inconvenience; an Air Force jet was dispatched to bring him to Reagan International, from where a helicopter brought him to the meeting.

It was left to Janssen to bring everyone up to date on the investigation’s progress, which he was unfortunately able to do in a brief presentation. “We’re nowhere,” is how he candidly began, much to the consternation of his direct boss, FBI director Edgar Barone.

“We have conclusively determined that the voice has gone through a synthesizer, but common sense told us that anyway. We have traced each call, but not only has the caller successfully hidden his tracks, he has sent us on a wild-goose chase to places from which the calls did not originate.

“In both cases, the plane and the amusement ride, the perpetrators have penetrated the computer systems that operated them. They were essentially hacked into, but in an ingenious way that gave the hackers total control. Our experts think it is possible that the control could have been regained, but not nearly within the time frame we were given. In fact, as you know, we were given no time at all on the amusement park ride; we didn’t know the target until it was hit.”

The White House chief of staff was the first to interrupt. “So they’re demanding money, and then not giving anyone an opportunity to pay.”

Janssen nodded. “That’s one of the many puzzling aspects of this. My view on it, and psy-ops agrees, is that they’re demonstrating their power and their ruthlessness. Probably setting us up for the big one.”

The Homeland Security director asked, “And what might that be?”

“There is absolutely no way to know that, and the possibilities are limitless. When it comes to computer crime of this type, it’s fair to say that the United States is a target-rich environment. The country is run by computers. All of our mass transit, many of our weapons systems, our dams, power plants of all kinds, you name it.”

Everyone in the room was stunned by the implications of this statement, even though they had all been briefed on most of this before the meeting. The Homeland Security director then took the floor, and outlined emergency measures that were already being taken to ensure security of computer systems throughout the country, starting with what were considered the most vulnerable, and most devastating if compromised, targets.

“As I’m sure you understand, a project of this magnitude can take months, if not years. Even then, our cyber-security people tell us there’s no guarantee that we can effectively stop them, even on a system that we recheck. These guys are beyond good, and if they’ve penetrated a system, they could most likely stay hidden in there as long as they want.”

Janssen nodded. “They could have been preparing this for years, and they can sit back now and hit us wherever and whenever they choose. And make no mistake, they will hit us again. I understand that we need to play defense, to make the systems as secure as possible, but if we’re going to stop them, it will be by catching them.”

“And we have no suspects?”

Janssen shook his head. “No. We’ve been identifying and investigating everybody we can find that is known to have extraordinary capabilities in this area. But while probably less than half the people in this country can point to North America on a map, computer geniuses are on every street corner.”

Until that point the meeting was just a briefing; law enforcement and security efforts were already well under way, and not waiting for any decisions to be made by this group. The real purpose of the gathering was to contemplate a key decision, how to deal with the public.

This was the White House chief of staff’s area, because this was a presidential decision. Until that point the public was in the dark. While there was rampant speculation that the airplane crash was a terrorist incident, it had not been confirmed by anybody of authority. The amusement ride was viewed as a tragic accident, and the two tragedies were not considered connected by the public.

As the conversation began, Janssen could smell the whiff of politics in the air. He jumped in, though he was not expected to; this was definitely not his domain or responsibility. “You need to tell people,” he said. “They have a right to know, and to protect themselves as best they can.”

The Homeland Security director said, “Protect themselves against what? We can’t even tell them where the danger is. How can they protect themselves?”

“Let me ask you something,” Janssen said. “Are you going to put your son on a plane this week to go down to Florida and visit Grandma? Of course not, because as little as we know, you’re in on it, so you know better.”

The chief of staff said, “The country will grind to a halt. It would do more damage to the economic underpinnings of this country than fifty terrorist attacks.”

Janssen nodded. “I’m sure the people on that plane gave a major shit about economic underpinnings.”

“That’s bullshit, Janssen. If the economy goes in the tank, people suffer. They lose their jobs, and they can’t pay for heat, and they can’t feed their families, and they can’t go to doctors, and some of them die.”

“But it’s their decision,” Janssen said. “We are their government, not their parents. And there is something else to consider. If we go public with this, we’ll have three hundred million pairs of eyes looking for the bad guys. We’ve got no tips coming in; if we spread this word we’ll be swimming in them. It would increase our chances of catching the bad guys a hundredfold.”

The meeting continued for another half hour, but the main points had been made. The chief of staff said that all views would be presented to the president, who would make the decision. He then pointedly added, “Which we will all support.”

It was almost two o’clock in the afternoon before Janssen got back to his office, and by then he decided that not only had he accomplished nothing, but he had been wrong.

Video-conferencing would have worked just as well.

The good news was that Novack knew what he was looking for … hackers. He had thought as much from his investigation of William Beverly and his brother. It seemed certain that those people, as well as the others whose IDs Charlie Harrison had in the safe-deposit box, never existed. The police department experts in the field agreed that only tremendously accomplished hackers could have pulled off such a feat.

But those hackers had stepped it up a terrifying notch with the attempt on Novack’s life. They had hacked into his car, and nearly succeeded in turning it into a murder weapon.

Novack asked his computer fraud people for a list of everyone they ever had in their sights who might have the capability to pull off an operation like this. He realized that those names would be mostly in the metropolitan area, yet by its very nature the masterminds could be anywhere there was a computer and modem. They could have sent someone in to deal with Novack’s car; that by no means meant that the top person lived around there. He could be in Pakistan, for all Novack knew.

At that point, Novack had two things to go on, Charlie Harrison and Hennessey, the person Sheryl named as the real murderer.

There was no way that Charlie could have been the center of the operation, or crucial to it. If the people employing Charlie needed him, they wouldn’t have killed him off.

There could be ten Charlies, or a hundred, or a thousand, spread out like a virus across the country. There was no way to know, and putting out the word looking for similar crimes would be unlikely to yield positive results. Entities like insurance companies that had paid off on these kinds of bogus claims would be unaware that they were swindled; surely no one had any idea that the beneficiary they paid money to did not really exist.

Hennessey provided more opportunities for Novack to go after. Assuming Sheryl was telling the truth, and every instinct Novack had made him believe she was, then Hennessey was also probably an employee of the people behind this. He seemed more like traditional muscle, the type that the hackers would have relied on for their more conventional needs. He would be the means by which they would avoid getting their hands dirty.

Novack and Captain Donovan considered going to the FBI with the information they had accumulated, but decided to hold off for the time being. They had very little concrete to go on, and the Bureau would at that point be likely to shrug them off. Either that, or move in on their case, claiming it was their domain under the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution. Both of those results were unacceptable, so Donovan rejected the idea.