Invasion of Privacy (8 page)

In his short time in Austin, Joe had adopted Threadgill’s on North Lamar as his home away from home. The restaurant was a local landmark built inside the shell of an old service station and dressed up in fancy paint and neon lights. Mary regretted suggesting meeting there as soon as the words left her mouth, but Don Bennett had agreed so quickly, she hadn’t had the time to change her mind.

She found Bennett waiting inside, dressed in a three-piece suit, stiff as ever, seated at one of the booths and playing with the jukebox that decorated the table. “What are we listening to?” she asked as she slid onto the leather banquette.

“Elvis.” Bennett dropped a quarter in the slot and thumbed a button. Elvis Presley began singing “Hound Dog.” “Wanna eat?”

“You have time?” said Mary, surprised. “I thought you’d need to get out to the crime scene.”

“That’s shut down.”

“So you figured out what happened?”

“I already told you.”

“You didn’t seem so sure last night.”

Bennett stared at her but said nothing. He appeared to have cut himself shaving.

“The informant shot Joe, and Joe shot him before he died,” she said. “You’re sticking to that story?”

“Those are the facts.”

Mary let it go for the moment. The waiter came and handed them menus. Mary put hers down. Threadgill’s stock-in-trade was down-home cooking: fried chicken, catfish, collard greens. She and Joe always ordered the same thing: chicken fried steak. She grabbed a biscuit out of the basket and spread a dollop of honey butter across it. It no longer mattered if she fit into the LBD.

Bennett set down his menu. “How can I help?” he asked.

“I’d like you to take a look at my phone,” said Mary. “If you’re still interested, that is.”

“That won’t be necessary,” answered Bennett.

“For you or for me? I’m asking a favor.”

“I can’t extend the Bureau’s services to a civilian.”

“I didn’t leave the message. My husband did—minutes before he was killed in the line of duty. I’d think you’d be damned interested.”

“I’m sorry, Mary, but the Bureau cannot assist you.”

“Cannot or will not?”

Bennett leaned closer. “Mary, your husband died twenty hours ago. The Bureau extends its condolences. I’m happy to talk to you about his final pay package, insurance, and all benefits due to you and your family. But that’s all. Now go home. Be with your daughters. Grieve.”

“You’re not telling me what happened,” Mary said.

“The incident is closed.”

Mary took the front page of the morning paper from her purse and unfolded it on the table, turning it so that it faced Bennett. “I looked at this for a long time. Right away I knew something was wrong, but it took me a while to figure out just what. You see, Don, you said the informant got in the car and neither of them got out. But look, there he is on the ground. Fine—I’ll let that go. Maybe a question of semantics, you picking the wrong words. But tell me this: when exactly did the informant shoot Joe? Was it when he was already outside the car? Did his first shot miss and take out the windshield, or did he fire again after Joe shot him? See all that blood on the sheet by his head? I’d say the informant’s first shot had to hit Joe, because he sure as shit didn’t shoot him after Joe shot him in the head. I’m asking because yesterday at the hospital, the surgeon, Dr. Alexander, said that Joe was shot point-blank and that the bullet severed his spinal cord. The informant isn’t anywhere near to point-blank, and Joe couldn’t have pulled the trigger once he was shot. Joe would have called that ‘a problem of chronology.’ So tell me again, Don, what happened out there?”

Bennett said nothing.

“I’m waiting,” Mary said.

“Please, Mary.”

“Don’t ‘please’ me.” Mary pushed her phone across the table. “Are you afraid of what you might hear?”

Bennett blinked, his eyes holding hers, avoiding the phone. “Anything else I can help you with?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Who exactly called 911? If Joe was all alone out there in Dripping Springs, it seems to me that no one would have
found him for hours. No backup, right? That’s what you said. But the EMTs got there twenty minutes after he was shot.”

“The investigation is closed.”

“Yours, maybe.”

Bennett rose from the booth. “Are we done here?”

“No,” said Mary. “Not by a long shot.”

Don Bennett, age forty-eight, twenty-three-year veteran of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, special agent in charge of the Austin residency, former navy corpsman, winner of the Bronze Star, veteran of the first Gulf War, rabid Cowboys fan, lover of Elvis Presley, and father of five, stood in the blazing sun, phone to his ear, asking himself what he was going to say.

It was a few minutes past one in the afternoon, and Bennett was drunk. He’d waited for Mary Grant to pull out of the lot, then marched back into the restaurant, ordered a Jack on the rocks, and drunk it down in a single draft. Then he did it again. The alcohol did little to quiet his mind. Mary Grant’s questions were his own, if more crudely put. He possessed information she did not. He had answers to her questions.
Some…not all
…but enough to trouble his obedient self.

Bennett gazed up at the sky. It was white with heat, the sun a blinding abstraction. He asked himself the question again, the question he knew his master would ask, and he had his answer. Bennett considered himself a fine judge of character. He recognized a fighter when he saw one. A scrapper. Mary Grant was the kind of person who did something just because you told her she couldn’t, the kind who’d continue even if it brought harm to herself. It was not the answer he desired, but it was the truth.

The phone rang a third time.

Bennett was a fighter, too, he reminded himself. A scrapper. He’d made it out of situations his brethren had not. Still, there were rules, and rules had to be followed. He believed in the chain of command and in obedience to your superiors. He’d built his life on doing as he was told. It was a successful life. A happy life. There was no reason to change now.

“Yes, Don,” his master answered.

“She’s asking questions.”

“You couldn’t convince her otherwise?”

“She doesn’t buy the official version. He called her before the incident. Apparently he knew something was up.”

“What did he say?”

“I’m not sure. He left her a message, but she deleted it. She asked for our help to retrieve it. I declined.”

“Best we didn’t know.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you keep your mouth shut?”

“I did.”

“Of course you did,” said his master. “You’re a reliable man, Don. I appreciate that.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“One last question…”

“Sir?”

“Will she be a bother?”

There it was. The question he’d seen coming. It would be easy to lie. But Don Bennett followed orders. He believed in the chain of command.

“Will she continue to ask questions?” his master repeated.

“Yes, sir. I believe she won’t stop until she finds out the truth.”

A lengthy pause followed. Bennett could sense his master’s anxiety, and it quickly became his own. “Sir?” said Bennett.

“That’s all, Don. Take the rest of the day off. See the family. Consider it an order.”

Bennett hung up.

There was truth and there was honor. He had never known them to war with each other.

It worked
.

Ian stood in the center of his office, feeling the perspiration dry on his forehead. His nerves were gratifyingly becalmed. His heart had stopped doing the quickstep. Titan’s cacophonous clatter was a distant memory.

“It worked.”

He turned over the words in his mouth like a piece of candy. The maximum internal temperature recorded at the peak of Titan’s frenzied, divinely ordered calculations—when each and every one of the machine’s 50,000 CPUs and GPUs had been pressed to their limit, straining to solve one of the world’s most complex equations, and in reaction generating their own “cybersweat” in the form of radiated heat—was 206° Fahrenheit, fifty degrees lower than previously measured.

Ian walked to his desk and sat down in his chair. He sat solemnly, aware of the occasion.

It worked
.

Two words that unlocked the future…
and might unlock the past
.

His assistant’s voice came over the speakerphone. “Mr. Briggs to see you. You have calls from Mr. Roarke in New York and from Ms. Taggart in Hollywood. You need to leave in fifteen minutes to make it to your meeting downtown.”

“I’ll roll the calls as soon as I’m on the road. Tell Briggs to give me five minutes.”

Briggs could wait. First Ian needed to share the news of his triumph.

He turned the chair slowly and gazed at the satchel in the corner of his office.

It was a black satchel, old, worn, the leather creased and scarred, but still sturdy. A satchel built to last, but then, so was the British Empire. A strap and a lock secured the case. Above the lock, the initials
PSP
were embossed in gold leaf. They’d found the satchel in the parking garage next to his father’s car.

After all these years, he thought, after the endless queries, the fruitless leads, after exploring shadowy path after shadowy path, all to no avail, just maybe there was a chance.

His eyes rose, catching a shadow. A man was standing next to the satchel. He was tall and upright, dressed in a navy chalk-stripe suit, a maroon necktie done with a perfect dimple, lace-up shoes polished to a regal shine. “Lobb of London. Only the best, right, son?”

Peter Prince’s black hair was cut short, parted immaculately on the left and shining with brilliantine. He was a gentleman, to look at. A man of authority. He was not a man who walked out of his home one morning and vanished without a trace. He was not a man who left his satchel beside his car.

“It worked,” said Ian proudly to his father. “I fixed it.”

Peter Prince dipped his gaze. His eyes narrowed, searching the room.

Ian raised a hand in greeting. A smile pushed at the corners of his mouth. “Dad…over here…”

“Five minutes, my ass!”

Ian spun back toward the door as Peter Briggs stormed into the office.

“You going to keep me waiting all day, then?” Briggs said. “Think I came over just to gossip? I know how to use a phone, too. We’re not all of us idiots who don’t know what
Everest
stands for. Christ!”

“What is it?” Ian asked.

“Urgent.” Briggs sat down in a guest’s chair, snapping his fingers in the air. “You all there? This one requires your attention. Semaphore.”

Ian glanced over his shoulder. His father was gone. There was only the black satchel by itself in the corner. “What about Semaphore? ‘Tied off,’ you said. ‘Bank it.’ ”

“The wife. She’s asking questions.”

“Excuse me. ‘The wife’? What do you mean?”

“The agent’s wife. Mrs. Joseph Grant. She’s got quite the bee in her bonnet.”

The mention of the dead agent’s wife was like a dash of cold water. “How so?” asked Ian, his attention squarely on Briggs.

“She doesn’t believe her husband could have been killed by an informant. Claims there are discrepancies in the FBI’s story. Wants to know what’s what.” Briggs helped himself to a fistful of almonds from a bowl on the desk, flicking them into his mouth one at a time. “You know the type. Nosy. Doesn’t know when to let well enough alone.”

“Are there?”

“Discrepancies?” Briggs shrugged. “Don’t know. Doesn’t matter. It’s the call. He must have said something to her.”

“Not that I recall.” Ian had listened to Joseph Grant’s message several times and was sure he hadn’t mentioned anything about Semaphore or ONE. “Anyway, I erased it from her phone. No evidence there.”

“She’s a woman. She doesn’t need evidence. She has intuition.”

“And the rest of it…besides the woman?”

“Tied off.”

Ian averted his gaze. He was beginning to despise the term. “We can’t afford any problems. Nothing that might put things in jeopardy.”

“I understand,” said Peter Briggs.

“I know you do,” said Ian. “So it’s just the woman?”

Briggs nodded.

“What’s her name?”

“Mary Grant.”

“Her full name.”

“Mary Margaret Olmstead Grant.”

Ian wrote the name on his ledger. “Go ahead, then. But easy does it. Nothing heavy-handed. Level one and that’s it. We don’t want to stir things up.” Ian stood, signaling that the meeting was over. “She can’t find anything anyway. It’s ‘tied off,’ right?” He looked hard at Peter Briggs.

“Bank it.”

Ian stared at the name on the ledger.

Mary Margaret Olmstead Grant
.

He knew what it was like to lose a loved one under mysterious circumstances. He knew about the power of unanswered questions. He knew about curiosity hardening to obsession. He also knew better than to take anyone for granted. Not even an ordinary housewife.

Ian called his assistant and asked her to push back his schedule fifteen minutes. He typed Mary Grant’s name into the Search bar and got three hits: Facebook, Austin real estate registry, and a Shutterfly account.

The Facebook account was under the name Mary Olmstead Grant, the private information available to her friends. Still, as a beginning it was promising. There was a picture of a tropical beach, two children
walking at water’s edge. He guessed it was somewhere in southern Mexico, Costa Rica, the Philippines, or Thailand. A photograph of a woman he assumed to be Mary Grant was inset in the landscape. It was an odd photo, showing only half the woman’s face, purposely cropped to disguise her identity. Still, he could see that she was blond, pretty, and vivacious. Her eyes held the camera.

She listed her work as “household engineer.” She had studied at Georgetown. She lived in Austin. She liked Stevie Ray Vaughan, Cold-play, and Alfred Brendel. She also liked the American Cancer Society, Sacramento Children’s Hospital, and the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. She had forty-three friends.

Again, not much, but a beginning.

A private woman proud of her upbringing, not wanting to lose her maiden name and all that it meant to her. An intelligent woman with an education. A woman who had traveled the world. A woman who had been touched sometime in her life by cancer, either her own or a family member’s. A woman who valued her privacy and was not comfortable sharing personal information with strangers. A woman who chose her friends carefully.

Ian’s concern grew. A formidable woman, he sensed.

He drew up yesterday’s work log to locate the number Joseph Grant had called minutes before his death. He noted that Mary Grant was not currently a ONE Mobile customer. (This had not prevented him from using the competing carrier’s equipment to gain access to her phone. Traffic between wireless carriers demanded cooperation on the most intimate technological levels. He had nearly unfettered access to his competitors’ servers, routers, and relay stations.) ONE Mobile had strong market share in Sacramento. Perhaps she’d been a client and switched carriers upon her arrival in Austin.

He logged into ONE Mobile’s Sacramento database and plugged in her name.

Bingo
. In fact Mary Grant had been a customer of ONE Mobile during her residence in Sacramento.

He pulled up the customary information: date of birth, home address, banking details (Mary Grant was an autopay customer), and Social Security number. He smiled inwardly. This last piece of information was crucial. A person’s Social Security number was a skeleton key that could unlock troves of personal, often confidential data.

He continued for a few minutes longer, downloading phone records
for the prior two-year period. Digging deeper, he found a record of her voicemail password: 71700. He guessed it was either an anniversary or the birth date of a family member, most probably one of her children.

The Shutterfly hit yielded only two photos, but to Ian they were important. Both showed two girls seated together. One was dark-haired and olive-skinned, the other fair and sickly pale. Mary Grant’s daughters.

The real estate registry showed that Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Grant had purchased a home on Pickfair Drive in northwest Austin ninety days earlier for the price of $425,000.

All of this was information to be stored away. Nothing useful now, but it might come in handy later. He saved the pages to a new folder in his ONE Platinum account before placing a call to Investigations.

“This is Ian. I have a Social Security number for you. Give me a full workup. And make it a priority.”