Liberty (17 page)

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Authors: Stephen Coonts

BOOK: Liberty
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“Yep. People who play those kinds of games always play too long. I certainly did.” He stood. “Let's call it a night.”
She hugged him.
Corrigan Engineering's facilities sat on an industrial campus in the western suburbs of Boston. The senior engineer, Harley Bennett, was a stringy sack of bones with a fringe of hair framing a bald brown pate. He looked to be in his fifties. “You must be a serious runner,” Toad remarked when he shook his hand.
Bennett beamed. “Do the marathon every year, finish in the top hundred.”
“Wow.” Actually Toad thought he was crazy, but he was too polite to say so.
Sonny Tran was also skinny—he didn't weigh 120 pounds, but he had a small bone structure and ate like a bird. He'd had a third of a muffin at Reagan National Airport for breakfast, and said he wasn't hungry when asked about lunch. Nor was he gregarious. On the plane that morning he sat beside Toad and didn't say ten words. He read the morning paper cover to cover—except for the classifieds—looked out the window a while, then worked a crossword puzzle.
In contrast, the Coast Guard officer, Captain Joe Zogby, was a veritable chatterbox. As they waited that morning to board the plane, before he settled in with his copy of the newspaper, he remarked on the weather, the fortunes of two baseball teams, and even noted that the stock market had gone up the previous day.
“So the government's buying these things?” Harley Bennett remarked. “Getting cutting-edge stuff, I can tell you. C'mon, let's look, then we'll talk.”
When the little party entered the lab, he swept his arm and asked, “What d'ya think of that?” The Washington delegation stood staring at a complex electronic instrument chained down to a wooden pallet. Toad bent down for a look. The thing looked a little like the inside of a computer, everything solid state.
“What does it do and how does it do it?”
Harley jumped right in. After he had spent five minutes discussing the sensors and detection technology in general terms, Toad asked, “Does it really work?”
“Of course.” Here Harley got technical, talking about various types of radiation and detection ranges. “The detection range will vary widely,” Harley explained, “depending on the type and strength of the radiation. And that will depend on the amount of shielding around the emitter. A well-shielded reactor, such as one in a late-model nuclear-powered submarine, would probably be undetectable unless you were within a few dozen yards. Perhaps not even then if it were an American sub. A Russian sub—I'm guessing—maybe a mile.”
“A Russian warhead—how far?”
“Missile?”
“Yes.”
“They don't have much shielding because the shielding is too heavy. Of course, the plutonium inside is not critical, but it's decaying, radiating. Given the amount of shielding in a missile warhead, and a leaky Russian one to boot, I should say we can detect it at five miles. Maybe six.”
Toad whistled. “You're the man,” Joe Zogby said with a grin. Even Sonny Tran smiled.
“Give us a demo,” Toad suggested.
First Harley screwed a sensor cable into one of the wire sockets. He laid the cable in a straight line along the floor.
On a nearby table sat an instrument containing a rotary drum and stylus. He turned it on.
“You'll notice that the detector is physically connected to the operator's instrumentation and recorder. In later versions of this gear the sensors, detector, and instrumentation can be at three different sites and communicate through data-link. For short-range versions we will put the sensors on belt clips and everyone can carry them around. We aren't there yet, though.”
From a lead vault, Bennett produced a small lead box. “Inside here we have a radioactive isotope for use in certain medical diagnostic procedures.” He carried it into the lab and set it on the table near the machine. As he lifted the test tube containing the isotope from its lead box, the recorder on the nearby table emitted a high-pitched noise. On the recorder the stylus began squiggling. Harley carried the test tube from the room. The instrument continued to scream. The noise stopped, finally, when Bennett was in the parking lot outside. He called in on the lab's telephone to report his location.
An hour later Toad Tarkington called Jake Grafton in Washington. “You better sit down, boss. You aren't going to like this.”
“Shoot.”
“Corrigan has hand-built prototypes of his detectors that he has been using for testing purposes. He has no manufacturing facility. The outfit he was dealing with to build the things is in China.”
“Which China?”
“The big red one.”
“Has he given them the engineering drawings or specs?”
“These people say no. Apparently he was negotiating with the government for a technology export license. That's how the administration learned what he had.”
“What has friend Corrigan been doing to get these things built since he shook the president's hand?”
“He's got a couple of custom shops lined up to hand-build
the things, so they'll be pricey. Another screwing for the taxpayers.”
“They're used to it. Do these detectors work?”
“Seem to. The head engineer gave me a demonstration and a classified capability sheet. These things would be very nice to have.”
“Get a delivery schedule and call me back.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jake went back to his paperwork. He was inundated. He needed someone to handle it for him, but he had to do the paperwork to get that someone.
And four warheads were missing.
Where are they
?
Tommy Carmellini knocked on his door. He was wearing an electrician's outfit. A&B Plumbing and Electric. His shirt proclaimed that his name was Junior. Jake waved him in.
“Just wanted you to know, sir, that Zelda and the Zipper are hard at it. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't watched it—they went right into the credit card databases of three large banks bang, bang, bang. Nothing to it. They know how security systems are set up, they know how to go around them, and they know how to get what they want.”
“Where did they learn all that?”
“I didn't ask, sir. I don't want to know. I don't think Zelda or Zip wants the FBI to ask either.”
“We need permanent access.”
“They're working on it. They actually designed one of the systems, left themselves a hole to go in and out of.”
Jake made a face.
“You know, Admiral, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I don't think they're honest.”
“I like your duds.”
“Yessir. I'm going to visit the D.C. police department about their cameras. We'll be wired in by tomorrow.”
“New York. We need every video feed in that city.”
“New York is going to be tougher because there is no central place to tap in. We need to let a subcontract.”
“For an illegal wiretapping?”
“It's a couple of independents the agency uses from time to time. I can get them in here for an interview if you like.”
“You trust them?”
“Yes.”
“Sign'em up.”
A half hour later Tarkington called again. “One every two weeks, Admiral. Each has to be tested for a week before it can be put in service.”
“Terrific,” Jake muttered, wondering what the president would say when he heard. “Leave Tran and the Coastie up there to learn all they can. You jump a plane back. I want to see that capability sheet.”
“See you this evening.”
The little bell on the door rang when Tommy Carmellini pushed it open on Tuesday morning. He went inside, stood by the counter looking at the televisions and VCRs stacked on the back wall. There was even a computer. A black man came through the door at the far end of the counter and walked along behind it. “Hey, Carmellini, my man. What's happenin'?”
“Hey, Scout. How come you guys got all these televisions and VCRs and stuff? These for sale?”
“We got'em'cause the owners couldn't pay their bill, man, and we needed some security. You see anything there you like?”
“Ah … no. Came to discuss a business proposition.”
“Hey, Earlene, come out here,” he called. “Carmellini is here and wants to make us rich.”
Earlene was a striking, statuesque woman. She was fit and looked it—she had spent two years in the WNBA. Now she was half of S&A Electric. Carmellini didn't know if Scout and Earlene were married; he had never thought to ask.
“Hey, Tommy.”
“Hey, Earlene.” He jerked his head toward the partition. “Anyone else back there?”
“Nope.”
“Mind if I look?”
Scout and Earlene glanced at each other. “It's like that, huh?”
“Yeah.”
Carmellini walked around the counter, stepped to the door, and looked. There was no one. He came back to the counter and leaned on it again. “I need some serious help. The agency wants access to some computers around the country, like the video control computer at D.C. police headquarters, the mainframe at various credit card processors, airline reservation computers, all of it. A lot of this work will be in New York.”
“The agency? That mean CIA?”
“Yeah.”
“Man, I thought they already had wormholes and trap doors and all that shit.”
“If they did, I wouldn't be standing here.”
Scout laughed. “Oh, man, this is heavy. The CIA?” He slapped his leg. “They know I'm a convicted felon?”
“Hell, no, they don't know. My boss told me to get some people I trust. I trust you. I'll give him an invoice from S&A Electric and he'll sign it and you'll get paid.”
“We're electricians, not telephone or computer experts.”
“Oh, don't give me that. I'd bet a paycheck that you do interior telephone wiring from time to time.”
“Well, yeah, sure. Got the stuff and know which wire is which, but we don't have the passwords and phone company numbers and all that.”
“I do.”
“How much?” Earlene asked sharply.
“Your usual rate.”
Disgust registered on Scout's face. “You a fuckin' comedian, man. I'm going to take a chance on gettin' arrested and losin' my fuckin' electrician's license for my
fuckin' usual rate? Enough already. I ain't got time for your shit today, Carmellini.”
“If we get popped, the charges will get squashed. We're working for the CIA, not some cracker hacker.”
“We?”
“I'll be there, too, for some of it. I have a lot of projects and I can't do them all. I need help. I told my boss I trust you. He trusts me, so that's good enough for him.”
“I don't want to bust your bubble, Tommy, but what if I get a little tempted?”
“Like I said, I trust you, Scout. You and Earlene. We know each other. You decide to cross me, better kill me first.”
“So that's how it is?”
“Yeah.”
“I hear you, man.”
Earlene snorted. “Hell, we're so far down the food chain that when we finally get a government contract, the work is illegal.”
“I brought you this deal because you're a minority-owned business.”
“Female-owned, too,” Earlene said. “I got fifty-one percent.”
“The rising tide of social progress has lifted your boat. Money only lightly soiled? How can you say no to an offer like this?”
They arrived at police headquarters an hour later. Tommy Carmellini presented a work order bearing the signature of a senior civil servant in the district public works department—Carmellini had signed the work order himself—and fifteen minutes later he was standing with Scout and Earlene in the main trunk room of police headquarters.
Carmellini had briefed them on the way downtown. Now they identified the incoming video lines, the camera control lines, and the feed to the main computer. As Carmellini suspected, there were bundles of unused telephone
and fiber-optic lines coming into the police station, a legacy of the massive bandwidth build-out during the final days of the great tech bubble that caused every street in the center of the city to be dug up and poorly repaved, sometimes numerous times as company after company laid their own lines willy-nilly under the streets, one atop the other. The bandwidth gold rush was aided and abetted by the city fathers, who pocketed campaign contributions and refused to force the network companies to pay for the damage they did to the pavement and underlying roadbase. As usual in America, when the bubble popped and the dust settled it was the taxpayers driving on ruined streets who got the bill for the incompetence, greed, and stupidity of their elected leaders.

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