Night Talk (8 page)

Greg picked up the paper to read it. The two officers stood up.

An electronic deposit had been made to an Ethan Shaw's bank account for $25,000 yesterday. Hours before he died. As he read the details of the transfer, Greg gripped the paper tighter. He didn't know his bank account numbers by heart but the transfer came from the bank he used.

“What's this supposed to mean? I never gave him anything.”

“Actually, you did. The bank transfer tracks back to you. Your account.”

“That's impossible. I didn't transfer any money to him.”

“Well, Mr. Nowell, you say you didn't, but the transfer came from your account, at your bank. So from my point of view, it was either you or the ghost in the machine who did it.” Batista snorted.

“This is insane.” Greg stared at the silent Mond. Batista hadn't told him Mond was a federal agent but that tag fit, with the accusation of a secret information exchange. “You think I gave him money for secrets. That's bullshit.”

Mond said, “Shaw hacked into a top-secret file and downloaded it. We know he did it for you because he told people he did. The money trail proves that. We want that file.”

“That's nonsense—all of it. I don't have a file, I didn't pay him anything. What kind of crap is this?”

Mond said, “The kind of trouble that gets violators life sentences. The kind smart people start plea bargaining on right away.”

“We're finished,” Greg said. “You people ambushed me with this bullshit. You can do your talking to my lawyer.”

Soledad stuck her head in. “Greg, there's a problem.”

“What?”

“The cloud files. They're all gone.”

“What do you mean?”

“Erased.”

“All of our caller files are gone—erased?”

“Just Ethan Shaw's calls.”

Mond pulled a small transmitter from his side pocket and said, “Geronimo.” He tossed papers on Greg's desk.

“Search warrant,” Batista said.

From the entry and outer offices came the sound of doors flying open, a stampede of footsteps, voices yelling, “Federal agents!”

Batista grinned. “You can save your place from being torn apart by giving us what Shaw gave you.”

 

15

“Have Mr. Nowell and his staff wait in the reception area,” Mond told Batista.

“I'm calling my attorney,” Greg said.

“From the reception area,” Batista said.

Soledad, Vince, their assistants and the clerical staff were already gathered in the reception area. An officer whose blue jacket said INTERAGENCY was standing between them and the elevator.

“They think Ethan gave me something secret he was working on for the government,” Greg told them. “He didn't give me anything or even offer to give me anything.”

“How could the calls have been erased?” Soledad asked.

“Not just erased, but it was done with a surgical knife deleting only Ethan Shaw's. Hang on,” he said, “I have to make a call.”

He went to a corner to get what privacy he could and dialed attorney Liz Tucker. He gripped the phone tight and clenched his teeth as it rang ten times and took him to voicemail. Keeping his tone neutral, he quickly explained what had come down. “Call me as soon as you get this message. I need help.”

Liz was the network lawyer for the show. She was smart and resourceful, the kind of lawyer that rolled with the punches but then hit back hard. She was also the only attorney he knew, except his tax attorney, who was out of his league with any issue beyond the tax code.

“Ethan Shaw's calls getting erased. How could that happen?” Greg asked Vince, the broadcast engineer.

“Wouldn't take much,” Vince said. “It's just a cloud account with a simple password. Every caller is a separate file. Hell, we didn't set it up to hide it from anyone, just as a convenient place to store the calls in case questions arose later. We only keep them for ninety days anyway, before they are automatically erased. We didn't think a backup was necessary.”

Greg was listening but his mind was spinning in the background about the accusation that he had paid Ethan for secrets. Anyone could have erased the calls but transferring money took effort because he was the only one on the account who could have done it. He would check his bank accounts when the feds cleared out but he didn't think they were lying about the money transfer. A lie that easy to check would be stupid.

His paying off Ethan also fit nicely with everything else that had come down—the strange accusation from Ethan, the missing calls, the fact that his show with its known theme of suspicion of overreaching governmental authority would be a perfect place to broadcast evidence of wrongdoing by the government.

If someone wanted to implicate him—frame him—in a stolen-secrets incident, a money transfer to a hacker with a criminal record would quickly put the noose around his neck and kick the chair out from under him.

He had no enemies. No, that wasn't true. No one had actually been threatening him though it had happened in the past. It was hard to be well known and deal with controversial issues and not tick off someone. Even a bunch of someones, but stolen government secrets and clandestine money transfers were way over the top.

Equipment was being carried out and Greg passed a message to Mond through an agent that they had better leave equipment necessary to go on the air or they would have the network going after them.

Batista came out of an inner office. “They're removing computer equipment that has stored information to examine at their offices. They'll let you continue to broadcast until they make a decision about your future.”

“That's big of them. While they're making decisions about my future, I'll ask my lawyers to start looking into
their
futures. As far as I know there's still a constitution in this country.”

Batista grinned and threw up his hands. “Hey—I'm just the messenger. This is a federal thing. They just wanted me along for window treatment.”

“What agency did you say Mond's with?”

“It's on the papers. I never dealt with them before, but feds are all the same when it comes to us local cops. They want us to do their dirty work so they can keep their hands clean.”

Batista did another disappearing act. Greg looked at the search warrant. It was issued by a federal judge. The request for the warrant came from Agent Mond, Interagency. Which told Greg nothing.

Soledad said, “This is insane.”

“Tell me about it.”

 

16

Walking to his apartment building Greg felt as if he had been wrung out, hung up and left out to dry. And paranoid. He called Liz Tucker again and left another voicemail message. It was too early for her to be at her son's wedding and she was good at answering calls, but he was sure she would call the network's general counsel before getting back to him.

He left the studio after the homicide cop, the federal agent and the searchers faded away. The place looked pretty much the same as it did before the search, but it wasn't the same. Things had been lifted up, inspected and put back in a slightly different way. Drawer contents that had been orderly were now a mess and some that were a mess looked more orderly. They had taken everything that could be used to store data on but left the studio able to broadcast.

Greg was relieved that he wouldn't be hosting the show for the next two nights. More than anything else he was angry. And puzzled. Questions swirled in his head like ghosts in an attic.

Money got paid to Ethan from one of his accounts—he had called and got his account balance before leaving the office. There had been a $25,000 electronic transfer to Ethan's account using Greg's account number and password. As simple as that—someone entered his account and transferred money. And Ethan removed top-secret documents from the government. That had to be a given, if for no other reason than the feds were tearing apart his life to find them.

Mond had refused to answer Greg's questions about what evidence they had other than repeating that a receipt for the money transfer was found on Ethan. Mond wouldn't tell him even the subject matter of the materials he claimed Ethan hacked into and gave to Greg. Or the name of the government agency Ethan worked for or hacked into to steal secrets.

Ethan was a hacker who had been in trouble before for illegally accessing forbidden territory. That he'd done it before elevated the odds he'd done it again. Greg didn't know who or what Ethan hacked, but the fact he went to work for the government and had access to top-secret material after being arrested made it a good bet that a federal security agency was Ethan's employer. That Ethan was on the West Coast and most federal agencies were headquartered near D.C. didn't matter. Computer work often was done from regional offices and even from home.

The bottom line was that money got transferred from him to Ethan, Ethan stole secrets, the feds thought Greg paid him to do it and, most important of all, Greg couldn't give them a good reason for the money transfer to refute their suspicion that he paid Ethan for secrets.

Mond said Ethan “told people” he gave secrets to Greg. Who would Ethan tell about stealing secrets? That he committed high crimes and misdemeanors? Was that something hackers bragged about to each other over a beer? Something like, “Hey, guys, wanna know what the CIA is up to this week?”

Another possible twist to Ethan's strange accusation occurred to Greg as he neared the apartment building.

What if Ethan wasn't the one who hacked into his account and transferred the money? What if someone else had led Ethan into believing that he was doing something for Greg? And then someone had hacked into Greg's account and transferred the money to Ethan so Ethan would buy the story. Then Ethan killed himself when he found out the feds were after him.

That theory made as little sense to Greg as the other notion that Ethan thought he killed him and got money from his account.

The “what if's” were still swirling around his head as he entered his apartment building and stopped at the reception desk, where Jose was manning the day shift.

“A woman left a note for you a few minutes ago,” Jose said.

“Did she give her name?”

“Nope.”

“What did she look like?” Greg asked as he took the note.

“I was on the phone and didn't get a good look. She just dropped the note and left. Not too old, too young.”

Greg stared at the message.
Get out—they're coming

He kept his features blank. “About thirty? Wearing a coat with a hood?”

“Yeah, that's her. Not bad-looking, now that I think of it. And a guy came by to see you earlier.”

“Who?”

“Didn't leave his name. Said he was a friend and asked to be let in to your apartment to wait. I told him no way and asked him if he wanted to leave a message and he took off like a bat out of hell.”

“What did he look like?”

“Tall, bald; it was that guy with the Jamaican accent that's on your show sometimes. I've seen him on TV. The writer who says aliens abducted and raped him. Know who I mean?”

He was describing Rohan. “I know who you mean.”

“He was kind of frazzled, jumpy. I started to ask if he was that writer guy but he shot out of here too fast.”

“How long ago?”

“Two hours.”

Greg tried Rohan again when he got to his apartment and got the “no longer in service” recording.

What put Rohan into such a panic? What was his relationship to Ethan? Hacking? Rohan had been in a battle with the university for years over his claimed abduction. Had he hired Ethan to hack in?

None of the scenarios between Rohan and Ethan explained how money from his account got to the hacker and why Greg was being accused of having paid for the theft of government secrets.

He heard a knock on his door and peered through the peephole at Mond's face. Greg opened the door and was pushed back by Mond as agents poured in behind him.

Mond shoved papers at him. “Search warrant. Secure him.”

Two agents grabbed him and started cuffing him.

“What are you doing? Are you arresting me?”

“Securing you for your own safety and that of the officers.” Mond nodded at the agents and they pulled Greg out into the hallway.

A neighbor poked her head out of her apartment, saw Greg cuffed and stared wide-eyed. Jose would be watching on the security monitors. And telling every tenant who came in about it.

Intimidation? Embarrassment? Mond had him cuffed not for control but as a power play because he could.

They hauled out his possessions with a single hand truck. His computer, disks and every piece of paper he had.

Mond had him uncuffed after the hand truck left. He flashed Greg's passport in his face.

“Don't bother trying to leave the country.”

“That passport was at my beach house. You went there first.” They must have searched it before they even sat down in his office to talk.

“The beach house is also in the papers you just got. Call me if you want to help yourself out by coming clean.” He offered a business card.

Greg ignored the card. “My attorney will be doing the call.”

“Ask your attorney if he'll do the time, too.”

“While you're hounding me, somebody is getting away with whatever Ethan took. That seems to be the plan and you're falling for it.”

“Funny thing about that. So far you're the only ‘somebody' whose name pops up everywhere we turn, not to mention your pal the hacker fingered you as the guy who drove him to it.”

Mond paused on his way out. “You may think you have some news-gathering protection, but you're wrong. Stealing government secrets is punishable by life in prison. Smart people make deals.”

 

17

Greg stood in the middle of his apartment feeling violated, even more so than after the search at the studio when they took his business records. This was personal. His home life was in that computer. His financial history. His love affairs. Prides and prejudices. They took everything electronic except his phone. But it wasn't an oversight. Like Rohan said, phones leak. Every call made or received was registered by the phone company and it was easy enough for the feds to capture every communication.