Night Talk (9 page)

He called Liz Tucker again and got her this time. “I was just going to call you,” she said.

“They searched my apartment, been to my beach house, holding my passport; I feel like I'm swirling in some kind of crazy vortex. I woke up in the Twilight Zone.”

“More like Dante's
Inferno
. What a horrible mess. Unbelievable,” she said.

Liz was blond, anorexic and, unlike Soledad, was airbrushed to blow away the years. She sometimes had the finesse of an ax murderer when dealing with issues she didn't like.

“You should never have spoken to the police. You should have called me.”

“They ambushed me. I thought I was just a witness to a suicide. I didn't know I was suspected of stealing secrets until they suddenly dropped the accusation on me. But all they got from me was my jaw dropping because I don't know anything. Liz, they never told me my rights, the Miranda stuff. And they handcuffed me when they searched my apartment.”

“They didn't have to give Miranda rights. You get rights before being questioned if you're arrested. They didn't take you into custody. But they can handcuff someone during a search for officer safety or just for failing to pass their attitude test. Knowing you, you probably let the cop know he was a dirt bag.”

“Do I have any rights?”

“You have the right to keep your mouth shut. So do it. Don't answer any questions from anyone, don't talk to anyone but a lawyer about the case. Cops, newspeople, your bartender or whoever you're sleeping with, all you give them is a ‘no comment.' Better yet, don't even say that.”

“How do we handle this? What's my next move?”

“I don't do criminal cases, so I can't give you any advice about the allegations. You need a criminal defense lawyer.”

“Criminal defense.” He hadn't thought of it that way despite the seriousness of the allegations. He wasn't a criminal.

“You realize, of course, that the network can't be involved in any form or manner.”

He got the message. He was on his own. What kind of crazy turn had his life taken that he was ending up facing criminal charges?

“Okay, how about some nonadvice.”

“I called a classmate who's a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's office in L.A. This is definitely a federal matter; the locals will be out of it. She hadn't heard anything about the case yet but it sounds to her that you are in a world of trouble.”

“I caught that much myself from the cowboys with badges who questioned me and tossed my studio and apartment. Is anyone interested in hearing my side of it or should we just start seeing how many years they'll give me if I save them the money of doing justice and simply plead guilty?”

“Greg, I'm sorry, but I have to tell you that I've already heard enough of your side of it to know you're in quicksand up to your neck. Your message said that the dead guy told people he stole secret files for you, he got a large sum of money from your bank account, that evidence of your dealings with him has been destroyed.”

“It's all bullshit. The only contact I had with the guy was some calls that were broadcast nationally. And that crazy call last night.”

“All of which are missing along with any other possible phone or e-mail contact with him.”

“Liz—”

“Please, I'm not accusing you, I'm just stating the obvious. This is one of those cases where there's so much evidence on the table you're going to have to prove yourself innocent rather than hope the prosecution can't prove its case. Even who you are is a strike against you. My friend says you're felony ugly.”

“What the fuck is that?”

“Sorry. I didn't mean to drop that on you. It's a prosecutor's expression for people whose appearance fits the crime. If you look like a guy who would rob a liquor store and you're charged with robbing a liquor store, the jury will assume you rob liquor stores. You're an antiestablishment—”

“Talk show host who would plot with a whacked-out hacker to steal secret files from the government and expose them to the world. Did your U.S. Attorney friend also tell you what the penalty is for stealing top-secret stuff?”

She hesitated. “You need to talk to a criminal defense attorney.”

“What did she tell you?”

“Treason is punishable by death but can be plea bargained down to as little as five years in prison.”

“Hey, that's great. I could broadcast from death row.”

“You can't do that.”

He took a deep breath and tried pushing his pounding heart back down his throat. “I was joking, Liz, joking. This is insane.”

“I'm sorry, Greg. You've always been terrific to deal with. Some celebrities are a pain in the ass but you never talk down to anyone. Your staff loves you, they're all for you at the network.”

“But—it's business.”

“Yes, it's business. The network has to, uh, stay neutral until the matter is decided in the courts.”

“Neutral. Meaning stay the hell away from me. I don't blame them. I feel like I'm trapped in a Kafkaesque story. I woke up this morning felony ugly. I'm in a nightmare.”

She hesitated again. “There's one more thing. You're, uh, suspended until things clear up. I'm sorry.”

“I'm sorry, too. I need an attorney who handles this type of thing. Know anyone?”

“I don't know him personally, but I've heard Carl Nevers speak at state bar events. He handled the Tom and Maddie case.”

Tom and Maddie were a shock-jock team who relied on outrageous stunts to keep an audience. They were busted for paying a hospital employee for information about celebrity medical records with an emphasis on treatment that had anything to do with sex.

Greg said, “They each got three years in jail. Barred from broadcasting for life. Bankrupt. Probably suicidal.”

“Probably a win-win for them. The prosecution had a strong case.”

“The testimony of a hospital clerk with a heroin habit on fire is a strong case?”

“Sound familiar? Only in your case you won't even be able to get the addict on the witness stand to cross-examine him because he jumped out of a window. Ask yourself this. How do you rebut the word of a dead man who had a receipt for money from you in his pocket?”

He didn't have an answer.

“Nevers is probably at the state bar event this weekend in Santa Barbara. Give him a call first thing Monday morning. The arrest warrant will probably be issued soon. Nevers can arrange for you to surrender and work at getting you bail.”

They signed off politely and he hung up. He felt again as if he had been beat on. The worst thing about the call wasn't just her opinion that he was in deep shit but something he picked up from her voice. Liz thought he was guilty. And he couldn't blame her. No question—he was felony ugly when it came to exposing sins of the government. The crime fit him like a glove.

He also remembered something he'd heard about Tom and Maddie and their attorney, Nevers. When they asked the attorney what his fee would be, the attorney's reply had been, “Everything you have.”

 

18

He had been set up. Stolen secrets, money transfer, destroyed evidence. A dying declaration that was an accusation. But he was sure Ethan had been used rather than doing the manipulation. The hacker had been too terrified, pressured to the point of breaking on the phone. Greg didn't see Ethan as diabolical enough to commit treason and blame it on him. To the contrary, whistleblowers who expose secrets want their own fifteen minutes of fame. The frame-up was all too well engineered, too ruthlessly efficient to be the work of a young hacker with a drug problem.

Greg's role was the fall guy, to take the heat when the government found out secret files had been stolen. Who, why and how were out of his reach, but he grabbed at pieces and tried putting them together.

The van had a role. It had been stalking him. Could have killed him but only made an attempt when he turned and started walking toward it, challenging it. What the purpose was of the stalking, he didn't know. To spook him? Get him worried and scared and wondering what was going to happen next because rattled people make mistakes?

The woman was part of it, too. Cryptic messages. A tease. Who was she? Why was she playing games with him? What had she been doing on the street after Ethan took the plunge? How did she know that the fallout from Ethan's death wouldn't end with blood splattered on the street?

He had only one solid piece of information about her other than a general idea of her appearance: She had an inside track about Mond's plan to search his apartment. And even before that she had warned him that it had just begun.

The “it” was his life being caught up in a maelstrom.

There was something else, too. Something that made his skin crawl.

He slid open the balcony doors and stepped outside to get some air and shake the sense of dread he felt.

Like the sword hanging over Damocles, his encounter as a youth with the unexplainable had left him with both a looming fear and a certainty that someday he would be revisited by the nightmare.

He couldn't explain even to himself why he identified the bad dream he was in with what happened to him decades before, but he sensed a connection with the past. But what was it? How could top secrets and money transferred to a hacker have any connection with a paranormal incident he suffered years earlier?

He had to put his fears from the past aside and concentrate on what he knew was on the table. There was a connection among Rohan, the woman, the van, the money, missing documents, a whirlwind of people and strange events swirling around Ethan.

What had Ethan been involved in? The hacker's hot spot had been the invasion of privacy that electronics interconnecting the world had created. As an electronics geek, Ethan understood better than most people the power and scope of the intrusion.

Greg also feared and fought the control that the electronic invasions had brought to people's lives. A great number of his callers shared apprehension about the electronic invasion. And there had been nothing new and radical about Ethan's conspiracy views, that everyone was being tracked by the Web sites they visited, the movies they saw, the books they read, even the food they ate. Those invasions were common sense, not the stuff of conspiracy theories.

But Rohan had said Ethan had gotten too close. Too close to what? Ethan wasn't just a man on the street talking about how electronics expose individual prides, prejudices, finances and souls. From what Ethan had revealed about his past over the air, he was actively involved in some phase of invasive electronics—obviously with his forced employment at an intelligence agency like the FBI, CIA or one of the other agencies identified by their initials.

Ethan hadn't identified which agency he worked for and was probably barred from doing so by the agency's rules. How Mond's Interagency fit in was a puzzle that Greg hadn't had an opportunity to check out yet. But Mond had left him with a way to do it. His smartphone.

Getting on the Internet, he immediately realized he had been stupid to refuse to take Mond's card. He didn't know if Mond was the man's first or last name or if “Interagency” was the full name of the organization Mond worked for or an abbreviation.

A search of Web sites brought up many types of interagencies but nothing that signaled there was a separate governmental intelligence organization with that name. The most common use of the word was a unit set up among agencies to deal with a specific issue.

Was Mond's Interagency not an actual independent agency, but an organization set up by intelligence agencies to deal with leaks since the Manning and Snowden exposures? Even if that were the case, Greg was surprised that nothing popped up about it on the Internet.

Something was obvious to him.

Everyone knew more than he did. Even the dead.

It was time he got some answers. Time for the worm to turn. He'd start with cold-calling Rohan in Marina del Rey. On his way out of the building he'd ask Jose if he had told Mond about the note from the woman on the funicular.

 

19

A woman he hadn't seen before was manning the front desk when Greg came through on his way to retrieve his car from the parking garage.

“Is Jose around?” he asked as he grabbed his newspaper off the counter.

“Jose's mother is sick. He went to Guadalajara to see her.”

“He was here earlier.”

“He's gone now.”

She looked too well dressed to be manning an apartment house front desk and not laid back enough to sit quietly for eight hours.

“I'm new.” She handed him his mail.

He almost asked her how long she'd worked with Mond but shoved the mail into his pocket without looking at it. All he received at the apartment was junk mail. He turned to go to the elevator but spun back around. “You know my place was searched by the police?”

She gave him a blank face and veiled eyes.

“I put some trash in the chute,” he said. “Don't let the police look at it unless they have a warrant. I'll be removing it later.”

He stepped into the elevator biting his lip to keep from grinning. He hadn't dumped any trash and he knew from a criminal defense lawyer that had appeared on his program years ago that the cops didn't need a warrant to search trash that's been dumped in a public place. He just thought it would be fun if Mond's crew spent hours poring through the whole building's trash to see if they could find something incriminating on him.

“Childish,” he muttered as he stepped out of the elevator. He was acting stupid. His gut was tight and he'd just played a dumb joke on the guy who could kick him some more. Liz Tucker was right. He would never pass a police attitude test.

As for the absence of Jose, mothers get sick. Having one in Guadalajara was more a norm in L.A. than having one in St. Louis or Cleveland. But he could think of a good reason for the feds to get rid of Jose and replace him with one of their own people. It made it easier to keep track of Greg if the person behind the security desk had access to the building's security camera monitors.