The Merchant of Secrets Read online

  “Huh?” he asked in a sleepy stupor.

  “Honey, just go back to sleep,” I told him.

  Keisha was waiting downstairs brimming with energy early in the morning, and projecting a cool confidence about the case when it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone else to be optimistic. She summoned the sheriff’s deputy to drive us back to Jones’ house where we scaled the wall like I had done the day before, and walked across the lawn and into the house. I was fixated on finding the evidence that would put Jones in prison for a very long time but I was tired and still groggy from the night before which wasn’t helping the situation. The two of us crawled through the house, searching everywhere from behind loose bathroom tiles, to inside the hollows of curtain rods, and everywhere in between until we had nowhere left to look. We were looking for documents, discs, portable drives, cell phones, or laptops. Anything that would connect Jones to missing classified material. Three hours later, nothing. Not even a clue. I was beginning to panic as time was running out. Jones, Qureshi and the mechanic would be released from jail in about 24 hours if we had no evidence. An that was the least of our problems. If we failed, Mike would have to account for the money he had spent in labor hours, and travel expenses, for a failed project, all because I got started on Qureshi in a restaurant in D.C. last winter. Jones could sue us for arresting him, I’d probably get fired, Keisha’s boss wouldn’t be happy that she took so much time off. Plus the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department wouldn’t be too pleased that we had spent their time for nothing. It was all bad. Very bad. If we didn’t find the evidence.

  “Does that boat actually move?” Keisha asked, staring at a big white cruiser.

  “I think so.”

  “Let’s get in and take a ride.”

  “You’re kidding. I don’t think we’re allowed to do that Boots.”

  “Hey Deputy!” She shouted. “We’re taking the boat for a spin.”

  “Get in, I’ll drive,” she commanded.

  I climbed the mini-ladder from the dock into the boat and sat down on a white vinyl seat cushion, Keisha turned the key on the engine, and steered the boat away from the dock. The wind was blowing against our faces and we each took a whiff of the salty air, this was better than being in an office all day. The boat was humming along, managing the waves without any problem until we were about a mile from the shore. Then she slowed the engine and the boat rocked back and forth from the push of the waves hitting the sides.

  “Now pull out your cellphone and turn it on,” Keisha ordered. I reached in my pocket and pulled out my phone.

  “Now think. If you were Jones, what would you be doing with that phone right now?” she asked, placing me in the role of the perpetrator to recreate the scene.

  I stared at my phone and gave it some thought. “Hm. If I were a crook, I’d probably be hacking into somebody’s network. Yea. Cruising the shoreline and eavesdropping on people’s network connection. ”

  “Okay. Now what if it’s the other way around. Reverse your thinking. Instead of stealing information from people who live on the shore, what if you had some information that you wanted to send out to somebody else. How would you do it?”

  “Ohhhhh. Good question. I’d dial into an email address that had a link already set-up. I’d copy the link, paste it to a new email then send it.”

  “Who would you send it to?”

  “Well, if Joe’s in China to deliver information in exchange for money, I’d send the email with the link in it to him.”

  “Good. Then what would you do?” she prodded.

  “I’d throw the cellphone in the ocean so there’s no evidence.”

  “Then what would you do?” She said, prodding again.

  “Nothing. I’d go back to Virginia and pretend that I was just on vacation in Florida. I’d wait for the mechanic to come back from China. And I’d check to verify that funds had arrived in my bank account in Abu Dhabi,” I replied.

  “Okay, now forget you’re Jones, and remember that you’re an analyst. How do we find that link with the stolen information?’

  “The device is gone, so I’d have to find it on the network.”

  ‘Well how do we do that?” Keisha asked.

  ‘We can’t. Sailing the shoreline, next to so many houses, he could have hacked anyone one’s network. Look at how many houses there are along the shore,” I said, pointing to the line-up of multimillion dollar homes along the beach. “That’s precisely the reason for sending the email sitting aboard a boat instead of sitting by the pool at his house. If he sent the email from his house it would have gone over his network, and we could have found it. But this way, we can’t possibly find it.”

  “What about the guy who received the email when he was in China. Joe the mechanic. Wouldn’t he have the same issue?” Keisha asked. “Wouldn’t he have in his possession a cellphone with downloaded information that was being delivered to the buyer?”

  “Maybe Joe still has the cell phone he used in China to receive the email from Jones with the link.”

  “Right, ” acknowledged Keisha.

  “So we really should be searching the mechanic’s house and office for a cellphone, not here, right?” I asked, seeking confirmation.

  “Yep!” she said.

  “Keisha, you’re brilliant!”

  “It’s the detective in me!” Boots exclaimed. It was a worthy assertion given that she’d added her talents to some impressive cases in the past. “We’d get into the mind-set of the criminal and retrace his steps. We cracked a lot of cases that way,” she said. Getting it right was a near-obsession for both of us.

  The temperature was soaring past the 85 degree mark with the sun blaring down and we were sweating through our shirts. Keisha was at the wheel, turning the boat back in the direction of shore. I called Mike. “Mike, we can’t get the information from this end, we need to get any cellphones or laptops belonging to the mechanic.”

  “Why him?” he asked.

  “Jones would have thrown the cellphone in the ocean to get rid of the evidence. And used someone else’s network to send the information. From Jones’ end, we have neither the phone nor the network. It’s a dead-end. We have to get the link from the receiving end, which had to have been the mechanic because he was the courier who delivered the stolen information in exchange for the money. ”

  “All right. We’ll give it a try. Come on back and we’ll head back to Virginia and see if we can still get some search warrants,” he said, not sounding very hopeful.

  “Okay Keisha, Mike’s ready to get search warrants on the mechanic.”

  “Yea, about that,” Keisha began.

  “About what?” I asked.

  “You and Mike?” she asked.

  “Oh, yea… well…”

  “Oh my God, intra company relationships aren’t allowed, and yet my friend sitting here is having sex with two company guys?” she said into the air as if she were telling it to a third person. Then she started to laugh, clearly amused by it all. Then turning around, face-to-face with me, she asked, “Do you want to get your butt fired or what?”

  “No, no you’ve got it wrong. Colin and I aren’t together anymore.”

  “You were together as of yesterday?…” She teased.

  “Yea,” I sighed “but I called him to give my flight number and his wife picked up the phone.”

  “Whaaat? He had a wife this whole time? Oh, no,no. My buddy Colin is a two- timer?” She shook her head from side to side in disbelief. “ I swear I would’ve never seen that comin’! That guy is a prick. Holy shit. Okay, we’re doing margaritas on me, as soon as we get back to D.C.. Ladies night out!”

  By then the boat was at the pier and the deputy was sighing with relief, grabbing the lines to tie it up quickly before Boots and I could do any damage to it.

  Keisha rode next to me on the private plane back to Dulles airport and we were impatient for the plane to land. “Do you think he got rid of the phone?” Keisha asked.

  “Maybe no
t. He wouldn’t have left it behind in Asia; he probably would have still had it when he boarded the return flight back to the U.S.. Once he landed, he probably thought nobody would figure it out, and kept it.”

  Turning to the row of seats across the aisle from us, Keisha asked “Hey, Mr. Mulally, you’ve got the mechanic in custody right now, don’t you? He must have been carrying a cellphone when he was picked up. Can Caroline and I have a look at it?”

  Mike laid his newspaper down on his lap. “Probably. He replied. “It’ll be in an evidence locker somewhere. I’m sure we can get you access.”

  “Good. Let’s go there and have a look. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” Keisha sunk back in her seat and waited for the plane to land. If the information was on a cell phone already in the possession of the police, we wouldn’t need a search warrant.

  While I sat near Mulally, memories of Colin were slipping further into the past.

  We were met at the gate by one of Keisha’s colleagues dressed in army fatigues who said that he would take us to Alexandria to get the cell phone from Joe who was in custody. As the car rolled down George Washington Parkway in Virginia along the Potomac River and toward the detention center in Alexandria I looked over at Mike gazing out the window at the national monuments. It was a little annoying to me that Mike sat there calmly unable to consider the possibility that I might fail. His over assurance of my abilities put us in different moods, I was tired, anxious and biting my nails, whereas he seemed to be relaxing.

  Keisha went inside the detention center first, and asked to see the personal belongings in Joe’s possession when he was arrested. A police officer came back with a small clear plastic bag with the words Evidence Bag, printed on the front. There was a place to write the name of the person examining it, and date. It tracked the chain of custody over the evidence. The evidence bag contained keys, a cellphone, and a wallet. The police officer handed us some plastic gloves.

  “Here you go, Miss Network Analyst. Try this out,” Keisha said as she turned around and handed me the phone.

  “Do you know what you’re looking for?” Mike asked, hovering over me as I gripped the mechanic’s phone.

  “I’m looking for incoming emails from Jones to the mechanic that would correspond to the dates that the mechanic was in Asia…..scrolling……here we go!

  ‘You found it?” he sounded astounded.

  “I found an email, now let’s open it up and check….there’s a link…. there’s….there’s…..a whole lot of encrypted data…..”

  “Let’s bring our equipment here to decode it,” he interjected.

  Keisha disagreed. “With all due respect Mr. Mulally, it’s a Department of Defense issue, since he’s selling defense equipment. It should be our programmers at the Defense Intelligence Agency who decode it.”

  He looked directly at Keisha. “Okay, Ms. Lebron, you’re on. But we want to see the files when you decode them.”

  “Understood,” Keisha nodded.

  The four of us, Mike, Jose, Hugo and I went to get something to eat while waiting for the guys from the Defense Intelligence Agency to show up and work on the files. We left Keisha behind at the jailhouse to wait for her colleagues. As we sat down at the table, the server handed us the menus, but Hugo put his down.

  Hugo looked at Mike, “So what’s going to happen with Caroline after this project?”

  ‘I don’t think she’s thought that through yet,” Mike replied, intimating that there were career options available at my discretion, and with a subtle sub-context reference to our relationship.

  “An uncertain future seems so ominous,” I said, half joking.

  “Hey,” Mike said softly, leaning over his seat. “Do you want to hear something funny?”

  “Sure, tell me, what’s so funny.”

  “Jones assumed he still held a bargaining position, even though he’s facing a lengthy list of federal criminal charges, and tried to negotiate his way out of handcuffs,” Mike laughed.

  “Well it worked for him once. That was enough,” I replied more disgusted than amused that Jones actually thought he could escape with a slap on the wrist despite the evidence mounting against him.

  “I agree,” Mike replied, still brimming with delight at the thought of Jones squirming in his handcuffs. “We shouldn’t waste the taxpayers’ money on another trial. Let’s send him on a one way trip back to Afghanistan and hand him over to the Taliban,” he smiled.

  “I think you’re on to a good idea Mike,” I said. “Let’s trade him for an American soldier held in captivity. I know of a couple of families who would love to see their sons to come home. For once Jones could really do something for his country!”

  When we finished our meal and had left through the restaurant door, Keisha was quickly approaching with an exuberant smile on her face. “We got him!!!!” Keisha shouted from the down the street with her arms raised in victory, oblivious to all who might hear. “The mechanic had 4G’s of aircraft designs, in a zip file emailed from David Jones!”

  “Oh my God,” Mike exhaled in relief, running his hand over his head. It was an extraordinary feeling of jubilation for all of us.

  “Boots you’re the best!!!” I shouted, stepping forward to offer a congratulatory hug.

  CHAPTER 22

  We went back to Ft. Meade, and Keisha shared the file, replete with multiple depictions of U.S. weapons systems including the essential ingredients for combating signal interference from the ground. The designs were of equipment that was still in its testing phase and thankfully not used in combat yet. The information was downloaded by a cleaning person working overnight at the aircraft company, from a company computer belonging to an employee on vacation. Then it was electronically faxed to an email address registered to Dave Jones. The link was picked up, copied and sent from Florida over a guest network to Joe in Beijing.

  The Chinese government would be taking some of that information to sell it on the black market to a third world country, but the rest they would copy for their own production. The airplane manufacturer would have to destroy the now-compromised designs and scrap the project. It cost the manufacturer and their insurance company millions upon millions of dollars. And millions more of taxpayer dollars to start all over again on a new design.

  The interruption in command and control at the base months earlier had been initiated by someone accessing the system with a passcode generated by the Irongate algorithm from the disk. The Department of Defense wanted badly to convict Jones and Qureshi.

  The day after the arrests I returned to the office where I had once worked to collect my personal belongings and to surrender my badge. As I passed Todd in the hallway, he looked grim and tried to avoid me. A couple of days ago I heard that Todd was taking early retirement.

  Bailey and a team at the I.R.S. successfully finished tracking all of the money flows through an intricate series of transactions including some dummy wires made to throw investigators, mostly forensic accountants, off of the trail.

  After the arrests, PFG’s board of directors struggled to contain the damage surrounding the arrest of its chairman. They issued a public statement that Jones had a “sweeping ambition” that “blinded” him to the “illegal aspects of doing business,” and that Jones acted without the knowledge of anyone else on the Board. They went on to say that Jones made a radical attempt to keep PFG afloat after the PFG proposal was dropped in the bidding process for a federal contract. After that, the initial public offering never came to fruition. Auditors issued an adverse opinion on PFG’s financial statements after they found that PFG’s balance sheet was significantly overstated, because Jones had instructed the C.F.O to book revenues from the anticipated contract with the Pentagon even though the contracts had not yet been signed. That killed any hope of taking the company public. PFG might have found some additional customers in the Middle East, Asia or Africa if they hadn’t been stopped by our investigation. PFG didn’t entirely collapse; it remains in business as a small company that provi
des record- keeping software to hospitals.

  As for our company, they promised some reforms in the security department but the true meaning of reforms will depend on how they handle the task of protecting the good while pursuing the bad. Todd had reversed those roles.

  Keisha has since moved into the Pentagon. Bailey got a huge promotion. So did Flumm, at last.

  Sara went on a couple of dates with the sailor who called her “sweetheart.” Mike sent Colin back to the U.K. to be with his wife. Mike himself is in line for an ambassadorship if the President wins re-election, but only after the trial.

  The federal prosecutor , named Riley, called us into his office for a trial strategy meeting.

  He started with the good news: the judge assigned to the case was a female. She was not inclined toward mercy in dealing with David Jones; she was well aware that Dave Jones did all of the horrible things that one person can do another when he was in Afghanistan, and hinted that if the prosecutor’s case was proven beyond a reasonable doubt she’d make a deliberate effort to paint a bleak portrait of what becomes of an illegal arms dealer. The judge wanted to send a clear message from the bench, to discourage others from engaging in the same type of activity. In short, she’d administer the maximum punishment to Jones, even though we all were aware that a new bumper crop of illegal arms dealers would rise up to take Jones’ place, probably even within days of the arrests, no matter what the sentence. When the meeting with the prosecutor was finished we walked to the courthouse for a pre-trial hearing on the venue for the trial.