“Has anyone seen Katie? Katie Kessler?”
“No,” said one aide. “But maybe she’s in the archives.”
“Haven’t been by her office yet,” said a junior attorney.
He heard basically the same thing from everyone else, but Witherspoon tried not to appear overly interested. Just a question here and there.
By 2 P.M., he was satisfied she wasn’t coming to work. No one heard from her, not even her closest associates on the floor. By four, he checked in with a source at the D.A.’s office who let slip that somebody drowned Saturday in the Charles. He wasn’t sure if a body was recovered, but apparently the Boston Police stepped aside for the FBI, which he said was “unusual.”
That would be about right, Witherspoon thought smugly. Her boyfriend would have called the troops.
The absence of any real news led Witherspoon to assume that “the accident” was getting some high-level attention, and Kessler’s name was being withheld for a time. Certainly someone at Freelander, Connors & Wrather would get a call later today after her family was informed. Then he’d hear.
But that call did not come. Nor did it the next day, despite growing concerns at the law firm.
It was Roarke’s idea to make Witherspoon uneasy. He calculated that the silence would be maddening. Silence about Katie. Silence about the assassin. He ignored that fact he also was causing her friends to worry.
But Roarke was right. Witherspoon made more phone calls to the D.A. Nervous ones. He then tried her parents. Thanks to Roarke and Katie’s convincing, they took an unscheduled vacation to Maui — all on the government’s dime. As a result, there was no answer at their house, either. Not even voicemail.
Witherspoon now called the police directly. “Nothing, sir.” All of his calls were logged.
The arrogant young attorney went from smug and confident to unsure and jittery.
Roarke used the time to confirm his own suspicions. The photo of the dead man was sent to Touch Parson.
“This is one ugly corpse,” the FBI photo analyst complained over the telephone. “Is this your work, Roarke?”
“Touch, just tell me. Is he or isn’t he?”
“Isn’t.” Katie’s assailant was not Depp.
While the doctors tested President Lamden’s blood for any possible traces of toxic substances, the FBI backtracked each meal he’d had seventy-two hours prior to his heart attack.
The two dinners on the rubber chicken circuit — state affairs where he just pushed the food around the plate — were quickly ruled out. By habit, Lamden only drank the water. They were from bottles brought by the Secret Service.
His only other dinner, his last, was from the White House kitchen, prepared by the president’s personal chef. Nonetheless, everything in the kitchen was hauled away for testing, which essentially wiped out the White House stock.
The FBI echoed what the doctors at Walter Reed explained. Analysis was best if immediate. It was now days later. Lab technicians, supervised by the Secret Service, complained about the delay. At first, they weren’t even sure what they were trying to detect. “Try testing for Sodium Morphate,” Roarke told them from Boston. “He used it before.”
“President Lamden?”
“No,” was all the Secret Service agent said. But the he Roarke inadvertently mentioned was only one man.
A tanned vacationer with a ten-day stubble on his face stepped off a flight from Miami. He wore a short-sleeve Tommy Bahama blue-and-green print shirt, khakis from Banana Republic, and black boots.
He looked like any number of other vacationers. He was probably more relaxed than the rest, though. He and his redhead had extended their stay at Cap Juluca. He’d never fucked so much in his life. But when his consort received a call that her mother was sick, she returned to Philadelphia. He went onto Dallas, for no particular reason. There, he checked into the Marriott and logged onto an eBay sale. Through the cryptic wording, he learned that his principal employer had an urgent communiqué.
“Damn!” he said. He wasn’t anxious to get back to work. Quite the opposite — he thought he’d travel more. French wine country, Scotland, Ireland. No big cities. Nothing in the U.S. for a while. But the message, encoded in an eBay website, was clear. The job would take just a few days of preparation and execution. Execution, how appropriate, he thought.
He shrugged and e-mailed his acceptance. He figured he could fly to Paris just as easily out of Boston.
Chapter 37
After living in a closed society and perpetrating the notion that everyone is being watched, it was impossible for Aleksandr Dubroff to think otherwise. The KGB no longer existed. But from what he read on a number of foreign Internet websites, the FSB (Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or Federal Security Service) had eyes everywhere. He sat back in his chair, looking at the screen. Maybe they watch more than the KGB did, he thought. More than any of us could have ever imagined.
It only made sense. Russia was Russia. Communist or not, this is what the Kremlin knew. This was how the people lived going back to a time before the Communists, before the Bolsheviks, even before the Tzars. There were always people watching, always people listening. That’s why he never talked about his work with those he met in the forests of Tver or on the streets of Staritsa.
As a quiet, mushroom-picking government pensioner, Dubroff wanted to believe he had been forgotten by the system. Yet, in his day, if he had been monitoring someone else undertaking such deep research, bells would have gone off from Starista to Moscow. Is there someone like me now? Someone with a raised eyebrow? Someone suspicious enough to call me in?
Whatever he wanted to believe, the reality was that, according to the rules of the game, Aleksandr Dubroff just declared himself an enemy of the State. He had no idea how right he was. Acting very much like the KGB, the FSB spied on its citizens via a little-noticed Orwellian Internet plug-in dubbed SORM.
The program was initiated by President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent himself, five days into office. With the stroke of a pen, he broadened the scope of the 1995 Law of Operations Investigations to give the tax police, the interior ministry police, parliamentary security, the border and customs patrol, and the Kremlin the rights to monitor the private correspondence of all web users in Russia.
By 2000, the FSB had the technological wherewithal to discreetly observe the actions of Russia’s then 1.5 million Internet users. Currently, there were millions more. The government responded by setting up a spy network to manage the surveillance.
Originally, the law gave only the FSB the authority to monitor private correspondence, whether through letters, cell phone traffic, or e-mail, providing the agency first obtained warrants from the court.
The actual oversight fell into the hands of a new department: the System for Operational-Investigative Activities or SORM. The cost of the operation was footed by Russia’s own Internet Service Providers. The ISPs were immediately required to install so-called “black boxes” through which all of their electronic communication flowed. Once hot-wired, the traffic would, in turn, be routed to FSB headquarters.
The ISPs also had to pay for the technology and cover the cost of training FSB officers who analyzed the data. Service providers that didn’t cooperate created their own problems, which the FSB dealt with expediently.
Not that Russia was alone in such Internet eavesdropping. The United States employed the secretive Eschelon system through the National Security Agency. The program is capable of monitoring, cataloguing, cross-referencing, and storing billions of electronic communications from around the world.