Sean recognized the faint expression as the highest compliment from the man who had just added the final element to a team that was now, without a doubt, the best for the job that lay ahead.
The American Airlines flight from Dallas-Fort Worth landed on Los Angeles International Airport’s runway Two-Four right just as Angelenos were halfway through the morning weekday rush hour. It was the milder form of the red-eye, just a three-hour jump from the sprawling Texas airport to LAX. Most of the eighty passengers were businesspeople who had risen before the dawn to catch their flight. Two of those passengers, as much businessmen in their own eyes as any of the others on board, had connected from an earlier flight from Miami. From one panhandle to another.
The two men, dressed in sweatshirts and jeans that gave them the appearance of youthful student travelers, took their carry-on bags and followed the crowd out to the baggage-claim area in Terminal 4 on the south side of LAX’s two-level loop. There were few people at the rotating oval baggage conveyers; businesspeople had learned to travel light, for fear of losing a needed bag.
The two young men, however, knew that carry-ons had one disadvantage for the business traveler in their line of work — the X ray.
The single blue Samsonite, which had been checked at the desk in Miami, slid down the ramp and was snatched up before it could start its transit around the stainless-steel racetrack. The men went next to the Budget Rent-a-Car counter and took possession of a subcompact car that was assembled by Chevrolet from parts imported from Japan. Five minutes later they were on the 405 freeway heading north, with traffic, toward the 10. That would take them into downtown L.A.
Then the work would begin.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
RETURN TO SENDER
Becoming a spy was frighteningly easy.
Samuel Paul Garrity had done so because, like others who chose treason as an avocation, he wanted to get back at a government, at a system that he believed had prevented him from living the American Dream. That concept was no more than a pipe dream fed to the eager masses who wanted something better, he knew, and had for a long time. There was no dream out there. Just a bait, an illusion to satisfy the desires of those who wanted more. But they could never reach it. Like Garrity, they were treading water, unable to get ahead enough to keep from falling behind. It was a cycle of desire, appeasement, and denial that he had decided to step out of. No longer was he in the loop. In fact, he was so far out that he didn’t even retain empathy for those still in it. Sam Garrity had found his brass ring, and to hell with those who were stupid enough not to go for their own.
As an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, Garrity had at one time been a loyal citizen who found some pride in serving his country, even in the oft-considered menial work he did. The job had once been a source of fanciful dreams and musings as to what the Agency really did behind the red doors that marked the secure areas he could never hope to enter. But the natural curiosity had led him to seek out, on his own, the knowledge of what the wondrous things might be. There were dozens of companies in the area surrounding the nation’s capital that carried the “latest” in electronic and surveillance equipment that those in private security and investigative fields used in their daily work. These showrooms were also open to the general public, as a buck was a buck, and there were thousands of bright, shiny toys to cause the amateur sleuth to drool uncontrollably.
Sam Garrity found himself in awe of the gear that was out there in the open, for the taking — with the liberation of a large amount of money from his savings. As he ogled at the plethora of “spy” toys, he came upon a device that he could combine with his passion of the moment — a high-end personal computer that had already eaten up a good chunk of that savings. It looked much like a small photocopy machine or, to an educated eye, an expensive scanner that converted documents or pictures placed under its cover to bits of digitized data to be stored on a computer connected to it. It was exactly that, and much more, and he had, after a particularly effective sales pitch from the store’s manager, taken it home with no idea what he would one day do with it.
This day, though, after a long night cleaning the mess left by the obscenely well paid executives who ruled Langley like the appointed monarchs he saw them as, Garrity knew exactly what to do. As usual he took a short nap when he arrived at his two-bedroom home, then, later, went into his “playroom.” In it were his babies, the computer and the machine hooked to it that had helped change his life to one where he was in control.
He repeated the same procedure each morning after work, though there was not always a yield from his efforts. First he switched on the IBM and started the program, called Deep Reader, that ran the scanning device. Next, he took the sheets removed from the DCI’s legal pad and scanned them one at a time into the computer memory that the program had set aside for the task. Several sensitive lasers swept over the blank pages and “read” the indentations left by the pressure of writing instruments on the sheets above. The process was familiar to law-enforcement agencies, who often used it to uncover the most mundane scribbles to tie criminal activities, or the plans of such, to certain individuals by way of handwriting analysis. Garrity knew who had written that which Deep Reader was scrutinizing and separating into distinct word patterns from the different pages. That man had made his path of treason all the easier with his incessant scribbling, something Sam had noticed during several of his late-night cleaning sessions while the director worked at his desk, despotically pointing out areas that needed more attention with the sweeper or the polish rag. At first he had taken the sheets on a lark, just to see if his new toy would work. Then, when references to individuals and groups he was familiar with started showing up, he made the leap from sleuth to spy, offering his services to the first one on the list. Surprising to him, they had accepted and were paying generously into a Canadian bank account that would ensure a very comfortable retirement beyond what he could ever have hoped for otherwise.
“What’s on the director’s tiny little mind today?” he asked the screen, watching the digitized hourglass drain as the five-minute-per-page process wound to its end. It was more complicated than just scanning the page for indentations, a trick that had once been accomplished by a method known as electrostatic detection. That was archaic compared to this. Deep Reader not only “saw” what was on the page, more important, it sorted through the numerous words and scribbles from potentially tens of pages above to piece together the logical word strings and other writings of that day. Because there could still be “leftovers” from the previous day, the program “looked back” at what had been culled twenty-four hours earlier and disregarded it. So much data had been stored since Garrity first began his homespun business that he had to install a backup to dump the excess to; his main hard drive just wasn’t big enough.
A bright blue FINISHED flashed in the graphically raised icon box. Garrity clicked on that with a sweep of the mouse and saw that Deep Reader had discerned seven separate pages of notes the director had made. He scrolled through them slowly, looking first for any notations that pertained directly to his paymaster. Those that didn’t were delivered as well. What happened after that was not his concern.
The fourth page yielded what he wanted. He had trained himself to decipher the director’s exaggeratedly left-leaning — no pun intended — penmanship. The letters were always spaced close together, some overlapping, especially the cases where there were two of the same next to each other. This one looked as though he was jotting down something someone else was saying, as the thoughts were far too coherent to be his alone.