“Wonderful,” Bud said. Urgent had to mean something about Cuba, and a trio of calls from the integral players in the situation could hardly signal anything positive. Life wasn’t that fair. “Let’s not make anyone wait. Conference it, and I’ll pick up in my office.”
Bud walked behind his desk and twisted the window shades closed to cut the glare from the afternoon sun. He finished the water with a quick gulp and lifted the handset. “Hello, everybody.” He was answered by three return greetings. “First of all, nobody is on speaker, right?” None were. The speakerphone was too much of a security risk, allowing those within earshot to hear things that were never intended for their ears. “And this is a four-corner conversation here, so let’s keep the interruptions to a minimum. Gordy, do you want to start?”
“Sure.” The FBI director could be heard flipping pages on his end of the line. “Our Miami field office served search and arrest warrants on the occupant of a house who a wiretap indicated was receiving information from a CIA employee. Greg was in on the warrant service up in D.C.”
“This was the leak you were worried about?” Bud asked.
“Yeah,” Drummond answered. “What did you get, Gordy?”
“The person receiving the information was Avaro Alvarez, son of José-Ramon Alvarez.”
“The head of the CFS?” Bud asked.
“Exactly.” Jones confirmed. A barely audible “Jesus” came from the DDI’s end of the line. “Avaro Alvarez was also directing the actions of two men in Los Angeles who killed Francisco Portero and one of my agents.”
“Son of a bitch,” Drummond said clearly this time. He knew just about everything after talking to Garrity, but not that. “You’re sure? Directing them?”
“The tape does not lie,” Jones said. “And we should know more soon. I just got word a few minutes ago that one of the gunmen was captured alive by the L.A. office. But let me tell you the rest. Avaro also had a sophisticated communication scheme involving pagers and phone booths worked out. He used this with the men out west and with the CIA leak. His name’s Samuel Garrity. Anyway, Garrity broke security and used his home phone. That’s how we nailed them. But he also had an encrypted cell-phone system set up to keep in contact with his bosses.”
“Encrypted. Like a voice scrambler?”
“No, Bud. Beyond that. It was one end of a multi-user package. Any phone with the same coded package can decrypt the transmission and convert the signal to simple audio. Without the package all someone would hear is white noise. It’s a pretty fancy system for a user like Alvarez.”
“So the other end has to have the same equipment,” Bud said.
“Right. Actually the properly coded microchip,” Jones explained. “And guess who was at the other end? Avaro’s cell-phone records indicated calls exclusively to one number. That number is a cell phone registered to a company called Onotronics.”
“Wait,” Drummond interrupted. “Onotronics out of Fort Lauderdale?”
“I knew you’d recognize it,” Jones said. “A major manufacturer of secure communications systems. They even did work on WASHFAX and SECVOCOM. And the company is owned and operated by Gonzalo Parra.”
“Number two in CFS,” Drummond expanded.
“And the calls in the previous two days have all terminated at a cell node near Shelton College, on the Cape.”
“Dammit,” Bud said softly. Why them? There were plenty of legitimate Cuban-American groups longing for their nation to be free again. Bright, patriotic, honest people. And too quiet in this case. The CFS had made the most noise making a name for itself, and had garnered much of the attention that should have been directed elsewhere. It was little wonder the rebels chose to contact such a “high profile” group, and less surprising that Anthony Merriweather had anointed them as the chosen ones. His chosen ones.
“It’s all very incriminating,” Jones said. “But not direct enough to prove CFS involvement beyond Avaro Alvarez. From this there’s no way to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Parra or any other CFS official was at the receiving end of those calls. We have him cold on espionage and conspiracy to commit murder, but we can’t legally extrapolate that to his father or anyone else without more evidence.”
“I think I can give some of that,” Drummond said. There was a determined edge to his voice that came from the revelation that murder was side by side with treason in the CFS’s repertoire. “Garrity came clean. Completely. The leak I thought I had in my directorate was actually in the next office.”
“What?” Bud said, the suggestion hard for even him to comprehend. “You mean Anthony?”
“Yes, but he didn’t even know he was giving just about everything discussed in his office to Garrity, and by way of him to the CFS.”
“How?” Bud asked.
“Anthony’s incessant scribbling and note-taking.”
“But that all went into the burn bag,” Healy said. “I thought we discounted that”
“The notes, yes. But Garrity didn’t need those.” The DDI explained the janitor’s exploitation of the device to decipher indented writing.
“We use Deep Reader!” Jones said, making the same mental note as the DDI to see that more stringent security measures be implemented regarding note tablets.
“But how did this Garrity link up with the CFS?”
“Chance and availability, Bud. When Garrity decided to use his toy for some moneymaking, he just went to the top of the list. The CFS was the big topic of the moment for Anthony, and they were reachable. Not like some of the other parties in his notes. Garrity couldn’t very well just go up to the Chinese embassy, or wherever, and say, ‘Look what I can do for you.’ But he could easily slip away to Florida, like on a vacation, to make his pitch to Alvarez and his bunch.”
“The money,” Healy said.
“Yep,” Drummond said. His counterpart had made the connection. “Garrity was passing pilfered intel to the CFS, and they were selling it to any and all takers. A financial trace that S and T was running identified a long list of contributors to a CFS account in Bern. The Chinese, the Israelis, Russians — all through intermediaries. It goes on and on.”
“The Russians,” Bud said with a slight chuckle. “I guess it wasn’t just my convincing that got them to come on board.”
“You laid the groundwork, but catching Anthony’s thoughts on the modernization program might have been the convincer,” Drummond said.
“So there is no druggie connection between the CFS and Coseros,” Healy observed.
“Maybe in the future, but all Coseros has done so far is pay for information.”
“No wonder he could avoid indictment,” Jones commented.
“Right. Every time I went in to brief Anthony on a new surveillance of Coseros, the same information made its way to him through the CFS.”
“Wait a second,” Bud said. “A CIA leak was supplying Anthony’s notes to the CFS through Avaro Alvarez. They were then selling this information to Coseros and others to fill their coffers. Plus, the son of the CFS head was also directing the actions of two men who killed the man who had the tape of the Castro/Khrushchev conversation. My question is why the CFS would have any interest in Portero?”
“Because they knew about the missile,” Healy revealed.
“How?” Bud and Drummond asked simultaneously.
“I can’t tell you exactly how,” the DDO said, the word “can’t” obviously translatable to “won’t.” “But Anthony received word soon after Portero came over that he had a story about the missile, and some sort of proof. A month later the person who informed Anthony about this was told to develop amnesia about the entire affair.”