“Excuse me?”
“The paint work,” Fennelli said. “Your ferry crew indicated that its first stop is the paint and mod shop. Where are you taking it? You know, we do a really fine job of configuring your bird to your exact specifications. Since you’re a customer, of course, we can offer you a substantial discount. Nobody does a better paint job on large aircraft like Mojave. Please consider it, Mr. Lake.”
Damn flyboys, Lake cursed silently. The stupid bastards that Cazaux and Townsend were digging out of the woodwork to fly these missions had real big mouths. The modifications and paint job were going to be done at one of four facilities already hired to do the job — Little Rock, Arkansas; Salina, Kansas; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; or Newark, New Jersey, depending on which had all the necessary personnel, equipment, and cargo ready to go, and which was under the least surveillance by the authorities. Fennelli would obviously want the job badly, so he might try to contact some of the names in the application to ask them directly. Lake had sewn up most of those traps so Fennelli might not get anywhere — but then again, he might if he tried hard enough.
“I’m afraid that’s up to the buyer, Mr. Fennelli, and he hasn’t confided in me about his plans for the airplanes,” Lake said. “But I will certainly pass along your offer.”
Lake couldn’t have been more relieved to get on the, Learjet and head back toward Los Angeles.
“Ted, get on the damned phone and contact the ferry 1 crews,” Lake ordered. “Tell them that if they don’t keep their mouths shut from now on, I will personally see to it that Cazaux deals with them. Then I want—”
“Harold, it’s not a good idea to use the Flitephone for something like that,” Fell interrupted. “The phone on the airplane has to go through a UHF radio station before it hooks into the landline phone system. It’s worse than a cellular phone system — everybody with a thirty-dollar scanner can listen in.”
“We’re still using the secure phone system and the dead- drop line, aren’t we?”
“Yes, but I’m not so sure how well it works over an ARINC network.” The scrambled phone system was a simple but usually very effective analog voice-scrambling system that would protect against unauthorized recording and casual surveillance; the dead-drop line was an 800 number that tied into the local and long-distance phone lines so all calls made would appear to go only to the 800 number, not to any particular phone or person. Fell knew that sometimes calls from the plane were not scrambled, or could not be descrambled on the other end, because of the properties of the additional Aeronautical Radio, Inc., radio link.
“The damned system cost well over a thousand dollars a month to operate — it better work,” Lake said. “I need the bank to cut a replacement check for Fennelli, and I want to make sure the taps on Universal’s branch offices and to Worthington Enterprises brokerage are in place — if Fennelli tries to contact them directly, I need to know about it. Get on it, Ted, right now. ”
Lassen, in a Piper Cheyenne II turboprop plane shuttling northward to visit another airport, was undoing another button of his shirt to try to get a bit cooler when his transportable phone insistently beeped at him. He plugged his headset into the unit, pressed the green SYNC button, and waited until the scramble-synchronization circuits between the caller and his unit agreed and allowed the call to connect. When it did a few seconds later, he heard a tone and responded, “Sweeper.”
“Sweeper, this is Peepshow,” came the reply. “Peepshow” was the tactical mission commander aboard an RC-12K Guardrail communications and intelligence aircraft. Because cellular and radio communications were difficult to maintain so far out away from large cities, federal agents involved in special investigations in remote areas often set up communications relays, which allowed them to maintain constant contact. One such communications relay system was the U.S. Army’s Guardrail system, which was a modified Beech Super King Air turboprop plane loaded with communications and signals intelligence equipment. Along with providing a secure, efficient communications link, Guardrail could also eavesdrop on radio, TV, cellular, telephone, and data communications for a hundred miles in any direction, and could break in on conversations or broadcast on civil channels or frequencies. “We got some information on your subject.”
“Stand by one.” Lassen pulled out a personal digital assistant computer, created a new note file, and readied his electronic stencil. “Go ahead.”
“Your target filed an IFR flight plan direct Santa Monica Airport,” the tactical mission commander reported. “Normal air traffic control communications. We monitored three separate radiotelephone calls via ARINC Mojave to a WATS number. Do you need the number? Over.”
“Let me guess,” Lassen said, retrieving another note file from the PDA and reading off an 800 number.
“The same,” Peepshow responded. “The conversation was scrambled, but the ARINC transmission was garbled and they had to repeat the password sequence several times. Finally, your target ordered the WATS operator to turn off the scrambler so he could log on to the service. We copied the ID number and password.” Peepshow passed Harold Lake’s service ID number and password to Lassen. It would — probably not do too much good — Lake would undoubtedly change the password at his first opportunity. “We copied several phone numbers, account numbers, and what appear to be code names before they scrambled the transmission again.” The tactical mission commander passed that information to Lassen. “In addition, we got a good analysis of the scrambler algorithm routine as they shut it off and then turned it back on again, so we can probably give you their scrambler’s algorithm to plug into your descrambler once we get back on the ground. That’s about all. Over.”
“Great work, Peepshow,” Lassen said. “Sweeper out.” Well, it didn’t prove too much, but it was a start. Using blind phone drops was not illegal — blind or dead drops prevented someone from knowing what number was called— although it looked very suspicious. It was going to take time to check out all these names, and he had six other airports between Mojave and Reno to check out. He decided to transmit his notes from the PDA via his radiotelephone back to his office in Sacramento so his staff could get to work on it; using Guardrail, the task took only a few moments.
Harold Lake and Ted Fell were two new names in this investigation, so this trip may not have been a total bust. Two guys from New York who admitted not knowing that much about planes, traveling all the way out to Mojave, California, to buy two very large transport planes. It might take a warrant for Fennelli to give him any information on Lake, his company, his financial institutions, and the persons he worked for. With a little push and some carefully veiled threats, Lassen was sure that Fennelli would easily roll on Lake or anybody else and hand over the files on Lake. But if Fennelli was smart and called in his attorney, Lassen would get into hot water with the U.S. Attorney, that avenue of information would snap shut, and, if he was dirty, Lake would disappear.