She knew that Stone had neoconservative leanings but was very much his own man when it came to decision making. Meredith also knew that she couldn’t pretend to know the Byzantine machinations of decision making within the Pentagon or even the White House.
Yet, she did understand that sometimes frenzy and momentum became currents too swift to fight lest you drown trying to swim against the tide. And so perhaps, she thought, tapping her lip, just perhaps there were some folks trying to do what they considered to be a good deed.
Stop a war in Iraq by starting one in the Philippines.
The more she thought about it, the more sense it made.
Chapter 55
Meredith waited until everyone had departed for the day, walked through the outer cubicles and offices one time, then reentered Rathburn’s office.
Dead men tell no lies, she thought. Meredith immediately scolded herself. He’s not dead.
Yet.
She tried to stop herself, but couldn’t prevent the sinking feeling that her boss was either dead or about to be killed.
She wandered around Rathburn’s E-ring lair, where he had worked for the past three months as the newly appointed assistant secretary of defense for international affairs. Typically an impotent position, Rathburn had seemed unusually powerful and con-nected in his beginning days with the Department of Defense.
What were his connections? she wondered. He had been a professor at Georgetown University’s National Security Studies Program and was woven tightly with the party leadership that had risen to power. What gave him that link?
Meredith, just over thirty, had always wondered how powerful men achieved their status. There were worlds that she could simply not imagine, and even the idea of taking a simple trip to Palau with Rath-burn had excited her beyond belief. To approach the source of importance and authority was akin to discovering truth. It was, she thought, like reaching out with her hand to touch Mother Teresa. Would some of the goodness rub off? Could she wave her hands over the wafting fumes of power, inhaling them, and experience the sensation herself? Achieve the status?
Rathburn had somehow drunk the elixir and one morning found himself in position to influence world events via his connection to the secretary of defense.
She picked up a football signed by all of the Washington Redskins. Next to it was a large machete given to him by a Gurkha soldier in Nepal. Other mementoes were scattered on several bookshelves and display tables.
She studied the diplomas on the wall for the first time as she spun the football in her hands the way a wide receiver might as he shot the breeze with the quarterback. She had seen the diplomas before, of course, but had never really read them. Rathburn had earned a Harvard undergraduate degree with a major in economics; a Harvard MBA; and a Princeton Ph.D. in political economy. Interesting, she thought. Mostly a finance background.
I guess that is what makes the world turn, she mused.
She sat at his computer and contemplated what she was about to do. Meredith had thought at length that day after her meeting with Stone. She had gone for a run around the Washington Monument from the Pentagon and during that exercise she began thinking about the comments she’d heard from the Japanese man leaving Stone’s office. The Japanese emissary had spoken in perfect English, as if he had attended Harvard.
What was the reference to “Beasts of Burden?” Sure, she knew it was a famous Rolling Stones’ song, but could it have been something else? Then, Stone’s preceding comment about getting satisfaction on one hand seemed innocuous enough, while on the other hand, when coupled with the “Beasts of Burden” comment, could have been some kind of code.
Speaking of codes, she thought, she pulled out the three-by-five card she’d had the computer technician give her months ago. Rathburn was always forgetting his password and finally the overworked twenty-two-year-old jotted on the card the secret and regular computer code words for access to Rathburn’s computer.
“Don’t tell anyone. I’ll deny it,” he had said, winked at her, tugged on his earlobe, and departed.
As they had before when Rathburn had called for help, the passwords worked, and she was into both his unclassified and classified hard drives.
She first checked his Internet browser cache to see what kind of Web sites he surfed. She found Google, Yahoo! MSNBC, and the garden variety of other URLs. Nothing unusual, she determined.
Then she clicked on history and was interested to see that Rathburn had never cleared his history file. She was able to view his activity from three months before, when he assumed the job. She spent some time perusing the Web sites that he had visited; again, nothing unusual. He apparently had a G-mail account and a Yahoo! e-mail account.
She tried to find the user names of those accounts, but everything came up with the blank sign-in screen. If he had been logged in, the browser had ultimately logged him out for inactivity. She then opened his Outlook work e-mail account, scanned through those, and again saw nothing that would raise a red flag.
She clicked on my pictures and saw nothing, then clicked on the trash bin and found one deleted photo.
It was a photo of four men, one of whom she presumed was Rathburn, all standing with arms laced around their buddies’ shoulders. She did a double-take as each man was wearing a Halloween mask. She immediately recognized Mick Jagger and thought she could tell which one was Keith Richards, but she wasn’t enough of a Rolling Stones enthusiast to remember the other two members of the band. There was a big tongue and lips superimposed on the photo, and she remembered that to be the logo on one of the Stones’ albums. Sticky Fingers maybe? Maybe not.
Huh, she thought.
She switched the Cybex Switchview box to the classified computer, which could not access the Internet but could access a Secret domain. There wasn’t much there, some routine e-mails on Outlook.
She closed the dialogue boxes and opened the my computer icon. She saw the common O: drive, where they shared office files and such, which she opened. Scanning through those there was nothing she either hadn’t seen or hadn’t put in there herself during her duties as his special assistant.
She closed the O: drive and studied the open my computer box and looked at all of the network drives. Again, nothing out of the ordinary. No references to the Rolling Stones or Keith or “Beasts of Burden.” Just the one photo, but what did that mean?
Frustrated and beginning to feel foolish, she stood, grabbed the football she had initially picked up, and began to put it back in the orange placekicker’s tee from which she had lifted the pigskin.
Her eye caught something in the center of the tee. She studied it more closely and saw that there was a small tear in the middle where the ball would rest on its pointed end. She touched it and determined that the tear was actually a tab, like a battery compartment cover. Meredith pulled at the tab and peeled back the soft orange material.
In the bottom of the well of the tee was a small thumb drive.
Huh, she thought.
Meredith flipped over the tee and a SanDisk 1-gig removable drive tumbled onto the desk. She sat back down and picked up the drive, which was indeed about the size of her thumb.
She removed the plastic tip and inserted it into the computer. A moment later a dialogue box appeared asking her if she wanted to open a file.