The intensity of the rain increased, pelting down in sheets.
Chapter 88
Other than being totally humiliated and having her car destroyed, Meredith’s worst injury was the gash on her head from Stone’s fireplace. She had crawled from the wreckage, running and not looking back, fearing that either Stone was chasing her or that her car was about to catch fire and explode.
The car, while totaled, did not burn, and thankfully she had been wearing her seat belt. She had spent one night in the Georgetown hospital, then rented a car so she could go to the one safe place she believed was still available to her.
She spoke to her assistant, Mark, over the phone from the Garrett house in Stanardsville. She told him that she would be reporting back to work in a few days, that she had an accident and needed to recover.
“Yeah, the SecDef personally came down here looking for you,” Mark said.
I bet he did.
“Really, did he say anything?”
“Not really. Just said he was doing ‘battlefield circulation,’ otherwise known as management by walking around. He asked where you were, then split. He looked kinda nervous.”
“Thanks, Mark. I’ll see you in a few days,” Meredith said, ready to hang up.
“Karen, can I use that computer I asked you about last night?”
“Sure thing. Do all my business on it. Have my own server too. Went back to UVA and got a certification in computer science. I’ll do the occasional house call for the folks around here to fix their stuff.” They walked into the study, which was lined with pine paneling and had two bookshelves at the back. A smallish desk was covered with mail and books and a black-and-walnut UVA college chair with an orange and blue seat cushion was pulled away from the desk. A bench was underneath the window that opened onto the north part of the farm and offered a generous view of the mountains.
“Huh,” Meredith said. “You any good with security stuff?”
“How ya mean?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I’ve got a thumb drive, and I can see the folders, but can’t open them.”
“Password-protected. You didn’t try to open them did you? Get locked out.”
“No, I figured that much out after I clicked on one and got the password dialogue box. I never tried a password.”
“Good thing,” Karen said. “Matt and I have played around with some algorithms for code breaking.” She looked up at Meredith after she sat at the computer and said, “Given his line of work.”
Meredith dug through her purse and said, “Well?”
“Problem?” Karen asked.
“Can’t find my lipstick, but here’s that thumb drive.” It was the one conscious thought she had as she crawled from the wreckage. Get the thumb drive.
Karen took the device and plugged it into the USB port and quickly pulled open the dialogue box with the files. Then she opened another program from her windows display and played around with it a minute. A black screen came up and scrolled through hundreds of lines of code and stopped. Karen minimized that screen and said, “Interesting.”
“What?” Meredith asked, hopeful.
“Did he have a problem memorizing passwords or something?”
“All the time,” Meredith said, more hopeful.
“Well, he used Firefox, and all you have to do is click on the Firefox icon here in his thumb drive and you get all the passwords,” Karen explained. She performed the function and a series of boxes with asterisks in them popped up.
“They’re still protected,” Meredith said.
“Watch this.” Karen clicked on java script. Suddenly the asterisks disappeared, and the passwords appeared.
KeithRichards2002.
“He a Stones’ fan?”
“You might say that.” Meredith grimaced.
“Okay, I’m going to leave it with you. I never did this. And if I ever get a call about it, this computer will be in the fireplace before I hang up the phone.”
“No worries. I promise. You’re awesome, Karen. Thanks so much.”
Karen left, and Meredith sat down to begin plowing through the files. The password worked for each folder, and what she found was, to put it mildly, shocking.
In the first file, the Pred-China folder, she read document after document that recorded financial transactions of U.S. technology sales to China totaling some $100 million. Meredith figured that at $5 million each, the Chinese had received about twenty Predators. The money, it seemed, was then funneled in two directions.
First, there was a clear chain of transactions to a man named Takishi, she presumed this was the man she had seen leaving Stone’s office and with whom Stone had exchanged a Rolling Stones’ code.
What could Takishi be doing with $75 million?
Well, she thought, he could be building weapons plants on the island of Mindanao. Was this any different than selling TOW missiles to Iran, then funding the insurgency in Nicaragua? Instead of Iran-Contra, do we have China-Abu Sayyaf, she wondered? That would be a twist, fund the bad guys to start a war … for what?
Next, she opened a file labeled “AIG.” American International Group was the world’s largest insurance company. In this file she found stock-trading records for early September 2001, prior to September 11. They were a combination of short sales of AIG and United Airlines stock as well as option puts. In essence, whoever the account numbers belonged to had bet in early September that AIG and United stocks were going to go down big.
Bottom line: Someone knew about the coming attacks.
Was that where it ended? she wondered. Did they know about the attacks or did they help plan the attacks? Meredith had read all of the reports of the high-ranking CIA officials who were under investigation for placing short trades on airline and insurance stocks a few days prior to 9-11. For whatever reason, the story never got much play in the press.
But the evidence was staring her in the face. The Rolling Stones, or at least Keith Richards, aka Bart Rathburn, either knew of the short trades or had placed the short trades … or both. Rathburn, after all, was a finance major and had worked at a hedge fund before finding his way to academia and the Pentagon. Had the other $25 million gone to short trades? Or had it gone to helping the hijackers?
She remembered reading somewhere that 9-11 cost Al Qaeda somewhere around a half million dollars. That was peanuts to these guys.
Or had their cooperation, if there was coop-eration, been more subtle, such as pushing aside a report on the flight training of insurgents, for example?
She shuddered. The bottom line, she assessed, was that the Rolling Stones knew about the 9-11 attacks before they occurred.
So, let’s see who they are. She opened Mick Jagger’s file and saw a complete dossier on Secretary of Defense Robert Stone. She scanned through the document and closed it.
Next she opened Charlie Watts’ file and saw a Harvard Business School picture of Takishi, smiling and handsome. As she read the file, Takishi was an HBS classmate of Bart Rathburn.
She had assumed that Rathburn was Keith Richards since there was no file on Richards and because Stone had once mistakenly called him Keith. So when she opened the Ronnie Wood file, she was not so much surprised when she didn’t see Rathburn’s face.
Instead, she was shocked at the image staring back at her.
Dick Diamond?
Chapter 89