“She’s that all right,” said Clutesi. “She’s an IRA terrorist who gets a kick out of torturing undercover agents.” He handed Foulger the other picture, the one of the man with the walkie-talkie. “I don’t suppose you know who this is?” he asked.
Foulger took one look at the picture and sneered at Clutesi. “Get outta here, Don. You’re jerking me around, right?”
Sullivan’s head snapped up. “You know him?”
“Come on you guys, there isn’t an anti-terrorist agent in the world who wouldn’t know who this is.” His mouth dropped. “Jesus H. Christ, are you telling me he’s in the States?”
“Who?” said Clutesi. “Who the fuck is he?”
Foulger held the photograph out in front of him. “Unless I’m very much mistaken, gentlemen, this is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. Alias Carlos the Jackal.”
Lou Schoelen switched on the small television in his bedroom and adjusted the sound level until he was satisfied that it would cover his voice. Carlos had been insistent that they were all to shun any contact with their friends and relatives until after the hit, but Schoelen thought he was being over-cautious. There was no evidence that anyone was on their trail, and besides, he had a foolproof way of ensuring that any call he made was totally untraceable. Carlos had left the house earlier, Lovell was downstairs watching television in the den, and the Lebanese woman was in her own room.
He pulled his kitbag out from under the bed and unzipped a small pocket from which he took a black plastic box about the size of a paperback book. On one side of the box were twelve grey buttons and on the reverse was a small grille covering a speaker. The electronics inside were quite simple and Schoelen had made the device for a few dollars. All the box did was to generate electric pulses which mimicked those used by the telephone companies. It was quite useless in the hands of someone who didn’t understand how communication networks operated, but Schoelen was no amateur. He flicked open a small notebook and ran his eyes down the columns of figures. It had taken him ten years to gather together the information in the book, swapping numbers with other phone hackers in the same way that children traded baseball cards.
Schoelen dialled the telephone number of an insurance company in Baltimore. He knew that the office would be closed — it was after nine o’clock at night — and that the call would not be answered. He waited until the third ring, then pressed the grille against the mouthpiece of the telephone. With deft movements he pressed twelve keys, one at a time, sending tonal pulses down the line. He put the phone to his ear and listened to a series of clicks which told him that the call was being routed through the Baltimore exchange and across the country to San Francisco. The clicks stopped and he heard the dial tone again, though this tone was being generated by an exchange thousands of miles away. So far as the phone company records would show, he had made a local call to the insurance company and nothing more. He put the box back to the receiver and keyed in a second string of pulses, which again produced a series of clicks. This time the call was being routed down the West Coast to an exchange in Los Angeles. Schoelen ran his finger down to a number of a call-box which he knew was in a line of six such boxes in Long Beach. He keyed in the pulses, and thousands of miles away the phone began to ring. Schoelen’s fingers moved quickly because he had to get the next pulses down the line before the phone was answered. He keyed in another string of twelve pulses which transferred the call to the main San Diego exchange. As the pulses shot across the country at close to the speed of light, the telephone stopped ringing in Long Beach.
Schoelen put the phone to his ear and once again he heard a dial tone. This one was being generated by the San Diego exchange, but if anyone should try to trace the call, the trail would end at the pay phone in Long Beach. The final pulses generated by the black box set the telephone ringing on the hall table in his parents’ house in Coronado. His mother answered on the fifth ring and immediately poured out a torrent of questions in her thick Germanic accent which had changed little during all her years in the United States. Schoelen waited until she’d finished. “Mom, I’m fine,” he said. “No, I don’t know when I’ll be back. How’s Willis?” Schoelen’s dog was the reason for the call. Before he’d left Coronado, his Rottweiler had been off his food and had been listless at night.
“Oh, Lou, he was not so good,” said his mother. “He was sick many times, so we took him to the veterinarian last week. His intestine is twisted, he said.”
Schoelen’s stomach lurched. “He’s okay, isn’t he, Mom?”
“Oh, he’s fine now, he’s back home, but it was expensive, Lou. Eight hundred dollars for the operation and the medicine.”
Schoelen sighed with relief. He had raised the dog from a puppy and loved it with a passion. “That’s okay, Mom. I’ll send you the money in a couple of weeks. Is he eating okay now?”
“Like a horse. We have to take him back next week to have stitches removed, but his stomach is fixed. So, when are you coming home?”
“I don’t know, Mom. This job is very important. It’ll all be over in two weeks though.”
“Willis misses you, Lou. And so do we. Please come home soon.”
“I will, Mom. Say hello to Dad for me. I have to go now.” Schoelen replaced the receiver. On the television screen Captain Kirk and Spock beamed up to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.
The days of FBI agents wearing telephone company overalls and scaling telephone poles to tap phones disappeared with the advent of digital exchanges. Physical wiretapping was replaced by computerised monitoring, much to the relief of the agents who had previously been forced to spend hours in damp basements or in the back of vans, their ears sweating under too-tight headphones.
Once Jake Sheldon had obtained the necessary legal approval for the monitoring of the telephone line at Lou Schoelen’s parents’ house in Coronado, the details were passed to an agent, Eric Tiefenbacher, on the fourth floor of the FBI’s East Indianola Street offices. He in turn liaised with a fifty-year-old technician in the phone company’s headquarters, a man who had been as closely vetted as any FBI agent. It was his job to arrange for the line to be monitored and he did that by pressing a few keys on his computer terminal and sending the signal along a dedicated line to the FBI building. He did it while on a second line to Tiefenbacher and sent a test signal down the dedicated line to ensure that the link was good. At any one time the technician was responsible for up to sixty telephone taps, most of them for the FBI and the DEA, and he had enough information to destroy a host of long-term investigations into organised crime and corruption. He was positively vetted every year by the Bureau, but the technician would never in a million years consider trading the information he had. His granddaughter had died five years earlier, knocked down by a getaway car driven by three black teenagers who had just robbed a liquor store. For him, wire-tapping was a personal crusade, a way of helping the forces of law and order against the vermin who ruled the streets.
Three walls of the office in which Tiefenbacher worked were lined with tape-recorders. The machines were voice-activated and the reels only turned when a call was made. In the centre of the room was a teak veneer desk and a chair at which Tiefenbacher chain-smoked while he monitored the tape-recorders and replaced the tapes as necessary. Each hour, on the hour, he picked up a clipboard and went from machine to machine, noting down the digits in the tape counter next to each line. The notation was a back-up check because the time of each call was electronically recorded on the tape, along with the number of the phone on the other end of the line. Call-tracing with digital exchanges had become a simple matter of computer programming.
Tiefenbacher alternated his shifts with three other agents, all of them heavy smokers, and between them they ensured that the office was occupied twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Some of the tape-recorders had red stickers attached, signifying that any calls had to be immediately reported to the agent involved, the rest were checked on a daily basis. Most of the agents in the building referred to the surveillance room as The Tomb and the four agents had long been nicknamed The Living Dead. All four had in one way or another offended someone high up in the Bureau. Being assigned to The Tomb was not a good career move for an ambitious agent.