Ka-boom.
It was as if all the blood had been suddenly flushed from my head. I felt dizzy, the room spinning. A big, gray blur.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“I don’t think I need to say it again.” No, he didn’t. “To be very clear, Claire was everything you thought she was, a national affairs reporter for the New York Times. She was a gifted journalist who only wrote the truth. But as I’m sure you’re aware, doing that — especially doing it at her level — takes sources.”
“You were one of her sources?”
“No, not me personally. Someone else within the NSA. The division is called Tailored Access Operations, if that means anything.”
“And in return?”
“You mean, what did she do for them?”
“Give something, get something... right?”
“Not exactly,” he said. “At least, not in the way you’re worried about. I think you know that Claire would never burn any of her sources. That’s not what she did for us.”
“Then what exactly did she do?”
Before Crespin could answer, though, we were both looking at Valerie leaning against the doorway again. She was back.
In one hand was a piece of paper, in the other a laptop.
So much for a cup of coffee.
“You need to see something,” she said.
Chapter 99
I assumed she was talking only to Crespin, especially when she walked right past me to hand him the piece of paper. He read it, glanced up at Valerie, and read it again.
Instead of handing it back to her, however, he handed it to me.
The reason was as clear as the e-mail address in the upper left-hand corner. It was mine. I was looking at a printout of an e-mail sent to me by Brennan, except I’d never seen it before.
That was when I noticed the time stamp: 5:34 a.m. Brennan had only sent it a half hour earlier.
Trevor, change of venue for our interview today if that’s ok. Too many distractions here at house. Mallard Café at 33rd and Prospect at 11? They do a mean Sun brunch. — JB
“There’s your answer, by the way,” said Crespin.
Answer to what? “What was the question?” I asked.
“What Claire did for us,” he said. “You’re looking at it.”
That hardly cleared up anything, and he knew it. The guy had coy down to a science.
Valerie to the rescue. “Josiah Brennan didn’t send the e-mail,” she explained.
I looked down again at the paper. There was Brennan’s e-mail address underneath mine, the same address he’d been using since first confirming our supposed interview.
“If he didn’t send it, who did?” I asked. But I already knew the answer before the words had even left my mouth. “Karcher?”
“Yes,” said Crespin. “And Brennan has no idea.”
“How do you know?”
“Karcher used a certain spyware virus. As soon as you read an e-mail from him, he can then assume your identity, basically controlling your entire e-mail account. The reason we know this is because we use the same virus.”
“I still don’t get the connection to Claire,” I said.
Valerie looked over at Crespin as if to say Go ahead, boss, you’re the one who brought it up.
Crespin thought for a moment. Finally, “Imagine you’re in London to interview a certain cleric before he’s deported from the UK to Jordan,” he said. “The cleric has little trust in an American journalist — or any American, for that matter — but he’s eager to speak his mind. The international stage can be intoxicating, and no one serves up the limelight better than the New York Times. A neutral location is agreed upon, almost always a hotel, and the cleric has one of his body men search you even though they’re not quite sure what they’re looking for. A recording device? It’s an interview. Of course you have a recorder. And as far as they can tell, it looks exactly like any other recorder they’ve ever seen.”
“But it’s not,” I said.
“No, instead it hacks the hotel’s Internet service and then hacks the cleric’s cell phone. And, here’s the key, it does all of it wirelessly. Which means Claire didn’t really have to do a thing.”
“Except give her consent,” I said, unable to hold back my smirk.
Crespin nodded. “But this wasn’t just any cleric, was it?”
No, it wasn’t. This was a guy who’d been jailed repeatedly in London without ever receiving a trial. Over a bottle of Brunello one night, Claire had argued with me that he deserved one, and I’d argued back that according to the antiterrorism laws passed in Britain after 9/11, he didn’t. This was the night before she flew to London to interview him.
“Here,” said Valerie, giving me the laptop in her other hand. “You need to log on to your e-mail and cancel on Brennan.”
“Cancel?”
“Unless, of course, you’d prefer your last meal to be eggs Benedict. This is Karcher setting you up,” she said.
“Yes, the same Karcher responsible for Claire’s death,” I shot back. Forgive me for sounding a little testy.
“Listen, I get it,” said Valerie. “You want revenge, who wouldn’t? But this isn’t you pretending to be drunk with some jet-set, skirt-chasing international playboy. This is a guy who wants to kill you.”
“Which is exactly why I’ll be at the Mallard Café at eleven o’clock,” I said, as sure as I’d ever been about anything in my life. “Karcher wants to kill me, all right, but he can’t. He won’t. At least, not right away. And that’s an opportunity we can’t pass up.”
I was ready to explain, to argue my case. Yell and scream, if I had to.
But I didn’t have to. Valerie and Crespin both had that look on their faces, the kind I used to see on juries during the closing argument of every case I’d ever won. It was as if I knew exactly what they were thinking.
This guy might actually have a point.
Now all we needed was a plan.
Chapter 100
“Can I get you anything while you’re waiting?” asked the waitress, a quick tilt of her head acknowledging the empty chair across from me. Her name tag read BETSY.
If there had been more time, more options, more everything, this young woman with rolled-up sleeves would’ve been Valerie undercover, and in addition to having her hair tucked into a ponytail, she would’ve had a Beretta tucked behind the white apron with the big green M that all the servers at the Mallard Café wore.
But sometimes you just have to make do.
“I’m good for now,” I said. “Thanks, though.”
This was clearly music to Betsy’s ears. One less thing she had to do. My very real waitress had that harried look of having a few too many tables in her section. As far as I could tell, she was the only one tending to all the outdoor seating that lined the front of the café.
Betsy shuffled off, while I kept waiting, not that I’d expected to be doing anything different. Karcher would absolutely make sure I arrived first. After that, it was anyone’s guess. Including whether it would even be Karcher who showed. The guy had a history of letting others do his dirty work.
“Stop fidgeting,” came a voice in my ear.
I mean, literally in my ear. Crespin had outfitted me with what had to be the world’s tiniest transmitter. Smaller than the head of a tack, it was fully out of sight inside my ear canal.
“Sorry,” I said, only to realize that I’d just broken one of his two rules.
“What did I tell you about talking to me?” came his voice again. “And don’t answer that.”