Whoever did that had tech skills and Shaw was sure the thief had erased entry logs into the burgled offices. They also would have altered RFID information about entering and leaving the building itself.
“That’s hard hacking,” Shaw said. “Let’s focus on your IT people.”
Shaw came up with an idea for an undercover op. Marianne Keller arranged interviews between those in IT and an outside consultant hired by Harmon to consider opening an IT facility on the West Coast. For the gig, Shaw — in the role of Carter Stone — had donned the one business suit hanging in his Winnebago and a pair of glasses with non-magnifying lenses.
“I look corporate enough?” he asked Nilsson.
She replied, “Middle manager all the way.”
He sat in a bare office, yellow pad before him, and the employees filed in one by one. Shaw didn’t begin the discussion with the corporate move but let his purpose hang vaguely over them for five or so minutes as he asked about their career history at the company, where they’d worked before, if they had any complaints. Only when he sensed suspicion rising did he mention the move. He jotted their response, thanked them and then called in the next employee.
All the while he’d been gauging each man’s or woman’s reaction.
One was notably uncomfortable, his body language easy to read: guilt and worry. Shaw put him at ease right away, shifting to the relocation story. Paul LeClaire soon relaxed. Shaw stayed true to the role and, with a good businessman smile and a good businessman handshake, sent him off.
He called Nilsson. “We’ve got him. Now we need to find the trigger.”
She said, “Surveillance.”
“Right.”
Over the next couple of days they tailed LeClaire and listened to his public conversations and read his emails, as his employment contract allowed. The phone was issued by the company, but while they could geotrack it, they could not eavesdrop.
Shaw and Nilsson followed him to meetings with two men at a motel outside of town. Using a Big Ear microphone they picked up the men’s names: Ahmad and Rass, Saudi businessmen, brokers in the energy field. They learned too about the handover time and location: an abandoned factory on the Kenoah River.
Sonja Nilsson and he had taken their findings to Harmon, who was as dismayed as he was angry. “Paul? Really? We’ve been nothing but generous to him... Damn. Well, we’ve got a name, and you’ve got evidence. Now the FBI and police have to get involved.”
“Are you sure you want that?” Shaw had asked.
“What do you mean?”
Nilsson said, “Colter and I were talking.”
Shaw took over and offered the plan. “I think we should swap out the real S.I.T. for a fake one with a GPS chip in it.”
Nilsson added, “We let the exchange happen, then track the fake S.I.T. and find out who the buyer ultimately is.”
Harmon’s eyes had narrowed as he considered this — the sniper-focused mode. “Good. Put it together. I want his goddamn head.”
Shaw rose and stepped toward the door, trying to remember the formula for battlefield smoke.
10
Present day
“We had another bidder.”
It was a half hour after he’d left Lenny Caster, following the encounter with Lemerov, aka Abe Lincoln. Shaw was once again with Marty Harmon in the man’s modest office.
They were sitting in front of the cluttered coffee table. The Swedish Alabaman security head, Sonja Nilsson, was here as well. Today in a silver jacket, black skirt, white blouse, small pearls.
The elfin man rubbed his frizzy hair and frowned. “Go on, Colter.”
“A Russian.” He explained about the attempted preemptive offer.
“How did he find you?” Nilsson asked.
“He was running surveillance too.” Shaw then told them what Lenny and Mack had discovered about the man.
Nilsson said, “GRU? Soviet apparatus... He could surface again. Phoenix from the ashes. They do that.”
Shaw said, “He got rebuffed. If he’s freelance, he might move on. If he’s on payroll, the failure won’t sit well with his bosses. That means he’ll try again.”
Nilsson nodded. Her blond tresses were down, cascading over her shoulders and ending in a severe cut about twelve inches below the nape. Shaw had noticed that her nostrils had flared slightly when she’d joined them. She knew about the camo smoke he’d concocted but now her face registered familiarity with the scent, which supported his deduction about her time in the military.
Shaw glanced at the S.I.T. “Check it. We need to make sure it’s real.”
“You mean the prick might be a double agent or something? Selling the Saudis a fake? And then the real one to someone else?”
Nilsson lifted an eyebrow. “Foolish. But he’s got those debts. The gambling.”
Harmon rose and walked to his desk. Among the clutter he found an electric screwdriver and undid the dozen tiny Phillips-head screws and removed the housing. He examined the guts. “It’s real.” The CEO set the unit aside.
He asked how Shaw would like the check made out and Shaw said to himself. Harmon wrote it, tore it from the book and handed it to him. “You should get yourself a corporation. Limited liability. You know, legally, a good idea.”
He believed he had one. He’d have to find out. Shaw took the check, stashed it in his wallet, next to another one he’d received for a reward job from a month ago. He’d forgotten to deposit it.
Shaw glanced Nilsson’s way. And what was with those eyes? So intensely green. Contact lenses? He’d been trying to decide.
“Now. LeClaire. What do we do? Call the prosecutor? Write out affidavits? And I want a civil suit too. Let’s break him.”
But Shaw said, “Might have a better idea. You have a payroll office here?”
“We do,” Harmon said.
“I need a thousand singles and four hundred-dollar bills. Temporarily.”
“Done. What for?” With a nose scratch, Harmon leaned in. His cherubic look gave way to the focused one.
“I’m going to find LeClaire and offer to buy the S.I.T. back. I’ll flash what looks like a hundred K.”
Harmon said, “But it’s already on that private jet. Halfway to Mexico or the Caribbean by now.”
Nilsson, though, was smiling. She got it. “Ah, but that’ll convince him and his buyers that it’s the real item. Maybe there was some splinter of doubt that Colter swapped it out when the smoke bomb went off.”
“What if LeClaire accepts?”
“He won’t.” Shaw and Nilsson said this simultaneously.
Harmon muttered, “And then jail?”
Nilsson said, “I don’t think we want a trial, Marty. Details of the technology’ll come out.”
Shaw said, “Trade secrets aren’t very secret once you get into court.”
Nilsson said, “And let’s not telegraph to customers we had a security breach.”
“I suppose,” he griped. This remedy clearly went against Harmon’s take-no-prisoners philosophy.
Shaw said, “Fire him. And then don’t do anything. He’ll keep waiting for the police to come knocking. Every time he hears a siren or sees a dark sedan parked nearby he’ll have a very bad day.”
This was a good second-place alternative and Harmon was laughing. “Love it! The other-shoe punishment!” He turned to Nilsson. “Why don’t we hire Colter? Put him on our security staff?”
She looked Shaw’s way with a smile. “I wouldn’t mind that.” A brief pause. “But I don’t think it’s the sort of job that would appeal.”
“Not for me.”
“What? You don’t love our beautiful burg?” Harmon glanced out the window at the dun cityscape. The river, its shade yellowish-gray from this angle, was prominent. Disintegrating cardboard boxes, driftwood, trash and dead fish floated downstream.