"Wow. Actual Serbians. Who'd have guessed?"
"You're lucky, Strachey. Those guys who went after you in the Outback parking lot didn't lop your ear off and make you eat it."
"No, they were under instructions to spur me on, not frighten me off. Somebody who knows me told Sam this is how I would respond to harassment. I wonder who. Any indication in any of this as to who that might have been?"
"No, but I'm still working on collecting voice mails. That particular morsel could be buried in there somewhere."
"So Sam hired these bad Serbians to rough me up? There are e-mails to that effect?"
"Just generalities. My guess is, Sam told them to do what they had to do to get the job done but what the limits were this would have been done by phone-and then the e-mails 232
Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson were just to set the operation in motion and confirm that such-and-such had been carried out. You'll see the oblique and possibly coded language. A lot of it's in broken English, but some borders on literate. There's one guy who seems to use an alias, John Jameson."
"Do you have some other names and addresses in Hummerston?"
"I do. There's a night club called Belgrade Grotto. Liquor and coke-and dancing, both folk and pole. These fellows appear to own it. It's their Bada Bing club."
"I'd like to download all this and have it available to me as I continue to carry out my duties for the McCloskey campaign."
"I brought you four disks, each identical, with this material on each one. I've also included two CDs of your interview with the unfortunate Trey Bigelow."
"Thank you, Bud. There's lots of good reading here to keep me spellbound into the night."
He smiled at me with quiet satisfaction, his dark eyes bright with pride.
I said, "Most of what you do is against the law, isn't it?"
"Do you really want to get into that? Your own qualms and so forth? Okay. Sure. I'm a fucking archcriminal, no doubt about it."
"You don't worry about being prosecuted and being sent to prison?"
"Oh, yeah, I do. Prison sucks, I'm sure. But I pick and choose. I don't do military secrets, and I don't do Tom Cruise.
I know what everybody else in the community is doing, and I stick with that. It's okay. Everybody does it is a weak moral argument, I know. But law enforcement goes along. Cops have better things to do, like terrorism and clubbing persons of the colored races for backtalk. Once in a while some doofus-y kid hacker fucks up a country's banking records or whatever. He's immediately clapped in irons, and I understand that. I don't want my bank statements arriving in my mailbox in Burmese any more than you do. But basically all a hacker has to do to remain at large is, don't do sabotage. I'll concede that political dirty tricks, so-called, can be a problematical area. But in this case I'm going to turn the raw material over to you, and it's going to be your set of practical and ethical quandaries from then on."
"How did you get into this line of work, Bud? Where did you study?"
"I went to Simon's Rock, but my gift for electronic information gathering may be genetic. I'm half Ethiopian and half Greek, and my Ethiopian mother was a spy for the anti-Mengistu coalition during the Marxist reign of terror after the monarchy was overthrown in 1973. She worked for the State Bank of Ethiopia, and she provided data on the regime's finances for the Tigreans and the Eritreans and for the CIA.
My father's parents had a restaurant in Addis Ababa, but in those disastrous years nobody could afford to eat in it, so they got out and went to Greece.
"At some point in '81, Mom realized she was being watched and had probably been found out and was likely going to be arrested and shot. So my parents got out of bed one night and disguised themselves as peasants and commenced to walk to Khartoum, six hundred miles away.
They nearly died from starvation and exposure and exhaustion, but they made it. My Uncle Getachew took the same route a month later. Thanks to a Baptist Church organization, they all ended up in Washington, where my parents now work for the Marriott Corporation. I was born in 1985 and my sister Yarukanesh two years later. She's quite respectable. Went to Brown and is a research scientist at the NIH. Don, what do you think? Am I unworthy of that amazing family history? Should I be embarrassed?"
"No, I think you just like living on the edge. You've found your own dangerous way of living among secrets."
He nodded. "I think you got me on that one."
"But aren't there less morally ambiguous ways of living this kind of life?"
"Like what?"
"I don't know. Cybersecurity?"
"What? For banks? For Wall Street greed pits?"
"What about antiterrorism? That's not so morally unclear."
"No, not usually. I could actually see myself doing that under the right circumstances. If antiterrorism meant more than just the police work end of it. Anyway, are you really the man to be lecturing me on questions of professional moral ambiguity? I know as much about the way you operate as you know about me, don't forget."
I thought about that. "I'm not sure what my excuse is. My mother only walked as far as Safeway. Generally of course she drove."
"There you go. You stand naked in your casual means-to-an-end-ism."
"God, Bud, you sound just like my boyfriend."
"Well, you were starting to sound just like my girlfriend."
"Then I'll stop. One more question, though, about these files. Is the Sam who is so busy behind the scenes orchestrating the election outcome for the Wall Street titans a man named Sam Krupa?"
"Yes, his name comes up in a couple of spots. My sense was that he was trying to keep his last name out of it. But some of the CEOs on a few occasions do refer to his full name. Who is that? The name sounds familiar."
"Years ago he was a political dirty trickster for Richard Nixon. More recently, he's believed by the political cognoscenti to be the man who-working for the same Wall Street gang trying to control the current gubernatorial election outcome-brought about the downfall of the bankers' archenemy, the crusading reformer Eliot Spitzer.
Chapter Twenty-eight
I left word on Timmy's voice mail that I would be out late.
I said I'd leave a key card for my motel room at the front desk, and he should come on in and not wait up for me.
I drove over to Staples and bought four large padded envelopes. Then to Target for a cheap wash cloth. At ampm, I bought a bottle of Snapple iced tea, then went into the men's room and flushed the contents-way too sweet for me-down the toilet. When I topped off my rented Honda's tank, I also filled the Snapple jar with gasoline and capped it. Something was missing, so I went back inside and asked for some matches with the pack of Lucky Strikes I purchased, and then tossed the cigarettes in the trash and kept the matches.
The Honda came equipped with an excellent Garmin GPS. I had looked up the address online, and I keyed in the Belgrade Grotto in Hummerston, New Jersey. The driving time was given as three hours, ten minutes.
I left Colonie at nine and was actually in Hummerston by eleven forty-five-traffic was light-and I drove in and out of the parking lot of the Belgrade Grotto. A few cars were still there, although it looked as if closing time was probably going to be twelve. Among the vehicles was a black Lincoln Navigator with a green dump sticker on a rear side window.
The club was a featureless single-story cinder block rectangle with a couple of blacked-out windows about seven feet up.