“There was a low-end guy, too,” the lieutenant said.
“Roy Meadows.”
“Which started the pissing contest between the Russians and the Dreads.”
“Cleaned out the underbrush,” she said.
“The way I remember it, Roy had a baby brother.”
“Tommy. Went up on a minor accessory charge.”
“Figure he’s out by now?”
“I can find out.”
“Find out first whether your guy Chapin is still assigned to the New York office.”
“And if he is?”
“Oh, for John’s sake. I have to spell it out for you?”
“You want me to squeeze Chapin.”
“What else have we got?”
“We don’t have any leverage,” Babs said. “I can use him as a last resort, but it has to be a quid pro quo.”
“You need something to trade?” the lieutenant asked. “Pick up Tommy Meadows, see if he’ll sing for his supper.”
The operation had the code name Labyrinth. Its objective was simple. Deny the enemy access. The pooh-bahs at DOD didn’t have any real idea what they were up against. If radical Islam had brought the war to our shores, we were going to take it to them.
The “we” here was a private security outfit calling themselves Xynergistics. They had contracts with Defense and State as well as FBI and CIA counterterrorism. Their specialty was cyberwarfare, not physical security. They didn’t provide boots on the ground. They looked for virtual footprints.
Lydie Temple was following what appeared to be an anomaly.
Lydie was one of the senior analysts, although she was only twenty-six. She’d done a tour with Naval Security Group, one of the service cryptologic agencies, and then signed on with NSA, the brass ring, but the money in the private sector was too good to turn down, push came to shove.
There was a lot of that going around. Everything was pieced out these days. GIs didn’t pull KP anymore because outside contractors bid for food service to the military. Companies like Blackwater offered hazard pay to hired guns, protecting diplomats and aid workers in hot zones. CIA used what were known as proprietaries, the first of which had been Air America, in Vietnam, flying morphine base out of the Iron Triangle, to keep the Saigon regime afloat on China White. It was a turning world. Outsourcing was the rule, not the exception, and chief among its virtues was deniability, an advantage much prized by a beleaguered clandestine intelligence community.
Lydie had a marketable skill set, and the fact that her job paid her three times what she could pull down as a GS-25, major medical thrown in, didn’t make her feel dirty. It made her feel necessary.
Computer traffic can be broken down and analyzed any number of different ways. Much of it is simple brute force. The big mainframes at Fort Meade, NSA headquarters, crunched the traffic wholesale. Lydie had developed an algorithm that weeded out the chatter.
Everybody was up against the same problem, the sheer volume of information. Encoded or encrypted, it presented a different set of variables, but most of it was in the clear. Trying to sort it out, classify it by timeliness or perceived risk factor, was like bailing out a sinking ship with a soupspoon. You were overwhelmed, and the boat kept getting lower in the water.
Lydie’s bright idea had been to filter the communications not by red-flagging isolated vocabulary (jihad, say) or the user networks (Al Jazeera’s blog site, for example)-not that these weren’t useful-but by context. In other words, she mined the data for patterns rather than the specific. This allowed her a margin for error, but it also enabled her to build up a baseline, what was known in the trade as an order of battle. It didn’t indicate the individual airline shoe-bomber, unhappily, but it mapped the links between potential events, a schematic of decentralized command-and-control. Her information had led directly to a successful Predator drone strike against a cell in Yemen, and her star was on the rise.
What she was looking at, in the event, wasn’t context. It was odd in that it didn’t call attention to itself. It was out of her immediate field of vision, and it was too specific.
And naturally, she followed where it led.
Tommy’s PO was a hardheaded career court officer named Helen Torchio. Hardheaded, not hardhearted. She wasn’t foolish enough to think Tommy could be entirely reformed, but she had hopes he might be led toward the light. It was a disappointment to her when Detectives DiMello and Beeks showed up.
Tommy’s appointment that morning was at ten. The cops were there at a quarter to.
“He’s no angel,” Helen said to Babs DiMello.
“I was counting on that,” Babs said.
“What are you after?”
“Information.”
“Tommy’s rolled before,” Beeks said. He was the junior partner. Helen thought he was too ready to play the hard guy to DiMello’s soft and easy. Not that she made Babs for soft.
“Ground rules?” she asked.
Babs nodded. “We want to know if Tommy’s heard anything,” she said. “I understand there’s an issue. If he’s hanging with other homies who’ve done time, you could violate him.”
“I’d like not to see that happen,” Helen said.
“Understood,” Babs told her. “But there’s the carrot, and there’s the stick. Tommy gives up something useful, he’s got my marker. The question might arise how he came by it.”
“Makes it awkward,” Helen said.
“Awkward for Tommy,” Beeks said. “It gives us leverage.”
“I meant awkward for me, Detective,” Helen said.
Babs cut him a quick look. “Tommy knows how this game is played,” she said to the PO. “He plays it like a piano, and he doesn’t want to go back in the joint.”
“So you’re the carrot and I’m the stick,” Helen said.
“I don’t say I’m not trying to jam Tommy, but will you work with me on this?” Babs asked.
“We’re on the same team,” Helen said.
“Home-field advantage,” Babs said, smiling.
Tommy was a little taken aback to see the two cops waiting in his PO’s office, but he made a quick recovery. “Hey,” he said to Babs. “Detective DiMello. How you doing? Sorry, man,” he said to Pete Beeks. “I forgot your name.”
Beeks didn’t introduce himself.
“Tommy, we could use a little help,” Babs said.
“Sure.” Eager, disingenuous. It was his strong suit. And it helped that they were coming to him, not the other way around.
This was the tricky part, Babs knew. She didn’t want to give away all the cards in her hand, but unless she got into the details, Tommy wouldn’t know what she was after.
“I’m going to get a cup of coffee,” Helen Torchio said.
Tommy understood what that was about. She was telling him he wouldn’t violate the terms of his release if he gave the cops any of his current criminal associations.
“The way I remember,” Babs DiMello said, after Helen left the room, “your brother Roy had some kind of in with cargo handlers at JFK. Air freight, not passenger baggage. This ring a bell?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Tommy said.
“I think there was some talk he knew more than he wanted to tell about the Lufthansa hit.”
Tommy nodded. Six million bucks, an inside job.
“Not a major player, of course, or he’d be farting through silk,” she said. “He wouldn’t have been working nickel-and-dime rackets like that cell-phone scam.”
“He might still be alive,” Tommy pointed out.
“You want to play with the big dogs, you have to learn to piss in the tall grass,” Babs said. “No disrespect, but Roy was never cut out to be a big dog. He didn’t have the chops.”
“Roy was only half smart,” Tommy said. “We both know it.”
“So don’t be half-assed, Tommy,” Beeks said.
“You haven’t told me what you want,” Tommy said.
“You still got a line into Port Authority?” Babs asked him.
“Their security’s a lot tighter these days, after 9/11.”