“He wasn’t cleared,” said the staffer—and without saying anything else, he left the room.
“What is this?” Frank demanded, looking upset. “I mean, what is this place?”
The lights dimmed. “Your attention, please.” The voice came from speakers around the room, slightly breathy as its owner leaned too close to the microphone. “The following videotape was shot by a closed-circuit surveillance camera yesterday, at a jail in upstate New York.”
Grainy gray-on-white video footage filled the front wall of the theater. It was shot from a camera concealed high up in one corner of the ceiling, with a fish-eye lens staring down at a cell maybe six feet by ten in size.
Mike leaned forward. He could almost smell the disinfectant. This wasn’t your ordinary drunk tank. It was a separate cell, with whitewashed cinderblock walls and no window—furnished with a bunk bolted to the floor, a metal toilet and sink bolted to the wall, and not a lot else. Single occupant, high security. This is important enough to drag me out of bed and fly me six hundred miles? he wondered.
There was a man in the cell. He was wearing dark pin-striped trousers and a dress shirt, no tie or jacket: he looked like a stockbroker or Wall Street lawyer who’d been picked up for brawling, hair mussed, expression wild. He kept looking at the door.
“This man was arrested yesterday at two-fifteen, stepping off the Acela from Boston with a suitcase that contained some rather interesting items. Agents Fleming and Garfinkle will be pleased to know that information they passed on from the preliminary debriefing of source Greensleeves directly contributed to the bust. Mr. Morgan here was charged with possession of five kilograms of better than ninety-five percent pure cocaine hydrochloride, which goes some way to explain his agitation. There were, ah, other items in the suitcase. I’ll get to them later. For now, let’s just say that while none of them were contraband they are, if anything, much more worrying than the cocaine.”
Mike focused on the screen. The guy in the cell was clearly uneasy about something—but what? In solitary. Knowing he was under surveillance. After a while he stood up and paced back and forth, from the door to the far end of the cell. Occasionally he’d pause halfway, as if trying to remember something.
“Our target here has no previous police record, no convictions, no fingerprints, nothing to draw him to our attention. He hasn’t even registered to vote. He has a driving license and credit cards but, and here’s the interesting bit, some careful digging shows that the name belongs to a child who died thirty-one years ago, aged eleven months. He appears to be the product of a very successful identity theft that established him with a record going back at least a decade. This James Morgan, as opposed to the one who’s buried in a family plot near Buffalo, went to college in Minnesota and obtained average grades, majoring in business studies and economics before moving to New York, where he acquired a job with a small import-export company, Livingston and Marks, for whom he has worked for nine years and six months. According to our friends at the IRS, his entry-level salary was $39,605 a year, he takes exactly three days of sick leave every twelve months, and he hasn’t had a pay raise, a vacation, or a sabbatical since joining the firm.”
The man on the screen seemed to make up his mind about something. He ceased pacing and, rolling up his sleeve, thrust his left wrist under the hot water faucet on the sink. He seemed to be scrubbing at something—a patch or plaster, perhaps.
“James Morgan lives in an apartment that appears to be owned by a letting agency wholly owned by a subsidiary of Livingston and Marks,” the unseen commentator recited dryly, as if reading from a dossier. “He pays rent of $630 a month—and you guessed it, he hasn’t had a rent rise in nine years. And that’s not the only thing that’s missing. He isn’t a member of a gym or health club or a dating agency or a church or an HMO. He doesn’t own an automobile or a pet dog or a television, or subscribe to any newspapers or magazines. He uses his credit card to shop for groceries at the local Safeway twice a week, and here he screwed up—he has a loyalty card for the discounts. It turns out that he never buys toilet paper or light bulbs. However he does buy new movie releases on DVD, which is kind of odd for someone who doesn’t own a DVD player or a TV or a computer. Once a month, every month, as regular as clockwork, he makes an overnight out of state trip, flying Delta to Dallas–Fort Worth, and while he’s away he stays in the Hilton and makes a side trip to buy a Glock 20C, four spare magazines, and four two-hundred-round boxes of ammunition—although he never brings them home. Luckily for him, because he doesn’t have a firearms license valid for New York State.”
On the screen, something peeled off Morgan’s wrist. He rubbed it some more, then turned the faucet off, raised his arm, and peered at whatever the plaster was concealing.
“Checking our records, it appears that Mr. Morgan has purchased over sixty handguns this way, spending rather more on them than he pays in rent. That’s in addition to his other duties, which appear to include smuggling industrial quantities of pharmaceutical-grade narcotics. Now, this is where it gets interesting. Watch the screen.”
Mike blinked. One moment Morgan was standing in front of the washbasin, peering at the inside of his wrist. The next moment, he was nowhere to be seen. The cell was empty.
Off to one side, Frank from the Surveyor’s Office started to complain. “What is this? I don’t see what this has got to do with me. So you’ve got a guard taking kickbacks to fool with the videotape in the county jail—”
The lights came up and the door opened. “Nope.” The man standing in the doorway was slightly built, in his early forties, with receding brown hair cropped short. He smiled easily as he stepped into the room and stood in front of the screen. It’s him, Mike realized with interest. The commentator with the dry sense of humor. “That wasn’t something we pulled off a tape, that was a live feed. And I assure you, once those data packets arrived here nobody tampered with them.”
Mike licked his lips. “This links in with what Greensleeves was saying, doesn’t it?” he heard himself ask, as if from a distance.
“It does indeed.” The man at the front of the auditorium looked pleased. “And that’s why you’re here. All of you, you’ve been exposed in some way to this business.” He nodded at Mike. “Some of you more than others—if it wasn’t for your quick thinking and the way you escalated it via Boston Special Operations, it might have been another couple of days before we realized what kind of intelligence asset you were sitting on.”
“Greensleeves?” Pete asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow. “You mean the kook?”
Mike shook his head. Source Greensleeves, who called himself Matthias, and who kept yammering on about hidden conspiracies and other worlds in between blowing wholesale rings like they were street-corner crack houses—
“Yes, and I’m afraid he isn’t a kook. Let me introduce myself. I’m Lieutenant Colonel Eric Smith, Air Force, on secondment to NSA/CSS, Office of Unconventional Programs. I work for the deputy director of technology. As of an hour ago, you guys are all on secondment from your usual assignments to a shiny new committee that doesn’t have a name yet, but that reports to the director of the National Security Council directly, via whoever he puts on top of me—hence all the melted stovepipes and joint action stuff. We’ve got to break across the usual departmental boundaries if we’re going to make this work. One reason you’re here is that you’ve all been vetted and had the security background checks in the course of your ordinary work. In fact, all but one of you are already federal employees working in the national security or crime prevention sectors. The letters have gone out to your managers and you should get independent confirmation when you get back home to Massachusetts and New York after this briefing round and tomorrow’s meetings and orientation lectures.” Smith leaned against the wall at the front of the room. “Any questions?”