“This won’t work if his wife answers,” Rita pointed out.
“I don’t think he’s married,” Toad told her. “He isn’t the type.”
“Oh, and what type is that?”
“Sensitive, warm, loving, wholesome, handsome, sharing, caring—”
“Shut up. It’s ringing… Hello, Richard Harper please… Mr. Harper, did you order a pizza about a half hour ago? No? Well, a Richard Harper on Gordon Street ordered a large pepperoni and olive and our driver can’t find the house…”
She fell silent as the man on the phone talked. From the living room Toad signaled no. Rita made her excuses and thanked him for his time.
They got lucky. They found him on the fifth call. An address in Chevy Chase.
“Let’s go,” Jake said.
Richard Harper wasn’t going to invite them in. Toad shoved the door open and pushed past him. Jake Grafton followed. “It’s two in the morning,” Harper squeaked.
“I know,” Toad Tarkington said. “But I wanted you to meet my boss, Admiral Grafton. Admiral, this is Richard Harper, late of the DIA and now with Central Intelligence.”
Jake stuck out his hand. Reluctantly Richard Harper took it. While Harper was still wondering how to handle this intrusion, Jake dropped into a chair and turned on the light on the reading stand beside him. “Let’s all sit down and visit a minute.”
Harper moved toward a chair, but he didn’t sit. “This won’t take long,” Jake assured him. Harper perched on the front edge of the seat.
Jake displayed his green military ID card and his DIA office pass. Harper refused to touch them. Jake made a show of replacing the cards back in his pocket, then began. “There’s been a security violation at the DIA and we’re trying to find the leak. We have to do this after office hours since people don’t want to talk about their colleagues at the office. You understand?”
Harper nodded reluctantly.
From Toad’s attaché case Jake removed a tape recorder — borrowed from Rita — and placed it on a low table between himself and Harper. He pushed the play button and made sure the tape was turning. “This is Rear Admiral Jacob L. Grafton. It is now two oh seven A.M. on June eighteen. I am interviewing Richard Harper. Mr. Harper, last Monday did you conduct a computer search of CIA records at the request of Lieutenant Commander Robert Tarkington at the DIA computer facilities?”
“Now wait a minute—”
“No, you wait a minute, Mr. Harper. Someone revealed classified information about that computer search to persons without access. Top secret information has been compromised. This is an official investigation. If you fail to cooperate you can be dismissed from government service and prosecuted. Do you understand?”
Harper’s face contorted. A tear rolled down his cheek. “I’ve already been fired.”
“Say again.”
“The CIA fired me this afternoon. They found out about my record.”
The two naval officers exchanged glances. Jake reached over and turned off the tape recorder. “Maybe you’d better tell me about it,” he murmured.
The recitation took most of an hour. Periodically there were tears. Richard Harper was twenty-seven and had been fascinated with computers since he was in high school. Just for the challenge of it, he became a hacker, a person who breaks into industry and government computer files for the sheer joy of outwitting the security devices that guard the files. He had been caught once while he was in college and received a suspended sentence. The second time, when he planted a virus program, he had gone to jail.
The computer industry refused to hire him. Computers were his life and he was blacklisted. He had managed to secure a temporary appointment at DIA by lying on his employment application. He knew the FBI would learn the truth sooner or later, so when agents of the CIA approached him about supplying them with information about DIA projects, he had agreed if they would give him a permanent computer job. A month went by, he supplied all the information they asked for, including Toad’s bizarre request, and they had him start work at Langley last week. Then today they pretended to have just learned of his previous convictions and fired him. It wasn’t fair. He had quit the DIA, the CIA had canned him, the FBI would eventually learn of his record. Computers were his whole life yet he couldn’t work in computers.
“Do you have a computer setup here at home?” Jake asked.
It was in the guest bedroom at the back of the little house. There Jake and Toad were treated to a proud recital of hard disk capacity, extended and expanded memory, CPU speed, and all the rest of it as they stared at screens, keyboards and the innards of computers that were scattered everywhere.
“How good a hacker are you?” Jake asked.
“I’m good. Real good. If I hadn’t done that virus way back when… And it was nothing, just tidbits of zen philosophy that popped onto the screen at holidays and all. It didn’t hurt anyone and…”
Back in the living room, Jake told Harper, “I have a job for you. I can’t promise a permanent job at the DIA until we get a final FBI check and go over it line by line. But I can pay you by the hour on a temporary basis if you can do this job. It would be here at home, on your own equipment.”
Harper was enthusiastic. Yes. He agreed before he even knew what the job was. Jake felt as if he were throwing a rope to a drowning man. He thought he had the authority to hire Harper on a temporary basis, but if it turned out he didn’t he would pay him out of his own pocket.
“I want you to find a river of money,” Jake said, intently watching Harper’s face, “a subterranean river flowing through the world banking systems. The task won’t be easy. I’m not even sure that you will be able to recognize the river when you see it. The mouth of the river is in Moscow, but I don’t have any idea where it begins.”
“Banks?”
“Banks.”
“I’ll need computer access telephone numbers, user names and passwords. If I go after that stuff myself they’ll be on to me in hours.”
“I thought—”
“Hackers get into computers by conning the phone number and codes out of somebody. I can do that. But I can’t do it three dozen times and get away with it. The National Security Agency has that stuff. They monitor bank transactions on a daily basis.”
“If NSA has it, we can get it,” Jake said, glancing at Toad.
“You give me that stuff, and if the money is there, I’ll find it,” Harper said confidently. Too confidently, Jake Grafton thought.
“Don’t be so quick to make promises. And I don’t want anyone to know you’re looking.”
“Maybe you’d better tell me what I’m supposed to be looking for so I’ll know it when I see it.”
Fifteen minutes later Harper knew everything Jake did, which was precious little. So Jake devoted another hour to discussing the possibilities and the probabilities. “The problem,” he told Harper, “is that I don’t know who I can trust. I’ve got to trust my boss, but who else? I can’t call friends in the FBI, in the CIA, people I’ve known for years. If there is a small cabal in the CIA, only the people involved know it is a cabal. Everyone else thinks they are doing their duty when they report conversations, fill out reports, do what they are told to do. That’s the problem.”
“How do you want me to report to you?” Harper asked.
“Well, written reports would be okay. Mail them to my wife. She’ll see that I get them wherever I am. I may be out of town for a few weeks.” He gave Harper his address.
When Jake and Toad left at four in the morning, Rita was asleep on the front seat of the car.
Under the streetlight Toad said, “I have a real bad feeling about this, Admiral. If Harper steals money or screws up some accounts, you and I will end up in prison.”