‘No,’ I said. ‘Only the box, thank you.’
I again paid in cash and gave a false return address. The transaction might have been anonymous but I had noticed the CCTV camera in the corner of the store, silently recording the faces of everyone who entered. I wondered whether I should have used one of my disguises, but perhaps I was being paranoid about secrecy.
But it was better to be paranoid, I thought, than dead.
I spent some of Sunday afternoon sightseeing.
To be precise, I took a taxi from my hotel across the Potomac to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial.
My first disappointment was that the cherry blossom was well past its prime, with much of it now decaying on the ground beneath the trees that surrounded the memorial. But there was enough remaining to give me some idea of how magnificent it must have been only a week or so earlier.
I climbed the circular marble steps and walked between the classical Ionic columns. In the centre, under the shallow marble-clad dome, stood a nineteen-feet-high bronze statue of the third president of the United States. I looked up at the face of the man after whom I had been named.
Jefferson Hinkley.
As a child I had hated my name. I was made fun of at my junior school because of it and I had vowed at the time that, thereafter, I would be known only as Jeff.
Curiously, in the presence of his likeness, I felt a slight affinity towards the man. Not that he was buried here. His final resting place was on his family plantation at Charlottesville, about 100 miles south-west, and this memorial had been built more than a hundred years after his death.
Jefferson was perhaps best known as the principal author of the US Declaration of Independence and part of his preamble was cut into the marble: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…
Strange, therefore, that Jefferson had been such a strong supporter of slavery. Indeed, he’d even had African slaves working in the White House during his presidency and, after his death, 130 slaves from his plantation were sold at auction to help pay his debts.
All affinity gone, I walked away without a backward glance across the bridge into West Potomac Park and on to the memorial of my other presidential namesake.
In full, I was officially Jefferson Roosevelt Hinkley. I was never able to ascertain the reason why my parents had named me after dead American presidents. By the time I realised where my strange forenames came from, my mother had died and my father claimed it had been her idea and he couldn’t remember the reason. In truth, he couldn’t remember much, other than where he had hidden his whisky.
I had always imagined that the Roosevelt after whom I had been named was Franklin Delano, the hero president of the New Deal and the Second World War, rather than his fifth-cousin Theodore — he of teddy-bear fame — who only became president due to the timely assassination of his predecessor.
The memorial to FDR was very different to that of Jefferson, being very much a creation of the mid-1990s. It lacked the grandeur of the earlier structure, consisting of four outdoor ‘rooms’ depicting the four terms of his presidency.
One of the many inscriptions on the memorial caught my eye, an extract from Roosevelt’s inaugural speech on first becoming President in 1933.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
I hoped he was right.
‘Mr Hinkley,’ called the young woman at Reception as I walked into the hotel, ‘package for you.’
I signed for a small plain-white padded envelope with my name written on the front in pencil. It had to be from Tony, I thought. No one else knew I was at this hotel.
The envelope contained two USB flash drives and a short handwritten note:
Here are the agency personnel files, the communication inquiry and the operation reports. I had them copied from the off-site data backup server so no one at the agency should be aware. I’ve asked my wife to deliver the package.
He’d clearly been busy in the twenty-four hours since we’d met.
The flash drives were each sixty-four gigabytes and they were both crammed with data.
I sat at the desk under the picture window and opened the first drive on my computer. It contained the personnel files of not only the racing section but all 2,631 employees of FACSA, as of the previous Friday. They were listed alphabetically by last name and it took me some time to navigate my way around the index to access them by section. But, before long, I had found the files of the eight agents working specifically on horseracing, together with their section head and six support staff — two intelligence analysts, one IT specialist and three admin assistants.
I connected the new printer to my computer with the USB lead. I had purposely not bought one that worked wirelessly and, furthermore, I ensured that both the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities on my laptop were switched off. Unlikely as it might be, I did not want someone else remotely snooping on my snooping.
I printed out the front page for each of the fifteen files and laid them out on the floor in a large semicircle round my chair. Fifteen faces stared up at me like arrest mugshots. I stared back at them.
Was one of these faces really that of a mole — someone who was prepared to forewarn wrongdoers of an impending raid? And if so, why? For financial gain? Or out of some misplaced sense of mischief?
Six of the fifteen were women — two of the agents along with four of the support staff.
Where the hell did I begin?
I spent the next four hours cross-referencing the names of the fifteen with their phone and email records that Tony had provided.
It was a mammoth job and I had barely scratched the surface by the time the figures began swimming in front of my eyes from tiredness.
By then I had discovered only one thing of interest.
I had no absolute proof, no smoking gun, but I was pretty sure that two of the agents were engaged in a secret relationship. It was something about the tone of their emails, together with the number and timing of the phone calls between them that left little doubt.
I looked more closely at their files.
Robert Wade, known as Bob, was forty-two, a former DC Metro-area traffic cop, married with two teenage daughters. He had been recruited into FACSA at the time of its creation sixteen years previously and was now considered to be one of its senior agents. According to comments in his assessments, he was being tipped as a future head of the horseracing section.
Steffi Dean was a recent recruit, having been a field agent for only a year. A graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, she had spent seven years in the service as a logistics officer, rising to the rank of captain before quitting the military to join the agency. At twenty-nine, she was thirteen years younger than Bob Wade, and single.
I leaned back in the chair and yawned.
I wasn’t here to pass judgement on the morals of the agents, just on their honesty. We all have our little secrets. It was only those that harboured corruption that I was after.
I went on through the lists but my concentration levels were dropping so much that I was wasting my time.
I glanced at the brightly lit red digits of the hotel alarm clock — 10.02 p.m. Hardly time for bed, but it was 3 a.m. back in London and I could hardly keep my eyes open.
I would have to continue in the morning.
As requested, I presented myself at the Federal Anti-Corruption in Sports Agency at nine o’clock on Monday morning dressed in my best Armani suit plus silk tie. First impressions were important and an Englishman abroad would be expected to be smart.