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“I didn’
t hear that,” McMahon said as he shut his eyes tightly.
“What’s done is done,” Juarez added. “What I want are answers. I’m willing to give Brooks one more chance. Let’s bring her in here, lay out her options, and get to the bottom of this. I want to know what in the hell Mitch is trying to hide.”
Kennedy studied Juarez for a moment and then looked to McMahon.
“Would it help,” McMahon asked, “if I left?”
“Probably,” Juarez answered.
“I don’t think it’s going to matter.”
“Why?” asked Juarez.
“I don’t think she’s going to talk, but we’ll give it a shot.” Kennedy leaned forward and hit the intercom button on her phone. “Sheila, would you please send Ms. Brooks in?”
Kennedy stood and pointed to the couch and chairs opposite her desk. She read the look of disapproval on Juarez’s face. “We’re going to try this the civilized way first.”
“Fine,” Juarez grumbled. “You go ahead and play the good cop. Skip can play the bad cop. I’ll just play the boss from hell. In my current mood it won’t require much acting.”
28
WASHINGTON, DC
The cyber café was one of those coffee shops that you could find in virtually every hip counterculture neighborhood across America. Each one, a stand-alone sole proprietorship or maybe an LLC with ownership of a half dozen shops at the most. They were all different, yet the same. United in their hatred of Starbucks, these shops were a blind chain with an unintended common theme. They were adorned with rickety, second-hand furniture, old laminate countertops, and a wait staff who tended to be open to body piercings, tattoos, and bad hairdos. The shops provided free Internet connection, service with an attitude, and a refuge from America’s shallow thirst for comfort through the similarity of franchise hell.
This particular place was called Café Wired. A big hand-painted brown and white sign hung above the large glass window that fronted the sidewalk. The name was bracketed on one side by a steaming cup of coffee and the other by a laptop. There were now three of the shops in the city. One in Bethesda, another by American University, and this one a few blocks away from Howard University, not far from Rapp’s condo.
Rapp was a silent investor in the cafés. He and his brother Steven had put up the money, and Marcus Dumond ran the places. Rapp had worked with the cyber genius going on five years now. Dumond had attended MIT with Rapp’s brother. While earning his master’s degree in computer science at MIT, Dumond had managed to get into some pretty big trouble with the feds. To win a bet with some of his fellow geniuses, he hacked into one of New York’s largest banks and then moved over a million dollars into several overseas accounts. He wasn’t caught because he left a trail. He was caught because he and his friends got drunk one night and began bragging about how easy it had been. A fellow student got wind of it and turned him in to the authorities. Dumond was facing serious jail time. That was until Steven Rapp called his brother to see if he could intervene.
The CIA doesn’t like to advertise the fact that they employ some of the world’s best computer hackers. These men and women spend their days and nights trying to sneak undetected into the networks of America’s adversaries. More often than not they are successful, and they are one of the country’s best-kept secrets. Dumond’s skills in this arena were unsurpassed. He split time between the cyber unit and the Counterterrorism Center.
Rapp circled the café twice before entering. He checked all the windows, the cars, and the people on the corner waiting for the bus. It was more out of habit than any real fear of being followed. He opened the door to the coffee shop and walked straight to the back, past the line of customers waiting for their morning fuel. The women’s room was on the left. The men’s on the right. Directly ahead was a door with a security camera and call box mounted to the side. Rapp pressed the button and put his hand on the doorknob. A second later a buzzing noise announced that the door was open.
Rapp went down the narrow stairs to the basement and past two open office doors to a third heavy steel door with rusted rivets ringing the perimeter. This one also had a call box next to it. Before Rapp could push the button he heard the buzzing release of the lock. He leaned into the heavy door, twisted the handle, and entered.
The first thing that Rapp noticed was that the room was a good ten degrees warmer than the rest of the basement. He’d been down here before. Dumond kept an apartment on the second floor, but for security reasons he kept his nerve center locked up in the basement. Rapp was not a detail guy. At least not when it came to computers. To him, they were like cars. Corvette, Ferrari, Mustang GT, Mercedez—when you got to the high end how much did a tenth of a second really matter in a zero to sixty challenge? He knew it mattered to the purists, just like he knew processor speed really mattered to Dumond, but in Rapp’s case—who really cared? One look at a red Ferrari and you’d have to be an idiot to not instinctively know it was fast. No need to look under the hood. Same with Dumond’s setup. All you had to do was look at the four flat-screen monitors that sat atop the half-circle desk, and you knew whatever was under the desk had to be the best that money could buy.
“How are things going?” Rapp asked as he took off his trench coat.
“Fine,” Dumond answered as he took a final drag off a cigarette and stabbed it out in a large glass ashtray. The twenty-nine-year-old African American exhaled a cloud of smoke and said, “The blogosphere is on fire with news that the FBI is going to announce the arrest of the primary suspect in the motorcade attack.”
“Did you leak the name?”
Dumond nodded. “Drudge just ran with it. It’ll be on the wire within the hour.”
“What about the Greek embassy?” Rapp laid his trench coat over the back of a chair.
“I already made the call.”
“You disguised your voice…right?” Rapp approached the desk.
“No,” Dumond said in a sarcastic voice. “I gave them my name and phone number in case they needed to get a hold of me.” He snatched his pack of cigarettes from the desk and fished out a stick.
“You’re a brave man this morning.”
“What the fuck do you expect from me?” Dumond stuck the cigarette between his lips and started searching for his lighter. The desk was covered with keyboards, mice, disks, memory sticks, card readers, speakers, and other odds and ends. “I’ve been up all night working on this shit, and you won’t even tell me what’s going on.” He found his lighter under a pile of disks in clear jewel cases and lit his cigarette.
