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“Someone to release the information in the event I died. It would have created an incentive for Durrani to keep him alive and it would have ensured that no matter what, the damage he wanted to do to us would happen.”
“I could see the little pencil dick doing something like that,” Hurley said, lighting a new cigarette off the embers of his old one. “But how?”
“More like who,” Rapp said. “Who did he give his files to and who released the information on Sitting Bull? Some foreign agent who has it in for us? A mercenary who’s just in it for the money?”
Kennedy shook her head. “Too unreliable. If it were me, I’d encrypt the files and hand them over to a lawyer. I’d tell him I was going to check in with him every week and if I didn’t, he should open a set of instructions I’d given him and follow them.”
“What would those instructions say?” Hurley asked.
“They would be a schedule for sending individual files. They’d go to someone less reputable—someone who knows how to send emails and post things to the Internet without being traced. The lawy
er would never know what was in the documents and the person releasing them would be the type who doesn’t care.”
There was a knock at the door, and a moment later a young man with an impressive Afro peeked in. “I found something.”
Marcus Dumond was a thirty-four-year-old computer genius with a bit of a checkered past. The young cyber-wiz had run into some trouble with the feds while he was earning a master’s in computer science at MIT. He was alleged to have hacked into one of New York’s largest banks and then transferred funds into several overseas accounts. The part that interested the CIA was that Dumond wasn’t caught because he left a trail; he was caught because he got drunk one night and bragged about his activities to the wrong person. At the time, Dumond was living with Steven Rapp, Mitch’s younger brother. When the older Rapp heard about Dumond’s problems, he called Irene Kennedy and told her the hacker was worth a look.
“Come in,” Rapp said. “What have you got?”
Dumond entered a bit hesitantly, setting up a laptop on the pool table. Rapp recognized it as being one he’d taken from Durrani’s house. It was still stained with Joe Rickman’s blood.
“I’ve cracked the encryption protecting all the files on here,” Dumond said.
“Really?” Kennedy replied, sounding surprised. “I thought Rick would make it harder than that.”
Dumond shook his head. “Just the standard stuff that came with the computer. His password was one of his kids’ birth dates.”
“I sense that you’re about to tell me the bad news.”
“Yeah . . . There isn’t really anything in them. Mostly personal stuff—his passwords to Amazon, checkbook registers, bank records. That kind of thing.”
Kennedy picked up her glass again. “That makes more sense to me. Anything we can access that easily is something Rick either didn’t care about or he wanted us to see.”
Dumond started to look uncomfortable again.
“What?” Rapp said.
“I figured I’d connect it to the Internet. You know, download any outstanding emails, see if anything interesting happened.”
“That’s kind of a risk, isn’t it?” Rapp said. “It could have been set to wipe the data.”
Dumond frowned. He liked being questioned about his work even less than Rapp did. “I mirrored the drive first. And like I said, there’s nothing interesting on it anyway.”
“So what happened?” Hurley said.
“It automatically downloaded a video.”
“What kind of video?” Kennedy asked. “Did you watch it?”
Dumond shook his head. “I figured it was stuff I didn’t really want to know.”
Rapp slapped him on the shoulder. “Good job, Marcus. Now why don’t you go back to work and see what else you can dig up.”
When he was gone, Hurley and Kennedy came over to the pool table and Rapp clicked on the video file in the middle of the laptop screen. A window opened, showing Joe Rickman sitting in his Jalalabad home office. He was wearing tooled leather boots, which were propped lazily on his desk. The location and the fact that his soft body and face were uninjured suggested that the recording had been made before his faked kidnapping.
“Hello, Mitch. If you’re watching this, me and Akhtar Durrani are dead. And if that’s the case, I figure you did it.”
Kennedy reached out and paused the playback. “Interesting. How many of these videos do you think he made?”
