“Right. That’s right.”
“And she slept with you, isn’t that also right, Joe?”
“We were in our twenties. It was kid stuff and it’s long over, Lindsay. What is relevant is that she was successful, well regarded in the Company, but eventually, she hated that kind of work. By then I was with the FBI and had lost touch with her.”
“Joe, come on. You’ve seen her recently.”
“I’m getting to that. When I was with Homeland Security, we knew Michael Chan was a spy for the Chinese, but we thought it was better to leave him in place. And I learned that Ali Muller, who was still with the CIA, had asked to get involved.
“Not long after, I moved here to be with you. Ali lived down the coast, had a good high-level day job that enabled her to travel without scrutiny. She was married with kids. It was a perfect setup for her real job. And as I came to find out recently, Chan fell for Muller. Very hard.
“I was in the Four Seasons the day Chan was taken out.”
“I know that.”
Joe arched his eyebrows.
“I have you on tape. I also have you on tape out at Chan’s house the next day.”
Joe nodded, and sighed deeply. “That surveillance van.”
I searched his face, looking for tells or twitches. But Joe was a trained liar, government grade. Triple threat.
“It was getting very complicated then,” Joe said. “We’d lost track of Muller. Chan and those two tech kids had been gunned down right under our noses. And we were aware that a big operation was in the wings.”
“Like the take-down of a passenger jet?”
“Yes, yes. We were aware of a possible threat. We didn’t know details. We thought Chan might know. That’s why Muller was with him. We didn’t know who his contacts were or if our information was any good at all. We didn’t have dates or times.”
Joe looked—heartbroken. Because the plane had gone down? Because the techies had been killed? Because Muller was missing?
I kept my hands in my lap and said, “What are your plans?”
“I have to locate Muller.”
“Were you planning to come home?”
I didn’t mean to say that. It just jumped out of my mouth and into the room.
Joe looked into my eyes and reached for me again, and this time, I let him wrap his big mitts around my hands. I wanted to believe in him. I wanted life to go back to the way it had been only a couple of weeks ago.
Was that possible?
He said, “I can’t make a plan, Lindsay. Country first. This is what I do. It’s what I’ve always done. I’m sorry.”
CHAPTER 80
I WAS SIMMERING. But I didn’t want to boil over, not here, not now. I said to Joe, “I can find my way out.”
He said, “Let me walk with you.”
We walked silently down the carpeted hallway to the reception room. Joe held the glass door for me and waited with me at the elevator. I didn’t look at him, and when the elevator came, I got in without saying good-bye.
I called Cindy as soon as I got to the street. I told her I had learned absolutely nothing, but—off the record—I had seen Joe.
She shrieked into my earpiece. She wanted to know what Joe had said, where he was now, when she could talk to him.
“Cindy, he’s in an ongoing operation with the CIA. That’s all I can tell you, and don’t blow his cover. Please. But if you want to run Bud and Chrissy’s pictures with their names and a request for information, you should do it.”
She said, “Consider it done. Talk to you later.”
I called a cab, and as my mind churned, I waited on the corner of Bush and Montgomery Streets.
I was thinking I owed it to Conklin to tell him everything I knew. I envisioned a very serious meeting in Jacobi’s office: me and Conklin and Brady and, by special permission, Cindy. I had a duty to report criminal activities. I had professional ethics that required me to get clean with my partners. I also wanted their advice and, with it, relief from the pressure that was like none I’d ever experienced.
But as soon as I imagined that collegial scene, new thoughts powered through. Where did my true loyalties lie?
With my husband, who until ten days ago, I had loved entirely?
Or with my coworkers and friends, who had trusted me with their lives as I had trusted them?
The taxi arrived. I had to give the driver a destination, and I heard myself say, “Take me to Lake and Twelfth.”
The driver got on the phone with his girlfriend, and I put my head back and closed my eyes. I woke up when the driver said, “Lady. Here you are.”
Ten minutes later, I was in my jeans and a T-shirt in Joe’s office, going through his things again. I talked to Julie as she bounced in her jumper seat.
“I don’t know what I’m looking for, Jules,” I cooed. “I don’t know what I could possibly find that would trump what Daddy told me an hour ago. He’s a spy on active duty. Yes. Active duty.”
Julie let loose with a peal of laughter.
I got up from Joe’s desk and went over and kissed her.
I said, “I want to make sure I haven’t missed something, little girl. I just want to know what he was doing all those months when he was here with you playing Mr. Mom.”
There was a box of Joe’s stationery in the top drawer, right-hand side. I’d opened it before, frisked it with my fingertips, but this time, I took out the note cards and envelopes and found a stubby little key Scotch-taped to the bottom.
The key had a number.
It could be to a safe-deposit box.
For all I knew, it could be to a safe-deposit box belonging to us, a fireproof lock box with life insurance policies and the deed to our condo.
Or it could be a secret trove of love letters and boarding passes and locks of Muller’s hair.
I put the key in my pocket and lifted Julie out of her chair. I took her into the bedroom, pulled the curtains closed, and got into bed with my baby. Martha curled up on the rug beside us.
It was completely still. We were alone. Maybe we’d always been alone. I had had to accept the depth of Joe’s deceit. That I’d been betrayed by my husband, my best friend.
“Country first,” he’d told me. “This is what I do.”
That son of a bitch.
CHAPTER 81
I SET UP a conference call with Rich and Cindy, and after some back-and-forth, we reached agreement on my plan.
I called Brady, saying, “I need to see you out of the office. It’s important.”
He said, “You sound—terrible.”
Brady had called me out. It was as if barbed wire were coiled around my chest and forehead. My breathing was shallow, and pressure was building behind my eyes.
He said, “Are you home? I can stop by after work.”
“Great. Buzz me and I’ll come down.”
Maybe I’m paranoid, but last week two spooks had dropped by my apartment to warn me off my search for Alison Muller. It was possible, even probable, that a mic or two had been planted in my apartment.
At 7:20 Brady texted me to say he was on the way, and twenty minutes later, he buzzed up from the intercom. I grabbed the baby and ran down the stairs.
I found Brady leaning against his Buick with his arms crossed over his chest and his hair blowing across his face. He opened the car door and I got in with Julie in my arms.
“How sick are you?” he asked. “Or was this a mental health day? You should take a couple days—”
“Thanks, Brady, but I’m not sick and I’m not falling apart. I have news on the hotel murders, and my place could be bugged.”
I held Julie against my shoulder as I caught Brady up on Cindy’s tipster, who’d gone by the name of Jad. I told him what Jad’s video had revealed: that our murdered Jane and John Doe had been working for the CIA and that now, thanks to Cindy, we had their nicknames: Chrissy and Bud.
“Cindy’s running their pictures today with those names.”
Brady said, “
Good. A positive ID could come out of that.”
I nodded, cleared my throat, and kept going.
“Brady. I heard something while I was watching Jad’s tapes. It was Joe’s voice. He was talking to those kids over the computer. He asked them if they’d picked up anything on a plane from Beijing. They said they hadn’t. But still, the CIA knew something about a plane, maybe WW 888, before the crash.”
Brady voiced some colorful curses that I was pretty sure Julie wouldn’t understand, and after the stream of disbelief and fury subsided, I continued.
“So this morning, I went to the CIA office on Montgomery. Joe was there,” I said. “I saw him.”
Brady is a pretty good listener, and although he said, “You shittin’ me?” he let me speak without further interruption. I described my visit to the NR office, saying that while Joe hadn’t told me much, he had confirmed that Michael Chan was a spy for the Chinese. And that Alison Muller was a CIA operative, now missing in action.
“The CIA will deny knowing anything about that plane, right, Brady? But they can’t stop us from working our case. And I think, but cannot prove, that Alison Muller either did the shooting or saw it go down.”
Brady raked his hair back, stared out the window for a long minute, and said, “What do you want to do?”
I told him.
He said, “Boxer. Do you really want to take on the CIA?”
“I don’t see any other way to close this case.”
“OK,” he said. “I’m on board.”
CHAPTER 82
BRADY PUT OUT a BOLO for the driver of a black Lincoln Town Car with a dragging muffler before I got out of his car, and by three the next afternoon, a young man named Jeffrey Alan Downey, aka Jad, was in our interrogation room.
According to his driver license and the answers he gave to the uniformed officers who brought him in, Downey was twenty-two years old, a recent graduate of a computer sciences program at Berkeley. He worked as a freelance computer tech and lived with his grandmother in Oakland.
He did not volunteer who he worked for, but from the sketchy knowledge I’d gathered, he perfectly fit the profile for a low-level recruit for our local branch of the CIA.
Brady and I watched through the glass as Conklin went into the interrogation room with Jad. The young, sweaty owner of a beat-up Lincoln in violation of the city’s noise ordinance told my partner that he’d pay the fine, but there was no way, no reason to hold him. He knew his rights.
Conklin asked mildly, “Where were you last night, Mr. Downey?”
The young man who called himself Jad said, “Really? I don’t have to tell you that.” He looked mad and scared enough to pull his I’m-under-the-protection-of-the-CIA card. But he hadn’t played it yet.
Brady said to me, “If he says the L-word, let him go.”
“No problem, boss.”
Downey looked up when I entered the box. “You.
You’re the reporter from the Chronicle. What is this?”
I asked Conklin if I could have a private word with Mr. Downey. After Conklin left the room, I took a chair, introduced myself, and said, “Sorry we had to pull you in, Mr. Downey. But if you answer my questions truthfully, you’ll be free within the hour. No one will ever know you spoke with the police.”
“Am I under arrest? Because either way, I’m not telling you anything,” he sputtered. “You played me, lady. I think you violated some code or something.”
I got up from the chair, opened the door, and shouted, “Everyone, take a walk. And no cameras. I mean it.”
I winked at Conklin; then I slammed the door. I went back to my seat across from Downey and leaned over the table so that we were nose to nose.
“Mr. Downey, please pay close attention. You have held back information about the WW 888 disaster that cost over four hundred people their lives. You will either tell me what you know and when you knew it, or I will turn you over to Homeland Security. I don’t care who you think has your back, you are a coconspirator in a hellacious act of terrorism. Do you want to spend the rest of your life in a federal prison?”
Downey’s face turned red and tears flew out of his eyes.
He said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. You think I know something about that airplane? I don’t. I called Cindy Thomas because I was sick about those dead people in the hotel room. But I had nothing to do with them, or that airplane—which hadn’t gone down when I made those surveillance videos. You don’t know if that guy, Joe, was talking about that particular plane. How could I know? I’m a geek. I signed on to do surveillance, period. I’m not even cleared for this stuff.”
He put his hands over his eyes and sobbed noisily.
I slapped the table and snapped, “Look at me.”
He jerked his head up.
“Mr. Downey, the CIA is going to walk away from you. They didn’t see the video. But I did. And Ms. Thomas did. And if you don’t convince me otherwise, I’m going to turn you in and we’re going to testify against you.”
He snuffled, used the tissues I handed him to mop his face, then sputtered weakly, “You’re giving me too much credit. I’m just a kid. And I don’t work for the CIA.”
Oh. Now I got it. June Freundorfer had said the FBI was interested in Chan. I guess they were interested in Muller, too.
“Who, then? The FBI?”
Downey nodded and his chest heaved. It was apparent that he was verging on another meltdown. I reached across the table and patted his hands.
“OK, Jeffrey. Tell me what you know. Don’t leave anything out. If I believe you, you can walk out of here today.”
Downey honked into the wad of tissues. He was still agitated and frightened, but he had moved in my direction.
He said, “All I know about the plane was that guy Joe asking the kids if they’d heard anything about a plane from Beijing. They hadn’t. I wasn’t even sent to learn about that. My peeps are all about crushing a Chinese spy ring.”
“What do you mean, ‘spy ring’?”
“I was paid to watch and listen, that’s all. If Chan was a spy, you know more than I do. Same for Muller. Is ‘the Prince of Gorgonzola’ a secret code? I don’t know. I just record what happens, and what happened is that those two got it on.”
“What do you know about Alison Muller?”
“For God’s sake. That’s what you want? I’ve got tape on her. Give me my laptop, I’ll show you what I’ve got.”
CHAPTER 83
DOWNEY HAD VIDEO of Alison Muller. He had video.
The barbed wire restraints around my chest dissolved and my heart did a happy dance, but I wasn’t about to let Jad know it. I asked him if he’d like something to drink while I got his computer, and shaking his head like a wet dog, he said no.
I left Interview 2, closed the door behind me, and asked Conklin, “What did you think?”
“He’s a foot soldier. I think he’s telling the truth.”
Conklin disappeared down the hall, and a long couple of minutes later he returned with Downey’s computer bag. I got two bottles of Voss out of the vending machine and went back into the interview room.
Downey opened his case and took out the laptop. Then he got up heavily from his chair, plugged the cord into a socket, scraped his chair this way and that, settled in, and booted up. It took a lifetime for him to cue up the video.
He said, “If you see something, say something, OK? Because I have followed this bitch a lot and nothing ever happens.”
Downey moved the laptop over to me, saying, “Usually, after I shoot the videos, I forward them same day to my boss. And then I delete them from my hard drive. Destroy them. I still have this one because it’s from the day when I told them my camera failed.”
“Gotcha,” I said, watching the blank screen expectantly.
“Here she is leaving her office at four-thirty,” Downey said. “She drove straight to the Four Seasons.”
I watched Ali Muller leave the office building with the Aptec logo over the door. She was
wearing the Gucci glasses, the swingy black leather coat, and her spike-heeled boots. She was speaking on her phone as she walked to her car in the underground garage.
Once she was in her car, Downey clicked on the icon for the next video in the playlist. When I saw the opening frames, it appeared to me that it had been shot by a dash cam in a car following Muller’s, which was exiting the garage.
Downey said, “Now, here comes one hour and ten minutes of drive time.”
“Go ahead and fast-forward,” I said.
From my seat in the interrogation room, I watched Muller’s BMW negotiate traffic from Silicon Valley to San Francisco, where she got out of the car on Stevenson, a small alley parallel to Market Street.
She gave the valet several bills, and although Jad’s camera was out of audio range, I knew she was saying something like “Don’t bury my car. I’m going to need it fast.”
The video ended—no doubt Downey shutting it down in order to park his own vehicle. As we already knew, bugs had been planted in Chan’s room prior to his planned assignation with Muller.
Downey said to me, “That’s all. You saw the video from fourteen-twenty. Muller gets naked with Chan and the network goes down. End of story.”
“You mind making me a copy of that footage?”
Downey grabbed the laptop away from me and closed the lid.
“Look. I showed you what you asked for. I’ve put my life in danger for this bullshit. I haven’t committed a crime. Now, let me out of here, or I’m getting a serious, no-shit lawyer to sue you in federal court for violating my constitutional rights. Why don’t you think about that?”
There it was. The man had said “lawyer.”
“Thanks for your help, Mr. Downey. You’re free to go. I’ll walk you out.”
CHAPTER 84
BACK AT MY desk, I contacted Monterey PD and spoke with the squad commander, asking if he had new information on Muller. I said, “I’m hoping she’s been seen.”
“No sightings and not a clue,” he said. “The husband calls every day, and every day we have to tell him we’ve got nothing.”