CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
In her haste to make an 8:00
A.M. meeting, Bonnie
Jerome had time only to change out of her Nike walking shoes and
into her pumps before scurrying down the hall to get checked off
somebody’s list for attending her umpteenth mandatory security
briefing. Spies were everywhere, the speaker had told her, and the
spies knew who she was. In fact, they knew who everyone was. If you
worked for the FBI—from a file clerk to the director himself—they
had your picture and a dossier. People like Bonnie and the
technicians who worked for her were just as likely to be approached
by a foreign agent as was anyone else—perhaps even more so, given
that technical types had no arrest powers.
Mentally, she’d checked out of the
briefing once the guy got to the part about foreign spies seducing
unsuspecting sources at the popular Washington, D.C., nightspots.
The thought of it made her smile. If last night’s conquest—a hunky
Georgetown student named Jonathan—was a spy, then he’d earned every
secret he’d taken home with him.
The meeting finally ended, precisely
three hours after it had begun, and now she could get back down to
the business of being a computer geek. What she and her people did
for the FBI could just as well have been done for any other agency
in the government; or even the private sector. They made sure that
the complex knot of computer systems—both hardware and soft—ran as
smoothly as possible, thus keeping the world safe from the Red
hordes, or whatever was the perceived threat du jour. In a town that was perpetually
fissured by politics, Bonnie truly didn’t care about any of it, so
long as her cats remained well fed, her rent was paid on time, and
these woefully out-of-date pieces of crap they called computers
continued to process the information they were designed to digest.
Her compartmentalized Top Secret clearance granted her access to
just about everything the system had to offer, but none of it held
her interest. Whatever she saw during the course of a day was
forgotten by happy hour.
At least, that was usually the case.
Today would be different. Just a few minutes after returning to her
desk, she discovered in her inbox an urgent message directly
related to the content of
information within the system, rather than on the function of the
system itself. She could think of only one other time it had
happened—a security breach in one of the older systems in the
network, the warning for which surfaced as an error message to one
of her programmers. In that case, Bonnie had merely bumped it to
the security people and was done.
This morning’s message was different,
however, and it came attached to a cover note written in hot-pink
ink on a lime-green sticky.
Bonnie—This popped up as an error message at 0321 hrs. this a.m. Thought you’d want to handle it. I’d do it, but I’ve got kids to put through school.—TR
He signed it with a dippy, ridiculous
smiley face.
TR would be Ted Rosencranze, her
assistant in charge of midnight shifts. Pulling the sticky off the
printout, she read further. Apparently, someone over at EPA had
tapped into a computer file that had been tagged by one of the old
Justice systems for surveillance, back in . . . she checked the
date again . . . 1983! Somehow the tag was forgotten, or maybe it
expired. Anyway, for whatever reason, it was never transferred to
the new system. The instructions were quite specific and, as such,
rather unremarkable: in the event that these files were accessed by
anyone for any reason, the case agent was to be personally notified
right away.
At first, Bonnie didn’t see what the
big deal was. This message contained nothing that Ted couldn’t have
handled on his own. Then she looked more closely and saw the name
of the case agent.
“Well, I’ll be damned.” She paused for
a moment to figure out what she should do. Finally, she shrugged
and reached for her Bureau phone directory and thumbed through the
pages until she found the entry she needed. After one more short
pause to collect herself, she lifted the handset and punched in the
extension.
A cheerful yet stuffy-sounding woman
picked up after the first ring. “Deputy Director Frankel’s office,”
she said.