Thursday
Zach Dolan called my cell early the next morning. He sounded excited and asked me to meet him at Starbucks so we could go for a drive. When he pulled into the parking lot, I hopped in. Cadaverous black circles underlined his eyes, and he looked like he hadn’t slept all night. Despite that, he was beaming.
“Well?” I asked as he pushed into traffic.
He unzipped his down vest, pulled out an eight-by-ten brown envelope, and slid it toward me. “I cracked it.”
“The encryption? Really?”
He nodded. “One of the toughest jobs I’ve ever done. But I finally got it.”
“How?”
“Let me try to break it down for you. Basically, there were several different types of encryption used. On the US end they were using a single-pass method. I finally found the decryption key on the Darknet. But the Chinese encryption was tough. I was afraid it was double-encrypted, which would have made it impossible to decode, but I connected with a Chinese hacker, and he got me the key.”
“I don’t understand.” Now for the final test of whether Grace Qasimi was telling the truth “So?”
“I printed out everything.” He placed his hand on the envelope. “I don’t need to tell you this is highly confidential shit. If anyone finds out you have it, we’re both screwed.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t take it,” I said. Then I stopped. What the hell was I thinking? This was the reason I was involved in the mess in the first place.
“Just so you know, I didn’t make a copy of anything. I put the second drive you gave me after the explosion in with the printouts. I don’t want to hear about this ever again.” He shot me a penetrating look. “Are we clear?”
“Crystal.”
He pushed the envelope toward me. I picked it up. It was thick.
I was about to open the clasp when he raised his hand.
“Don’t open it here.”
I nodded and slipped the package into my lap. “How much do I owe you?”
“We said three hundred, right?”
“But that was before they blew up your office.”
He looked over. “I should have known when that went down that I shouldn’t go any further.”
“But you couldn’t help yourself, could you?”
He sighed. “That’s about the size of it.”
“Should I write you a check?”
“Not on your life. This is a cash-only deal.”
“You be careful, Zach.”
“You too, Ellie.”
After Zach dropped me off, I rushed home, as if the envelope was on fire and I had to put it out. Luke’s pickup wasn’t in the garage; nor was it parked at the curb. Still I called out once I was inside.
“Luke? You home?”
No answer.
It was better that way. I carried the envelope gingerly up to my office, closed the door, and pulled down the shades. I opened the clasp and pulled out what was inside. There must have been a sheaf of more than fifty papers.
The first dozen or so sheets were copies of three-way emails between Hollander, Gao, and Parks. I started reading. It felt like a film was unfolding in front of me. At the beginning there were emails of introduction in which everyone said how honored they were to meet the others. That was followed by lots of praise and compliments about each person’s respective position within his or her organization. And how kind Gregory Parks was to put them together.
Kindness, my foot. Parks was being paid for the connection, probably by both sides. Chances were he was making a killing. I caught myself and grimaced at my choice of words.
Then the conversation moved into more substantive areas. Parks brought up the system, although he didn’t mention the words “anti-drone” or “DADES.” He explained that Hollander had been working on little else during the past two years. Gao responded with effusive praise. Parks followed up by saying that Hollander was the only person in the entire world who knew the system inside out, and that her knowledge might be helpful to General Gao, who emphatically agreed. Parks took the conversation further by proposing that the two meet; he understood they might have mutually beneficial needs.
When I read the next batch of emails, I gasped. They had met! Six months earlier, all three had flown to the Bahamas for a long weekend. That must have been where the deal was struck, because there was nothing in the emails prior to the trip or afterward that mentioned dollars or contracts or exactly who was getting what.
In fact, the nature of the emails changed significantly after that. The three-way emails between Hollander, Parks, and Gao ended; instead, everything went through Parks. It made sense—both Hollander and Gao had to protect themselves as much as possible. I wondered if Hollander had deleted the earlier emails from her computer—I was sure she had. General Gao undoubtedly had as well.
Fortunately for me, though, my flash drive came from Parks, which contained all the emails that had been exchanged between the three since the beginning. I was able to read the ones from Hollander to Parks, but the ones from Parks to Gao were in Chinese, and I had no idea what they said. Maybe Grace would translate them. Then I reconsidered. I was reading about treason. The fewer people involved, the better.
The final batch of emails from Hollander to Parks were businesslike. Most had to do with delivery timetables, components, and specs. One email from Hollander acknowledged receipt of a deposit. I suspected that might be the most incriminating email. There were also diagrams and charts and schematics attached to some of the correspondence. Again, I had no idea what I was looking at, and probably wouldn’t, even if I had a degree in engineering. There were also emails listing reputable suppliers and discussions about who could formulate the parts, especially the electronics, although Hollander told Parks she expected Gao would have his own.
Which would be much cheaper, I thought. The Chinese were known to steal American technology, copy it, and sell it for half the price.
I skimmed the emails between Parks and Gao. While I couldn’t understand them, I did notice that Parks had forwarded the attachments from Hollander. I eyed a few of them; they appeared to be the same documents she’d sent to Parks from her end.
Everything from Hollander’s side was sent from her personal email, Char24@comcast.net. And nothing from Gao’s email address indicated he worked for the Chinese government. Still, if Hollander sent them from work, even from her personal account, there was probably a record of them on the Delcroft computer system, and I was sure Stokes was trying to decrypt them too. But Stokes didn’t have what I had, which was the correspondence from Parks to Gao. Which made what I had even more valuable. In fact, now that Parks was dead, I might be the only person who had the full story.
Now I knew why Hollander was desperate to get Parks’ flash drive. Stokes, too, even though there didn’t seem to be any love lost between the two of them. Hollander needed to destroy the drive, and Stokes—well, I wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with the emails, but he couldn’t do anything until he had them in his possession. The enormity of what I held in my hands swept over me, and I let out a shaky breath. There might as well have been a huge target on my back. I went into my bathroom, swallowed a Xanax, and tried to figure out what to do.