CHAPTER 46
Georgetown Pike, near CIA headquarters, Langley
Robert Tranthan reached into his coat pocket, pulling out the vibrating Sectéra cell phone. He looked up at the driver to ensure that his eyes remained focused on the highway. The cell phone was a top-secret SME PED. The screen had multiple choices, in color, to include one that was labeled Sensa Secure Mail. He opened the secret mailbox. The e-mail was simple.
Call office.
The e-mail wasn’t from Tranthan’s office. The visitor to Maggie’s room was telling him to expect a call.
“We need to go back.”
The driver had driven the deputy director since Tranthan was appointed to the office and authorized to receive the special security of an armored Yukon. He never asked questions.
“CIA?” The driver said, more as confirmation of an order than a question.
Tranthan paused, looking out of the window at the leafless winter trees, seeing glimpses of the Potomac River. A bundled-up runner was running on the path that paralleled the highway for a short distance, her breath visible and frigid.
“Yes.”
The trip didn’t take long; the morning traffic had already thinned out. Fifteen minutes later Tranthan was picking up his messages at Laura’s desk.
Laura looked up.
“Mr. Tranthan?”
“Yeah.” He had to act as if he didn’t know.
“Nurse Cook at Bethesda called.” She handed him a telephone message.
“It’s over, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
He showed what he thought was an appropriately solemn and sad expression to his secretary. “Hold my calls.”
Tranthan pulled the door closed and picked up his telephone. He held the receiver in the crook of his neck as he pulled out a cigarette and lit it up. At the same time, he opened his e-mail on his computer. Cook’s cell phone only rang once.
“What happened?” It was Billie Cook who opened the conversation. Her voice was brooding and angry.
“What the hell do you mean?” Tranthan knew anything was possible now, including telephone conversations being recorded.
“She just didn’t throw a clot.”
“What time did she die?” He made sure to modulate his voice, fainter, sadder.
“Thirty-five minutes ago.” Cook still seethed.
Tranthan followed suit, speaking with heat. “Listen, you little shithead: Don’t forget who you work for. Period.”
“You’re not stopping an autopsy.”
Tranthan didn’t respond but slammed the telephone down.
Hell yes, I will stop an autopsy.
He inhaled the cigarette, blowing the swirling smoke up into the air, as he leaned back in the chair. He looked at his hands, noting their softness. They didn’t look like the hands that dug ditches in his little Chicago suburb of Burr Ridge. Throughout high school, Tranthan worked for the street and road department, digging ditches and throwing asphalt. He remembered coming home to the small house on Hamilton Avenue from a day of shoveling dirt to the sharp, antiseptic smell of vodka that hit him as soon as he stepped through the back door. The old man’s voice always followed.
“Boy? Get in here!”
Robert Tranthan’s father spent every extra cent he had ever earned in the glass factory on a stop he made every day coming home from work. The old man worked the night shift, getting off at seven. His breakfast was picked up around eight when the liquor store opened. A cheap fifth of vodka slowly worked its way through his father’s liver.
A scholarship to a small college on the Susquehanna River deep in central Pennsylvania proved Tranthan’s way out of that hell. He hadn’t cared where he went. He left the old man at home and never looked back.
Tranthan knew the girl on sight when they met in class. The only daughter of the rookie senator from Pennsylvania. Robert could see the insecurity in her eyes. She carried the pain of never coming anywhere near the bra sizes or glamour of her sorority sisters, but she was the senator’s daughter, so most people had enough sense to leave her alone. Tranthan talked her into eloping six months after their first date. He used the excuse of love, but it took two years before she ever traveled to the broken-down house on Hamilton Avenue in Burr Ridge. A new owner was gutting the small ranch. He explained that it was a different world, back when the nearby highway was Route 66, not the truck-clogged Interstate 55. Back when it was a house in the woods of suburban Chicago. She never met his father or his poor, pathetic mother, who had taken the old man’s beatings in silence.
Tranthan picked up the telephone again.
“Laura, can you get me a sandwich and coffee?”
“Sure.”
He looked at his watch and waited for five minutes. The canteen was on the other side of the CIA campus. It would take her at least thirty minutes. He didn’t need nearly half that time. He opened his side desk drawer, unlocked a metal lock box, and pulled a pad out from within. It had a series of numbers on one sheet of paper.
Tranthan walked out to Laura’s desk, pausing to look down the hallway. Few people ventured into this floor and this end of the hallway. Most employees treated this part of headquarters as holy turf to be avoided.
Tranthan sat down at Laura’s computer and went directly to the SMTP mail server. He had an idea as to what e-mail address to use and pulled out the sheet of paper, putting in the IP address:
2001.0db8.69d3.1212.8a2e.0404.liz1
He then opened up the computer’s day, date, and time and wound it back.
Others would do the work, but James Scott and William Parker would soon be dead.
Tranthan’s counterfeit e-mail was read on a BlackBerry just east of London. The recipient forwarded it to another BlackBerry at a train station near Madrid.
The first recipient handled the BlackBerry only with a glove and then placed it under the tire of his car parked at a meter on the street. The wheel crushed it as the car drove away.
The other BlackBerry rested on a train track seconds before the commuter train entered the station.
Another target was added to the list that Tranthan had originally sent: this one British.
As Tranthan sat behind her desk, he looked up to see a man standing there.
“Shit!” Tranthan yelled out.
No one ever came to his end of the hall.
“Yes?” He yelled it out loud.
“Sir, I’m sorry.” The computer technician, George, stood there sheepishly. “I didn’t mean to surprise you.”
“Yes, what do you need?”
“I was able to save the flash drive.”
“It wasn’t too damaged?”
“No, sir, and your password worked. I have the flash drive decoded.”