The next morning the three made a show of leaving the cabin and driving away. Anyone observing their behavior from, say, the nearby shrubbery, would have seen the two women, the sisters, bickering, and the older man, resplendent in a large pattern green-and-white houndstooth sport coat barking at them, “Shut up and get the hell in the car.” It should have been convincing. They drove away, and after a pause, two men emerged from the shrubbery and approached the house. A third man stepped into the driveway farther along and spoke into a shoulder-mounted radio. The men stopped at the front door, acknowledged the call, picked the lock, and were inside in less than thirty seconds. Motion-detectors planted in several places responded and recorded their visit with the cameras placed in every room. They stayed for thirty minutes and left, leaving, they believed, no trace of having been there.
At the same time, another duo stopped by Bert’s and made copies of the surveillance footage taken the previous day. The tapes were taken to the New Star Ranch where a team of men ran them through facial recognition programs. The process took several hours and resourced every database available to them but no identities were made or confirmed. To more sophisticated reviewers, that should have been a red flag. By this time, in the country’s terrorist-obsessed culture, nearly everyone had been photographed and cataloged. Between NSA, Homeland Security, the FBI, CIA, and the remaining alphabet soup of acronymous security services there were precious few people over the age of twelve who were not resident in one registry or another. But these three were nowhere to be found. Had the scan been done a day later, it would have identified Beatrice Silver, June Gottlieb (nee Silver), and Marvin Gottlieb, all from Raleigh, North Carolina, but Charlie Garland had been busy with debriefing the agents ensconced in Ruth’s cottage in Maine. He did hear that the scan had been done and hoped that the persons looking at the Gottliebs would not notice their absence in the files. He certainly would have.
***
The director of the FBI was a career agent. Unlike his recent predecessors, he had actually served in the field as a special agent. Over the twenty-five years he’d been an agent, he’d worked his way up through the ranks and the president, at the time torn between two conflicting loyalties each vying to have their choice appointed to the directorship, had solved his dilemma by appointing a career man instead, thus satisfying no one, but not offending anyone either. The New York Times called it a “bold, nonpartisan move for which the President should be commended.”
The director studied the pink memo on his desk with disgust. He did not like political interference in the operation of the Bureau and especially not the sort that emanated from the Congress. He thought that Congress and its members, past and present, had enough skeletons in their collective closet to suggest they give the Bureau a wide berth, not stir up questions by seeking political favors. But politicians are not known for their introspection, and so the requests for special consideration landed on his desk nearly daily. Anyone who knew him also knew he was not stupid and realized that bending in the wind would sometimes prevent breaking. Occasionally allowances had to be made.
The matter of Karl Hedrick’s continued employment in the Bureau hit his desk that morning. He did not understand why a senator would presume to question the effectiveness of an agent he’d never met and about whom he knew nothing. It bothered him. Obviously, Hedrick had stepped on someone’s toes and they did not like it. On the other hand, he thought a few of the boys on the Hill could use a looking into and toyed with the idea of opening the file on the person making the request. He was pretty sure the Bureau had one. He shook his head, sighed, smoothed his patterned silk tie, a birthday gift from his wife—he hated it—and passed the request on to a senior deputy with more ambition than scruples. The deputy, in turn, scanned Karl’s file and noted the adverse entries already in it. He ignored the exonerating documents accompanying those entries and pulled Karl out of Picketsville and back to his desk in the Hoover building.
***
Karl’s removal from the case, while serving as a blow to the work underway at the site, did provide another bit of information for Charlie to work with. Who had enough pull at the top to initiate a request like that and, more importantly, whose pocket was he in?
“We are triangulating,” he announced to Alice. She smiled an acknowledgement but had no idea what he was thinking. She didn’t ask. She knew from experience that to do so would interrupt the process he referred to as “problem solving.”
***
When they were well away from the cabin, Ike turned to Sam in the backseat. “We’re set with surveillance?”
“Done and done. I have motion-activated cameras all over the place. When we get back, we can download the footage and see who visited us and what they were doing.”
Ruth twisted in her seat. “Won’t they see them? I mean, if they are breaking and entering, isn’t it a fair assumption they will be looking for cameras?”
“That depends on whether they think we might not be who we say we are. Then they might. But I don’t think they will. Not this time, anyway.”
“There will be another time?”
Ike grinned. “Oh, yeah. If they are professionals, there will be. People with suspicious minds like theirs will always repeat a search on the assumption that we are as suspicious of them as they are of us and assume we staged the house for a search, but are not smart enough to anticipate a follow-up. They might guess that we will hide things and then, having been searched, get careless and leave stuff lying about. So, to be sure, they will come back in a day or two.”
Sam leaned forward and handed Ruth a picture of a clothes hook. “What do you think?”
“Very minimalist. Are you and Karl doing your closets in black and white?”
“No. This is a picture of one of the cameras, Ruth. It looks like a coat hook but it isn’t. My only concern is that the people in there will wonder at the number and placement of clothes hooks in the house.”
“This is all very Edgar Allan Poe.”
“Poe? How?”
“C. Auguste Dupin in ‘The Purloined Letter.’”
“Ruth is being professorial,” Ike said. “It’s a story about a missing letter and it is hidden in plain sight, in a letterpress with other letters. Your hooks work because they look like they belong where they are”
“Sorry, Sam, Ike is right, couldn’t resist showing off a little. With all you spooks, snoops, spies, and cops, I never get a chance to play in your sandbox and have to take what I can get. So, how many hooks?”
“Twelve in all. Then, there are three alarm clocks, and four electrical outlets all with built-in cameras. I hope they don’t try to plug anything in. They are electrically dead.”
“Why would they? Just as a matter of general information, how many of those things are in my bedroom, and when were they installed?”
“Just two—no, three, and this morning. Don’t worry, your sex life is not about to go public.”
“You’re sure?”
Sam grinned wickedly. “Why would I lie?”
Ruth slumped back in her seat, not mollified. “Ike, when we return to normal, you are to shoot Sam. Maybe I will. It would be self-defense.”
“Only after I’ve seen the videos. If I remember rightly, they just might have some commercial value. Think of all the nouveau célébrités who have launched their dubious careers with a tape like that. Who knows? You could be the next Kardashian.”
“Do that and I will save your enemies the trouble and shoot you myself.”
“Gotcha. No naughty tapes. You hear that, Sam? We switch off after we review what happened today.”
“I planned to, although I must say, from what I’ve heard about you, June Gottleib, I’m surprised you’d be finicky about a measly sex tape. The boys back in the old neighborhood said they have stuff on you that would start a fire, already.”
“Shut up, High-Ho, or you’re walking home.”