Douglas Preston - Gideon’s Sword

He saw a flash of movement. A scrawny, one-eyed cat came slinking out from a hedge.

“Hungry, partner?”

The cat made a low meow and crept over, tail twitching warily. Gideon offered it a fry. It sniffed at it suspiciously, ate it, then meowed again, louder.

Gideon tossed the cat a small handful. “That’s all, kiddo. Any idea how bad trans-fatty acids are for you?”

The cat settled down to nosh.

Gideon dove in again, stirring the garbage with his arm, this time turning up a wad of discarded papers. Quickly sorting through them, he saw they were some little child’s math homework — straight A’s, he noted with approval. Why were they thrown away? Should be framed.

He pushed them back in, dug out a chicken drumstick, and set it aside for the cat. He reached in again, both hands this time, wriggling downward, encountering something slimy, fumbling deeper, his fingers working through various semi-solid things before encountering more papers. Grasping them and working them to the surface, he saw they were just what he was looking for: discarded bills. And among them was the top half of a phone bill.

Jackpot.

“Hey!” He heard a shout and looked up. There was the homeowner himself, Lamoine Hopkins, a small, thin African American man, excitedly pointing his arm. “Hey! Get the fuck outta here!”

In no hurry, glad of the unexpected opportunity to interact with one of his targets, Gideon shoved the papers into his pocket. “Can’t a man feed himself?” He held up the drumstick.

“Go feed yourself somewhere else!” the man shrilled. “This is a decent neighborhood! That’s my trash!”

“Come on, man, don’t be like that.”

The man took out his cell phone. “You see this? I’m calling the cops!”

“Hey, no harm done, man.”

“Hello?” said the man, speaking theatrically into the phone, “there’s an intruder on my property, rifling my trash! Thirty-five seventeen Kearny Street Northeast!”

“Sorry,” Gideon mumbled, shambling off with the drumstick in one hand.

“I need a squad car, right now!” shrilled the man. “He’s trying to get away!”

Gideon tossed the drumstick in the direction of the cat, shuffled off around the corner, and then picked up his pace. He quickly wiped his hands and arms as thoroughly as he could on his cap, discarded it, turned his Salvation Army coat inside out — revealing an immaculate blue trench coat — and put it on, tucked in his shirt, then slicked back his hair with a comb. As he reached his rental car a few blocks off, a police cruiser passed by, giving him only the briefest of glances. He slipped in and started the engine, rejoicing at his good fortune. Not only did he get what he’d come for, but he’d met Mr. Lamoine Hopkins in person — and had such a lovely chat with him.

That would come in handy.

From his motel room, Gideon began cold-calling the numbers on Hopkins’s phone bill the next morning. He worked his way through a succession of Hopkins’s friends until on the fifth call he struck pay dirt.

“Heart of Virginia Mall, tech support,” came the voice. “Kenny Roman speaking.”

Tech support. Quickly, Gideon turned on a digital recorder plugged into a line-splitter on the phone line. “Mr. Roman?”

“Yes?”

“My name is Eric, and I’m calling on behalf of the Sutherland Finance Company.”

“Yeah? What do you want?”

“It’s about the loan on your 2007 Dodge Dakota.”

“What Dakota?”

“The loan is three months overdue, sir, and I’m afraid that Sutherland Finance—”

“What are you talking about? I don’t have any Dakota.”

“Mr. Roman, I understand these are difficult financial times, but if we don’t receive the amount currently overdue—”

“Look, buddy, dig some of the wax outta your ears, will you? You’ve got the wrong person. I don’t even own a pickup. Suck​—​My​—​Dick.” There was a click as the line went dead.

Gideon hung up. He snapped off the digital recorder. Then he listened three times to the exchange he’d just recorded. What are you talking about? I don’t have any Dakota, Gideon mimicked aloud. Look, buddy, dig some of the wax outta your ears, will you? You’ve got the wrong person. I don’t even own a pickup. He repeated the phrases many times, in different combinations, until he felt he had the inflections, tone, rhythms down just about right.

He picked up the phone and dialed again: this time, the IT department at Fort Belvoir.

“IT,” came the response. It was Lamoine Hopkins’s voice.

“Lamoine?” Gideon said, whispering. “It’s Kenny.”

“Kenny, what the hell?” Hopkins sounded instantly suspicious. “What’s with the whispering?”

“Got a fucking cold. And…what I got to say is sensitive.”

“Sensitive? What do you mean?”

“Lamoine, you got a problem.”

“Me? I got a problem? What do you mean?”

Gideon consulted a sheet of scribbled notes. “I got a call from a guy named Roger Winters.”

“Winters? Winters called you?”

“Yeah. Said there was a problem. He asked me how many times you’d called me from work, that kind of shit.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah.

“He wanted to know,” Gideon-as-Kenny asked, “if you’d called me on your office computer, using VoIP or Skype.”

“Christ, that would be a violation of security! I’ve never done that!”

“Man said you had.”

Gideon could hear Lamoine breathing heavily. “But it isn’t true!”

“That’s what I told him. Listen, Lamoine, there’s a security audit going on over there, I’ll bet you anything, and somehow they’re on your case.”

“What am I going to do?” Hopkins fairly wailed. “I haven’t done anything wrong! I mean, I couldn’t make a VoIP call from here even if I wanted to!”

“Why not?”

“The firewall.”

“There are ways to get around a firewall.”

“Are you kidding me? We’re a classified facility!”

“There’s always a way.”

“For Chrissakes, Kenny, I know there isn’t a way. I’m IT, remember? Just like you. There’s only one outgoing port in the entire network, and all that it allows past is passphrase-​encrypted packets from specific nodes, all of which are secure. And even then the packets can only go to certain external IPs. All the classified documents in this archive are digitized, they’re super-paranoid about electronic security. There’s no way in hell I could call out on Skype! I can’t even send out e-mail!”

Gideon coughed, sniffed, blew his nose. “Don’t you know the port number?”

“Sure, but I don’t have access to the weekly passphrases.”

“Does your boss, Winters, have access?”

“No. Only, like, the top three in the organization get the passphrase — director, deputy director, and security director. I mean, with that passphrase you could pretty much e-mail out any classified document in here.”

“Don’t you guys in IT generate the passphrases?”

“You kidding? It comes down from the spooks in a secure envelope. I mean, they walk the sucker over here. It never enters any electronic system — it’s written down by hand on a piece of frigging paper.”

“Problem is that port number,” said Gideon. “Is that written down?”

“It’s kept in a safe. But a lot of people know it.”

Gideon grunted. “Sounds to me like you’re being framed. Like maybe one of the top guys screwed up and is looking for someone else to take the fall. ‘Let’s pin it on Lamoine!’”

“No way.”

“Happens all the time. It’s always the little guys who get shafted. You need to protect yourself, man.”