Mike Lawson - The Payback

‘Doing what?’ Emma said.

‘Part of the training is the book stuff,’ Shipley said, ‘which we do here, and part is shipboard. Carmody is supposedly watching the shipboard training, but my guys say that he seems to spend most of his time just bullshitting with the sailors.’

‘But he’s on board the submarines a lot,’ Emma said. ‘On his own.’

‘Yeah,’ Shipley said. ‘Is there a problem with that?’

Emma led DeMarco to a café on Bremerton’s waterfront. The place smelled of incense and flowers and served fifty varieties of herbal tea. The cheerful lady who ran the café sported John Lennon-style wire-rim glasses and had straight, gray hair that reached the small of her back. She wore what DeMarco thought of as a granny dress, a long shapeless thing as glamorous as a flour sack that touched the tops of her Birkenstock sandals. DeMarco had thought that hippies were extinct, but apparently not.

Emma ordered an exotic tea, something with ginseng in it. DeMarco asked for coffee, then a Coke, then a plain old Lipton’s and each time was informed by the woman – not only a hippie but a health Nazi – that she didn’t stock such beverages. He settled for a glass of water; the happy Nazi put a slice of lemon in it.

They took seats near a window where they could see the ferry terminal and watch the jumbo ferries from Seattle dock at the terminal in Bremerton.

‘I think Whitfield may have been right about Mulherin and Norton,’ Emma said.

‘That they’re committing some kind of fraud?’

‘Not fraud,’ Emma said. ‘Something else.’

‘What else? What are you talking about?’

‘Let’s look at everything Dave Whitfield said from a different perspective. He said Mulherin and Norton, two guys in debt, suddenly retire early and come into a lot of money and start buying things. Then you consider where they’ve been working, in a training facility loaded with classified materials. And then right after Whitfield calls you about them, he’s killed. So maybe Whitfield saw Mulherin or Norton doing something or overheard something and—’

‘Espionage? Is that what you’re saying, Emma?’

Emma nodded her head slowly.

DeMarco had never been near a spy in his life, at least not that he knew of. His normal assignments involved wayward politicians and greedy bureaucrats and being the middleman for deals that Mahoney didn’t want his fingerprints on. ‘You might be right,’ he said to Emma, ‘but you saw the security in that place.’

The shipyard’s perimeter was protected by tall fences topped with barbed wire; boats armed with machine guns patrolled the waterfront to keep watercraft – watercraft potentially filled with explosives – from approaching the drydocks or ships that were moored at the piers; armed guards manned entry gates and patrolled the grounds, and cameras were located in strategic spots. And these were just the security measures that were visible.

People entering the shipyard were carefully controlled. The employees, the ones who worked on the nuclear ships, had to have a security clearance and they wore badges that had their pictures on the front and a magnetic strip on the back, like the strip on the back of a credit card. To enter the shipyard, workers had to show their badges to guards stationed at the gates and swipe the badges through bar-code readers to further confirm they were allowed to enter. Miller, the shipyard security chief, had said that random searches of backpacks and lunch boxes and vehicles were performed at all times, and if the national or regional threat level increased, everybody was searched, from the shipyard commander’s wife on down to the guy who mopped the cafeteria floor.

‘Let me tell you something about security systems,’ Emma said to DeMarco. ‘Most systems – including the one at this shipyard – are primarily designed to keep the bad guys out . But once a worker has been vetted for a security clearance and given a badge, he’s in . And once he’s in, he’s trusted, and he has access to classified information, and most important, he knows how such information is protected.’ Emma paused to sip her tea, then added, ‘And espionage isn’t the only possibility.’

‘What else is there?’

‘Sabotage. There are currently four nuclear-powered submarines being overhauled at the shipyard. Sabotaging one of these ships would have significant repercussions. Not only the cost to repair whatever was damaged, but fleet operations would be disrupted if a vessel had to be taken out of service for a significant amount of time, and work on all the other ships being overhauled would be delayed.’

‘It’s kinda hard to picture Mulherin and Norton as spies. I mean these guys, they’re just—’

‘Remember Aldrich Ames?’ Emma asked.

‘The CIA guy?’ DeMarco said.

‘Right,’ Emma said. ‘Ames was probably the most damaging mole ever to penetrate a U.S. intelligence service. He was an alcoholic and poorly thought of by his coworkers. He was turned down for promotions, not all that bright, and openly flaunted the money he received from the Russians. In spite of all that, he fed CIA information to the KGB for almost ten years, and ten native Russians providing intelligence to the CIA died because of him. When you think about it, Mulherin and Norton bear a rather large resemblance to Aldrich Ames.’

‘What about Carmody?’

‘We don’t know anything about Phil Carmody,’ Emma said and her lips compressed into a stubborn line that said they soon would.

‘Hell, even if they are spies, according to that tall gal up in the training area, what’s-her-name, Shipley, it’d be pretty hard to sneak anything classified out of that place. You sure as hell can’t sneak one of those big damn books out of that vault.’

‘I know,’ Emma said.

They sat in silence a moment until DeMarco said, ‘If all those security systems don’t keep the spies out, how do they get ’em?’

‘The first opportunity,’ Emma said, ‘is the background checks performed when they issue a man or a woman a security clearance. That’s the time to see if they’re in financial trouble or susceptible to blackmail. But that’s not how spies are usually caught.’ Emma gestured toward the shipyard, the eastern end of which was visible from the teahouse. ‘All that security – the fences, the cameras, the safes, the cyber locks – that’s the physical perimeter that protects the facility and its secrets. But there’s a second perimeter that’s just as visible but not as apparent – a human perimeter. The employees. Employees like Dave Whitfield watching their coworkers, looking for odd behavior, looking for something that stinks , as poor Dave put it. It’s the second perimeter that catches the spies.’

Emma tipped her cup back and swallowed the remainder of her horrible, healthy tea. ‘There’s somebody I need to talk to,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you later.’

‘I need some help here, Bill,’ Emma said.

Bill Smith – his real name – worked for Emma’s old outfit. He was five foot nine, slim, had curly dark hair, and wore glasses with heavy black frames. He didn’t look like an international spy; he looked, to his great dismay, very much like the older brother of a guy who did a national TV commercial, one that had been running for more than three years. He and Emma were sitting in a Denny’s restaurant and Emma winced as Smith poured half a pint of raspberry syrup over his waffles.

‘I can’t do it, Emma,’ Smith said. ‘We’re more shorthanded right now than we were during the cold war.’ Before Emma could object, he held out a forkful of waffle, red syrup running down the handle of the fork. ‘Wanna bite?’ he said.