William Bernhardt - Double Jeopardy

Travis looked at himself reproachfully in the mirror. He hated to admit it, but she was right. He had involved her. He’d put her life in danger just as surely as his own.

“We need some answers, Byrne. And quick. And for that, we need Moroconi. Do you know his phone number?”

“Sure,” Travis said. “Just dial M for Murderer.”

“I take it that’s a no. Fortunately, I have an inkling how we might find him.”

Travis felt a swelling in his chest. For the first time since the dawn of this nightmare, he had some small hope that he might survive it. “How do we start?”

“By checking the phone records on that call Moroconi made to you night before last.”

“How? By strolling casually into Southwestern Bell?”

“Just let me take care of that, Byrne.” She pressed down on the accelerator and merged onto the LBJ Freeway. She pulled into the fast lane, hit her best cruising speed, and opened the console between the seats.

“What are you looking for?”

“The phone,” she muttered. She yanked out an old floppy fishing hat, complete with lures hooked around the brim.

“You like to fish?” Travis asked.

“I live to fish,” Cavanaugh replied.

“Really?”

“Is that so incredible?”

“Well … you always seemed more the white-wine-and-croissant type to me.”

Cavanaugh rolled her eyes. “I may surprise you.”

“You already have.”

She withdrew a small handheld tape recorder. “I use this to take notes sometimes,” she explained.

“I’ve seen you talking into it in court. I always assumed you were calling me names.”

“You may have been right.” She slipped the tape recorder inside her purse, then reached back into the console and withdrew a small portable phone. She clipped it onto her dash and plugged it into the lighter. Then she pressed a series of fifteen numbers.

“Who are you calling?” Travis inquired.

“An old friend. He owes me a big favor. And he works for the phone company.” After a momentary clicking, Travis heard the line ringing.

“Hello? Crescatelli here.”

“John? It’s your old pal Cavanaugh.”

“Cavanaugh? Hey, it’s been a while. I heard you went legit.”

“Yeah, yeah. Listen, John, I don’t have time to play ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ I need help. I’m in trouble, see. Very dangerous players are looking for me, including perhaps certain law enforcement agencies, and you’d be in big trouble if anyone found out you were talking to me.”

There was a brief pause, a few clicks, then: “What’s that? I’m sorry, there must be some static on the line. Who is this again?”

Cavanaugh smiled. “Bless you.”

It sounded like Crescatelli was blowing into the receiver. “Damn these car phones. The reception is horrible. Who’s calling, please?”

“John, I need access to a central switchboard computer terminal with the records for the last forty-eight hours for all lines in the greater Dallas/Fort Worth area Like, for example, the one you’re probably sitting in front of. And I need to make calls without being traced.”

Crescatelli pounded the phone against something solid. “I can’t believe this crappy reception. It’s these new fiber-optic cables, you know. They don’t work worth beans. Look, whoever this is, I expect to be at my terminal until six o’clock tonight, but between twelve-thirty and one-thirty everyone else in the office goes to lunch, so I’ll be here all by my lonesome. If you can’t get a better connection, you might consider coming by in person.”

Cavanaugh nodded. “Maybe I will. Talk to you later, John.” She pushed the red button, disconnecting the line.

“Travis,” she asked, “how would you like to pay a visit to the inner bowels of Ma Bell?”

42

12:40 P.M.

TRAVIS STOOD IN THE midst of row after row of electronic switching equipment and tried to act more comfortable than he really was. He didn’t think anyone would recognize him; he was certain he’d never been here before. Somehow, though, that didn’t make him feel a bit safer. He’d never been to Cavanaugh’s apartment before, either, but that didn’t prevent them from finding him.

He was hiding behind dark sunglasses and beneath the brim of Cavanaugh’s fairly ridiculous fishing hat. Sure, it shaded his face, but he wondered if it didn’t attract more attention than it deflected. And it clashed with his necktie.

John Crescatelli was a jumbo-sized man whose fingers skidded across his computer keyboard at a speed faster than the eye could follow. The terminal was connected by shiny metal cables to a series of metal boxes, each equipped with flashing lights, buttons, and LED displays. To Travis, the place looked like a set from Star Trek, but Cavanaugh assured him it was all standard-issue telecommunications equipment.

“As I mentioned on the phone,” Cavanaugh said, “I need to be able to make phone calls that cannot be traced.”

Crescatelli nodded, apparently nonplussed. “May I ask why?’

“No. And let me remind you that I am not here, I never was here, you’ve never talked to me, you don’t know who I am, and you wouldn’t help me if you did.”

“Roger.” He gazed at the ceiling. “Someday I must seek a cure for this dreadful habit of talking to myself. I guess it stems from the fact that I’m fundamentally a lonely person.”

Cavanaugh smirked. “We’ll stand behind this row of beeping gizmos, just in case someone wanders in early from lunch.”

Crescatelli continued to stare at the ceiling. “What was that sound? The wind? Man, they really need to do something about the drafts in here.” He shuffled the papers on his desk. “Maybe this would be a good time to start outlining my doctoral dissertation—just in case I ever decide to go to college. In order to make an untraceable call, you need to understand about tandems.”

Cavanaugh scribbled into her notepad. “Tandems. That rings a bell.”

“The tandem is the key to the whole Bell telephone switching system. Each tandem is a carrier line with relays capable of switching other tandems in any toll-switching office in North America, either one-to-one or by programming a roundabout route through other tandems. If you call from Dallas to Tulsa and the traffic is heavy on all the direct trunks between the two cities, the tandem automatically reroutes you through the next best route, say for instance, through a tandem down in Shreveport or Houston, then up to Denver, then Wichita, then back to Tulsa.”

“Thanks for the fascinating background info,” Cavanaugh muttered. “So how do you make the untraceable call?”

“When a tandem is not in use, it whistles.”

Travis blinked. “Whistles? Like Yankee Doodle Dandy?”

“Mental note,” Crescatelli said. “Remove all frivolous asides from dissertation before publication. Anyway, when a caller dials a long-distance number, he is immediately connected to a tandem. The tandem stops whistling and converts the number into multifrequency beep tones, then transmits the tones to the tandem in the area code the caller wishes to reach.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Cavanaugh said. “I’ve got the general idea. Get on to the good stuff.”

“You would think this system is utterly immune to interference—who could talk to a tandem? No one could—until someone invented the first blue box.” Crescatelli reached into his bottom desk drawer and withdrew a small blue metal shell case. “You see, Ma Bell got careless. She allowed some egghead on the East Coast to publish an article in a technical journal which, in passing, revealed the actual frequencies Bell uses to create those multifrequency tones. Who’d have thought anyone would notice? Well, one squid at MIT read that issue. And half a day later he’d created the first blue box.”