24 Veto Power by John Whitman

said.
    “What?” Kelly snapped when the line went live.
    Debrah Drexler sounded like she was pacing. “I’m running out of time here, Kel. I have to speak to someone from the press in about half an hour. If I don’t, that news goes public and I’m ruined. I need help and I need it now.”
    “Do you know what you’re asking me to do?” he hissed back at her, forcing his voice down.
    “No,” she said, quite honestly. “I have no idea. But I do know that you’re the only one with access to information like this, and the only one who might be able to stop it.”
    Kelly looked around. The walls of his office were glass. He could have darkened them with a switch, but it was still early and the gravediggers were the only ones on. They were down on the deck, manning their terminals. He continued. “You don’t even know what ‘it’ is.”
    “Yes, I do—”
    “It might be a live witness. It might be a hard copy of a photograph in a safe somewhere. I can’t touch that, period. I certainly can’t do it in thirty minutes.”
    “I know what it is,” Debrah repeated. “I just got a copy of it on my e-mail. It’s a reminder to do what I’m told.”
    Sharpton had the queasy feeling that his stomach was sinking and his heart was leaping at the same time. “You got an e-mail? Send it to me.”
    He hung up.
    The e-mail came through a few seconds later. Kelly went straight for the attachment and opened it, and there it was. A series of black-and-white photos of a man with a woman who was definitely Debrah Drexler, twenty years younger than today and probably ten younger than when Kelly had first met her. The shots were grainy but clear, and they told a simple story. Manand womanenter hotelroom. Manputs money on nightstand and undresses. Man needs to lose weight and shave his back. Woman takes money and undresses. Woman needs to eat more. Woman lays a pillow on the floor and drops to her knees . . .
    Kelly recognized the style. These were screen grabs from gotcha footage from a sting operation. The man was clearly the target, not Deb, and he could guess why it had never surfaced before. The man, whoever he was, had cooperated, or become irrelevant, or the law had just forgotten about him, and the footage was filed away for years. The man, most likely, never rose to prominence, and the hooker was just the hooker. Without Debrah’s name attached to the file, there was nothing to find, even when digital databases replaced card files. The greatest danger to Debrah Drexler’s career had lain dormant in some catalog in a local archive for twenty years. Until now.
    Kelly turned his attention to the e-mail itself. It was a forward, from Deb’s e-mail, naturally. She’d received it from “ [email protected] ”, which would be a blind, of course, but that didn’t worry him. He was the Federal government.
    Kelly fired up a search program on his desktop and sent the e-mail, forward and all, into it. The search software was nicknamed “Sniffer” and it was the nephew of the Carnivore program, the FBI’s daunting powerhouse that could track and monitor any e-mail sent anywhere over the Internet. Sniffer wasn’t nearly so powerful, but it was a lot more focused.
    The first thing Sniffer did was easy—it broke open the IP numbers, including the one for “oldfriend1604.” Now Sniffer really went to work, a digital bloodhound on an electronic trail. Kelly sent him back upstream to find where this particular collection of bytes had first come from. As the minutes ticked by, Sniffer sent him regular updates: a server in Los Angeles had relayed from a server in Arlington, Virginia, which had in turn relayed from a server in Washington, D.C. After chasing its tail in circles for a while inside the Beltway, Sniffer finally straightened out and pointed its nose at a computer terminal in the Attorney General’s office registered to “Bigsby, Shannon.” Kelly looked up that name in CTU’s (rather extensive) listing of