The Enemy Inside by Steve Martini Page A

wasn’t a DUI. Our client was drugged against his will. Used as cover for a murder. That bumps it all up. A much bigger case for them. “Her testimony works. I just don’t like the idea that we’re paying her.”
    “You can ask her to testify out of the goodness of her heart,” he says, “but I doubt it’s gonna work.”
    He’s right. I look at my watch. “Let’s do it.”

TEN
    O K, what do we have?”
    “Are you on a secure line?”
    “No. So let’s keep it cryptic.”
    “We have overlapping objects on the matrix. One of them in a vehicle outside. He was joined by someone else about six minutes ago. Right now the two of them are just sitting there. The girl is in the building.”
    “How close?”
    “Less than eighty meters.”
    The man gripped the tarnished eagle and moved his hand slowly over the smooth oxidized surface of the cane’s handle as he thought. “It could just be a coincidence,” he said.
    “Possible, but not likely.”
    The loose ends were multiplying. “Any idea who the other man is in the vehicle?”
    “We’re working on it. Nothing yet.”
    “How much time do we have?”
    “We’re not sure. Depends when she leaves and where she goes. Assuming her usual ride, her boyfriend, we are four by four. Positive nav system is breachable.” In a word they were ready to go. “What do you want to do?”
    The Tarnished Eagle thought for a moment. “We sit tight and wait. Don’t do anything until you clear it here. If she exits the building, I want to know it. Understood?”
    “Yes.”
    “If either of them make any effort at contact, call me at this number. Do we have a cage over the twitter, hers and his?”
    “Affirmative.”
    This meant that if either of them tried to contact the other by cell phone, the call would be picked up and recorded. There was no reason to believe that either of them had the other’s cell phone number, or that they had ever communicated or met. Still, how did they find her? It hit him like a bolt out of the blue. “If you have a cage up, you have his number?”
    “Correct.”
    “Is he on the grid now?”
    “Negative.”
    “Can you turn him on?”
    “Just a moment.” Several seconds passed. “Yes. We have him.”
    “Copy it. Everything. Even if it’s not clear, copy it all!”
    “Copying now.”
    “When you’re done, stream it through. You know the drill. And give me a transcript.”
    The ability to turn on a cell phone without the owner’s knowledge or consent was old technology. It had been used by the FBI to bring down members of the Genovese crime family more than a decade earlier. It was the reason heads of state do not carry cell phones and why they are often stripped from members of their entourage as well. It was a modern-day fact of life. If you carried a cell phone with a live battery, you were wired for sound, and anybody with the right hardware could listen in, not just to phone calls but to any face-to-face conversations as well. Anything within earshot of the phone could be recorded. Carrying a live cell phone was the electronic equivalent of wearing a bug.
    The place is everything Herman described and more. I am seated at a table in the middle of the room up nearly to my waist in purple smoke. This comes from a machine that heats glycol mixed with water, producing a thick vapor. It is blown like a ground-hugging fog over the stage until it spills down and piles up on the floor like bilious clouds of melted purple marshmallow. This is occasionally pierced by laser lights that scatter in the fog like bullets, every color of the rainbow.
    It is crowded. The pounding music vibrates off the walls, rattling the ice in my drink as I finger the tumbler on the table.
    Men are piled up against the bar at the other side of the room trying to get more libation, many of them rowdy, half gassed and working toward a full tank.
    So far I see no sign of the woman we know as Ben, Crystal to her friends here. Though with this mob it’s hard to tell.