Under the Color of Law Page 21

  Sara listened as Kerney described the chain of events starting with the Terrell murder. He gave her the facts and his carefully thought-out suppositions about the case, and listed the reasons why he believed that military intelligence was heavily involved.

  Sara's head swam. She knew Kerney to be an exceptional investigator and not one to exaggerate. But she didn't like what she was hearing. Everything she knew about the regulations that governed army intelligence activities argued against his hypothesis.

  On the one hand, she knew nothing about SWAMI or a secret training base in Colombia. On the other hand, she'd heard about Carnivore through her own contacts and a few brief news stories, and she knew about the controversy surrounding the School of the Americas. She also knew about how army intelligence kept an eye on its own, especially soldiers and civilians in sensitive, highly classified positions.

  She bit back a desire to challenge Kerney's suppositions and let him finish up.

  He looked at her expectantly, waiting for a response.

  "Interesting," Sara said.

  "That's it?"

  "For now."

  "You're usually not so noncommittal."

  Sara toyed with her academy class ring. "I have to think, Kerney. You've thrown a lot at me in a very short time."

  "Do you think I'm overreacting?"

  "I don't know."

  "I've caught you off-guard."

  Sara replied with a weak smile. After a hellish week at the Command and General Staff College, made worse by draining bouts of morning sickness, she'd come to Santa Fe concerned and worried about Kerney. Now that she knew more, it meant the timing was wrong to talk to him about the strong maternal feelings that were shifting her focus away from the army and making her yearn for a real home life.

  They had yet to resolve the issue of whether or not Kerney would join her at her next permanent duty station or remain in New Mexico. She doubted he'd willingly transform himself into a full-time military dependent. So in theory, she'd be married and a mother. But in practice she'd be raising a child as a single parent, with occasional visits from a distant, part-time husband. The prospect held little appeal.

  Her next assignment after school would most likely be a fast track staff position at the command level that would require twelve hour days and seven-day weeks. She'd known women officers who'd left husbands and children behind for three-year assignments. And women who, for the sake of their children, had branch-transferred to jobs that cut short their advancement and froze them at their current rank until retirement. Women like Sara, who'd been promoted ahead of schedule only to resign from active duty because their family life was suffering. She reached out and took Kerney's hand.

  "Let me think about it some more."

  They drove home in silence. Kerney was tense, on guard, his eyes searching the rearview mirror. She believed he was being watched, followed, and spied on, that he'd been threatened with consequences if he didn't back off on the investigation. Over dinner he'd sidestepped her question about the risks he was taking with assurances that everything was under control. That, she didn't believe. She decided she needed do more than just think about what Kerney had told her.

  "I want to review your case material," she said.

  "You're not part of this. It's not your problem."

  "I'm not asking for permission, Kerney."

  Kerney shot her a sidelong glance. A stern expression greeted him. "Fine. You can look at it when we get home."

  "I'm not staying with you tonight."

  Kerney slowed the truck and gave Sara a long look. "Why not?"

  "Because I want to draw my own conclusions."

  "You don't believe me?"

  "Did I say that?" Sara asked in an icy tone.

  "Take whatever you want, Colonel."

  "Don't be sarcastic, Kerney."

  Kerney pulled up at the cottage. "Are we fighting?"

  Sara jumped out of the truck. "Yes, but for now it's just a skirmish."

  Chapter 12

  Sara booked a four-hundred-dollar suite at a downtown hotel, called for a cab, and hung up.

  "I can give you a ride," Kerney said. "Weren't we supposed to spend the weekend looking at some property?"

  "We were."

  "What's it going to take to get you to move out of here into something decent?"

  "Enough free time to do it," Kerney said.

  "You've got about six months," Sara said, patting her still-flat stomach. "This baby isn't going to wait any longer than that."

  "We won't be living here when the baby comes."

  "Where will we be, I wonder." She made a dismissive gesture. "Never mind."

  Kerney followed her into the bedroom. "Is that what you wanted to talk about?"

  "Not now." Sara's gaze skimmed across the clutter of paper, files, and tapes, her eyes frost-green. "We'd be up all night and I'm too tired for a marathon."

  "Should I come to the hotel in the morning?" Kerney asked as he sorted through case notes and materials, passing pertinent items to Sara.

  "Call me first," Sara said.

  He gave her field notes, progress reports, document inserts, lists of names, lists of informants, and duplicates of Bobby Sloan's investigative reports.

  "Perhaps we could meet at the hotel restaurant for breakfast," he said.

  "I don't have much of an appetite in the morning, these days," Sara said. "Just call, okay?"

  He gave her Sloan's summaries of the videotape contents, his own chronological event log, crime-scene photographs, and transcripts of recorded conversations.

  "Okay."

  He pointed at the audio- and videotapes. Sara shook her head and zipped everything into her travel bag. The taxi driver sounded his horn.

  "Let me send the cab away," Kerney said. He passed her one of the new cell phones and a new number to use to get in touch. "I'll take you to the hotel."

  Sara grabbed her coat and stuck the cell phone in a pocket. "I don't want you to. I'll see you tomorrow."

  Kerney watched her walk out the door, wondering what they were really at odds about. He decided it was a bit of everything: the investigation, the baby, the marriage, the army, the cheerless cottage he lived in, their busted weekend plans.

  Sara confirmed his observation when he heard the taxi door slam shut.

  ***

  Two blocks from the Santa Fe Plaza, in the basement of the federal courthouse, Tim Ingram, just back from El Paso, reviewed transcripts of police radio transmissions and phone calls made to and from the Santa Fe Police Department.

  Nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary.

  Once a bomb shelter during the early days of the cold war, the basement had been converted to a sophisticated listening post that targeted suspected foreign agents working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, thirty-five miles away. Within recent years a British Army major on detached duty at the lab and a visiting Israeli physicist had been uncovered trying to stick their hands into Uncle Sam's cookie jar of nuclear weapon secrets.

  Four operators sat at consoles in the sealed room. Two worked the SWAMI data that flowed into computers from phone lines, cell phones, and wireless Internet devices. Much like the NSA computers, SWAMI automatically scanned for millions of key words and phrases and immediately downloaded any that were programmed for intercept. The current operating program was case specific to the Terrell-Mitchell containment operation.

  A woman manned a Carnivore unit that tapped into the Santa Fe Police Department's on-line computers and retrieved electronic communications.

  The fourth technician monitored vehicle tracking devices planted on key police department units, watched real-time video of the front of Kerney's house, and taped audio transmissions from external remote listening stations and the fixed bugs at the police department, Kerney's residence, and the state police chief's office.

  Every person on duty was a member of a team of military intelligence specialists who'd been handpicked as watchers, listeners, and monitors
.

  When SWAMI launched in three months as a private corporate enterprise, every illicit, suspicious, or fraudulent electronic or wire transfer monetary transaction flowing out of Colombia would be tracked and either seized or frozen.

  Because SWAMI could burrow into the data banks of financial institutions around the world, it would violate international laws, compacts, and trade agreements, and intrude on the sovereignty of nations. Revolutionary in design and concept, SWAMI would also capture sensitive economic and financial data from foreign governments and multinational corporations. That capacity virtually guaranteed long-term continued American domination of technological intelligence gathering.

  Ingram watched the videotape of Sara Brannon's arrival at Kerney's house, caught on camera by a transmitter placed on a neighboring house.

  He watched Kerney's cautious approach and entry. He listened to the tape recordings of their conversations, including their after-dinner exchange in Kerney's truck that had been picked up by a mobile unit trailing a kilometer behind the vehicle.

  Tim shook his head at the thought of Sara Brannon's involvement in the case. With her army credentials and contacts, she just might be able to break through the Trade Source and APT Per forma corporate shields. While that wouldn't get her to the SWAMI secrets, it was unacceptable nonetheless.

  Ingram knew Brannon personally. A recent blurb in the West Point alumni magazine had reported she'd been the first in their class to make lieutenant colonel and earn the highly coveted sistinguished Service Medal for exceptionally meritorious service while serving in Korea.

  Elaine Cornell, aka Special Agent Applewhite, was a member of the same graduating class. He wondered how Applewhite would react to the news of Brannon's arrival.

  He went to a SWAMI console, where one of the operators had locked into Sara's Internet server. The screen rolled data in from Saras laptop.

  Information about Cornell from the West Point Association of Graduates Web site scrolled across the screen. It confirmed her cover as a resigned officer now serving as a special agent with the FBI. The next name Sara entered was his own. Ingram clamped his mouth shut. How in the hell had she got onto him? He was supposed to be embedded deep enough to be under anyone's radar. Who had made him, and how? He had to report the breach.

  Tim ran over the current body count in his mind. Too many had died in an operation that was supposed to be bloodless. Kevin Kerney they and Charlie Perry would soon join them. Would the brass be willing to neutralize Sara Brannon, too, one of their own?

  Under the guise of national security it had been done to others before, quietly and away from public scrutiny. There were any number of ways to wind up accidentally dead in the military: training exercise disasters, chopper crashes, getting washed off the deck of a ship in choppy seas. He wanted to call Sara, a woman he liked and respected, and tell her to get her butt on a plane back to Fort Leavenworth right away. But that wasn't possible.

  He watched as names he didn't recognize got entered into government Web-site search engines from Sara's laptop.

  "Who the hell are those people?" he asked the operator.

  "One moment, sir," the operator said, switching his attention to a computer keyboard.

  "I'll add them in as SWAMI key words." He typed in the names and SWAMI answered back.

  "People who attended Mrs. Terrell's funeral," the operator said. Ingram pulled up a chair.

  "Let's see where else she goes."

  ***

  It was after midnight when Kerney knocked on Sara's hotel room door. She opened up wearing shorts and a sleeveless tank top. She had a ballpoint pen clenched in her teeth.

  Kerney resisted an impulse to take her in his arms. He leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek. She pulled back.

  "You called?" he asked.

  "Do you really want to hear my take on this?"

  "I do."

  Sara walked barefooted to the large writing desk in the nicely furnished sitting room, and picked up a notepad.

  "First, Trade Source and APT Performa are legitimate companies with solid performance records as military subcontractors, and as far as I can tell SWAMI isn't being treated like some big secret government project. Instead, it's being touted as a private-sector technological breakthrough."

  "I'm aware of that," Kerney said. "But private outfits have been fronts for intelligence agencies before. The CIA used both private companies and nonprofit aid agencies to run covert operations in Vietnam."

  "True, and more recently they've done the same in Latin America. But that's the CIA. I've never heard of the military going outside their sphere of authority."

  "Would it be possible?"

  Sara moved to the couch and sat. "Possible, but not likely."

  Kerney took the easy chair.. "We have Thayer on tape referring to Ingram as 'major' and telling him the commanding general of INS COM--army intelligence--had ordered something done."

  "It could simply be a matter of Thayer using military etiquette. I did some Internet surfing. Ingram and Cornell--that's Applewhite's real name--are West Point graduates. In fact, they were members of my class. I was able to easily identify them from the photographs you gave me. According to their alumni biographies they resigned their commissions as captains. But Ingram may be serving in the reserves as a major. I haven't checked that out yet."

  "How well did you know them?" Kerney asked.

  "Not well. They were in the middle of the class academically and both were hard-core jocks. Ingram seemed nice enough, Cornell was the competitive type who hated to lose."

  "What were their service branches?"

  "Both were in military intelligence before resigning and joining the FBI."

  "That doesn't ring any bells for you?"

  "Not in and of itself," Sara said. "On the federal level its not difficult to transition between law enforcement and intelligence work. Stay with me, Kerney. As I mentioned, APT Performa is an army subcontractor. It could be that Thayer was talking about a procurement fulfillment order for

  INS COM."

  "Placed by the commanding general?"

  "It's common practice to reference the highest authority for a procurement. Especially one that has priority."

  "That's a stretch, Sara, and you know it."

  "It's within the bounds of possibility."

  "I think you're seeing things the way you want to see them."

  Sara gave him a withering glance. "Let me finish, before you accuse me of shortsightedness. If Ingram and Applewhite are military intelligence, they could have a legitimate assignment that's connected to APT Performa's contract with INS COM."

  "Like meddling in a civilian criminal investigation and posing as FBI?"

  "You've heard of undercover work, haven't you?" Sara snapped. She tossed the notepad on the cushion. "But since you brought it up, let's deal with it. You were told right at the top of the investigation that national security was involved and your role was to offer support. That's not meddling, to my way of thinking."

  "The feds didn't play it that straight with me." Sara sighed in frustration.

  "Because, if it's a national security matter, you don't have a need to know."

  "What about Terrell's murder, Mitchell's murder, Stewart's murder? The disappearance of Terjo and Browning? I have a need to know about all of that."

  "Do you have even one remotely credible homicide suspect?"

  "No, but that doesn't address the fact that Charlie Perry and Applewhite took Terjo into custody and lied to me about it."

  Sara shook her head. "That's a guess you've made. Which means you're down to one missing person, Browning."

  "That's right, I'm guessing. But I'm not guessing that Perry faked the lab results that turned Scott Gatlin into a murderer."

  "Gatlin may well have been the murderer in spite of the faked physical evidence," Sara said.

  "Granted, Randall Stewart had sex with Phyllis Terrell the night she was killed, and that does cast suspicion in his direction. Bu
t it proves neither Stewart's guilt nor Gatlin's innocence."

  "Stop giving me the party line, Sara," Kerney said. "I can get that from Charlie Perry or Agent Applewhite."

  "You're acting like a blockhead, Kerney. If you came here expecting a knee-jerk endorsement of your theories, you might as well go back to that dump you're renting. Do you want to talk this out or not?"

  Kerney composed himself. "What else have you learned?"

  "Here's where it does get interesting. Clarence Thayer is a retired army finance corps colonel. That could easily explain why he addressed Ingram by his rank. He was on the promotion list for his first star when he left the service. Lifers don't normally do that, so I called a friend who took a Harvard MBA and served under Thayer. He said Thayer was recruited to head up APT Performa, offered four times his salary, and jumped at the opportunity."

  "That just makes my case about APT Performa stronger," Kerney said.

  "Lifers are part of a good-old-boy club, Kerney. There are thousands of retired field-grade and general officers working in defense related industries. They recruit one another for plum civilian jobs. It's a common practice."

  Sara peeked at her notes. "What did grab my attention were some of the people who put in an appearance at Phyllis Terrell's funeral. The special assistant to the undersecretary for international affairs is a former lieutenant colonel. He's a graduate of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, fluent in Spanish, and served in DOD as a strategic intelligence analyst."

  Sara flipped a notepad page. "The treasurer of Trade Source is an ex-navy captain who served as deputy director of DOD financial services. At that level he was privy to information about all clandestine operations throughout all service branches."

  Her finger ran down the page. "Treasury sent the financial crimes enforcement director who was once an air attache at the U. S. embassy in Panama. Those postings normally carry intelligence-gathering responsibilities. And the Justice Department sent an ex-Marine JAG attorney who was on staff at the National Security Agency and who holds an adjunct faculty appointment at the Joint Military Intelligence College."