Page 25 of Identity Unknown
“I should have asked Sal more questions or stepped inside the house to take a look at the roses for myself, but I didn’t think about it. He needed to be on his way to West Virginia and I couldn’t stay very long either.”
“Sounds like we should take a few more precautions,” Lucy decides.
She calls Secret Service headquarters about the bogus First Family Florists, and I can hear the conversation in my headset. Someone posing as a delivery person showed up at Sal Giordano’s house yesterday, Lucy tells whoever she’s talking to, an agent with a quiet deep voice.
“I want to make sure the large vase of white roses this person delivered isn’t a booby trap,” she’s saying. “Appropriate measures must be taken to ensure that any possible explosive devices or anything else dangerous are rendered safe before investigators go in…”
The Doomsday Bird follows I-495 west, trees on either side of us. The mountains are a bluish-gray haze in the distance, the storm front’s dark wall rising higher above them.
“Do you think someone’s already been through Sal’s place before we’ve had the chance?” I ask.
“We know that the alarm’s been on since he set it yesterday as he was leaving for West Virginia.” Lucy watches a red-tailed hawk sail past, a hazardous weather warning flashing on an illuminated weather map.
“I saw him do it,” I confirm.
“In a perfect world we would have had his property under surveillance from then on. But we had no way of knowing he was about to be abducted and killed. By the time we were notified this morning that he was missing, anyone interested in his property would have had a significant head start.”
“Assuming he was grabbed after leaving the Red Caboose around eight-thirty or nine last night, we’re talking a ten- or eleven-hour window before anyone started looking for him,” I tell her. “That’s quite a head start indeed. Obviously, you’re worried about someone breaking into his home.”
“And hoping it hasn’t already happened,” Lucy replies. “That and sabotage, planting bombs, poisons, who knows what. According to his alarm company, the security system is old and doesn’t include glass breakers and motion sensors. He has a camera over the front door, nothing else, and none of this would stop anybody as sophisticated as what we’re dealing with.”
“Breaking in for what reason?”
“Looking for something.”
“What?” I ask.
“Information would be my first guess. Stealing any electronic devices, for example.”
“Needless to say, I lectured him about his safety and security when given the chance,” I reply.
“So did we.” She means the Secret Service did. “He’d come to the White House or Camp David, driving his old truck by himself, living as if he wasn’t a Nobel laureate and confidant of the president.”
“He was a free spirit, determined to block out distractions, especially unpleasant ones such as people wanting to hurt him.” It’s becoming easier to talk about him in the past tense, the finality slowly sinking in and tightening its grip.
CHAPTER 10
Lucy continues pulling in power, our airspeed easing past 155 knots, or almost 180 miles per hour, as we near the Civil War battlefields in Manassas. Vast rolling green fields are spotted with cannons and monuments surrounded by wooden palings. The trails snaking through are busy with tourists before the bad weather moves in.
“Are you expecting anyone in particular to show up at Porto Sicuro?” I study the dark clouds above the mountains, the wind gusting harder.
“Whoever abducted him was after something,” Lucy replies. “It wasn’t just to take him out or he’d probably be inside his crashed truck with a bullet in his head. Not dropped naked into the middle of a theme park after being held all night somewhere.”
“Your theory about what someone might want beyond passwords to critical facilities such as Green Bank?” I ask.
“And also the massive radio telescopes at Sugar Grove that as you well know are busy tracking what Russia and other enemies are up to,” she adds.
“Sal didn’t need to write down passwords and other sensitive information to remember it,” I reply as we fly over a school. “Anybody who knew much about him would be aware of that.”
“The passwords we’re talking about are incredibly sophisticated cryptology that changes constantly,” Lucy answers. “Even if Sal could recite the most recent ones it wouldn’t have done any good. And you’re not given the current password until you’re inside the observatory’s control room. The minute you leave, the password is changed again.”
But that doesn’t mean Sal didn’t have valuable information, she adds. In the wrong hands the security procedures would make it easier to figure out the key to hacking in. He also knew the identities of personnel involved in the intelligence community and could have blown the cover of agents in the field.
“That’s a very big incentive for our enemies,” Lucy explains.
“Is there a chance his abductor gained access to this sort of information?” I can’t imagine anything much worse for Sal and wouldn’t expect him to cooperate.
“I don’t know what might have been given up, but it appears we’re lucky so far,” Lucy says. “Green Bank, Sugar Grove and others are already taking extra security measures. Certain members of the intelligence community were forewarned the instant we realized Sal had been abducted.”