Night Talk (22 page)

She knelt down beside a cat litter box that looked cleaner than the kitchen counter. The cat litter smell had not come from the litter box or even from her apartment but from somewhere else in the building.

She ran her hand through the litter and came out with a sandwich bag. She stood up and threw it at him. It bounced off his arm and hit the floor and he picked it up.

“Give me the money,” she said.

He gave her the money and they left in a hurry to get out of the depressing place. He took out the flash drive and tossed the bag.

Greg walked so fast for the car Ali told him to slow down.

“I can't keep up. You look like an angry husband running from your wife.”

“Sorry. She's probably on the phone right now calling Mond to see if there's a bounty on our heads.”

“More likely she hocked the phone for a fix. I didn't see one lying around. Greg, that scratching?”

“Meth syndrome. It's called crystal meth lice. They feel things crawling on their skin.”

“Terrible. What harm people do to their bodies for brief moments of feeling good. More information supplied by your callers?”

“It's an eclectic education, for sure.” He started the car. “We need something that can read the flash drive.”

“A mall, take me to a mall. I'll run in and buy a small tablet. You might be recognized.”

“Risky. What if it's traced?”

“It won't have a tracking device in it because they don't know we're buying it. I'll pay cash.”

He started to pull away and braked.

“What's the matter?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. Just thinking about what the girl said about giving the flash drive to a friend.”

“It's possible.”

“Yeah, anything's possible at the moment.”

He had learned something else during the talk with the girl, but he wasn't ready to share it with Ali.

 

42

He sat in the mall parking lot while she went inside to buy the tablet and thought about what Jaime Balzar had said about “the bitch” who led Ethan around. Was she talking about Ethan being led around romantically? Or getting him to steal secrets?

One thing for certain—Ali had lied to him.

Ali said that she and Ethan both worked for the NRO, but separately, from their residences, and only saw each other periodically back east during meetings. But that wasn't true—she had been in a bar with Ethan in West Hollywood when his mother called.

Why were they out together? Business chat? Not likely. She said they had separate functions at the NRO. On a date? A real long shot unless Ali had been leading him on, getting his testosterone levels to spike in order to get him to do her bidding. Greg wouldn't find that hard to believe—she got his own levels soaring.

A romantic relationship between the two of them just didn't work for him, not, at least, one that was honest. Ali was too mature, too sophisticated to be involved with an awkward geek who had a drug problem. He couldn't see them as romantically involved though he could imagine Ethan being attracted to her. Yet they had more of a connection than she pretended.

They had connected enough for her to tell Ethan about the God Project, which fed his hacking addiction. As she said, the fact it was the holy of holies in the world of hackers spying on spies would be irresistible for him.

Connected enough for the authorities to suspect her of conspiring with Ethan to hack into the project. Enough to meet in a bar and Ethan to brag to his mother that he was out with a beautiful woman. To stir the jealousy of Ethan's girlfriend. Enough for her to lie to me about their relationship, Greg thought.

Ali came back to the car with the tablet in a box. As she unwrapped it, she told him that they were in a wireless hotspot for the Internet.

“Ethan may not have the actual files on the flash drive. NRO national security files will be huge. He probably hid them somewhere in a cloud. In that case, I'd expect him to have a link to wherever he hid the files on the flash drive. It may take hours to find the file and access. Maybe days. Maybe the rest of our lives.”

“Why?” Greg asked.

“Ethan had the ability to crack complex programs and protect them. God only knows how many levels of encryption we will hit.”

“God only knows how much time we'll have to try and access the file before Mond finds us and sticks garden hoses in our mouths.”

“Does what?”

“Waterboarding.”

Nervous energy drove Greg out of the car while she inserted the drive into the tablet to check on its content. He walked around feeling uneasy, even antsy, ready to boil over and confront her.

The story she fed him about innocently passing on the name of a secret project to Ethan had never set right. She said she wasn't a hacker—yet she could hack into the internal security files at the NRO, one of the world's largest and most secure spy agencies.

He didn't have a problem giving her a motive for leading Ethan on. If she was a hacker, she probably had the same insatiable urge to crack into the project as Ethan had, but didn't have Ethan's talent for doing it. Even if Ethan did the actually cracking, if she was in on it with Ethan, why didn't she have the file or at least have some notion as to where it was?

He did believe the reason she gave for contacting him. If she had been connected to the theft of a secret file and didn't have it and was frightened that she would get arrested at any moment, getting it back to the government or at least finding out what was in it would be high priority.

Greg also didn't think that she was faking her concern about being arrested. She was scared for sure. And his gut was telling him that she was more heavily involved in whatever Ethan had been up to than she claimed—but not involved enough to have the file. Could she be working for Mond or some other federal agency? What do the cops call it when they get a suspect to work for them? Turning them? Hooking her onto him to get him to lead her to the file? If that was the case, they—whoever they were—would be unpleasantly surprised to find out that he actually didn't have the file.

He thought about making up an excuse to get her out of the car and leave her standing on the street, but couldn't go through with it. He didn't completely believe her so he didn't totally trust her, but he also wasn't ready to dump her when it might mean throwing her to the wolves—not to mention that if he abandoned her to Mond's tender mercies, she would reveal the car he was in and that Franklin had supplied the car and phone.

He had to consider whether he was misjudging her, too. He recognized that she was reserved and was not being completely open with him but he didn't know if that was because she was instinctively cautious with others or if she had something to hide. Probably both, was his call.

A frown and puzzlement on her face brought him back in.

“What's the matter?”

“I got by a layer of encryption and I'm into one that will maybe take me an hour to crack, but I'm sure I'll be able to do it. I've seen the type of encoding before.”

“We need to find somewhere to hide out while you work on it.”

She shook her head. “Something's wrong.”

“What?”

She stared at him, the wheels in her head turning. She looked away for a moment before she came back with an answer. “It's too easy.”

“You said it could take an hour.”

“That's the point. No security program Ethan would use could be broken in an hour. But the program on the flash drive let me break into step one in minutes and I'm not near as good as Ethan and most crackers. And I recognize the encryption class used for the next step and I'm sure I'll be able to crack it.”

She shook her head again. “This isn't how Ethan would do it. If he did something you thought was easy, you would soon find that you were in a digital maze and play hell trying to find a way out. This just doesn't read like Ethan. It's like looking at a signature to see if it's genuine, and it's not his.

“You have to consider something else. Why would Ethan encode a file he prepared for you? He knows you're not into computers, knows you couldn't break even the simplest encryption. So why would he bother putting any encoding on access to the file when he knows you wouldn't be able to break it but that any mid-level hacker could easily crack?”

“It's a setup,” Greg said. “That's the feeling I've been having in my gut while you were working on it. Everything has been too easy. Ethan's mother welcomed us in without blinking an eye despite the fact she had already been visited by Mond.”

“As if she was expecting us.”

“Right, as if she was expecting us. And directs us to the girlfriend who conveniently has a flash drive in her cat litter. Remember what his mom told us—they even X-rayed the walls and cereal boxes? Think they would have left cat litter untouched?”

“I don't know.”

“They're not stupid. I've heard of searchers taking toilets off the floor to see if something is hidden in the pipe underneath. They would have checked the cat box.” He banged his head with his palm. “I should have thought about it. The cat litter was clean. Hell, it was cleaner than the kitchen counter. And we didn't see a cat. I'll bet she doesn't even have a cat.”

“But why would Mond set us up with a flash drive containing false information if they believe we already have Ethan's stuff?”

“It may not be Mond. It may be someone who knows we don't have whatever Ethan stole.”

“The black ops Franklin mentioned? But what good would it do to give us a useless flash drive?”

“To track us.”

“My God, you're right. Let's get rid of this damn thing.” She rolled down the window to toss the flash drive and he stopped her.

“No, that makes it too easy for them to figure out that we ditched it. Let's find another way.”

He spotted a bus approaching a stop on the street next to the mall parking lot not far from where they were parked.

He jerked the flash drive out of the tablet and slipped out of the car. “I'll be back.”

He was waiting at the stop when the bus arrived. He went aboard and immediately flopped into an empty seat.

“Fare,” the driver said.

“Oops.” Greg slipped the flash drive in the crack where the bottom seat met the back. “Wrong bus.”

 

43

He got out of the bus and hurried back to the car.

“What now?” Ali asked.

“There's someone else that factors into both Ethan and Rohan. A UCLA professor, Carl Murad.”

“How does he fit in?”

“He's the one who supervised the sleep study which Rohan said he'd been abducted during. He's also a skeptic and debunker of anything paranormal, from Bigfoot to E.T. He claims stories of abduction come out of movie watching. I've had him on my show several times to give another view and we always end up butting heads. He simply rejects all incidences of paranormal encounters without bothering to deal with facts. Some experiences are contrived, but others need to be investigated and some need to be thoroughly investigated when no cause was discovered other than the contention that it was a paranormal event.”

“What's his connection to Ethan?”

“Rohan. He had something going with Ethan. I think Rohan was using him to hack into Murad's computer system.”

“You think Rohan was behind the NRO hacking?”

“I don't know, but I'm sure he and Ethan had something going. Rohan had an obsession about Murad. He believed that the professor ran the sleep study to provide drugged people to aliens so they can be examined. He called Murad a whore master for aliens. He made that accusation in his books and talks over and over, so it's no surprise if he hired Ethan to get into Murad's system for evidence.”

“With Rohan running around accusing Murad of conspiring with aliens, it sounds like fertile ground for a defamation of character lawsuit.”

“Murad claims suing him would have just given Rohan free publicity and another platform from which to hurl accusations. Rohan once told me he'd make a deal with the devil for a peek inside Murad's computer.”

“Ah, you think Ethan did it.”

“I'm leaning that way, plus it's a little more in line with what we're dealing with. Lately Rohan had kicked his attack on Murad up a notch, claiming he was getting proof from an unimpeachable source showing that Murad was working for an entity that sought world control.”

“That unimpeachable source being the file Ethan was cracking?”

“It seems to fit. There's something else, too. Rohan knew Ethan had died shortly after it happened.”

“How did he find out? Could he have been there? Saw it?”

“I had a phone message from him shortly after Ethan died. He lives in Marina Del Rey, said he used a neighbor's phone because he was worried that his was tapped. I think he was telling the truth. That means someone told him, someone who was at the scene.”

“The killer?”

“I don't know. He got the word somehow. But I'd like to find out what Murad knows about Ethan. I'm only going to find out if I talk to him.”

“You're going to risk calling him?”

“I was thinking more in terms of a cold call.”

He started to pull out and she said, “Wait.”

A black SUV came by with a white van following behind it.

“It's used,” Greg said, referring to the SUV. “Not something the government or rogue ops would use.”

The vehicles continued in the direction of the bus.

He pulled out of the parking lot and drove the other way.

 

THE McMINNVILLE UFO PHOTOS

Paul and Evelyn Trent lived on a farm about nine miles outside of the town of McMinnville, Oregon. On May 11, 1950, at about 7:30 p.m., Mrs. Trent was feeding her animals when she saw a large, metallic-appearing, disk-like object in the sky. It was heading in her direction and moving slow.