Chasing the Monkey King Page 14

  “SDR?”

  “Software Defined Radio. Most audio bugs operate between 10 megahertz and 8 or 9 gigahertz. With an SDR kit and this software, we can use your laptop to detect signals covering most of that range.”

  “Okay, Howard.”

  “Howard?”

  “Hughes. And after we get your bug detector, maybe we can make aluminum foil hats to keep the NSA from controlling our minds with beamed satellite signals.”

  Severin went back to his room, dragged his desk over to and up against his door, and stacked a bunch of empty beer cans and bottles on the edge of it in several tall, precarious columns. It probably wouldn’t stop anyone from getting in. But it would slow them down, and make it impossible for them to get in without making a racket and, hopefully, waking him.

  Finally, utterly exhausted, he got into bed and turned off the light.

  *****

  Severin had just nodded off when the hotel telephone rang, startling him. “This had better be good, Man Pretty.”

  “Lars Severin?” a deep, unfriendly voice asked.

  “Who’s this?”

  “You know who this is. Don’t say my name over the phone. I want to talk to you. Set a few things straight. Can you be at the main entrance to my building tomorrow morning at 7 a.m.?”

  “Why so early?”

  “Is that a problem for you?”

  Severin sighed the special sigh he reserved for people who irritate the hell out of him. “We’ll be there.”

  “I’ll send someone down to meet you at the security checkpoint and escort you though.”

  FOURTEEN

  The next morning, Severin turned his cell phone back on to discover that Bergman had forwarded the photo that Keen has texted him from China—probably by accident—the day before he disappeared. Severin looked at it, and found that Bergman’s description had been on the money. A blurry, gray-black blob, seemingly out of focus and totally unidentifiable. He sent it on to Zhang, instructing him to see if he could find someone—one of his tech buddies—who could shrink down and clean up the image so that they might be able to discern what it was. Then he showered, once again messed up his bed, and once again hung the do not disturb sign on his doorknob. But just as he pulled his door shut to leave, he set up another simple, old, but harder to foil surveillance trap. He placed a small wedge of folded-up paper in the crevice between the door and the doorframe, just below the middle hinge. If anyone tried to open his door, the wedge would, if all went as planned, drop to the floor before they could see precisely where it was placed. If it was gone when he got back, or if it was repositioned, he would know someone had been in his room.

  *****

  On the Metro train ride to Federal Triangle, Severin scanned the faces of those who shared their train car, searching his memory for a hint of recognition of any of them, and doing his best to commit each to memory so he’d know if he ran into them again. He told Zhang how he thought they should play their interview of Wesley.

  “Generally, I like to go into these sorts of things with a lot more information than we have, on my own timeline and on my terms. But he initiated the contact. He may not give us another chance. And we can’t compel him. We have to jump on it.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “If the circumstances were ideal, and if we were sworn law enforcement officers, we’d go in there already knowing almost everything, and with an eye toward getting a straight confession out of him. We’d take command of the conversation from the get-go. Empathizing. Conveying our understanding of his reasons. But also making it absolutely clear that we already know he did it. That he wouldn’t stand a chance at trial. That any attempts at subterfuge would only run against his own interests. We’d lay out the list of evidence if we had to, and then tell him this is his one last chance to come clean and to tell his side of it. That by doing so, by being cooperative, he’d make the prosecutor much more inclined to reduce the charges, request the lightest possible sentence, and encourage the judge to agree to the same.”

  “And that the opposite is true as well?”

  “Exactly. Try to mislead us, and the system drops the hammer. No mercy. Maximum penalty. Maximum sentence.”

  “But.”

  “But, unfortunately for us, we don’t have near enough factual information to take that tack.”

  “And we aren’t sworn law enforcement officers.”

  “Right. We can’t offer a carrot, and we have no stick. So I propose that we do two things here, in particular order. One, we just let him talk. He’s already indicated a desire to quote-unquote set a few things straight. So, great. We let him run. Let him feel like he’s in control. Let him believe we think his words are sincere. He’ll bullshit us, and we’ll hold back. We won’t be aggressive. We might even be well-advised to play it a bit obtuse. Act like semi-retired mercenary versions of the ubiquitous in-house agency security nincompoops these guys deal with in getting their various clearances signed off on. Guys who aren’t quite bright enough to be out on the street working cases. In short, guys of the type Wesley has learned to not take seriously. To that end, I won’t mention my background unless he asks about it. If he does, I’ll be vague.”

  “We’ll follow up with a few innocuous seeming questions. He’ll bullshit us some more. But the shape of his bullshit will tell us a lot. Will help us deduce. Everything a person says tells you something, even if it’s lies. So this, Wallace, is the subtle, indirect fact-finding phase. You follow me?”

  “Like you said, it isn’t rocket science.”

  “Part two is where we shake him up a bit and see how he reacts. Ask him some questions that poke at his sensitive parts. See if he looks honest, evasive, terrified, or whatever.”

  “Got it. Incidentally, my computer wizard acquaintance got back to me with some pertinent and very timely information.”

  “The hacker?”

  “Let’s stick with computer wizard. And again, let’s not use names.”

  “You’re right. The less I know about your little ring of Amerasian computer geek friends from high school, the better.”

  “Actually, he’s Pakistani. Here on an EB-5 visa.”

  “Oh, good!” Severin said with a laugh. “I’m sure the folks at the NSA aren’t watching for Pakistani nationals here on visas trying to break into U.S. government email networks.”

  “Hey, if I had any redneck Bible Belt WASP friends who knew how to do this sort of thing, I’d have gone to them. Anyway, my guy had some success.”

  “Did he indeed?”

  “With one email account. Non-government.”

  “Well, that’s good news.”

  “A private email account for Keen. My guy sent me a file of all of Keen’s emails from the three months leading up to his disappearance, and a month after.”

  “Excellent. And?”

  “And, though I haven’t had time to conduct a thorough examination of the whole file, when I scanned his emails for the week before they left for China, one jumped out at me.”

  “Don’t leave me in suspense, Wallace.”

  “It was an itinerary confirmation from Singapore Airlines for passengers Kristin Powell and Bill Keen for a nonstop flight, one-way, from Shanghai to Denpasar, Bali. No return flight to the United States.”

  “Huh! Running off to Bali, eh? Well, toot my whistle. I guess Holloman and Chloe Kellar were right.”

  “But then why would they bother to go to China at all? Why not pretend to leave for China and then just disappear?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t a sure thing yet. Maybe Keen planned to use the trip to convince Kristin to run away with him.”

  “Or maybe they wanted to get the job done and email their report off before jumping ship so that they wouldn’t totally screw over their boss.”

  “Maybe, maybe, maybe. Were there any logins or emails sent from his account after the date they allegedly disappeared?”

  “I don’t know about logins. But, after they disappeared, there were no more emai
ls sent from that account. It went dead.”

  “That isn’t encouraging.”

  *****

  They stepped through the bronze main doors of the Commerce headquarters building to see that its entry foyer was even more grand and spectacular than its columned, Neoclassical, Greek Revival-style exterior. Walls of granite and limestone climbed from the marble and travertine floor to a high, vaulted ceiling with golden coffering and enormous bronze chandeliers. After pausing for a moment to let Zhang gawk, Severin checked in at the relatively quiet security desk. The security officer made a phone call, and around 10 minutes later, a short, slouching, meek, and thoroughly broken looking middle-aged man arrived to escort them upstairs subsequent to their going through an antiquated magnetometer—probably inherited from a recently renovated airport. Aside from confirming Severin and Zhang’s identity with the morbidly obese security desk officer, the man didn’t speak. He just turned to walk away, and Severin and Zhang, assuming it was appropriate, followed.

  Their escort—who Severin thought bore an unfortunate resemblance to one of the elder hobbits from the Lord of the Rings films—led them to the far side of the building where they rode an elevator to the seventh floor before emerging on a hallway that Severin guessed had to be a thousand feet long. “How big is this building?” he asked the hobbit.

  “Herbert Clark Hoover Federal Building has 3,300 rooms, 36 elevators, and an area of 1,812,102 square feet. Largest office building in the world at the time of its completion in 1932. Pentagon is bigger now.”

  Severin revised his moniker for their escort. He wasn’t a hobbit. He was the savant character from the movie Rain Man.

  Rain Man led them to a door to an office suite, knocked, opened and held the door open for them, then departed without a sound. They stood in a cramped, stuffy, windowless, colorless room containing two unoccupied gray cubicles, one against either side wall, each stacked high with documents and random office detritus. Another door stood open in the opposite wall. They approached it and looked in to see Wesley Powell, whom they recognized from the day before in the Reagan Building food court, sitting behind a large wooden desk and staring out tall windows that framed a view of the Ellipse and White House South Lawn across the street. He had a phone pressed against his ear and appeared to be in a state of deep thought. “Mmm-hmm,” Wesley was muttering into the phone. “Yeah. Well, I need that memorandum by Tuesday at the latest. So figure out how to get it done.” He glanced up at them for a moment, raised an insolent just wait right there finger, then resumed his conversation as he stared down through the surface of the desk. Classical music played from hidden speakers.

  Several things occurred to Severin. First, there probably wasn’t really anybody on the phone with Wesley. It was too early in the morning for him to be in a work conversation. Indeed, there was hardly anyone in the building yet. Plus, his tone struck Severin as contrived. Second, this wasn’t Wesley’s office. He’d probably removed and hidden somebody’s nameplate, maybe Elaine Danielson’s, just prior to their arrival, hoping they’d think it was his. They already knew he shared a suite of cubicles with other workers. In short, Severin figured that Wesley was trying to make himself look more important than he was, driven by some kind of insecurity or fear. Or that he was trying to hide his guilt behind of a façade of busyness and authority. Or both. After another minute of occasional mutterings into the phone, Wesley hung it up.

  “Sounded like an important call,” Severin said.

  “Well. They’ll have to get by without me for a few minutes.”

  Going back to verse one, chapter one of his law enforcement training introduction to interrogation course—get your interviewee talking—and banking on his read of Wesley as being someone who liked to go on and on about himself and what he did, Severin, feigning ignorance, fired off an open-ended question that he already knew the answer to. “So what do you do here?”

  “What do I do here,” Wesley echoed in an altogether pedantic and pompous tone of voice—more as a statement than a question. “I save the U.S. economy.”

  “Wow. Awesome. How do you do that?”

  “By enforcing U.S. antidumping law.”

  “Anti-what?”

  “Antidumping.”

  “You mean, like, toxic waste?”

  “No. Not, like, toxic waste,” Wesley said with a sigh, nearly rolling his eyes. “Have you ever read anything written by James Fallows?”

  “The sports writer from Winnipeg?”

  “Sports writer? No. Never mind. Let’s see if I can explain this without confusing you. Dumping is an old-school international trade law term for strategic anticompetitive pricing. It’s a classic unfair trade practice and a massive threat to the U.S. economy. Foreign companies cutting prices to undercut U.S. companies—not just to compete for sales in the U.S., but to instead drive the U.S. companies to extinction. To prevent that, to prevent foreign companies from purposely destroying U.S. industries by dumping super cheap goods into the U.S. market, we have a body of federal law designed to stop it. In a nutshell, a U.S. industry brings us a complaint that alleges dumping by their foreign competition. We investigate those foreign companies, and if we find that they are dumping their products in the U.S., then we place a tariff on those foreign companies’ imports into the U.S. It levels the playing field.”

  “And that saves the U.S. economy?” Severin asked. “Must be a big deal.”

  “You’re skeptical.”

  “No. Well, I mean, I guess it seems weird that I’d never heard of antidumping until just now,” Severin lied. “I mean, I read my hometown paper.”

  “Let me illustrate it a different way. What’s an industry you think of the U.S. as leading the world in?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “How about computer stuff. Microchips and so forth.”

  “Ah, semiconductors. Perfect example. Did you know that there would be no Intel, no Motorola, no AMD computer chip manufacturing companies today—probably no Apple, no IBM, no Dell or Hewlett-Packard—if it weren’t for us?”

  “Is that right?”

  “I’ll tell you a story. This was a long time ago, so I may not have my facts 100 percent right here. But with that caveat, in the 1980s, Japanese semiconductor manufacturers like Hitachi, NEC, and Toshiba, probably under the direction of Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry, began dramatically cutting the prices of the memory chips they sold to U.S. computer makers. Dumping them in the U.S. market. The prices were ridiculous. In fact, they were often below the cost of production. As you can imagine, after several years of this, the U.S. memory chip makers were on the verge of bankruptcy. Even though U.S. technology was absolutely, positively superior, the U.S. manufacturers, following free market principles, couldn’t stay in the game. They couldn’t afford to sell at a loss just for the sake of being competitive and maintaining production. By 1986, roughly 9 out of every 10 of the most popular types of memory chips were made in Japan. And one by one, as the U.S. chip makers bowed out, the aftereffects began to take down the U.S. companies that made the machinery that made the chips. Then, the U.S. computer makers began to falter because the supply of the chips they needed began to dry up as the Japanese chip makers, who now largely controlled the global supply, were suddenly favoring Japanese computer makers. Restricting the flow.”

  “Needless to say, the result was a domino effect. In a few short years, U.S. high tech went from leading the world to facing extinction—even though, with respect to free market principles, they’d done everything right. Even though they made the best stuff. U.S. manufacturers were on the brink of utter collapse, from end-to-end of the supply chain. And you can bet that U.S. microprocessor producers were next on Japan’s list of targeted industries.” He leaned back in his chair. “So how did the Japanese pull this off?”

  “No idea,” Zhang said.

  “They offset their losses on their U.S. sales by overcharging their customers back in Japan. In short, they were using high prices
back in Japan as a sort of subsidy so that they could undercharge customers in the U.S. All with an eye toward destroying their U.S. competition over the long term. All with an eye toward eventually taking over and completely dominating the U.S. and world semiconductor and computer industries. They didn’t care about short-term profits. They were playing the long game. Once Intel, Motorola, and AMD were out of the memory chip game, Hitachi, NEC, and Toshiba would be able to charge whatever they wanted. They could favor Japanese computer makers with greater availability of the most cutting-edge chips, and with better, lower prices than what they charged U.S. computer makers. Then, once Apple, HP, Dell and IBM were gone, Japanese computer companies Sony, Fujitsu, Toshiba, and so forth would be king. Japan would be king. Every U.S. product with a silicon chip in it would need to get that chip from Japan. The U.S. military would be utterly dependent on Japan for critical components of its weaponry. And a lot of American high-tech workers would now be picking cabbage outside of Modesto.”

  “But you came to the rescue.”

  “Happily for Apple Computers, happily for U.S. Steel, American wheat and honey farmers, battery and solar panel makers, timber workers, shrimp fisherman, and so forth, this anticompetitive pricing, this dumping, violates U.S. law. In the computer memory chip case I was describing, our investigation led us to impose tariff rates as high as 35 percent on the import of Japanese memory chips into the U.S. As a consequence, the Japanese surrendered in their trade war against us. Thanks to us, the U.S. industry rebounded. So today we still have Apple. We still have Intel. Our high-tech industry is once again the envy of the world. And truth be told, without the antidumping laws that we enforce here, there would probably be no U.S. steel industry left, no solar panel industry, no commercial uranium enrichment, no tomato or salmon farming, less wheat farming, less domestic lumber production, no domestically manufactured batteries, diamond saw blades, lined paper, washing machines, laminate flooring, wind turbine towers, or oil pipe. The list goes on and on.”