Red White and Black and Blue (21 page)

I flipped through the pages and now understood that my car had not been wired, and my computer had not been penetrated. It was my cell phone. My cell had been hacked.

I said, "Where did you get this stuff, Mr. Louderbush?"

"It was shoved through the mail slot at my home in Kurtzburg last night. There were two other copies besides this one. One is safely stowed away. The other I had sent by courier half an hour ago to Tom Dunphy."

His wife watched me with contemptuous eyes.

"Any idea who gathered this all up?"

"None whatsoever. Do you?"

"None offhand."

"It's quite a bundle for an ambitious federal prosecutor to sink his teeth into," Louderbush said. "A federal prosecutor or a reporter from the
Times
or the
Times Union
who's interested in illegality and corruption over at the Shy McCloskey gubernatorial campaign. It looks to me as if there's Pulitzer Prize potential here."

"It's all pretty innocuous, really."

"Impersonating a federal agent?"

"It's not treasonable in this case, although the law does frown on it."

"And are you recording our conversation as we speak, Mr.

Strachey?"

"I might be."

"Ah. I might be, too."

I noted that the missus's handbag was aimed right at me.

"So, is it safe to say," Louderbush went on, "that we have arrived at a point of stalemate?"

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* * * *

My impulse was to call Timmy, but when I felt for my phone the thing seemed toxic in my pocket and I let go of it. I couldn't call Dunphy either. As I walked up State Street, the phone sounded its fluty little tune. I saw that it was Dunphy calling me; he must have received a report from the Clean-Tech listeners, and he would be instructing me to fly to Brazil for an extended period. I tossed the phone in a trash barrel in front of City Hall, then thought better of that and reached in and retrieved it. Bud Giannopolous would want to have a look at it.

I made it to Crow Street, not panicky but hyperalert, and picked up my car. I remembered vaguely where Giannopolous lived, in an attic in the Pine Hills section of Albany, ten minutes away. The big frame houses looked a lot alike on Giannopolous's street, but I was able to pick out his place from the wire antennas and satellite dishes on the roof. His building looked like a CIA safe house in Bethesda.

I would have been followed, but I didn't care. Somebody already knew about Bud, and about me as a client of Bud's, so what were they going to do next, say
boo
?

I parked the car on the street and buzzed Bud's intercom.

"Yo."

"Strachey."

"Abandon hope all ye who enter here."

"You're telling me."

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The door clicked open, and I climbed the two wheezing flights. Somebody on the second floor had been smoking pot for breakfast and I took a deep breath.

Bud had a headset on when he opened his door, and I said, "Houston, we have a problem."

He gave me a little oh-no-bother wave of the hand as I stepped into a room that was piled high with Bud's poli-sci and world affairs book collection on one wall and a long table heaped with computers and other electronic gear against another. A dormer window looked down on the backyard of the house next door, where a man had a motorbike upside down and was fiddling with its front wheel. A poster on the rear wall of Bud's room showed a picture of some pita bread and a bowl of dip and bore the words
I am hummus, nothing
is alien to me
.

"Can I speak freely in here?" I asked him.

"If not here, where?"

Bud was roughly five-feet-two and bore a striking resemblance to the one-time emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie: ginger-skinned, high forehead, noble brow. Both Bud's bearing and his costume were more casual. He wore no medals and bore no scepter, and his outfit was non-imperial: ripped jeans, flip-flops, a faded T-shirt with an image on it of a squid wearing a hat that looked like a satellite dish. Nor would a crown sit easily on Bud's spiky little dreads.

"We may need lawyers," I said. "Or at the very least PR

firms."

"Nah. What's up?"

"My cell phone was hacked."

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He seated himself on his throne, an oversized wheeled office chair with cracked plastic armrests, and I perched on a bench. Stacked next to me were hundreds of techie magazines and computer catalogs, and the piles shifted ominously as I brushed against them.

"Not a big deal getting into cell phones," he said. "I've done it. All you need is an asset at whichever phone company it is who will give you the PIN code for anybody's phone."

"I guess this is against the law?"

He chuckled. "I would certainly hope so. What are we here, freakin' Hamas?"

"Well, in this instance there may be consequences—have been already." I retrieved the envelope from the Price Chopper supermarket bag the Louderbushes had provided for me and watched while Bud read through the transcripts and other documents.

"Holy Moly."

"Yeah."

"This is the product of a consummate professional."

"Do you recognize a professional colleague's work signature?"

"Well, no. It's not that easy. I'd need more samples, and I'd need to study them over time."

"I'll have to have a new phone, I guess. And number."

"I can fix you up."

"Are you and I going to go to prison, Bud?"

"Ha ha ha!"

Why was I not reassured? "I guess you can see from the transcripts what I've been working on. The Shy McCloskey 206

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campaign hired me to prove that Kenyon Louderbush has had abusive sexual relationships with young men. This information—it's true, by the way—is supposed to drive him out of the gubernatorial race. I just met with Louderbush and his wife, and they handed me this bundle. They now consider me—and the McCloskey campaign—neutralized."

"Wow."

"So I'm in a bit of a pickle. I haven't talked to the McCloskey people about it yet."

"Kenyon Louderbush. My respect for that sorry old right-wing hack just went up."

"Not for his mixing sex with violence."

"No, that's creepy and disgusting. But I'm impressed as shit with his technical abilities—or somebody's. Any idea who did this stuff for him? It's ballsy and it's state of the art."

"I thought you said anybody could do it with inside technical data from a phone company. Verizon in my case."

"That's the easy part. It's doing it without the account holder becoming suspicious that's tougher. You haven't had any dropped calls or heard any weird beeps or clicks lately?"

"None that I noticed."

"Very nice work on somebody's part."

"Louderbush doesn't know who did it. This appalling packet was sent to him anonymously. Or so he claims. He could be lying. He's an experienced liar."

"This other hodge-podge of stuff—people you misrepresented yourself to in person supposedly. Can't you backtrack and find out who they talked to about you? It obviously wasn't law enforcement, or you would have heard 207

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from the feds by now, or at a minimum the attorney general's folks. Impersonating a BBC representative—that's a good one. I'll have to remember that. Can you do Telemundo?"

"I plan to backtrack, yes, and find out what I can. But now my cover is blown with these people—or some of them. It's hard to tell how many of my misdeeds were gleaned from the hacked phone calls and how many from interviewees ratting me out."

"Meanwhile, how can I be of assistance?"

"Can you hack into Louderbush's phone calls?"

"I can try. It may depend on which phone company he uses."

"I want to know who he's talked to in the past week and, if possible, what was said."

"Who he talked to, sure. Otherwise I can only get you voice mails. If you're talking about the next two weeks, I can maybe do better."

"Do what you can. Thank you."

A loud bang rattled the house, and then we heard a low
whoosh
.

"What's that?"

"The guy next door works on motor bikes in his yard. I hope he's all right."

We looked out the window, and the motorbike repairman was fine—and trotting through an open gate and out toward the street.

I followed Bud down the stairs and out the front door. My car was ablaze, the flames rising high and licking the lower branches of a handsome maple tree, with oily black smoke 208

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billowing and a frightful stench spreading across the neighborhood.

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

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Chapter Twenty-four

The fire department found it puzzling. They doubted my story about having not tended to a fuel leak, although one fireman complained that Toyota wasn't the brand it once was.

Anyway, one fireman said, the blaze seemed to have originated in the rear of the car near the gas tank. Two cops came by, acting mildly interested, and when the opinionated fireman told them it looked to him as if it could have been arson, one of the cops said to me, "Do you have any outstanding gambling debts, sir?"

I called a cab to take me downtown, where I rented another car. Bud had outfitted me with a fresh cell phone, having transferred the memory from my old one. The account holder on the new phone was his cousin Ephram. Bud kept the old phone and said he wanted to run some tests on it.

I assumed I was being watched—by multiple parties?—but I barged right into McCloskey campaign headquarters, Mr.

Nonchalant. The multicultural young Phi Beta Kappas in the outer office didn't gasp or even look up, and I could see Dunphy in his office behind his desk.

"Holy shit, Strachey. Get in here and shut the door."

"Have you talked to McCloskey about what happened?"

"He wasn't stunned to hear about it. He had some choice descriptions of you. Loose cannon. Royal fuck up. Goddamn blithering gay caballero. Those are the appellations that are repeatable."

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"I'm no longer an example of a bygone piece of colorfully beloved Americana?"

"He didn't mention that this time."

"Who does he think is behind this?"

"Merle Ostwind."

"That nice Republican country club lady? Come on."

"Not her personally. People who want her elected. Karl Rove? Rupert Murdoch?"

"So, this is all to protect Louderbush and keep him in the race. Then he trounces Shy in the primary and the freaked-out, mild-mannered New York electorate falls in behind Merle in the general. We're back to that scenario?"

"Did we ever leave it? If so, I missed that."

"How adept is Mrs. Ostwind with a gasoline-soaked rag and a match? Somebody just blew up my car."

He sat up. "No."

"Over in Pine Hills."

"Jesus, were you in it?"

"Do I look charred?"

"Oh my God. Are the cops on it?"

"Not in any serious way. Anyway, your name never came up. Or McCloskey's."

"I don't know what to say. God, I'm so sorry, Don. But I don't get it. If you've already been knocked out of the game by Louderbush's despicable blackmail, why would anybody do such a thing? Could it be something else you're involved in?"

"I think not something else, no. I assume it's the Serbians again. Whoever they are."

"More Serbians. Jesus."

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"So, am I still on your payroll?"

"I was going to bring that up. Yes and no. Shy thinks we need to put a bit of distance between you and the campaign.

All this impersonating a federal agent crap and the rest of it has given us all the heebie-jeebies. On the other hand, the senator doesn't want you turning into some embittered ex-employee going off half-cocked. Showing up on
60 Minutes
with a paper bag over your head and describing Shy and me as a reeking cesspool of political corruption, et cetera, et cetera. Also, Shy feels that you're the one who enabled Louderbush to blackmail us in the first place, and he'd like to give you the opportunity to get right with the Lord by blackmailing—I use that term facetiously, of course—by blackmailing Louderbush right back. If you can manage it this time."

"Isn't that how this all started out?"

"Blackmail isn't the word I would actually have used for threatening to expose a man's sadistic criminal activities. I'd call it law enforcement by other means. Karmic retribution?

And of course it's all been in the interest of the higher cause of saving New York State from a bunch of Republican idiots."

"The only way out of this that I can think of is, I take the incriminating material I have on Louderbush and find somebody else to confirm it independently—a
Times
reporter?

The
National Inquirer
?—and then step aside. Louderbush will blame me, of course, and McCloskey will have to disown me—

your spokesperson will say I approached you guys with this odiferous stuff and you all told me to take a hike."

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"I couldn't have put it more succinctly. This is exactly the approach we were going to suggest. Indirection. And publicly we disown you as seedy PI scum."

"Plus, all the risk will be mine."

"But you'll still be paid. Though from a special fund—an investigative journalism fund set up by a few of Shy's supporters."

"Oh, it's journalism now."

"Will the muck you've raked get in the papers? I should certainly hope so."

I thought, I'm in over my head. It had been a sense of liberal civic duty along with outrage over Louderbush's cruelty along with morbid curiosity along with the need to make a buck along with a comically exaggerated sense of self-importance that had gotten me mixed up in this sociopolitical-twisted-personality phantasmagoria in the first place. But there was still so much I didn't understand about any of it, and it all felt so fraught—would my next car explode with me inside it?—that I considered for about thirty seconds saying to hell with the whole thing.