The Angel Tapes (15 page)

But again: What to do with the incriminating evidence? Someday, he decided, he could maybe put it to good use. He'd use it to make the fucker
bleed!
For the moment, though, he would hide it where it wouldn't be noticed—in the most logical place, among the rest of his cassettes, anonymous.

Peter reached for a felt-tip pen and wrote the word
BLANK
on the tape's label. Then he put it in the box along with the others.

In his consternation, however, he'd failed to note two ostensibly unimportant things.

One: He'd forgotten to rewind the tape.

Two: He'd marked the label on the
B
side.

Sixteen

If it was unusually hot in Dublin in that July of 1998, then the temperature was almost unbearable in Langley, Virginia. Yet in the room that housed the three giant Unix mainframe computers, deep within the warren that was the headquarters of the CIA, the climate was maintained at a pleasant fifty-three degrees Fahrenheit the whole year round. For the benefit of the machines, not their custodians; in this room technology took precedence over human beings.

The room's temperature altered by a minute fraction of a degree when Jesse Murdock entered. The chief of the western hemisphere division in the Directorate of Plans was mopping his brow, and was grateful for the coolness. The air-conditioning in his own office was on the blink again.

He nodded a greeting to the computer team and went directly to the most senior member of the Unix staff.

“Anything?”

“Zilch, Jesse. We're throwing twelve hundred gigaflops from one machine at it, and almost a thousand from another, but it's like trying to find two snowflake patterns that match.”

“Hmm. What does that mean in American: twenty-two hundred jiggy-what's-its-name?”

“It means more computing power than you can ever imagine. Look at it this way.
One
gigaflops is a billion floating-point operations. And that's roughly one thousand times more powerful than the computer they put on board
Voyager Two
in seventy-six. You know: the spacecraft that's headed out of the solar system, searching for other life-forms?”

“I'm impressed. But we're looking for only one life-form here, Nick. The lowest kind.”

He handed the technician a small, padded bag.

“Here. Try this for size. It just came in from Larry Redfern.”

“Another tape? Same voice?”

“Uh huh. Might be better, though. I'll let you people be the judge of that.”

The technician opened the bag.

“A DAT. It's promising, I guess. But sound quality isn't the issue here, Jesse. It's calculating the algorithm that'll convert the voice back to its original state.”

Murdock looked at the towering bulks of the number crunchers that were going soundlessly about their work. He didn't understand a damn thing about the infernal monsters—nor did he think he ever wanted to. Life was complicated enough.

“How long will it take,” he asked, “to find this
algorithm?
”

The technician smiled ruefully. “Who can say? Maybe two weeks—”

“Too long.
Way
too long. We don't have that kind of time, Nick. I have the White House breathing down my goddamn neck. They want results right this minute.”

“Can I finish? It
could
take up to two weeks—if we're lucky. If we're not lucky, we're talking maybe ten years.”

“That's impossible!”

“I kid you not. Look, I won't hit you with the math involved here, Jesse, because it almost goes over my head, too.” He jerked a thumb at the computers. “That's why we have these little fellers to help us. But I'll give you an analogy, if it'll help.”

“I'm listening.”

“You're not colorblind, by any chance?”

“No.”

“Just checking. Okay, let's take the most common form of colorblindness: red-green blindness. Somebody who's RG blind can't distinguish between reds and greens, no matter what shades they are. And believe me, Jesse, there are a hell of a lot more than forty shades of green, in spite of what my old Irish grandmother used to say. I've a daughter doing art studies at Moore College. She reckons there are
millions.
Maybe she's right. Try talking to somebody in a body shop about getting colors to match if your car's scratched.”

“I've been there.”

The technician placed his fingers on his temples and pulled a face. “So here's our colorblind friend. Those millions of shades of green and red—they're all
brown
to him. You've seen the color tests, I guess: little dots of red, green and brown that make up a pattern? Say, the number forty-five in green and red on a field of brown dots?”

“I think so. Yes, I know them. Had 'em in the army—and in the tests the agency runs.”

“They're pretty much standard. So this RG-blind guy can't read the number; everything looks brown to him. Now, ever been to the Guggenheim in New York?”

“A couple of times, yes.”

“How many paintings have they got? Take a guess. Only the ones on show.”

“Umm, two thousand? Three?”

The technician laughed.

“Try
ten
thousand; you might be closer. It's a very big gallery. But let's say there's half that number. Now: We give our colorblind friend a swatch of red and a swatch of green, like the color samples the paint companies put out. Then we set him loose in the Guggenheim and his mission is to find a portion of any painting that matches those samples
exactly.
”

“Mission Impossible.”

“Right in one. It could take him years, maybe the rest of his life. That's what we're dealing with here, Jesse: Mission goddamn Impossible.”

Murdock was sweating again. The Unix machines hummed to one another across the unseen, unimaginable tracts of cyberspace. Murdock had a sudden, wild fancy that their electronic songs sounded sad and frustrated.

Later the two men walked together through the long corridors of the Langley labyrinth. Murdock was a troubled man.

They rounded a corner—and the computer technician stopped dead in his tracks. He almost saluted, as a young woman wearing a CIA identity tag and a man whose ID dubbed him
VISITOR
approached from the opposite direction. The technician stood, slack of jaw, as the pair strolled past.

“That wasn't …
was
it, Jesse?”

Murdock smiled. He needed cheering up.

“Nope. But I'll tell you something, Nick. I'd be mighty happy if I made
half
as much as that guy earns. Not that I'd trade places with him. I'm too fond of living.”

The technician continued to stare after the retreating pair.

“I'll be damned,” he said.

Seventeen

There were few things Jim Roche enjoyed more than new gizmos. Give him a fresh piece of electronic wizardry and he was like a kid again.

The unit that he now held in his hand was no bigger than a television's remote control. It also worked in a similar way, using infrared technology. The difference was that this device didn't emit signals but was built to receive them. In the trade it was known as a countersurveillance sweeper.

Because buggers could be bugged, too.

He'd the house to himself that Thursday afternoon: Joan was at the tennis club, Peter was cycling in Wicklow, and Sandra would be staying overnight with a girlfriend. Roche could put his gadget through its paces at his leisure, undisturbed.

He decided on a multiple trial, in order to test whether the device was capable of isolating a number of signals simultaneously. First he fitted a microphone into a table lamp and married the transmitter's signal to a tape recorder in the garage. Next he placed in the hall an attaché case containing a built-in, voice-activated recorder. He rigged the third bug to the telephone; as soon as the receiver was lifted, a tape recorder would kick in.

It worked a treat. He experienced a little difficulty with the attaché case but soon had the glitch fixed. The countersurveillance sweeper scanned the house, registered, and homed in on the three bugs.

And found a fourth.

Roche stared with disbelief at the red light flashing on the dial. He went to audio and, sure enough, heard a faint zooming sound. He redirected the device. The zooming grew. Roche walked toward the rear wall, but the signal didn't increase significantly in strength.

Then he pointed it at the ceiling.

Many thoughts went through Roche's head as he climbed the stairs. There was always the possibility that he'd left a piece of equipment in the bedroom he shared with Joan. But that was nonsense: He never brought anything up there, let alone switched it on accidentally. Joan? That was crazy, too. Why would she? Why should she?

It didn't take him long to find the rogue power outlet: His sweeper led him straight to it. He didn't even need to disassemble it to confirm that it contained the bug; the device in his hand fairly hummed with excitement when it drew close.

It was one of Roche's own samples; he could see the rectangular trace of adhesive left by the removal of the Centurion Security sticker. He'd dozens of the things, yet kept account of each one of them, knew its exact location at all times. It was a matter of pride with him. He'd no idea how this one had gotten here—but by God he could find out easily enough!

He thumbed the dial on the sweeper that changed the mode from
SOURCE
to
RECEIVER
and let the device execute a slow arc. A zooming note sounded when he aimed it in the direction of the door. Peter's room lay beyond that door, on the other side of the corridor.

Goose bumps formed on Jim Roche's neck. Throughout his entire career he'd never—to his knowledge—been bugged. It was an unsettling feeling: as a soldier must feel when, having spent many months on the firing range, he's suddenly confronted in combat with targets that shoot back.

Peter's room was locked, a situation that Roche briskly remedied with the aid of one of Joan's hairpins.

The room was unusually tidy for that of a nineteen-year-old. Spartan almost. Besides the bed, a chair, a bedside locker, and a home trainer, there was little else apart from a bookshelf, a stereo, and a work desk. The sweeper homed in inexorably on a radio receiver. It was hooked up to a small tape machine on the desk, one of Roche's own.

The recorder was empty, and Roche quickly saw the reason why. Beside it lay a small padded bag, and an oblong-shaped bulge betrayed the nature of its contents. When Roche saw the name of the addressee, he swore loudly. He snatched up the bag and dumped the tape out on the desk, inserted it in the machine, and allowed it run for a few seconds. It was enough; Roche reddened to the roots of his hair.

Jesus, but he'd fix the little bastard! He ejected the tape and pocketed it. He needed another.

There was a box of cassettes on a corner of Peter's desk and Roche reached for it. B
LANK
read the first one that came to hand. Thank you, Peter, he thought: considerate of you to help old Jim like that; saves him a lot of time.

But Roche's years in the surveillance business had taught him that you didn't take even such minor details for granted. Blank tapes sometimes had a nasty habit of turning out to be the exact opposite. He slotted the tape into the recorder—and was rewarded with a satisfying, low hiss of white noise. Empty. Like Peter, he didn't notice that the machine was playing the
B
side.

He found a black felt-tip pen, used it to obliterate the handwritten word
BLANK
, and slipped the tape into the Jiffy bag addressed to “Mr. Blade Macken.”

Eighteen

“I know it's not my investigation, sir,” Superintendent Nolan said as he entered Duffy's office, “but I feel like a spare dick on a honeymoon, so I do, when I know there's a bomber on the loose and I'm just waiting on the sidelines.”

“You're right, Charlie,” Duffy said. “It's not your case. And I wish to God you'd let Blade get on with it. The pair of ye have me driven to distraction as it is.”

Nolan sat down, uninvited, in front of Duffy's desk. The phone rang.

“Excuse me a minute, Charlie.” Duffy listened to what the caller had to say. “Good, good. Have Brendan O'Sullivan question him. Oh, and make sure there's a woman garda present, okay?” He hung up. “They may have got the Dalkey rapist,” he told Nolan. “That's a piece of good news at least. He's only fifteen, too, would you credit it? Now, what can I do for you?”

“I've come for a word of advice, sir.”

Duffy sighed. “Fire away. You know that's what I'm here for.”

“Well sir, it's like this.” He paused. “I don't know how to put it, sir.”

“Plain English is usually your best man, Charlie.”

Nolan looked over both shoulders in quick succession, a move that had Duffy wishing that his phone would ring again. He hated histrionics.

“It's about Jim Roche,” Nolan said at last.

“Right. What about him? Is it the Delahunt business?”

“It is and it isn't, sir. You see, I've brought him in on the case—as you know. But now I'm having me doubts, so I am.”

“Oh? In what way?” Ring, phone, ring!

Nolan studied the front cover of the
Garda Review,
lying—for him—upside down on the desk. The police rowing team was being tipped to carry off the trophy.

“I think he's bent, sir.”

“Roche? Gay?”

“No sir. Criminal.”

“Explain.”

“Well, sir, I don't want to go sticking me neck out.…”

“Of course not.”

“But I've reason to believe that Jim Roche may be involved in more than he lets on to be.”

“Go on.”

“He's been a great help so far with the Delahunt investigation, y'know. I'd be lost without him, to tell you the truth. I really knew next to nothing about high-tech security systems before Roche explained some of the stuff to me. He also gave me these to look through.”