Collateral Damage Read online

  “That’s tragic,” Jim said, making her laugh. “Do you really think they were trying to hit you?”

  “How could they come that close if they weren’t trying?”

  “I’ve got my famous meat loaf in the oven. It’ll be ready in fifteen minutes or so.”

  “I’ll just suck up bourbon until then,” she said. “Maybe even another one after this.”

  “You won’t get an argument from me,” Jim said. “I know how much fun you are with a couple of drinks in you.”

  She squeezed his hand. “You could join me.”

  “I can do that,” Jim said, pouring himself one and sitting next to her on the sofa.

  She leaned close to his ear. “You know that thing I told you about?” she whispered.

  “I know that thing you didn’t tell me about,” he whispered back.

  “I think someone heard me not telling you about it. There’s a tabloid that has a history of bugging Vanity Fair people to get inside info on what stories they’re working on.”

  He leaned back and looked at her closely, but she pulled him back. “Do you know somebody who could come here and look for bugs?” she whispered.

  He kissed her on the ear. “I know somebody who will know somebody who can do that.”

  “Have them do it tomorrow, please.”

  Herbie Fisher was at his desk when Jim Rutledge called. “Good morning, Jim. Thanks for taking care of that lighting problem so quickly.”

  “All it took was twenty-seven desk lamps,” Jim replied. “Herb, I need some advice.”

  “Sure. You want to come see me?”

  “No, I just need a name.”

  “What sort of a name?”

  “The sort who can come to my apartment and sweep it thoroughly for bugs.”

  “Do you have some reason to believe you’re being bugged?”

  “My girlfriend told me about something— No, strike that, she didn’t tell me about something, but she intimated that she knew about something that happened in L.A. during the opening of The Arrington, that she couldn’t tell me about. Then, last night, she was on the way home with a bottle of very good Cabernet in her hand when she was almost hit by a black SUV, darkened windows, traveling very fast. Took the wine right out of her hand.”

  “Who is your girlfriend?”

  “Kelli Keane, magazine writer.”

  “Yeah, I remember her being out there.”

  “You were there, too?”

  “Yes, my girl and I got there late, but we had a great time. Is Kelli talking about the three bombs that were intended for The Arrington?”

  “No, that was reported in the press. There must have been something else.”

  “That’s odd,” Herbie said. “I think I was in a position to know if there was some other incident.”

  “Do you know somebody who can sweep the apartment?”

  “As it happens, I do. She’s my girlfriend, name of Harp O’Connor. She’s a PI and does all sorts of security work.”

  “Could she come over? I’ll be home all day, working on a project.”

  “Hang on a minute,” Herbie said, and pressed the hold button. He speed-dialed Harp’s cell.

  “Hey, Herb.”

  “Hi, babe. A friend, architect by the name of James Rutledge, thinks his apartment may have been bugged. Can you do a sweep for him?”

  “Where?”

  Herbie gave her the address. “It’s a loft downtown.”

  “I can be there about four this afternoon,” she said.

  “I’ll tell him. Thanks, babe.” He ended the call and pushed the other button. “Jim?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Harp will be there around four o’clock.”

  “I’ll look forward,” Jim said. “Let’s have dinner some night soon.”

  “Good idea. See ya.” Herbie hung up, thought for a couple of minutes, then called Stone Barrington. Joan put him through.

  “Morning, Herbert.”

  “Hey, Stone. Tell me, did something happen when we were at The Arrington? I mean, apart from the three bombs.”

  Stone was quiet for a moment. “Why do you ask?”

  “I just got a call from Jim Rutledge, the architect, who lives with Kelli Keane.” Herbie told him about her nearly being run down. “She thinks it’s because she told Jim about something that happened at The Arrington.”

  “She told him about something that happened?”

  “Well, no, she just intimated that something happened that she couldn’t talk about. Next day, a black SUV with darkened windows nearly takes her out. She’s scared.”

  “Nothing happened that I know about,” Stone lied. “Will you let me know if you hear any further details about that?”

  “Why?”

  “I’d just like to know.”

  “Okay, Stone, if I hear more, I’ll tell you. In the meantime, Harp is going over to Jim’s place to sweep it.” Herbie hung up. “Stone knows something,” he said aloud to himself. “What’s going on here?”

  —

  Stone called Holly on her personal cell phone.

  “Hey, there,” she said.

  “Hey. You get back to Langley okay?”

  “Yep. Choppered in about an hour ago.”

  “Tell me, did you have Kelli Keane’s apartment wired for sound?”

  Holly cleared her throat. “Why would you think that?”

  “Because Kelli thinks that. She also thinks that somebody tried to run her down yesterday: a black SUV with dark windows. She wants her place swept for bugs, and her boyfriend called Herb Fisher for help.”

  “No, I haven’t had her place bugged, and I haven’t tried to have her killed. I’m surprised you would ask me something like that.”

  “It’s just that, after the conversation we had a few days ago, it occurred to me that you might have been referring to Kelli.”

  “No, I wasn’t. Do you think she is becoming a security threat? I mean, I read her the riot act, and she signed the agreement.”

  “I don’t know. I just hear that she’s scared.”

  “Has she told her boyfriend something?”

  “Apparently she just told him that something happened in L.A. that she couldn’t talk about. Herb is sending his girlfriend, Harp O’Connor, over to Kelli’s place to do a sweep.”

  “When?”

  “At four this afternoon.”

  “Do me a big favor, Stone?”

  “Sure.”

  “Call Herb back and tell him to ask Harp not to keep the appointment.”

  “For what reason?”

  “Tell him it’s no longer necessary.”

  “As you wish,” Stone said. “Hope to see you soon?”

  “Maybe sooner than you think,” Holly said.

  —

  Jim Rutledge was working at his drawing board at three o’clock when the downstairs bell rang. He picked up the phone and pressed the intercom button. “Yes?”

  “Hi, Jim, this is Ted. Harp O’Connor asked me to come and see you.”

  “I’ll buzz you in,” Jim said, pressing a button.

  A minute later, Jim opened the front door to find a short, pleasant-looking young man standing there, holding two toolboxes and an aluminum ladder hung over one shoulder.

  “Hi, I’m Ted. Harp got an emergency call, so she asked me to take this one. We work together.”

  “Come in, Ted,” Jim said. “What can I do to help?”

  “Not a thing. Just do whatever you were doing, and I’ll get to work.”

  “Okay,” Jim said. He looked at his watch. “How long will you be?”

  “A couple of hours. What time does your girlfriend get home?”

  “She’ll be a little late tonight, probably around seven.”

  “Good, I won’t disturb her.”

  Jim went back to his drawing board, and Ted went to work, donning a pair of earphones and waving some sort of antenna around.

  An hour later Jim finished his day’s work, stood up, stretche
d, and went to find Ted. He was in the master bedroom with his equipment. “Ted, would you mind if I leave you here alone? I thought I’d catch a movie down the street.”

  “No problem,” Ted replied.

  “Just let yourself out when you’re done. The door will lock itself.”

  “No problem.”

  Jim got his coat and left the apartment.

  “No problem at all,” Ted muttered to himself.

  Holly was still at her desk at six-thirty when she got a phone call. “Holly Barker.”

  “Hi, Holly, it’s Mike Theodore at the New York station.”

  “Hi, Mike.”

  “I visited the Rutledge and Keane apartment in New York, as requested.”

  “And what did you find, Mike?”

  “I found that all the telephones had taps that would record anything said on the phone or in the apartment.”

  “That’s interesting. What sort of equipment?”

  “Over-the-counter, but good quality. The taps transmitted to a re-transmitter, and I found that on the roof, duct-taped inside an air vent. That unit could transmit eight to ten miles, maybe less in the city.”

  “Did you strip out the taps?”

  “Yes. Rutledge came back from the movies as I was wrapping up, and I gave him all the equipment.”

  “What else did you do?”

  “I installed six of our proprietary units, high-definition video and audio. For all practical purposes they’re undetectable, at least by an ordinary tech or PI. If you want to take a look, I’ll pipe it to your desk.”

  “My computer’s on, go ahead.” Holly watched as her screen went black, then came up again divided into six rectangles, each providing a look into a room.

  “Got it?” Mike asked.

  “Yes, it looks good.”

  “Write down this code.” He read it slowly while she copied. “If you click on the button in the lower right-hand corner of each screen, you can operate the camera with the virtual joystick, zoom in or out, and control the volume.”

  Holly tried it. She clicked on the kitchen camera, and the image filled her whole screen. James Rutledge was at the stove, sautéing something. She zoomed in on the pan: shallots. She turned up the volume: sizzle. “Brilliant, Mike. Thank you so much.”

  “How long do you want the equipment left in place?”

  “I’ll let you know.” Holly hung up and, as she watched, Kelli Keane entered the frame, still wearing her coat. They kissed, she shucked off the coat and left the screen. Holly switched back to the six-camera view and saw her hanging the coat in a closet near the front door. She then poured two drinks and took them back to the kitchen. Holly switched to the kitchen view.

  “How was your day?” Rutledge asked.

  “Run-of-the-mill,” she said. “Just minor notes on a story. I fixed them on her computer. Did the scan lady show?”

  “She sent somebody, who found that there were taps on all our phones.”

  “Shit!” Kelli said. “So they could listen to our calls?”

  “Not only that, they could listen to anything we said in the apartment. The sound was transmitted to a black box on the roof, which could re-transmit it just about anywhere from midtown to the Battery. The equipment is on my desk.”

  Holly switched views and saw Kelli go to the desk and pick up one of the units, then she returned to the kitchen. Holly switched back.

  “Did you ask him who uses that kind of gear?”

  “Yeah, he says it’s not government issue, FBI or CIA. You can buy it at those spy shops or on the Internet. Nothing to installing it. Can you think of anyone—not government—who would want to listen in on us?”

  She seemed to think that over. “No, I can’t. What about you?”

  “Me? Who would want to listen in on an architect?”

  “I don’t know, a design freak, maybe?”

  They both laughed.

  “But,” Kelli said, “who would want to run me over in the street?”

  “Let’s not make too much of that. It could have just been a bad driver. After all, you said you were about to jaywalk from between two cars.”

  “Maybe.” She didn’t sound convinced.

  “Anybody try to kill you today?”

  She slapped him on the back of the head. “You shut up!” They both laughed.

  —

  Holly called the New York station and asked for Mike Theodore.

  “Yes, Holly?”

  “I’m glad you’re still there. How many black SUVs do we operate out of your station?”

  “Six or seven, I think.”

  “Is there any record of their whereabouts yesterday, late afternoon, early evening?”

  “Hang, and I’ll check.” He put her on hold, then came back a moment later. “One on Long Island, one in Brooklyn, two in the garage all day, two in Manhattan, but never below Forty-second Street.”

  “Thank you, Mike, that’s good to know.” She hung up and looked back at the screen, then laughed. Kelli was sitting on the kitchen counter, and Rutledge was standing up, his pants around his ankles, fucking her. Holly switched off the images but realized she was aroused by what she had seen.

  —

  Later that night, in an office in midtown a man made a call.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s me. We’re not getting transmissions from the Rutledge apartment.”

  “Equipment failure?”

  “My equipment doesn’t fail. I buy the best. I went down there and checked the transmitter on the roof: it was gone. I tested the system with another unit and got nothing. That means that the mikes were removed from all the phones in the apartment. Then I checked the recordings and this morning, Rutledge called somebody who said he would send down somebody to sweep the apartment. A man showed up later, and the last thing we recorded was Rutledge saying he was going to a movie. After that, there were some noises, then the guy left the apartment. He must have found the rooftop transmitter, because we got nothing after that.”

  “What now?” the man asked.

  “I bill you for the equipment, that’s what, and it’s going to be expensive.”

  “You told me it would be undetectable.”

  “Undetectable by Rutledge or his girlfriend. I said nobody but a pro could find it. The guy was a pro.”

  “Damn.”

  “You want me to break in again and re-bug the place?”

  “I’d better speak to somebody before I can tell you to do that. Don’t hurt me too bad on the equipment.”

  “I’ll bill you the replacement cost. Tell your guy if you want me to go back in there, I’m going to have to do a different kind of job with different equipment, and it’s going to be expensive. You got the low-cost option the first time.” He hung up the phone and began typing out a bill.

  Felicity Devonshire took her seat at the conference table in the room adjoining the offices of the newly appointed Foreign Minister, who pointedly did not sit next to her but across the table. Also present were Sir Trevor Peel-Jones, the head of MI-5, the intelligence service charged with domestic counterespionage and counterterrorism, and the cabinet member to whom he reported, the Home Secretary; Sir Robert Bacon, chief of the Metropolitan Police; and Chief Inspector Sir Evelyn Throckmorton, head of New Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, which dealt with serious crimes.

  “Now,” the FM said, opening a file on the table before him, “we are here to discuss the actions of MI-6 in London yesterday. Six members of that service are dead, with an aggregate of five widows and nine children left to grieve their loss, and an estate agent, Susan Bell, who was present in a house across the street from the one in which the explosion took place. That house no longer exists, having been razed on the order of the local council.”

  He looked across the table at Felicity. “Architect,” he said in an even tone, “what happened?”

  Felicity took a breath and in her beautiful RADA/Oxonian accent, in measured cadences and without referring to notes, gave a detailed
account of her orders to her people on the previous day and how they had been carried out. Her tone changed, becoming regretful only when she recited the names of the agents who had died. Finally, she said, “I have reviewed all of my actions and those of the people who acted on my orders, and I have determined that each of them acted in accordance with established procedures in such cases, and that the deaths occurred only because the suspect, Jasmine Shazaz, had left the house no more than five minutes earlier, leaving the bomb behind her. We believe that she set off the device by cell phone.”

  “Established procedures?” Sir Trevor practically spat. “There are no established procedures for MI-6 to conduct an armed raid on a house in the United Kingdom. Architect is aware that hers is a foreign intelligence service, is she not?”

  “Now, Trevor,” the Home Secretary said, “let’s give Architect an opportunity to address that issue before we go any further.”

  “Thank you, Home Secretary,” Felicity replied coolly, “for pointing out the only point of this meeting. I took the actions I did because we had traced the recent arrival of this suspect from a foreign location and had advised the Home Office of her presence in the country. We did not establish any surveillance of the subject, nor did we advise MI-5 to do so, because we were not aware of her location. When we became aware, I had only minutes to react, and I took the decision to delay calling in MI-5 and Special Branch only because it would have taken them, based on past experience, some hours to react in a useful fashion. We had an opportunity to apprehend the al Qaeda operative responsible for the recent death of a foreign minister, and I placed the importance of that opportunity above bureaucratic cooperation.”

  Sir Trevor’s voice became shriller. “I deeply resent the insinuation that involving the properly authorized organizations would have caused the opportunity to be missed.”

  “Sir Trevor,” the FO said patiently, “I would point out that it would have been impossible for you to react in the time available, and if you had done so, it is your people who would be dead now, instead of those belonging to your sister service. It would seem that you have much for which to be grateful.”

  Sir Trevor took a breath but was stayed by the hand of the Home Secretary on his arm. “Trevor, Foreign Minister, I must say that, after Architect’s very succinct and comprehensive presentation of the facts, I believe her actions to have been proper … in the circumstances. I know very well from her past cooperation with the Home Office and MI-5 that she is aware of the duties, obligations, and limitations placed upon her service by the government, and I believe that she had no intent to violate any of them. As far as the Home Office is concerned, this matter is closed.”