Death of Secrets Read online

  DEATH OF SECRETS

  A Novel

  By Bowen Greenwood

  Copyright © 2014 by Bowen Greenwood. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are fictitious, or are used fictitiously.

  Backers' Page

  The following individuals generously supported the launch of Death of Secrets

  Errol & Sharrie Galt

  Donald Rodriguez

  Rietta Goodglick

  Representative Lee Randall

  Chairman Will Deschamps

  The Honorable Rick & Betti Hill

  Scott McClellan

  Robert Zirpoli

  Thank you. Thank you all, and all the other backers as well.

  This book is dedicated to my best friend. He changed my life. He changed it more than I can ever recount. He saved my life, in fact. He's an author too, but in His case, His book is the bestselling work of non-fiction in all of human history.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  EPILOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  The moon hid behind a reef of dark clouds. A young woman named Kathy Kelver walked back to campus very late at night.

  She saw a man get murdered.

  There he stood, on the sidewalk, looking like he might go in to a basement apartment. And then he spun around, and screamed, and flung his arm out at a crazy angle until he landed on the ground.

  A thundering report reached Kathy’s ears at almost exactly the same time. The gunshot sounded much louder than Hollywood made them out to be.

  She did what most people would do, and screamed.

  When she recovered her senses, she ran toward the man to see if she could help. She was a young and athletic woman; her strong legs carried her slender frame quickly. The dash caused her loose brown ponytail to flop behind her.

  Wind howled down the narrow cobblestone street in Georgetown. It made the man’s words hard to hear. "Please…" He stretched out a hand to her. His voice was weak and his word was dragged out and barely audible.

  She could only pray. Kathy grew up in the rural Rocky Mountains, and to her violent death was something that happened to deer in the fall, not to people.

  He reached to her again, this time with the other hand. The hand was not empty.

  It was a programmed response, not a choice. He wanted to give her something and Kathy accepted it before she even knew what she was doing.

  Her fingers brushed his, and she nearly recoiled at how cold they were. But before her hand jerked back, the object passed to her. She recognized it right away; she had a few of them rattling around the drawer in her desk. It was a thumb drive.

  "Jakarta," the man croaked. "Get it to Jakarta." A long, weak sigh slipped out of his mouth, and he repeated the word once more. His facial muscles went slack, and his head hit the sidewalk with a thump.

  Kathy knelt there by the body, heart racing and lips trembling. "God help me…" she breathed, her voice trembling and on the verge of tears. She bolted to her feet and ran for the campus, intent on calling 911. The college senior was nearly as close to her dormitory as she was to any of the nearby houses, and fear drove her toward her own home, rather than a stranger’s. Her hand unconsciously clung to the flash drive.

  Her dash back to her room teetered on the edge of panic. She pounded on the button for the elevator, paced back and forth through the whole ride, and tore open the door to her room as soon as she was inside. Ignoring her roommate’s distracted greeting, Kathy grabbed her phone from where she left it before work and dialed 911.

  When the dispatcher answered, she blurted out her plight with words that ran together and tumbled over each other. After a promise that an ambulance had been dispatched to the scene, she was told to go back and meet them.

  Handing the problem over to someone else did a world of good for Kathy’s mental state. She finally responded to her roommate’s agitated inquiries about what was going on.

  "I found this guy on the way home from work," she panted. "Shot. Dead, I think. I’ve got to go back there and tell the police what I saw."

  "No joke? Dead? That’s … Let me come with you, Kathy. You’ll need someone to hold your hand."

  Together the two young women returned to the scene at a much more rational pace. After meeting in their freshman year at Georgetown, they’d chosen to live together because they were both night owls, dramatically reducing the traditional roommate conflicts over when to turn the lights out.

  But in other ways they could not have been more opposite. Kathy’s long legs meant that each of her strides covered nearly twice the distance of her roommate, Colleen's. The shorter girl had blonde hair versus Kathy’s brown, cut in a bob above her neck while Kathy’s hung below her shoulders when it wasn’t up in a ponytail. Kathy was a performing arts major whose every step was graceful and efficient; Colleen studied computer science and always seemed a bit awkward when she moved. She had interrupted an online Call of Duty deathmatch to accompany her roommate to the body.

  Outside the front gates of Georgetown University, the two girls made two turns on their way back to the corner where Kathy had found the man. Flashing red and blue lights greeted them.

  Kathy ran up to the first man in uniform she saw. "I’m so glad you’re here. I was so scared. Is he dead?"

  The officer turned to her with a chilly gaze and asked, "Are you the young woman who called the dispatcher?"

  She nodded. "Kathy Kelver. I found him on the way home from work. Is he dead?"

  "Miss, there was no one here. Are you sure you got the location right?"

  ***

  Back in their dorm room, Kathy and Colleen opened a bottle of wine and poured two glasses. "I just can’t believe that," Kathy said, for about the fifth time since they left the crime scene, or whatever it was. "He was right there! It’s not like I hallucinated the whole thing."

  Colleen gave her a long hard look. "Kathy, if you were anyone else, I’d ask some serious questions about that."

  "Colleen, don’t be a jerk. I’m telling you, I saw him!"

  "I know, I know, I believe you. But I’m making a big leap to do it, OK?"

  "How could he have gotten up and walked away?" Kathy stood up and paced, nearly spilling her wine. "He was hurt way too bad to walk. When I came home to call the cops, I thought he was dead."

  "You’re just lucky MPD didn’t ticket you for a false alarm," Colleen said.

  "Oh, and that really made me mad," she fumed. "I can’t even believe they were suggesting that. And they didn’t even believe me when I told them about the flash drive. If only I hadn’t left it on my desk! I could just…" Kathy finished with a sound that was part sigh and part snarl.

  "Look, maybe he wasn’t hurt as bad as it looked."

  "Then why did he give me that flash drive?"

  Kathy jumped as soon as she said it, and ran to her desk. "The flash drive! See? Here’s the proof! I told you I didn’t imagine the whole thing!"

  Colleen followed her over and looked at the flash drive. "There’s not a mark on it anywhere."

  ***

  Detective Sam Franken settled his ample rump onto the bench seat in his unmarked car. With a sigh, he put the sedan into gear and drove off. False alarms ranked very near the top of his personal pantheon of annoyances. Franken wasn’t lazy, e
xactly. If there was work to be done, he did it. But he was a hefty man, nearer to 300 pounds than 200, and lifting his bulk off the car seat involved a substantial effort. If he was going to exert that effort, he wanted results. He grumbled to himself, thinking he should have ticketed that little brat for calling in a false alarm.

  But she possessed a certain quality of believability. He supposed it might be a hunch – TV cop shows always seemed to show police officers having those, after all – but whatever the reason he believed her story. There had been a shooting victim on that spot. The victim was just no longer there.

  Oh, he was sure the girl had exaggerated a bit. Obviously there couldn’t have been such a bloody carnage, or it would have left traces behind when he left. To a young girl seeing her first gunshot, no doubt it looked much gorier than it had actually been. Still, it took a real effort to keep walking after being shot. Franken knew – a year ago he’d been shot on the job, and he hadn’t been able to do anything but lay there and scream for help.

  So whoever had been shot there had been strong as an ox. Or, which seemed to Franken far more likely, the victim had been high as a kite when it happened, and was able to keep walking because his brain just wasn’t feeling the pain.

  And that, in Franken’s eyes, practically closed the case. Well, as closed as it would ever be. Druggies shooting each other didn’t exactly have first claim on MPD resources. He’d open a file, notate it a couple times to indicate that no new evidence had been found, and eventually it would fade from memory.

  But still, he thought as he turned onto Wisconsin Avenue, it was awfully strange to find a drug shooting in Georgetown.

  ***

  Three men stood on a sidewalk beside a parked car. Behind them, the frantic rhythm of nightclub music made it through the doors they had left behind.

  "Come on, D.W. Let me drive. You drank too much."

  "I’m fine, Mike."

  "You’re not fine."

  "You drank your fair share too."

  "Not as much as you. Let me drive."

  "Mike, this is a no-brainer. You’re a Congressman. I’m a lobbyist. If I get a DUI, it’s an annoyance. If you get a DUI, it’s the end of your career."

  For the first time since they left the club, the third man spoke, slurring his words. "Fair point."

  The first man, Mike, bit his lip and looked like he wanted to go on arguing. The teeth that showed as he worried his lower lip were gleaming white and straight. His blond hair was moussed solidly into place. He was a slender man, in good shape, and dressed well. But his politician’s trained smile was absent at the moment. He was too uncomfortable about his friend D.W. driving to smile.

  Michael Vincent had been nursing two martinis all night. His friend had rather more than two. But the other two men were right about the logic.

  Mike tried one more time. "I only had two drinks all night, D.W. I know you had more than that."

  "Yeah, and I weigh more. Trust me Mike. I’m fine. You know I’m right about this. I’m always right about political stuff. Putting you behind the wheel is the more unacceptable risk."

  D.W. Tilman was telling the truth about the weight issue. His 250 pounds were all sitting right on his waist. He had height to go with it, but not enough to disguise the fact that he drank too much beer and ate too much starch. His hair was far enough gone that he shaved his head bald. He stood in a permanent slouch that hid a couple inches of his height. He had a slightly pink tinted birthmark on the far right side of his forehead – like Mikhail Gorbachev but smaller.

  "He’s got a fair point," said the third man, apparently too drunk to remember that he’d already said that once.

  Mike shook his head and reluctantly opened the passenger side door. Once they were all aboard, the car headed away from the nightclub and into Georgetown. The third man’s home was there.

  Tilman and Vincent shared over a decade of history. Their friendship traced its roots to a time when they were both young idealists working in the trenches of American politics. Tilman gave Vincent his first campaign job, and taught him his first lessons about navigating the waters in a very treacherous business. In the years that passed, the older man’s career hit a rocky shoal, and he left politics to start his own company. But Vincent had never forgotten his old teacher.

  They still made time to socialize regularly, but this night was about more than just catching up. Tilman’s company had a new electronic device they wanted to sell to the federal government. Vincent was a member of the House Intelligence Committee, which would authorize the funding to buy it.

  "It’s a surveillance tool for the NSA, Tilman," Vincent said as they drove. "That’s not going to be politically…"

  The Congressman’s words cut off mid-sentence as they turned a corner. A driver coming the other direction was directly in front of them. The cars were inches apart at best, it seemed to Mike. He started shouting, "Holy…" but didn’t have time to finish as his friend slammed on the breaks and the screech of rubber filled the air.

  Amazingly, they didn’t collide. Mike sat catching his breath for a moment. He was amazed to be uninjured, and tried to figure out what happened.

  The other car had apparently swerved to the left. Between Tilman’s crash stop and the other car’s emergency turn, they had not hit each other.

  Unfortunately, the other car had hit a tree instead of them.

  When he realized that, Vincent threw open his door and ran to the other vehicle to see if he could help. He arrived at the driver’s side door, and reached down for the handle.

  That’s when he noticed the pistol aimed right at his face.

  His jaw dropped open. For a few seconds he was simply frozen in place, unable to move. Then he lifted his hands in the air and backed up slowly. Tilman, just getting out of his car, saw what was happening and swore loud enough to be heard, but stopped in place.

  The man in the other car – the man holding the gun – stared at Vincent. "Your car’s undamaged, right? No need to call the police then, right? Trust me on this: if you call them, I will know. And I will kill you."

  With that he backed away from the tree and stomped on the gas hard enough to make his tires squeal. He sped away.

  Tilman ran up to his friend. "Mike… what just happened?"

  "No idea," the Congressman replied. "Not one clue. That was crazy. Guy pulls a gun on me out of nowhere."

  "The guy’s right about calling the cops. It’s like I said: you are a Congressman."

  "Yeah, and you should’ve let me…"

  Tilman held up his hand to stop Mike. "No one likes a guy who says ‘I told you so,’ Mike."

  ***

  Kathy stood aside as Colleen popped the mysterious flash drive into her desktop PC. For things like this, Kathy always yielded to her more technical roommate. Her use of computers included social media, online videos, and e-mail. She was aware they could do more, but wasn’t sure why anyone would care.

  Colleen, on the other hand, had built nearly a whole life around them. A computer science major, she wrote most of her own software and was perfectly secure in the knowledge that she’d have a high paying job in two years writing code in California or Seattle. She had a much more active social life online than she did on campus. Now, she settled back in her chair and peered intently at the screen.

  "Well, there are several files on it, but I’ve got no idea what kinds," she said after a couple moments of clicking and typing. "They’re probably either binary or encrypted – possibly both. Let me hack on it for a while, and see if I can find anything else out."

  With a sigh, Kathy rose from her chair and began pacing the room. From long experience, she knew she’d have trouble getting any more intelligent conversation out of Colleen until she either knew what was on the flash drive or had given up on it.

  Colleen clicked a few icons, and the jarring beat of the latest in electronic dance music poured out of her speakers. Intrigued, Kathy found her feet wanting to dance. "Nice tune, what is it?" she aske
d.

  "Uh, not sure. Some new techno rave stuff. I swiped it off a torrent. Quit bothering me if you ever want me to learn anything from this." Colleen turned back to her screen.

  Kathy shrugged and turned away. Colleen's ability to get free music was the one thing that gave Kathy any desire to learn more about computers. For a kid working her way through college, free sounded way better than 99 cents a song. But it was obvious her roommate wasn’t in the mood to teach her about it tonight. With nothing to do but wait, Kathy gazed longingly at her bed, but didn’t go to it. There was no point. Adrenaline coursed through her veins from the incident, and she knew this night held no sleep for hours yet. Pacing gave way to rehearsing a few steps of her composition for modern dance class, and then to an attempt to read. Nothing held her attention for long, though, and soon enough Kathy was back to watching Colleen at the computer.

  Colleen never even noticed. She alternated between long periods of staring off into space and moments of furious typing. After an hour, though, she stood up. "I don’t know what it is, and neither does anyone else I asked. Heck with it, let’s go to bed."

  Kathy pointed at the window, where the sun peeked over the athletic field. "Might be a little late for that."

  Colleen grunted. "Pull the shades, then. I don’t have class ‘til noon, and I’ll need some sleep before I go."

  ***

  Early Wednesday morning, D.W. Tilman' car pulled up at the gate to the Electron Guidewire compound, one of dozens of high tech businesses located in the northern Virginia suburbs along the Dulles Airport Access road. He drummed his fingers as the guard cleared him through. He knew the security procedures were necessary; he just didn't like having to wait for them. Patience came even harder to him when he’d been out ‘til two in the morning and not had any sleep.