False Witness Page 35

  He answered quickly, she noticed. Too quickly?

  “Didn’t they capture Hoffman unexpectedly too?”

  This time Drew hesitated. His thirst apparently called, and he took a sip of Coke. “Yeah. But he knew they were after him.”

  “Another thing that’s been bugging me is the kidnapping itself. It keeps coming back, replaying itself in my mind. I’d really forgotten all about it, probably suppressed it, until I tried to sleep that first night. Every time I closed my eyes, I was in that stairwell again.

  “And the thing is, Drew, I distinctly remember pulling out my gun and firing two shots, right into the gut of the man who grabbed me from behind. But nothing happened.”

  This time Drew tried a quizzical look. “You probably had the safety on. When you’re under that kind of pressure, if it’s not habit, you don’t usually remember things like not releasing the safety.”

  “I thought about that possibility. But I distinctly remember squeezing the trigger. It clicked back. Would it do that with the safety on?”

  “No,” Drew admitted, “probably not. But you don’t always remember things right when you’re under that kind of stress.”

  Jamie took a deep breath and leaned back in her chair. This was going exactly as she thought it would. Not the way she hoped, but definitely the way she expected.

  “And so I called the Jacksonville coroner’s office on Friday afternoon. At first, they just gave me the runaround. But I was very persistent. Told them I had been the victim in the kidnapping that resulted in three men being shot—one Russian guy and two others. Told them I worked for the district attorney’s office in Gwinnett County, which isn’t exactly true, but I did clerk there last summer. They finally told me what I knew they would say.”

  She leaned into this next part. She watched the blood slowly drain from Jacobsen’s face. He was good at conducting interrogations, but not so good on the receiving end. “There were no autopsies, Drew. No bodies. No three men killed. How does that add up? I thought autopsies were mandatory whenever the cops shot and killed somebody.”

  In response, Drew just stared back. The bedroom eyes had run out of answers.

  84

  Jamie waited him out, a technique she had learned in trial practice class. Do not speak when the witness is struggling to find an answer.

  “What are you saying?” Drew eventually asked. He spoke softly, avoiding any hint of indignation.

  “You know exactly what I’m saying.” Jamie felt the anger crawling up her spine, stiffening her neck, reddening her face. “The mob didn’t kidnap me; the feds did. It was all a big setup, and you went along with it. My own government knocks me out, ties me down in the back of some truck, and then puts me in fear for my life.”

  Jamie felt the tears stinging her eyes. Tears of anger. Frustration. She knew the importance of this algorithm, a national-security risk of enormous proportions, but what could possibly justify this? “My own government violates every constitutional right I have.” She paused, boring into him. “And they use someone who pretends to be my friend. For what? So you could bring Hoffman out of hiding? So the federal government could get its precious algorithm and start spying on other people’s lives, violating more constitutional rights?”

  Drew had his hand out now, palm down, trying to get Jamie to settle down. He looked around, obviously concerned about the eavesdroppers. “Jamie,” he said, his voice nearly a whisper, “it’s not that way. Is that what you really think? Is that how you really feel?”

  She laughed. Shook her head. “Like you really care how I feel.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Sorry? That’s it? A little remorse and it’s all better? They killed my dog, Drew. Kidnapped me. And you’re sorry?”

  As her voice rose, Jamie’s rant drew a sea of staring faces. Conversations at tables around her halted. Jamie didn’t care.

  Drew kept his voice low, his tone urgent. “Jamie, we didn’t have anything to do with Snowball or the first time the mob came after you. That part was real. That’s why we had to take action. This threat wasn’t going away.”

  She pushed away from the table and stood, aware that she had drawn a crowd of onlookers. “Good luck in the FBI, Drew. You should fit right in.”

  She turned and stalked toward the door. Drew followed and quickly caught up with her, mumbling apologies, telling her she had it wrong. When she was outside, heading down the walkway toward the parking garage, he reached for her arm.

  She shook it loose with a look of disdain. “Don’t you dare touch me.”

  “Jamie, I know you’re upset. You’re entitled to be. But listen to me, just for a minute.”

  She crossed her arms, staring him down. One minute. Clock’s starting.

  “I did this for you, Jamie . . .”

  You’re off to a bad start, buster.

  “I cared about you. Worried about your safety. These guys play for keeps. This wasn’t about bringing Hoffman out of hiding. It was about getting you out of harm’s way.”

  “Did it ever occur to you and your friends that you could just ask? That maybe I would have been fine with leaving the area for a few days? That maybe you didn’t have to stage a kidnapping and put me in fear of rape—of rape, Drew, a woman’s worst nightmare—before I might cooperate with you?”

  With others milling about the sidewalk, Drew tried his softer tone again, always the cop, worried about who might overhear. “Okay, it was stupid. And yes, part of the motivation for the feds was getting Hoffman to play out his hand so they could get the algorithm. But that wasn’t why I went along.

  “Sure, maybe you would have gone away, Jamie, but for how long? A week? A month? A year? Don’t you see—you would never have been out of danger until we busted these guys.”

  “If that was the plan, why didn’t you just ask me to go along? Why not let me in on the scam? After all, it was my kidnapping.”

  Drew shook his head, his eyes pleading. “You would never have gone along. You would never have deceived your own client. The plan could only bring Hoffman into the open if he really thought the triad had captured you.”

  She gave him a rueful smile. “No, you’re right, Drew. I would never have betrayed someone that close to me.”

  The comment rendered him speechless, as she knew it would. He took a deep breath and stared at the ground for a moment. “What are you going to do?” he asked gently.

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  This time, when he looked back at her, he had the look of a defeated man. His handsome face reflected a deep sadness, a regret that he couldn’t possibly find the words to express. For the first time since she pieced her theory together, Jamie felt a tinge of sympathy.

  “If you want to pursue this,” he said, “and file a lawsuit or disciplinary proceedings or whatever, I’ll testify for you. Against myself, if I have to. I won’t try to cover this up.”

  To this, Jamie didn’t respond. She would take it under advisement. “You’d better go back in there and pay.” She forced a thin smile. For now, she had finished venting. She was still furious of course, but what else was there to say?

  Drew sighed deeply, brushed a hand through his hair, and focused somewhere past Jamie, at some distant spot on the sidewalk. “The day before the kidnapping, I found some pictures in an envelope on your car windshield. They were pictures of you—pumping gas, entering the law school, getting out of your car at home—and every one of them had your head in the center of thin red crosshairs.”

  Jamie could see the tears building in his eyes as Drew faced her squarely. “I care about you, Jamie. I took the pictures to the FBI. They came up with the plan.”

  His tears didn’t melt her—she wasn’t even sure they were real—but they softened her anger a little. The red flare of emotion had burned itself out, replaced by a smoldering frustration.

  But her suspicions only grew. “We didn’t have anything to do with Snowball,” Drew had said. “That part was real.” Maybe they
didn’t. And maybe those pictures were authentic as well—placed on her windshield by the mob rather than the FBI. She wanted to believe him, but she couldn’t just take his word for it. He had already lied more times than she could count.

  Whom could she trust in cases like this? Drew said he cared about her; therefore, he lied to her. It was all so very sad.

  “I need to be going,” she said.

  “Can I at least walk you to your car?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Can I call you sometime?”

  Jamie thought about her watch. The GPS chip that Drew had allegedly planted there. The lies, the hurt, the fear he had put her through.

  “Maybe I’ll call you,” she said.

  And they both knew it would never happen.

  85

  Wellington couldn’t get enough church on Sunday. He went to the morning service. Then after lunch, he drove across the suburbs to the Hoffmans’ funeral. Yet he still felt the need to be in the pew on Sunday night. After all he had been through, and given all he was facing in the coming week, he needed as much inspiration as he could get.

  It hit him halfway through the Sunday night service. The answer came precisely the way he knew it would—a flash of insight when he was barely thinking about it. It had been blindingly simple all along.

  The pastor was preaching from Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the Bible. One hundred seventy-six verses, to be precise. Wellington was seated in the third pew from the front, the fourth seat from the aisle, participating in the second worship service of the day.

  Each set of five numbers in the algorithm is not a code; they’re place markers.

  The first number in each set—what was the range? He couldn’t remember exactly, but it was pretty small, something like one through fifty or sixty. The ranges for the second and third numbers in the series were larger, if Wellington remembered correctly, something like one through about a hundred and fifty. But the fourth and fifth numbers in the series were small again, even smaller than the first number. He was pretty sure that none of the fifth numbers were larger than twenty.

  He didn’t have the code with him; in fact, he had hidden his hard copy in the middle of one of his two-hundred-page class outlines and had camouflaged the electronic version so deep in one of his computer files that nobody would ever find it. But Wellington knew without even looking that his hunch would prove correct. The first number represented the book of the Bible. The second number, the chapter. The third number, the verse. The fourth number, the word in that verse. And the fifth number, the letter in that word. The system could be versatile, kicking out either letters or numbers, even spelling out mathematical functions. And the Bible he had been given was important, not because of what verses might be underlined or what the margin notes might say, but simply because the decoder would need to know which particular translation to use.

  He was antsy now, anxious to get home, pull out the Bible Stacie had given him, and plug in the letters and numbers. He tuned out the preacher and started leafing through his Bible looking for the longest verse, the longest word. He found a verse, Esther 8:9, that contained sixty-five words. He found a word, the name Maher-shalal-hash-baz, that contained eighteen letters.

  This was it! He was sure. He started counting the minutes until the service ended. After the final praise song, he left the building as if it had caught fire. He hustled home, breaking the speed limit by an unprecedented ten miles per hour. He pulled out the encrypted math formula, cross-referenced the numbers against the Bible, and felt the air rush from his emotional balloon. Something still didn’t make sense. Sometimes, this method would generate meaningful results, illuminating part of the formula. But on other sets of numbers, it just generated more gobbledygook. Frustrated, he rechecked his work, paying careful attention to the parts of the formula that remained a mystery. After fifty minutes of frustrating agony—so close but not quite there—it hit him! The reason for the underlining. One last twist from the brilliant mind of Professor Kumari.

  Wellington smiled to himself, content in the knowledge that within a few hours he would be able to unlock the key to history’s most exquisite math algorithm. He downloaded the software program he needed and got right to work. Two and a half hours later, he filled in the last missing variable!

  He spent the next hour factoring large numbers into their prime components, amazed at the efficiency and symmetry of the formula he had revealed. He tried to break the formula down into its component functions so he could determine why it worked. But it was far beyond even Wellington’s gifted mathematical brain, on another level altogether. It was as if Wellington could only add and subtract, but Kumari could perform calculus. Wellington felt like an aspiring young artist who had just uncovered the Mona Lisa in his attic.

  Kumari’s mathematical feat in deriving this formula was, quite simply, awe inspiring.

  Which made it that much harder for Wellington to do what he knew had to be done. There were some technological advances, he had concluded, so staggering in their implications that they went beyond man’s present moral ability to handle them. Like splitting the atom. Or perhaps the manipulation of DNA. Granted, this mathematical formula didn’t present the same kind of ethical issues, but it would present its holder with vast power over the secrets of the most important communication medium in the world.

  If the government had the formula, they could use it to violate the closely guarded secrets of its citizens. And if the formula fell into the hands of a criminal enterprise, or even a power-hungry individual who was not a criminal, the repercussions would be even worse. No message sent and no business conducted over the Internet would be safe. There were six billion people in the world. And Wellington was the only one who knew the key to this algorithm. God had entrusted him, and nobody else, with this incredible secret. The sensation was like he’d been given a supernatural gift, Superman discovering he could fly.

  Wellington felt so inadequate, so overwhelmed. He realized that this was a typical response when God gave a person a monumental calling. It was the awe of the Virgin Mary when she was told she would bear the Christ child, the trepidation of the apostle Paul when he was commissioned to take the gospel to the Gentiles, the wonder of David the shepherd boy when he was chosen to be king. Or how about Gideon, a lowly farmer whom God called to lead the Israelites against the fierce warriors of Midian?

  This would be Wellington’s legacy, like it or not. The way Wellington saw it, God had taken this powerful algorithm out of the hands of the mobsters and government officials and given it to him—Wellington, a second-year law student. And Wellington’s job was to keep it under wraps until the world was ready for it, until Internet encryption technology had moved beyond reliance on prime factorization. Or until such time as using the formula would do more good than harm.

  After all, when David was just a shepherd boy, Samuel the priest told David he would be king, but David had to keep it a secret until the appointed time. If David could keep that kind of thing a secret, Wellington could certainly keep his mouth shut about an algorithm.

  But there was still one major problem. When Wellington thought about the grand jury subpoena, his palms started sweating. He couldn’t lie, not under oath. There was a verse in Proverbs someplace that promised a false witness would not go unpunished. His only recourse would be to stare down the authority of the federal government and refuse to say anything. The very thought of such a confrontation made him sick to his stomach.

  He didn’t mind keeping the world’s biggest secret, but how would he ever survive if Carzak convinced a judge to hold Wellington in contempt? Comparing himself to biblical characters was one thing. Facing jail in real life was quite another.

  86

  Monday, April 14

  Fort Worth, Texas

  They ate lunch at the Stockyards. Medium-rare T-bone steak for him, salmon for her. They cruised the Fort Worth malls. Brandi said it was crucial to get her shopping bearings. In a city, women gave di
rections using the malls as guideposts, the way farmers used old oak trees a hundred years ago. “You know where the Ridgmar Mall is? Well from there, you go west on I-30 . . .”

  They shopped at three different sporting goods stores before they found the right trampoline. They paid extra for delivery and setup. The clerk said it would take less than a week. Shane complained to his wife about the price.

  “It won’t feel like home until it comes,” Brandi countered.

  Shane spent his time trying on cowboy hats and boots. He settled on a broad-rimmed brown Stetson and a pair of dark brown, pointed-toe boots on sale at Cavender’s. Maybe they should move out to the country and get a horse, Shane suggested. Maybe you should get a different wife if you want to be a farmer, Brandi replied.

  They made it home by four. Agent Sam Parcelli showed up precisely at five.

  Parcelli looked around the barren house, made a few wisecracks about their interior designer, asked Shane about his ribs, then pulled out the paperwork so they could review it on the kitchen counter. He slid one copy of the memorandum of understanding to Shane and another to Brandi.

  This had been their first opportunity to meet with Parcelli since the federal government had whisked them out of town last Friday, mere hours after the explosion that appeared to claim their lives. While onlookers focused on the front door of the mob headquarters as Walter Snead and a few triad members emerged, FBI agents led David and Stacie Hoffman out the side door of the van—the side opposite from the civilians and local police—and twenty feet away into a waiting sedan with tinted windows. A few seconds later, the explosion occurred.

  The couple decided to start life over in the Lone Star State. Shane had always thought of himself as a cowboy.

  “These are basically the same terms your attorney discussed with Mr. Carzak last week on your behalf,” Parcelli said, working them over with the stone-cold stare that was his trademark. Today, the sunken eyes looked more sickly than ever, as if the man had just emerged from his casket to handle the paperwork.