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Chapter 63 - Blackmail

The following day, Tamara had arranged a “chemistry” day. She planned to meet with her biochemistry postdoc collaborator, Joyce Darner, two medical school endocrinologists with whom she was also collaborating, and her first medical school radiologist consultant, Dr Jose Marcos. About two weeks prior to this meeting, Tamara, together with Darner, had worked out how to synthesize small amounts of her “pheromone” and separate the stereoisomers formed. She recalled the day when she had proposed to Darner the method that she had theorized.

One month earlier

Tamara entered Darner’s lab and greeted her. “Joyce, tell me if this wild-assed idea is feasible, okay?”

Darner grinned at her. “What did you come up with? This should be good.”

“Damn, you must have been speaking with Emma. She tells me that all the time. Anyway, here’s what I thought. I had the idea of looking into the quantum-mechanical properties of steroids, particularly those of the sex-hormone class. I came across the Franck-Condon principle, you know, the one that describes the electronic and vibrational energy levels of a molecule when it absorbs energy. I found that under quantum-mechanical rules, the molecules’ vibrational wave-functions behave like harmonic oscillators. It turns out that the coil-force circuits that I’ve been working with appear to affect the harmonic oscillations of molecules and I’ve calculated that the effect should be slightly different based on the symmetry of the molecules.

“The Franck-Condon principle is based on the molecule’s absorbing photons. Optical activity is based on the molecule’s ability to polarize light, that is, filter out only the wave forms of the incident photons that match the molecule’s polarity. This effect should work really well in aromatic compounds like the steroids because of the presence of the delocalized electrons from the rings’ π-bonds. The wave functions from the Born-Oppenheimer approximation appear to support that idea. I wrote out most of a paper that discusses that idea; here’s a copy; look at it and see what you think. So it appears that by using the coil-force circuits I’ve developed, you could use the effect their forces causes on the π electrons to assist in the synthesis of the pheromone molecules. I also think that the coil device can help separate the different optical isomers of the compounds in the gas chromatograph. Do you want to try to do that first? If it works, I’ll submit the paper to a journal.”

“That’s a really way-out idea, Tamara, but the way your gadgets seem to work, it might be worth a shot. I see you have a box with you. Is this a device based on your coil things?”

Tamara nodded. “Yep. I had Saul, my engineering tech, cobble up a device that can be connected to your gas chromatograph.” She opened the box and took out a Rube-Goldberg-looking contraption. “It’s not pretty, is it. Okay, inject the volatilized sample in the side port here, connect the carrier gas line here, and this end goes to the GC column. If you take samples at the detector as the sample exits the column, you’ll probably get the separated stereoisomers. The battery here powers the coil assembly—all you need to do is switch it on right over here,” Tamara pointed. “It’ll probably take you a bunch of runs to get the bugs out, but let me know if it works.”

“Okay, I’ll give it a go. How’d you get to know so much about chemistry, anyway? This is really advanced stuff.”

“Um, it’s just physics as applied to molecules and molecules are linked by their constituent atoms’ electron interactions. I understand how electrons perform very, very well, I guess,” Tamara told her. “Many of my devices depend on electron flow, storage, and properties.”

Darner grinned at her. “My prof told me that you’ve got a rep as an engineering physicist. What you’re doing here is actually chemical physics; it’s a combination of atomic and molecular physics and condensed matter physics. I can’t wait to see how this works.”

“Those are just labels; they only serve to pigeonhole people into artificial specialties. I’m more of a generalist and use whatever principles I need to solve problems. And about solving problems—solving the one about the inactive stereoisomers. The coil assembly should also work in your steroid compound synthesis,” Tamara said, handing her another folder. “Here’s the procedure to try with that. Part of the reaction needs to be done inside the energized coil assembly.”

She took another little device out of her box.

“Works the same way; uses the same power supply. Turn it on when you’re running the ring closure reaction sequences through your doing the Diels-Alder reaction. Those are the parts where the stereospecific synthesis should be corrected.”

“Cool, Tamara. Damn, if this works, it’ll be an incredible addition to organic chemical synthesis and analysis, I’ll let you know.”

About a week later, Darner called, excited. The devices worked and she had managed to synthesize and purify two of the compounds at a microgram quantity by coupling Tamara’s synthetic methods to a set of techniques popularly called “click chemistry.” Popular among chemists, that is, and that technique proved worthy of recent Nobel Prizes to its inventors. And Tamara’s device had allowed her not only to efficiently separate the different isomers; it had also worked to allow for synthesis of selected optical isomers. They both agreed that the device was unique enough to warrant submitting the scientific paper Tamara had written, after Tamara’s patent application had been filed.

Back to the present

Now it was time for her meeting with the clinical people. Tamara had designed a research protocol to test the pheromones that had been synthesized and purified. She wanted to test those two pheromone isolates on subjects while performing a MRI scan in an attempt to visualize the nerve signal pathway from the triggering of the olfactory nerve receptor to the signal’s destination in the cerebral cortex.

“Tamara, you do realize that you’re effectively looking for a needle in the haystack, don’t you?” one of the endocrinologists, Dr John Oglebie, asked. “We know that humans have only about 350 olfactory receptor subtypes in the olfactory epithelium and a total of only twelve million olfactory receptors, which are distributed among hundreds of different receptor types that respond to different odors. The result is that humans can sense only about 10,000 different odors and your putative pheromone is just one molecule. Catching single receptor binding events will be difficult, don’t you think?”

“Maybe, John,” Tamara responded. “But the MRI scan really lights up when there’s any chemical activity, so the depolarization of the receptor upon binding should be visible and so should the signals as nerve action potentials change during the relay of the signal into the brain. This experiment should show the parts of the limbic system that get activated by that particular molecule.”

“Wow, twelve million olfactory receptors in humans?” Darner asked. “That seems like a large number.”

“Not when you consider other animals,” Oglebie remarked. “For example, most dogs have about one billion receptors while dogs like bloodhounds have four times that number.”

“My department keeps a roster of potential volunteers for imaging studies,” Marcos commented. “Tamara, this new protocol of yours for the study can go as it is to our human subjects committee as a supplement to your first study. That should speed its review. John, what she said about visualizing receptor depolarization is correct; the resolutions we’re getting are amazing. It’s sensitive down to possibly thirty receptor activations and they would all come from a single olfactory receptor cell. This is a valid approach and we should pursue it. The evidence we get may finally settle the question about the existence of human pheromones, I’m sure.”

The group set to work to outline the details of the experimental procedure. When they finished, Tamara spent the rest of the day working on refining her dark matter/energy theory, and when she and Peter got home in the evening, she told him about getting her last major project underway.

“What do you mean, sweetie?” he asked. “Your work on the MRI and the coil force were your priorities, I thought.”

She chuckled. “I guess you’ve forgotten your excellent summary of my goals which you outlined the day before my folks moved into their new home here. I haven’t forgotten how you listed them. One was the MRI studies to learn how my ‘pushing’ emotions affects areas in the brain. The results of those scans show stuff that they’re still analyzing; there was so much data, but we’re getting lots of good information there. Another was to see if the chemicals I secrete are different for each emotion I ‘push.’ We found out that they are; there appear to be slight differences. Next was seeing if I generate a detectible EEG signal when I ‘push’ an emotion and it appears that I do; those tracings are still being analyzed. And I figured out how to do EEG studies in an active magnetic field and while accounting for RF pulses, in addition. Today we began on the last of those goals; seeing if my pheromones have an effect on a subject when I don’t ‘push’ that emotion.”

Peter grinned. “Well, that means you can retire now. You finished your bucket list.”

“You wish. I still have that large-scale G-force experiment. And I want to do stuff with all the things I found now—develop my inventions. Help people, improve their lives. I’ve got that deal I made with Gerston, remember. And the project that we’ll do with Kevin and Denise, whatever that turns out to be.”

“Yeah—and that meeting you have on Monday with that stalker of yours.”

“Ugh. Right.”

~~~~

Tamara got to the coffee shop early; she wanted to stake out a table in a very exposed part of the shop so that she would be easily visible and wouldn’t be cornered. It took her a lot of convincing, but she got Peter to agree to stay away. She was wearing a small recording device that Wilkins had provided and, in addition, the tiny G-force transmitter was hidden in a necklace pendant. Wilkins had the matched G-force receiver. The transmitter-receiver pair had been tested and it worked, although the sound quality was far from ideal.

Tamara was sitting at the table nursing an iced tea when two men arrived and looked around. Spotting her green blouse, which was the recognition signal that she had included in her email message, they walked to her table.

“Miss Alexandre?” one man asked.

“That’s me,” she replied.

“Ah, this table isn’t a satisfactory meeting site,” he commented.

“It is for me, sir. Now state your business or leave. I trust you’ve brought your business proposal?”

The man glanced at his companion who shrugged; then they pulled out chairs and sat.

“First thing now,” Tamara looked at the spokesman with a steely expression. She didn’t detect any overt evil intent but got the impression that the man felt that this contact was somehow extralegal. “You know my name but I don’t know yours. Nor do I know anything about the outfit you say you represent. Do you have a business card?”

The men looked at each other again and the spokesman replied, “Our names are immaterial. I see you have your phone out. Is it recording?”

“Correct. I want a record of our meeting.”

“We cannot allow that. Please turn it off and let me watch as you do that.”

The other man took out a little device from the briefcase he was carrying and turned it on.

“She’s got another device on her,” he told the first man.

“Okay, miss, this isn’t a hide-and-seek game. Let’s get that device out and turned off too.” He looked at his companion. “See any wireless signals or other any surveillance device on her?”

“No,” was the response.

“We intend that this meeting will be private. This table location is totally inappropriate for our discussion. Since you refuse to move to a less-exposed table...”

“I do,” Tamara interrupted. “I’ve already experienced one kidnapping attempt and I’m ensuring that my risk here is minimized. Just so you know, it’s possible that some of the people in here are my college friends and if they are, you should know that my friends will watch out for me.”

The spokesman looked at his companion again. “Detect any remote listening device?” he asked and got a negative head shake in reply.

“This table will have to do then but I’ll be speaking softly. You must not let anyone know about this discussion; you won’t like the consequences if you do. We are here representing an official agency. We would like to offer you a position continuing your work on the human brain, along the lines of your papers describing the use of MRI technology, but concentrating on training the brain the way you trained the subjects to improve their sense of smell. You will be compensated appropriately.”

Tamara replied, “I’m sure, since you appear to be familiar with my papers, that you know that I’m a physicist and not a neuroscientist. I must decline your offer; my work is mainly in quantum engineering and physics, not human physiology and neuroscience. I’m sorry to disappoint you and your agency, but there’s no way that I’d agree to change career paths.”

“I was anticipating that you would decline the offer,” he responded, “but I’m afraid that you will have no choice and will have to agree. Your professional services are required by us, you shall work for us exclusively, and you shall not tell anyone about this conversation. You would be most unhappy to suffer the consequences of outright refusal to cooperate.”

“One second there,” Tamara interrupted again as she “pushed” a compulsion color. “What agency do you claim is making this demand? Federal? Foreign? What right do you have to dictate who I can work for? Are you aware that slavery was abolished by the thirteenth amendment in the middle of the nineteenth century?”

“Ah... the U.S. govern... ah shit... It matters not, exactly who we work for. Listen, I’ve said too much now so I’m going to tell you why you’ll have to cooperate. My associate has a memory card which contains digital copies of recordings of your telephone conversations with agents of several foreign countries. In the recordings, you agreed to cooperate with those agents to sell classified research materials. Each recording is labeled with the date and time that it was intercepted together with the locations of yourself and the agent you spoke with. There also is a video clip of you making a drop of the information as agreed in one of the recordings...”

Tamara looked at him in disgust. “Your body language is shouting that these statements are outright lies, you know. This is a miserably poor attempt at blackmail. You’re also claiming that you wiretapped my communications; I’d like to see a copy of the search warrant that allowed this. What if I refuse and expose you for this felony?”

“You’d greatly regret that, miss. You see, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Section 702, we don’t need a warrant. If a U.S. citizen communicates with anyone outside of the United States, a non-citizen, then their conversations can be monitored and recorded. And that act also set up the FISA court which approved this investigation, so we will have you arrested under the terrorism laws and those recordings will prove your guilt. We can have you tied up for years, probably in prison custody during that time. I’ll give you until next Monday to decide; if you don’t respond by Monday evening using the email address I contacted you with, we’ll begin the process to charge you with terrorism on Tuesday.”

The second man passed the SD card to him and he laid it on the table.

“Take this and listen to it; then I’m sure you’ll be contacting me.”

The two men got up and walked out; they didn’t notice that when they did, they were followed out the door by a middle-aged couple. Another man came over to Tamara’s table as she sat, lost in thought.

I could probably make this problem go away, but that’s really a sticky situation and it might expose me to a greater risk...

“Miss Alexandre?” the man interrupted her thoughts. “Where did they touch? We need to get fingerprints.”

“Ah, yeah. That SD card, for one. They both handled it. And the backs of the chairs and possibly the table edges in front of them.”

A man came into the shop carrying a case and looked over at Tamara’s table, then hurried over. It was a tech, who began to check for prints. Then Tamara remembered her phone and turned it on; a text message appeared. It was from Wilkins: call me asap.

Tamara looked at the two FBI people working on the table. “You guys need me now?”

One looked up. “No, the boss’ll handle this now. She’ll call you.”

“Already happened. I’ll go somewhere quiet and call back.”

She took out a different phone, made the call, and heard, “Wilkins.”

“It’s Tamara. Yeah, this is a different burner phone. I have four and switch around randomly. Were you able to hear that crap he spouted?”

“I sure did. We’ve got two tails on them now; also got some mug shots. They left the data card that he mentioned?”

“Yeah. The tech is getting prints from it.”

“Did you touch it?”

“Nope. He set it on the table and left. Then one of your guys came over and secured the area; chased away a bus person who wanted to clean the table.”

“Very good. Listen, can you come to my office now? I’m over at Windsor Mill, maybe eight miles away. Hang on ... okay. They lifted prints from the chip and it’s being rushed here. If you come, we’ll play the recording for you and listen to what they have.”

“Um, sure, I can call for an Uber... oh, jeez, it’s Peter.”

“What? Your boyfriend?”

“Yeah. Told him to stay away. Guess he couldn’t.”

“He’s a good man, Tamara. He kept out of the way when he had to and now’s making sure you’re okay.”

“Right. I’ll see if I can get him to take me. Hey, can he be there when I talk to you?”

“Certainly. This affects him as well as you.”

About forty minutes later, Tamara and Peter were shown into a little conference room at the FBI field office. Wilkins greeted them.

“Okay, now we know who our targets are,” she opened with. “Neighbors of yours over in Laurel—the NSA at Fort Meade.”

“The National Security Agency? Why would they want to come after me like that? Hey, I assume they must also be behind that ambush you helped me avoid—they’d be able to get the airport CBP people to work with them.”

Wilkins nodded. “It looks like they were the ones that set it up. I kicked that one up to the agency chiefs; doing what they did, they broke a bunch of laws right there. But no way will I stick my neck out on that. Possibly someone high up in the FBI might be involved too. Anyway, we got a match on the prints and our tails followed them to the NSA headquarters. Why you? You’ve attracted their attention somehow. From the recording of his conversation with you—by the way, that little transmitter device is outstanding. Tiny, undetectable, untraceable, unhackable—I got dibs on one or more when you’re ready to produce them. Anyway, from what he said, looks like they want you to do some kind of brain research for them; but doing what is unclear. Not mind control or mind reading, I hope. But that’s really far-fetched.”

Tamara thought, Yeah, that was my thinking too... and that’s too close to the reality.

“Anyway,” Wilkins continued, “I played the recordings of your supposed phone calls and it does sound like your voice. I’d expect that it would be convincing since the NSA is involved and they’ve got some quality equipment and sound experts. The video looks like it’s you but it could be an actor made up to look like you; there are only fleeting images of your face. Let me play that.”

She played the video clip and Peter exclaimed, “Hey, Tamara doesn’t walk or move anything like that. That person looks stiff and unnatural.”

“And the images aren’t very clear too, so I’m certain that the video can easily be discounted as evidence. It must have been included as a scare tactic. Let me play the phone calls.”

She did and then Tamara and Peter sat back in their chairs for a minute.

“Are they dated? And do they have a phone number associated with them?” Tamara asked.

Wilkins shook her head. “Phone taps don’t have metadata internally associated with the audio in the same way that digital images allow—besides, metadata can be hacked. Someone would need to attest that the audio recording in the conversation corresponded to a particular set of phone numbers, dates, and times. Location, too.”

“So the NSA can say their people intercepted the call and recorded it and give the date, time, and all that and a court would just take that info as a given?” Tamara asked.

“It’s like a cop testifying,” Wilkins remarked. “They’re considered to be impartial witnesses.”

“Well, I have something on that,” Peter broke in. “Mrs Wilkins, have you ever heard of something called electrical network frequency matching? From a few years ago, I recall reading about its use for forensic analysis of recordings. It’s called ‘ENF matching’ for short.”

“Hmm, sounds vaguely familiar. Let me get Foster in here. Foster Simpson is one of our evidence technicians; he’s a digital forensic examiner and should be aware of different analysis techniques.”

When Simpson came in and was introduced, and then heard the question about ENF matching, he broke out into a big grin.

“‘Course I heard of that,” he said. “Every sound recording made in the real world using normal equipment has a digital fingerprint that can tell us when, to the second, it was recorded and whether it was doctored.”

“Yeah, that’s what I remembered,” Peter commented. “It came up in my class on power generation and distribution.”

“You’re an engineer?” Simpson asked.

“Well, I have an EE bachelor’s degree. I have yet to earn the ‘engineer’ title.”

“Cool. I see the others are looking clueless, so let me explain,” Simpson chuckled. “You know the hum you get from an audio device when you crank up the volume and nothing’s playing?” They nodded. “That’s the hum that’s generated by the electrical frequency on the power lines and it’s pervasive. In North America, the frequency is nominally kept at 60 hertz and that hum creeps into any audio device, onto recordings too.

“The key part is that it’s impossible for power grids to maintain an invariant frequency of 60 hertz; there are countless tiny random fluctuations caused by power demand changes, quirks in generator operation, and various other electrical events and that’s how ENF matching works. It matches the patterns of the tiny changes in the power line frequency on a sample recording to the database record of the frequency profile present on the power grid at that time. What I can do to determine if the recordings are fake is to pull out the 60 hertz signal and its harmonics from those phone recordings and compare them to the FNET database that the University of Tennessee keeps.”

“What if they used a battery-powered recorder?”Tamara wondered. “No connection to the grid there.”

“No matter,” Simpson replied. “That hum is everywhere and any electronic circuit picks it up, battery or not.”

Tamara nodded, “Duh, that’s right; my energy storage device actually collects that free inductive energy. How can you tell if a recording is doctor... oh sure. The background hum is discontinuous. Gaps.”

“Right. And you’ll ask about location next, right?” They nodded. “The info file here says the other party was calling from Europe. Their power grid runs at 50 hertz, not 60. I’ll take a wild guess and say that the hum in that part of the recording will be at 60 too.”

“Does it take long to do the test?” Wilkins asked.

“A day, maybe two,” Simpson shrugged. “Filtering out the signal and harmonics is simple. Finding the match in the FNET database will take longer but I recall that they have new tools to help. This should be interesting to do; I just had one case like this before, it was a few years back at another field office and I showed that the recording took place when the agency claimed it was and it hadn’t been tampered with. Nice to be on the other side.”

“Okay,” Tamara looked at Wilkins. “Let’s assume that they made the recording at the time that they claim I made those calls. What then?”

“If the other person on the line wasn’t in Europe, case closed,” Wilkins said. “That’s proof it was faked. If the results show evidence of tampering, then the recordings get tossed. We also have a case of attempted blackmail with an audio recording of the attempt plus witnesses and that poisons this chip as evidence. Another thing, FISA can’t be used if both parties are in the U.S. They’d need a search warrant, so this fake evidence would get tossed. Since I learned an hour ago that NSA agents were the perps, I’ve been suspecting that this operation isn’t an official NSA one; now I’m sure. There are way too many irregularities.”

“Ah, that brings up something in my thoughts,” Tamara mused. “I do a fair amount of work for DARPA. Isn’t the NSA under the Defense Department too?”

“It is, and your point is...?” Wilkins asked, smiling. “I think I see your idea.”

“Yep. My dad knows people in government—not only the State Department, but in Defense too. Other agencies like the CIA and you know about his FBI contacts. One guy he knows and keeps in touch with is one of the under-secretaries of Defense—in the research office, and DARPA is under him. I assume that the NSA must be in a different branch, like intel. Yeah, that must be where. Can I ask Dad to call you? I think he’s a great strategist and knows how to play a situation for maximum effect. He calls it ‘shock and awe,’ but I think it’s really a military doctrine of using overwhelming force.”

“I can see that, especially from what John Norris told me about him,” Wilkins chuckled. “Yes, we can meet—I assume you’ve told him about this situation?”

“Sure. He said to let you handle it; you know your business way better than him.”

“I’m liking him better and better. I’ve got some unrelated issues now and won’t be available until this evening, so have your dad call my cell about 7 p.m. He has that number; it’s how he first reached me. Sound good?”

Tamara and Peter left the office and while Peter drove them to the APL, Tamara called Wilson to update him on the NSA problem, which is how she was thinking of the situation now. When they arrived, she joined Miskin to continue working on the large-scale coil system. They now had a number of sub-coil assemblies built and were carefully matching their response to power input so that the complete system, when coupled, would be balanced.

~~~~

That evening, Wilson contacted Wilkins. She agreed to have Wilson call his Defense contacts the next day and set up a meeting to discuss the NSA blackmail attempt.

“Try to make it on Tuesday,” Wilkins said. “I’d like to know if their threat was actually a bluff, and if they really had applied to the FISA court to investigate Tamara. Anyway, if they follow through with the threat, they would go to the U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland to present their evidence. The U.S. attorney would then go to the federal district court to obtain an arrest warrant. I can have an agent at the U.S. attorney’s office to see if someone from the NSA appears; if someone does, I’ll have the agent detain him. So you want to set up a meeting at the Defense Department?”

“That’s my thought. Squash this idiocy at the source. And learn how this garbage happened in the first place.”

“Direct approach,” Wilkins said. “I like it. Call me when you get something set.”

The following morning, Wilson called Robert O’Rourke, explained the problem, and asked for an emergency meeting with him, the Defense secretary, and a top-level NSA official. O’Rourke was outraged at the news and promised to arrange a meeting with the appropriate officials and Wilson suggested a few more whom he felt should be there too. About two hours later, O’Rourke called Wilson back to tell him that the meeting was set for 2 p.m. Wilson relayed this to Wilkins’ office and she returned his call later in the afternoon.

“Got your message,” she said when he answered. “The meeting’s set, right?”

“Yeah, as I said in my message, it’s arranged for Tuesday at 2 p.m.,” Wilson told Wilkins. “When I called my Defense contact, the under secretary in the research division, and told him what was going on, all hell broke loose. I had to convince him not to go on the warpath; that could wait until the meeting when they’d see what the NSA was trying to do.”

Wilkins sighed and then said, “Damn; this is getting big now. Okay, our tech has the first results of his analysis; he’s looked at two of the phone-call recordings. He said that the sections which seem to be Tamara’s voice are actually computer-generated tracks and lack the noise and hum found in normal telephonic recordings. He told me that the people who did this used a technique called ‘deepfake’ to do voice cloning. And the supposed foreign voices on those recordings have the normal sub-audible hum and that was at 60 hertz, not the European 50.”

She briefly explained the ENF matching technique for him and continued, “The computer-generated voice was saved directly to the media rather than by recording an audio signal, he told me. So there isn’t any audio hum when the computerized speech occurs. But he did get matches on the supposed foreign voice. He said they matched to... let me read it ... the ENF database for the eastern interconnection of the U.S. electrical grid on October 29 between 2:19 p.m. and 3:47 p.m. My tech said the eastern grid covers most of the U.S., east of the Rockies. So those weren’t overseas calls at all, and the times don’t match the listed dates and times in the SD card’s phone data info file either. So our technical analysis shows this is fraudulent evidence.”

“Good, that’s great news to have tech backup like that,” Wilson said. “I assume you’ll come to the meeting with the evidence.”

“Wouldn’t miss it. I’m bringing Mr Simpson, our evidence tech, too, so he can handle questions about the faked recordings.”

The Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia

On the appointed Tuesday, Wilson, with Tamara and Nadine, met Agent Wilkins and her tech at the Pentagon Metro station, and they all went to the nearby visitor entrance. There, Wilson confirmed that everyone in his party was registered on the special access roster. Wilson was wearing his Marine class ‘A’s, as O’Rourke had requested. As he was attached to the Marine commandant’s office, he possessed a DoD Common Access Card with Pentagon access and therefore had visitor escort privileges. Tamara, who had access to DARPA research facilities, already had her own CAC. Wilkins and Simpson had FBI “blue badge” access to the Pentagon. Only Nadine had to go through the security check and be issued a visitor’s pass. She was fine with that.

When they arrived at O’Rourke’s office, they were led to a large conference room—there was space for thirty people around the large table and many more chairs along the walls.

Wilson walked over to O’Rourke and shook hands, commenting, “Great to see you; hope you aren’t planning to fill this room.”

“No way, but the deputy secretary wanted us to use the big room.”

“Let me introduce you,” Wilson said and motioned to the others. “You remember Nadine and Tamara.”

“Sure do. Great seeing you both again; sorry for these circumstances,” O’Rourke told them.

Tamara shot him a little smile. “Wait, you should enjoy what happens here. I will.”

Wilson looked over at Wilkins and noticed that she seemed to be talking quietly with one finger at her ear. She finished and smiled at him, then walked over.

“Spook phone, right?” Wilson grinned. She nodded. “Let me introduce you, then. Under Secretary O’Rourke, let me introduce you to FBI Special Agent in Charge Sarah Wilkins, out of the Baltimore office...” they shook hands, “... and Mr Foster Simpson, FBI ... you said forensic examiner, right?” He nodded. “Mr Simpson will tell us what he found when he analyzed those recordings.”

They shook hands as people began to enter the room and O’Rourke told them to find their name card at the table and sit there. Meanwhile Simpson began working with one of the secretary’s aides to hook his laptop up to the room’s projection system.

Wilkins whispered to Wilson as they went to their seats, “We have a NSA person in custody; they did send someone to the U.S. Attorney’s office.”

Wilson nodded.

At 2 p.m., O’Rourke opened the meeting. “Welcome, everyone. This is an important meeting and I’m sorry that we were so cryptic about the topic, but it does bear very heavily on national security. This time the problem comes from within the intelligence community itself, and we’ll get to that soon, after I turn over the meeting to my associate, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ralph Gross. But first, let’s go around the table and introduce ourselves, beginning with Ralph here.”

Gross gave a nod, saying, “Ralph Gross.”

Then came Dr Janine Carlson, director of national intelligence; then General Ezra Visson, director of the NSA; Mark Gray, associate deputy director of the FBI; and sitting next to Carlson, Visson, and Gray were their aides or chiefs of staff. A few seats away sat two staff members who were taking minutes. On the opposite side of the table were the Alexandres, Wilkins, and Simpson.

Tamara noticed that Visson’s eyes widened slightly when she gave her name and title, “Tamara Alexandre, physicist and engineer at Johns Hopkins University.” Interesting, he knows something, she thought.

Then Secretary Gross took over. “Last week I was given some extremely disturbing information about an intelligence operation being conducted in the Baltimore area and when I heard the details, to say I was distressed and angry would be an understatement. We are here now to learn exactly what happened and find out how such a thing could have occurred on my watch.”

Tamara was watching the others across the table and there was no sign that anyone knew what Gross was talking about. Even Visson looked uncertain, despite his earlier recognition of her name.

Then Gross asked Agent Wilkins to explain what had happened.

“I’ll start right in the middle of the events because this should get your full attention,” Wilkins began. “Miss Alexandre is the target of a blackmail attempt. We hope that they are rogue agents, but the perpetrators are, in fact, agents of the NSA.”

The result was an uproar, with many people standing and shouting questions and Gross called for order.

“Most of your shouted questions were asking for proof,” she went on when order was restored. “First, let me play a recording of the actual blackmail contact, which took place under the surveillance of the FBI, in a Baltimore coffee shop. The recording device used was an experimental electronic device invented by Miss Alexandre and it’s still in the development stage, but it worked just fine. You will see from listening to the recording why she wanted to use it as a backup to a regular FBI wire.”

She played the recording of the coffee shop meeting and then pointed out that the men had used electronic countermeasures to detect any recording or eavesdropping devices present. Her audience sat there, listening impassively.

“Who were they? Tamara had contacted me some weeks before; it appears that she has intelligence resources that are probably better than our agency’s or even the DoD’s. She had been alerted about a planned ambush at the BWI airport—and in fact, one had been set up; there was a plant of a large amount of counterfeit currency in a random passenger’s luggage which was retagged with her name, but Tamara’s warning, and my assistance, avoided that problem...”

Gray, the FBI official interrupted, “We’re still working on your report about that incident, Sarah. There are all kinds of blind alleys we’ve chased into.”

“Fine. Perhaps this info will give you some better leads. The perps who met with Miss Alexandre left her an SD memory card with recordings of her purported contacts with two foreign agents, offering to sell classified information to them.”

There was another hubbub at that. When it subsided, Wilkins continued, “That wasn’t all they left; they left fingerprints. Apparently they thought she’d have limited resources to fight their blackmail or extortion attempt and didn’t know that the FBI was watching. We tailed them when they left, all the way back to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. And the prints match NSA employees Nathan Gondon and Warren Kruse.”

Visson slapped the table in front of him. “Damn! That’s why the name Alexandre rang a bell. It was in this morning’s action report, to seek an arrest warrant for her on terrorism charges.”

Wilkins nodded. “Right. That NSA agent is in our custody now for attempted blackmail and other charges and we’re seeking warrants for Gondon and Kruse as well. I suppose you’d like to hear the evidence that the FBI has that will prove these cases. Let me play...”

There was a knock at the door, it opened, and a head poked in and looked around. Nodding, the man came in and stood at the side of the door and announced, “Okay to enter, sir.”

Through the doorway walked President Gerston.

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