Post reporter’s laptop and BlackBerry, plus the CIA officer’s cell phone and the disk Givens had handed over at the hotel, as well as the digital recording of the conversation between the two men.
He began with the recorded conversation at the hotel, sitting back and listening to it several times to make sure he missed nothing, especially not the reactions of the young CIA officer.
If nothing else Administrative Solutions under Sandberger had the well-deserved reputation for thoroughness. No messy shoot-outs in which innocent bystanders were gunned down. No trips to the Hill to answer intrusive questions by some congressional subcommittee. No tax audits by the IRS. No complaints from any foreign government. And damned few disaffected employees walking out the door threatening to tell all. In fact, Admin had remained beneath the radar of the media. Until now.
He’d argued against taking on Foster’s Friday Club as a client, but Roland had been adamant to do just that, arguing that the club’s powerful members and connections would lead to a lot of lucrative contracts.
“We can’t lose,” he’d promised.
Except that the media was all over the club and Admin was starting to come into the reflected glare. Something they didn’t want or need. Look what all the media attention had done for Ron Hachette and his company Task Force One. Some of his people had been brought under indictment for murdering supposedly innocent civilians in Baghdad. And Hachette himself was still under intense security by Justice.
What Givens had told Van Buren at the restaurant was as bad as they thought it would be, based on the information they figured the reporter had managed to gather over the past several months.
But Remington felt the first sense of buoyancy listening to the young CIA officer’s reaction. Van Buren had been, at the very least, skeptical, as he had every right to be. What Givens had told him was nothing short of fanciful—except of course for the fact that everything he’d said, plus much, much more, was true. He’d not yet stumbled upon the most important aspects of the Friday Club’s activities, especially not the reasons for what had been done and what was being done, nor the ultimate goals.
Science fiction, had been Remington’s initial reaction when Sandberger had brought him into the Friday Club’s fold. And even at that Remington suspected that he hadn’t been told the half of it.
Setting the recorder aside, he fiddled with the reporter’s BlackBerry, but after a few minutes finding only a long list of telephone numbers with nothing more than cryptic notations after each, along with several dozen Web sites, which he didn’t want to bother looking up at this point, he moved on to the laptop.
It was a high-end Toshiba, slim, lightweight, and wide open. After booting up, then hitting the file manager, Remington’s mouth dropped open. He was inside with no encryption program, not even a simple password to block access, which told him that Givens was either a man highly confident in the power he wielded as a newspaper reporter, or incredibly naïve, or terribly stupid, or all three.
Out of more than three hundred documents, fully one third of them had the notation “FC” in front of them: FC: Foster; FC: Weitman; FC: DoD; FC: Pentagon; FC: Homeland Security; FC: Atlanta—which Remington realized were files that involved the Friday Club and its members and associations.
Opening the FC: McCann file, he was struck dumb after the first page or so and he sat back in his chair to catch his breath. Givens had somehow stumbled onto payments made to the now deceased CIA deputy director of operations by the club to a Cayman Islands account from something called Littoral Associates, Ltd., which had been suggested by Sandberger two years ago.
The FC: Pentagon file contained similar lists of payments to several important generals in various accounts, mostly in Switzerland.
The FC: Atlanta file contained a detailed account of a highly complex and still ongoing program of gerrymandering that to this point had resulted in swinging seven of Georgia’s districts from solid Democrat to Republican. The manipulations had not helped in the last presidential election, but there was little doubt in Remington’s mind that given time the political climate in the state would change. It was about the long term, something Remington and Sandberger had not discussed in any detail. Admin’s job, vis-à-vis the Friday Club, was to provide security. Keep the media at bay. Keep the walls unbreached.
Keep a lid on investigators like Givens and his friend Van