He wouldn’t let this slide.”
“That’s exactly why I didn’t tell him.”
“Call him, Matt. Now. Bring him up to date.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll call him tonight.”
She frowned. “Why in the world would someone go to all that trouble to implicate me?”
“More misdirection,” said Logan. “It’d be no big deal for the CIA to tap into the computers at the Otto Foundation and their bank. They could have set up the whole thing so that it looked as if Nigella was receiving money into that account for months. Then, suddenly the money started going to the Sarasota bank and J.D. was withdrawing it. They just added J.D.’s Social Security number to the mix to make it seem more authentic.”
I shook my head. “But that would presuppose they knew that we’d get into Stanley’s computers and follow up on the bank’s.”
“No big deal,” said Logan. “They’d pointed you at Stanley and could guess that you and Jock would follow up and stumble across the drugs and the accounts. The CIA, or whoever, must have known that you knew about Stanley being Bracewell.”
“I don’t see how anybody could have picked up on that information,” I said. “It was kept pretty close. Just the memos to J.D. and Doc and to my own file.”
“Maybe they hacked into your computer,” said Logan.
“I think I can explain it,” said Doc. “My office computers had been compromised. Somebody set them up so that everything was being mirrored on an off-site computer.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.
“A month or so ago we upgraded our entire system. An outside vendor came in and spent a couple of weeks reworking things. I think one of their people fixed our system so that anything that was on it was being seen on another computer somewhere else in the world. All my e-mails would have been intercepted.”
“Including the memos I sent you.”
“Right. I didn’t think about that until Saturday afternoon late. I rousted our IT guy and had him check out the system. He spent all night working on it and found the back door or whatever the hell they call those things. He couldn’t track where the signal was going. I figured it had to be CIA.”
“Can you trust your IT guy?” asked Jock.
“Yes. He’s been with me from the beginning. He’ll keep quiet about what he found.”
“So,” said Logan, “the CIA or whoever was reading your memos, Matt.”
“I don’t believe it’s the CIA,” said Jock. “There may be a rogue element that’s involved, but the agency itself wouldn’t take a chance on getting caught up in something like this.”
“And,” I asked, “who are the Asians we keep bumping into?”
“There’re only five of them that we know about,” said Jock. “The guy whose elbow you broke, the woman he was with, and the guy who hired Bates to kill Matt. The three of them were aboard Dulcimer the night of the murders. The fourth one is the guy who held a shotgun on us at Stanley’s house in Macon, and of course, there’s Nigella Morrissey. Nigella’s Vietnamese and the guy at Stanley’s house spoke Vietnamese. Maybe the other three are Vietnamese, too.”
“Vietnamese working for the CIA?” I asked.
“The four that anybody heard speak English, including Nigella, are probably American born or at least have been here most of their lives,” said Jock. “Maybe they’ve been recruited by some rogues in the agency.”
“Or maybe,” said Logan, “this is personal.”
“What do you mean?” asked J.D.
“Maybe the ghosts of Ban Touk are coming home to roost,” Logan said.
I thought he might be right. Avenging angels riding a dark wind blowing from the village. A wind not unlike the one that fueled the fire and consumed the dead on that fateful night so many years before.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
Dinner was a simple affair. Doc had a large grill built into his patio, a summer kitchen I think it’s called. He grilled fresh grouper steaks for eleven; Jock, Logan, J.D., me, and the seven surviving members of Team Charlie. Harrison Fleming tossed the salad and heated the bread in the built-in electric oven. The wind was up so the small bugs that like to bite were kept away. We ate the steaks, salad, and bread and drank some very good wine around a big table next to the pool, overlooking the clear water of the sound. We talked of things of little importance, putting off the serious stuff, as if by agreement, until we finished dinner.
Doc cleared the plates and stashed them in a dishwasher under the counter.