“It shouldn’t hurt very much.” We took the elevator to the lower level, where the Investigative Support Unit was the fire in the belly of the FBI. Wesley reigned over eleven other profilers, and at this hour, every one of them had left for the day. I had always liked the space where Wesley worked, for he was a man of sentiment and understatement, and one could not possibly know this without knowing him.
While most people in law enforcement filled walls and shelves with commendations and souvenirs from their war against base human nature, Wesley chose paintings, and he had several very fine ones. My favorite was an expansive landscape by Valoy Baton, who I believed was as good as Remington and one day would cost as much. I had several Baton oil paintings in my home, and what was odd was that Wesley and I had discovered the Utahan artist independent of each other. This is not to say that Wesley did not have his occasional exotic trophy, but he displayed only those that held meaning. The Viennese white police cap, the bearskin cap from a Cold Stream Guard, and silver gaucho spurs from Argentina, for example, had nothing to do with serial killers or any other atrocity Wesley worked as a matter of course. They were gifts from well-traveled friends like me. In fact, Wesley had many mementos of our relationship because when words failed I spoke in symbols. So he had an Italian scabbard, a pistol with scrims hawed ivory grips, and a Mont Blanc pen that he kept in a pocket over his heart.
“Talk to me,” I said, taking a chair.
“What else is going on? You look awful.”
“I feel awful.” He loosened his tie and ran his fingers through his hair.
“Kay” –he looked at me”–I don’t know how to tell you this. Christ! ”
“Just say it,” I said very quietly as my blood went cold.
“It appears that Lucy broke into ERF, that she violated security.”
“How could she break in?” I asked incredulously.
“She has clearance to be there, Benton.”
“She does not have clearance to be there at three o’clock in the morning, which was when her thumbprint was scanned into the biometric lock system.”
I stared at him in disbelief.
“And your niece certainly does not have clearance to go into classified files pertaining to classified projects being worked on over there.”
“What projects?” I dared to ask.
“It appears she went into files pertaining to electro- optics, thermal imaging, video and audio enhancement. And she apparently printed programs from the electronic version of case management that she’s been working on for us.”
“You mean from CAIN?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“What wasn’t gotten into?” I asked, stunned.
“Well, that’s really the point. She got into virtually everything, meaning it’s difficult for us to know what she was really after and for whom.”
“Are the devices the engineers are working on really so secret?”
“Some of them are, and all of the techniques are, from a security standpoint. We don’t want it known that we use this device in this situation and use something else in another.”
“She couldn’t have,” I said.
“We know she did. The question is why.”
“All right, then, why?” I blinked back tears.
“Money. That would be my guess.”
“That’s ridiculous. If she needs money she knows she can come to me.”
“Kay” –Wesley leaned forward and folded his hands on top of his desk”–do you have any idea how valuable some of this information is?”
I did not reply.
“Imagine, for example, if ERF developed a surveillance device that could filter out background noise so we could be privy to virtually any conversation of interest to us anywhere in the world. Imagine who out there would love to know the details of our rapid prototyping or tactical satellite systems, or for that matter, the artificial intelligence software Lucy is developing…”
I held up my hand to stop him.
“Enough,” I said as I took a deep, shaky breath.
“Then you tell me why,” Wesley said.
“You know Lucy better than I do.”
“I’m no longer so sure I know her at all. And I don’t know how she could do such a thing, Benton.” He paused, staring off for a moment before meeting my eyes again.