Читать книгу The Payback - Mike Lawson - Страница 18

Emma had decided that she wanted to see the facility where Mulherin and Norton worked when they were inside the shipyard – the area where Whitfield had been just before his death. Richard Miller, the shipyard’s head of security who had been at the briefing, had already left the police chief’s office and was just getting into his car when Emma stopped him.

Miller had a head like a stubby cinder block: a square-shaped face topped by brush-cut gray hair. He had probably been a burly guy in his youth but at age fifty all the muscles had collapsed into a tire of fat around his waist. When Emma told Miller what she wanted, he told her that he had better things to do than walk her around the shipyard, at which point Emma took a card out of her purse and handed it to him.

‘Call that number, Mr Miller,’ she said. ‘A phone will ring in the Pentagon and someone with stars on his shoulders will explain to you why you want to be nice to me. Now I’m going to get a cup of coffee but I’ll be back in five minutes.’

Fifteen minutes later, Emma, DeMarco, and Miller were inside the shipyard, walking toward the training facility. As they walked, Miller kept glancing over at Emma; whatever he’d been told by the man in the Pentagon had made an impression.

To reach the training facility they had to traverse almost the entire length of the shipyard. The place was enormous and everything in it – the buildings, the equipment, the drydocks – was enormous. Miller said the shipyard’s machine shop was the biggest such facility west of the Mississippi River, and DeMarco believed him.

Four of the shipyard’s drydocks held submarines being overhauled and one drydock held two submarines that were being dismantled. The sixth drydock, the largest one, was empty, but big wooden blocks were laid out in a pattern for a ship to set down on. A big ship – a Nimitz class aircraft carrier.

Miller allowed them to look into a drydock holding a Trident submarine. A Trident submarine is five hundred and sixty feet long – almost the length of two football fields – and carries more weapons of mass destruction than most countries have in their entire arsenal. A Trident is a sleek, sinister-looking killing machine, and it wasn’t hard for DeMarco to imagine it sitting motionless beneath the waves, a missile hatch silently opening – and then the entire world being set on fire. But ‘Gee that thing’s big’ was the only thing he said out loud and Emma just looked at him – like he was the first idiot to master understatement.

Miller introduced them to Dave Whitfield’s boss, the person in charge of training the shipyard’s nuclear engineers. She was a handsome, dark-haired woman in her forties named Jane Shipley and she was even taller than Emma. Shipley showed them her domain, which consisted of several classrooms, study areas for the trainees, and the ubiquitous corporate cubicles where instructors and other personnel pounded away on computers.

Shipley pointed out the cubicle where Mulherin and Norton worked. It was located on the front wall of the building and looked just like all the other cubicles: two desks, two chairs, two phones, two computers, one filing cabinet. DeMarco could tell that Emma wanted to yank open all the drawers, but she restrained herself.

There was also a large walk-in vault at the rear of the training area, the type of vault you would find in a bank. DeMarco could see blueprints and big books – books the size of Bibles or phone books – on shelves inside the vault. A woman – half guard, half librarian – was posted at a desk near the vault.

‘What do you keep in there?’ DeMarco asked Shipley.

‘Drawings of ships’ systems and components. The big books are reactor and steam plant manuals.’

DeMarco remembered what Dave Whitfield had said: the reactor plant manuals told you how the ships’ reactors worked.

Emma looked at the vault, then did a slow turn to take in the rest of the training complex. To Shipley, she said, ‘You have a lot of classified information in this facility, don’t you?’

‘Well, sure,’ Shipley said. ‘Our engineers are trained primarily on three different classes of ships: Nimitz class aircraft carriers, Trident submarines, and Los Angeles class attack submarines. We can’t go running all around the shipyard every time we have to prepare a class or teach a course.’

‘I know,’ Emma said. ‘But there’s so much information here, all in one place.’ Before Shipley could respond, Emma said, ‘Are the manuals, those reactor plant manuals, are they on CDs?’

Miller hesitated. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It’s the most efficient way to update them when they’re revised.’

‘CREM,’ Emma said.

It had sounded to DeMarco like Emma was either clearing her throat or uttering a heretofore unknown curse word.

‘What did you say?’ DeMarco said.

‘CREM. They have CREM,’ Emma said. Now the word sounded like a sexually transmitted disease. ‘Controlled removable electronic media. In other words, CDs and floppy discs that contain classified information. CDs that can be stolen and copied and e-mailed. CREM is a security officer’s nightmare, isn’t it, Mr Miller?’

Miller’s mouth took a hard set, bristling at Emma’s comment. ‘We control our classified material tighter than anybody in the business, lady,’ he said. ‘Particularly since Los Alamos.’

In July 2004, Emma explained to DeMarco later, two classified CDs were reported missing at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Weapons Physics Directorate – a place that designs and experiments with nuclear bombs. This was the same facility that the Chinese had supposedly infiltrated in the 1990s, making off with design information related to thermonuclear warheads. The CDs lost at Los Alamos in 2004 may simply have been misplaced – stuck in the wrong file drawer or safe – or accidentally destroyed. Subsequent investigations showed that the people at the laboratory, most of them egghead scientists with skyscraper IQs, were incredibly absentminded when it came to controlling classified material. Or maybe the CDs weren’t lost or destroyed – maybe they were mailed to North Korea or Iran or some other equally unfriendly party.

Because of what had happened at Los Alamos, the shipyard was ultracareful when it came to removable media. Miller explained that when an individual checked out a classified CD from the vault, the number of the CD was recorded – just like when you checked out a book from the library – and at the end of the day, the CD had to be returned to the vault. An inventory was done every day to make sure all the CDs had been returned – and if one was found missing, Miller’s security force went to high alert. The problem was CDs could be copied and their contents e-mailed. When Emma said this, both Miller and Shipley responded immediately.

‘No way,’ they said, simultaneously. They explained that the shipyard’s computers were designed to prevent copying classified CDs and the shipyard’s firewall prevented classified material from being e-mailed out of the yard.

‘Humph,’ was Emma’s response. ‘And Mulherin and Norton, I suppose they have access to these classified CDs?’

‘Yes,’ Shipley said.

‘And do they use your computers or their own?’

‘You can’t bring personal computers into the yard,’ Shipley said. ‘So their contract specified that they be given a work space here in the training facility and computers and phones. You saw their office. They needed the computers because a lot of the training materials – class outlines, course materials, exams – are on CDs or a secure network. But like I said, you can’t burn copies of classified CDs on our computers.’

‘I see,’ Emma said.

Shipley shook her head and said, ‘Mulherin and Norton are a couple of eight balls. I wouldn’t hire them to clean my blackboards. Why anybody would pay these guys to review my training program is beyond me.’

‘You know Dave Whitfield thought there was something, ah, funny about the work Mulherin and Norton were doing,’ DeMarco said. He didn’t want to use the word ‘fraudulent.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ Shipley said. ‘He complained to me about it.’ She hesitated, then added, ‘Look, I think this review Carmody’s doing is a waste of time, and I’ve already told you what I think of Mulherin and Norton, but there isn’t anything illegal going on like Dave seemed to think. He was upset because these guys were making more money than he was, but … well, that’s just the way Dave was.’

‘What about Carmody?’ Emma asked. ‘Does he spend much time here?’

‘No,’ Shipley said. ‘He comes up here once in a while – to check on Norton and Mulherin, I guess – but he spends most of his time on the subs.’

‘Doing what?’ Emma said.

‘Part of the training is the book stuff,’ Shipley said, ‘which we do here, and part is shipboard. Carmody is supposedly watching the shipboard training, but my guys say that he seems to spend most of his time just bullshitting with the sailors.’

‘But he’s on board the submarines a lot,’ Emma said. ‘On his own.’

‘Yeah,’ Shipley said. ‘Is there a problem with that?’