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Nutsbe thought Covington was working the special agents. There was a men’s club chumminess to all this. A brotherly pact he was articulating.
“You assure us that this is a protected conversation, knowing the full strength of Iniquus stands behind Mr. Crushed,” Covington smiled a slow smile. “or we shake hands, and I will escort you to your car,” Covington spoke with a monied southern drawl. It put people at ease.
Nutsbe’s mom loved that kind of voice. She said it was “solace.” Nutsbe always knew when he found his mom curled on the couch, knitting and watching To Kill a Mockingbird, that she was emotionally wrung out and needed a dose of Atticus Finch to make her feel safe and calm.
I should call Mom. As soon as the words formed in his brain, he jerked that thought to a stop. Nutsbe needed to stay away from his family unless and until he figured out how Russia discovered his name and what that would mean in the shakeout.
This was why Iniquus employees went dark once they signed their contracts. They worked to have a zero footprint, especially the members of the operational teams. Nutsbe even paid for his house in full with his cash signing bonus. His trust held the title. It would be nigh on impossible to trace his personal address back to his name.
Nutsbe scanned through the normal modes of tracking someone down. Yeah, all his official papers—driver’s license, voter registration, income tax forms—all listed his barracks apartment on Iniquus’s high-security campus as his address. And like Finley said, there was nothing beyond the absolute necessity in terms of his name in the public sphere.
Who had a reach that could touch Nutsbe’s info?
Banks had his voice for phone recognition. That technology certainly existed. If someone had recorded his voice along the way, they’d have to put it together with Thaddeus. That was the confounding part. The planes of his face were mapped, and his fingerprints were taken as part of his security clearance. The FBI had access to that.
The FBI’s reach and capabilities were the problem here.
As Nutsbe thought through the possibilities, Kennedy and Finley had taken a moment to discuss Covington’s proposal. And though they didn’t look thrilled about it, Kennedy said, “You’ve got a deal.”
“Not quite,” Nutsbe said. “More. I need updates on what’s going on. You don’t keep me in the dark when it comes to the me part of the case.”
“We’ve got you,” Finley said.
It wasn’t an official “We’ve got you” it was a verbal handshake kind of deal. That Covington had put the weight of Iniquus into play was an incentive. Nutsbe knew these men, and they had always been forthright and dependable. He just hoped that when he was talking about their counterintelligence chief, the one that might have a trickledown effect on their career trajectories, they could hold onto their ethics.
“This touches close to home for you. So, here we go,” Nutsbe said as he splayed his fingers wide on the dark mahogany of the conference table. “Panther Force was working with a longtime client out of New Jersey. A couple of years ago, they approached us because they had an executive that they were concerned about.”
“Who was the client?” Kennedy asked.
“Confidential,” Covington said.
“What was the concern?” Kennedy asked. “Just in general.”
“At the time they came to Iniquus, their in-house security detected emails and phone calls going to Albania,” Nutsbe replied. “At first, they thought that their guy—” Nutsbe looked at Covington. “Can I say that name?”
Covington gave him a nod.
“First name Blerim. Last name: Hotel. Oscar. X-Ray. Hotel. Alpha. He pronounces it Ho-JAH, just like the former Prime Minister of Albania Hoxha, but there’s no familial connection. I checked.” Nutsbe bit at the inside of his cheek. “At first, the company thought Hoxha might be concerned about his family and that he was reaching out to relatives.”
“They brought it up with him?” Kennedy asked. “That he shouldn’t be making international calls of a personal nature from the company line?”
“Right,” Nutsbe said. “He reassured them that this was about business. The CEO wasn’t satisfied with his answers, so he quietly got Iniquus involved. It was handed to our team because this was right before Panther Force provided a close protection detail for their execs heading over to Montenegro for a retreat near the Albanian border a couple of years ago.”
“So you started looking into this guy’s background to see if he presented a threat to his coworkers while they were abroad,” Kennedy said.
“Exactly,” Nutsbe said. “Hoxha had ties to Albanian intelligence.”
“Recently?” Kennedy asked.
“No. Decades ago. Hoxha would be sixty-four-ish,” Nutsbe said. “He came to the U.S. when he married in his early thirties and became an American citizen. But since he raised a bunch of red flags for the company’s president, we were allowed to make audio recordings of Hoxha’s phone lines.”
Covington leaned forward. “That’s his work number that goes through their switchboard, but it’s also the company-owned cellphone that is issued and is supposed to be dedicated to work calls only. This is a precaution to keep any spyware, malware or tracking from attaching to the company, and also so the company can legally monitor their workforce. New Jersey has a one-party consent law. And whether Hoxha remembered or not, when he was hired, he gave written consent to record all calls made on company phones.”
“What industry?” Finley asked.
Covington steepled his fingers under his chin. “Confidential.”
“But we can look up Hoxha’s name and find that out,” Finley pointed out.