Industrial Espionage

He skipped the last two speeches of the conference and headed up to the National Zoo. The weather had returned to summer for the day, with temperatures climbing into the 80s—unusual for mid-November in D.C. The heat combined enticingly with the fall foliage, still in its full glory here.

The zoo was very near the Washington Sheraton—a few blocks tramp uphill through whatever leaves had fallen since the last batch had been raked. Darkness would descend in an hour or so, and that brief span of strolling around and looking at species other than human would constitute some of the vacation portion of his business/vacation trip.

People were scattered along the paths—they always were—but not many, since this was so late in the season and late in the day. He walked up toward the aviary, intending to see the birds of prey. These were the animals he most identified with—those powerful birds, keenly honed hunters of high intelligence. Anyone who has seen the condor might call him the king of beasts. Can the lion catch him and bring him down? No, not really.

He saw her up ahead on the path, in the area marked as the residence of the red foxes, where she was peering into the bushes. He couldn’t detect any movement, however, and wondered if the foxes were out and about, and if she was wondering the same thing herself. He hung back and watched her watching—what?—maybe nothing. She was quietly stunning, he thought, someone you could overlook, but shouldn’t.

Then he saw the two young men. They stood motionless on a branching walkway, hidden in the shadows of one of the large old—what were they?—oaks? The men had their eyes on her, too, stalking her, probably in order to rob her, but maybe something else. He debated whether she had seen the men or had sensed them, she was so focused on whatever she imagined she saw or actually did see there in the bush. But possibly she was listening behind her, listening to their soft whispers as they plotted to do her harm.

She broke her concentration and moved on easily, without haste, turning to read the explanatory signs, but not stopping or slowing down. The men, boys really, followed behind, and he let them, putting them between her and him and then moving noiselessly after.

By no means was his intention to protect her. He merely wanted to see what would happen.

She paused, took a mirror from her purse and glanced into it, adjusting her hair. He presumed that meant she was aware of the boys, the men, behind her and was simply checking to see if she was correct. But he really didn’t know.

This peculiar entourage hastened past the bird house, which he had wanted to visit. He walked on with the others, nonetheless. The chase at hand was much more interesting than the encaged creatures. These boys fancied themselves to have hawklike skills, the ability to swoop down on an unsuspecting little rabbit and grab the defenseless mammal in their talons. Such was the animal kingdom, he acknowledged, but among the beasts, the hunting was one species upon a second, not brother upon brother. Perhaps no one had told these children that men—and women—belong to one family, one phylum.

She led them further afield, toward a more isolated part of the park, where the signs promised spectacled bears. Indeed, he, too, wanted to see those curious creatures. He watched the young men instead, the way they seemed to be pumping each other up, without speech, but by gestures, leading one another on to greater heights of machismo, before they struck.

Eric kept well back and took what cover he could. When the men finally glanced behind them, they appeared to see nothing at all to alarm them.

She stopped at the top of the walk, glancing into the area behind the electrified fencing to see if the bears were actually in their habitat on this glorious day. The boys came closer, and as they approached, divided, so that they could come upon her from both her right and her left.

Eric crept up near enough to view the action, but not close enough to disturb the hunters at their work. He smiled.

The taller boy on the right, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of a much-admired local sports team, came directly toward her. She looked up, a pleasant and expectant expression on her face. Yes, she was a beauty. Her short black, glossy hair swung coquettishly, framing softly rounded cheeks and a delicate jawline. The high color in her face was natural, not the result of cosmetic intervention. Her lips glistened.

The first boy took a spring-action type of knife from his pocket, which he opened at once, purposefully. Simultaneously, her second attacker appeared from behind, so she was caught between the two. They said something to her that Eric couldn’t quite catch.

Gazing straight into the first boy’s eyes, she wrapped the strap of her purse around her arm. Without a second’s hesitation, she kicked the taller attacker in the groin, simultaneously blocking the swing of the immediately descending blade with her purse, knocking the weapon out of her attacker’s hand. The young man cried out in pain and gripped himself, falling over onto the ground.

She wheeled, bringing her knee up as she did so, to kick the second male forcefully in the chest. The boy staggered back, regained his balance, then came toward her again. He didn’t have a knife or gun but seemed to think he could handle this wild little female anyway. He grabbed at her arm to bring her under control, but he couldn’t even touch her. Instead, the toe of her shoe thumped against his ribs. A startled expression came over his face. Perhaps he was getting the idea!

Not quite. The boy’s intention was to subdue her, and he couldn’t imagine it otherwise. He lunged. She stepped back quickly, causing him to stumble. He changed direction and threw himself at her once again, an enraged bull. Smiling, she dodged the fist directed at her face. Her hair wasn’t even mussed.

This had gone on long enough. Eric came forward up the path, not bothering to hide his presence. The second boy, his face red with effort and frustration, saw that he was now trapped between his intended victim and a rescuing male. The young man turned and ran across the parkland. The first attacker still lay doubled over on the ground, breathing in gasps, but starting to recover.

“Damn it, Eric,” Helen said in annoyance. “I knew you were back there. Couldn’t you have done a little something to help me out?”

“That would have been rude, wouldn’t it?” he asked in sincere puzzlement. “Chauvinistic?” He hadn’t wanted her to be ticked off at his interference.

Helen looked down at the young man who had begun to rise. “Get out of here, you creep, before I really hurt you,” she told him. She put her foot on the fallen knife, so he couldn’t take it with him. Turning, she gave Eric a piercing look of pure feminine annoyance.

He was here for the International Security Systems Symposium—"I Triple S.” She was here to be with him and to ‘network’ in the bar and exhibit hall. He had actually paid for the seminars, including the lectures that he had just skipped. She didn’t feel like forking over several hundred dollars, she had told him, in order to be fed information she could pick from his brain later on.

Nonetheless, she had sat up until midnight the first night reading the bound conference proceedings, while he had tried to fall asleep, totally conscious of her presence in the bed with him. They hadn’t spent that many nights together, especially lately, and this was the first time in several weeks.

The sky was nearly dark as they walked back from the zoo, he to attend the cocktail party arranged for the conferees, and she to forage for contacts at the lobby bar. They were both, frankly, looking for jobs. Each was trained as an executive protection specialist, but he no longer wanted to work in the field and she was the restless sort, not certain what she wanted to do next.

Eric hoped to add operations security—OPSEC—and espionage countermeasures to his security repertoire, either for a full-time position or as a consultant. Mostly, he wanted, at last, to have a stable home where he could bring up his son. The boy was six and lived with Eric’s sister, Katherine, in Larchmont, New York. Oh, yes, David had Down syndrome; he was developmentally disabled.

Helen, ready for something new, had latched onto Eric’s direction.

This conference focused on information security, most specifically against espionage from abroad. National intelligence efforts of the Russians, the French, the Israelis, and certainly the Japanese, were centering on industrial data, particularly high-tech research. The idea was only slowly dawning on U.S. companies that they must now protect themselves in a stringent, well-organized fashion.

Eric circulated at the party, trying to find out what companies people were with and get their cards. Too many of the attendees, however, were employed by the military or other government entities. Having spent eight years in the Army, Eric preferred to work on the corporate side. Companies had as many failings as the public sector did, but not the identical ones he had grown weary of.

Eric found himself stuck in a corner talking to a computer nerd from the National Security Agency who began to spell out the details of the agency’s Blade Runner, the latest national means of cracking encryption. The fellow rambled off on the subject of cryptoprocessors. Eric wondered why the guy was being so loose-mouthed at a security conference, but maybe it was okay, since Eric himself didn’t understand what the hell he was talking about anyway.

When finally, Eric ran out of stock phrases with which to lob back the conversational ball, he excused himself. He looked around, feeling pretty much as if he didn’t know what he was doing here.

He abandoned his club soda on a serving tray and exited Ballroom B. Well, that hadn’t worked. He’d join Helen at the bar and they could have dinner; they had passed a decent-looking restaurant on their trek back from the zoo. He brightened. At least there was that. He walked over to the bar area and looked around for her. The place was noisy and smoky and filled with men wearing tags like his own.

He didn’t see Helen. Maybe she had gone up to their room. That was even better. They could make love and then go on to dinner. He took the elevator up.

His heart beat a tad fast with anticipation, but when he opened the door, he saw that she wasn’t there. He sank into a chair. At least the room was quiet, and no one was smoking. Where was she? He looked at his cell and retrieved his single message. The caller was Helen, phoning from either the bottom of the ocean or a noisy bar, telling him to go ahead and eat; she was in the middle of something.

His cheeks burned and he sort of felt like whimpering, but he was a thirty-two-year-old combat veteran and couldn’t permit himself to react like a wounded adolescent. He tried to laugh instead and wound up smiling wryly. Some things worked for him—that was true—but some things surely didn’t.

He showered and went down to dinner alone in the hotel’s second-best restaurant. The crab cakes and homemade coleslaw were nicely done. Dinner was the most welcome thing that had happened to him all day, maybe so far this year. But this was only November. Something great could come along before the first of January.

Upstairs, he undressed and slid into bed with the conference proceedings. She had been reading this? Most of it was unfathomable. “Transmission media type and topology determine media reliability and availability,” he read. Topology was like, conditions in the field. “Media types include parallel cables, serial cable, radio, microwave, and satellite.” Fine. He guessed the NSA computer hack would understand this article. Ah, Christ, he’d better go to the transmission security seminar tomorrow.

He poured over the next day’s schedule, marking the most obscure programs as musts. But he definitely did want to hear the one about Pegasus, the Israeli software that could latch onto a person’s cellphone and take total control without the phone’s owners suspecting a thing. Although licensed to nations only, Eric had heard some of the nations it was licensed to used it to spy on journalists and dissidents. What a world.

After browsing through an almost readable article on labeling documents according to their security classification, he lay down, and let himself drift a little, rousing only when he heard the click of the door.

He sat up as she came into the room and looked at his watch. It was ten-thirty. He couldn’t decide if that was awfully late for her to be returning or blamelessly early. He didn’t say anything, for fear of sounding as if he were whining.

“Were you sleeping? I’m sorry if I woke you up.” She didn’t seem to be sorry; she seemed aglow, in particularly high spirits. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, then began removing her jewelry. “You ate, didn’t you?” she asked. “You got my message?”

He watched her suspiciously. He could remember watching his one-time wife like this—wondering what her actual life was like, what her thoughts were at the moment. Such uncertainty wasn’t a very pleasant aspect of a relationship. That sense of suspicion reminded him of all the rotten feelings that came up when you were emotionally involved.

“Aren’t you going to ask me where I’ve been?” she demanded, hanging up her blouse and giving him a sidelong glance. Both the question and the striptease piqued his interest.

“Out with some sexy guy with plenty of money, who wants to give you a job,” he suggested sarcastically. He wasn’t going to be very well behaved this evening, he could tell. That made him feel frustrated, too.

“Bingo,” she responded. “You’re either psychic or psychotic. It’s hard to decide which. I have a job. A great job.” She was full of life, excited, fairly dancing around in her underwear. She sat on the edge of the bed to remove her pantyhose.

“Okay, go on, tell me about it.” He forbid himself to show the slightest bit of jealousy and made every effort to smile, even though she wasn’t looking in his direction. “Great,” he added. “You deserve something good.” But did she? Had she worked as hard as he had the last two months trying to land something? He didn’t entirely like himself for feeling this way, thinking these thoughts, but there it was.

“I’m practically in,” she announced, turning toward him, her eyes shining. “I know I’m going to get it. The security director at Westlake Technologies, Terry Ryan, offered me the job of information security manager at their headquarters in Westchester. All I need is a prior reference telling him that I’ve served in exactly that same position with overwhelming success.” She smiled and dropped down on the bed, scooting toward him.

At a moment like this, it was hardly his place to remind her that she had never done such a job before in her life. He was sure she realized it anyway. He smiled again, cautiously.

“Oh, don’t look so glum,” she told him. “All I need to do is call Mrs. M. She’ll have Dr. M. tell Ryan that I was information security director at MacMan and did a great job. Klein will have to agree.”

Helen was referring to Dr. Manfre, CEO of MacMan Pharmaceuticals, and his security director, Jim Klein. Helen and Eric had worked protection for the Manfres and Dr. M. would probably do anything for them—maybe even lie. The idea didn’t sound altogether savory to Eric though. He would never ask Dr. or Mrs. M. to lie for him, and he couldn’t understand Helen doing it. But that was her way, he guessed.

She gazed up at the ceiling, thinking her thoughts, making plans for her future. He could feel the heat radiating out from her, but he doubted that she was actually present with him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re pissed because I didn’t come back for dinner.” She looked at him. “Did you meet anyone? Did you make any good contacts? I hope you didn’t have to eat dinner alone.”

He took her hand, put it on his bare chest, and began stroking himself with her fingers. When he removed his own hand, she continued caressing him. She laughed. “You’re so subtle,” she said. She rolled over and kissed him on the lips. He reached out for her, instantly hard.

Helen came up for air, still distracted. “You won’t believe the salary,” she added. “They want to pay me for my expertise.” She giggled, since she knew she had none. “There may be a lot of travel, too.” With this guy Ryan, he imagined.

He pulled her to him again and ran his hands down the muscles of her back to the perfect roundness of her butt. “Go on,” she whispered. Her hands were between them, her fingers creeping up his thighs.