FORGOTTEN WITNESS (The Witness Series) by Rebecca Forster

Author:Rebecca Forster [Forster, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Rebecca Forster
Published: 2013-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

***

Half of Washington D.C. slept and the other half were awake and watching. The ones who were awake patrolled the streets, were glued to computer screens, and listened in on telephone conversations. When mischief was detected, the watchers called other people whose job it was to stop it. Sometimes, mischief made their jobs easier because it came directly to them. Usually it didn’t appear late at night, but there was always the exception and that night the exception was Eugene Weller.

He had put on his overcoat and braved the bad weather to get to a small building on a side street in a middle class neighborhood where some of the watchers worked. He doubted more than a handful of people knew the building housed a very specific unit of the NSA.

On the stoop, he took off his hat – a fedora that he was particularly fond of wearing in the fall – but didn’t unbutton his coat. He held his identification up to an almost impossible to detect camera eye embedded in the grout between two bricks. The lock was disengaged. He went in. A security guard sat at a table reading a magazine. Without a word, Eugene handed him his identification again and the man indicated a pad on his desk. Eugene pressed his thumb onto it.

“Do you know where to go?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

Eugene took the stairs to the second floor. He was at home in the silence and emptiness. Only one of the desks on the second floor was occupied and it was there that a young man worked diligently. Eugene walked right up to him and stood by his side but the young man kept working. When he was ready to talk, he laced his hands behind his head, looked at Eugene and said:

“Yeah.”

Eugene took Ian Francis’ cell phone from the pocket of his coat.

“I would very much like to know who this phone belongs to, a print of the histories: text, email, phone records. I would like to know where it was purchased. I would be especially grateful if you can pinpoint specifically where the user has been for, say, the last year.”

The young man took the phone. “Cheap.”

“Can you?” Eugene asked.

“Give me twenty,” he answered.

Eugene went to the small coffee room down the hall. Without unbuttoning his coat he put a printout in front of him and highlighted items pertinent to his report. When he was done he had highlighted seventy-five that interested him out of four hundred and eight. He had also spent exactly twenty minutes doing his chore. The young man came in with a printout and handed it to Eugene. He waited neither politely nor impolitely as Eugene perused it.

“Thank you.”

“Anything else?” the young man asked.

“No,” Eugene answered. “I’ll take it from here.”

The man melted away. He was like Eugene’s friends in college. Once they had served their purpose they were forgotten.

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