No sooner had I returned home from the office and ensconced myself on the couch to start the weekend with an 18 year old single malt scotch than the doorbell rang. It was Herb, my next door neighbor. He’s the owner of four upscale boutiques in Chevy Chase, Tyson’s Corner, White Flint and Montgomery Mall. His business is always good, and I’ve never seen him the least bit worried or upset about anything, but now he looked like he’d been chased out of Oak Hill Cemetery by the undead and ravenously vampiric body of Edie Sedgwick. He rushed into my foyer holding a load of envelopes and packages.
“Tom, I need your help – you know about this kind of thing,” he said breathlessly.
“What kind of thing?” I shot back.
“Spying, espionage, surveillance, intrigue, skulduggery, back stabbing, betrayal, politics, diplomacy – that kind of cloak-and-dagger stuff,” Herb continued as he ran into my living room and dumped his pile of correspondence on the coffee table.
“My experience with that kind of thing is dwarfed by Perkins up the street,” I offered, “he’s a chief spook over at Langley. Why not ask him for help?”
“Because,” Herb retorted as he drew closed the curtains facing the street, “I can’t be sure that the guys at Langley aren’t behind this!”
I resolved not to succumb to the contagion of Herb’s emotional condition, and so calmly resumed my seat on the couch and continued enjoying my scotch. “Why don’t you just relax,” I said, gesturing to the other end of the couch, “and begin at the beginning.”
As Herb settled in, he let go a huge sigh that reeked of anxiety. I poured out some of what I was drinking and handed it to him, neat.
“And then proceed until you get to the end.” Herb grabbed the scotch and downed the double shots I had poured him in one fell swoop. The poor devil was a mess – sweat beading on his brow, breathing like a spent marathon runner, hands shaking from what I could only guess was too much adrenaline brought on by intense fear.
“Somebody’s been reading my mail, Tom,” he finally managed, while extending his glass for a refill, which I readily supplied.
“Really?” I asked as I poured, “what makes you think that?”
Herb swigged down his second double, then picked up three padded mailing envelopes – they were all the same size and color. None had a return address, his address was typed in the same font on identical labels glued to the envelopes and, on all of them, the postage was stamps – Ronald Reagan commemorative 39 cent first class.
“The stuff inside came from three different companies,” Herb lamented, “a DVD movie, a hardcover book, and a set of new needles for my direct-to-disk audiophile air cushioned vinyl recording turntable.”
Herb was obviously not imagining things. I finished my scotch and stood up, motioning for him to follow. “Let’s take the rest of it down to the basement. I have some equipment we can examine it with.”
When we got to the basement, Herb handed me two rip-and-pull mailers. The tampering was even more obvious than that of the padded mailers – somebody had reattached the rip tags with staples and one of them had the contents reinserted backwards and upside down. The standard letter envelopes took a bit of work, but about ten minutes later, I had determined that all of them had been steamed open, and with too much steam at that – there were tell-tale wrinkles, visible under a stage microscope, from the excess moisture. A closer examination with a stand microscope revealed tiny beads of the substance used to re-seal the envelopes protruding from under the flaps. I took a sample and ran some quick chemical tests – it was Elmer’s glue.
“This is incredibly sloppy work,” I observed. “That rules out the CIA, FBI, NSA, DEA, ODNI, NIC, NNSA, DOJ, ATF, FINCEN, PFIAB, IOSS, NICX, the U.S. Marshals, Customs, the USPS Postal Inspectors, the Secret Service, Treasury, Interpol, ASIS, NZSIS, BND, CSIC, CNI, NBH, ABW, SEID, SISD, the FSB, the French IS, the AIVD, the Mosad, PRC Intelligence, ROC MJIB, British MI6, the Japanese Naicho, and all of the U.S., NATO, SEATO and ASEAN Defense Departments.”
I could tell that Herb didn’t know whether to be relieved or more frightened. “Who’s left, then?” he asked.
“Well,” I said, looking up from the test tube I was swirling over a Bunsen burner, “it could be the Fairfax County Sheriff, the Virginia State Police, or the Department of Homeland Security. You mixed up in anything illegal?”
“No way, Jose! This paisan no play with the godfathers.” “No, ah, illicit substances?” I inquired.
“Not just no – hell no! I get nice and drunk like the good Lord intended, Tom.”
“How about your customers? Any suspicious foreign nationals?”
Herb, taken aback, pondered for a moment. “Thousands of people come in to my shops in the course of a year…”
“No, no,” I interrupted, “I mean people you have met personally through your business – ones that wanted special deals, big purchases, discounts, rebates, that sort of thing.”
Herb smiled with temporary relief. “Alles klar, herr commissar. I don’t have any special customers like that, nobody Middle Eastern, Chinese, Cuban or anything else suspicious.”
“And no problem with your suppliers, I suppose. I’ve seen the stuff you sell, and it’s all from famous design houses. No change in that lately?”
“None at all, Tom. You know me – finest quality, upscale, high-end reputable merchandise and nothing but.” Herb exuded a certain pride when he made that statement. “I’ve never sold a knockoff or a fake designer item, ever. No shady contacts in my suppliers.”
“So we can,” I concluded, “safely rule out the local sheriff, the state cops and DHS. None of them would open your mail without a warrant, and, according to you, there’s no reason for them to have one.”
Herb lost his equanimity again. “You mean whoever is doing this doesn’t have a warrant from a judge?”
“Well, technically, no member of the Executive Branch needs one anymore,” I explained, “not since the latest Signing Statement. But with the Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, there’s no way any federal bureaucrat or agent is going to actually open your mail without a warrant, Signing Statement or not. No, there’s only one member of the Executive Branch idiotic enough to think he can open your mail without a warrant just because a Signing Statement says so…”
Herb’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Oh, my God! Tom, that’s unbelievable! Impossible! Why would he want to read my mail?”
I paused for a moment as I put down the test tube and booted the basement PC. “You’re quite the man about town, aren’t you, Herb?” I inquired as the disk drives began to hum. “You nail plenty of ‘tang at the various nightspots around the Metro area, right?”
Herb positively beamed with satisfaction when I said that. “You bet, Tom,” he chuckled wickedly. “But I had no idea that my exploits had become common knowledge around the neighborhood.”
That bit of disingenuous, self-serving rhetoric made me crack a wry smile of my own. “You’ve got to be kidding, boyo – every backyard cookout I’ve seen you at, you’ve been three sheets to the wind, telling the man of the house all about Don Herberto’s amorous exploits.” Herb blushed, quite deeply, and I swear, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen him do that.
“OK, so I’m young, my family has some serious bucks, my Dad set me up in business, I drive a Ferrari and I nail plenty of ‘tang,” he said, looking up at the ceiling, then, after a remorseful moment, down at the floor, “I mean, really, Tom, I’m not the only well-to-do horn-dog in the world.” His eyes rose from the exquisite five-color Carrara marble parquet to meet mine. “So what are you getting at?”
“Herb,” I asked, “in the last five years, have you ever been hanging out in a posh bar around the DC area, particularly in say, Georgetown, Foggy Bottom, K Street or the Federal Triangle, and met a pretty young woman with a slight Southern accent, possibly not quite 21, who entered in a hurry, went around hitting on guys more or less like yourself, talking to them for two or three minutes, and then hitting on you?”
A pallor of unease spread over Herb’s face. “Yeah,” he replied, “I’ve seen a couple of young women behave like that.”
“And,” I continued, “when she hit on you, was it not obvious that she wanted to know two things right away? First she wanted to know where you lived. Second, she wanted to know if you had a nice collection of expensive liquor at your house.”
The blood drained from Herb’s face. “Yeah,” he gulped.
“These couple of young women, who behaved like that, when they found out that you lived in Great Falls Virginia, which is a quick drive right across the river from Georgetown and only a few minutes drive further from those other places, and then learned that you have an extraordinarily well stocked wet bar at your bachelor pad – they hopped right into your Ferrari as fast as they could, did they not?”
Herb found a chair to sit down on. He seemed to age about ten years in fifteen seconds. “They did, Tom,” he finally managed to say.
“And when you got them home, these women went right for your world-class booze and sucked it up like a Texas fly slurping the sugar on a Louisiana shoo-pie, and then did anything you wanted as long as you kept pouring that hooch into their cake holes. And when you were completely exhausted in every aspect, they suddenly got dressed and demanded you drive them back to DC as fast as your Ferrari could go. But they didn’t want to return to the bars where you met them – they wanted you to drop them off on a street corner; two DC street corners, which, you will no doubt now recall, were, in each separate case, no more than four blocks from Lafayette Square.”
Herb started to slump in the chair. Once more, he was staring at the floor. “That’s right, Tom.” He knew what was coming next, so he didn’t wait for me to say it – “and I never saw them again.”
I clicked on the PC’s browser icon, grabbed a search engine URL from Favorites, selected Advanced Search Options, entered a certain famous family surname in the major search field and two female given names in the Boolean OR field. Then I clicked on Go. In a fraction of a second, the SERP appeared and I opened the first link for Herb to see, in full color and high resolution. “Do you recognize this person?” I asked him.
Herb took one look, doubled up as if someone had punched him in the guts, and vomited all over my exquisite five-color Carrara marble parquet basement floor. I clicked another link two entries down the first page of the SERP, displaying another photo. “How about her?” Herb raised his head, squinted at the monitor, fainted and fell off the chair into his puddle of puke.
That was last night. There’s a FOR SALE sign out on Herb’s front lawn today. He hasn’t told me where he’s going, and frankly, I don’t want to know. But I’ll tell you this – I did learn something from Herb’s visit. A mixture of stomach acid, single malt scotch and nervous bile can seriously stain white Carrara marble.