"Any idea who gathered this all up?"

"None whatsoever. Do you?"

"None offhand."

"It's quite a bundle for an ambitious federal prosecutor to sink his teeth into," Louderbush said. "A federal prosecutor or a reporter from the Times or the Times Union who's interested in illegality and corruption over at the Shy McCloskey gubernatorial campaign. It looks to me as if there's Pulitzer Prize potential here."

"It's all pretty innocuous, really."

"Impersonating a federal agent?"

"It's not treasonable in this case, although the law does frown on it."

"And are you recording our conversation as we speak, Mr.

Strachey?"

"I might be."

"Ah. I might be, too."

I noted that the missus's handbag was aimed right at me.

"So, is it safe to say," Louderbush went on, "that we have arrived at a point of stalemate?"

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* * * *

My impulse was to call Timmy, but when I felt for my phone the thing seemed toxic in my pocket and I let go of it. I couldn't call Dunphy either. As I walked up State Street, the phone sounded its fluty little tune. I saw that it was Dunphy calling me; he must have received a report from the Clean-Tech listeners, and he would be instructing me to fly to Brazil for an extended period. I tossed the phone in a trash barrel in front of City Hall, then thought better of that and reached in and retrieved it. Bud Giannopolous would want to have a look at it.

I made it to Crow Street, not panicky but hyperalert, and picked up my car. I remembered vaguely where Giannopolous lived, in an attic in the Pine Hills section of Albany, ten minutes away. The big frame houses looked a lot alike on Giannopolous's street, but I was able to pick out his place from the wire antennas and satellite dishes on the roof. His building looked like a CIA safe house in Bethesda.

I would have been followed, but I didn't care. Somebody already knew about Bud, and about me as a client of Bud's, so what were they going to do next, say boo?

I parked the car on the street and buzzed Bud's intercom.

"Yo."

"Strachey."

"Abandon hope all ye who enter here."

"You're telling me."

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The door clicked open, and I climbed the two wheezing flights. Somebody on the second floor had been smoking pot for breakfast and I took a deep breath.

Bud had a headset on when he opened his door, and I said, "Houston, we have a problem."

He gave me a little oh-no-bother wave of the hand as I stepped into a room that was piled high with Bud's poli-sci and world affairs book collection on one wall and a long table heaped with computers and other electronic gear against another. A dormer window looked down on the backyard of the house next door, where a man had a motorbike upside down and was fiddling with its front wheel. A poster on the rear wall of Bud's room showed a picture of some pita bread and a bowl of dip and bore the words I am hummus, nothing is alien to me.

"Can I speak freely in here?" I asked him.

"If not here, where?"

Bud was roughly five-feet-two and bore a striking resemblance to the one-time emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie: ginger-skinned, high forehead, noble brow. Both Bud's bearing and his costume were more casual. He wore no medals and bore no scepter, and his outfit was non-imperial: ripped jeans, flip-flops, a faded T-shirt with an image on it of a squid wearing a hat that looked like a satellite dish. Nor would a crown sit easily on Bud's spiky little dreads.

"We may need lawyers," I said. "Or at the very least PR

firms."

"Nah. What's up?"

"My cell phone was hacked."

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He seated himself on his throne, an oversized wheeled office chair with cracked plastic armrests, and I perched on a bench. Stacked next to me were hundreds of techie magazines and computer catalogs, and the piles shifted ominously as I brushed against them.

"Not a big deal getting into cell phones," he said. "I've done it. All you need is an asset at whichever phone company it is who will give you the PIN code for anybody's phone."

"I guess this is against the law?"

He chuckled. "I would certainly hope so. What are we here, freakin' Hamas?"

"Well, in this instance there may be consequences—have been already." I retrieved the envelope from the Price Chopper supermarket bag the Louderbushes had provided for me and watched while Bud read through the transcripts and other documents.

"Holy Moly."

"Yeah."

"This is the product of a consummate professional."

"Do you recognize a professional colleague's work signature?"

"Well, no. It's not that easy. I'd need more samples, and I'd need to study them over time."

"I'll have to have a new phone, I guess. And number."

"I can fix you up."

"Are you and I going to go to prison, Bud?"

"Ha ha ha!"

Why was I not reassured? "I guess you can see from the transcripts what I've been working on. The Shy McCloskey 206

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campaign hired me to prove that Kenyon Louderbush has had abusive sexual relationships with young men. This information—it's true, by the way—is supposed to drive him out of the gubernatorial race. I just met with Louderbush and his wife, and they handed me this bundle. They now consider me—and the McCloskey campaign—neutralized."

"Wow."

"So I'm in a bit of a pickle. I haven't talked to the McCloskey people about it yet."

"Kenyon Louderbush. My respect for that sorry old right-wing hack just went up."

"Not for his mixing sex with violence."

"No, that's creepy and disgusting. But I'm impressed as shit with his technical abilities—or somebody's. Any idea who did this stuff for him? It's ballsy and it's state of the art."

"I thought you said anybody could do it with inside technical data from a phone company. Verizon in my case."

"That's the easy part. It's doing it without the account holder becoming suspicious that's tougher. You haven't had any dropped calls or heard any weird beeps or clicks lately?"

"None that I noticed."

"Very nice work on somebody's part."

"Louderbush doesn't know who did it. This appalling packet was sent to him anonymously. Or so he claims. He could be lying. He's an experienced liar."

"This other hodge-podge of stuff—people you misrepresented yourself to in person supposedly. Can't you backtrack and find out who they talked to about you? It obviously wasn't law enforcement, or you would have heard 207

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from the feds by now, or at a minimum the attorney general's folks. Impersonating a BBC representative—that's a good one. I'll have to remember that. Can you do Telemundo?"

"I plan to backtrack, yes, and find out what I can. But now my cover is blown with these people—or some of them. It's hard to tell how many of my misdeeds were gleaned from the hacked phone calls and how many from interviewees ratting me out."