Chapter 529

At 1000 we were standing in the bricked patio to the south lawn. The wind had died down and the sun felt good, especially as it was the middle of February. I went out with the early ones and stood at the wall next to the door.

Ninety minutes later I was still standing by the door when the question and answer session began. The camera hogs were getting hammered with tough questions. The stuttering soon started and they began passing questions to others.

Then the words I was hoping I would not hear were uttered, “I believe Ambassador Jones had a broader knowledge of events and can answer that question,” one of the agency directors said. “Is the Ambassador still here?” “I think she is standing at the back,” someone replied. My cover blown, so I walked to the podium.

“Yes I can answer that, these arrests are indeed part of the previous terrorist raids. The information that was used to formulate last night’s arrests was part of an intercepted file in Middle East and Africa terrorist web traffic,” I said.

“Encrypted large files take time to break into, as these have,” I said.

“Marley, I think you had a question a moment ago?” I asked.

“Yes Ambassador; has the fact that this many high level government officials compromised this or previous investigations?”

“The extent of the damage at this time is unknown, that investigation will obviously take a lot time. The task force and other agencies have reached their limit without additional investigators. It takes a tremendous amount of time to train them and get them on board with things this complex,” I replied.

“Scott,”

“Of the group of officials, which one had been the most damning to the task force?” he asked.

“For the task force itself, it would have to be the one in the FBI IT lab. Luckily we divided up evidence and sent things to be evaluated to two labs. I have suspected something was wrong with the FBI lab because they were so slow and often reported poor data results when the other tech group reported in twenty four hours or less,” I said.

“Paul?”

“There were arrests nationwide last night; has everyone on the list been arrested?” Paul asked.

“No, the arrests go on. I am sure as the ones arrested negotiate for less jail time, they will give up accomplices. They need to make that decision quickly for it to have any value in negotiations. I’m not a fan of bargaining away jail time unless it is traded for people of value,” I replied

“However, that is a Justice Department decision to make, not mine. My decision would be for the firing squad immediately after the guilty verdict. I have been told I have no compassion; a true statement when it comes to traitors. For a few bucks they sold hundreds of billions of dollars and decades of research and development to our enemies. The result could be thousands of causalities - possibility millions - if a war went nuclear,” I added.

“Another point of issue is the billions of dollars and time it is going to take to make existing weapons systems reliable and dependable. The question is always going to be there; is a weapons system now programmed to fail when you need it the most? In some cases complete systems may be down months while the programming is rewritten and tested or they may simply have to be replaced. The DOD has a tremendous job ahead of it now.”

“I think that is about all the time we have. Any of you gentleman and ladies have a closing statement?”

When no one did the VIPs scattered.

I saw Hanna was off to the side giving a report to her station for the noon day report; I stepped off the patio to go speak to her. Four Secret Service agents followed me. She was just finishing up.

“Hey girlfriend, did you hear we bought the radio station we talked about?” I asked.

“No, are you still going the play that crappy music?” Hanna asked.

“NO! After we talked about the purchase, everyone had a different thing they wanted. Jason wanted big band music, Lisa wanted classical, Jake wanted truck driving songs, and I wanted old time country- something besides the new screaming at the top of their lungs and calling it a song. We decided to do segments; a hour long of each kind of old music and to do a real farm report three times a day,” I replied.

“You are going to have trouble finding advertisers for that, I think,” Hannah replied.

“We are not looking for them for a while; Ching Lee is going to run ads that sell the things JBG does and along with the new things that are in the works for us. The format and call letters change starts Monday as does the personnel shake up. The sales and accounting people are going to various JBG departments,” I said.

One of the Secret Service agents tapped me on the shoulder, “Boss, there are a couple people waiting on you inside.”

“I have to go, stop in and see me at the office. We can talk some more,” I said.