The Vulture by Frederick Ramsay Page A

persuasion?”
    â€œI’m guessing Antarctica.”
    â€œI’m hurt.”
    â€œI calls ’em like I sees ’em.”

Chapter Fifteen
    Karl called Charlie with his personal iPhone. It wouldn’t do to have his superiors know he was in communication with the CIA off the record and without authorization. Interagency cooperation is a concept that plays better at the top and in theory than in practice. What the FBI had uncovered about the radio repeater tower in Idaho, he said, was good news and bad news.
    â€œGive me the good news first,” Charlie said.
    â€œThe good news, if you can really call it that, is that the broadcast from the tower is generally directional. That is, it is beamed in a north by northwest direction and it only has any real strength for thirty miles or so. That could limit the search for the people we want somewhat.”
    â€œAnd the bad news?”
    â€œThere are two parts to that. First, all of the signals it transmits are encrypted or scrambled. My people say it is at a very sophisticated level. Second, it does not send a single signal. It seems that there may be as many as a dozen subscribers to the service on as many frequencies.”
    â€œWait a minute. What do you mean subscribers?”
    â€œThe tower is owned and operated by a company registered as Dexiplex, Inc. We are trying to establish its corporate profile now, but the wonks in that department say they’re being stonewalled for some reason. We do know it is a subsidiary of a larger media group. We haven’t been able to uncover who. Dexiplex owns and operates several of these towers around the country in areas where a market has been created by folks who are paranoid and/or fear the intrusive practices of the NSA, which they are convinced are ongoing. Probably with some justification, if the news reports are right. And then, some of them are people who believe that the telephone equivalent of paparazzi are tapping into their private phone conversations or soon will be tapping. Since the Murdoch dust-up in Great Britain, that possibility seems increasingly real to them. That being the case, it’s a fair assumption that at least one or two of the end users of the service are celebrities, movie stars of one sort or another, and their wannabes. Anyway, they have their calls routed through the tower and rendered undecipherable. They pay a pile for the privilege. The tower then sends the encoded message and the person buying the service receives a device that unscrambles it and is specific for his line only.”
    â€œThat’s interesting. Am I to assume that the encoding works in the reverse? If the owners of the system wanted to, they could be privy to all the calls. Is that right? When they purchase the service, they must have a high level of trust in the company.”
    â€œI suppose so, yeah.”
    â€œHmmm…Okay, then if we want to find the one recipient of the calls we are sure were made to the person responsible for the two bombings, we will have to sort through…how many channels?”
    â€œHard to say for sure. If there are weekenders who only use the service occasionally, we wouldn’t have picked them up yet, but on this tower I’m thinking fifteen or maybe twenty.”
    â€œThat creates a problem on top of a problem. Okay, I hate to do this to you, Karl, but you’re going to have to move up Sam’s trip to Idaho. She can tap into some of the NSA programs that, as we all know, don’t exist, and start breaking into those encrypted messages.”
    â€œUnderstood.”
    Charlie hung up and stared out the window which had been washed for a change. He could see the license plates on the bumpers of the cars parked in his section of the parking lot. That is if he looked up. Basement offices did not offer much in the way of aesthetics. On the other hand, no one coveted his office and he knew he’d keep it and all the odds and ends he’d