Free Conspiracy by Stephen Coonts

of her, physically stopping her a few yards from the street. A teenager had stopped on the sidewalk nearby. He looked like a much younger version of Gerald Forester.
    Dean nodded in the boy’s direction, then began walking again. Lia stared to follow.
    â€œHey, are you here about my dad?” asked the boy. His voice mixed bravado with anger; he was partly challenging them, and partly pleading for information.
    â€œWe were just checking up on a few things,” said Dean.
    â€œHe didn’t kill himself.”
    The young man held his arms straight down, fists clenched. For a moment Lia thought that he was going to leap at Dean and pummel him.
    â€œWe’d like to prove you’re right,” said Dean. “Can you think of anything that would help us?”
    The question seemed to catch the kid in the stomach, a punch that grabbed his breath.
    Lia misinterpreted the reaction, thinking he had something he’d been wanting to point out but hadn’t until now. Before she realized that he was only trying to hide his grief, she asked if he knew of anyone who had threatened his dad. Tears began rolling from the corners of the young man’s eyes. He pressed his lips together so tightly they turned white. Then he bent his head forward and walked past them, his pace growing brisker until he reached the house.

 
22
    AGENT FORESTER’S COMPUTERS were plain vanilla PCs running Windows XP, home version, and they were filled with the sorts of things one might find on perhaps 85 percent of the home computers in the United States—a word-processing program, a Web surfer, home finances software, and an assortment of soft porn.
    The fact that the porn had been deleted made no difference to NSA computer expert Robert Gallo, whose computer tools allowed him not only to view the images but also to reconstruct “missing” parts of the files. More important, his software allowed him to search the files for encrypted messages.
    He found none.
    â€œPorn wasn’t even that interesting,” he told Johnny Bib. “Better stuff on MySpace.”
    â€œWho’s having the affair?” asked Johnny, pointing at one of the text blocks on Gallo’s machine.
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œThe instant message.”
    Gallo moused over to the screen and brought up the files. The instant messages had been left from a cache several weeks before.
U awake?

Goin’ to bed. Jealous?
Need to use yr computr tomorrw

OK
Hw’s yr Frnch?

Francois?
    â€œOh yeah. Account ID got ripped out when the file was deleted, but it’s gotta be the kid, no?”
    Johnny Bib picked up one of the printouts, leafed through, and showed it to Gallo. “Takes Spanish.”
    â€œYeah, so that’s why he’s asking about the girl’s French. If it’s a girl.”
    Johnny Bib leaned over Gallo’s screen. “It’s from computer one.”
    â€œYeah, but the kid used both. You think it’s important?”
    Johnny Bib answered by staring at Gallo, opening his eyes as wide as they could go, and then crossing them.
    â€œI guess that’s a ‘duh,’ ” said the analyst. He selected a software tool that constructed a “session profile” and used it to determine when the computer had been used and what else it had been used for during the IM session. There were plenty of gaps, as the tool relied primarily on cookies, saved and deleted files, and other bits of deleterious. Nonetheless, it showed that at roughly the same time the instant message had been saved, the checkbook program was running.
    â€œAll right. Probably Agent Forester,” Gallo said. “But why would anyone need French?”
    â€œHa!” said Johnny Bib. “Find out who was on the other end. And see what else you can recover.”
    Â 
    THIN AS IT was, the fact that Forester had been having an affair with another Secret Service agent was the first real evidence against the suicide that