Choirboy Caffrey

Chapter 9 - Trust but Verify

New York, FBI White Collar Division. Friday afternoon, December 19, 2003

"You wanted to see me?" Jones asked.

"Yes, come in, shut the door," Peter instructed. "I want to ask a favor of you. Will you keep an eye on Caffrey for me?"

Jones took a seat in Peter's office. "Sure. Happy to. Anything in particular I'm watching for?"

Peter suppressed a sigh. "I have no idea what to expect from him. I've been warned about what could happen if he gets bored, though, so at least make sure he has something to work on when I'm out next week. Beyond that, try to keep him out of trouble."

"I'll do my best."

"How's he handling the lunch-time tails?"

"You know about that?" Jones asked.

"Yeah, well, I'm an FBI agent."

"He ran Hitchum ragged the first day, never staying anyplace for long. The rest of us he took caroling at a local hospital." Jones smiled.

"You seem to have connected with him, more than anyone else on the team."

Jones shrugged. "For a year now, I've been the new guy and the youngest member of the team until Caffrey came along. My first six months, half the people here called me 'Junior' instead of 'Jones.' I get what it's like, and I'm grateful it's not me anymore. He's a likable enough guy, but I'm still aware of his faults."

"Such as?"

"He's impetuous. He knows he should keep a low profile around here and blend in while we get used to him, but he can't help showing off. And if there's something he doesn't want to do, he'll either try to talk his way out of it, or convince someone else to do it." Jones paused. "I have to ask. Why did you want him on your team?"

"He's brilliant," was the first thing that came to mind. "If we can harness his mind and energy, he's going to help us do great things here. The flip side is, if we don't keep him on the straight-and-narrow, he could go down in flames and take some of us with him." Peter paused, considering how much of his own speculation to share with Jones. "It's a risk, I know, but my gut tells me that he can do this, and more than that, he needs this. He needs the structure, the direction, the example that we'll set, and the knowledge that we want... or that we need him to do the right thing. That he can make a difference."

"Sounds like you've given this a lot of thought."

"I have. I keep coming back to your point that he's the youngest member of the team. I'm torn between feeling like his boss or his dad. In fact, I called my own father last night for advice. He reminded me that when I was twenty-four, I wanted his input, but on my terms. I didn't want my parents hanging over my shoulder watching and judging everything I did. I wanted their respect, and their trust."

"Yeah, but at twenty-four you were completing a master's degree in accounting. You hadn't accumulated years' worth of cons, thefts, and forgeries."

"That's where you come in," Peter said. "I know this is asking a lot, but I want you to act as the filter. Monitor his accounts, his old aliases, his phone records. If you see something suspicious, dig deeper. I'm not looking for detailed reports or daily updates. Just let me know if I need to step in."

"You want me to spy on him."

"It's the best compromise I could think of. You've shown you have good instincts. After a while, if you tell me you haven't found anything to justify that level of monitoring, we'll stop. But at first... Do you have Christmas plans?"

"I'm going to hang out with my brother and his wife. They're local."

"I've talked to Hughes about our options for monitoring Neal over the holidays, when he travels to Washington D.C. Hughes told me about a hush-hush program the government recently initiated, to gather raw data from the major cell phone carriers. It's a mass of data. Not just the standard times and numbers of phone calls, but the content of text messages, the locations of cell phones based on the towers carrying their calls or messages. It's supposed to be used for identifying and tracking terrorists, but we need to run some tests, determine how to mine and use the data so we can be sure of what we're doing when the time comes. Hughes agreed we could use Caffrey's phone for one of our tests."