Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  “What about the stuff you have? That’s still a problem.”

  “If you talk some more with Rosalind Welsh, she’ll tell you that we are discreet as long as we’re not fucked with. I don’t want the FBI coming after me—they might find me. Once we’ve got Carp in hand, and the laptop, you’ll never hear from me again. Besides, we don’t have much. Carp, on the other hand, has about fifty huge files. He has used a small fraction of only one, and that’s the one I’ve got.”

  “Fifty?”

  “That’s right. He hasn’t used one percent of what he’s got.”

  “Oh my God.”

  >>> “WE THINK we can get to Carp, without him knowing it,” I said. “Sort of, mmm, through a third person. We could tell him that you want to make a deal. That you’ll cover for him in exchange for neutralizing the Bobby laptop. We know he’s broke and desperate and probably homeless, and we think he’s crazy—so he might go for it. We think you might be able to set up a meeting.”

  “And then what?”

  “You’re the politician, Senator. Negotiate with him. Try to bring him in. I wouldn’t try to grab him, though. He’s crazy, but he’s smart. If he agrees to a meeting, he’ll set up some way to get out. And there’s too much of a chance that he’ll have set up a time bomb on the laptop.”

  “What?”

  “You know, an information bomb. You grab him, he does nothing but keep his mouth shut, and twelve hours later, the computer dumps everything to CNN. That’s simple enough to do. All you need is a motel room with a telephone, and a few lines of computer code.”

  “Goddamnit.”

  “You’ve got to do something,” I said. “Right now, he’s completely out of control. If you go after him with the FBI, the laptop is going to become public property, and you’re toast. If you can talk to him, face-to-face, you should be able to deal with him. Somehow.”

  “I’ve got to think about this. How would you convince him to get in touch with me?”

  “We’re not exactly sure we can. I don’t want to explain it to you, because it would give something away. But we think we can get him to call . . . to get in touch.”

  “Okay. You do that, and I’ll think about it.”

  >>> WE DID nothing overnight, except make a stop at a Home Depot to pick up a couple of bronze plumb bobs; and talk about it.

  If we called at night, we thought, Carp might do something like set up a middle-of-the-night meeting somewhere, and that would make him much harder to track. Better to do it in daylight.

  As we lay awake in bed, LuEllen said, “Every move you make, you act like you think Krause is gonna pull something smart. That he’s gonna double-cross us.”

  “I’d bet on it,” I said. “That’s why we don’t get involved with any exchange. Let them work it out. If we can get the laptop, that’s all we want.”

  “There are a lot of assumptions buried in that—that Carp takes the Corolla, that he takes the laptop and leaves it in the Corolla, that he tries to figure out something clever.”

  “It’s more than just hope,” I said. “He has to believe that nobody’s figured out the Corolla—nobody official, anyway—or they would have grabbed him already. He can’t leave the laptop with anybody, because if he is busted, and it makes television, then his friend, whoever he’s staying with, would have no choice but to turn it in. If he didn’t, then he’d go down with Carp. So Carp can’t trust anybody, but he can sort of trust the car.”

  >>> WE GOT up the next morning at seven o’clock, had a quick breakfast, drove out to our wi-fi building, and went online to Lemon.

  We have been monitoring Sen. Krause. He is talking to his staff director about making a deal with Carp, so we think Carp may have contacted him and Krause is disposed to deal. Do you have *anything* more on Carp location? Anything would help? If not, we may abandon Washington.

  Twenty minutes later we got:

  Nothing more. Sorry. Will check everything, will monitor Krause if I can. Stay in touch.

  “He never asks what happened at Griggs’s place,” LuEllen said. “Because he knows what happened.”

  “And he sort of kisses us off. He’s gonna call Krause,” I said.

  >>> TEN minutes later, we were staked out two blocks apart, on opposite ends of Carp’s parking lot, in the two rental cars. LuEllen had pointed me at the Corolla, and I’d cruised it once, just to make sure I had it. Then we settled down to watch.

  >>> WE WAITED three hours, staying in touch with the walkie-talkies. I had a couple of books in the car, the Times, the Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and LuEllen had some papers and a stack of magazines. Still, it got hot, even with the car windows down. I worried about attracting attention, just sitting there doing nothing, but nobody even glanced my way. LuEllen spotted a cop car coming from her end of the block, ducked before it got to her, called me, and I rolled up the window and slid down out of sight until it was safely past. That was the only cop we saw.

  We had two false alarms, heavyset men walking into Carp’s parking lot carrying briefcases. Sitting there waiting, I had time to think about how out-of-shape Americans were getting: a few thin people walked by, but it seemed that seventy or eighty percent of the people I saw were overweight, sometimes grossly overweight.

  I watched a short woman who might have weighed two hundred fifty pounds making her way down the sidewalk with a shopping bag, and wondered if she had any thought or care of what she was doing to her heart—that she might as well have been walking around town carrying a half-dozen car batteries. Then LuEllen beeped: “Wake up, bright eyes.”

  And here was Jimmy James Carp, pushing a mountain bike across the parking lot; a black nylon briefcase hung by his side, on a shoulder strap. He opened the car door, popped the trunk from inside, had a little trouble taking the front wheel off the bike, then put the wheel and the rest of the bike in the car trunk, along with the briefcase. A moment later, he rolled out of the parking lot and LuEllen called, “Coming your way.”

  I went out ahead of him to the first big cross street and took a left toward Washington. He was a half-dozen cars behind me, also in the right-turn lane. He followed me obediently around the corner, and I called and said, “On Quaker.”

  LuEllen: “I saw him turn. I’ll be around in a sec.” Then: “I’m around, I’ve got him.”

  I accelerated, putting more cars between us, but we were coming to a freeway access. I didn’t want to go on before him, so I pulled into a Wendy’s parking lot and drove around the building just in time to see him go by the entrance. LuEllen was still on him and I pulled out behind her. We were both behind him now, and we followed him onto I-395 and headed north.

  “Slow way down,” LuEllen called to me. “He’s going about forty-five. I think he’s looking for people going slow behind him. I’m trying to fade back.”

  I slowed down to forty, and LuEllen faded on him, and he got off I-395 and swung between the Pentagon and Arlington cemetery, along the Potomac and then across a bridge toward the Lincoln Memorial. Just across the river, he dropped off the highway onto a riverside street and headed north. I caught a street sign that said Rock Creek Parkway.

  >>> FOR the first mile or two, there was enough traffic to cover us. Carp was still moving slowly, but maybe, I thought, that was the way he drove. We went up the river, past people in rowing shells, past a single sailboat heading upstream under power, and then into the ravine that was the lower end of Rock Creek Park. Traffic disappeared, and before long, I was the next car behind Carp.

  “I’m gonna have to get out,” I called to LuEllen. “I’m getting off at the next street. You stay back as far as you can.”

  “Okay.”

  Rock Creek Park must be several miles long; it’s the designated body-dumping spot for the Washington metro area. The lower end of the park is a narrow, steep-sided, heavily wooded ravine. In places, the boulder-filled creek runs precisely through the middle of it, with the road pinned to one side, and a hiking or jogging trail on the other. As I wen
t past a narrow wooden footbridge across the creek, I began to get an inkling of Carp’s thinking, of why he’d taken a mountain bike with him. If he were ambushed in here by people in cars, and he were on the bike, he’d be able to outrun anyone on foot, and go where no car ever could. I wondered if he’d considered the fact that bullets can move even faster over rough terrain than mountain bikes.

  A side street was coming; I switched on my right-turn signal and took it. As soon as I was out of sight of Carp, I did a U-turn and saw LuEllen go by. I fell in behind, keeping pace, but well back, always in touch with LuEllen by radio.

  We wound farther into the park, and it got wilder and deeper. The cross streets were infrequent, and if Carp stopped to look at trailing traffic, he might bust us.

  LuEllen called. “He turned, he’s getting out of the park. I gotta keep going or he’ll spot me.”

  “I’ve got him,” I said.

  I followed him up the side of the ravine, on a narrow black-topped street that suddenly got wider and merged with a busier street; lost him for a minute, then saw the Corolla turn right, fifteen or twenty cars ahead of me, onto Sixteenth Street. I charged up the hill, beeped impatiently at a car ahead of me—got the finger from the driver—turned right, and then timidly followed Carp a couple of blocks to a park.

  As I called and gave directions to LuEllen, Carp turned into a street that led across the park to what looked like a small stadium. I stopped in front of a Presbyterian church, idled by the curb, and watched him drive toward the stadium. I was about to follow when he pulled into a parking spot.

  “He’s parking,” I told LuEllen. Two minutes later, she pulled in behind me. A baseball diamond sat right on the corner, with soccer fields on the other side, and then tennis courts, and then the parking lot where Carp was getting the bike out of the car.

  “Let’s watch some baseball,” I said to LuEllen on the walkie-talkie, and we both got out and walked over to the ball diamond, where a group of parents were sitting on a berm along the third-base line, watching their small children play T-ball.

  We found a grassy spot and from there watched Carp assemble the mountain bike behind the Corolla.

  When he was done, he rode it once, in a practiced way, around the parking lot. He seemed too big for the machine, but he rode it with a confidence that suggested that Jimmy James Carp had talents we didn’t know of. A second later, the bike having been tested, he went back to the car, pulled on a long-billed black fishing cap, then slammed and locked the door.

  He didn’t have the briefcase with him.

  “I’m gone,” LuEllen said. She’d try to stay with him. We both got up, both dusted the seat of our pants, and walked back to the cars. She did a quick U-turn and then went down the street beside the church and did another, so she was pointing back toward the park. Whichever way Carp went, she could follow, as long as he didn’t cut cross-country.

  I watched Jimmy James pedal by, take a left, and head back to the street that had taken us up out of the park. LuEllen dropped in behind him, and I went after the Corolla.

  >>> ON THE front seat of my car, I had a plumb bob. Plumb bobs are one of the oldest surveying tools in the world, and were undoubtedly used to help build the pyramids. Basically, the modern version is a slender brass cone, with a sharp stainless-steel point. A long piece of string attaches to the precise center of the blunt end of the cone, and when you let the plumb bob dangle, and the pendulum movement subsides, the string makes a perfect vertical line.

  That’s useful if you’re making a pyramid foundation.

  Which I wasn’t. I’d pulled the string off and had thrown it away, leaving myself with a heavy brass cone with a sharp steel point. I pulled into a parking spot next to Carp’s car and called LuEllen.

  She came back, “He’s headed back into the park, down the hill. I’m not gonna get out of the car, but I could lose him. . . . I can still see him. . . . Do the car now.”

  “Doing the car,” I said.

  I got out of my car, carrying the plumb bob. Stepping up to the driver’s-side window on the Corolla, I put the point of the plumb bob on the glass, just outside the inner door lock. I hit the blunt end of the plumb bob with the heel of my other hand, and the steel point poked easily through the glass with almost no sound at all, or obvious motion on my part.

  I pulled the plumb bob out of the hole, stuck my finger through the glass, popped the lock. Inside the car, I took a few seconds to find the trunk latch: found it, popped the trunk, took the briefcase out. I couldn’t help myself: I looked inside, and there, just where it was supposed to be, was an IBM laptop.

  “Excellent,” I said to myself as I got back in my car. “Kidd, you are a fuckin’ genius.”

  >>> THEN LuEllen called. Her voice was jerky, screeching, and for the first time I’d ever heard it, afraid: “Kidd, I’m in trouble here. I’m in trouble, Kidd. This is a trap, this is a trap. Carp’s running on the bike. They’re stopping cars. I’m gonna try to get out, oh, Jesus, Kidd. Get out. Get out, get out, wipe your car, dump your car, I’m gonna try to run.”

  Two minutes later, I got a last call: “Kidd, if you can hear me . . .”

  “I gotcha.” I sounded calm to my own ears, but my heart was in my mouth.

  “It was a trap. They’re sweeping the park, there must be thirty of them,” she said. “They spotted me watching him, they blocked me out, they got the car. I don’t know if they got him, or not, I saw him heading into the woods on the bike.” She was breathing heavily, but no longer sounded frightened. “I’m on foot, in the woods, but they’re all around here, they’re gonna get me. I ditched all my ID, buried it, they’ve got nothing on me. I’m gonna throw the walkie-talkie in a minute. Get me out. Get me out, Kidd. Don’t leave me.”

  And she was gone. I sat with the radio pressed to my ear, listening for anything. Nothing came.

  Chapter

  Sixteen

  >>> I KEPT REMEMBERING the exact timbre of her voice: “Get me out, Kidd.” I’d never heard that out-of-control note in LuEllen’s voice before, and it was deeply disturbing, the kind of disturbing you get when you think your heart has just stopped.

  Besides, this didn’t happen. We didn’t get caught. We were too good.

  Not counting what she described as youthful experimentation at local department stores, LuEllen had been a professional thief for fifteen years, had worked five or six times a year during that time, sixty or seventy jobs, without ever taking a fall. She’d never been fingerprinted, and had been photographed only once, as far as we knew, and that was by me. I’d never been suspected—not by the cops, anyway. We’d managed to live outside the system, invisible.

  Now they had her. Or somebody did. I didn’t know who Krause had gotten cranked up, but it had to be one of the intelligence agencies—I doubted he’d risk the FBI, where his control would be limited. Anyway, LuEllen was no longer invisible. They were probably fingerprinting her, photographing her. Hell, they may have been working on her with a cattle prod; these weren’t cops.

  >>> WHEN LuEllen’s radio went down, I got in the car and steamed back to the hotel, frantic to get there; but not so frantic that I ran red lights or broke the speed limit. I had to get there in a hurry, not get stopped by the cops. The problem was, if they had her car, they’d have my fake ID, and eventually they’d have my rental car, too. A little while after that, they’d have my hotel room, which was on the same credit card. Because they didn’t have her ID, they wouldn’t have her room. Not for a while. If they put her on TV, then all bets were off.

  I was back at the hotel in fifteen minutes and drove the car to the most crowded part of the parking ramp. I meticulously wiped the interior, and left it. With any luck, it might sit there for a few days before anybody noticed. Then I headed upstairs, to the room I’d rented, but which I hadn’t used, wiped anything I might possibly have touched, recovered my bags, and carried them up to the room LuEllen had rented.

  Wiping her room took an hour. When I was done, I strip
ped the sheets off the bed—DNA analysis has made all of us crooks a little paranoid—and stuffed them into one of my suitcases, and checked out the back door.

  Twenty minutes later, I was checking into a hotel across the street from the White House, under my own name, with my own credit card. I’d been there before, when I was in Washington on business. It was one of my favorite hotels in the world, and LuEllen knew it.

  >>> AS SOON as I was set up, I headed toward what Washington calls the downtown, and called Krause from a mall. He answered, a little cocky and maybe a little wary: “Yes?”

  “Senator Krause, this is Bill Clinton.” Some of the fear leaked into my voice, and that little show of weakness pissed me off.

  Krause picked up on it, of course; that’s what politicians do. “We have your friend,” Krause said, in the congenial voice of a man who’s looking at four aces. “We think it would be best if you came in now. If you come in, we are prepared—” He was either reading a written statement, or he’d memorized the speech.

  I cut in, not quite shouting: “Shut up, motherfucker. Shut up. Listen to this: Every half hour that my friend is held, I’m going to dump another congressman or senator. I’m going to do the first three right now. Right now. No bargaining. But it’s not quite free of charge, asshole. When I do each one, I will call that guy’s office, and I will tell them that their disgrace was organized by you. You and your information surveillance office. I will send them proof. After the first three are done, which should be in a couple of hours, I will give you a chance to free my friend, if you haven’t already. If you haven’t, I’ll start doing more of them. If you don’t release her at all, a good chunk of Congress will be down the drain by this evening, and they’ll all know who to blame. Someplace along the way, I’ll do you. Good-bye.”