“ Wait—”
I hung up and left, to look for a few clean phones and a new wi-fi site.
>>> KRAUSE was a negotiator, like all people in his job. Therefore, no negotiation. The choice had to be stark: release LuEllen, or face ruin. If I let him negotiate, he might talk himself into the proposition that sooner or later I’d cave in. And I wouldn’t—I’d never cave.
LuEllen and I had talked about this possibility, in somewhat different contexts. Giving them two people, instead of one, never made sense. That was behind all the talk of whether LuEllen should have left the current job, the hunt for the laptop. There hadn’t been any desperate need for her to stay on, but she had stayed, for too long, because she’d been enjoying herself. That was a mistake, but there was no point in compounding it.
To get her back, I had to keep the pressure on Krause. I could do that, I thought, with the photo file from the first laptop. The question was, could I push Krause over the edge before they got something definitive on LuEllen?
>>> IN THE meantime, I found another phone and called John.
“They got LuEllen—the government did, Krause,” I told him. “I’m trying to get her back, but we might need a railroad out of the country.”
“I can give you Mexico if you need it.”
“Get something set up. I don’t know what’s going to happen.” I told him, briefly, about the ambush in the park.
“Forgive me for saying it, but you don’t sound all that smart.”
“We didn’t think they’d stop everyone in the park,” I snapped back. Then: “Sorry. You’re right. I think that’s another reason I’m so pissed. I feel stupid.”
“But you don’t think they got Carp.”
“I don’t think so, but I don’t know. Just something about the way he went into it. I think he knew more about the park than they did. I’ll find out soon enough.”
“If LuEllen ditched her ID like she said, and they haven’t found it, then I don’t know what they could do,” John said. This was the law-office John. “What can they charge her with? If she’s tough enough to keep her mouth shut, they won’t know who she is, or what she does. What can they do with her?”
“Stick a cattle prod somewhere and keep asking questions. These are intelligence guys, and they’re desperate,” I said.
“You don’t think she’s tough enough?”
“Not tough enough forever. Nobody is. But I think she’s tough enough to hang on until I get her out. And I will.”
“Call me when you know,” John said.
>>> EXCEPT for clients who were buying my polling software, I never paid much attention to elective politics. Politicians always seemed about as differentiated as Daffy and Donald, the Ducks, and you have to ask yourself, would you send Daffy Duck to Washington to set policy on medical care or nuclear waste? I just hope I’m dead before the entire unholy scheme—created by politicians, lawyers, and our new class of media courtiers—blows up in our faces.
End of rant. I personally knew nothing at all about the three victims I picked to hammer Krause. All I knew was that they were crooks, which was no surprise, and they all had quite a bit of clout in the government. The three were Congressmen Frank Marsh from Connecticut and Clark Deering from Oregon, and Senator Marvin Brock from Missouri.
Marsh ran the House Armed Services Committee, which annually handed out a couple hundred billions in military pork. Deering was the second-ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, which handled most of the rest of the economy. Brock ran the Senate Agricultural Committee, which might have been not so big a deal, if Krause hadn’t been from Nebraska.
>>> I GOT online and checked all three networks, and both CNN and Fox News, and made lists of names of working producers. I started calling from a series of phones I found by walking around downtown. I’d call each Washington bureau and start asking for producers until I got one on the phone. I never did get one for CBS, but I got the rest of them. Like so, with Fox:
“This is John Torres.”
“I’m calling for Bobby,” I said. “The Bobby. We’re releasing files on two more congressmen and a senator. We need e-mail addresses. We expect to release within half an hour.”
“How do we know you’re from Bobby?”
“Look at the files. You don’t like them, throw them away. What’s one more piece of spam in your mailbox?”
Five-second pause. Then, “Right. Send them to . . .”
>>> I SET up with my wi-fi can across the street from the Department of the Interior, which had so many possible connections that it took a while to sort them out. I wanted a fast line—I got it; the government always goes first class—because the files I was sending were big. They were essentially scanned-in pictures, rather than text files. That is, they contained text, but instead of a tight little stream of numbers and letters, they were reproductions of photocopies, or in some cases, actual photographs.
Marsh, the first congressman, had been running a whole series of nickel-and-dime scams, mostly involving travel. He traveled by private jet, like a movie star, and paid for it out of his own pocket, the equivalent of a first-class fare. That’s a cheap ticket for a chartered plane, but he always claimed that he was simply “riding along” with corporate people. What was not visible in the government accounts was that his wife and family, including two grown daughters and their husbands, traveled with him, but invisibly, all paid by two large defense corporations. That was thoroughly documented, and was bad enough.
The killer was the château in the South of France, which he had apparently been given as a gift by a French military hardware conglomerate. Superficially, the deal looked like a purchase, rather than a gift, but if you had the right set of documents, the reality was clear enough. The congressman had neglected to tell anyone about his good fortune; not even the IRS. But we had the deed and we had a nice picture of his wife working in their pretty French garden.
With Deering, the other congressman, it was strictly sex. We had pictures of him with half a dozen different women, none of whom looked like virgins, all of them far too young. Names, dates, times, and places. The photographs looked like the product of professional surveillance. He’d be charmed by that.
Brock’s situation was more intricate. All of his investments were made on his Senate salary—he had no family money—and supposedly were controlled by a blind trust. But the trust was placed with an investment company that had a tight relationship with a huge private commodities corporation.
Agricultural commodities—like wheat, corn, sugar, cocoa, and orange juice—are bought and sold by two different kinds of buyers. The first are speculators, who are betting on the price moves the commodities will make in the future. The amount of rain in Iowa in June can send corn prices all over the place, depending on whether it’s too little or too much or just right. Really smart, tough, fast speculators can get rich. Most go broke.
The second type of buyer is the big commodity-using corporation, which sells the wheat or corn, or buys it to make pizza or pancake flour. They’re not speculating—they’re using futures contracts to stabilize the prices they will get or spend on the commodities.
Brock’s investment company routinely handled the futures contracts for the commodities corporation, as a way of stabilizing future prices. But the trustees for Brock’s account, handled through the same firm, were speculating with Brock’s money. And doing it brilliantly. Too brilliantly. They won virtually all of their speculative bets, and had run a few tens of thousands of dollars into nearly fifteen million, tax paid.
The trustees won all their bets because, according to our xeroxed account returns, the commodities company was quietly picking up Brock’s losing bets and replacing them with winning bets of their own. Because it was all handled inside the same investment firm, all the scheme needed was a few adjustments in a computerized account. And Brock had all the paperwork and paid all the taxes.
Nice. Invisible. Illegal.
And fifteen milli
on was such a large, juicy, fat, ridiculous, greedy amount, that when the word got out, Brock would be screwed.
>>> I PUT the word out and gave Krause credit for developing the information. I thought about calling each official’s office separately. Instead, I re-sent the files I’d sent to the networks to each man’s executive assistant. I included the Krause note. Whether he let LuEllen go or not, Krause was in trouble with his peers and the party.
As I worked the wi-fi connection, I’d been staring at the back of the Interior Department building, a wall of some kind of undistinguished gray stone. I thought later that if I had to describe it to someone, I would have said that it looks like the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984.
But then, I may have been overwrought.
>>> I CALLED Krause at three o’clock in the afternoon and he said—no calm reason this time, but with real fear on his side, choking down a scream—“Stop it! Stop it! We let her go, she’s just fine, we’re not following her, we’re not surveilling her. We let her go.”
“I don’t think surveilling’s a word,” I said.
“What? What? What do you mean—”
“I mean if I don’t hear from her in six hours, I start again,” I said. “I’ve got three more ready to go and one of them might be you.”
“I told you, we let her go, you asshole. We let her go.” Yes: real fear. Almost too much. Had something happened I didn’t know about? That I’d never know about?
“Did you get your boy Carp?”
“No. He had that bike. You shithead, you’ve done more damage than you can possibly understand.”
“You better get Carp,” I said. “Whether or not you turned my friend loose, we’re gonna publicly put this killing on your guy, if you don’t do something about him pretty quick.”
“We’ll get him—we’re going to the FBI.”
“I’ll give you a couple of days. If you get him and you stay off our backs, you won’t be hearing from us again. If we hear from you again, we’ll drop the bomb.”
I hung up, found a deli, bought thirty dollars’ worth of food and drink, and headed back to the hotel. I spent the rest of the day and the evening lying on my bed, or sitting at the desk, poking at the computer I’d taken out of Carp’s car. I was afraid to leave the room. At six o’clock, the first stuff about Deering, Marsh, and Brock started to leak onto the news—CNN, and Fox at first, and then ABC. There were no details, only teasers about how “more powerful Washington legislators may be entangled in the growing Bobby scandal that has rocked Washington for a week.”
Good enough; the TV boys were checking out the documents. I wondered if Bobby would be pleased. As far as I knew, he’d never used any of the blackmail stuff himself—but then I didn’t know where all the continuing Washington scandals came from, and I didn’t know what might have been done quietly, as pressure, rather than as a direct attack.
>>> WAITING . Going from TV to computer and back. I finally got out the tarot deck and did a spread. I took a while to frame a question about LuEllen, and when I did, came up with the Two of Cups. That was interesting, but didn’t give me any hint of what might happen in the next few hours.
And I thought, Jesus, Kidd, you’re doing a gypsy reading, as if you believe in this shit. That says something about my level of stress.
Before I put the cards away—my little man, the leprechaun-like id-character that everyone carries in the back of his head—was laughing at me, but I did a reading on my own future. Just killing time. Came up with the King of Swords, which told me nothing I might not suspect even without the cards.
Not entirely bad, but not entirely good, either. But self-psychoanalysis is not what I needed. Or, rather, I may have needed it, but it wasn’t what I so desperately wanted. What I wanted I got at eleven o’clock; I almost ruptured an appendix getting to the phone.
>>> “YEAH,” I said. LuEllen had known where I’d be; and she’d call me through a hotel switchboard, so there wouldn’t be anything on my cell phone.
“It’s me,” she said. She sounded tired. “I’m near that narrow lane, the one we used to check for tails the last time we were here. The airplane time. You remember? I don’t want to say the name. Nobody could have followed me this far. I went to a Goodwill store and bought clothes and dumped all of my stuff, every stitch, and my shoes, so I’m not bugged.”
“Are you okay?”
“Mmm. Physically. Otherwise, I’m pretty screwed up. They put me in a room and every once in a while, somebody would come in and ask a question. I didn’t say one fuckin’ word to them. Then they came and got me, put me in a car, drove around for a while, gave me a hundred dollars, dropped me off, and told me to get lost. I don’t know where I was in the room, it was like an office building, but I don’t know where.”
“They got your car?”
“Yes. They’ll have my prints. I didn’t see anybody take a picture. They . . . they weren’t real cops. They were something else. I thought maybe Army—some of them had those funny white-sidewall haircuts.”
“Okay. So I’ll cruise the lane in exactly twenty minutes. You got your watch?”
“No, I dumped everything. But I know twenty minutes.”
“You come in at the same time I do, so you’re moving. I’ll flick the lights when I come into the street.”
“See you.” She really did sound beat.
>>> I GOT her twenty minutes later, on a narrow one-way lane that we’d once used to make sure that nobody was behind us. I went into the lane slowly, blinked my lights, and crawled through, worried sick that she wouldn’t be there.
She was. She stepped out from behind some kind of evergreen, next to a low stone wall and a garbage can, and held up her hand and I slowed and she got in.
“You look like you just got out of Vogue,” I said.
“Shut up and drive,” she said. I was still wound tight as a grandfather clock, afraid that a black federal car would suddenly block the way, and guys with guns would come parachuting out of the trees.
But they didn’t. Six blocks down the road and around a few corners, and she said, “Pull over.”
“What?” I looked in all the mirrors and saw nothing.
“I need a squeeze,” she said. “Really bad.”
I pulled over and we spent a little time just squeezing each other, though modern cars aren’t built for it. Christ, I’d been worried. I’d been so worried. . . .
“You got me back,” she said.
Chapter
Seventeen
>>> LUELLEN DISAPPEARED into the bathroom, taking her cosmetics bag with her, leaving the Goodwill clothes on the floor. She said she expected to be in there awhile. I gathered up the clothes and stuffed them in a sack. We could drop them somewhere the next day.
With the bathwater running in the background, with LuEllen home and well, I went back to Bobby’s computer, the laptop I’d taken from Carp’s car. I’d been poking at it during the afternoon, while I waited to hear from LuEllen. What I’d found was curious.
The files that had been on Carp’s computer, the blackmail files, were there, all right, as were the encrypted files. But some of the encrypted files had been decrypted. He’d made notes: This from File 23, Indexed as MRG Cleanup: and there was the Norwalk virus file.
The question that plagued me was, how had he decrypted it? Where had he gotten the decryption keys? Bobby’s laptop had the encryption program right there, out front, and it was a good, solid commercial program that would essentially produce an uncrackable file.
From the bathroom, LuEllen said, “Oh, Jesus,” and I looked up, then rolled off the bed, went to the bathroom door, and poked my head inside.
“What was that?”
“My ass hitting the hot water. Close the door, you’re letting the cold air in.” I took a longer lingering look before I backed out. She’d put some bubble bath in the water, and it smelled good; and some pink parts were poking out of the bubbles, fairly artfully, I thought. She said, “Your look is lingering.”
“I wanted to make sure you were physically okay,” I said.
“What do you think?”
“I’ll need a closer look.” I shut the door.
>>> BACK to the laptop. The thing had an abnormally huge hard drive. And the files were large, I could see that much. From Carp’s note, I knew that one, or part of one, was an index.
Was it possible that Bobby had hidden the keys somewhere in the computer itself, and that Carp had found them?
I began tearing the laptop apart, a boring and ultimately fruitless activity. The problem was the size of the files—they were just too big. What I was doing was like walking through a library looking for a particular sentence, without knowing what book it was in. Yet Carp had done it. Was he that much smarter than I was?
Leaving behind the mystery files, I looked through some non-encrypted utility programs that Bobby had stashed in a corner. They had esoteric names like Whodat and Whatsis and Dogabone and Bandersnatch, a bunch of fishhooks for various jobs that Bobby had needed done. I had the same kind of collection in my laptop, with the same kind of names.
I transferred Whodat to my laptop and pulled it apart, and found a search program that looked for names. That’s all it did; but it was nicely written, and would be very fast. I had encountered circumstances where it would be useful, like searching a company’s database for memos to or from a particular person. Whatsis was a big library of electronic circuits. If you had a big enough circuit diagram, you could import it into Whatsis and Whatsis would give you a list of machines that you might be looking at, that used that precise circuit.
Dogabone was a modification of an old program I’d written myself, years ago, which would find programs in one place and put them in another. I still had the same program on my computer, but my original was called Fetcher, which is where I suppose Bobby got the Dogabone. The next program, Bandersnatch, was meant to be left in a remote computer, where it would watch whatever file you attached it to. When that file was manipulated, Bandersnatch would immediately make a copy of the manipulated file, change its name, and re-store it. So Bobby could go into an outside computer, and if he encountered an encrypted file, he could attach Bandersnatch to it. When it was manipulated—that is, decrypted—Bandersnatch would copy and store it. Bobby could then come back and retrieve the file without ever having the decryption key.
Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4 Page 90