The Hanged Man’s Song

by John Sandford

  “Anything in there about his dog?” John asked.

  AFTER more talk, I decided to get in touch with Lemon, Bobby’s successor. Among other things, I needed to tell him that Bobby was dead, in case he didn’t know for sure, and to set up a routine we could use to communicate with each other. I also wanted to check again on the FBI investigation.

  That evening LuEllen and I drove down to Greenville and located another warehouse with a friendly wi-fi. I called into the FBI first, went straight to the guy’s folder, and found some snappy memos back and forth from Jackson, the essence of which was that they were getting nowhere. I signed off and went looking for Lemon.

  Lemon from 118normalgorgeousredhead:

  I am a friend of Bobby’s and a member of the ring. Went to Bobby’s house with another member of ring, found Bobby murdered and his laptop gone. His true name was Robert Fields of Jackson, Mississippi; see news stories on cross-burning in Jackson. We have informed National Security Agency of his identity in effort to close attacks on hack community. We have Bobby’s backup DVDs but they are encrypted. The current holder of the laptop is launching attacks signed Bobby. Apparently not all files are encrypted; we are trying to recover it. We are searching for a man named James Carp, a former employee of U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee who we believe now holds the laptop and is launching the attacks. Any help appreciated. We believe it necessary to find Carp before government agents. Believe agents already searching for him.

  – Estragon

  I dumped it with a return address, and then went looking in another direction. We had all of his credit card numbers from the bills we’d found at his place. Credit card databases are basic stuff, and I checked the ones I had for card activity: as far as I could tell, he hadn’t used a credit card for a month.

  LuEllen had the inspiration: “Check his mom’s cards.”

  I did, and immediately found a Shell card that was getting activity. It had been used the afternoon of the shooting-once, an hour later, near Slidell. Had he gone back to his mother’s place, or was he just heading east on I-10? No way to know from just that. But the next use of the card was at a pump in Meridian, Mississippi, way north on I-59. Then, the next morning-just about the time Marvel had been screaming at us about John-he’d used it to charge gas and food in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

  “Going north,” I said. “Going fast.”

  “Headed for Washington.”

  “Maybe.”

  A HALF-HOUR had passed by the time we finished with the credit cards, and I went back to my dump site. We found a note from Lemon:

  Estragon:

  YOU MUST RECOVER THE LAPTOP. When I was online with Bobby, he rapidly accessed multiple encrypted laptop files, I believe with encryption codes kept on the laptop itself. I don’t know how codes were kept, but maybe disguised as another encrypted file. While Carp may not be able to use them, any encryption center would break them out almost immediately, if that is how they are disguised. GET THE LAPTOP. I will search for Carp and advise at this address. Much Carp information online. He maintains current address at 1448 Clay Street, Apt. 523, Washington, D.C.

  I went back with the three e-mail addresses we had for Carp, suggested that Lemon monitor them, but not give away his presence:

  We maybe try to find Carp for face-to-face using e-mail, if nothing else works.

  He was back in a second:

  Will do that, will begin research now. You go to Washington?

  I went back:

  Think so. Will advise. Will check here every six hours.

  He said,

  Who did burning cross?

  I said,

  We did-wanted FBI investigation, so we could monitor. Monitoring now, they find nothing, but should start working on Bobby angle.

  He said,

  Okay. Will get back in six hours.

  “ARE we going to Washington?” LuEllen asked.

  “Tell you in a minute. I’m gonna run a little check on this Lemon stuff.”

  I went back out, looked in a couple of databases, and came up with a phone bill-a big phone bill-for Carp at the Clay Street address in Washington. “There it is,” I said.

  “So…”

  “Everything goes there,. Carp’s headed that way, Lemon says he has a current apartment there, and so does AT &T, and there’s this working-group thing. I think that’s where it’ll happen.” I turned and put my arm around her shoulder. “But it’s getting a little strange for a simple burglary wench,” I said.

  “I’ll hang on for a while longer. Guy’s starting to piss me off.”

  BACK in Longstreet, we lost John, which we’d expected. Marvel, arms crossed, said, “I’m putting my foot down. If John gets killed, I’ll have to find work to support the kids. To do that, I’ll have to go out of town and the whole Longstreet project goes down the drain. So I’m telling him, No.”

  John looked abashed, the guy who didn’t want to appear to be under his wife’s thumb, but who knew she was right. I couldn’t see any reason for him to come with us. “It’s all gonna be computer stuff at this point. If we need help carrying a body, we’ll give you a ring.”

  “Do that,” he said. But I think he wanted to come.

  WE LEFT for Washington the next morning, driving. We were driving because that’s about the only anonymous way to travel around the U.S. Everything else will wind up in a database.

  Even by car, anonymity is tough: if you pay for motels or gas with credit cards, if you speed and get a ticket, if you use your cell phone, you’re gonna be on a computer, fixed at an exact spot at an exact time. I’d noticed, once-you can see for yourself-that when you pull up to the parking-garage exit booth at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, to pay your money, they’ll give you a receipt with your license tag number printed on it. This is four seconds after you pulled up, so your tag is being automatically read somewhere along the line.

  Both LuEllen and I had a couple of alter egos who had their own credit cards, all carefully paid, and we used hers in the only motel we needed while heading north. Building an alter ego is almost like identity theft, but backwards. You build a nonexistent life, rather than steal someone else’s. It’s fun, if you’re careful.

  The trip was pleasant enough, nine hundred miles or so with the inevitable side trips to look for decent food and places to run. We did it in one long and one reasonably short day, riding up I-40 to I-81 through the heart of the summer, along the Appalachians and up the Shenandoah, then over to Washington on I-66.

  The first night, in a mom-and-pop hotel, I went online and found a note from Lemon:

  Find six calls last night and this morning from Carp’s Washington apartment.

  I went back:

  On the way. Need anything new.

  WE WOUND up in a Holiday Inn in Arlington, checking in separately, for separate rooms, although we’d only use one or the other. It’s better to have a bolt-hole and not need one, than to need one and not have it.

  LuEllen checked in first, dropped her bags, then walked back out to the parking garage and gave me her room number. I checked in, put a bag in my room, stuck a sport coat in a closet, rumpled up the bed, hung a “Do Not Disturb” ticket on the door, then toted the rest of my stuff up to LuEllen’s. There was one big bed, and the room was decorated with colors that you forgot when you weren’t looking at them. Like almost everything now, it smelled of cleaning fluids.

  “So,” LuEllen said. She pulled back a curtain and looked out: cars and tarmac. The sun was still well above the horizon. “What’s first? Carp’s?”

  “That seems reasonable. Take a look at it, anyway. Watch the news for a while.”

  WE’D missed the initial newsbreak, being stuck in the car, but Senator David Johnson of Illinois was being accused of covering up a drunk-driving incident involving his oldest daughter. According to what CNN referred to as “the source known as Bobby,” Debra Johnson’s car had struck a middle-aged bicyclist in downtown Normal, Illinois. The man had suffered a br
oken wrist and bruises and scrapes, and his bike had been destroyed.

  Debra Johnson had paid a ticket for careless driving, but the initial ticket had been for Driving While Intoxicated, issued to her after she had failed a Breathalyzer test. She’d been transported to a local hospital after the accident, complaining of head pain, and had never been taken to police headquarters.

  The bicyclist had settled for twenty thousand dollars for pain and suffering. Initial reports said that the money had come from Johnson’s campaign fund, which is illegal.

  Johnson hadn’t yet made a statement, but the vultures were circling. A photograph accompanied the news release-a picture of a drunk-looking young woman standing in a city street, between a cop car and a Saturn, looking at the camera, her eyes bright red with the reflected flash.

  “Goddamnit,” I said. “He’s gotta let up.”

  “Pouring blood in the water,” LuEllen said.

  From the Johnson story, CNN went directly to the Norwalk virus-San Francisco story, which the talking head said was “consistent in style with other releases from the Bobby source.”

  California was planning to sue the federal government for a trillion dollars for damage done by the Norwalk virus experiment, CNN said. The money would be used to provide educational programs on the virus and to close the state’s budget gap. A San Francisco law firm had signed up seventy thousand people on its website for a class-action suit claiming that the virus did irreparable damage to the victims’ health, destroyed their businesses, drove away tourists, caused building foundations to fail, encouraged cats and dogs to interbreed, and allowed Russian thistle to invade the ecosystem. They also wanted a trillion dollars.

  A more serious study by UC Berkeley suggested that four people had died in San Francisco of complications arising from an initial Norwalk virus infection. Weeping members of all four families were shown, the cameras lingering lovingly on the tears rolling down overweight cheeks. The victims had all been good providers.

  The government was now denying that the experiment took place, but nobody believed it anymore. There was too much money at stake.

  In rounding up the Bobby stories, the anchorman said that the special forces officer accused of executing an Arab prisoner had been flown into Washington and was being questioned by members of the Army’s criminal investigation division.

  THEN a second guy, a media specialist, went off in another direction: “The one question that everybody is asking is, ‘Who is this Bobby, where does he get this stuff, and what does he want?’ ” To help him with this conundrum, he interviewed two congressmen who were newly enough elected to be fairly clean, two media advisors-public relations guys, we supposed-and the mayor of San Francisco.

  After cutting through the bullshit, the answer was that they had no idea of who Bobby was, where he got the stuff, or what he wanted. One of the PR guys guessed that Bobby was a hacker who was getting his information from government databases, said Bobby probably wasn’t acting alone, and referred to Bobby’s group as “Al-Code-a.”

  “That’s bad,” I said.

  “Carp’s gonna have a short life span as Bobby,” LuEllen said. “If we don’t get him soon, somebody else will.”

  CARP’S apartment was in the District, two miles due north of the White House, on Clay Street between Fourteenth and Fifteenth, and a half-block east of Meridian Hill Park. The building was a crappy brown-brick five-story wreck; we cruised it once, and on the back side found that half the tenants had their wash hung out on the balconies. The whole area was run-down, with the kind of street life that suggests you might want to look over your shoulder every once in a while: idle guys, walking around with their hands in their pockets, surrounded by an air of hip-hop cool; clusters of skaters; a drug entrepreneur whose eyes skidded right past me; women in government secretarial dress who walked as if they had a cold wind at their back, shoulders hunched, heads down. Alleys, with people in them; trash on the streets and sidewalks; and some graffiti.

  Up the hill from the apartment was Meridian Park, with a fountain that dropped in a pretty series of steps down a long hill toward the south. Down the hill was Fourteenth Street, with some ordinary strip-shopping-center businesses-nail places, a pizza parlor, a diner, a branch bank, like that. There was enough automobile traffic that nobody gave us a second look as we made the pass at Carp’s place. The curbs were packed with cars, mostly old and beat-up. No sign of a Corolla.

  From his bills, we knew Carp’s apartment was on the fifth floor, which, from the outside, appeared to be the top one. As we got to the bottom of the hill, at Fourteenth, an aging Ford Explorer started backing out of a parking spot across the street. I barged through oncoming traffic and grabbed the spot.

  We were now two hundred feet from the apartment entrance, parked in front of a place called either Lost and Damaged Freight or Major Brand Overstocks, or both; I never figured it out. We sat and watched for a while, then started working on a New York Times crossword puzzle, hung up on an eight-letter word across the middle of the puzzle, the clue being, “Old grape’s reason for being?”

  “Raison d’être?” LuEllen suggested. She took the words right out of my mouth.

  “Eleven letters,” I said, counting them on my fingers. “Unless I’m spelling it wrong.”

  “Look it up. Gotta be ‘raison’ something-or-other. The question mark in the clue means it’s a pun.”

  “Ah, man.” But I got out the laptop and called up the Merriam-Webster. Eleven letters.

  We were in the car for two hours, off and on, watching the sun go down, still working on the puzzle, hung up on the old grape. There was nothing going on in my brain that would answer that question, but I was still working on it when the streetlights came on.

  “Better think about what we’re gonna do,” I said.

  “Shush,” LuEllen said. “Look at these guys.”

  Two guys were walking up the street toward Carp’s apartment. They were hard to make out in the fading light, but one was black, one white.

  “The guys from Carp’s place, the mobile home?” I whispered, even though there was nobody around.

  “I think so. They look right. They’re built right,” she said. “They must be tracking him, just like we are.” The two stood on the low stoop for a minute, looking at the street, then up at the face of the apartment. One was dressed in khaki slacks, a T-shirt, and a sport coat, the other in slacks and a golf shirt. They were not from the neighborhood.

  “Cops of some kind?” I suggested, as they disappeared inside the building.

  “Probably not exactly cops,” LuEllen said. “They’re not carrying guns, unless they’re those little ankle things. They don’t have all that shit clipped to their belts that cops have. No beepers, no cell phones, no cuffs, nothing to conceal it with.”

  “So we know Carp’s place is hot. Somebody’s inside, probably the feds.”

  “Probably. All they’d need is one guy inside, in the hallway or on the stairs on the way up, and we’d be toast.”

  My eye was pulled to another too-fast movement in the direction of Meridian Park. “Uh-oh. Look at this, look at this,” I said. A bulky figure was jogging down the sidewalk. “That’s fuckin’ Carp,” I said.

  “This guy’s a blond, a blond.” Floppy blond hair fell around the jogger’s rounded shoulders.

  “I don’t care, that’s Carp,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  “Let’s go where?” She caught my arm.

  “Up the hill. See what happens. See what we can see.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, with a tone of urgency, but I was out of the car, and heard her car door slam behind me as I crossed Fourteenth and headed into Clay Street, toward the apartment.

  Up ahead, most of a block away, Carp dodged a car and ran up the steps into the building. I was moving that way and LuEllen called, “Kidd, slow down, slow down.”

  I slowed. Slow is always best. “He didn’t have the laptop,” I said. “It’s either in his apartment or it’s
in his car. If we can find the car, a red Corolla, it’s gotta be close.”

  “But if it’s in the apartment, then somebody else is in on the deal. Maybe he’s still working with these guys. Maybe they were in New Orleans to meet him, and we chased him away before they could meet.”

  She had my arm again, restraining me, just a bit of back pressure above the elbow. But I was moving along and we’d started up the hill when we heard the shots.

  This was not a.22. This was three or four shots from something a lot bigger. We stopped, then LuEllen said, “Turn around, turn around,” and we turned around so we were facing back downhill. A black guy was sitting on a stoop at an apartment across the street, reading a newspaper, and when he heard the shots, stood up quickly and stepped inside his door.

  “Keep walking, keep walking,” LuEllen said. We were walking downhill, looking over our shoulders, stumbling on the uneven sidewalk. Then the white guy we’d seen go inside the apartment, the white guy from the trailer, we thought, smashed through Carp’s apartment door, fell down the stoop, tried to get up, and fell down again, into the street, hurt bad.

  Carp was through the door, on top of him with the gun. He fired a single shot into the white guy’s head, and the white guy went down like a pancake, flat on his face.

  “Ah, Jesus,” I said, and LuEllen was chanting, “No, no, no,” and her fingernails dug into my forearm.

  Carp ran up the hill toward the park, stuffing the gun in his pocket as he went.

  Above us, on the second floor of Carp’s building, a woman threw open a window and began screaming, “Nine-one-one, nine-one-one, nine-one-one,” and I wondered why she didn’t call it herself, until it occurred to me that she didn’t have a phone. An old white man came out on the steps and pointed a shaky finger at the vanishing Carp. “There he goes. There he goes,” but there was nobody to look, and nobody to chase him.