The Hanged Man’s Song

by John Sandford

  “In Philly,” she said. “You met the guy.”

  “I thought he was just guns.” He’d once armed me for a confrontation in West Virginia. Another thing I try not to dream about.

  “We can order stuff,” she said.

  “He creeps me out.”

  “ ’Cause he’s a creep,” she said. “But he can get the stuff and he’s trustworthy. We’re going in somewhere?”

  I rubbed my face, thinking about it. “Michelle Strom is interesting,” I said. “I’d like to look around her apartment. Let me…”

  I went back into the personnel computer using the Dfinch name, and pulled Strom’s file. She was single, thirty-three, with a B.A. in history and Russian, and an M.A. in Russian. She had some kind of supervisory capacity, though I couldn’t tell exactly how many people she supervised. There were two good photos of her, apparently used for her ID card. I copied down her home address, and her home, office, and cell phone numbers.

  “So…”

  “If we could get in and out, without her knowing, it would probably be worth it.”

  “Would we need time inside?”

  “Mmm… yeah,” I said. “Eight, ten, not more than fifteen minutes.”

  “That’s half a lifetime… so tell me why, in twenty-five words or less.”

  This was a joke with us-if you couldn’t explain why you were breaking into a place in twenty-five words or less, you hadn’t thought it through. I said, “Everybody takes work home, nowadays, even secret work. We can’t break into Strom’s office, we can’t get her online, so we hit her apartment. How many words was that?”

  “Less than twenty-five,” she said. “If nowadays is one word.”

  LuELLEN made a call and we ran up to Philly. We were going to see a guy named Drexel, gun dealer to the trade, so to speak. I’d met him twice, on other trips to the Washington area. On those trips, he’d been living in an accountant-looking suburban house. This time, he was way west of the city, in a truck-garden exurb, in a house a third smaller than his earlier one.

  He met us at the door, smiled, and said, “Package got here fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Nice house,” LuEllen said, looking around as he let us in. The place was furnished in Early Twenty-first Century Discount Scandinavian. “Why’d you move?”

  “Soon as my daughter got out of school, she and my wife left,” he said. He was tall and thin, wore rimless glasses, and looked like the farmer in the Grant Wood painting American Gothic. He’d always been pleasant enough, though creepy, and too prissy for a man who dealt in illegal firearms. An underground gun dealer should, at a minimum, have an eye patch. He led us through the basement door, picking up a laptop as he went. “I guess they spent a few years not liking me.”

  “Jeez,” LuEllen said, as though that were unthinkable. She glanced at me, the glance telling me don’t say it.

  We followed him down the basement steps. His old house had had a basement workshop, too, and this one was much like the other: neatly kept, everything in rigid, soldierly order, and very dry. There were a lot of wires in the ceiling, and I suspected the place had excellent security. “Yes, well-I wish they’d told me earlier, so we wouldn’t have had to put up with each other all those years. I didn’t like them much, either.”

  “So you sold the house,” LuEllen said.

  “Had to. Wife got the money, but at least I’ve got no strings attached. No alimony. I’m happy.” He went to a workbench, flicked on an overhead light, pulled open a drawer, and took out a plastic carrying case. “These little babies are hard to find. I think they might have started out with the CIA-but wherever they started out, the police try to keep track of them.”

  “This one’s clean?” LuEllen asked, as she popped open the case.

  “Taken from a locksmith who died… natural causes, a heart attack.”

  Inside the case was a box about the size of a pack of cigarettes, but painted flat black. A probe stuck out the top of the box, with a hair-like plastic bristle sticking out of that; on the bottom of the box was a USB port. The plastic carrying case also contained a USB data key and a short USB cable.

  “There are five extra fibers,” Drexel told LuEllen. “If you mess them all up, I don’t know how you’d replace them. They’re supposed to be pretty sturdy, though.”

  “They’re okay,” LuEllen said. “I’ve used one once, but I rented it. Always wanted one of my own. How much?”

  “Seven thousand.”

  She bobbed her head. “I’ve got the cash in the car. But let’s plug it in first.”

  DREXEL turned on his laptop, explaining to me that the USB data key simply held the software for any Windows-based laptop, and that he’d loaded it into his laptop when he was buying the device from his supplier. He brought the program up, and with a USB cable, plugged the black box into the laptop.

  “There’s a Yale lock on the storeroom door, if you want.”

  “Thanks.” LuEllen carried the laptop and the black box over to the door and slipped the fiber optic into the lock.

  The bristle, which was about the thickness of a broom straw, was a piece of fiber optic that acted like a tiny camera lens, and had been developed for heart and vascular surgery.

  When you pushed the fiber-optic probe into a normal lock, you could actually see, on the laptop screen, the pins and the key cuts inside the lock. If you knew your locks-LuEllen wasn’t a specialist, but she knew enough-you could cut yourself a key. The software made it unnecessary to actually see the interior of the lock, as it would specify a key blank and spacing for almost any lock in use in the U.S. or Europe, but, Drexel said, most people liked to see the inside, too. “Gives them confidence that the numbers are right.”

  We were watching as LuEllen probed the lock, and you could see the guts of the lock right on the laptop screen. She watched, grunted, and shut it all down. “I’ll get the cash,” she said. She handed Drexel the box and headed up the stairs.

  AS SHE went, Drexel reached up to turn off the light over the workbench, but as he did it, I put a finger to my lips and he paused. When LuEllen was walking away from the top of the stairs, I asked, “Would you have a small gun? Something handy, not too noisy? But threatening-looking?”

  “It’s best not to threaten people with a gun,” Drexel said solemnly. “If you get to the point of taking it out, it’s best to pull the trigger. And at that point, you probably shouldn’t worry too much about the noise. The difference in noise between a.380 and a.357 isn’t that critical, if you’re shooting it off in a motel with people all around. It’ll be noticeable either way, so you might as well have something that’ll do the job.”

  “So what do you have?”

  He looked pleased: guns had always been his first love, and he enjoyed dealing them. “That really depends on what you’re going to use it for.”

  “Look, I really don’t want to get too deep into this, and I’d like to get it done before my friend gets back.”

  “You’re not…” His eyebrows went up.

  I didn’t understand the question for a second, then said, “Jesus Christ, no, I’m not gonna shoot her. We’re dealing with a guy who’s a little nuts, but if I take a gun, LuEllen might argue.”

  He nodded. “Good. I’m glad it’s not her. She’s always been a good customer and I would hate to lose her. Okay, you’re not an enthusiast, you need it for close-up protection, nothing fancy. I have just the thing. Seven hundred dollars.”

  WE WERE climbing the stairs when LuEllen came back, the pistol pulling down my pants pocket. It was a Smith & Wesson hammerless revolver-hammerless so it wouldn’t snag on your clothes when you pulled it out in a hurry-loaded with six rounds of.38 special. Guns are for killing. People can make a sport out of shooting, a pastime, a hobby, but all of those things are a perversion of a gun’s intention. Guns are for killing and handguns are for killing people; I wasn’t comforted by its presence.

  And I told LuEllen about it as soon as we cleared Drexel’s.

  “Didn
’t ask me about it,” she said.

  “I didn’t think about it until we were down there in the basement,” I said. I took the gun out of my pocket and pushed it under the seat. “I didn’t want you to veto it.”

  “At this point, I wouldn’t have,” she said. “Not after we saw the execution. But it bums me out… but why’d you tell me now?”

  “If we get caught inside, and we have a gun…”

  “Yeah.”

  In most states, armed illegal entry will get you a few additional years. Not that we’d get caught.

  Chapter Twelve

  MICHELLE STROM lived in an Arlington apartment, like half of the other DDC employees. The apartment was in a complex fifteen minutes from our hotel. From the street, it was a tidy, well-kept collection of six-story yellow-brick buildings, with a swimming pool deck and parking garage. There were a bunch of trendy chain stores-Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn, Williams-Sonoma, Barnes & Noble-as part of the same complex of buildings, and a lot of pedestrian traffic around it all.

  “Well-off singles, mostly,” LuEllen said. “Won’t be any trouble getting in the door. Hope the corridor outside Strom’s place isn’t too busy.”

  We began by figuring out which part of the building she was in, and then calling her. No answer.

  Then I sat in the car, on the street, where I could see one of the entry doors. LuEllen, carrying a cloth tote with the laptop and probe inside, sat on a retaining wall a few yards down from the entrance, as though waiting for a car to pick her up. When I saw a man inside, walking toward the door, I gave her a beep with the car horn. She bounced to her feet, hurried up the steps with her key ring in her hand. By that time, the guy was coming through the door, and she caught it, smiled at him, and went through.

  I sat in the car, not a care in the world, for five minutes. Then she reappeared, looking positively perky-she loved doing this. I don’t know how in the hell she thought she’d be able to quit. She walked to the car, hopped in, said, “Routine Schlage,” and we were out of there.

  The software gave us the blank number and we stole three blanks from a suburban Home Depot. We also got a tiny triangular file, which we paid for. LuEllen took three hours to make three keys, looking at the software designs and working very carefully. When she was done, we drove back to the apartment and tried them on the outer door. All three worked, but outside locks are notoriously loose. We probably wouldn’t have that kind of luck with Strom’s lock.

  “Single, early thirties, Saturday night. What are the chances?” LuEllen asked.

  “I don’t know. We can call.”

  “Better off if we could watch her, isolate her, then you go in while I make sure she’s out of the way.”

  “In a perfect world,” I said. “But we’re short on time.”

  She thought about it for a minute. “We call her, and if she’s in, we go away. Maybe until Monday. If there’s no answer, you go in. I do my waiting-impatiently act in the downstairs hallway, and if she comes in, I call you on your cell, and you get out.”

  “If she still looks like her ID photos. And that assumes she’s not somewhere else in the building, and that she won’t come in the end doors instead of the main door.”

  “It assumes she’ll take an elevator instead of walking up the steps,” LuEllen said. “Nothing we can do about it if she’s at the next-door neighbor’s. She’ll walk in on your ass and you’ll have to chop her head off and make it look like Carp did it.”

  “Got it. I’ll draw the sign of the Carp on the walls.”

  “In her blood.”

  “Naturally.”

  We tended toward heartiness when we suspected we were about to do something stupid, of which there had been a couple of instances in the past.

  We went back to the apartment complex, walked arm in arm past all the commercial stuff, window-shopping, looking up at where LuEllen thought Strom’s apartment was. The window was dark. We called from the Barnes & Noble. No answer. Called her cell phone, and she picked it up on the third ring. “ Sharon?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong number,” she said. Strom was a natural soprano, and sounded like a nice woman-a polite one, anyway. I could hear other voices in the background, and said, “I’m sorry, is this…?” I gave a number close to hers.

  “No, you’re very close, but you’ve got two of the numbers turned around. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I hope I didn’t disturb you.” Another voice, and a clank-dishes-and we both hung up.

  I looked at LuEllen. “She’s in a restaurant.”

  “Could be five minutes from here,” LuEllen said. “Probably is.”

  “No better time,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  I HAD the keys in my pocket, my laptop under my arm. We went through the front door, and up. LuEllen pointed me at Strom’s and I tried the first key. The door popped open. “I’m a genius,” LuEllen said. “I’ll be downstairs.”

  I stepped inside the apartment and called, “Hello?”

  No response. I pushed the door shut with my foot, tripped a light switch, and called, a bit louder, “Hello? Anybody home?”

  No answer. I moved quickly, one fast lap of what turned out to be a two-bedroom apartment, looking for the lights on a burglar alarm key pad. No pad. The place smelled of plants and the acrid odor of plant food. I found, in the kitchen, six African violets, all freshly watered, sitting on a draining board across the sink.

  Then I headed into the second bedroom, which had a cozy office setup, including a desktop Dell and a good office chair. A black-leather satchel, the kind prosperous women executives use as briefcases, sat next to the chair. I brought the machine up, then checked the satchel. Inside was the usual collection of office junk-pens, pencils, Kleenex, an airlines sleep mask, a telephone connection cord for a laptop but no laptop, a spare pair of regular glasses and a pair of prescription sunglasses, a hundred or so business cards, and, tucked away in a pen slot, a gray USB memory key. Terrific.

  I stuck the key into my laptop’s USB slot, dumped a half megabyte of something into my hard drive, and put the key back into the satchel. No time to see what it was. I’d been inside the apartment for three or four minutes and was already feeling the pressure.

  I sat at her machine, hooked it into my laptop, and started dumping her document files to the laptop’s hard drive. Most of the files had unpromising names like Budget and Letters, and I didn’t have a lot of confidence that I was breaking out her computer passwords. While I waited for the files to clear, I checked her desk drawers, the bottom of the keyboard, the underside of the desk, and minutely examined the satchel for any anomalous number-letter combinations that might be passwords. I found nothing.

  Probably was around somewhere, I thought. High-security places tell their employees to come up with passwords of random numbers, letters, and symbols, so that they can’t be cracked by hackers doing research. The problem is, nobody can remember the high-security numbers, so they get written down.

  A better policy would be to tell the password holder to think of a person or place that’s significant to him, subtract a letter or two, and add a significant number or two. Say, your father’s middle name backwards, with your mother’s birthday attached. That way, you’d have a password that you could work out, would never come up in a hacker’s dictionary, and wouldn’t be written down so it couldn’t be stolen. As it is, most high-security passwords look like the registration code on the back of a Windows software box.

  And I couldn’t find one. I found an address book, flipped through it, looked in a checkbook, scanned a small Rolodex, flipped through the pages of a wall calendar featuring English kitchen gardens. Still nothing. The document files cleared, and I went into her computer, looking for other files, finding not much.

  The cell phone rang. A single ring-LuEllen’s signal that I’d been inside for ten minutes. Now we were pushing it. Too many things happen when you stay inside too long. People notice lights, decide to stop by for a visit. People
come home.

  Getting nowhere. Shut down the computer. Gave up.

  I CALLED LuEllen on the way out, and when I got downstairs, she was already walking across the parking lot to the car. I got in, and she said, “What?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”

  “Bummer.”

  “Well, I dumped a lot of stuff to the computer, but most of it looked personal.”

  “She’s a Russian major, she’s gotta have a good memory-maybe she just memorizes her codes.”

  “Maybe. But a lot of those places change passwords every month, or every week.”

  I GOT her passwords, all right, and because of LuEllen, a lot faster than I might have.

  At the hotel, I started by looking at the stuff I’d dumped from the USB memory key. When I opened it, I found a novel, chapters 1 through 17.

  “Ah, Christ, she’s writing a novel,” I said. I scanned a page. “She writes okay.”

  “What’s it about?” LuEllen was a reader.

  “Some mystery thing,” I said. “She’s got this bounty-hunter chick or something. I don’t know. Not gonna tell us anything about the working group.”

  I quit the novel files and started through the stuff I’d stripped from her desktop. First up was Strom’s personal budget, and it was a little surprising. She was well-off, for a thirty-three-year-old mid-level bureaucrat. Digging in a little, I found that she’d had an inheritance from her grandfather, nearly half a million dollars, all nicely invested with Fidelity. The next file up was what looked like a series of letters, but I couldn’t be sure, since they were written in Russian.

  I closed that out and rubbed the back of my neck. “I’m gonna go stand in a shower for a few minutes. I’ve been spending too much time in front of a screen.”

  “We oughta go out and run,” LuEllen said. She stood up and stretched. “I’m getting tight myself.”

  “So let’s find a place,” I said. “I’ll do the shower later. Let me pee and wash my face.”