Extreme Prey (5 page)

“Okay. Google is developing a text identification program that will allow them to look at messages streaming through Google mail and other places, and match texts with a high degree of accuracy,” Kidd said. “Ultimately, they hope that if John Doe is a gun nut and a chess player and a boat owner, they’ll be able to pick out every time he sends a message to any website, from any computer,
anywhere, anytime, and quickly paste in advertisements for guns, chess sets, and boats.”

“Gotta love that,” Lucas said. “It’s the American way.”

“Yeah, well, I . . . borrowed their program for a while this evening and ran it against the e-mails you sent me. I didn’t come up with a name, but I did come up with a group of organizations this woman may belong to. They’re scattered all over the Midwest and the plains states—farm country—and use her ideological language,” Kidd said. “Three of them are in Iowa and it seems likely that they overlap. There’s the Progressive People’s Party of Iowa, the Isaac Alfred Patriot League, and a group called Prairie Storm. I couldn’t find a membership list for any of them, but I’ve got contacts for all three. They’re small organizations, they hit their peak back in the eighties and early nineties.”

“Who’s Isaac Alfred?”

“He was a kid from Mason City who applied for a religious exemption from the Vietnam War, but was denied the exemption by the draft board. He was drafted and sent to Vietnam as a company clerk, where he was in constant trouble for talking up war resistance. Shortly before the Army was going to arrest him and ship him home, he was killed in a rocket attack on his base. The group was started by his father. That was basically an anti-war group that evolved into a more general populist political-action organization, then got weird and sort of petered out.”

“Kidd, I owe you,” Lucas said. “If you could put the names and contacts in an e-mail and ship it to me, I’d owe you more.”

“I’ll collect someday,” Kidd said.

“I suspect you will,” Lucas said. “Call me if you think of anything new.”

Just before he went to sleep, Lucas thought of Alice Green, when she’d said, “You got nothin’.”

He smiled to himself: she had no idea what he had.

He still had his friends.

A
t one o’clock in the morning, with broken clouds hanging low in the sky, the scent of rain in the air: a blacktopped highway a half-mile out of Westile, home of the National Guard’s D Company, 34th Engineers. The white pickup’s lights were the only ones to be seen, other than a distant yard light or two.

“This is it,” Marlys Purdy said over her shoulder, through the window to the pickup’s truck bed. Cole was in the back, lying flat on a plastic air mattress, a pack between his feet. “Wait ’til I’ve stopped rolling.”

Marlys didn’t want to touch the brakes, because she didn’t want the brake lights flashing in the dark. The pickup rolled to a halt and she said, “Go now,” and Cole bailed out the back, pulled on the pack, and humped down into the roadside ditch. At the bottom, he sank knee-deep in muck and, cursing, plowed through to the other side, the foul-smelling water soaking through his boots and into his socks.

Cole was wearing bow-hunter’s camo, with the matching camo backpack, and carrying a StrongArm cutter. Out of the swampy
water, he climbed the far side of the ditch and rolled across the fence and into the cornfield beyond, where he instantly became invisible.

With the truck gone, he for the first time realized exactly how dark it was. He could not see his own hands.

Marlys moved on to the next stop sign, looked both ways down a gravel road, and continued through town, out to Interstate 80 and a cluster of cheap motels and two gas stations. She didn’t want anyone to see her face, so she parked at an empty motel space and slid down in the driver’s seat.

Nothing for her to do but wait.

—

COLE MOVED
a few rows back into the cornfield and pulled up his face mask, not so much for concealment—not yet—as to keep the corn leaves from cutting his face as he walked through them. He tried to be as quiet as he could be, but he was not quiet, to his own ears, as the saw-edged corn leaves dragged across the camo jacket and pants. The corn rows ran parallel to the road, and acted as guides: he followed two rows straight north, emerging at the gravel road that Marlys had crossed.

He waited inside the screen of corn, listening for motors, watching for lights, then climbed the fence and plodded through the ditch, feeling his way—this one was dry at the bottom—and across the road. He had to grope for the next fence, found it, dropped into another cornfield. That field ran right up to the edge of town and to the edge of the blacktop pad around the National Guard building.

When he got to the pad, he sat again, and listened for a while. He could hear some sound from the sleeping town, but not much—the hiss of a car going by on the main road, some sort of motor noise from far away, maybe at the grain elevator, and the muted rumble of traffic on the distant interstate highway. He could also see a little better in the thin reflected light from the other side of the Guard building.

Cole was apprehensive: not frightened, but tense. A lot could go wrong here: the story of his life.

—

IN TROUBLE THROUGH
most of his school years, he’d been sitting in an assistant principal’s office, in seventh grade, and he heard the guy say to a secretary, “Him again. Something seriously wrong with that boy. He’s had more fights than Muhammad Ali.”

The secretary had said, “Shhh . . . he’s right outside.”

Cole pretended he hadn’t heard, to everyone’s relief; but he
had
heard. And he’d heard that stuff all the time, from the minute he walked into kindergarten and another kid asked, “What you lookin’ at?” and Cole punched him in the face.

The only place he’d felt at all at home, besides when he
was
at home, had been in the Army. Army rules had been stupid, but simple, and following them hadn’t been a problem. He was athletic enough that basic training had been a snap, and he’d driven a truck for years before the Army sent him to truck driving school.

Iraq had been different. After growing up in the fertile fields of Iowa, he’d looked down at the deserts surrounding Baghdad, and only one word came to mind: “Shithole.”

Iraq was a shithole, and in his whole time there, he’d seen nothing to change his opinion. Well, one thing, maybe. He’d come and gone through Kuwait, and if anything, Kuwait was even more of a shithole than Iraq. Was it possible to have a shithole lite? If so, then maybe that’s what Iraq was.

Though Iraq had left him injured, there was one aspect about the place that fascinated him. The snipers. There’d been four of them at the FOB where he’d spent most of his time, and it wasn’t so much the non-standard guns that had fascinated him, but the attitude.

Whatever else you might say about them, the snipers were stone killers.

Told to kill, they would do it. They were cool: just do it.

He admired that. Liked it.

—

COLE PUSHED THE SPEED DIAL
button on the cell phone, said, “Going in.”

Marlys came back: “Don’t get hurt.”

Cole picked up the Hurst StrongArm cutter he’d surreptitiously borrowed from the volunteer fire department. He was a volunteer, had a key to the building, and would have the cutter back before dawn.

He pulled on a pair of plastic gloves and sat for a few more seconds, letting the electricity flow through him. He was out there, he was operating, fighting the good fight. He’d driven tankers full of high-test gas through towns controlled by Al Qaeda fighters, and here he was again.

Well: more or less. Anyway, the action seemed to quell the
headaches, clear the cobwebs from his brain, bring the world into focus. More than the VA had ever done for him.

—

THE NATIONAL GUARD PARKING LOT
was illuminated by two pole lights, both on the other side of the building, near the parking lot entrance. He crossed the fence, not to the National Guard building itself, but to a steel shed at the edge of the parking lot. He was somewhat concealed by parked Humvees, but not entirely. If anyone were to unexpectedly drive past, he might be seen, even with the camo.

The shed was locked with a fat-shanked padlock. Cole turned on the StrongArm and cut through the shank. He pulled the door open and stepped inside, where there was barely enough room to stand, pulled the door shut again, and turned on his flashlight. Now he was invisible again, from the outside. If somebody had seen him going in . . . nothing to do about that.

“You’re sweating like a dog,” Cole muttered to himself. “You stink.”

His boots were even worse, reeking of the muck from the roadside marsh.

—

THE SHED WAS EMPTY,
but on the floor, set in a foot-high circle of concrete designed to keep water out, was a steel manhole cover, with another fat padlock on it. The StrongArm cut that one, too, but it took a minute, and a few tries. When it was done, with a loud
clunk
, Cole froze, and listened. Heard nothing—and realized
that while the
clunk
was loud in his ears, it probably wouldn’t have been heard ten feet away.

“Move,” he whispered.

The manhole cover had two steel loop handles, and he lifted it out of the circle of concrete. Beneath it was an eight-foot-deep hole, with poured concrete walls and a concrete floor, and a ladder going down.

Cole went down.

—

MARLYS’S CELL PHONE RANG.
Jesse. She answered, “Yeah? Jesse?”

“Where are you guys?”

“Went out to the all-night Walmart, thought we’d stop and get a bite. We’re off I-80.”

“Well, I’m home. See you when you get here.”

“Don’t wait up,” Marlys said. She hurriedly clicked off: couldn’t have the phone tied up, if Cole called.

—

COLE SHONE THE FLASHLIGHT
around the underground concrete box. The box was lined with wooden shelves, on which he found two wooden boxes of plastic explosive and smaller boxes of blasting caps. Candy store!

If it all went off at once, he thought, it might blow the manhole cover to the moon, but that deep in the ground, with bunker-weight concrete all around, probably wouldn’t hurt much else. Except him, if he were still there. The cops might not even find the raspberry-jelly stains he’d leave behind . . .

—

COLE CARRIED
a whole box of explosive up the ladder, left the box on the ground-level floor, went back down for a box of blasting caps and four electronic detonators. Back up the ladder, he stuffed the blasting caps and detonators in his backpack, picked up the StrongArm. He listened for a minute, in the steel shed, then turned the flashlight off, put it in his jacket pocket, and picked up the box of explosive, which probably weighed twenty pounds.

As he did that, he saw lights swing across the hairline crack where the door wasn’t quite closed tight: his heart jumped and he touched the holster at his hip. Then the lights dimmed and he heard a car accelerating away. Somebody had used the parking lot to turn around.

He hoped.

He waited another minute, then another. He reached toward the door to ease it open . . .

Scotch tape! He’d almost forgotten. He got a roll of it out of the side pocket of his camo cargo pants, put it in his mouth, picked up the box of explosive again, and pushed the shed door open.

Outside, in the dark again, Cole lingered just a minute, fitting the broken padlock back on the shed’s door latch, fastening the broken ends with a strip of Magic Mending tape. He and Marlys thought it unlikely that the engineers would go into the explosives dump with any regularity. If you could see the padlock hanging there, in place . . . it could be days or even weeks before anybody discovered that the C4 was gone.

With the padlock in place, Cole picked up the box of explosive
and the StrongArm, humped them into the cornfield, back the way he’d come in. He crossed the gravel road and then, instead of going back into the second field, he jogged down the road to the corner, where he sank behind a clump of weeds. No point walking through that swamp again.

—

A MILE AWAY,
Marlys was getting nervous: then the cell phone lit up, and the call came in.

“I’m out. We’re good. Pick me up at that corner.”

“Coming,” she said. No identifiers.

As Marlys started the truck, she felt as though somebody had stuck an icicle in her heart.

Until this moment, they’d done nothing illegal. With all the reconnaissance they’d done, with all the research, they’d really had no way to get at Bowden—nothing that wasn’t purely suicidal. She wasn’t suicidal.

She had worked out an idea of how they might kill Bowden and get away with it, but she didn’t have what she needed to do that: now they did.

Marlys was a fatalist: if she had a perfect plan, but if something were to stop her from doing that, by denying her the materials . . . well, then, Fate had spoken, hadn’t it?

Bowden would walk away from Iowa, get elected, and the whole ugly system would grind on.

But so far, Fate was telling her that she was right on course.

A
t eight in the morning, Lucas called Bell Wood, a friend who headed the major crimes section of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation. Wood said, “I was talking to that fuckin’ Flowers a few days ago and he said you’re being a hangdog about it all and you still don’t have a job.”

“Yup.”

“What are you doing? You gotta work, man.”

“Well, I’m putting an addition on my cabin up in Wisconsin. I’ve been doing that all summer,” Lucas said. “Right at this very moment, I’m making an inquiry . . . for Governor Henderson. I’m down here in Iowa, in Ames.”

“Uh-oh. What’s going on?” Wood asked.

Lucas explained about the e-mails and the woman and the man who’d spoken directly to Henderson, and the problem with getting someone to take the threat seriously.

“We’ve got a security team dealing with the campaigns. Send me the e-mails, and everything else you’ve got, and I’ll run it past the team,” Wood said. “Will you keep looking at it?”

“Yeah, unless somebody tells me different,” Lucas said.

“I say keep going. You got a gun with you?” Wood asked.

“In the car, I’m not carrying,” Lucas said.

“Listen, down here we’ve got a professional weapons permit deal that would allow you to carry,” Wood said. “I’ll talk to my guy at Weapons Permits and I’ll get you one.”

“That’d be nice. I don’t think I’ll need it, but . . . I’ll take it,” Lucas said. “And I’ll ship you those e-mails in one minute. I’ve already done some checking around, and I’d like to see if you could get me phone numbers and addresses for three different people. None of them are suspects, but they run political groups that might give me a lead on this woman and the other guy.”

“Send them,” Wood said. “I’ll get back to you as quick as I can, with the information and the permit.”

—

LUCAS SENT THE E-MAILS
to Wood, then called Mitford, the governor’s weasel. “When are you leaving?”

“Fifteen minutes. Well, that’s when we’re scheduled to leave. Probably be more like half an hour.”

“I’d like to stop by and talk to the governor for a minute,” Lucas said.

“Better hurry,” Mitford said.

—

THE GOVERNOR’S CAMPAIGN PARTY
was in another interstate motel, less than a block away. The campaign bus was idling in the
parking lot, belching out diesel exhaust, and a group of underlings was loading luggage and office equipment onto it. Lucas found Alice Green getting a cup of coffee in the front lobby.

“Got breakfast in the campaign suite, if you want a bagel and cream cheese,” she said. “Coffee and Cokes and Pepsi for caffeine freaks.”

Together they walked back to the campaign suite, and Lucas said, “It occurs to me that once I start digging around, somebody could get pissed off at Henderson . . .”

“Thought of that. The governor knows what these people look like and we’ve got a safe word. Rumpelstiltskin. He says that, we close around him.”

“Best you can do, I guess,” Lucas said. “Anybody talk to the Gardner campaign?”

“I don’t think he’s important enough to shoot, but yeah, I talked to his head security guy and sent him the photo and Elmer’s descriptions.”

At the campaign suite, Lucas got a toasted bagel with jam and a Diet Coke, and followed Green to Henderson’s suite, where Mitford and Henderson were on hardwired phones, dealing with political business back in Minnesota.

As Lucas waited, his phone rang: Bell Wood.

“That was easy,” Wood said. “All three of those guys are in our database, they’ve all been involved in various marches and sit-ins, they’ve all gone to jail at one time or another. Two of them are nonviolent, more or less, but the other one has a problem. I’m dropping it all to your e-mail right . . .
now
.”

“How big is the guy’s problem?” Lucas asked.

“He’s getting a little old for it now, but he liked to beat people up, back in the day,” Wood said. “Details in the e-mail.”

“Thanks. I’ll keep you up to date,” Lucas said.

—

MITFORD AND HENDERSON
were still yammering away on the phones, so Lucas called up the e-mail on his phone, then called up Google Maps. There were three names, with three addresses and phone numbers. Switching between the map and the addresses, he located a David Leonard in Atlantic, Iowa, a small town south of I-80 between Des Moines and Omaha; a Joseph Likely, from Mount Pleasant, Iowa, in the southeastern part of the state; and a Clark Alfred from Mason City, off I-35, near the Iowa-Minnesota border.

Checking the map a final time, he found that Mount Pleasant wasn’t too far from Ottumwa, one of the towns from which the suspicious e-mails had been sent, and the drive between the two towns was fast and straightforward, on U.S. Highway 34.

Likely, though, was supposedly a committed pacifist, and his group, the Progressive People’s Party of Iowa, had always been of the nonviolent drop-and-drag type, more of a pain in the ass for cops than an active challenge.

Leonard, on the other hand, had done three years at Anamosa State Penitentiary for aggravated assault after trying to break up a foreclosure auction with a baseball bat. Before forming his Prairie Storm group, in the mid-1980s, he’d done two short prison terms for assault and armed robbery, and after the three-year term had been arrested twice more for assault and acquitted once on a
burglary charge. To Lucas’s eye, he looked like a criminal who’d moved himself into politics.

His group, Prairie Storm, had been involved in violent incidents at foreclosure auctions, loan companies, and banks.

Clark Alfred’s anti-war group had started out protesting the Vietnam War, had gotten involved in populist politics after the farm crash of the eighties, had short, local revivals during the first and second Gulf wars. At the moment, it seemed to have only one member: Alfred himself. Alfred, according to Wood’s information, was ninety-four years old.

After a moment’s consideration, Lucas decided to look at Leonard first, and then Likely. Given his age and history, Alfred didn’t seem like much of a candidate for a violent conspiracy.

—

WHEN EVERYBODY WAS OFF
their respective phones, Henderson asked Lucas, “You got them yet?”

“No, but I’ve got some things to work with,” Lucas said. He gave them a quick recap of the information he’d scraped up, then said, “I’m going to Atlantic first, then over to Mount Pleasant. I’ll need your travel schedule and some phone numbers, to stay in touch.”

“We’re going down to Des Moines for a picnic with Catholic Social Services and a cocktail party for possible donors, and then to Iowa City,” Mitford said. “We’ve got a private event there tonight, then a rally tomorrow morning. Then we go to Cedar Rapids and Cedar Falls. That’s the University of Iowa, Kirkwood Community College, University of Northern Iowa, all tomorrow.”

“Hitting a lot of colleges,” Lucas said.

“I’m a lefty,” Henderson said. “If a lefty needs a crowd, he goes to colleges.”

“If you’re going to Mount Pleasant this afternoon, that’s close to Iowa City. If you want a room in Iowa City, call me and I’ll have our travel planner get one for you,” Mitford said to Lucas.

“Thanks. Right now . . . do you know where Bowden is?”

“She’s in Chicago right now, a fast day trip to talk to her money people this morning. She flies to Burlington, that’s here in Iowa, this afternoon, for a speech, then she heads up to Davenport by car,” Mitford said. “She has a fund-raiser on a riverboat out of Davenport at five o’clock and will be back in town for a speech at six-thirty.”

“Where exactly is Burlington?” Lucas asked.

“On the Mississippi, down in the southeast corner of the state,” Mitford said. “As a matter of fact, it’s only about thirty-two miles from Mount Pleasant and about forty minutes by campaign bus. You could probably drive it in twenty-five.”

“Really? You know that off the top of your head?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah, really,” Mitford said. “I have a map of Iowa, with all the mileages and travel times, tattooed on my chest and stomach. That little teeny bit of the state that dangles down to Keokuk? That’s on my dick.”

Henderson said, “Jesus, Neil,” and tipped his head toward Green.

“That’s all right,” Green said. “It’s only a little teeny bit.”

The governor smiled and turned back to Lucas. “You’re going to talk with Bowden?”

“Well, with her weasel, anyway, if you can get your weasel to set it up,” Lucas said.

Henderson nodded at Mitford, who said, “I think of myself more as a wolverine.”

“A wolverine’s a weasel,” Green said.

“Yeah, but it’s the biggest, meanest one,” Mitford said. To Lucas: “I’ll call Norm, tell him you’re coming.”

—

A WOMAN WITH A CLIPBOARD
hustled into the room and said, “Governor, I know it’s not on the schedule, but a WHO van’s outside, they’d like one minute with you, if you could. Jack Gardner says you’re an unrealistic dreamer and that Congress wouldn’t pass any of your policies—”

“One minute? I’ve got one minute,” Henderson said.

They all drifted through the motel to the parking lot, where a TV cameraman was pointing his camera at the HENDERSON banner on the side of the campaign bus. The woman with the clipboard stopped Henderson before he got to the cameras, opened a lunch box and took out a powder puff, dabbed at his nose and the thin rings under his eyes, did a final touch-up with a tissue, and said, “Go.”

—

WHILE THEY WAITED
for the governor to finish with the camera and get on the bus, Lucas took Green aside. “Is it possible that there’s somebody on Bowden’s bus who might be a problem? Anybody I should be worried about?”

“I doubt it. They’re thoroughly vetted. I talked to the Secret Service campaign liaison guy in Washington, an old friend of mine, had him run all the names in depth. That’s us, Bowden’s and Gardner’s campaigns. Everybody seems to be clean, a few pot busts, a couple of cocaines, four DWIs. Most of the bus people are political, but more on the technical side of things, rather than, you know, policy.”

“Not nuts, then,” Lucas said.

“No. There are a few crazies around, but not on the buses. Why are you worried about the buses?”

“If there was somebody feeding information, or support, or money, or whatever, to these stalkers, if there are stalkers, I need to know who I should look at,” Lucas said. “It’s like Neil—Neil wouldn’t betray Henderson, they’re joined at the hip, but he knows everything about Bowden, too. Where she’s going, what time she’s going there . . . That’d be pretty useful if you were planning an attack.”

“Most of that you could find out on her website,” Green said. “You wouldn’t need Neil to tell you.”

Lucas grinned and rubbed his nose. “Okay. I’m the new guy. I didn’t think of that. The website gets updated every day?”

“Not just every day, but every hour,” Green said. “We’ve got a Web tech on the bus with us. Bowden does, too. Right now, our guy is posting to people in Des Moines that we’ll be fifteen minutes late.”

“And Bowden does the same thing?”

“Sure. Minute-by-minute,” Green said.

“Okay . . . so if you know all this stuff, where’s the most
uncontrolled spot Bowden will be in the next couple of weeks? Or the governor?”

“That’s easy—the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines,” Green said. “Every candidate goes there. It’s the major event of the summer, as far as the campaigns go. There’s between ninety and a hundred and ten thousand people going through the fair every day. There are no effective security controls, as far as I can tell.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah.”

“All right. That gives me a deadline,” Lucas said.

“But—this is all just a
feeling
on Elmer’s part,” Green said. “That something’s wrong. I kind of agree with him, but when I was with the Secret Service, we dealt with all kinds of perceived threats and virtually none of them were real. Or realistic. Mostly they were goofs who wanted some attention.”

“And got it.”

“Yes, but the critical thing was, they’d never be a real threat to the president,” Green said. “They just didn’t have the planning ability, the . . . foresight . . . to be a real threat.”

—

LUCAS THOUGHT ABOUT THAT
as the bus pulled out of the parking lot. He thought Green was interested in what he was doing, but protecting Bowden wasn’t part of her job description. While he’d told her of Elle Kruger’s psychological analysis of the e-mails, he had the feeling that she hadn’t taken that as seriously as he had—because Elle was a nun, and Green didn’t know her. Where did a nun get off peddling advice on possible psychotic assassins?

But Lucas
did
know Elle Kruger and she’d left him with a bad feeling about the whole situation. Somebody, he thought, was stalking Bowden. Whether or not they’d pull the trigger on her was another matter. The problem was to get to them, before they had the chance to act, before they had to make that final decision.

—

AFTER SEEING THE BUS OFF,
Lucas went back to his motel, used the Wi-Fi to send a short note to Weather, who was probably in an operating room and wouldn’t see it until the afternoon. He found another short e-mail from Bell Wood that asked, “Do you know where you’re staying tonight?”

Lucas sent back: “Don’t know for sure, but probably in Iowa City, with Henderson’s campaign crew.”

With the e-mail out of the way, he got cleaned up, went out to the car, and at nine o’clock headed south and west.