The Hanged Man’s Song (17 page)

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.

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 stripped 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.”

“
W
ait
-
”

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 million 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.”