John Sandford - The Hanged Man’s Song

“Terrance Small of Alexandria and William Heffron of McLean, both government employees with a Justice Department data processing center, were apparently on their way to visit a friend when they were shot. Police speculated that the men had inadvertently stumbled into a drug transaction at the Marlybone Apartments on Clay Ave.

“Police say each of the men was shot once in the head at extremely close range, execution-style, in addition to suffering wounds to the body. Neither of the men had criminal records, police said. Terry Banks, a supervisor at the Justice Department’s Division of Data Integration, said, ‘This is a terrible tragedy. These were fine men; everybody liked them. I just don’t understand how these things can happen. The people in this division will be devastated.’ ”

There was more, but that was the substance of it.

“A drug deal? The government’s not even talking to the cops when their own people get murdered,” LuEllen said. “They’re as nuts as Carp is.”

“Maybe they really don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they don’t know what Heffron and Small were doing there, that Carp has an apartment there.” I went back into the search engine, looking for Carp, and got only fish-related sites. “Nothing at all on Jimmy or James Carp.”

LuEllen shook her head, the corners of her mouth turned down. I’m a skeptic when it comes to government; she’s a couple steps further along that road than I am.

“SOnow what?” LuEllen twisted around in her seat, looking out for passersby. “We’ve been here a long time.”

“If you had to get better entry equipment, instead of the Target stuff, could you get it close by?”

“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.”

LuELLENmade 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.”

DREXELturned 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.