John Sandford - The Hanged Man’s Song

Another pause.

“Yes, a mask. Is he… mmm, reliable?” I was already edging toward the door. He listened for another few seconds, then said, “Thank you. I’ll be back in touch.”

He looked at me and said, “The recommendation wasn’t the best.”

“But do you think I’m lying about Carp?”

“No, no.” A car pulled into the driveway, lights playing across the front of the house. “That’s my wife,” he said. I heard the garage door going up.

“I’ve got to run anyway. Welsh will have her NSA people on the way. I just wanted to let you know the quality of what’s out there. But I guess we’ll find out if you’re telling the truth if the word gets out.”

“No, no, that word can’t get out,” he said hastily.

“Give me your phone number. A cell phone. I’m going to call you tonight with a proposition that may get us all out of this mess.”

He gave me a number and we heard a door opening in the back. I repeated the phone number to him, and backed out the door. “Don’t follow us. Don’t try to spot the car. Just let us go, and maybe we can save your ass.”

But he said, “Wait. What was that you said about research on Congress?”

“I can’t believe you don’t know about that,” I said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then you may be genuinely fucked,” I said. “There are people in your group who are doing deep background research on a whole bunch of congressmen, on cabinet officers… all kinds of people. Heavyweights. And I mean deep background research, including surveillance. They have compiled a series of what I could only call blackmail files.”

“That’s not right,” he said. He wasn’t quite whining.

“Bullshit. Ask around. But I’d be very, very careful about who I asked.”

He was still deep in the house when I headed out toward my car. I heard his wife call to him, and then I was in the driveway and out to the car and backing down the hill, lights still off.

In the street, LuEllen asked, “How did it go?”

“It went. Let’s find a place where I can wipe the license plate, just in case.” I threw the Clinton mask in the backseat, and she took us out of the neighborhood.

WE CALLED KRAUSEfrom Gettysburg, Pennsylvania -now that the NSA was in it, we wanted to be away from anywhere that might have a tight federal law-enforcement presence, where they could move on us quickly. If we’d called from one of the big Washington-area malls, there was a 95 percent chance that we’d have been okay. That means that you get caught one time in twenty, which is too often. We’re willing to take one time in a thousand.

In any case, we called Krause from a highway rest stop, and he answered on the third ring. “Yes?”

“Senator Krause, this is Bill Clinton. Do you want to talk?”

“Yes. I’ve, uh, talked with my staff director. He does liaison with the working group. He says he’ll check on what you told me, but says he doesn’t know anything about it. I’m afraid he’s lying. There’s more going on than I know about. I could see it.”

“He has a problem, though,” I said. “He can’t cover forever because some of the files are already out there. We’ve got some, Carp has some, we don’t know what Bobby might have gotten before he was killed.”

“You said you might have an idea about how to handle this.”

“Yeah. But before we get to that, let me tell you again. You’ve got to be careful. Really careful. There’s some strange stuff going on.”

“You can’t think… I mean, that there would be any physical danger.”

“I do think that. Three people are dead, murdered. Two of those people were apparently trying to jump Carp without any… regular authority. They were intelligence people, for Christ’s sakes. Somebody has freaked out and we don’t know who.”

“I can make some arrangements.”

“If you want, I could call with a threat. Make it sound Middle Eastern.”

“No, no, no. Let me handle it,” he said. “Now, your idea.”

“WE-our group-have two limited objectives,” I said. “We want to kill Bobby’s computer and we want Carp punished for murdering Bobby. That’s all. If Bobby’s laptop is destroyed, that solves our problem and solves part of yours. That’s one less wild card running around out there. Of course, you still have to deal with your working group.”

“What about the stuff you have? That’s still a problem.”

“If you talk some more with Rosalind Welsh, she’ll tell you that we are discreet as long as we’re not fucked with. I don’t want the FBI coming after me-they might find me. Once we’ve got Carp in hand, and the laptop, you’ll never hear from me again. Besides, we don’t have much. Carp, on the other hand, has about fifty huge files. He has used a small fraction of only one, and that’s the one I’ve got.”

“Fifty?”

“That’s right. He hasn’t used one percent of what he’s got.”

“Oh my God.”

“WE THINKwe can get to Carp, without him knowing it,” I said. “Sort of, mmm, through a third person. We could tell him that you want to make a deal. That you’ll cover for him in exchange for neutralizing the Bobby laptop. We know he’s broke and desperate and probably homeless, and we think he’s crazy-so he might go for it. We think you might be able to set up a meeting.”

“And then what?”

“You’re the politician, Senator. Negotiate with him. Try to bring him in. I wouldn’t try to grab him, though. He’s crazy, but he’s smart. If he agrees to a meeting, he’ll set up some way to get out. And there’s too much of a chance that he’ll have set up a time bomb on the laptop.”

“What?”

“You know, an information bomb. You grab him, he does nothing but keep his mouth shut, and twelve hours later, the computer dumps everything to CNN. That’s simple enough to do. All you need is a motel room with a telephone, and a few lines of computer code.”

“Goddamnit.”

“You’ve got to do something ,” I said. “Right now, he’s completely out of control. If you go after him with the FBI, the laptop is going to become public property, and you’re toast. If you can talk to him, face-to-face, you should be able to deal with him. Somehow.”

“I’ve got to think about this. How would you convince him to get in touch with me?”

“We’re not exactly sure we can. I don’t want to explain it to you, because it would give something away. But we think we can get him to call… to get in touch.”

“Okay. You do that, and I’ll think about it.”

WE DIDnothing overnight, except make a stop at a Home Depot to pick up a couple of bronze plumb bobs; and talk about it.

If we called at night, we thought, Carp might do something like set up a middle-of-the-night meeting somewhere, and that would make him much harder to track. Better to do it in daylight.

As we lay awake in bed, LuEllen said, “Every move you make, you act like you think Krause is gonna pull something smart. That he’s gonna double-cross us.”

“I’d bet on it,” I said. “That’s why we don’t get involved with any exchange. Let them work it out. If we can get the laptop, that’s all we want.”

“There are a lot of assumptions buried in that-that Carp takes the Corolla, that he takes the laptop and leaves it in the Corolla, that he tries to figure out something clever.”

“It’s more than just hope,” I said. “He has to believe that nobody’s figured out the Corolla-nobody official, anyway-or they would have grabbed him already. He can’t leave the laptop with anybody, because if he is busted, and it makes television, then his friend, whoever he’s staying with, would have no choice but to turn it in. If he didn’t, then he’d go down with Carp. So Carp can’t trust anybody, but he can sort of trust the car.”