John Sandford - The Hanged Man’s Song

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 CALLEDKrause 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.”

“I’ll give you a couple of days. If you get him and you stay off our backs, you won’t be hearing from us again. If we hear from you again, we’ll drop the bomb.”

I hung up, found a deli, bought thirty dollars’ worth of food and drink, and headed back to the hotel. I spent the rest of the day and the evening lying on my bed, or sitting at the desk, poking at the computer I’d taken out of Carp’s car. I was afraid to leave the room. At six o’clock, the first stuff about Deering, Marsh, and Brock started to leak onto the news-CNN, and Fox at first, and then ABC. There were no details, only teasers about how “more powerful Washington legislators may be entangled in the growing Bobby scandal that has rocked Washington for a week.”

Good enough; the TV boys were checking out the documents. I wondered if Bobby would be pleased. As far as I knew, he’d never used any of the blackmail stuff himself-but then I didn’t know where all the continuing Washington scandals came from, and I didn’t know what might have been done quietly, as pressure, rather than as a direct attack.

WAITING. Going from TV to computer and back. I finally got out the tarot deck and did a spread. I took a while to frame a question about LuEllen, and when I did, came up with the Two of Cups. That was interesting, but didn’t give me any hint of what might happen in the next few hours.

And I thought, Jesus, Kidd, you’re doing a gypsy reading, as if you believe in this shit . That says something about my level of stress.

Before I put the cards away-my little man, the leprechaun-like id-character that everyone carries in the back of his head-was laughing at me, but I did a reading on my own future. Just killing time. Came up with the King of Swords, which told me nothing I might not suspect even without the cards.

Not entirely bad, but not entirely good, either. But self-psychoanalysis is not what I needed. Or, rather, I may have needed it, but it wasn’t what I so desperately wanted. What I wanted I got at eleven o’clock; I almost ruptured an appendix getting to the phone.

“YEAH,”I said. LuEllen had known where I’d be; and she’d call me through a hotel switchboard, so there wouldn’t be anything on my cell phone.

“It’s me,” she said. She sounded tired. “I’m near that narrow lane, the one we used to check for tails the last time we were here. The airplane time. You remember? I don’t want to say the name. Nobody could have followed me this far. I went to a Goodwill store and bought clothes and dumped all of my stuff, every stitch, and my shoes, so I’m not bugged.”

“Are you okay?”

“Mmm. Physically. Otherwise, I’m pretty screwed up. They put me in a room and every once in a while, somebody would come in and ask a question. I didn’t say one fuckin’ word to them. Then they came and got me, put me in a car, drove around for a while, gave me a hundred dollars, dropped me off, and told me to get lost. I don’t know where I was in the room, it was like an office building, but I don’t know where.”

“They got your car?”

“Yes. They’ll have my prints. I didn’t see anybody take a picture. They… they weren’t real cops. They were something else. I thought maybe Army-some of them had those funny white-sidewall haircuts.”

“Okay. So I’ll cruise the lane in exactly twenty minutes. You got your watch?”

“No, I dumped everything. But I know twenty minutes.”

“You come in at the same time I do, so you’re moving. I’ll flick the lights when I come into the street.”

“See you.” She really did sound beat.

I GOTher twenty minutes later, on a narrow one-way lane that we’d once used to make sure that nobody was behind us. I went into the lane slowly, blinked my lights, and crawled through, worried sick that she wouldn’t be there.

She was. She stepped out from behind some kind of evergreen, next to a low stone wall and a garbage can, and held up her hand and I slowed and she got in.

“You look like you just got out of Vogue ,” I said.

“Shut up and drive,” she said. I was still wound tight as a grandfather clock, afraid that a black federal car would suddenly block the way, and guys with guns would come parachuting out of the trees.

But they didn’t. Six blocks down the road and around a few corners, and she said, “Pull over.”

“What?” I looked in all the mirrors and saw nothing.

“I need a squeeze,” she said. “Really bad.”

I pulled over and we spent a little time just squeezing each other, though modern cars aren’t built for it. Christ, I’d been worried. I’d been so worried…

“You got me back,” she said.

LuELLEN DISAPPEAREDinto the bathroom, taking her cosmetics bag with her, leaving the Goodwill clothes on the floor. She said she expected to be in there awhile. I gathered up the clothes and stuffed them in a sack. We could drop them somewhere the next day.

With the bathwater running in the background, with LuEllen home and well, I went back to Bobby’s computer, the laptop I’d taken from Carp’s car. I’d been poking at it during the afternoon, while I waited to hear from LuEllen. What I’d found was curious.

The files that had been on Carp’s computer, the blackmail files, were there, all right, as were the encrypted files. But some of the encrypted files had been decrypted. He’d made notes: This from File 23, Indexed as MRG Cleanup : and there was the Norwalk virus file.

The question that plagued me was, how had he decrypted it? Where had he gotten the decryption keys? Bobby’s laptop had the encryption program right there, out front, and it was a good, solid commercial program that would essentially produce an uncrackable file.

From the bathroom, LuEllen said, “Oh, Jesus,” and I looked up, then rolled off the bed, went to the bathroom door, and poked my head inside.

“What was that?”

“My ass hitting the hot water. Close the door, you’re letting the cold air in.” I took a longer lingering look before I backed out. She’d put some bubble bath in the water, and it smelled good; and some pink parts were poking out of the bubbles, fairly artfully, I thought. She said, “Your look is lingering.”