John Sandford - The Fool's Run

"I thought so too."

"And Dace is dead."

We drove into the Philadelphia airport and retrieved my car. Before we left, I called Bobby from a phone booth, using the portable.

What?

Need everything you can find on Hellwolf/Whitemark and Sunfire/Anshiser. Crash jobs, full-time. Flat fee $10,000. Need feeds every few hours.

Leave terminal on answer.

Leaving the airport, we turned back west. The appearance of the two hoods and the inevitable conclusion about Maggie kept me awake. I drove all the way through to Gettysburg, where we checked into the biggest motel we could find.

I put LuEllen to bed, called Bobby, and took the first dump of information on Anshiser and Sunfire. LuEllen slept most of the day, woke up long enough to eat, and went back down for the night. I was beat-up but drove into town and bought another printer so I could dump incoming files to paper. Late in the day, Bobby was calling every hour, and the stuff was coming faster and faster. Most of it was useless: lightweight business-magazine stuff, public biographies. I'd seen some of it during the first run-through, before taking the job.

On the second day, a rainstorm came through from the west. It killed a spell of late September heat and replaced it with autumn. The rain left the park grounds dark and somber. I walked LuEllen along Cemetery Ridge, pointing out the path of Pickett's Charge.

"It doesn't look so hard; it's not hardly a hill," she said.

"It didn't have to be. The crest was just high enough to hide the federals and give them some cover during the preparatory barrage. The Southerners thought the cannonading had done a lot more damage than it had. But they came up the hill into a hornet's nest. The high tide of the Confederacy. The South was defeated that week. Lee was turned around here, and out West, Grant was taking Vicksburg. What a time."

We'd gone out to the battlefield during a break in the rain, but now it was sweeping in again, a thin, gray wall coming down from Seminary Ridge, across the peach orchard, obscuring the Roundtops, and up the hill. We turned our backs on it, retreated to the car.

"I was supposed to be in Mexico today," LuEllen said as we went back to the motel. She stared out the window, and tears trickled down her cheeks. I couldn't think of anything to say. We rode back to the beat of the windshield wipers and the sound of wet pavement hissing under the wheels.

Another lengthy file was waiting at the motel. I dumped it to the printer and started working through it. Ten minutes later I found it.

"That's funny." I sat up on the bed.

"What?"

I looked at the source of the article I was reading: one of the popular science magazines.

"I've seen a couple of references to a guidance system called Snagger. For the Hellwolf."

"So?"

"So it sounds a hell of a lot like the String system. But I haven't seen anything about String."

WHAT?

Need word search on all files, references: String and Snagger.

It took about six hours to accumulate, but when we had done it, the facts were clear enough.

"Anshiser never had the String system. Whitemark developed the Snagger. Same thing, essentially. Anshiser didn't have a clue. Then, six months ago, when preliminary design studies were due, word got out that Whitemark was onto something big. Anshiser didn't have anything to compare with it."

"So Anshiser stole it from Whitemark, not the other way around?"

"Looks like it. They desperately needed time to understand Snagger and do a knock-off for their own plane. That's where we came in. That whole routine they did in Chicago was an act. Jesus! I bought the whole thing!"

LuEllen sat hunched on the bed, her hair hanging limp down the sides of her face, her face wrinkled in thought. Eventually she shook her head and looked up.

"So?"

"So?"

"Yeah. So what?" she said. "So they conned us into doing a job on Whitemark. What difference does it make? If they'd told you the truth and offered you two million to take down Whitemark, you probably would have said 'yes' anyway. They lied, but that's no reason to start shooting at us. We're no more likely to go to the cops now than if they were telling the truth."

"Maybe not. But it makes what we did a lot more serious, especially for Anshiser. If Whitemark had stolen the String system and Anshiser could prove it, it might have cost Whitemark the contract. Or a lawsuit so big that winning the contract would have been meaningless. But if Anshiser stole Snagger and then wrecked Whitemark to slow them down so they could do a knock-off, and if Whitemark could prove it.

"Then Anshiser is ruined. Absolutely."

"And if Anshiser had hired the job done by a group of outsiders, and one of them was a newspaper guy with a reputation for busting defense industries, and another one was a thief whose name he didn't even know.

"It might make sense to get rid of them permanently," LuEllen concluded.

We both thought about it for a minute.

"Where did they get the gunmen?" she asked.

I shrugged. "Anshiser is a defense industry. They know all kinds of people. They probably found a couple of ex-Special Forces guys looking for a little cash."

"And then you've got a couple of guys who know the story and have killed people because of it," LuEllen objected. "I don't know. It sounds weak."

"They wouldn't have to tell those guys the whole story, just point them at the targets," I said. "I can't think of any other rationale."

The motel room had two single beds. When we went to sleep that night, LuEllen suddenly said in the dark, "I'd like to come over and sleep with you, but, like, no sex. I just want to sleep with somebody."

"Come on." She snuggled in against me, and we whispered back and forth for a while, and then she drifted away. Her body warmth under the blanket reminded me of Maggie, like a black patch on my mind. I was dozing off when the computer alarm sounded, and I rolled out of bed to look.

Something weird.

What?

Been in newspaper clip files, gone way back. Anshiser old man was in German mob.

What?

Chicago had German mob. Like Mafia. Anshiser father convicted in 1910 extortion, two years in prison, charged 1914 murder and extortion, not guilty. No more charges but mentioned in stories as accountant for German mob. Don't know what that is yet, keep digging?

Look for stuff on Anshiser and associates.

Already got most of it.

Got access to criminal intelligence data banks, FBI?

No. Tried once. Maximum protection.

How about NCIC?

Easy access if got codes. Need codes.

Who got codes?

I find. Call back later. Want mob clips now?

He dumped the clips to the computer. There weren't many of them, but there was enough information to suggest that Anshiser's father was a major crime figure. Exactly what he did was unclear from the clips. I had just finished reading the clips when Bobby called again. He had a name.

When LuEllen woke the next morning, she smiled, a small tentative smile, the first one I'd seen since the shooting.

"I don't know how to break it to you," I said.

"What happened?" she asked, quickly serious.

"We've got to hit another house. We need some more codes." I told her about the background on Anshiser's father. "We need to get into some crime intelligence files. Bobby found a guy for us. He goes into the NCIC-the National Crime Information Center-from his home computer."

"Uh, is this guy.

"Yeah. He's a cop."

The cop was named Denton. He was the liaison man between the Washington police and the National Crime Information Center, supervising computer-entry work for the city.

"I've never hit a cop before," LuEllen said. She was worried.

"It shouldn't be any worse than the others. Maybe he'll have better locks."