Twisted Prey

by John Sandford

  “Well, naturally,” she said.

  Smith: “Gimme her email and yours. I’m going to send her a string like the one you sent me . . . a different one, of course . . . and I’ll send all the texts and emails in one long file to your email. We’ll keep them separate so nobody can see both at the same time. You’ll need to enter the code to read them. It’s a onetime code, nobody else will be able to use it after you do. Not even you. Of course, if you open the files on your computer and save them in plain text, and somebody takes the computer away from you, they’ve got it.”

  “I’ll open it on my iPad. I got Touch ID,” Lucas said.

  “Didn’t this Ritter guy lose his fingers?” Smith asked.

  “Yeah,” Lucas said. “I won’t do that.”

  “Gimme Rae’s email.”

  “Don’t hit on her,” Lucas said.

  “Hey, I’m with the FBI. Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity—FBI.”

  * * *

  —

  SMITH SAID IT WOULD TAKE a while to put a file together, and they sat and restlessly watched a Nationals game for twenty-five minutes, then Lucas’s iPad dinged, and the file came in. A minute later, a string of letters and numbers came in for Rae: “Hey, sugar bun, I’d gr8ly like 2 take U out 4 a drink someday.”

  “That can’t possibly be the code,” Rae said.

  Bob: “Sure it is. Remember what he said about using regular sentences as keys? And what Lucas told him about hitting on you? He’s delivering the encryption code and hitting on you at the same time.”

  “He’s not a bad-looking guy, either,” Rae said. “Tall. Intelligent.”

  “Bald,” Bob said.

  Lucas said, “Jesus, Rae, just type the fuckin’ thing into my file.”

  She did, and the new file opened up: twelve documents and thirty emails.

  “Not much,” Rae said.

  “Ritter was disciplined,” Lucas said. “Probably cleans out stuff he’s not using.”

  “Even though he knows we could never crack the encryption without the code?” Bob asked.

  “Even then,” Lucas said. “If you got something you don’t need, get rid of it.” He thought about the Ritter bank statement he’d flushed.

  * * *

  —

  BUT RITTER WASN’T PERFECTLY DISCIPLINED.

  The longer files contained details of shipments to Libya, Niger, and Iraq from Heracles—there were no details of what the shipments might be—that Ritter, McCoy, and Moore would be escorting to their final destinations. There were names of recipients and places mentioned, along with notes on briefing times, and, occasionally, enigmatic labels that seemed to Lucas to be cautionary: “Maziq is reliable and knows his way around, and he’s always got protection, both physical and political, so you’ll be okay there,” and, “You can’t count on Jibril to back you up if push comes to shove (which it won’t). Be aware that he’s belonged to four different militias that we know of, and they’re not friendly with each other, so he’s a guy who’s willing to change beliefs like he changes his shorts. If he changes his shorts . . .”

  Another one said, “Every time the cases are out of your sight, check the seals when you get back. Even when you get off the plane. This shit can’t get pieced out or we’re in trouble.”

  A third one said “Beware the OGA, they’re thick in there.”

  “I wonder what the OGA is?” Lucas asked.

  “I know that,” Bob said. “It stands for ‘Other Government Agency,’ which means the CIA.”

  “Got it.”

  “The FBI needs to see this,” Rae said. “What about the emails?”

  Most of the emails were cryptic. They came in from several people at Heracles, but mostly said things like “We still on for two?”

  Then they found the maps.

  Lucas clicked on an email titled “Here” and, when he opened it, found two satellite blowups of tight areas of West Virginia. One had a dot on what appeared to be the intersection of a dirt lane and a back road less than half a mile from Smalls’s cabin above the South Branch of the Potomac.

  The other displayed a “path” that went from the point of impact, where Ritter’s truck hit Smalls’s Cadillac, to the back road above the cabin, to the spot where the logs that had been on the side of the truck were dumped.

  They all read it, half disbelieving, until Bob tapped the screen where the trail intersected with the back road. “This is a scouting report, setting up the attack. Somebody was set to watch Smalls—here. When they left the cabin, he would call Ritter, in the truck, and walk out to where the truck was going to pick him up—here. He’d be picked up, and they would drive out to the place where they dumped the logs. After that, it was over the hill and back to D.C.”

  “Look at the time stamp,” Lucas said. “It was, what, five days before they hit Smalls? They must have been watching him, and knew he’d be going up there with Whitehead.”

  “You don’t get that just by watching,” Rae said. “They bugged him.”

  The email had gone from Moore to Ritter.

  Lucas said, “We need to tell the FBI guys about this. Then we go bust Moore. He’s toast. We got our new guy. The only question now is, do we put him in a cell or wire him up?”

  * * *

  —

  HE FOUGHT through the FBI bureaucracy again, finally arriving at the desk of Jane Chase’s assistant. The assistant said that Miz Chase was in a conference. Lucas said, “This is quite important. Go into the conference, right now, and tell her the U.S. Marshals are calling with information she’d want. She’ll know what you’re talking about.”

  The assistant hesitated, then said, his voice pitching up with mild exasperation, “Well, I’ll do it, but I hope you’re not getting me in trouble.”

  “I promise, I’m not.”

  Two minutes later, Chase said, “Hello?”

  “Agent Chase? This is Lucas Davenport, the U.S Marshal from the meeting—”

  “I remember,” she said, her voice dry as desert sand. “What do you want?”

  “You’re aware that one of our targets, James Ritter, was murdered?”

  “I was informed of that, yes. Your man Forte called.”

  “We seized Ritter’s laptop . . .”

  “Which I understand is heavily encrypted.”

  “Yes. The other marshals and I cracked the code this morning. We have a number of documents about shipments from Heracles to Libya, Iraq, and Niger, although it doesn’t say what the shipments were. But it looks to me like it might be stuff they don’t want anyone to know about. From our perspective, the more important document apparently locates a suspect named Moore at Senator Smalls’s cabin and also pinpoints the location where the logs we found with paint from Smalls’s Cadillac on them were dumped. We’re thinking of busting Moore right away. The question is, do we drop him in a cell or see if he’ll wear a wire for us? Or might the FBI have a different idea altogether?”

  “Wait. You cracked the encryption code? I was told by experts that couldn’t be done,” she said.

  “Yeah, well . . . what can I tell you? We’re marshals.”

  After considering that, she said, “I’m jammed up in the early afternoon, but I’ll clear my schedule for later on. Be here at four o’clock. You’ll be met in the lobby. Bring the documents you’ve found with you. We will have some of our specialists look at them.”

  Lucas told her that the computer guy at Quantico could have them to her in seven minutes, and she said, “Excellent. I will retrieve them from him. Your diligence is to be commended. We’ll see you here at four.”

  She hung up, and Lucas said to Bob and Rae, “There is a woman not just with a stick up her ass but an entire fuckin’ tree. With branches.”

  Rae said, “You gotta be straight to get as high up as she is with the feebs.”

  “Like you,�
� Lucas said.

  Rae said, “Nah. I just gotta be willing to shoot any dumbass motherfucker stupid enough to run from me. Which I am willing to do. And I have to take care of the Stump, of course.”

  “For which I’m eternally grateful,” Bob said.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS CHECKED his cell phone. “Four o’clock—three hours. Maybe I’ll work out. Too hot to go shopping.”

  “Take a nap,” Rae said. “Or I could drive down to Quantico and meet Smith for a drink. He could give me a back rub. I could use a good rub.”

  Bob said, “I’ve been thinking . . .”

  Rae: “Oh-oh. You know what I told you about that.”

  “What’s the ‘S’ on Ritter’s belt?”

  Lucas said, “What?”

  “There’s an ‘S.’ Right at the end of the code. If the dots are a code, maybe the ‘S’ is, too.”

  Lucas got out his iPad, called up the photos of Ritter’s belt. Bob was correct about the “S,” written in the same black ink as the Braille dots, although Lucas was not certain whether the symbol was actually an “S.” The initial, or symbol—or whatever it was—was rendered in open-ended double parallel lines, with one side of the initial/symbol shorter than the other. “It’s more like a shape than an actual initial. It’s like an S-shaped road,” Lucas said.

  “That’s dumb. Who’d have to remember an S-shaped road?” Rae asked. “What good would it do you?”

  “Maybe a river?” Lucas suggested, and Rae shook her head.

  They sat and stared at it for a while, and Lucas said, “Fuck it, let’s think about it.”

  A second later, Bob said, “You know what it looks like? It looks like the trap under a sink. Like maybe someplace you’d hide something small. A thumb drive, for instance?”

  Rae and Lucas looked at each other, back at the iPad, and Rae said, “Goddamnit, we didn’t look. Now we’ve got to go back over to Ritter’s. And be back here by four.”

  * * *

  —

  ON THE WAY, Lucas called Russell Forte, told him about the meeting with the FBI. Forte said he’d be there, and O’Conner would probably come along to add weight. When Lucas finished the call, he made another to the manager at Ritter’s condo complex, asked if they had a maintenance man. They did. “We need him to do some plumbing,” Lucas said.

  The maintenance guy, a phlegmatic man with watery blue eyes, was waiting for them when they arrived. He said they might not have seen everything, but they’d seen most of it, no longer curious about why three feds in suits showed up to have him take a sink apart.

  They started in the kitchen, found nothing in the trap.

  In the bathroom, he looked at the trap, and said, “This has been taken apart a few times, but not by me. And I’m the only one authorized to do it.”

  The maintenance man took off the looped section of the pipe, stuck his finger into it, and popped out a plastic tube about the length and diameter of Lucas’s little finger. The ends were wrapped in tape.

  He handed it to Lucas, and said, “Radiator hose tape. So water can’t get in. Couldn’t put it in the kitchen because garbage going down could push the tube along and clog the sink. Nothing goes in this sink but water, soap, and whiskers.”

  While the maintenance man put the sinks back together, Lucas borrowed Bob’s Leatherman tool to cut the tape off the plastic box. That done, he pulled the box apart and took out a flat, odd-looking key.

  “Safe-deposit box,” Rae said. “This should be good.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS CALLED FORTE. “I need a couple of clerks and another warrant, and I need them in a hurry.” He explained, and Forte wasn’t sure they’d need the warrant because Ritter was dead but decided that having a warrant when they didn’t need it was better than needing a warrant when they didn’t have it. “I’ll write it up and get it.”

  The clerks started calling banks in the area, using three names: Ritter’s own, and those on the two passports they’d found under the rug. One of the clerks found a David Havelock at a Citibank a half mile away. Forte wasn’t much farther away than that, at the Marshals Service headquarters, and said he would meet them there with the warrant.

  Lucas said, “Let’s go,” and they were out the door and into the heat. They arrived at the bank ahead of Forte, got to the branch manager, and told her what was about to happen. “The warrant’s fine,” she said, after looking at their IDs, “but I’ll need to call a man to drill the lock.”

  Lucas took the key from his pocket. “We have Ritter’s key, and also the passport he used to get the box under false pretenses.”

  The woman looked at the passport, and the key, and muttered, “Yeah, it’s one of ours. It’s a big box. I think I remember this gentleman. He’s a nice-looking fellow.”

  “Not so much now,” Rae said.

  * * *

  —

  FORTE SHOWED UP, sweaty yet well dressed, and produced the warrant. “You know I don’t do this so much, come to the scene. I’m more of an intellectual than a street guy.”

  “We all know that, but it never hurts an office guy to add to his street cred,” Rae said.

  “Hadn’t thought of it that way,” Forte said. “I should start packing heat.” They all looked at him, and he added, “Okay, maybe not.”

  They followed the manager into the vault, along with the women who managed the registry and safeguarded the master keys. The box opened on the first try, the woman pulled it out, said, “Heavy. Let’s take it to a viewing desk.”

  The desk was in a private niche. They sent the bank people away, gathered around as Forte popped the top, looked in, and Bob said, “Oh boy.”

  The box was filled nearly to the top. The first layer, six or eight inches thick, was a mass of documents in English, French, and Arabic. “Contracts for delivery,” Rae said, thumbing through them. “Guns. Oh my God, antiaircraft missiles.”

  “Ritter was keeping the docs for self-protection, his cover-your-ass files. Just in case,” Lucas said.

  “Looks like it’s gonna work, too, if we’re right about who killed him,” Rae said. “Maybe not for self-protection, but revenge.”

  Under the first layer was a thin, flat plastic box, identical to those that Lucas had for his fishing tackle. Inside were two dozen thumb drives.

  The third layer consisted of cash—hundred-dollar bills and five-hundred-euro notes—and gold coins, and three more passports. They did a quick count of the cash, and an estimate of the gold, and Forte, looking at his cell phone calculator, said, “He was looking for a rough equivalent of a million dollars in cash. The five-hundred-euro notes make it more compact.”

  The eighty gold coins added a bit more than a hundred thousand dollars to the total.

  * * *

  —

  RAE WENT BACK to the lobby and got a cardboard bank box from the manager. Forte filled out a return on the search warrant, signed it, the manager took it away to xerox, and then they put everything inside the box and carried it out to Forte’s car.

  “Got thirty minutes to get to Hoover,” he said. “We could be a bit late, especially if I drive slow. And I will. Holy cats, a million dollars in the footwell. Maybe I’ll be really late, drive out to Reagan and get on a plane to Panama.”

  “Think about the wife and kids,” Bob said.

  Forte said, “That’s what I was doing.”

  20

  Forte’s boss, Gabe O’Conner, was waiting for them outside the Hoover Building. He saw the box that Forte was carrying, and joked, “Money?”

  Forte said, with a straight face, “Over a million, we think, though we didn’t have time to work out the exchange rate on the euros. Or the current price of gold.”

  O’Conner looked from Forte to Lucas, to Rae, to Bob, and back to Forte. “Are you shittin’ me?”

/>   “Might not be the most important thing,” Lucas said. “We took it out of Ritter’s safe-deposit box; there are a lot of CYA docs in there, apparently about illegal weapons sales.”

  “You guys find . . . interesting cases,” O’Conner said. He looked at his watch. “Let’s go. Russell, talk to me about this while we walk up. I don’t want to be late, but I don’t want to be the complete dumbass in there, either.”

  Forte started talking, and didn’t stop, even when their escort showed up. He talked fast—and in paragraphs, Lucas thought. If you’d typed out what Forte said, you could have published it as an essay. He continued all the way to the conference room, with O’Conner nodding steadily like a bobblehead doll. The conference room was still empty, like the first time they were there, until Jane Chase and her retinue of suits showed up, Chase carrying a thin aluminum attaché case.

  As they were arranging themselves in their chairs, Forte stood up, plunked the mass of documents on the table. He followed that with the thumb drives and passports, added the stacks of cash, and finally the pile of gold coins, and sat back down.

  “Where did you get it?” Chase asked.

  Lucas smiled, rubbing his nose as cover. They weren’t asking “How much?” or even saying “Oh my God” but instead “Where did you get it?” The gold and cash weren’t enough to impress this particular bunch of bureaucrats.

  Forte looked at Lucas, and said, “You talk for a while.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS STARTED with Ritter’s laptop and the encrypted documents, explaining how the code had been concealed—though openly—on the back of Ritter’s gun belt. Then he explained Bob’s sudden comprehension of the “S” design on the same belt and finding the safe-deposit box key.

  One of the suits with Chase, a woman, said to Bob, “You thought it was a drain? Why would you think that?”