Masked Prey

by John Sandford

  “We can afford a lot more than we do. You can’t possibly think . . .”

  And so on. Snarling, just a bit.

  * * *

  —

  SO THEY’D GONE TO BED GRUMPY. Lucas had packed that night, woke, groaning, at 6:55, and lay thinking about getting shot, and about the problems of the street people, until the alarm was ten seconds from erupting. He reached out and clicked it off, rolled over, and put his arm around Weather. “Love you, babe.”

  Weather muttered into her pillow, “Thank you. Let me know when you’re out of the bathroom.”

  “You still pissed off at me?”

  “No. I got over it at three o’clock when I realized I was completely right.”

  “God bless you, Weather. You’re a good person.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS GOT CLEANED UP, dressed himself in a blue, lightweight wool suit from Figueroa & Prince, a tailor in Washington, with just a bit of extra room on the left-side hip to accommodate his gun. Black oxfords from George Cleverley, a Brioni shirt in pale blue stripes, and an Hermès tie completed the ensemble. He checked himself in a three-way mirror and thought that the soft colors of the suit, shirt, and tie did nothing but emphasize his grayness, putting colored threads on a scarecrow.

  Weather, out of the bathroom and dressed in a T-shirt and underpants, turned him around and said, “You look great.”

  “Not gray?”

  “Lucas . . . you don’t have all the weight back yet, but you look good. Really good. Maybe a year or two younger, even . . .”

  Weather rousted the kids from bed and they all had cereal together.

  The kids ignored them, mostly, when Weather pushed him on the Washington job: “I think you’re dealing with the devil here. Yes, Henderson, he might not actually be the devil himself, but they’re Facebook friends. Lucas, he could make you do something crooked.”

  “No, he couldn’t.”

  “Yes, he could,” Weather insisted. “You wouldn’t realize it at the time. It’s like the old boiling frog story . . .”

  “I know that story,” Lucas said.

  Weather went on anyway. “You put a frog in a pot in cool water and slowly heat it up until it’s boiling,” she said. “The frog never feels the change in temperature and winds up boiling to death. That’s what happens with politicians like Henderson. Or Porter Smalls, for that matter. You get in the pot with them and when you try to get out, you find out you’ve got a dozen felonies around your neck.”

  Their son Sam asked, “Can I get a frog?”

  In the end, Lucas kissed each of them and was out the door at 7:40, at the fixed-base operator at 7:55, where the jet was ready to roll.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS HATED TO FLY; was frightened of it. He knew all the numbers, how much less likely you were to die in a plane crash than an auto accident or even on a train, but it made no difference. It made no difference because he was not in control of the plane. A friend who was also a shrink had explained that to him, and he’d thought, kiss my ass, but hadn’t said it aloud because the shrink was also a nun he’d known since childhood.

  In any case, after two hours and fifty minutes of abject fear, the plane had landed safely and he was climbing into a taxicab at National, across the Potomac from the capital.

  “Watergate Hotel.”

  The cabbie looked over his shoulder, checked his suit, shirt, and tie: “You a big shot?”

  “No. I’m a flunky.”

  “Huh. You don’t have that flunky look,” the cabbie said.

  “I do carry a gun,” Lucas said.

  “That’s disturbing. I don’t have much cash.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m a U.S. Marshal.”

  “Okay, then. Say, how about them Nationals?” the cabbie asked, as they pulled into traffic.

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” Lucas said. “You make a living by beating up on teams like the Marlins. That’s like beating up on a troop of Girl Scouts.”

  “Okay, so you don’t want to talk.”

  “I don’t mind talking, but let’s talk about something interesting. How’s the President doing?”

  “Ah, man . . .” Then he went on for a while, at two hundred words a minute, sputtering through the capital traffic.

  * * *

  —

  SENATOR HENDERSON’S OFFICE had called the Watergate and had emphasized that an early check-in was no problem, and the hotel had agreed that it really wasn’t any kind of a problem at all. A desk clerk with a tennis player’s tan and perfect white teeth told Lucas that a car was waiting in the hotel parking garage and should he summon it?

  “I’ll call,” Lucas said, and headed up to his room.

  He unpacked, hung another suit and two sport coats in the closet, with five shirts, washed his face and hands, and called for the car, which turned out to be a Music Express limo—and he thought, as he climbed into the backseat, there’d be no government record of this pickup. The driver took him through a Starbucks on E Street, where Lucas got a blueberry muffin, a hot chocolate, and a Washington Post. A quick look at the Post suggested nothing that Henderson might want to talk to him about.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS HAD THE DRIVER drop him three blocks from the Senate Office Building and tipped him twenty bucks for his wait and the ride. The driver and limo would hover during the meeting and pick him up afterward.

  The day was warm with an icy-bright-blue sky overhead, a good September midday in Washington, DC, heading toward a high in the low 80s. As he walked along Constitution Avenue, still sipping on the hot chocolate, the Post rolled and tucked under his arm, a couple of women smiled at him; or perhaps at his suit. Anyway, he smiled back. Joggers were out in force, and young women pushing strollers and boys with dogs.

  One of the nannies tracked him with her eyes as they passed, and nodded.

  Maybe, he thought, he wasn’t looking that bad.

  * * *

  —

  THE RUSSELL SENATE Office Building did look bad, like America’s largest old post office, the aging limestone façade now resembling poorly laid concrete block. Lucas checked through security, where he was met by one of Henderson’s staffers, the security process eased by the fact that Lucas’s .40-caliber Walther PPQ was back in the hotel safe.

  The staffer, whose name Lucas thought was Jaydn, or possibly Jared or Jordon or Jeremy—he didn’t quite catch it—and who was wearing jeans, a nubby white-cotton shirt open at the throat, and cordovan loafers (no socks), led him through the building to Henderson’s office and then to the inner office, where Henderson was waiting with the other Minnesota senator, Porter Smalls, and an FBI agent named Jane Chase.

  As Lucas was ushered in, Henderson looked at the aide and said, “Hey, Jasper, thanks—I’ll catch you later.”

  In other words, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass.” When Jasper was gone, they all shook hands and Lucas asked, “If Jane’s here, why am I?”

  “We’ll explain that,” Smalls said. “Jane’s here to outline what the FBI has done so far and why they can’t do much more.”

  “Why can’t you do much more?” Lucas asked Chase, as they all settled into chairs.

  “Because no crime has been committed,” Chase said. “Not yet.”

  “And because word of what was going on would inevitably leak, even with Jane’s thumb in the dike,” Henderson added.

  Henderson was a tall, slender, fair-complected man, with longish blond hair and blond eyebrows, who’d hoped that the vice presidency might be a stepping stone to the top job. He and the presidential candidate had lost their race, although they’d won the majority of the popular vote. He was a Democrat, and liberal even for that party.

  Porter Smalls’s stature reflected his name: he was short, five-seven or five-eig
ht, thin, white-haired, and tough as a lugnut. He was a Republican and extremely conservative, though he and Henderson were longtime friends, going back to their wealthy childhoods in Minnesota. Lucas had worked with both of them.

  Jane Chase was an FBI bureaucrat, an effective one. She’d been shot in the leg the last time Lucas had been in DC. She was middle-sized, outfitted in a navy pantsuit, carefully coifed and dressed, attractive but not cute—didn’t want to get above yourself in the federal bureaucracy—and very smart.

  Lucas: “Okay. What’s going on?”

  * * *

  —

  HENDERSON AND SMALLS looked at Chase, who said, “I trust nothing here is being recorded. Or noted. Even on paper.”

  “Absolutely not,” Henderson said. “Say what you think.”

  Chase turned to Lucas: “Senator Roberta Coil—”

  “Never heard of her,” Lucas interjected.

  “—of Georgia, has an ambitious seventeen-year-old daughter named Audrey who runs her own blog called Young’nHot’nDC. She has several sponsors who pay her to hustle their products—cosmetics, lingerie, yoga togs, fighter jets, and so on.”

  “Fighter jets?” Somehow, fighter jets seemed out of place on the list of sponsors.

  “Her mother’s on the Senate Armed Services Committee,” Henderson said.

  “Ah.”

  Chase: “Anyway, Audrey has a friend named Blake Winston. Blake wants to be a movie director. He’s also seventeen, they go to the same school, and Blake makes Audrey’s blog videos. A few days ago, they were making a video and Audrey asked Blake if he knew how to track down faces on the internet, using a face-matching app. She wanted to know if word was getting around about her blog. He did know about such an app. He loaded several photos of Audrey into it, clicked Return, and up popped a website that calls itself 1919.”

  “Like the year after World War I,” Smalls said.

  “Yes, but that title only comes up when you get to the site. The actual name of the site is a series of letters and numbers, plus dot-com. A code that you’d have to know to find it, unless you found it like these kids did, going in sideways with the photo search. In other words, it was hidden, and they only found it by accident. When they clicked on the link, Audrey found a photo of herself walking out of her school and also spotted a couple of other photos of people she knew—a daughter of another senator and the son of a congressman.”

  Lucas: “Huh. Why 1919?”

  “There was some accompanying text,” Chase said. “Apparently ‘nineteen’ refers to the letter S, the nineteenth letter of the alphabet. In that case, 1919 would be . . .”

  “SS,” Lucas said. “That’s not good. No offense, Porter.”

  Henderson snorted and Porter Smalls said, mildly, “Fuck you.”

  “To go on,” Chase said. “It appears to be a publication of a heretofore-unknown neo-Nazi group. What’s particularly disturbing is that they go to extraordinary lengths to conceal the origin of the photos and the text. Also, the Nazi Schutzstaffel, as you probably know, was both paramilitary and military.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Lucas said. “History wasn’t my strong suit.”

  “Yeah, your strong suit was a pair of hockey breezers,” Smalls said.

  Chase ventured an eye roll. “Both military and paramilitary. Armed, in any case, and dedicated to violence, as are most of the articles on the site. Our analysts say we can’t do a word-match analysis on the articles, to find out who wrote them, because they were all cut-and-paste, taken from a variety of white supremacist websites. They were not written by any one person. Actually, and this can’t go any farther than here, one of the articles was written by one of our agents attempting to penetrate a white supremacist organization.”

  Smalls said, “There you go. Taxpayer money well spent.”

  “No direct threats?” Lucas asked.

  “No, other than the fact that each photo has a cutline, identifying the kid and his or her parent and the school the kid goes to,” Chase said. “The lack of threats is almost as disturbing as the Nazi connection. We’ve kept this very quiet inside the Bureau, but one of my associates has argued, convincingly, I think, that whoever is doing this is running a kind of distributed-cell organization. Nobody issues or takes orders, so you can’t pin down a chain of command, but everybody is marching to the same drummer. It’s possible that not even the organizer would know who his followers are. All the readers would know is, ‘Here are some targets, if you want to do something about them.’ Then, if somebody attacks one of the kids, the organizer—who probably doesn’t even know the attacker—might begin with extortion of the other parents.”

  Henderson: “They chum the water with these photos and when and if an attack occurs, it’s hard, if not impossible, to pin down the original responsibility. You might get the body, the shooter, but you don’t get the brain.”

  “Have you checked the ISPs?” Lucas asked.

  Chase was already shaking her head. “Of course. Nothing there. The internet service provider is in Sweden, one of the confidential sites. A month or so after the website was set up, the photos were all posted at once and came in from a Starbucks. There were some video cameras in the neighborhood, but not right at Starbucks. Our analysts have spent hours looking at the local videos, trying to spot somebody who might be our guy. No luck so far.”

  “License tags?”

  “Yes, there was one camera that did a good job on tags, but we came up dry on that, too. We did all the routine. We continue to think about it and do more work. Explore new possibilities. Some senators decided . . . perhaps we needed something a little more off the wall. Like you. Whoever did this is apparently internet savvy and security aware, so the regular routine, however intense it is, may not turn them up.”

  “What happened to the website? Is it still up?”

  “Yes, it is. As I said, the site doesn’t come up as 1919-dot-com, or anything like it. You could never find it just by looking. It doesn’t have much traffic and we’re hoping that the people running it will post more photos—give us an idea of who’s running it, where the photos are coming from. The parents wanted it taken down, of course, but reluctantly agreed to let us leave it up, at least for now. If we don’t leave it up, it could be redone under another password-like URL and we might never find it again. We contacted the ISP, and after some back-and-forth, the Swedish government whispered into the owner’s ear and we were informed unofficially that the site was paid for, in advance for two years, with a Western Union check. The check was bought here in Washington at a bodega that caters to immigrant Hispanics. No cameras. No ID possible.”

  Lucas said, “Maybe there’ll be no attack. Maybe the whole idea is to intimidate. Have there been any demands for any particular kind of action?”

  Smalls: “No. Maybe I should say, ‘Not yet.’ Or ‘We don’t know.’ With the Senate divided so closely, shifting one or two votes could change the way the world works. You might never know that a vote was the result of extortion. Most senators would never admit to caving in.”

  “Are the kids protected?”

  “They are now. Not 24/7, but the Secret Service has assigned agents to watch them in and out of school, and to run checks on the environments around them, the places they come and go,” Chase said. “They’re not covered like the President, but closely enough that a shooter would probably be detected unless he was very sophisticated. We’re looking at license plates coming and going around the schools, to see if anything pops.”

  “What do you want from me?” Lucas asked.

  Chase said, “You’ve developed a reputation in both the House and Senate as somebody who can take care of business quietly and effectively. I already know too much about that, from last year, and I really don’t want to know any more. If your, mmm, investigation is successful, the Bureau would be ready to listen to what you have to say. If, hopefully
, what you say points to an actionable crime. There’s no crime in shooting photos of people in public: anyone can do it.”

  Henderson: “As background, one of the kids in the photos is the son of Burton Cherry from Colorado. He knew about you and that you were tight with Porter and myself. He got with the other people whose kids were on the website and they asked Porter and me to call you.”

  Smalls: “They don’t like the FBI’s basic attitude: no crime, nothing to see here.”

  Chase turned to Smalls: “That’s not our attitude, Senator. We understand the situation, but we’re handcuffed by the law and also by the fact that, realistically, we know there are leaks, even in the Bureau. We’ve worked with Lucas before, to our mutual advantage, and appreciate his discretion.”

  Lucas said, “I’ll look at it. I need to see what the FBI has done.”

  Chase took a thumb drive from her jacket pocket and tossed it to him. “There’s a program on there, encrypted, called Sesame. Easy to use. Open it, and you’ll see all the photos and docs we’ve got, all of our reports. About as thick as three Bibles. Please don’t export the stuff to anywhere else. When I get back to the Bureau, I’ll send the key to your cell phone. Do you have a password vault on your phone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Copy the key to your vault, then erase the message,” Chase said. “You’ll need the key every time you open the files unless you export them. Don’t do that.”

  “I’ll have to interview this girl . . . and her boyfriend, the photographer,” Lucas said.

  “Not a problem. They know you’re coming,” Chase said. “They don’t know much, though. We did replicate their facial-recognition search, with better software, and turned up the same result.”