Masked Prey

by John Sandford

  Lucas asked, “Does all this . . . scare you?”

  “Scares the heck out of me,” the senator said.

  “It’s a little scary,” Audrey said, glancing over at her mother, who nodded. “I now get dropped off by a Secret Service man and go in the back way at school. I only go three days a week—I do assignments at home the other two, which really helps with the blog, you know. I’ve got more time to work on it.”

  “Do you miss school?” Lucas asked.

  “Yeah, I do, all my friends. I still see them three times a week, though,” Audrey said. “To tell the truth, I’d rather work than go to school, but I know school’s necessary.”

  “She does well in school,” Roberta Coil said, smiling. “She’s gotten about three B’s in four years, everything else is A’s. And it’s a tough school.”

  “That’s great,” Lucas said. To Audrey: “Have you responded in any way to the 1919 site?”

  Another flicker in the eyes, but Audrey shook her head: “No. I’d be scared to. Have you looked at it?”

  “I got here a couple of hours ago—I haven’t had time.”

  “There aren’t many replies, but they’re all from guys with fake names. One of them is ‘Lizard Shooter.’ Who calls himself Lizard Shooter? And there’s never any replies from the blogger. The people replying ask questions and so on, but there’s never an answer. Blake did a Google search and he says there has been some talk about 1919 on a couple of Nazi websites and there are links . . . that’s about it.”

  “Do you know what websites?”

  “I don’t, but Blake knows.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY TALKED FOR a while longer, touching on the discovery of the website, but the Coils had no real information about the site itself. Lucas gave them his Marshals Service email address and asked Audrey to send him a link to her website, which she said she’d do immediately.

  “I gotta get these guys off my back,” she said, miming a shiver. “They’re cramping my style. You ever try to talk fashion to a Secret Service agent?”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN LUCAS GOT up to leave, Senator Coil asked him to wait a minute, went to the kitchen and came back with two warm oatmeal-raisin cookies in a plastic baggie.

  “Smells good,” he said.

  “They taste even better. Georgia cookin’,” she said.

  “Bye,” Audrey said, and she scrambled up the stairs and out of sight. Roberta Coil looked after her, then touched Lucas’s arm and said, “She’s a good kid. She’s being brave about this, but I’m really not. Do you think I should hide her? I could send her back home.”

  Lucas said, “I can’t make that call for you. We don’t know that there’s any threat at all. But we don’t know that there isn’t. With Secret Service coverage, she should be okay. Those guys are good. But, we’re dealing with crazy people with guns and . . . you really don’t know.”

  “Why do crazy people have guns?” Coil asked.

  “You’d know the answer to that better than I would, Senator,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  —

  AS LUCAS DROVE to Blake Winston’s house—he ate the cookies on the way, and they were excellent—it occurred to him that not only had he discussed fashion with a (former) Secret Service agent, a woman named Alice Green, but that Roberta Coil might even know her.

  Green was running for a Virginia seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, had won the Democratic primary, and was leading her Republican opponent with less than two months to go to the election. Green was a clotheshorse, as was Lucas, and they’d spent a few pleasant hours on a campaign bus with Elmer Henderson, reading fashion magazines and exchanging ideas.

  On the drive from Arlington to McLean, Lucas passed through a number of housing zones, arriving in the million-dollar-plus zone a few minutes after leaving the Coils’. The size and apparent values continued to climb the farther north he got and the closer to the Potomac. Following his phone’s navigation app down a narrow tarmac lane, he eventually came to a sprawling ultra-modern white stone-and-glass house set in a forest that appeared to go on down to the river.

  When he pulled up to the house, the front door opened and a young woman walked barefoot down a stone walkway to the driveway. Lucas got out of the car and she stuck out a hand to shake and said, “I’m Anne-Marie, I’m Mrs. Winston’s assistant. They’re waiting for you in the tennis room.”

  Anne-Marie had an attractive accent that might have been German or Dutch; and she looked German or Dutch, pretty, with short blond hair and square shoulders; she might have been a competitive swimmer. She led Lucas through a wide stone entry, down a stone-and-plank hallway past an oval living room designed for entertaining, with a huge black concert-grand piano in one corner.

  They passed a couple of closed doors and finally stepped out into a semicircular room that Lucas would have called a family room, except the shelves showed off tennis trophies and the oversized windows looked out over a tennis court, which was built lower than the house so the room functioned as a gallery.

  Blake and Mary Ellen Winston were sitting on a long flat couch positioned both to look over the court and to half-face another long flat couch. Anne-Marie said, “Marshal Davenport,” and turned away and left them.

  Mary Ellen was a tall athletic woman with carefully colored and coifed dark hair around an oval face. She wore a high-collared white dress shirt and navy slacks, with coral-colored linen slippers that matched her lipstick. She got up and gave Lucas a tennis-callused hand to squeeze, then backed up and sat next to her son. Blake looked a little like himself, Lucas thought, when he was seventeen. Lucas hadn’t had the accoutrements, like the multimillion-dollar house, but there was a distinct resemblance.

  Mary Ellen said so, to her son, with a smile: “The marshal looks more like you than your dad does.”

  The kid said, “Nah. He looks meaner.”

  “That’s something you develop on your own,” Lucas said, as he sat down. “If you’re gonna be a movie-maker, you’re gonna need a mean streak. If you don’t have one, you should get started on it.”

  Blake, serious, lifted his eyebrows and asked, “Why is that?”

  Lucas said, “Think about your basic hundred-million-dollar action movie. You’ve got to cast a lot of ugly people being stupid. Or fat ugly people. Have you ever thought about holding the auditions for those roles, about choosing the actors? How mean that must be?”

  Blake put a finger to his lips and said, “No, really. I never thought about that.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS: “HOW DID you find the 1919 website?”

  Blake explained about the face-matching software, originally developed, he thought, to detect unauthorized uses of copyrighted photographs.

  “You’d have designers looking for photos for the website they were designing, and if they didn’t have a big budget, they’d steal the photos. Sometimes, for pretty big companies. Pro photographers started asking for software that would help track their photos . . . online photographs are basically enormously long strings of pixels that are unique—no two photos are exactly alike on the pixel level. You put in your string and the software looks for a matching string. Eventually, it got sophisticated enough to match faces.”

  “Audrey wanted to match her face?”

  Blake nodded. “Yeah. She wanted to see if her face was getting to be known. It’s not, much, there are only about a zillion girly websites doing what she’s doing, though she’s actually got some decent sponsors. Anyway, we found some headshots of her. One of them, a shot I took, was on the Nazi site. They lifted it off her blog.”

  “Audrey said you had some ideas about the cameras used in the other photos.”

  “Not the cameras so much as the lenses. The way the images are compressed, and the thin depth of field . . . you know
about depth of field?”

  “Yes, some.”

  “Well, the combination of compression and thin depth of field tell you the pictures were taken with a telephoto lens. The same one, I think. All outdoors, in good light, but from long distances. To get those close-up headshots, they had to crop the photos quite a bit, then blow up what was left. That’s why they look a little grainy. If I had to guess, I’d say a decent one-inch camera with a long zoom lens. There are a lot of those around. Uh, you know about metadata?”

  “Yes. Information attached to photographs, usually including camera settings and a time-and-date stamp.”

  “It was stripped off the photos. I looked,” Blake said.

  “Then the photographer is fairly sophisticated?”

  He shrugged: “Everything you’d need to know, you could learn in an hour. So, no, he’s not necessarily sophisticated. He’d have to know about the metadata to get rid of it, but if he knew, then stripping it off is easy.”

  “You know a lot about photography,” Lucas said.

  “Blake had his own darkroom for film cameras, when he was twelve,” Mary Ellen said. “He and his dad built it in our basement, in Birmingham.”

  “Dad said if I was serious about it, I should start with film,” Blake said. “I moved to digital pretty quick, but . . . film is good. Knowing about it.”

  “How did you and Audrey start working together?”

  Blake threw a quick glance at his mother and Lucas suspected he wouldn’t be getting the full story.

  “We’re friends, from school,” he said. “She dated a friend of mine for a while. Then she started doing her website with, you know, selfies that she took with her iPhone. She even made phone videos of herself, really bad videos. Later she tried a real camera, a point-and-shoot that wasn’t much better. She’s smart, and she knew she had to step up her game. She knew I was into photography and video and we did a couple of shoots. She got some sponsors and started throwing a few bucks my way. Now we’ve got a thing going.”

  Blake said that he didn’t know anything especially interesting about the 1919 site, except that the people who had put it up didn’t know much about creating a website: “It’s crude. There are fifth-graders who could have done it better. They took crappy photos and slapped them on a preformatted form, along with the texts. The texts were ripped off from right-wing websites. They didn’t even bother to change the fonts on the texts they took—they cut and pasted them, so they all look different, which is not a good look, technically speaking.”

  Mary Ellen said, “Blake told me something that you might be interested in, but he didn’t want me to tell you. I’ve decided to tell you anyway.”

  Blake: “Aw, jeez.” He flopped back on the couch. “Audrey will kill me.”

  “We won’t tell Audrey,” Lucas said. To Mary Ellen: “What am I not supposed to know?”

  “Blake said that Audrey got excited when they figured out what was going on, and the FBI came around and questioned them. She thought it’d make a great blog entry, pull in a lot of new traffic. The FBI agents asked her not to do that, but . . .”

  “She might do it anyway,” Blake said. “Don’t tell her I said so.”

  “That could cause some trouble,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, trouble,” Blake said. “Trouble is another word for ‘going viral.’ That’s living the dream. That’s going on Fox News.”

  “If you have any influence . . .”

  “I don’t know if I have that much. You really don’t want to be standing between Audrey and a TV camera,” Blake said. “I say that, even though she’s a friend of mine.”

  “All right,” Lucas said.

  Blake: “One more thing. It’s sorta funny. Funny strange, not funny ha-ha.”

  “Yeah?”

  “When the FBI agents were here, they told me some of what they’d found out. Not a lot, but I asked questions and they answered some of them. They told me they hadn’t been able to break down the website because it was paid for anonymously and it’s run out of Sweden.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “No, that’s not unusual, if you know what you’re doing and you want to stay hidden. But this is a really shitty website . . .”

  “Thanks for the ‘shitty,’ Blake,” his mother said.

  “Well, that’s what it is,” Blake said. “Shitty. Way too bad for somebody who knows enough about what he’s doing to get an anonymous check to Sweden and hire a Swedish ISP to carry the site. You know why he went to Sweden? Because they have strict privacy laws. You’d have to know that, to go there for your ISP. Also, you can get good, free anonymous website formatting software that will let you put together a functional website in a couple of hours, with decent design. But this site looks like it was put together by complete retards.”

  Mary Ellen: “Blake!”

  “Sorry, but that’s what it looks like,” the kid said. “So, is it an experienced computer guy putting together a retarded website? It looks almost deliberately bad. How is it that somebody who knows enough to go to Sweden, knows how to get the money to them without giving himself up . . . doesn’t know how to make a decent website?”

  “An interesting question,” Lucas said. “What do you think about that?”

  He frowned. “I dunno. I smell a rat. Something’s not right.” He raked over his bottom lip with his lower teeth, then glanced up at Lucas, and said, “You know, I thought maybe the FBI put the website up, spoofing the Nazis. Getting the crazies to try to get in touch. Then, when everybody freaked out, the FBI figures it screwed up and tries to bury it. Now they can’t admit that they’re behind it.”

  “Oh, boy,” Lucas said. He shook his head and said, “You’re a smart kid. Nobody’s said anything like that to me, or even hinted at it . . . but now I’m gonna have to think about it. It would explain some things.”

  Blake said he’d done a Google search for 1919, but there were 492 million results—“Really, 492 million”—so that didn’t help. He’d done a follow-up search on the ISP name, the code, and had come up with three neo-Nazi sites that mentioned the ISP, but only in the last few days. There were no older references to it.

  Lucas took down the ISPs for the three sites and would look at them later.

  As Lucas was leaving, with Anne-Marie waiting to take him out, he handed Blake his card. “If you identify that rat you’ve smelled or something else occurs to you . . . call me.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS CALLED WEATHER to tell her about his first day in Washington, then spent the evening reading through the files that detailed the FBI investigation, focusing on those involving Charles Lang. Lang had attracted attention not only for his writings on neo-Nazism, but also because of his contacts, and what some said was his support of the groups.

  His support was classified only as “possible” and “likely,” not a sure thing, by agents who’d looked at his bank withdrawals. Lang had, in three separate documented cases, made serial withdrawals of $9,500 from a savings account, which had then been replenished from an investment account. In one case he’d withdrawn a total of $66,500 over five weeks. In the two other cases, he’d withdrawn $38,000 over two four-week periods. That was interesting because cash withdrawals over $10,000 had to be reported to the government and serial withdrawals of $9,500 suggested that Lang was evading that reporting requirement.

  Where the $66,500 went, the FBI didn’t know.

  Of the two $38,000 withdrawals, an undercover agent working inside a group called Pillars of Liberty noted that shortly after the final withdrawals by Lang, Pillars had experienced a financial resurgence and had sent money to other neo-Nazi organizations to support publications and political actions.

  A secret look at emails between the head of Pillars and the neo-Nazi organizations suggested that $38,000 would be a good guess as the amount of money involved. The conne
ction was there, the investigators thought, but would be hard to prove.

  Complicating the situation was that Lang had confided to a friend, who was also an FBI-recruited informant, that he’d lost some significant amounts of cash at a place called the Horseshoe Casino in Baltimore, Maryland; and that he’d used cash because he didn’t want anyone to trace his credit cards to a casino.

  The confession had suggested to the feds that Lang was onto their informant, and was using her to provide himself with an alibi.

  Lang, Lucas thought, might not be as dumb as the average Nazi.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  Elias Dunn understood that “fascist” wasn’t a hot brand anymore, but in his research he’d found that it had been a wildly popular political philosophy in much of Europe in the 1930s, as well as in parts of South America and even in Japan, and that it was rising again in Eastern Europe.

  Roughly equivalent philosophies had been popular in the U.S. as well, although they’d never gotten to the point where they achieved major elective status. They might have, if it hadn’t been for that moron Adolf Hitler.

  And for good reason.

  There were lots of different flavors of fascism, but they all tried to deal with what Dunn had identified, through extensive reading, as the major failing of America: the nation had lost its founding values and had fallen into a fatal decadence.

  The light was going out. The country was being invaded by people of inferior cultures and inferior races. The real, vital, white America was being submerged.

  * * *

  —

  TO GET BACK would require a strong leader, a strong intelligent leadership group below him, and a strictly ordered society below that, with each group fixed in an honorable place. From top to bottom, from president to even some dumbass like Randy Stokes, there would be honorable work with decent, livable wages.