Masked Prey

by John Sandford

  He gave her Lucas’s room number. When he hung up, he said, “She’ll be here in an hour. Let’s go downstairs and get something to eat. I could use something stronger than a beer.”

  They adjourned to the dining room, got hamburgers, and Henderson got a vodka tonic and then a second one while Lucas settled on a Diet Coke. They talked for a few minutes about wives and family, then Lucas yawned, and said, “I’m getting tight about talking with Coil. It’s giving me the yawns.”

  “So am I. I don’t know her well, but she has the reputation of a woman with sharp edges,” Henderson said. “This will not make her happy.”

  “She gonna get me fired?”

  “No, that won’t happen. You’ve got way too much protection and from both parties. But if she quits, or is forced out, then you’re right—Georgia has a Republican governor who’ll appoint her replacement and we’ll lose the seat.”

  “I get nervous when I’m tangled up with these political considerations,” Lucas said. “It feels . . . corrupt.”

  “Yeah? Welcome to the big time.”

  * * *

  —

  AS THEY FINISHED EATING, a bearded guy, wearing an ill-fitting tweed sport coat and black jeans, came by and said, “Senator Henderson. How are you?”

  “Dave. Trolling the Watergate, huh?” He said it with a smile. “Hoping for a repeat?”

  “I wish. I’m told your Obamacare enhancement bill won’t be going anywhere,” the man said. “It’s deader than Elvis.”

  “It’s a work in progress. It may not go anywhere this session, but I’ve got commitments from several Republicans now and it’ll rise out of the grave next year. It’s gonna pass,” Henderson said.

  “Maybe,” the man said. He didn’t sound interested. He looked at Lucas. “Who are you?”

  “A friend of the senator’s from Minnesota,” Lucas said. “Who are you?”

  “Works for the Post,” Henderson said, before the man could reply. “He wrote a story a couple of years ago that got turned into an HBO movie, so he’s probably rich now.”

  “Right. My total take was about the same as your daily income,” the man said. He took a step away and asked Lucas, “You sure you’re from Minnesota?”

  Lucas said, “Yah, you betcha.”

  “You’re not here to soak the federal government for huge sums of money? You’re not selling hammers for four hundred dollars each?”

  “Go away, Dave,” Henderson said. “Lucas is a school pal and there’s no government business going on here. At all. We’re talking about old high school girlfriends and whatever happened to them.”

  “Had to ask,” the guy said, and he drifted away, eye-checking the other tables in the restaurant.

  * * *

  —

  “HE’S SMARTER THAN HE SEEMS,” Henderson said in a low voice. “Given what we’re talking about here, I want to get under cover. I hope to hell he doesn’t spot Coil coming in.”

  They went back up to Lucas’s room, Henderson carrying a third vodka tonic in a plastic tumbler, switched through CNN, Fox, MSNBC, talked about how, exactly, they’d tell Coil about her daughter, and didn’t quite jump when Coil knocked. Henderson answered the door, said, “Come in,” and Lucas saw her face tighten when she spotted him sitting on the bed.

  “What happened?”

  “We have a problem,” Henderson said. “You have a problem. Actually, everybody has a problem and we’ve got to figure out what to do about it.”

  When Coil was sitting down, Henderson said to Lucas, “Go ahead.”

  Lucas: “I can’t tell you my sources for the information I’m going to give you. I cannot do that. We’ve learned, and this is beyond question, I’ve checked and double-checked . . . I’m afraid Audrey is the one who set up the 1919 website.”

  Coil gaped, turned to Henderson and demanded, “Is this a joke?”

  Henderson: “This is no joke, I can assure you. The question is, what to do about it?”

  She turned back to Lucas: “How do you know this?”

  Lucas explained about the photos and the metadata. Coil asked how he’d gotten into Audrey’s computer and he told her that it had been compromised by teenaged hackers interested in her website because of her provocative photos, and that he’d found the people who’d done it through sources at the FBI.

  “They were talking about blackmailing you. They put out a feeler to one of the more radical hacker guys, who happens to have a side job as an FBI informant,” Lucas lied. “The information was routed to me and I dropped the hammer on them. Told them they were looking at twenty years in prison. Took their computers over to the FBI lab, found some sexting photos of underage girls, which in Virginia counts as child pornography. They are sealed up tight, they won’t be talking to anyone, ever.”

  “Which is a good thing,” Henderson said to Coil. “Makes you, you know, throw up in your mouth a little, letting those weasels go free, but that’s where we’re at. Anyway, we’ve cauterized that.”

  Henderson then went through all the problems Audrey had created, for Audrey, for Coil, for the Democratic Party as it involved the U.S. Senate. “This is a disaster waiting to happen,” he concluded. “You’ve got to shut Audrey up. Get her off the air. Preferably, find some excuse to pull her out of school and send her back home, to finish school there. Or wherever, but someplace there aren’t reporters every five feet.”

  Lucas said, “Your daughter’s a minor, so any legal penalties wouldn’t be as severe as they would be if she were eighteen. There might be some, but I don’t know. I’m not a prosecutor and you’re a person of some influence, and that could change what happens. At this point, very few people know about this—me, Senator Henderson, my sources, although my sources don’t have the whole story.”

  “Could she go to jail?”

  “I don’t know. If somebody actually gets shot, I suppose that could be a possibility, but as I said, I’m not a prosecutor,” Lucas said. “What we’re doing here, Elmer and I, is trying to seal off possible leaks. From anyone, including Audrey.”

  Coil picked up her purse, which she’d dropped on the floor, and said to Lucas, “You’re clearly convinced about this. I’m not. I’ll go home and talk to Audrey, and I will get the truth out of her.”

  She turned to Henderson. “If somebody gets shot, what are the chances that it’ll all come out?”

  “Depends on whether we spring a leak. The likeliest way we’d do that, spring a leak, is if Audrey keeps talking and if somebody decides they’d like to get in on all the publicity. So Bob—get her out of here.”

  “I’ll call you tonight,” she said. She stood up.

  “Dave McCall from the Post was wandering around the restaurant a while ago. Be nice if he didn’t see you,” Henderson said.

  “I’ll take care.” She looked again at Lucas, said, “Come on. Let’s go.”

  Lucas looked at Henderson and back to Coil. “I wasn’t planning . . .”

  “Bullshit. You’re coming. Get your car.”

  Henderson said, “Go.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS FOLLOWED COIL across the river, trailing her right up to the house, parked in the driveway as she rolled her car into the garage. She waited until Lucas was inside before she dropped the garage door, saying not a word as she opened a side door that led to a stairway to the main floor.

  Once there, they could hear music from the next floor up. “Sit down,” Coil said, “I’ll get her.”

  Lucas sat and Coil climbed the stairs, disappeared down a hall. Lucas heard a harsh exchange without being able to make out specific words, and Coil reappeared, trailed by Audrey, who saw Lucas, stopped at the head of the stairs, and asked, “What?”

  “Get down here,” the senator said.

  Audrey Coil came slowly down the stairs, her eyes fixed on Lucas. Her mother poin
ted at a chair, and said, “Sit.”

  When Audrey was sitting, nervous, playing with the ends of her hair, Coil said, “Audrey: did you make up the 1919 website?”

  “What? No! What are you . . .”

  Coil said to Lucas, “Ah, God. She’s lying. I’ve been able to tell when she’s lying, ever since she was a small child. She’s lying now.”

  “I am not,” Audrey wailed. “I don’t know where—”

  “You don’t protect your laptop from outside intrusion,” Lucas said. “You leave it plugged in, turned on and running. Overnight sometimes. The photos you took with your RX100 camera are still on your hard drive.”

  Audrey stared at him for a minute, with something that looked like pure, unadulterated hate, sniffed, then started to cry: “All this wasn’t supposed to happen. I thought it might get me on TV, but I never thought . . .”

  “Ah, God,” Coil said again. To Lucas: “All right. We know she did it. What’s next?”

  “Like Senator Henderson said . . . she’s got to go away.” Lucas turned to Audrey, who was sobbing, but trying to suppress it by pressing her knuckles to her teeth. “Audrey . . . who else have you told about this? Is there anyone else we have to shut up?”

  “No . . .”

  “How about Blake Winston?” Lucas asked, throwing a head fake. “He must’ve known.”

  “No, I didn’t tell anyone . . .”

  “How did you do this?” Roberta Coil asked. “I know why, but how?”

  Audrey explained that she’d gotten the idea from a story on Ars Technica, a website that covered technology and computers, about how websites were used to create whole fictitious stories for political and monetary reasons. The techniques, she said, were simple enough.

  “How did you avoid the cameras around that Starbucks, where you set up the website?” Lucas asked.

  “Easy. I never went there,” she said. “I walked in from the back and uploaded my stuff from the alley.” Then she asked, “Are you saying there’s somebody in my laptop?”

  “Not anymore. When I found out about it, I shut it down,” Lucas lied. “I also shut down the people who were doing it. The computer penetration—and they were going after a lot of people besides you—is illegal. If this blows up, they’re going to prison. I made that very clear to them.”

  “Jeez, are they in my computer?” Roberta Coil asked.

  Lucas shook his head. “They say not. But what do I know? I’d have it checked, if I were you.”

  * * *

  —

  ROBERTA COIL SNAPPED a couple of more questions at her daughter, her voice climbing in volume, until she was just shy of shouting: “I could lose my Senate seat. I wasn’t planning to stop at the Senate, and now you’ve put everything at risk . . .”

  Lucas said, “Senator Coil . . . I’m going to leave you two alone. You figure out the rest of this. Maybe talk to Senator Henderson some more. Let’s all hope that there aren’t any more crazies out there who took the website seriously.”

  * * *

  —

  BACK AT THE WATERGATE, Lucas called Weather, swore her to secrecy, and told her what had happened. She was properly appalled. They spent ten minutes speculating on possibilities, then a few more talking about the kids, and Weather told him about an intricate surgery she’d be doing in the morning.

  When they’d rung off, Lucas mulled over the situation, thinking about how much trouble he might be in if the whole thing came out, realized there wasn’t much he could do about it, and turned on the TV. He found an old movie, The Little Drummer Girl, and was halfway through it when Henderson called.

  “Senator Coil told me about your little séance. She said that her husband, George, has been having a series of heart problems and that Audrey has asked that she be allowed to go home for a semester to be with her father. Coil has already spoken with the school head, and he’s agreed to the semester in Tifton, without loss of place toward graduation. Audrey’ll be down there for several months, at least.”

  “Are the heart problems real?” Lucas asked.

  “Lucas, I mean, for Christ’s sakes . . .”

  “Okay.”

  Audrey would be on a plane to Atlanta in the morning, Henderson said, and any press inquiries would be deflected with the heart-problem excuse. Her blog would be temporarily suspended, since Young’nHot’nTifton probably wouldn’t gather a crowd.

  “Bob’s catching a plane to Jerusalem. She hooked onto an Armed Services Committee junket to talk about fighter jets with the Israeli government. She’ll be out of pocket for at least a week, which will also deflect media inquiries to her. If we can have this done in a week . . .”

  “The problem is that we won’t know when we’re done,” Lucas said. “All we can do is hope there’s not another lone wolf out there, still believing in 1919.”

  “So we fall back on prayer. I was afraid we’d get there sooner or later.”

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  Dunn arrived at the cemetery a few minutes after 7:30 in the evening, sunlight fading under the western horizon, his car parked on the other side of a residential block opposite the cemetery. His reasoning: if he should be discovered, and if there were a foot chase, he could run across the street and disappear into the trees and bushes around a half dozen different houses, before cutting over to the car.

  He was a fan of Jason Bourne movies and he’d remembered that when Bourne wanted to drive cross-country and not be followed, he would slip up behind a random car and steal a fresh license plate. Dunn scouted a couple of shopping centers, the Shops at Stonewall and the Virginia Gateway, but could never get comfortable with lifting a plate: there were eyes everywhere, people coming and going, and sometimes unexpectedly, cars turning down the parking aisles, sweeping the aisles with their headlights . . .

  And cameras. He spotted a couple, but thought there must be more that he didn’t see.

  He left both places with a chill down his spine and an unused screwdriver still uncomfortably large in his jacket pocket. That Bourne shit, he learned, was harder and riskier than it looked.

  So his car carried its own plate, and if there were some survey of cars being done in the area, well then, he was cooked. He’d take that chance, simply because, he thought, no such surveys were being done.

  He had his camera bag slung over his shoulder and now carried a tripod as well. He entered the park unseen, he thought, went to his shooting nest, settled into it. He’d dressed warmly, though it wasn’t apparent: he was wearing silk long underwear under his long-sleeved shirt, and had a military casualty blanket strapped under his camera bag.

  He set up the tripod, locked the camera onto it, took a couple of shots of the western sky, and settled in to watch.

  Because if the cops were still there, at the parking structure, they’d be working in shifts, and one way or the other, he’d catch a shift change, suspicious arrivals and departures.

  He hadn’t planned to get bored, and he didn’t. He dozed from time to time, but not so heavily that he didn’t pick up cars arriving at, or leaving, the parking structure down the hill. Then, a few minutes before nine o’clock, he heard voices. He couldn’t see anyone, but the voices were close, and muted; a little laughter, and a few moments later, the sweet funky smell of marijuana.

  A couple of kids, he thought, were off to his left, near the edge of the cemetery, inside a screen of trees. He’d been sitting on the tarp, the silvery foil side up and folded over his legs. Now, with the kids not far away, he wrapped the blanket over himself, nothing poking out but his head. The outside of the blanket was done in a camo pattern and he was confident in his invisibility. Unless, of course, they literally tripped over him.

  He stayed focused on the talk, and the occasional giggling, which he suspected meant there was something sexual going on; but who knew, really, or cared?

  At 10:30 or so,
there was a burst of louder conversation and then the sounds of the intruders moving through trees, and then a pale light that he recognized as the flashlight from a cell phone. The flashlight bobbed around, eighty or a hundred feet away, and then disappeared up the hill.

  A half hour later, he heard somebody on the street, more talking. He risked a look, and there was enough ambient light to make out a couple and a dog, walking down the hill with a flashlight showing the way. They stopped at the edge of the cemetery for a moment, then moved on. Another moment and he picked up the scent of fresh dog shit.

  Didn’t bother to bag it. That annoyed him; that always annoyed him when he saw it.

  Time dragged. He let it drag. Slept off and on, with no cars to disturb him. If there was still a shift of cops, he thought they’d be arriving perhaps two hours before the school opened. He set his cell phone alarm to vibrate, and dozed, sitting upright, but comfortable, his back against a gravestone.

  At five, he woke, found a thin layer of dew covering the blanket. He began watching again, alert now: his time was coming. At 5:30, he saw a suspicious-looking car pull into the hospital parking structure—there appeared to be two men in it. Tracking its taillights, he watched though his binoculars as the car drove to the top floor of the parking ramp, although there were empty spots on the two floors below.

  He was too far away to tell if the men got out of the car; he heard no car doors slam, but they might have closed them quietly.

  Over the next hour, when the car didn’t reappear, he decided that it was very possible that the occupants were FBI or Secret Service agents. He was not sure if they’d hear the shot from his .223—if they were inside a car, or if they were behind a hospital door, he thought they probably would not.

  Just in case, he decided that he needed to be closer to the spot where he’d hidden the gun, so he could conceal it again after taking the shot. He crawled the fifty yards to the shed and lay down beside it. From that position, he didn’t have as clear a view of the playground as he did from his tombstone lair, and the rifle’s bipod wasn’t high enough to give him a clear view over the grass and weeds. He tied his coat, blanket, and camera bag into a bundle, thick enough that he could get a steady gun rest that was high enough to see over the weeds and the edge of the slope. He couldn’t see the parking ramp’s top floor, but that wouldn’t make any difference one way or the other. Once he took the shot, he had to re-hide the gun, and then move, fast, without looking like he was moving fast.