Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  >>> THE final directory was called Background and showed what could be done by operational units, spies, working with good database search programs. Rent a porno movie? They’d know it. Move a chunk of your portfolio from Intel to Boeing because you’re a government worker with an inside source on new military contracts? They’d know that and link the pieces within seconds of the transaction. Kid gets C’s in school? Case of the clap in the Army? Prescription for Xanax or Viagra? Go on vacation three times in a row with the same woman, not your wife, in the next seat on the airplane?

  They were already running the program on fifty-odd subjects. Some of the names rang bells, but only vaguely, until LuEllen said, “This guy’s a senator. From Wisconsin.”

  “Holy shit,” I said. I scanned down the list. “I think they’re all senators. Or congressmen. Look, here’s Bob. Congressman Bob. Jesus—look at the stuff. This looks like the stuff that Carp’s putting out there. The Bobby file. What the hell are they doing with this stuff?”

  We’d been slumped over the screen and LuEllen suddenly sat up and looked around. “Kidd, unplug the goddamn thing. Let’s get out of here. C’mon, let’s get going.”

  Her nervousness affected me, too. I pulled the plug on the wi-fi and we drove away, slowly, as always. LuEllen said, after a while, “You know what’s so weird about all of this? One thing, anyway?”

  “What?”

  “That you could get into their files. They’re this bunch of rocket scientists down in the basement talking about databases the size of the moon—they’re talking about building the Death Star—and some broken-ass hacker gets into their system and it all pops out.”

  “Thanks. I wasn’t completely sure my ass was broken,” I said.

  “You know what I mean. They can’t even secure themselves.”

  “We might be coming to a time when nobody is secure. When nothing is secret. You sit up in your chair and behave yourself, or your little secret is on CNN.”

  “I’m moving to fuckin’ Argentina,” she said, disgusted.

  “They’d have it in Burundi,” I said. “Once the technology is demonstrated, it’ll get used. Pakistan and North Korea have the bomb and they can’t even feed their people.”

  We drove around for a while, thinking our own thoughts, occasionally looking out the back window, and then LuEllen said, “I’m glad people don’t live forever. I don’t think I want to be here when all this gets worked through the system and gets established. It’s like . . .”

  “A nightmare,” I said.

  >>> BACK at the hotel, I started opening files that I’d simply snatched, without reading, from the DDC database. Usually when I was doing laptop stuff, LuEllen was restless and moving around, watching TV, shopping, playing golf, whatever; now she was glued to my elbow.

  The working group was a secret inside the intelligence community. The Senate committee, as the intelligence oversight group, knew about it, without apparently knowing all of the details. The senators apparently got everything about the biometric research, about the money card proposals and the telephone intercept analysis, and the future map, but may not have known about the Background files.

  Not that an experiment was taking place, at any rate. And some of the items in the Background section made me think.

  “You know what? Bobby was inside this project. He was in their system. Look, they’re talking about the senator’s daughter’s DWI case, and about the Bole-blackface tape.”

  “Maybe that’s why they were so worried about him.”

  “No, no—but that’s why Carp went after him so hard. He suspected Bobby was in there, or maybe the operation hinted what a guy like Bobby might have. But I bet that’s what got the ball rolling.”

  >>> WE FOUND more about Carp, too. Carp had sent a memo around repeating a rumor that Bobby had sent computers to poor black kids and suggesting that the name of a poor black kid be dragged through sites Bobby was known to inhabit. He even had a name, a young computer freak he’d known in New Orleans.

  The idea was summarily rejected—a notation on a separate file called Carp a “technician” who seemed “obsessed” by Bobby, even though it was possible that Bobby didn’t actually exist, but was some kind of elaborate hacker construct. The memo suggested that Carp’s “access to group personnel” be limited, which might have been a reference to the sexual harassment problem.

  Then there had been a recent exchange of memos, begun after the Bobby attacks started, suggesting that they “keep all bases covered” by contacting Carp to see if he had had any contact with Bobby. Heffron and Small, the two guys we’d seen at the trailer, and who had gone into Carp’s apartment building the night before, had been delegated the job. There was a note from Small suggesting that somebody else be sent, because neither he nor Heffron knew Carp by sight, but an answer from the department head said that nobody else could be spared at the moment and that “ID photographs should be sufficient . . . this is a completely unofficial contact.”

  We looked through the available stuff that would indicate that the group was investigating or was even aware that Heffron and Small had been killed, but there wasn’t anything in the system yet. Not on the files we’d copied, in any case.

  I also found myself in the system: a report on my face-to-face talk with Rosalind Welsh. “Subject is approximately six feet tall and athletic,” LuEllen read. “. . . in a pursuit, deliberately burned a car to destroy any biometric evidence. He is considered exceptionally dangerous, and may be traveling in the company of a young female accomplice.”

  “Must have seen you from the helicopter,” I said.

  “That athletic-and-dangerous shit makes me hot,” LuEllen said.

  “I can handle that,” I said.

  >>> THE night before, LuEllen, in her moment of intimacy, had told me why she might quit stealing. This night, with the lights dimmed, I had a couple of fingers hooked inside the front elastic band of her underpants, and we were going through some kind of juvenile what-does-this-feel-like routine, when I absolutely geeked out.

  I’m not a geek. I’m an ex-wrestler and an artist. But I gotta admit, I was easing her underpants down and the words just burped out of me: “Jesus Christ, it won’t work.”

  “Won’t work?” LuEllen pushed up on her elbows, confused, with a certain tone in her voice.

  “Not that, dumb-ass,” I said. It must have been churning around in the back of my brain. “This data search stuff won’t work. They’ve got a fundamental problem. It won’t work.”

  She yawned and asked, reluctantly, I thought, “Why not?”

  “Suppose they get every database in the country hooked together and they start looking for patterns. Going through all the data, looking for terrorists, looking for criminals. Okay, got that?”

  “Um.” Her interest was under control.

  I kept talking; like I said, geeking out. “Okay. Suppose this data-mining method has amazing capabilities. If it’s ninety-five percent accurate—which is way, way more than anything I can even imagine—one person in twenty would still get past them. A false negative.”

  “So it’s got holes.” She was a little more interested.

  “More than that. It’ll also point a finger at one person in twenty who is absolutely innocent. If you ran it against, say, the population of the U.S., that’s . . .” I did some figuring. “That’s fifteen million false positives. Fifteen million people who you think might be guilty of something, but who are absolutely innocent. Victims of random error. Unless you take a closer look—surveillance, wiretaps, that sort of thing—there’s no way to tell them apart from the real positives you get. No way at all.”

  “Fifteen million?”

  “That’s it. At ninety-five percent accuracy. Nothing is that accurate. I don’t think anything ever will be. There’s just too much fuzz and bad information in the system. How in the hell do you do hard surveillance on fifteen million people?”

  “So it won’t work.”

  “Nope.” I flopped flat
on my back. “Nothing they can do to make it work—not that they won’t try. And they gotta have people smart enough to know it.”

  “Then why are they doing it?”

  “Funding, probably. Jesus. This whole goddamn data-mining thing is another five-hundred-dollar hammer.” I reached over and patted her on the leg. I was so pleased.

  After a moment of silence, she said, “You’re such a fuckin’ romantic that sometimes I can’t stand it.”

  Chapter

  Thirteen

  >>> LUELLEN HAD BEEN AWAKE half the night, occasionally poking me to ask, “Are you still awake?” and then following with a disturbing question. Like “What are our chances?” and “Why do you think Carp cracked Bobby’s computer?” and “Would Bobby really put the decryption codes on the same computer?”

  “Our problem is,” I groaned late in the night, “is that we really didn’t know Bobby. We thought his security was almost perfect, but some low-rent federal technician figures out a way to get to him.”

  She pushed herself up on her elbows and was looking down at me in the dark. Somehow, she still had nice-smelling breath. “We know they’re looking for us. Looking for you and me, I mean. Personally.”

  “They have been since the satellite heist,” I said. “I never gave a shit before. We were covered.”

  “So what’s going to happen?” she asked.

  “Well, in the next three minutes, I’m going back to sleep. Unless you stick a finger in my ribs again. Christ, I almost pulled a muscle.”

  “Why do you think Carp cracked Bobby’s computer?”

  “Because I haven’t seen anything, anywhere, about the Norwalk virus. That’s the biggest thing he’s done so far, and I can’t find any trace of it in the DDC files.”

  >>> WHEN we finally got up the next morning, LuEllen insisted that we get out the tarot cards. I dug out the card box and did a spread called the Celtic Cross, which I like because it combines simplicity and flexibility. The Hanged Man came up again, but this time, as the basis of the problem rather than the outcome. The outcome spot was taken by a card from the minor arcana, the King of Cups, in the reversed position.

  “Is that bad?” she asked. She became very quiet and focused when I was doing a reading.

  “It’s ambiguous, just like the readings with the Hanged Man,” I said, as I rewrapped the deck in the silk rag. “It can mean treachery, but that doesn’t tell us a hell of a lot. Everything in this deal is treacherous.”

  “So are we stuck?”

  “I think . . . I may have a really bad idea. Either that, or I’m a genius.”

  She looked at me skeptically. “What idea?”

  “Remember when I went to see Rosalind Welsh? That moved some people around. I’m thinking . . . what if we go after Senator Krause? Face to face. Figure out where he lives, hit him sometime when he’s alone, or maybe with only another guy or his wife.”

  A few minutes earlier, she’d run down the hall to get a bottle of orange juice, and now she stood drinking it, draining it, looking at me. She licked the last of the juice off her upper lip, and she said, “That sounds like a last resort.”

  “We don’t have that many resorts left. And this DDC business scares the shit out of me. I can’t believe that they’re running a test on public officials—somebody in there is goofy. It’s already out of control.”

  “So let’s keep it as a last resort and figure out a couple of other resorts that we can go to first.”

  One thing we did, right away, was drive over to our wi-fi site and go online looking for Lemon. He wasn’t around—Bobby had always been around, but then, Bobby was crippled—so we left a message telling him that Carp had killed two people, and that we were going to have to give up his name.

  Carp is undergoing psychotic collapse, may kill more people. We will wait until we hear from you.

  We had breakfast, and then went back online. Lemon had strayed, but not far. He was there when we went back:

  Don’t give up Carp name yet. Must get laptop. Can’t let feds get laptop. If they get laptop, we could be done. I have been doing research on Carp and find he has girlfriend Mary Griggs lives in Arlington. Suggest check before giving up name. Also searching possibility that he has been in contact with old employer. Nothing yet. Check Arlington and get back.

  —Lemon

  He appended a note with Griggs’s address and phone number.

  “Man, this Lemon guy has to understand that we’re not cops,” LuEllen said. “We can’t kick down the door and bust somebody.”

  “He might not understand that,” I said. “Half of these guys live on video games and never get out of their folks’ basement.”

  “Carp got out.”

  “Yeah. But he’s nuts. I think Lemon’s right: we ought to see if we can spot him. He can’t carry the laptop everywhere. If we can spot him, and we see him going out with Griggs, we can hit the apartment, or hit the car, grab the laptop, and call the feds in.”

  “I don’t know,” she said moodily. She shifted around in the car seat, looking over her shoulder. She was spooked by all the DDC stuff. “The whole feel of the thing is changing.”

  “Want out?”

  “I want to see what you’re gonna do. But this time, we take the gun.”

  >>> I DIALED Griggs’s number. That seemed like an easy enough first step. The phone rang and I handed it to LuEllen, who listened for what seemed like a long time, and then said, “Hi, is, uh, Terry there?”

  She asked with the voice women use when an unknown male answers the telephone of a female friend, a voice that seems to ask, rapist? lover? plumber? Then she listened for a moment and said, “Gee, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I did, I’m just silly.”

  She got off and turned to me. “Guy’s voice.”

  “So let’s go take a peek.”

  “Didn’t . . . mmm . . . sound like Carp. I only heard him for that one minute at Rachel’s, but he seemed kinda squeaky. High-pitched. This guy had some hormones. His whole attitude was sorta . . . cool.”

  “I dunno,” I said. And I didn’t.

  >>> MARY GRIGGS lived in a small brick apartment building in the Ballston area of Arlington, an upwardly mobile neighborhood with a little rolling contour, a four-acre park in the middle of it, the whole thing almost as green as Longstreet. The day was insufferably hot and humid. By contrast, the park looked pleasant and cool, with big spreading trees and what I took to be government workers sitting on the park benches eating their bag lunches.

  We left the car a block off the park, down toward a busy street. LuEllen had spotted a deli as we went in, and we stopped and got sandwiches—apparently the source of the government sandwiches and white paper bags—carried our own lunches up the block and across the street to the park, found a bench where we could see the front of the Griggs apartment building, and nibbled on the sandwiches. Off to our left, a woman was lying on a blanket, reading a book. A bunch of kids were sliding down a curvy slide at a playground, and a park worker was changing a net at a beach-volleyball court that featured real ankle-deep yellow sand.

  Because I was carrying a gun, I’d worn a sport coat, despite the heat, and had the revolver in the left breast pocket. There might have been a little fullness on that side, but nothing obvious. Still, I could feel the weight hanging off my chest.

  “That kind of building,” LuEllen said, looking at Griggs’s apartment, “is the worst of all possibilities.”

  “Worse than a Saddle River jeweler’s house with a hundred-thousand-dollar alarm system?”

  “In some ways,” she said, launching into a burglar’s analysis. “You have an insider in the jeweler’s house, so you eventually figure out a way to handle the system. You’ve got somebody telling you when the house will be more or less empty, and even if it’s not empty, you can spot the people still inside. But you get a place like this, people are coming and going all the time—nobody knows who’ll be coming and going, or why. It’s random. And the building is older so it’s pro
bably got relatively thin walls: if you have to break a door, somebody’ll hear you. Or they’ll see the damage. Plus, everybody inside probably recognizes strangers.” She took a bite out of her sandwich and studied the building.

  “Just don’t tell me you’d go in over the roof,” I said. She liked ropes and climbing.

  “I was just thinking that was a possibility,” she admitted. “You avoid a lot of issues that way. And look at the windows. They’re the old-style windows that open, with a twist-lock. You poke a hole through the glass, twist the lock, slide it up, and you’re in. You don’t meet anybody in the hallways, you don’t have to break any doors. No visible damage.”

  “Of course, you have to get on the roof.”

  “That can be done.” She studied it some more. A guy in a funny old-fashioned snap-brimmed hat strolled by, led by a bulldog on a leash. The guy took a good look at LuEllen; the bulldog sniffed what I assumed was a bed of pansies—they looked like the African violets in Strom’s sink from the day before, but in lighter colors, and with more variety—and then lifted a leg and peed on them.

  I was following them on their path through the park when I saw the guy with the binoculars. I casually turned back to LuEllen and said, “If you look past the back of my head, you’ll see a guy in a blue shirt looking at us with binoculars. Either that, or he’s looking at a really low bird.”

  She turned toward me and laughed, threw back her head, and said, “I see him. Yup. Who is it? Somebody tagged us? How did that happen? So now what? We run?”

  “Maybe not run, but we go. I’ll wad up the sandwich bag and walk over to the trash can to throw it in, and you can sit here. Then I’ll call you over, like I’m looking at something. That’ll get us a hundred feet toward the car.”

  “I hope he doesn’t have a camera. I hope he doesn’t have a long lens. I hope he doesn’t have our faces.”