Heat Lightning

by John Sandford

  Sinclair said, “Wait a minute. Sit down for two more minutes. Let me tell you what I know about this whole thing. Maybe we can work something out. . . . You owe me, after I gave you Phem and Tai.”

  “You knew you were giving them to me?”

  “You knew the Virgil quote—I thought there was a good chance that you’d be smart enough to pick up on me.”

  “Weird way to do it.”

  “I needed something absolutely deniable.” Sinclair grinned at him. “You got the information, I got the deniability. Deniability is the Red Queen of American intelligence.”

  VIRGIL PLAYED THE TAPE for Rose Marie Roux, for Davenport, and for Neil Mitford, the governor’s aide. Roux, who’d been a cop and later a prosecutor before she went into politics, said, “He’s willing to testify that Homeland Security—some officials at Homeland Security—cut this deal knowing that a bunch of people would be murdered.”

  Virgil nodded.

  Rose Marie tapped a yellow number two on her desktop, then looked at Mitford and asked, “The governor’s on the way?”

  “He should be in the building if traffic isn’t too bad.” Mitford was another lawyer.

  “Get down there and brief him. We’ve got to go.” Two Homeland Security people were in the conference room, waiting.

  THE HOMELAND SECURITY guys looked like the security people that Warren had been bringing in, but with thinner necks. They were sleek, tanned, confident, smiling, gelled, and their neckties coordinated with both their suits and their eye color; one of them checked out Virgil’s cowboy boots and backpack when he came in and frowned, as if he suspected that he might not be talking to the BCA’s upper crust.

  Rose Marie sat everybody down and introduced the two, James K. Cartwright and Morris Arenson, to the BCA agents. She said, “Virgil has just come back from a firefight up north. Three of the Vietnamese were killed, and two escaped into Canada. We are asking for Canadian assistance in tracking them down.”

  Arenson threw back his head and said, “Ah, damnit.”

  “I thought that would be good news,” Rose Marie said.

  “Anytime things go international, they become harder to control,” Cartwright said. “Was one of the dead Viets a young woman?”

  “No, that was Mai,” Virgil said. “Or Hoa. She and another guy got away.”

  Cartwright looked around the table and said, “Thank God for small favors. Her family is right at the top of the totem pole in Hanoi.”

  Davenport asked, “Whose side are you guys on, anyway? We’ve been—”

  Before he could finish, the governor pushed through the door, smiling, trailed by Mitford. The governor said, “Glad I could make it. Glad I could make it.”

  When they were introduced, Arenson looked at his colleague and then at Rose Marie and the governor and said, “I’d thought that we were keeping this on an Agency level.”

  The governor said, “I like to keep up.”

  THE TWO Washington men, Mitford, the governor, and Rose Marie then went through a couple minutes of name-dropping and bureaucratic hand-wringing, and the governor finally said, “Look, I came all the way down the hill to hear this. I have other things to do, so let’s cut the horse hockey and get down to it.” He turned to Virgil: “Virgil, tell me what you know about all this.”

  Virgil said, “Well, from what I’m able to tell, six Minnesotans went to Vietnam just before the fall of Saigon and stole a bunch of Caterpillar tractors and other equipment that was being abandoned by the military. While they were there, one of them, Ralph Warren, killed a number of people, including a couple of toddlers, and raped a woman who was, at the time, either dying or dead.”

  “Disgusting,” the governor said.

  Virgil continued: “A year or so ago, the Vietnamese found out who’d done it—found a couple of names, anyway. The murdered people had family who are now high in the Vietnamese government. The family decided to get revenge.

  “To do that, they contacted an American intelligence agency and offered a trade: they had information about an alleged al-Qaeda plot coming out of Indonesia. They would turn over the information to Homeland Security, if Homeland Security looked the other way—and provided some direct informational support—for a hit team.”

  Virgil continued: “A deal was made, and the Viets sent a gunman, a torturer, and a coordinator over here to kill the six people involved in the ’75 murders. They’d already killed one man in Hong Kong, I believe. They only had two or three names for the people here, and had to gather the others as they went. That’s why John Wigge was tortured before they dumped his body on the Capitol lawn.

  “An American, Mead Sinclair, who may have been a CIA agent but who was well-known as a political radical with contacts in Vietnam, was coerced into working as a contact between the Vietnamese and the intelligence agencies here in the U.S. The idea was, he was deniable.

  If he talked, the old intelligence agencies could point to the fact that he was a longtime radical friend of the Vietnamese and had no credibility. Sinclair didn’t want to do it, but threats were made against his daughter—”

  “Let’s stop there,” Cartwright said. “Most of this is just speculation. I don’t doubt that Virgil here did a bang-up job in tracking these people down”—Virgil thought he detected a modest lip-curl with the compliment—“but that American intelligence agency stuff is fantasy.”

  The governor looked at him for a moment, then said, “Virgil?”

  Virgil said, “Well, you all know most of the rest of it. The Viets killed Warren last night. I’d discovered that they’d bugged my car, with a bug that looks like it was designed right here in the good ol’ USA. I used the bug, which was still operating, to convince them that I didn’t know where the last man was. Then we flew to the guy’s place and set up an ambush. The Viets walked into it this morning, three of them were killed, and two escaped to Canada, one of them wounded. So here we are.”

  “And that’s just about nowhere,” Arenson said.

  Virgil said, “We’ve got Sinclair. We’ve got him cold. He’s willing to turn state’s evidence.”

  Cartwright looked straight across the table at Virgil. “That won’t happen.”

  “Already happened. I accepted his offer, and he gave me a brief statement,” Virgil said. “I recorded it.”

  Arenson pushed back from the table and said in a mild voice, “I don’t think you folks understand quite what is going on here. We represent the Homeland Security Agency. We’re not asking you what we’re going to do. We’re telling you what we’re going to do. What we’re going to do is, we’re going to smooth this whole thing over. The Vietnamese provided us with a key contact—”

  The governor broke in: “Wait a minute. A whole bunch of Minnesotans are dead. Two were completely innocent. Five, maybe, were involved in a crime thirty years ago, but they get a trial.”

  “Governor, in the best of all possible worlds, that’s the way it would work,” Arenson said. “Post-9/11, some things have changed, and this is one of them. I’m authorized, and I’m doing it—I’m classifying this whole matter as top secret. We will help you develop an appropriate press release.”

  “You can’t . . . this is our jurisdiction,” the governor began.

  “There’s been a tragedy, but a minor one,” Cartwright said. “What was done was necessary. We may have saved hundreds of lives. If the al-Qaeda plan had gone through . . .”

  The governor said, “I can’t accept—”

  Arenson snapped: “Let me say it again, in case you didn’t get it the first time: we’re not asking you, we’re telling you. What part of telling don’t you understand?”

  THERE WAS A moment of silence, then the governor cleared his throat and said, “Rose Marie, Neil, Lucas, Virgil, let me talk to you in Rose Marie’s office for a moment.” He stood up and said to the two Washington guys, “Just take a moment. I think we can come to a satisfactory resolution of this.”

  The governor led the way out the door and down the
hall to Rose Marie’s office, closed the door behind Virgil, the last one in, then turned and bellowed, “Those MOTHERFUCKERS think they can come into MY state and kill MY people and they tell me that THEY’RE saying how it is? They don’t tell ANYBODY how it is in MY state. . . . I say how it is—they don’t say a FUCKIN’ THING.”

  The governor raged on and Virgil looked away, embarrassed. The tantrum lasted a full thirty seconds, then the governor, breathing hard, red-faced, looked around, looked at Rose Marie, looked at Mitford, and Mitford smiled and said, “Glad we got that cleared up.”

  “What are we going to do?” the governor asked him, his voice rough from the tantrum.

  Mitford shrugged. “You’re a liberal, God bless your obscenely rich little soul. How does it hurt you to go up against a bunch of fascists from Homeland Security?”

  “Uh-oh. What are you thinking?” Rose Marie asked.

  Mitford said to the governor, “You don’t have much political runway left here in Minnesota. What will you do when you’re not governor anymore?”

  “I thought I’d just be a rich guy,” the governor said. “If somebody dies, I could run for the Senate.”

  “Will that make you happy?” Mitford asked.

  “Neil, skip the dime-store psychology,” the governor said. “What are you thinking?”

  “We could arrest these two guys and charge them with conspiracy to commit murder in the planned execution of five Minnesotans, with two more murdered in the process. Before anybody has time to react, you have a press conference. You give an Abe Lincoln speech about protecting our precious freedoms, about how we don’t turn our laws over to a bunch of Vietnamese killers. You’d take some heat, but by this time next week, you’d be a national name. You’re on the cover of Time magazine. You’d be a hero to a lot of people in the party. Play your cards right over the next four years . . .”

  The governor looked at him a long time, then said, “What’s the downside?”

  Rose Marie said, “They arrest you for treason and you’re executed.”

  The governor laughed and said, “Really.” That didn’t worry him; he was far too rich to hang.

  Davenport turned to Virgil: “You did turn off that recorder, didn’t you?”

  Virgil said, “Jeez, boss . . . I forgot.”

  Davenport: “Wonder what they’re in there saying?”

  “They already said enough,” Virgil said. “But . . . I wouldn’t be surprised if they said a few more things. Being in there by themselves.”

  THEY ALL contemplated him for a few seconds, then Rose Marie shook her head, turned to the governor, and said, “Neil raises an interesting possibility. But you would take some heat. A lot of people think security is all-important—they’d absolutely throw six or eight people overboard if it might stop an al-Qaeda attack. As long as it wasn’t them getting thrown.”

  “That can be handled,” Mitford said. “That’s all PR. Our PR against their PR, and we’ll have a big head start. Do it right, and they’ll be cooked before they can even decide what to do. We’re talking televised congressional hearings.”

  The governor mulled it over, then cocked an eye at Mitford. “A national name by next week?”

  “Guaranteed.”

  Rose Marie said, “A national name isn’t the same as a national hero. Lee Harvey Oswald is a national name. Benedict Arnold—”

  Mitford snarled, “You think I’m so lame with the PR that we’d wind up as Benedict Arnold? For Christ’s sakes, Rose Marie, I ran the negative side in the last campaign.”

  “I’m just saying,” she said.

  The governor said, “Let’s sit here and think about it for two minutes. All right? Two minutes.”

  At the end of the two minutes, the governor covered Rose Marie’s hand with his own and said, “Weren’t you getting a little bit bored? How long has it been since we’ve been in a really dirty fight?”

  “You got me there,” she said.

  THEY TROOPED BACK into the conference room, where Arenson and Cartwright were slouched in their chairs, barely containing their impatience. The governor said, “Virgil?”

  Virgil said to Cartwright and Arenson, “Well, guys, I’ve got some bad news.”

  Cartwright: “What’s that?”

  Virgil threw his arms wide, gave them his best Hollywood grin, and said, “You’re under arrest for murder.”

  28

  THE CONSPIRACY-to-murder charges were filed with Ramsey County, although, when he learned the circumstances, the Ramsey County attorney got nauseous and had to be excused to a quiet place, where he could curl up with his blankie.

  Mitford put together the PR package in two hours, and the press conference was held in the rotunda of the Capitol, with an oversized American flag, borrowed from a fast-food franchise, hanging in the background. The governor gave the Abe Lincoln speech, provided family photos and testimonials from the loved ones of the two innocent men who were killed, as well as crime-scene photos of the five men executed by the Vietnamese for the crime in Vietnam.

  Davenport tipped friends at TV stations and the newspapers, and after the press conference—a sensation that quickly spread from Minnesota to the evening talk shows in Washington—they’d perp-walked the two Homeland Security guys, something that was never done, so there was lots of film available.

  After the perp walk, they gave the two guys the mandatory phone call.

  THE U.S. ATTORNEY served a habeas corpus on the Ramsey jail six hours after Cartwright and Arenson went inside, and put them on a plane to Washington, where they became unavailable for comment.

  Mitford had a package of the local crime scenes and family photos on an earlier plane, to the same destination, a half hour after the governor’s press conference. When the Homeland Security fanboys went on the Washington political shows, they were greeted with the photos and “How do you explain this?”

  A few tried to float the idea that although this was a fantasy dreamed up by a longtime opponent of the administration, that if it hadn’t been a fantasy, it would have been a pretty good deal, giving up these six criminal Americans while saving all those hypothetical lives somewhere on the West Coast.

  That didn’t fly worth a damn. How many hypothetical people died, anyway? Then an Internet guy in Indonesia learned that one of the Indonesian al-Qaeda plotters ran a lawn service, and posted a photo showing the man pushing an ancient Lawn-Boy. There was an international guffaw at the expense of Homeland Security.

  Blah-blah-blah-blah.

  In the end—after two weeks, anyway—Mitford was proven correct. The governor was a national figure, both admired and reviled, who further confused the issue by giving a rousing pro-gun, anti-Vietnam-killers speech at the NRA convention.

  A good time was had by all.

  MEAD SINCLAIR went back to the University of Wisconsin, where, it turned out, nobody much cared about what happened in the sixties. A week after he got back, though, he was spit upon by an aging hippie while he was walking down State Street, and Sinclair punched the hippie in the head and knocked off his glasses, which broke when they hit the sidewalk.

  Sinclair was later taken to the hospital for observation after a possible heart attack, but the heart attack was not confirmed. A student photographer, arriving too late for the actual fight, got the hippie to put his glasses back on the ground where they’d fallen, then took a neat photo of them with the light shining through the cracked lens, with a drop of dried nose blood, and the cops in the background. The photo ran in the student paper, the unannounced “reconstruction” was revealed in a letter to the editor, and the student was fired by the newspaper.

  JANEY SMALL told Virgil that their night of passion couldn’t happen again, because it was too depressing. Virgil agreed, which set off an argument, and he fled to Mankato.

  While he was there, a man named Todd Barry called from the New York Times Magazine and said he’d talked to Sinclair about it, and that they could use twenty-five hundred words each for two articles, to run
sequentially, on the Great Caterpillar Heist & Vietnam’s Revenge. Virgil told him he could have the stories in two weeks. Barry asked him if he was sure he could get permission from all the sources. Virgil said, “Fuck a bunch of permission,” and Barry said, “We could get along.”

  THEN MAI called from Hanoi.

  When she called, Virgil was sitting in a country bar talking to a woman named Lark, an opium addict who was accused of boosting thirty thousand dollars’ worth of toddler jeans out of a Wal-Mart supply truck as the truck had sat unattended overnight in a Wal-Mart parking lot. According to the local cops, Lark had driven her boyfriend’s Ford F-350 Super Duty up beside the tractor-trailer, cut her way through the side using a Sawzall run off a Honda generator, and then filled up the longbed pickup with the toddler clothing. She was not believed to have had time to get rid of the loot, but nobody could find it. They were hoping that a thoughtful threat from Virgil might help, since Virgil had at different times arrested her boyfriend, father, and brother.

  When Virgil’s phone rang, he looked at it, saw the “Caller Unknown,” opened the phone, and said, “Yes?”

  “Virgil?”

  He picked up her voice and turned away from Lark, into the booth. “Mai? Where are you?”

  “Hanoi. In a pastry shop.”

  “Who got shot?” Virgil asked.

  “He was a college boy who supplied the boat and the vehicles,” Mai said. “He was supposed to go back to school, but now he’ll have to find another school. He’s here.”

  “Hurt bad?”

  “The bullet broke his leg,” she said. “I had to carry him. When we were in the truck, I looked back at you and saw you aim, but you didn’t shoot.”

  “Ah, there was a farmhouse in the background. I couldn’t see what was behind you.”

  After a moment, she giggled and said, “You could have thought of something more . . . I don’t know. Sensitive? Romantic? You didn’t shoot me because you thought you might hit a cow?”