The Hanged Man’s Song (16 page)

“Then you may be genuinely fucked,” I said. “There are people in your group who are doing deep background research on a whole bunch of congressmen, on cabinet officers… all kinds of people. Heavyweights. And I mean
deep
background research, including surveillance. They have compiled a series of what I could only call blackmail files.”

“That’s not right,” he said. He wasn’t quite whining.

“Bullshit. Ask around. But I’d be very, very careful about who I asked.”

He was still deep in the house when I headed out toward my car. I heard his wife call to him, and then I was in the driveway and out to the car and backing down the hill, lights still off.

In the street, LuEllen asked, “How did it go?”

“It went. Let’s find a place where I can wipe the license plate, just in case.” I threw the Clinton mask in the backseat, and she took us out of the neighborhood.

WE CALLED KRAUSE
from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania -now that the NSA was in it, we wanted to be away from anywhere that might have a tight federal law-enforcement presence, where they could move on us quickly. If we’d called from one of the big Washington-area malls, there was a 95 percent chance that we’d have been okay. That means that you get caught one time in twenty, which is too often. We’re willing to take one time in a thousand.

In any case, we called Krause from a highway rest stop, and he answered on the third ring. “Yes?”

“Senator Krause, this is Bill Clinton. Do you want to talk?”

“Yes. I’ve, uh, talked with my staff director. He does liaison with the working group. He says he’ll check on what you told me, but says he doesn’t know anything about it. I’m afraid he’s lying. There’s more going on than I know about. I could see it.”

“He has a problem, though,” I said. “He can’t cover forever because some of the files are already out there. We’ve got some, Carp has some, we don’t know what Bobby might have gotten before he was killed.”

“You said you might have an idea about how to handle this.”

“Yeah. But before we get to that, let me tell you again. You’ve got to be careful. Really careful. There’s some strange stuff going on.”

“You can’t think… I mean, that there would be any physical danger.”

“I do think that. Three people are dead, murdered. Two of those people were apparently trying to jump Carp without any… regular authority. They were intelligence people, for Christ’s sakes. Somebody has freaked out and we don’t know who.”

“I can make some arrangements.”

“If you want, I could call with a threat. Make it sound Middle Eastern.”

“No, no, no. Let me handle it,” he said. “Now, your idea.”

“WE
-our group-have two limited objectives,” I said. “We want to kill Bobby’s computer and we want Carp punished for murdering Bobby. That’s all. If Bobby’s laptop is destroyed, that solves our problem and solves part of yours. That’s one less wild card running around out there. Of course, you still have to deal with your working group.”

“What about the stuff you have? That’s still a problem.”

“If you talk some more with Rosalind Welsh, she’ll tell you that we are discreet as long as we’re not fucked with. I don’t want the FBI coming after me-they might find me. Once we’ve got Carp in hand, and the laptop, you’ll never hear from me again. Besides, we don’t have much. Carp, on the other hand, has about fifty huge files. He has used a small fraction of only one, and that’s the one I’ve got.”

“Fifty?”

“That’s right. He hasn’t used one percent of what he’s got.”

“Oh my God.”

“WE THINK
we can get to Carp, without him knowing it,” I said. “Sort of, mmm, through a third person. We could tell him that you want to make a deal. That you’ll cover for him in exchange for neutralizing the Bobby laptop. We know he’s broke and desperate and probably homeless, and we think he’s crazy-so he might go for it. We think you might be able to set up a meeting.”

“And then what?”

“You’re the politician, Senator. Negotiate with him. Try to bring him in. I wouldn’t try to grab him, though. He’s crazy, but he’s smart. If he agrees to a meeting, he’ll set up some way to get out. And there’s too much of a chance that he’ll have set up a time bomb on the laptop.”

“What?”

“You know, an information bomb. You grab him, he does nothing but keep his mouth shut, and twelve hours later, the computer dumps everything to CNN. That’s simple enough to do. All you need is a motel room with a telephone, and a few lines of computer code.”

“Goddamnit.”

“You’ve got to do
something
,” I said. “Right now, he’s completely out of control. If you go after him with the FBI, the laptop is going to become public property, and you’re toast. If you can talk to him, face-to-face, you should be able to deal with him. Somehow.”

“I’ve got to think about this. How would you convince him to get in touch with me?”

“We’re not exactly sure we can. I don’t want to explain it to you, because it would give something away. But we think we can get him to call… to get in touch.”

“Okay. You do that, and I’ll think about it.”

WE DID
nothing overnight, except make a stop at a Home Depot to pick up a couple of bronze plumb bobs; and talk about it.

If we called at night, we thought, Carp might do something like set up a middle-of-the-night meeting somewhere, and that would make him much harder to track. Better to do it in daylight.

As we lay awake in bed, LuEllen said, “Every move you make, you act like you think Krause is gonna pull something smart. That he’s gonna double-cross us.”

“I’d bet on it,” I said. “That’s why we don’t get involved with any exchange. Let them work it out. If we can get the laptop, that’s all we want.”

“There are a lot of assumptions buried in that-that Carp takes the Corolla, that he takes the laptop and leaves it in the Corolla, that he tries to figure out something clever.”

“It’s more than just hope,” I said. “He has to believe that nobody’s figured out the Corolla-nobody official, anyway-or they would have grabbed him already. He can’t leave the laptop with anybody, because if he
is
busted, and it makes television, then his friend, whoever he’s staying with, would have no choice but to turn it in. If he didn’t, then he’d go down with Carp. So Carp can’t trust anybody, but he can sort of trust the car.”

WE GOT
up the next morning at seven o’clock, had a quick breakfast, drove out to our wi-fi building, and went online to Lemon.

We have been monitoring Sen. Krause. He is talking to his staff director about making a deal with Carp, so we think Carp may have contacted him and Krause is disposed to deal. Do you have *anything* more on Carp location? Anything would help? If not, we may abandon Washington.

Twenty minutes later we got:

Nothing more. Sorry. Will check everything, will monitor Krause if I can. Stay in touch.

“He never asks what happened at Griggs’s place,” LuEllen said. “Because he
knows
what happened.”

“And he sort of kisses us off. He’s gonna call Krause,” I said.

TEN
minutes later, we were staked out two blocks apart, on opposite ends of Carp’s parking lot, in the two rental cars. LuEllen had pointed me at the Corolla, and I’d cruised it once, just to make sure I had it. Then we settled down to watch.

WE WAITED
three hours, staying in touch with the walkie-talkies. I had a couple of books in the car, the
Times,
the
Post,
and the
Wall Street Journal,
and LuEllen had some papers and a stack of magazines. Still, it got hot, even with the car windows down. I worried about attracting attention, just sitting there doing nothing, but nobody even glanced my way. LuEllen spotted a cop car coming from her end of the block, ducked before it got to her, called me, and I rolled up the window and slid down out of sight until it was safely past. That was the only cop we saw.

We had two false alarms, heavyset men walking into Carp’s parking lot carrying briefcases. Sitting there waiting, I had time to think about how out-of-shape Americans were getting: a few thin people walked by, but it seemed that seventy or eighty percent of the people I saw were overweight, sometimes grossly overweight.

I watched a short woman who might have weighed two hundred fifty pounds making her way down the sidewalk with a shopping bag, and wondered if she had any thought or care of what she was doing to her heart-that she might as well have been walking around town carrying a half-dozen car batteries. Then LuEllen beeped: “Wake up, bright eyes.”

And here was Jimmy James Carp, pushing a mountain bike across the parking lot; a black nylon briefcase hung by his side, on a shoulder strap. He opened the car door, popped the trunk from inside, had a little trouble taking the front wheel off the bike, then put the wheel and the rest of the bike in the car trunk, along with the briefcase. A moment later, he rolled out of the parking lot and LuEllen called, “Coming your way.”

I went out ahead of him to the first big cross street and took a left toward Washington. He was a half-dozen cars behind me, also in the right-turn lane. He followed me obediently around the corner, and I called and said, “On Quaker.”

LuEllen: “I saw him turn. I’ll be around in a sec.” Then: “I’m around, I’ve got him.”

I accelerated, putting more cars between us, but we were coming to a freeway access. I didn’t want to go on before him, so I pulled into a Wendy’s parking lot and drove around the building just in time to see him go by the entrance. LuEllen was still on him and I pulled out behind her. We were both behind him now, and we followed him onto I-395 and headed north.

“Slow way down,” LuEllen called to me. “He’s going about forty-five. I think he’s looking for people going slow behind him. I’m trying to fade back.”

I slowed down to forty, and LuEllen faded on him, and he got off I-395 and swung between the Pentagon and Arlington cemetery, along the Potomac and then across a bridge toward the Lincoln Memorial. Just across the river, he dropped off the highway onto a riverside street and headed north. I caught a street sign that said Rock Creek Parkway.

FOR
the first mile or two, there was enough traffic to cover us. Carp was still moving slowly, but maybe, I thought, that was the way he drove. We went up the river, past people in rowing shells, past a single sailboat heading upstream under power, and then into the ravine that was the lower end of Rock Creek Park. Traffic disappeared, and before long, I was the next car behind Carp.

“I’m gonna have to get out,” I called to LuEllen. “I’m getting off at the next street. You stay back as far as you can.”

“Okay.”

Rock Creek Park must be several miles long; it’s the designated body-dumping spot for the Washington metro area. The lower end of the park is a narrow, steep-sided, heavily wooded ravine. In places, the boulder-filled creek runs precisely through the middle of it, with the road pinned to one side, and a hiking or jogging trail on the other. As I went past a narrow wooden footbridge across the creek, I began to get an inkling of Carp’s thinking, of why he’d taken a mountain bike with him. If he were ambushed in here by people in cars, and he were on the bike, he’d be able to outrun anyone on foot, and go where no car ever could. I wondered if he’d considered the fact that bullets can move even faster over rough terrain than mountain bikes.

A side street was coming; I switched on my right-turn signal and took it. As soon as I was out of sight of Carp, I did a U-turn and saw LuEllen go by. I fell in behind, keeping pace, but well back, always in touch with LuEllen by radio.

We wound farther into the park, and it got wilder and deeper. The cross streets were infrequent, and if Carp stopped to look at trailing traffic, he might bust us.

LuEllen called. “He turned, he’s getting out of the park. I gotta keep going or he’ll spot me.”

“I’ve got him,” I said.

I followed him up the side of the ravine, on a narrow black-topped street that suddenly got wider and merged with a busier street; lost him for a minute, then saw the Corolla turn right, fifteen or twenty cars ahead of me, onto Sixteenth Street. I charged up the hill, beeped impatiently at a car ahead of me-got the finger from the driver-turned right, and then timidly followed Carp a couple of blocks to a park.

As I called and gave directions to LuEllen, Carp turned into a street that led across the park to what looked like a small stadium. I stopped in front of a Presbyterian church, idled by the curb, and watched him drive toward the stadium. I was about to follow when he pulled into a parking spot.

“He’s parking,” I told LuEllen. Two minutes later, she pulled in behind me. A baseball diamond sat right on the corner, with soccer fields on the other side, and then tennis courts, and then the parking lot where Carp was getting the bike out of the car.

“Let’s watch some baseball,” I said to LuEllen on the walkie-talkie, and we both got out and walked over to the ball diamond, where a group of parents were sitting on a berm along the third-base line, watching their small children play T-ball.

We found a grassy spot and from there watched Carp assemble the mountain bike behind the Corolla.

When he was done, he rode it once, in a practiced way, around the parking lot. He seemed too big for the machine, but he rode it with a confidence that suggested that Jimmy James Carp had talents we didn’t know of. A second later, the bike having been tested, he went back to the car, pulled on a long-billed black fishing cap, then slammed and locked the door.

He didn’t have the briefcase with him.

“I’m gone,” LuEllen said. She’d try to stay with him. We both got up, both dusted the seat of our pants, and walked back to the cars. She did a quick U-turn and then went down the street beside the church and did another, so she was pointing back toward the park. Whichever way Carp went, she could follow, as long as he didn’t cut cross-country.

I watched Jimmy James pedal by, take a left, and head back to the street that had taken us up out of the park. LuEllen dropped in behind him, and I went after the Corolla.

ON THE
front seat of my car, I had a plumb bob. Plumb bobs are one of the oldest surveying tools in the world, and were undoubtedly used to help build the pyramids. Basically, the modern version is a slender brass cone, with a sharp stainless-steel point. A long piece of string attaches to the precise center of the blunt end of the cone, and when you let the plumb bob dangle, and the pendulum movement subsides, the string makes a perfect vertical line.

That’s useful if you’re making a pyramid foundation.

Which I wasn’t. I’d pulled the string off and had thrown it away, leaving myself with a heavy brass cone with a sharp steel point. I pulled into a parking spot next to Carp’s car and called LuEllen.