They were talking, nervously, I thought, then they looked up and down the street, as if checking for somebody they might interrogate. Then they got in the car, bumped back onto the road, and left. I read their license number to LuEllen, who wrote it on her arm with a ballpoint pen. Then she put the Motorola to her mouth and said, “Dave, come on.”

We went out the back door and walked sideways across the narrow lawn, then up the street, carrying the backpack. John came up behind us, slowed, and we got in. The old guy had finished mowing his lawn and was sitting in a lawn chair drinking beer out of a brown bottle. He never turned his head as we went by.

“Goddamnit,” I said.

“Nothing?” John asked.

“Two guys came by and knocked on the door. We got their tags,” LuEllen said.

“Ah, shit. I didn’t know. I was outside.”

“Ford Taurus. Could have been a rental.”

“Cops?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “They were indoors people. Office workers. Maybe we’ll find out from the tags.”

“Damn,” John said. “We waste our time and almost get caught at it.”

“No, no-we got a laptop,” I said. “We found a laptop.”

“What?”

He checked my face to see if I was joking. “Jimmy James left it behind when he ran last night. It’s not Bobby’s, but it might tell us a lot about Jimmy James.”

I STILL had the stew-can antenna. Before we started messing with Carp’s laptop, we went back to the truck stop and warehouse, went online, checked with a few friends for entry routes, and then went into the Louisiana auto registration database. The two guys’ license tag went back to Hertz. Hertz was an old friend. I was in the Hertz database two minutes later and pulled out the name William Heffron of McLean, Virginia. He was using a credit card issued to the U.S. government.

“McLean,” LuEllen said. “Weren’t we there when…”

“Yeah. It’s about a foot and a half from Washington.”

Chapter Ten

WE SPENT THE AFTERNOON at the Baton Noir. A small but pleasant swimming pool hung off a second-floor deck, and LuEllen put on a modest black bikini and went out to sun herself before the gathering insurance salesmen and lawyerly deal-makers. John began reading through the paper we’d taken out of Carp’s, and I did the laptop.

Among the paper John found dozens of bills, mostly unpaid, indicating that Carp owed upward of $30,000 to various credit card companies. Most of the bills had been sent to an address in Washington, D.C.

He also found Carp’s online service account numbers and e-mail addresses, and increasingly unpleasant letters both to and from a lawyer concerning his mother’s estate. In the latest of those letters, Carp accused the attorney of looting his mother’s bank accounts. John’s impression was that when the lawyer was finished, Carp got the aging mobile home and a few thousand dollars-but he also got the impression that there wasn’t much more than that anyway.

“But he’s really pissed,” John said. “If I were that attorney, I’d be watching for guys in clock towers.”

“He’s desperate for money,” I said. “His mother’s estate must have seemed like a dream come true, and it turns out to be a mirage.”

I GOT started on Carp’s laptop by working my way around the password security. I plugged my laptop into his via a USB cable, ran a program that took control of his hard drive from my laptop, deleted his password file, and I was in. It ain’t rocket science.

One thing I found immediately was that Carp had dozens of documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee: CIA briefings on Cuba, Venezuela, Korea, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and a half-dozen Middle Eastern countries, including some negative assessments of the leaders of Israel, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. None of it was encrypted.

In another file, I found letters to Senator Frank Krause of Nebraska, the head of the committee. There was no indication of whether any had actually been sent, and several showed signs of incomplete editing. All of them were written to object to Carp’s firing, which had happened three months earlier. The other side of the correspondence wasn’t on the computer, and John couldn’t find it among the papers, so it was hard to know exactly why he’d been fired. Judging from Carp’s side of the issue, it may have involved his political views, which were unstated. There was a draft of a note to someone else, another staffer, complaining about the unfairness of his firing, which referred to “crazy feminist politics.”

The letters suggested that his employment involved office computer support-he kept the committee’s computers running, helped with basic software issues and security problems. In an e-mail file, I found a couple hundred complaints and questions typical of an office system: questions about ethernet connections, lost e-mail, distribution lists, password changes, equipment upgrades.

LuEllen came back, carrying a Coke, looking for her suntan cream. The pool was getting crowded, and she was moving from display to exhibition mode.

As she was about to leave again, I hit the mother lode: a file of photographs and short films, two of which we’d already seen on television-the military execution and the blackface film. Nothing about the Norwalk virus.

“This is the Bobby file,” LuEllen said. “This is it.”

We paged through the photos, looking at the captions. John, who’d spent most of his life in politics of a kind, was fascinated. “You could do an unbelievable amount of damage with these things,” he said. He wasn’t enthusiastic, he was awed. “Some of the biggest assholes in the Congress would go down… if this stuff is real.”

“What are they doing in Carp’s computer?” LuEllen asked.

“Must’ve transferred it from Bobby’s,” I said. “A backup, or something, before he started messing with the other files.”

“Okay,” John said, still looking over my shoulder. “Oh my God, look at this. This guy’s a cabinet guy, he’s what? HUD? HEW? Something like that.”

We talked about the effect of the photos for a while. LuEllen thought they’d be revolutionary, but John shook his head. “You read those books about people finding the body of Christ and it ends Christianity, or somebody finds out that the President likes to screw little boys, and that leads to an atomic war. It doesn’t work that way,” he said. “Nothing is simple. Stuff like this ruins careers, it might change the way things work for a while, but the world goes on.”

“You’re an optimist, John,” LuEllen said. “I’m going back to the pool. There are a whole bunch of guys from Texas up there.”

“That’s a blessing,” John said. “Wouldn’t want to miss that.”

I went back to the computer and John finished with the paper. A half hour later, sitting in a dwindling pile of scraps, he said, “Ah, man.” He was holding a slip of paper, shook his head and passed it to me. It was a phone bill for cable repair service, made to Robert Fields. Bobby’s address was right there. “Took it out of Baird’s file,” I said.

“Gotta be,” John said.

LuELLEN had come back, glowing with the sun, took her bikini-ed self into the bathroom to clean up and dress, and when she came back out, turned on the TV. A little while later, changing from Oprah to CNN, she said, “Look at this.”

The Norwalk virus story was exploding: the President, in person, was promising a full investigation. If the so-called test had actually taken place, he said, the persons responsible would be prosecuted. He added that the government had no evidence of such a test and suggested that this “supposed revelation” might be a new kind of terrorist attack intended to discredit the American military and shake up financial markets.

“Getting ugly,” John said.