“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.”