Chapter Sixteen

I KEPT REMEMBERING the exact timbre of her voice: “Get me out, Kidd.” I’d never heard that out-of-control note in LuEllen’s voice before, and it was deeply disturbing, the kind of disturbing you get when you think your heart has just stopped.

Besides, this didn’t happen. We didn’t get caught. We were too good.

Not counting what she described as youthful experimentation at local department stores, LuEllen had been a professional thief for fifteen years, had worked five or six times a year during that time, sixty or seventy jobs, without ever taking a fall. She’d never been fingerprinted, and had been photographed only once, as far as we knew, and that was by me. I’d never been suspected-not by the cops, anyway. We’d managed to live outside the system, invisible.

Now they had her. Or somebody did. I didn’t know who Krause had gotten cranked up, but it had to be one of the intelligence agencies-I doubted he’d risk the FBI, where his control would be limited. Anyway, LuEllen was no longer invisible. They were probably fingerprinting her, photographing her. Hell, they may have been working on her with a cattle prod; these weren’t cops.

WHEN LuEllen’s radio went down, I got in the car and steamed back to the hotel, frantic to get there; but not so frantic that I ran red lights or broke the speed limit. I had to get there in a hurry, not get stopped by the cops. The problem was, if they had her car, they’d have my fake ID, and eventually they’d have my rental car, too. A little while after that, they’d have my hotel room, which was on the same credit card. Because they didn’t have her ID, they wouldn’t have her room. Not for a while. If they put her on TV, then all bets were off.

I was back at the hotel in fifteen minutes and drove the car to the most crowded part of the parking ramp. I meticulously wiped the interior, and left it. With any luck, it might sit there for a few days before anybody noticed. Then I headed upstairs, to the room I’d rented, but which I hadn’t used, wiped anything I might possibly have touched, recovered my bags, and carried them up to the room LuEllen had rented.

Wiping her room took an hour. When I was done, I stripped the sheets off the bed-DNA analysis has made all of us crooks a little paranoid-and stuffed them into one of my suitcases, and checked out the back door.

Twenty minutes later, I was checking into a hotel across the street from the White House, under my own name, with my own credit card. I’d been there before, when I was in Washington on business. It was one of my favorite hotels in the world, and LuEllen knew it.

AS SOON as I was set up, I headed toward what Washington calls the downtown, and called Krause from a mall. He answered, a little cocky and maybe a little wary: “Yes?”

“Senator Krause, this is Bill Clinton.” Some of the fear leaked into my voice, and that little show of weakness pissed me off.

Krause picked up on it, of course; that’s what politicians do. “We have your friend,” Krause said, in the congenial voice of a man who’s looking at four aces. “We think it would be best if you came in now. If you come in, we are prepared-” He was either reading a written statement, or he’d memorized the speech.

I cut in, not quite shouting: “Shut up, motherfucker. Shut up. Listen to this: Every half hour that my friend is held, I’m going to dump another congressman or senator. I’m going to do the first three right now. Right now. No bargaining. But it’s not quite free of charge, asshole. When I do each one, I will call that guy’s office, and I will tell them that their disgrace was organized by you. You and your information surveillance office. I will send them proof. After the first three are done, which should be in a couple of hours, I will give you a chance to free my friend, if you haven’t already. If you haven’t, I’ll start doing more of them. If you don’t release her at all, a good chunk of Congress will be down the drain by this evening, and they’ll all know who to blame. Someplace along the way, I’ll do you. Good-bye.”

“ Wait-”

I hung up and left, to look for a few clean phones and a new wi-fi site.

KRAUSE was a negotiator, like all people in his job. Therefore, no negotiation. The choice had to be stark: release LuEllen, or face ruin. If I let him negotiate, he might talk himself into the proposition that sooner or later I’d cave in. And I wouldn’t-I’d never cave.

LuEllen and I had talked about this possibility, in somewhat different contexts. Giving them two people, instead of one, never made sense. That was behind all the talk of whether LuEllen should have left the current job, the hunt for the laptop. There hadn’t been any desperate need for her to stay on, but she had stayed, for too long, because she’d been enjoying herself. That was a mistake, but there was no point in compounding it.

To get her back, I had to keep the pressure on Krause. I could do that, I thought, with the photo file from the first laptop. The question was, could I push Krause over the edge before they got something definitive on LuEllen?

IN THE meantime, I found another phone and called John.

“They got LuEllen-the government did, Krause,” I told him. “I’m trying to get her back, but we might need a railroad out of the country.”

“I can give you Mexico if you need it.”

“Get something set up. I don’t know what’s going to happen.” I told him, briefly, about the ambush in the park.

“Forgive me for saying it, but you don’t sound all that smart.”

“We didn’t think they’d stop everyone in the park,” I snapped back. Then: “Sorry. You’re right. I think that’s another reason I’m so pissed. I feel stupid.”

“But you don’t think they got Carp.”

“I don’t think so, but I don’t know. Just something about the way he went into it. I think he knew more about the park than they did. I’ll find out soon enough.”

“If LuEllen ditched her ID like she said, and they haven’t found it, then I don’t know what they could do,” John said. This was the law-office John. “What can they charge her with? If she’s tough enough to keep her mouth shut, they won’t know who she is, or what she does. What can they do with her?”

“Stick a cattle prod somewhere and keep asking questions. These are intelligence guys, and they’re desperate,” I said.

“You don’t think she’s tough enough?”

“Not tough enough forever. Nobody is. But I think she’s tough enough to hang on until I get her out. And I will.”

“Call me when you know,” John said.

EXCEPT for clients who were buying my polling software, I never paid much attention to elective politics. Politicians always seemed about as differentiated as Daffy and Donald, the Ducks, and you have to ask yourself, would you send Daffy Duck to Washington to set policy on medical care or nuclear waste? I just hope I’m dead before the entire unholy scheme-created by politicians, lawyers, and our new class of media courtiers-blows up in our faces.

End of rant. I personally knew nothing at all about the three victims I picked to hammer Krause. All I knew was that they were crooks, which was no surprise, and they all had quite a bit of clout in the government. The three were Congressmen Frank Marsh from Connecticut and Clark Deering from Oregon, and Senator Marvin Brock from Missouri.

Marsh ran the House Armed Services Committee, which annually handed out a couple hundred billions in military pork. Deering was the second-ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, which handled most of the rest of the economy. Brock ran the Senate Agricultural Committee, which might have been not so big a deal, if Krause hadn’t been from Nebraska.