8
Forte said, “These are bad guys, Lucas. Mercenaries. There have been a dozen complaints filed against them by military people in Iraq and Syria, and more by the Iraqi and Libyan governments. They shoot first and ask questions later, but it appears that we continue to contract with them. By ‘we,’ I mean the Defense Department and contractors working with foreign governments. Can’t tell about the CIA, but probably there, too.”
“Do they work here in the U.S.?”
“They’ve got no special status here,” Forte said. “They poke a gun at somebody, and that’s ag assault, and they go to jail. They’re not LEOs. Not law enforcement officers, no way, shape, or form.”
“If they jumped me on the street . . .”
“Did they do that?”
“Somebody did,” Lucas said. He told Forte about the problem he’d had the night before, and described the three men; he left out the part about screaming for help like a little girl.
“Well, there you go,” Forte said. “It sounds like what I imagine the Heracles guys are like, though I’ve never actually seen them myself. Most of what they call action executives are former SEALs, Delta, Force Recon, Rangers, that sort of thing. You didn’t see a gun?”
“No. All three were wearing jackets that had some bulk—like they were wearing light armor, or maybe thick shirts, or padding of some kind, like they were ready for a fight,” Lucas said. “I suspect they were planning to take me down but not kill me. Killing me would cause somebody a much larger problem than what might pass as the mugging of an out-of-towner.”
“You’re sure that’s not what it was?” Forte asked.
“Yeah, I’m sure. They were all too neat. Uniform. They wore masks. They didn’t look like raggedy-ass muggers; they looked like . . . cops, actually.”
“Here’s what I want you to do,” Forte said. “Write it up, all the details. Put those cell phone photos with it. I’ll file it as ‘Attack on a U.S. Marshal, Unsolved.’ Then if you identify one of the guys, we grab him, file charges. With you as the only witness, we might not get far with it, but we might be able to squeeze the guy while we’ve got him . . .”
“Probably should have done that last night—or called the D.C. cops.”
“I’ll call the cops, inform them. I can somewhat mask the time of your report. If they think you reported it immediately . . . well, let them think that. That way, we’re on record with two different agencies.”
“All right.”
“So, sounds like life is getting complicated, but that’s why you were hired,” Forte said. “What else are you going to do about it?”
“Called Bob and Rae, for one thing. They’ll be talking to you guys about coming up here.”
“We’ll clear them through. Now, about that Ford F-250 . . . There are forty-seven black F-250 short beds of last year’s model registered in the three zip codes surrounding the area where those plates were stolen. Black is a popular color, but the F-250 is pricey, so there weren’t as many as I expected . . .”
Lucas: “The West Virginia cop I talked to . . .”
“Armstrong,”
“Yeah, he said the truck was new, but didn’t specify a year, so maybe we should look at this year’s, too.”
“Nope. I talked to him this morning, soon as I got in, and he sent me some grab shots from the security video,” Forte said. “The taillights changed between the two years—it was last year’s model, not this year’s.”
“Did you get the driver’s licenses and run them?”
“I did. Got a whole bunch of hits, but nothing that went directly to Heracles. Several military people—more Navy than Army, but that could include SEALs. Criminal activity is all minor stuff. A few drunk driving arrests, domestics, like that.”
“Can you get me the license photos?” Lucas asked.
“We’re queuing them up now—my assistant is. You’ll have them in twenty minutes.”
“Russell, thank you. I’ll keep you up to date.”
“Stay safe,” Forte said. “I don’t like the sound of that thing from last night.”
LUCAS TOOK the elevator down, ate breakfast, took the elevator back up, and found forty-seven driver’s license photos attached to an email. Twelve were women, which, if not irrelevant, wouldn’t match any of the faces either he or the hotel security man had seen.
He flipped through the forty-seven, returning a couple of times to the image of a James Harold Ritter, age thirty-nine. He resembled the man whose mask he’d pulled down. He’d been wearing a green tennis hat low on his forehead, so Lucas wasn’t positive about the ID, but the chin and mouth looked right. He got on the phone and called Schneider, the hotel security chief, and asked if Jeff Toomes was on duty. Toomes had seen the man he thought might have come from Lucas’s hotel room.
Toomes was in the hotel, and Schneider said he’d send him up. He arrived ten minutes later, smelling faintly of onion rings. Lucas let him in, sat him at the desk in front of Lucas’s laptop, and let him scan the photos.
“I don’t think so,” he said eventually. “Photos aren’t so great, but none of them ring a bell.”
AS LUCAS took him to the door, Toomes turned, and said, “Let me show you something.”
He swerved into the bathroom, where a box of facial tissue sat on the sink counter. He pulled out a sheet, tore off a quarter-sized piece, dropped the rest of it in the toilet, touched the small piece to the tip of his tongue, wetting it, wadded it into a small spitball, and pressed it into the peephole of the door.
“These peepholes work both ways,” he said. “There was this freak who’d go around making movies of famous women who were walking around their room naked. He was shooting through the peephole. I’m told that you can buy special lenses for that specific purpose, on the Internet. Unless you want to take the chance that somebody’s looking at you, keep the spitball in it.”
“I’ll do that,” Lucas said. “You’re good at this hotel security stuff, huh?”
“Yeah, I am,” Toomes said. “A lot of weird shit happens in hotels. It’s interesting.”
WHEN HE WAS GONE, Lucas called Forte. “I need everything you can find on James Harold Ritter. You’ve got his license info, so that’s a good start. Nothing’s too small.”
“I’m in a meeting. Give me a couple of hours.”
“Fine. I’m going to go scout his house, see what I can see,” Lucas said.
“Easy, boy.”
He did not leave immediately. Instead, he called Smalls, and said, “You’ve got a woman working for you at the cabin. Janet Walker . . .”
“Yes, she runs a caretaking service for absentee landowners.”
“I need her phone number,” Lucas said.
Smalls went away for a while, then came back for the number. “Her cell phone; she usually answers right away.”
She did. Lucas identified himself, and asked, “Do you have access to the Internet?”
She said, “I live in West Virginia, not on the friggin’ moon.”
“Great. Do you have it handy?”
“I’m in the yard. I’d have to walk into the house.”
“I’m going to send you eight or ten photographs. Tell me if any of them look like the guys you saw driving the F-250.”
The whole round-trip with the photographs took five minutes. Lucas sent ten, and, after examining them, Walker said, “The third photograph—that looks like the driver. I’m not sure I could swear it was him, if it went to court, but it looks like him.”
“Thank you,” Lucas said. “Keep this under your hat, if you would.”
JAMES HAROLD RITTER.
Lucas had three markers pointing at Ritter: his impression of the attacker’s face on the street; Walker’s identification; and the fact that he owned a black F-250. Could be a coincidence, with a little bit of a stretch, but Lucas felt he was on a roll, that Ritter was the one.
Like most of the other people Lucas was trying to find, Ritter lived across the Potomac in Virginia, in what turned out to be a neatly kept condominium complex not far from where the F-250 plates had been stolen. The complex had individual covered parking spaces at the back of the building. Although Ritter’s driver’s license hadn’t included an apartment number, Lucas spotted the black Ford pickup, which did have an associated apartment number; the apartment number apparently included a vacant space beside the pickup.
Lucas parked in a visitor’s lot and walked back to the F-250. There was nobody around in the noon heat, so he walked into the covered parking area and took a close look at the truck.
Smalls had said that his Cadillac had been hit by the passenger side of the attacker’s vehicle, and when Lucas squatted at the back of the truck bed, he thought he could see a subtle distortion in the truck’s sheet metal. He checked the driver’s side for a comparison, and when he came back to the passenger side, the distortion—nothing as clear-cut as a dent or a tear—seemed even more apparent, like a quarter-inch wave in the flow of the metal.
He walked down the side of the truck, to look at it from the front. The same distortion was visible, and the front right headlight cover had a small crack on the right side. He peered in the passenger-side window, but there was nothing visible on the seats. He pulled out a shirttail, used it to cover his hand as he tried all four doors. All four were locked.
The truck had been recently washed, Lucas thought, dragging his shirttail-covered hand across it: it was virtually spotless, and even a heavy forensic examination might have trouble placing it in West Virginia. Still, the truck had been involved in an unusual impact: he wasn’t sure he’d found the truck that had taken Smalls and Whitehead off the road, but he’d found a solid candidate. Proving it would be another problem, a greater problem than simply knowing it.
But what kind of impact would leave both trucks without obvious damage while still being violent enough to knock one truck right off the road? He thought about it . . .
His first thought: what if Ritter and his friends had rigged a lattice of freshly cut tree trunks and hung it off the side of their truck? They would have had to put padding under the trunks, against the side of the truck, to prevent damage, but they’d want the raw timber to hit the Cadillac.
It’d be simple enough. When Lucas was in the Boy Scouts, his troop had built rafts out of dead wood and rope and had floated down the Rum River on them. Hung on the side of a truck, the rafts would have worked well as protection against impact, and, even better, would have left evidence of wood contacting metal.
But who would think of that?
People who thought about killing other people in undetectable ways, Lucas figured. Professionals who were given a problem: knock a car off the road and down a bluff without any metal-on-metal contact. Given that dilemma, the tree-trunk-lattice idea would pop right up.
LUCAS WALKED BACK to the Evoque, cranked it up, pushed the air conditioner to max, and called Carl Armstrong, the West Virginia accident investigator.
“I may have found that F-250,” he said when Armstrong was on the phone. He described the truck’s condition, and asked, “Since you can see there was some impact, but since it’s been washed . . . is there going to be anything there for you?”
“If we can show there’s been an impact, we could question him about when it happened and why it is that the damage was both extensive yet subtle, and whether he reported the accident. That kind of damage would be uncommon—in fact, I’ve never run into anything like it. Be hard to explain.”
Lucas told Armstrong about the tree-trunk-lattice idea, and after a moment Armstrong said, “That seems kinda unlikely. Not to say . . . stupid.”
“I’ve given you an explanation,” Lucas said. “Do you think my idea could result in the kind of damage I’ve seen?”
“Well . . .”—Lucas could visualize Armstrong scratching his head—“it could, I guess. If it was padded on the back side. Maybe something like a good solid rubber mat, that would do it. As far as finding hard forensic evidence . . . Sounds unlikely. For one thing, everything you find driving around eastern West Virginia you’ll find driving around Virginia. Pollen, and all that.”
“Okay. I don’t want to do anything with it now, but I may be calling you to take a professional look, after we’re out in the open on the investigation.”
“Happy to do it,” Armstrong said. “But, really, a lattice?”
LUCAS WALKED AROUND to the front of the condominium complex and went to the glass front door, which turned out to be the first of two doors. He could get inside the outside glass one, but the interior door was locked. There was a phone on the wall, with a sign that boldly said “DIAL 1 + APT. NUMBER,” and, below that, not so boldly, “Dial 1+00 for Management Office.” A domed security camera in the ceiling monitored the door and the phone.
He called the office, identified himself to the woman who answered. “I’ll buzz you in. Take the first left and walk all the way down the hall to the end. We’re the last door on the left.”
She buzzed him in. Inside the door was an enclosed booth for mail, with mailboxes on the outside for the residents and an enclosed area behind them that would allow the mail carrier to insert mail in the open backs of the boxes without needing keys to open them. No camera was monitoring the booth’s door.
Lucas tested the door: locked, but the lock was crappy, and the door rattled in its frame. He continued on into the building, took the first left, walked down to the end of the hall and into the office, where a woman sat at a desk behind a service counter. She looked up from her computer and asked, “What’s going on?”
Lucas flashed his ID and badge at her, said, “I’m a U.S. Marshal. We are trying to talk to Thomas D. Pope, who we understand lives here.”
She looked puzzled, and said, “I know everybody who lives here. There’s no Thomas Pope.”
Lucas said, “Huh? Are you sure?”
“Absolutely positive,” she said. “Are you sure you got the name right?”
Lucas scratched his head. “I got the name right, but I might have the wrong apartment building . . . I’m navigating with a description and don’t have an exact address, as such.”
“You need an address,” the woman said. “There are about a million apartment buildings around here. This is a nice one, but there are quite a few that look like it.”
Lucas rubbed his nose. “Well, shoot, I guess I’m going to have to do it the hard way. Getting an exact address is a little harder than it usually would be, since the guy moves around a lot.”
“I wish I could help you . . .”
“Well, not your fault . . . Have a good day.”
LUCAS WALKED BACK toward the main entrance, but, instead of going out, he passed the elevators and then took a staircase up to the second floor. Hallways stretched in both directions from the landing, burgundy carpet in one direction, blue in the other. Nobody was in the hallway; the complex was white-collar, and residents were at work. If he needed to black-bag Ritter’s apartment, there wouldn’t be a lot of people around, and he saw no security cameras. He went back down the stairs, headed toward the exit.
At the mail booth, he checked for movement inside and out, grabbed the doorknob and put all of his weight against the door, pushing it sideways toward the door hinges, and with an additional punch from the shoulder, the door popped open. He looked around again, stepped into the booth. The backs of the mailboxes were all identified by name and apartment number. Lucas scanned them, found Ritter’s. A half dozen pieces of mail sat inside it, and he quickly thumbed through them while listening for footsteps. Three ads, an electric bill, and a bank statement.
He stuck the bank statement in his jacket pocket, replaced the rest of the mail. The lock on the door had a turn bolt on the inside, and he unlocked it, stepped outside, and pushed the door shut behind him. Maybe the mail carrier would think he’d forgotten to lock it.
He walked outside, let the stress fall away in the sunshine. Mail theft: a federal felony, if anybody found out about it, but nobody would.
He hoped.
HE WALKED BACK around the building. The heat was stifling, and though he’d only been out of the Evoque for a few minutes, the interior was already intolerably hot. He started the truck, stood outside briefly, peeling off his jacket while the air conditioner took hold, got back in, and opened Ritter’s bank statement.
The statement listed routine payments to fifteen or twenty different places—gas, electric, water, cable, Visa, Amex. The incoming money was more interesting. He found what appeared to be weekly paychecks from a company called Flamma Consultants.
He stuck the letter in his hip pocket: he’d shred it and flush it down the toilet back at the hotel.
AS HE WAS HEADED BACK across the Potomac, he took a call from Rae Givens. “We talked to your man Forte, and we’re on our way down to New Orleans right now. We’ll be flying back straight into D.C. He got us rooms at the Watergate Hotel. I said, ‘Are you kiddin’?’ and he said, ‘No, why would I be?’ I said, ‘Okay’ . . . So we’ll see you there tonight.”
A second call came from Forte himself, with information about Ritter. “There’s not much on him in the files; we’re not allowed to see his income tax returns, but we did take a look at his Army records and his passport. He did three tours in Iraq, got good evaluations, landed a job with Delta and looked like he was in there for life. Instead of reenlisting a third time, he dropped out. His passport would suggest he’s been out of the country, in Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, for most of the time since then.”
“A guy who knows his way around. A hard guy.”
“Yes . . . Did you get anything?”
“I did. I’ll tell you, Russell, I’m going back to the hotel to write this up, but, basically, Smalls’s accident was no accident. It was an assassination attempt and a murder, and Ritter was in it up to his neck. His truck was used to run Smalls and Whitehead off the road.”
“Lucas, you gotta be sure,” Forte said. “It’s too hot to be wrong.”
“I am sure now, but I can’t prove it yet. Between us, we have to figure out where to go with this. Think about it.”
“Write it all up, in detail, don’t leave a single fuckin’ thing out of it. If they smell you coming for them, they might not try to beat you up again. And next time they might come with guns.”
“Bob and Rae . . .”
“Are a good idea, but might not be enough. I need to know everything you get, in case you have a problem.”
Like getting shot, Lucas thought, smiling to himself. “I’ll send you an email, Russell. Later this afternoon.”
AT THE HOTEL, Lucas made a few notes, then shredded Ritter’s bank statement and flushed it. That done, he kicked off his shoes, dropped onto the bed, and used his burner phone to call a St. Paul friend named Kidd, a painter and an expert in computer databases. Kidd’s wife, Lucas believed, was a jewel thief, but that was another story.
Kidd came up, and Lucas identified himself—“Oh-oh. Using a burner?”—and asked Kidd what his favorite charity was.
“Other than myself? The Minneapolis Institute of Art. Weather’s a big deal over there, I understand,” Kidd said.
“I will give a thousand dollars to the institute if you can dig up some stuff on the Internet and tell me how I could have done it myself,” Lucas said.
“What’s it all about? That you have to use a burner to even ask me the question?”
“It’s about a murder and an assassination attempt . . .”
Kidd had helped Lucas with the original investigation of Taryn Grant. Like Lucas, he believed that Grant was a murderer and that she had gotten to the Senate through a murderous political trick. Lucas explained about the accident, and what he’d found about Ritter, and told him about Jack Parrish and Heracles.
“I, uh, would have a hard time explaining how I came up with the connection between Ritter and Flamma,” Lucas said. “I need to be able to make the connection on the ’Net. You know, like I did some research, and there it was. I need it quick.”
Kidd said he’d start looking. “I’d like to see you get Grant. She’s your basic fascist thug, but with great tits,” he said.
From the background, Lucas heard Kidd’s wife, Lauren, shout, “Hey! I’m standing right here.”
“Call me at this number,” Lucas said. “Don’t use my regular one. I worry about being tracked.”
“As you should,” Kidd said. “Give me an hour or two.”
LUCAS SPENT AN HOUR putting together an email to Forte, explaining how he’d tracked Ritter, leaving out the part about stealing the bank statement. He saved the email to his laptop but didn’t send it. He went back to the bed, closed his eyes, and thought about the case.
So far, he had nothing on Grant or Parrish. They were the ones he needed to get to. If he could nail Ritter for the murder of Whitehead, he could talk to the West Virginia cops about a prosecution. Looking at life in a West Virginia prison would be a powerful incentive to talk about Grant and Parrish.
Of course, Ritter might be one of those hard-nosed stoics who’d take pride in not talking, who’d go to prison first.
KIDD CALLED BACK.
“You said you already knew about Heracles. If you look at the company’s incorporation papers—I’ll send you a link—you’ll find the list of officers. If you run the officers, you’ll see that they’re also the officers of two other companies, Flamma Consultants and Inter-Core Ballistic Products.”
“Wait—there’s a direct connection among Heracles, Flamma, and Inter-Core?”
“Not technically direct, but, yeah, they’re all run by all the same people.”
“Kidd . . . this is serious shit. I’m throwing an extra ten dollars at the museum.”
“Thanks, ol’ buddy. Anyway, if you run Flamma Consultants, you’ll find an online article published in last September’s Combat Tech Review magazine called ‘CanCan Dancers.’ In the gun world, suppressors—silencers—are called cans. In that article, you find a picture of Ritter and a couple of other guys all geared up, testing some big-bore silencers at a rifle range in Virginia . . . and Ritter is ID’d as an employee of Flamma. That’s how you tied them together.”
“Excellent,” Lucas said. “I owe you.”
“Actually, you owe the museum. A thousand and ten dollars. The original Flamma, by the way, was a famous Roman gladiator, which fits with the whole Heracles We read the classics thing. Oh, and let me encourage you to look at that magazine article. Ritter was testing that silencer on an M2010 sniper rifle, which is like a .300 Winchester Magnum and has an effective range of twelve hundred meters. In other words, they can shoot you in the back from more than half a mile away.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Lucas said, “I’ll go hide under the bed. Listen, this Inter-Core Ballistics . . . I met this lawyer out here who told me an interesting story about a Pentagon bid . . .”
He told Kidd what Gladys Ingram told him about a company that had outbid her client on a contract for lightweight side-panel armor for military vehicles. Lucas was checking his notes as he described his meeting with Ingram: “Her client was Malone Materials. If you could check around and see what happened with that particular lawsuit . . .”
“I hate that kind of shit. Good guys die because of it,” Kidd said. Lucas knew Kidd had served in an unusual military unit as a young man. “I’ll get back to you—I’ve got extensive resources at the Pentagon. You go hide under the bed.”
Rather than hiding under the bed, Lucas called up the text for the email to Forte, added the information about Flamma, which he supposedly found himself on the Internet, and sent it off.
GRANT AND PARRISH: time to look at where they lived.
He got his jacket and went back out, spent the afternoon cruising their houses, which weren’t far apart, in Georgetown.
Grant had a mansion, as was fitting for a billionaire, while Parrish lived in a town house. Lucas pulled out his iPad and entered Parrish’s address: it popped up on Zillow, which showed it sold three years earlier for $1,450,000. Three bedrooms, three baths, “close to M Street shopping.”
Not bad for a guy who’d never worked for anything other than the federal government and maybe two or three years at a private business, Lucas thought. It would be interesting to see if he had a mortgage and, if so, how large it was.
In the meantime . . .
He drove over to M Street to see if that was a big deal—and it was, he supposed. It was like Madison Avenue meets Greenwich Village, mixing high-end clothing boutiques with burger joints, bars, and yuppie-oriented bicycle shops.
He got a decent burger, drank a couple of Diet Cokes, watched the Washington women walking by, almost all of them clutching cell phones. He asked the waiter where he might buy a book. The waiter had no idea, but a woman who overheard the question told him there was a used-book store three blocks down the street.
He spent a half hour browsing there, found a Carl Hiaasen hardcover novel, Skinny Dip, selling for $5.98, bought it and took it back to the hotel.
HE’D LEFT the burner phone in the closet safe, and when he checked it he found a call from Kidd that had come in twenty minutes earlier. He called back, and Kidd said, “Okay, it’s as bad as you thought. I’ve got some ways to check on information . . . that most people wouldn’t be able to use. The information is public, and it’s out there, so I worked backward through a lot of it.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Lucas said.
“It means that after you find some information, after you know what you’re looking for, you can usually find some other way to get to it. Something you could have at least theoretically gotten to. For example, if you know that a company did X, you can often find references to X as the nine hundredth entry on a Google search. Nobody looks for it there—it would take forever. But if you know it’s there and you’ve got specific search terms . . .”
“Got it,” Lucas said. “So what was nine hundredth on the list?”
“The guys who run Heracles and Flamma invented Inter-Core Ballistics after the Army began looking for bidders on the armor panels. When they won the bid, they paid another company down in Florida, Bishop Composites, to make the armor. Inter-Core was the middleman on the deal. When I looked up Bishop, it turns out that their stuff had failed earlier tests for shrapnel resistance. They recycled their product through Inter-Core, and, this time, they passed the tests.”
“Was it different armor or the same?”
“As far as I can tell, it appears to be identical. Let me make that a little stronger: it was identical. After they failed the earlier tests, they were stuck with a lot of the plate, so they gave Inter-Core a cut-rate price. Bishop looks to have sold around thirty-five million in plate, and, from looking at their financial statements, it appears that Inter-Core took about twenty percent of that.”
“Twenty percent? Seven million for doing nothing?”
“Not for doing nothing: Inter-Core had to fix the deal.”
“Tell me how I get to that,” Lucas said.
KIDD DID, with explicit directions of where and how to search legally. Lucas understood most of what he found, although only a forensic accountant could pull it all together. He thought about it, and called Gladys Ingram.
“Marshal Davenport,” she said. “Nice to hear from you. How’s the investigation going?”
“After you told me about your Malone Materials lawsuit, I went looking for information about Inter-Core Ballistics and found that it tied in to my investigation. I’d like to pass some computer links to you. You probably have much better information resources than I do, so I thought . . . you could take a look, and if you found anything interesting, you might pass it back to me.”
“Sure. We still represent Malone, and I have an intern who was born with a silver computer in her mouth . . . What’d you find?”
Lucas gave her a few of Kidd’s key discoveries—she’d find the rest herself, or her intern would. Then, Lucas hoped, it would appear that the information was flowing from her to him rather than from him to her.
When she had Lucas’s notes, Ingram said, “I’m impressed. I see why you made money on the Internet.”
“Yeah, well, it isn’t all that hard,” Lucas said modestly. “If I had more time, I think I could probably find even more . . . Anyway, get back to me.”
“I will.”
“And soon.”
“Yes.”