“So…”
“Everything goes there,. Carp’s headed that way, Lemon says he has a current apartment there, and so does AT &T, and there’s this working-group thing. I think that’s where it’ll happen.” I turned and put my arm around her shoulder. “But it’s getting a little strange for a simple burglary wench,” I said.
“I’ll hang on for a while longer. Guy’s starting to piss me off.”
BACK in Longstreet, we lost John, which we’d expected. Marvel, arms crossed, said, “I’m putting my foot down. If John gets killed, I’ll have to find work to support the kids. To do that, I’ll have to go out of town and the whole Longstreet project goes down the drain. So I’m telling him, No.”
John looked abashed, the guy who didn’t want to appear to be under his wife’s thumb, but who knew she was right. I couldn’t see any reason for him to come with us. “It’s all gonna be computer stuff at this point. If we need help carrying a body, we’ll give you a ring.”
“Do that,” he said. But I think he wanted to come.
WE LEFT for Washington the next morning, driving. We were driving because that’s about the only anonymous way to travel around the U.S. Everything else will wind up in a database.
Even by car, anonymity is tough: if you pay for motels or gas with credit cards, if you speed and get a ticket, if you use your cell phone, you’re gonna be on a computer, fixed at an exact spot at an exact time. I’d noticed, once-you can see for yourself-that when you pull up to the parking-garage exit booth at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, to pay your money, they’ll give you a receipt with your license tag number printed on it. This is four seconds after you pulled up, so your tag is being automatically read somewhere along the line.
Both LuEllen and I had a couple of alter egos who had their own credit cards, all carefully paid, and we used hers in the only motel we needed while heading north. Building an alter ego is almost like identity theft, but backwards. You build a nonexistent life, rather than steal someone else’s. It’s fun, if you’re careful.
The trip was pleasant enough, nine hundred miles or so with the inevitable side trips to look for decent food and places to run. We did it in one long and one reasonably short day, riding up I-40 to I-81 through the heart of the summer, along the Appalachians and up the Shenandoah, then over to Washington on I-66.
The first night, in a mom-and-pop hotel, I went online and found a note from Lemon:
Find six calls last night and this morning from Carp’s Washington apartment.
I went back:
On the way. Need anything new.
WE WOUND up in a Holiday Inn in Arlington, checking in separately, for separate rooms, although we’d only use one or the other. It’s better to have a bolt-hole and not need one, than to need one and not have it.
LuEllen checked in first, dropped her bags, then walked back out to the parking garage and gave me her room number. I checked in, put a bag in my room, stuck a sport coat in a closet, rumpled up the bed, hung a “Do Not Disturb” ticket on the door, then toted the rest of my stuff up to LuEllen’s. There was one big bed, and the room was decorated with colors that you forgot when you weren’t looking at them. Like almost everything now, it smelled of cleaning fluids.
“So,” LuEllen said. She pulled back a curtain and looked out: cars and tarmac. The sun was still well above the horizon. “What’s first? Carp’s?”
“That seems reasonable. Take a look at it, anyway. Watch the news for a while.”
WE’D missed the initial newsbreak, being stuck in the car, but Senator David Johnson of Illinois was being accused of covering up a drunk-driving incident involving his oldest daughter. According to what CNN referred to as “the source known as Bobby,” Debra Johnson’s car had struck a middle-aged bicyclist in downtown Normal, Illinois. The man had suffered a broken wrist and bruises and scrapes, and his bike had been destroyed.
Debra Johnson had paid a ticket for careless driving, but the initial ticket had been for Driving While Intoxicated, issued to her after she had failed a Breathalyzer test. She’d been transported to a local hospital after the accident, complaining of head pain, and had never been taken to police headquarters.
The bicyclist had settled for twenty thousand dollars for pain and suffering. Initial reports said that the money had come from Johnson’s campaign fund, which is illegal.
Johnson hadn’t yet made a statement, but the vultures were circling. A photograph accompanied the news release-a picture of a drunk-looking young woman standing in a city street, between a cop car and a Saturn, looking at the camera, her eyes bright red with the reflected flash.
“Goddamnit,” I said. “He’s gotta let up.”
“Pouring blood in the water,” LuEllen said.
From the Johnson story, CNN went directly to the Norwalk virus-San Francisco story, which the talking head said was “consistent in style with other releases from the Bobby source.”
California was planning to sue the federal government for a trillion dollars for damage done by the Norwalk virus experiment, CNN said. The money would be used to provide educational programs on the virus and to close the state’s budget gap. A San Francisco law firm had signed up seventy thousand people on its website for a class-action suit claiming that the virus did irreparable damage to the victims’ health, destroyed their businesses, drove away tourists, caused building foundations to fail, encouraged cats and dogs to interbreed, and allowed Russian thistle to invade the ecosystem. They also wanted a trillion dollars.
A more serious study by UC Berkeley suggested that four people had died in San Francisco of complications arising from an initial Norwalk virus infection. Weeping members of all four families were shown, the cameras lingering lovingly on the tears rolling down overweight cheeks. The victims had all been good providers.
The government was now denying that the experiment took place, but nobody believed it anymore. There was too much money at stake.
In rounding up the Bobby stories, the anchorman said that the special forces officer accused of executing an Arab prisoner had been flown into Washington and was being questioned by members of the Army’s criminal investigation division.
THEN a second guy, a media specialist, went off in another direction: “The one question that everybody is asking is, ‘Who is this Bobby, where does he get this stuff, and what does he want?’ ” To help him with this conundrum, he interviewed two congressmen who were newly enough elected to be fairly clean, two media advisors-public relations guys, we supposed-and the mayor of San Francisco.
After cutting through the bullshit, the answer was that they had no idea of who Bobby was, where he got the stuff, or what he wanted. One of the PR guys guessed that Bobby was a hacker who was getting his information from government databases, said Bobby probably wasn’t acting alone, and referred to Bobby’s group as “Al-Code-a.”
“That’s bad,” I said.
“Carp’s gonna have a short life span as Bobby,” LuEllen said. “If we don’t get him soon, somebody else will.”
CARP’S apartment was in the District, two miles due north of the White House, on Clay Street between Fourteenth and Fifteenth, and a half-block east of Meridian Hill Park. The building was a crappy brown-brick five-story wreck; we cruised it once, and on the back side found that half the tenants had their wash hung out on the balconies. The whole area was run-down, with the kind of street life that suggests you might want to look over your shoulder every once in a while: idle guys, walking around with their hands in their pockets, surrounded by an air of hip-hop cool; clusters of skaters; a drug entrepreneur whose eyes skidded right past me; women in government secretarial dress who walked as if they had a cold wind at their back, shoulders hunched, heads down. Alleys, with people in them; trash on the streets and sidewalks; and some graffiti.