“Doing the car,” I said.
I got out of my car, carrying the plumb bob. Stepping up to the driver’s-side window on the Corolla, I put the point of the plumb bob on the glass, just outside the inner door lock. I hit the blunt end of the plumb bob with the heel of my other hand, and the steel point poked easily through the glass with almost no sound at all, or obvious motion on my part.
I pulled the plumb bob out of the hole, stuck my finger through the glass, popped the lock. Inside the car, I took a few seconds to find the trunk latch: found it, popped the trunk, took the briefcase out. I couldn’t help myself: I looked inside, and there, just where it was supposed to be, was an IBM laptop.
“Excellent,” I said to myself as I got back in my car. “Kidd, you are a fuckin’ genius.”
THEN LuEllen called. Her voice was jerky, screeching, and for the first time I’d ever heard it, afraid: “Kidd, I’m in trouble here. I’m in trouble, Kidd. This is a trap, this is a trap. Carp’s running on the bike. They’re stopping cars. I’m gonna try to get out, oh, Jesus, Kidd. Get out. Get out, get out, wipe your car, dump your car, I’m gonna try to run.”
Two minutes later, I got a last calclass="underline" “Kidd, if you can hear me…”
“I gotcha.” I sounded calm to my own ears, but my heart was in my mouth.
“It was a trap. They’re sweeping the park, there must be thirty of them,” she said. “They spotted me watching him, they blocked me out, they got the car. I don’t know if they got him, or not, I saw him heading into the woods on the bike.” She was breathing heavily, but no longer sounded frightened. “I’m on foot, in the woods, but they’re all around here, they’re gonna get me. I ditched all my ID, buried it, they’ve got nothing on me. I’m gonna throw the walkie-talkie in a minute. Get me out. Get me out, Kidd. Don’t leave me.”
And she was gone. I sat with the radio pressed to my ear, listening for anything. Nothing came.
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.”