“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.
I GOT online and checked all three networks, and both CNN and Fox News, and made lists of names of working producers. I started calling from a series of phones I found by walking around downtown. I’d call each Washington bureau and start asking for producers until I got one on the phone. I never did get one for CBS, but I got the rest of them. Like so, with Fox:
“This is John Torres.”
“I’m calling for Bobby,” I said. “The Bobby. We’re releasing files on two more congressmen and a senator. We need e-mail addresses. We expect to release within half an hour.”
“How do we know you’re from Bobby?”
“Look at the files. You don’t like them, throw them away. What’s one more piece of spam in your mailbox?”
Five-second pause. Then, “Right. Send them to…”
I SET up with my wi-fi can across the street from the Department of the Interior, which had so many possible connections that it took a while to sort them out. I wanted a fast line-I got it; the government always goes first class-because the files I was sending were big. They were essentially scanned-in pictures, rather than text files. That is, they contained text, but instead of a tight little stream of numbers and letters, they were reproductions of photocopies, or in some cases, actual photographs.
Marsh, the first congressman, had been running a whole series of nickel-and-dime scams, mostly involving travel. He traveled by private jet, like a movie star, and paid for it out of his own pocket, the equivalent of a first-class fare. That’s a cheap ticket for a chartered plane, but he always claimed that he was simply “riding along” with corporate people. What was not visible in the government accounts was that his wife and family, including two grown daughters and their husbands, traveled with him, but invisibly, all paid by two large defense corporations. That was thoroughly documented, and was bad enough.
The killer was the château in the South of France, which he had apparently been given as a gift by a French military hardware conglomerate. Superficially, the deal looked like a purchase, rather than a gift, but if you had the right set of documents, the reality was clear enough. The congressman had neglected to tell anyone about his good fortune; not even the IRS. But we had the deed and we had a nice picture of his wife working in their pretty French garden.
With Deering, the other congressman, it was strictly sex. We had pictures of him with half a dozen different women, none of whom looked like virgins, all of them far too young. Names, dates, times, and places. The photographs looked like the product of professional surveillance. He’d be charmed by that.
Brock’s situation was more intricate. All of his investments were made on his Senate salary-he had no family money-and supposedly were controlled by a blind trust. But the trust was placed with an investment company that had a tight relationship with a huge private commodities corporation.
Agricultural commodities-like wheat, corn, sugar, cocoa, and orange juice-are bought and sold by two different kinds of buyers. The first are speculators, who are betting on the price moves the commodities will make in the future. The amount of rain in Iowa in June can send corn prices all over the place, depending on whether it’s too little or too much or just right. Really smart, tough, fast speculators can get rich. Most go broke.
The second type of buyer is the big commodity-using corporation, which sells the wheat or corn, or buys it to make pizza or pancake flour. They’re not speculating-they’re using futures contracts to stabilize the prices they will get or spend on the commodities.
Brock’s investment company routinely handled the futures contracts for the commodities corporation, as a way of stabilizing future prices. But the trustees for Brock’s account, handled through the same firm, were speculating with Brock’s money. And doing it brilliantly. Too brilliantly. They won virtually all of their speculative bets, and had run a few tens of thousands of dollars into nearly fifteen million, tax paid.
The trustees won all their bets because, according to our xeroxed account returns, the commodities company was quietly picking up Brock’s losing bets and replacing them with winning bets of their own. Because it was all handled inside the same investment firm, all the scheme needed was a few adjustments in a computerized account. And Brock had all the paperwork and paid all the taxes.
Nice. Invisible. Illegal.
And fifteen million was such a large, juicy, fat, ridiculous, greedy amount, that when the word got out, Brock would be screwed.
I PUT the word out and gave Krause credit for developing the information. I thought about calling each official’s office separately. Instead, I re-sent the files I’d sent to the networks to each man’s executive assistant. I included the Krause note. Whether he let LuEllen go or not, Krause was in trouble with his peers and the party.
As I worked the wi-fi connection, I’d been staring at the back of the Interior Department building, a wall of some kind of undistinguished gray stone. I thought later that if I had to describe it to someone, I would have said that it looks like the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984.
But then, I may have been overwrought.
I CALLED Krause at three o’clock in the afternoon and he said-no calm reason this time, but with real fear on his side, choking down a scream-“Stop it! Stop it! We let her go, she’s just fine, we’re not following her, we’re not surveilling her. We let her go.”
“I don’t think surveilling’s a word,” I said.
“What? What? What do you mean-”
“I mean if I don’t hear from her in six hours, I start again,” I said. “I’ve got three more ready to go and one of them might be you.”