He spent some time brooding, and finally managed to get to sleep at two in the morning.
He’d gotten up the next morning, had shaved, showered, and was about to go to breakfast when Forte called and said, “You’re not fucking around with this Heracles place, are you?”
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.