“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.”
9
Parrish was let into Grant’s house by a housekeeper who told him that Taryn Grant was in her “study”: the SCIF in the basement.
Grant was standing behind her desk, talking into a hardwired phone. She used a yellow pencil to point him at a chair.
He sat, and while she talked to somebody about developing a new line of Samsung cell phone apps—it sounded crooked to Parrish, but what did he know?—he considered lying to her about the attempt to mug Davenport.
And decided against it.
Grant was saying, to someone, “Look: I don’t want you to copy the code. I want you to look at what the code produces and I want you to produce the identical fuckin’ app with a different batch of code and I want you to translate it into fucking Zulu. Are the fuckin’ Zulus writing their own apps? Then find out. Call me back tomorrow. I want numbers.”
Grant was wearing a white blouse and an ankle-length white skirt, both with cutouts that looked like lace and offered peeks at what lay beneath. What lay beneath, Parrish thought, was either nothing at all or a body stocking that precisely matched her complexion.
Either way, it wouldn’t affect him much. Like Grant, he found power more compelling than sex. A quiet deal meeting at the Pentagon or the Senate Office Building, with serious people, was far more compelling than a piece of ass. Anybody’s ass.
Grant put the phone on the hook, and said to Parrish, “I mean, Jesus, how hard can it be?”
“What are you trying to do?”
She inspected him, rolling the yellow pencil between her fingers like a baton, and decided to take ten seconds for the answer. “There are about a billion apps for the Samsung phone and the iPhone. The apps are mostly in the major languages. So you take the best ones and you redo the code so nobody can sue you for plagiarism, or whatever that would be, and put it into a non-English language that doesn’t have that app. Like Zulu. There are ten million Zulu speakers, and I suspect about eighty percent of them have cell phones. Eight million phones times two bucks for an app is worth doing—especially if you can translate the same app into a whole bunch of other non-major languages that add up to a billion people or so, and if developing the app costs you ten grand.”
Parrish considered this, and finally said, “You know, I might have some people who’d be interested in talking to you about that. About specialized apps. I wonder if there are military apps? Tactical apps? I wonder . . .”
Grant waved him off. “No, no, no. The problem with that is, you have to do research. Research costs money. The way we’re doing it: we pay some nerd five grand to rewrite the app with different code and pay some college language professor another two grand to translate the language. No research. If it’s already a popular app in fifteen major languages, the market research is done, too.”