“Bald,” Bob said.
Lucas said, “Jesus, Rae, just type the fuckin’ thing into my file.”
She did, and the new file opened up: twelve documents and thirty emails.
“Not much,” Rae said.
“Ritter was disciplined,” Lucas said. “Probably cleans out stuff he’s not using.”
“Even though he knows we could never crack the encryption without the code?” Bob asked.
“Even then,” Lucas said. “If you got something you don’t need, get rid of it.” He thought about the Ritter bank statement he’d flushed.
* * *
—
BUT RITTER WASN’T PERFECTLY DISCIPLINED.
The longer files contained details of shipments to Libya, Niger, and Iraq from Heracles—there were no details of what the shipments might be—that Ritter, McCoy, and Moore would be escorting to their final destinations. There were names of recipients and places mentioned, along with notes on briefing times, and, occasionally, enigmatic labels that seemed to Lucas to be cautionary: “Maziq is reliable and knows his way around, and he’s always got protection, both physical and political, so you’ll be okay there,” and, “You can’t count on Jibril to back you up if push comes to shove (which it won’t). Be aware that he’s belonged to four different militias that we know of, and they’re not friendly with each other, so he’s a guy who’s willing to change beliefs like he changes his shorts. If he changes his shorts . . .”
Another one said, “Every time the cases are out of your sight, check the seals when you get back. Even when you get off the plane. This shit can’t get pieced out or we’re in trouble.”
A third one said “Beware the OGA, they’re thick in there.”
“I wonder what the OGA is?” Lucas asked.
“I know that,” Bob said. “It stands for ‘Other Government Agency,’ which means the CIA.”
“Got it.”
“The FBI needs to see this,” Rae said. “What about the emails?”
Most of the emails were cryptic. They came in from several people at Heracles, but mostly said things like “We still on for two?”
Then they found the maps.
Lucas clicked on an email titled “Here” and, when he opened it, found two satellite blowups of tight areas of West Virginia. One had a dot on what appeared to be the intersection of a dirt lane and a back road less than half a mile from Smalls’s cabin above the South Branch of the Potomac.
The other displayed a “path” that went from the point of impact, where Ritter’s truck hit Smalls’s Cadillac, to the back road above the cabin, to the spot where the logs that had been on the side of the truck were dumped.
They all read it, half disbelieving, until Bob tapped the screen where the trail intersected with the back road. “This is a scouting report, setting up the attack. Somebody was set to watch Smalls—here. When they left the cabin, he would call Ritter, in the truck, and walk out to where the truck was going to pick him up—here. He’d be picked up, and they would drive out to the place where they dumped the logs. After that, it was over the hill and back to D.C.”
“Look at the time stamp,” Lucas said. “It was, what, five days before they hit Smalls? They must have been watching him, and knew he’d be going up there with Whitehead.”
“You don’t get that just by watching,” Rae said. “They bugged him.”
The email had gone from Moore to Ritter.
Lucas said, “We need to tell the FBI guys about this. Then we go bust Moore. He’s toast. We got our new guy. The only question now is, do we put him in a cell or wire him up?”
* * *
—
HE FOUGHT through the FBI bureaucracy again, finally arriving at the desk of Jane Chase’s assistant. The assistant said that Miz Chase was in a conference. Lucas said, “This is quite important. Go into the conference, right now, and tell her the U.S. Marshals are calling with information she’d want. She’ll know what you’re talking about.”
The assistant hesitated, then said, his voice pitching up with mild exasperation, “Well, I’ll do it, but I hope you’re not getting me in trouble.”
“I promise, I’m not.”
Two minutes later, Chase said, “Hello?”
“Agent Chase? This is Lucas Davenport, the U.S Marshal from the meeting—”
“I remember,” she said, her voice dry as desert sand. “What do you want?”
“You’re aware that one of our targets, James Ritter, was murdered?”
“I was informed of that, yes. Your man Forte called.”
“We seized Ritter’s laptop . . .”
“Which I understand is heavily encrypted.”
“Yes. The other marshals and I cracked the code this morning. We have a number of documents about shipments from Heracles to Libya, Iraq, and Niger, although it doesn’t say what the shipments were. But it looks to me like it might be stuff they don’t want anyone to know about. From our perspective, the more important document apparently locates a suspect named Moore at Senator Smalls’s cabin and also pinpoints the location where the logs we found with paint from Smalls’s Cadillac on them were dumped. We’re thinking of busting Moore right away. The question is, do we drop him in a cell or see if he’ll wear a wire for us? Or might the FBI have a different idea altogether?”
“Wait. You cracked the encryption code? I was told by experts that couldn’t be done,” she said.
“Yeah, well . . . what can I tell you? We’re marshals.”
After considering that, she said, “I’m jammed up in the early afternoon, but I’ll clear my schedule for later on. Be here at four o’clock. You’ll be met in the lobby. Bring the documents you’ve found with you. We will have some of our specialists look at them.”
Lucas told her that the computer guy at Quantico could have them to her in seven minutes, and she said, “Excellent. I will retrieve them from him. Your diligence is to be commended. We’ll see you here at four.”
She hung up, and Lucas said to Bob and Rae, “There is a woman not just with a stick up her ass but an entire fuckin’ tree. With branches.”
Rae said, “You gotta be straight to get as high up as she is with the feebs.”
“Like you,” Lucas said.
Rae said, “Nah. I just gotta be willing to shoot any dumbass motherfucker stupid enough to run from me. Which I am willing to do. And I have to take care of the Stump, of course.”
“For which I’m eternally grateful,” Bob said.
* * *
—
LUCAS CHECKED his cell phone. “Four o’clock—three hours. Maybe I’ll work out. Too hot to go shopping.”
“Take a nap,” Rae said. “Or I could drive down to Quantico and meet Smith for a drink. He could give me a back rub. I could use a good rub.”
Bob said, “I’ve been thinking . . .”
Rae: “Oh-oh. You know what I told you about that.”
“What’s the ‘S’ on Ritter’s belt?”
Lucas said, “What?”
“There’s an ‘S.’ Right at the end of the code. If the dots are a code, maybe the ‘S’ is, too.”
Lucas got out his iPad, called up the photos of Ritter’s belt. Bob was correct about the “S,” written in the same black ink as the Braille dots, although Lucas was not certain whether the symbol was actually an “S.” The initial, or symbol—or whatever it was—was rendered in open-ended double parallel lines, with one side of the initial/symbol shorter than the other. “It’s more like a shape than an actual initial. It’s like an S-shaped road,” Lucas said.
“That’s dumb. Who’d have to remember an S-shaped road?” Rae asked. “What good would it do you?”
“Maybe a river?” Lucas suggested, and Rae shook her head.
They sat and stared at it for a while, and Lucas said, “Fuck it, let’s think about it.”
A second later, Bob said, “You know what it looks like? It looks like the trap under a sink. Like maybe someplace you’d hide something small. A thumb drive, for instance?”
Rae and Lucas looked at each other, back at the iPad, and Rae said, “Goddamnit, we didn’t look. Now we’ve got to go back over to Ritter’s. And be back here by four.”
* * *