Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(30)

“You’re my guy?” Lucas asked.

“Yes. I am,” the man said. “If you arrest me, I won’t resist, but I won’t say a word except ‘lawyer’ and by-and-by, you’ll be in desperate legal trouble for arresting me, since you have no cause. You also won’t get any help from us. Agreed?”

“I’m not here to arrest you or even hassle you,” Lucas said. “I followed your instructions. You aren’t Old John, I take it?”

“No, I’m not. We were fairly sure you would follow the instructions, but not positive,” the man said, mildly enough. “You are being followed, though. Doesn’t look like federal people, to us.”

“Blue RAV4?”

“He was in a blue RAV4, but he ditched it after a while—found a lucky parking place—and now he’s on foot,” the man said. “He’s on Virginia, a block or two behind us.”

“Goddamnit. I’d really like to know who it is,” Lucas said. “He was back there yesterday. I think he’s trying to figure out who I’m meeting.”

“We’ve taken a couple of pictures of him. We’ll send them to your phone. An email address would be useful, too.”

Lucas took out his ID case, extracted a business card with his official email address, and handed it across. The man dropped it in his jacket pocket.

Lucas: “Now . . . I wanted to talk to you because Charlie Lang thinks you’re a large well-organized group with good contacts among the alt-right. We need to track down this 1919 group as quickly as we can. If a kid gets hit, the FBI will tear up everybody in sight and that includes you. We need you to put out feelers to all your cells: anything will help.”

“I don’t think we have that many people in the District, or around it,” the man said. “I’ll talk to my friends and see what they want to do. See what they can do. We’ll get back to you by telephone, the number we called this morning.”

“You don’t know how many members you have? What’s your position with the ANM?” Lucas asked.

The man smiled. “I’m a trusted member. We don’t have officers, as such. Even Old John is more of a coordinator than an officer—he can’t order people around, because, well, that’s the kind of thing we’re against.”

“You can’t really promise me anything? Make any commitments?”

“No. I’ll get in touch with Old John if I can and he’ll trickle the information around, and maybe something will trickle back up. That’s all I can tell you.”

“You know, from the outside, you sound like this 1919 group,” Lucas said. “They don’t identify themselves, they don’t ask for anything specific, they apparently are trying to recruit people they don’t know and who don’t know them . . . and from the looks of the website, they’re fond of guns and we know you guys are.”

The guy rolled up his hands in a “what can I say?” gesture. “They want to shoot kids, they’re nuts. Our basic philosophy is that the country is going to hell in a handbasket. We don’t want to overthrow it, we just want to survive the coming catastrophe. We want to help create a sustainable form of social organization, where people re-learn how to take care of themselves.”

“I saw that in your papers,” Lucas said. “On the other hand, there’ve been some shootings . . . like in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania, that some alt-right people think you were involved in. If you’re willing to pull a trigger, then . . . where are you going to stop?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” the man said.

“If you can’t give me any information or commit to anything, then . . . why are we talking? And why you?”

“We’re talking because apparently the PR lady wasn’t enough for you, you wanted to go face-to-face with a member. Here I am. We also wanted to get a look at you—we’ve got some pictures now. From what we’ve read on the internet, you’ve been involved in some killings yourself.”

“As a cop.”

“Some people would say as a tool of the deep state. I don’t necessarily say that, since I’ve had some . . . relationships . . . with the deep state myself. But, some people would say that—about you. You work for people who pull the levers, but don’t come out in the open to do it.”

“And you’re here . . . why? You personally?”

“I was chosen to make contact because my particular friends, my group, is here in the District, and includes people with operational intelligence backgrounds with the U.S. government. They could spot somebody tracking you. I specifically was chosen to meet you because I’m very fast and can run like hell, if necessary.”

He smiled at that, as a phone buzzed in his pocket. He answered, listened for a moment, then clicked off and said, “The guy who’s following you is trying to sneak up on us. He’s about a half block down Virginia. I’d rather he not see my face.”

Lucas looked down the street and the man said, “I gotta go.”

He waved a hand and a car crossed the street and pulled up next to them, a blue LED “Uber” sign in the window. He nodded at Lucas and said, “We’ll call, one way or the other,” and climbed into the Uber. The car pulled into a stream of traffic and was gone.