Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(45)

“That’s no fun,” she said.

“Could get to be fun, though. You want in, or not?” Lucas asked.

“Oh, yeah. We want in, because we know you. Sooner or later, there’ll be our kind of trouble,” Rae said. “We’re going through a training sequence with some new guys, but there are other people here who can pick up the slack. Bob is already headed back to his house to load up his gear and kiss his sweetie goodbye.”

“And you’ll be doing the same?”

“We’ll talk about that when we get there,” she said.

Lucas: “Oh-oh.”

“Yeah, but it was inevitable. Sandro’s already there in DC and I ain’t going with.” Rae had been involved with an FBI agent named Sandro Tremanty.

“Maybe you could have lunch . . .”

“Nope. I’ve still got feelings for him, but we’re done. He’s basically political, and he’ll be a big shot. Having a tall black gunslinger chick hanging around won’t help him with that. He sorta wanted both, the politics and the gunslinger, but I had the feeling that if he was forced to pick, he’d go with DC. So, I let him go.”

“I’m sorry, Rae.”

“I’ll get over it. And I’ll see you tonight, if Forte keeps his promise on the plane tickets. He’s thinking two o’clock out of News Orleans. If that works, we should be there in time for you to buy us dinner.”

“Bring your guns.”

“We don’t leave home without ’em.”



* * *



—

WHEN HE HAD FINISHED DRESSING, Lucas called Charlie Lang and said, “I need whatever you have on Patriotus, Forlorn Hope, White Fist, Controlled Burn, Lethal Edge, and on the White Gazette.” He omitted Pillars of Liberty from the list, because if Lang was their major source of funding, he’d warn them.

“I’ve heard of all those groups, but we wouldn’t have much in our files—with the exception of White Fist and the White Gazette, they’re all small and insignificant,” Lang said, in his oily voice. “That said, that’s a good list—they’re exactly what you’re looking for. I’ll have Stephen pull together what we do have in our files and send it to you. And, I’ll have him make some calls. We have some sources who would know those people.”

“Excellent. I need it soon.”

“Of course you do. Now, do you have anything for me?”

Lucas thought for a moment, then said, “I talked to Old John.”

“No! You found him!”

“I’ve been told, by another ANM source, that John told the other members of ANM that he’d been compromised and his cell has now pulled out of ANM. No other cells will remain in touch with him. He’s out.”

“Fascinating,” Lang said. “If you could give me his real name . . .”

“I can’t do that. I could call him and ask if he’d call you. I have no problem doing that, and I think he might be interested in talking about his ideas . . . in a general way.”

“I will wait by my phone.”



* * *



—

LUCAS WENT DOWN to the restaurant for breakfast, and when he’d returned to his room and brought up his laptop, he found another group of encrypted files from Jane Chase. He opened them and found a note from her, along with files on each of the groups named by Aline.

In the note, Chase said that Controlled Burn, a prison-linked group, had been run by a man named Sawyer Loan, who was currently locked up in a hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He and another member of the group had gone into a Chattanooga liquor store with guns and got all shot up themselves. Loan was hit four times, and his partner, Daniel McCutcheon, had been killed.

In her note, she said that McCutcheon had been shot seven times, three times while he was already lying on the floor, wounded, because the liquor store employees “wanted to make a point,” which they had. Loan, she said, probably wouldn’t stand trial in Tennessee, since he was out on parole and liquor store holdups were not an approved parolee activity. He’d be going back to a federal prison for at least another six years.

She added that Loan had not been so much a leader, as a phone number for the other members of the group. The Virginia state police believed his replacement was his girlfriend, Tabitha Calvin, who lived in a place called Goochland, Virginia.

Lucas looked up Goochland on Google Maps, and found it to be a bit more than a hundred miles and a couple of hours by car from Washington.



* * *



—

HE LOOKED THROUGH THE OTHER FILES. All six of the other groups, and their leaders, were closer than Goochland, and seemed to be bigger threats. Goochland, on the other hand, was out a ways, but he could be there and back before Bob and Rae got to Washington. If the Virginia state police were correct, he only had to deal with a girlfriend.

He checked his watch: 9:30. If he hurried, he could be in Goochland by noon, back before five. He hurried.



* * *



—

GETTING OUT OF WASHINGTON was a hassle, twenty minutes to the Potomac after he got stuck behind a moving van that was jammed up in a corner, but once on I-95, he began to roll. The landscape was like neither Minnesota nor the Cincinnati area—it was green, but if it wasn’t industrial or commercial, it was forested, with relatively few farms visible from the highway. The route took him almost into Richmond, then swerved west on I-64, and from there cross-country into Goochland.