Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(70)

“I get nervous when I’m tangled up with these political considerations,” Lucas said. “It feels . . . corrupt.”

“Yeah? Welcome to the big time.”



* * *



—

AS THEY FINISHED EATING, a bearded guy, wearing an ill-fitting tweed sport coat and black jeans, came by and said, “Senator Henderson. How are you?”

“Dave. Trolling the Watergate, huh?” He said it with a smile. “Hoping for a repeat?”

“I wish. I’m told your Obamacare enhancement bill won’t be going anywhere,” the man said. “It’s deader than Elvis.”

“It’s a work in progress. It may not go anywhere this session, but I’ve got commitments from several Republicans now and it’ll rise out of the grave next year. It’s gonna pass,” Henderson said.

“Maybe,” the man said. He didn’t sound interested. He looked at Lucas. “Who are you?”

“A friend of the senator’s from Minnesota,” Lucas said. “Who are you?”

“Works for the Post,” Henderson said, before the man could reply. “He wrote a story a couple of years ago that got turned into an HBO movie, so he’s probably rich now.”

“Right. My total take was about the same as your daily income,” the man said. He took a step away and asked Lucas, “You sure you’re from Minnesota?”

Lucas said, “Yah, you betcha.”

“You’re not here to soak the federal government for huge sums of money? You’re not selling hammers for four hundred dollars each?”

“Go away, Dave,” Henderson said. “Lucas is a school pal and there’s no government business going on here. At all. We’re talking about old high school girlfriends and whatever happened to them.”

“Had to ask,” the guy said, and he drifted away, eye-checking the other tables in the restaurant.



* * *



—

“HE’S SMARTER THAN HE SEEMS,” Henderson said in a low voice. “Given what we’re talking about here, I want to get under cover. I hope to hell he doesn’t spot Coil coming in.”

They went back up to Lucas’s room, Henderson carrying a third vodka tonic in a plastic tumbler, switched through CNN, Fox, MSNBC, talked about how, exactly, they’d tell Coil about her daughter, and didn’t quite jump when Coil knocked. Henderson answered the door, said, “Come in,” and Lucas saw her face tighten when she spotted him sitting on the bed.

“What happened?”

“We have a problem,” Henderson said. “You have a problem. Actually, everybody has a problem and we’ve got to figure out what to do about it.”

When Coil was sitting down, Henderson said to Lucas, “Go ahead.”

Lucas: “I can’t tell you my sources for the information I’m going to give you. I cannot do that. We’ve learned, and this is beyond question, I’ve checked and double-checked . . . I’m afraid Audrey is the one who set up the 1919 website.”

Coil gaped, turned to Henderson and demanded, “Is this a joke?”

Henderson: “This is no joke, I can assure you. The question is, what to do about it?”

She turned back to Lucas: “How do you know this?”

Lucas explained about the photos and the metadata. Coil asked how he’d gotten into Audrey’s computer and he told her that it had been compromised by teenaged hackers interested in her website because of her provocative photos, and that he’d found the people who’d done it through sources at the FBI.

“They were talking about blackmailing you. They put out a feeler to one of the more radical hacker guys, who happens to have a side job as an FBI informant,” Lucas lied. “The information was routed to me and I dropped the hammer on them. Told them they were looking at twenty years in prison. Took their computers over to the FBI lab, found some sexting photos of underage girls, which in Virginia counts as child pornography. They are sealed up tight, they won’t be talking to anyone, ever.”

“Which is a good thing,” Henderson said to Coil. “Makes you, you know, throw up in your mouth a little, letting those weasels go free, but that’s where we’re at. Anyway, we’ve cauterized that.”

Henderson then went through all the problems Audrey had created, for Audrey, for Coil, for the Democratic Party as it involved the U.S. Senate. “This is a disaster waiting to happen,” he concluded. “You’ve got to shut Audrey up. Get her off the air. Preferably, find some excuse to pull her out of school and send her back home, to finish school there. Or wherever, but someplace there aren’t reporters every five feet.”

Lucas said, “Your daughter’s a minor, so any legal penalties wouldn’t be as severe as they would be if she were eighteen. There might be some, but I don’t know. I’m not a prosecutor and you’re a person of some influence, and that could change what happens. At this point, very few people know about this—me, Senator Henderson, my sources, although my sources don’t have the whole story.”

“Could she go to jail?”

“I don’t know. If somebody actually gets shot, I suppose that could be a possibility, but as I said, I’m not a prosecutor,” Lucas said. “What we’re doing here, Elmer and I, is trying to seal off possible leaks. From anyone, including Audrey.”