Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(8)
In other words, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass.” When Jasper was gone, they all shook hands and Lucas asked, “If Jane’s here, why am I?”
“We’ll explain that,” Smalls said. “Jane’s here to outline what the FBI has done so far and why they can’t do much more.”
“Why can’t you do much more?” Lucas asked Chase, as they all settled into chairs.
“Because no crime has been committed,” Chase said. “Not yet.”
“And because word of what was going on would inevitably leak, even with Jane’s thumb in the dike,” Henderson added.
Henderson was a tall, slender, fair-complected man, with longish blond hair and blond eyebrows, who’d hoped that the vice presidency might be a stepping stone to the top job. He and the presidential candidate had lost their race, although they’d won the majority of the popular vote. He was a Democrat, and liberal even for that party.
Porter Smalls’s stature reflected his name: he was short, five-seven or five-eight, thin, white-haired, and tough as a lugnut. He was a Republican and extremely conservative, though he and Henderson were longtime friends, going back to their wealthy childhoods in Minnesota. Lucas had worked with both of them.
Jane Chase was an FBI bureaucrat, an effective one. She’d been shot in the leg the last time Lucas had been in DC. She was middle-sized, outfitted in a navy pantsuit, carefully coifed and dressed, attractive but not cute—didn’t want to get above yourself in the federal bureaucracy—and very smart.
Lucas: “Okay. What’s going on?”
* * *
—
HENDERSON AND SMALLS looked at Chase, who said, “I trust nothing here is being recorded. Or noted. Even on paper.”
“Absolutely not,” Henderson said. “Say what you think.”
Chase turned to Lucas: “Senator Roberta Coil—”
“Never heard of her,” Lucas interjected.
“—of Georgia, has an ambitious seventeen-year-old daughter named Audrey who runs her own blog called Young’nHot’nDC. She has several sponsors who pay her to hustle their products—cosmetics, lingerie, yoga togs, fighter jets, and so on.”
“Fighter jets?” Somehow, fighter jets seemed out of place on the list of sponsors.
“Her mother’s on the Senate Armed Services Committee,” Henderson said.
“Ah.”
Chase: “Anyway, Audrey has a friend named Blake Winston. Blake wants to be a movie director. He’s also seventeen, they go to the same school, and Blake makes Audrey’s blog videos. A few days ago, they were making a video and Audrey asked Blake if he knew how to track down faces on the internet, using a face-matching app. She wanted to know if word was getting around about her blog. He did know about such an app. He loaded several photos of Audrey into it, clicked Return, and up popped a website that calls itself 1919.”
“Like the year after World War I,” Smalls said.
“Yes, but that title only comes up when you get to the site. The actual name of the site is a series of letters and numbers, plus dot-com. A code that you’d have to know to find it, unless you found it like these kids did, going in sideways with the photo search. In other words, it was hidden, and they only found it by accident. When they clicked on the link, Audrey found a photo of herself walking out of her school and also spotted a couple of other photos of people she knew—a daughter of another senator and the son of a congressman.”
Lucas: “Huh. Why 1919?”
“There was some accompanying text,” Chase said. “Apparently ‘nineteen’ refers to the letter S, the nineteenth letter of the alphabet. In that case, 1919 would be . . .”
“SS,” Lucas said. “That’s not good. No offense, Porter.”
Henderson snorted and Porter Smalls said, mildly, “Fuck you.”
“To go on,” Chase said. “It appears to be a publication of a heretofore-unknown neo-Nazi group. What’s particularly disturbing is that they go to extraordinary lengths to conceal the origin of the photos and the text. Also, the Nazi Schutzstaffel, as you probably know, was both paramilitary and military.”
“I didn’t know that,” Lucas said. “History wasn’t my strong suit.”
“Yeah, your strong suit was a pair of hockey breezers,” Smalls said.
Chase ventured an eye roll. “Both military and paramilitary. Armed, in any case, and dedicated to violence, as are most of the articles on the site. Our analysts say we can’t do a word-match analysis on the articles, to find out who wrote them, because they were all cut-and-paste, taken from a variety of white supremacist websites. They were not written by any one person. Actually, and this can’t go any farther than here, one of the articles was written by one of our agents attempting to penetrate a white supremacist organization.”
Smalls said, “There you go. Taxpayer money well spent.”
“No direct threats?” Lucas asked.
“No, other than the fact that each photo has a cutline, identifying the kid and his or her parent and the school the kid goes to,” Chase said. “The lack of threats is almost as disturbing as the Nazi connection. We’ve kept this very quiet inside the Bureau, but one of my associates has argued, convincingly, I think, that whoever is doing this is running a kind of distributed-cell organization. Nobody issues or takes orders, so you can’t pin down a chain of command, but everybody is marching to the same drummer. It’s possible that not even the organizer would know who his followers are. All the readers would know is, ‘Here are some targets, if you want to do something about them.’ Then, if somebody attacks one of the kids, the organizer—who probably doesn’t even know the attacker—might begin with extortion of the other parents.”