The Chaos Kind (John Rain #11)(80)

Carl lowered the Wilson.

“Leave,” she said to the man. “Right now. This is your chance.”

He looked at her, panting, then at Larison. He eased the muzzle of his gun away from Schrader’s face, relaxed his grip, started to move to the side—

Livia stepped offline, brought up the Glock, and put two rounds in his face. His head snapped back and he went down.

“Oh, my God!” Schrader screamed. Larison stepped in and kicked him field-goal style in the balls. The scream was instantly cut off and Schrader doubled over.

Larison looked at Livia and smiled. “You’re good. For a second there, you had me convinced, too.”

Carl rushed in. He and Larison grabbed Schrader by the arms and half dragged, half carried him out the back, Livia covering them from the rear.

She heard sirens. But in seconds they were in the woods, and a minute later, the van. Carl and Larison threw Schrader in back and sat on him. Livia jumped in front.

“You got him?” Diaz said.

“Go,” Livia said, her heart pounding. “Drive normally. Head west. Yeah, we got him.”

She turned around and watched as Carl and Larison flex-tied Schrader’s wrists behind his back. She heard Diaz say, “Actual fact, girl: you are badass.”

Schrader was crying. He said, “I want to go home.”

“Don’t worry,” Livia said. “That’s the plan.”





chapter

fifty-seven





RISPEL


It was already ten in the morning on the East Coast, and still no word from the Seattle team. Of course, a benign explanation was possible, but Rispel knew something was wrong. Everything about the Schrader operation had been a clusterfuck, almost from go. Well, not everything. Getting Schrader released from jail had worked. Weirdly, it was the most audacious move of the entire game, and the only one that had gone smoothly.

She told her admin to hold her calls, then tried Sloat again. Then Tyson. No one answered. She tried them on their alternate burners. Nothing.

She checked the news feed on her desktop monitor. Nothing out of Seattle. But the Washington Post had a scoop: intelligence about the discovery of a Russian disinformation campaign, including deep-fake photos and videos of administration officials engaged in salacious acts. “This is the next step in the information wars,” an unnamed senior intelligence official was quoted as saying. “Russia’s ability to wage this kind of asymmetric, low-intensity warfare against the integrity of our government, our elections, and our way of life cannot go unanswered. America needs to develop a robust set of tools for a full suite of potential responses throughout the battlespace. Until that happens—until our adversaries pay a price for this kind of meddling—we’re going to see continued escalation of fake news from the Kremlin.”

Devereaux, she thought. Playing bullshit bingo with the press. Information wars, meddling, fake news, the Kremlin . . . It was actually an astute move, and she mentally kicked herself for having given him the idea. You could get the establishment media to print anything on background, and then quote it yourself later as proof of the need for whatever policy you were selling. In this case, Devereaux was indeed shaping the battlespace. Now if those videos were released, he’d be able to point to reports like the one he’d just dictated to his stenographer at the Post as proof that the videos were nothing but fake news. Information wars, indeed.

She paused for a moment, thinking. Had Devereaux learned something about an imminent release of the videos? Why else would he be establishing this preemptive groundwork?

Or—had something been released already?

The more she thought about it, the more she suspected he’d been lying to her about the president being in the videos. Because what was he going to do, tell her the truth? Help me out here, Lisa. I fucked a bunch of teenaged girls at a drug-fueled orgy and now it’s all going to be released as a movie of the week. He would have been afraid she would want those videos for her own leverage. And rightly so.

But who was pressuring Devereaux? He had been vague about that when he first brought Rispel into this. Schrader himself? How could he have, from jail? Through his lawyer, maybe, but who would the woman contact? Well, given that the underlying problem was an out-of-control assistant US Attorney, it stood to reason that Schrader’s lawyer would have gone to the attorney general himself. But why would Hobbs have cared enough to bring in Devereaux, unless Hobbs was implicated in the videos, too?

It didn’t matter. Either way, she needed to secure the videos quickly. Every leaked report about Russian fake news would bleed off the eventual impact. Enough time, and Devereaux and Hobbs and anyone else who appeared in the videos might even be able to ride out a release. They’d cry “fake news” in unison and accuse anyone in the media who wanted to publish the material or even to ask questions about it of doing the Kremlin’s kompromat work. It wouldn’t be easy—the public, like the press, was far more interested in sex scandals than in routine corruption—but if Devereaux and the rest kept strict message discipline, eventually they’d exhaust the media, and it would move on to the next glittering object. In the end, it always did.

She went back to news from Seattle. And this time, there it was. Explosions and a shooting in a house on Lake Tapps. She felt a cold weight settle inside her chest.

She found a television station. Reporters were standing outside the house, which was surrounded by police tape. A stunned-looking uniformed cop the chyron identified as being with the Bonney Lake Police Department was briefing the press. Five bodies inside, all shot to death. A reporter asked if this had anything to do with the shootings the day before in Freeway Park and the Four Seasons, or with Andrew Schrader’s escape from prison. The cop stammered that she didn’t know. Rispel almost sympathized. Before this morning, probably the cop’s toughest case had been a couple of teenagers breaking into an empty off-season lakefront vacation home.