Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(35)

“Wait—there’s a direct connection among Heracles, Flamma, and Inter-Core?”

“Not technically direct, but, yeah, they’re all run by all the same people.”

“Kidd . . . this is serious shit. I’m throwing an extra ten dollars at the museum.”

“Thanks, ol’ buddy. Anyway, if you run Flamma Consultants, you’ll find an online article published in last September’s Combat Tech Review magazine called ‘CanCan Dancers.’ In the gun world, suppressors—silencers—are called cans. In that article, you find a picture of Ritter and a couple of other guys all geared up, testing some big-bore silencers at a rifle range in Virginia . . . and Ritter is ID’d as an employee of Flamma. That’s how you tied them together.”

“Excellent,” Lucas said. “I owe you.”

“Actually, you owe the museum. A thousand and ten dollars. The original Flamma, by the way, was a famous Roman gladiator, which fits with the whole Heracles We read the classics thing. Oh, and let me encourage you to look at that magazine article. Ritter was testing that silencer on an M2010 sniper rifle, which is like a .300 Winchester Magnum and has an effective range of twelve hundred meters. In other words, they can shoot you in the back from more than half a mile away.”

“Thanks for the tip,” Lucas said, “I’ll go hide under the bed. Listen, this Inter-Core Ballistics . . . I met this lawyer out here who told me an interesting story about a Pentagon bid . . .”

He told Kidd what Gladys Ingram told him about a company that had outbid her client on a contract for lightweight side-panel armor for military vehicles. Lucas was checking his notes as he described his meeting with Ingram: “Her client was Malone Materials. If you could check around and see what happened with that particular lawsuit . . .”

“I hate that kind of shit. Good guys die because of it,” Kidd said. Lucas knew Kidd had served in an unusual military unit as a young man. “I’ll get back to you—I’ve got extensive resources at the Pentagon. You go hide under the bed.”

Rather than hiding under the bed, Lucas called up the text for the email to Forte, added the information about Flamma, which he supposedly found himself on the Internet, and sent it off.



* * *



—

GRANT AND PARRISH: time to look at where they lived.

He got his jacket and went back out, spent the afternoon cruising their houses, which weren’t far apart, in Georgetown.

Grant had a mansion, as was fitting for a billionaire, while Parrish lived in a town house. Lucas pulled out his iPad and entered Parrish’s address: it popped up on Zillow, which showed it sold three years earlier for $1,450,000. Three bedrooms, three baths, “close to M Street shopping.”

Not bad for a guy who’d never worked for anything other than the federal government and maybe two or three years at a private business, Lucas thought. It would be interesting to see if he had a mortgage and, if so, how large it was.

In the meantime . . .

He drove over to M Street to see if that was a big deal—and it was, he supposed. It was like Madison Avenue meets Greenwich Village, mixing high-end clothing boutiques with burger joints, bars, and yuppie-oriented bicycle shops.

He got a decent burger, drank a couple of Diet Cokes, watched the Washington women walking by, almost all of them clutching cell phones. He asked the waiter where he might buy a book. The waiter had no idea, but a woman who overheard the question told him there was a used-book store three blocks down the street.

He spent a half hour browsing there, found a Carl Hiaasen hardcover novel, Skinny Dip, selling for $5.98, bought it and took it back to the hotel.



* * *



—

HE’D LEFT the burner phone in the closet safe, and when he checked it he found a call from Kidd that had come in twenty minutes earlier. He called back, and Kidd said, “Okay, it’s as bad as you thought. I’ve got some ways to check on information . . . that most people wouldn’t be able to use. The information is public, and it’s out there, so I worked backward through a lot of it.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Lucas said.

“It means that after you find some information, after you know what you’re looking for, you can usually find some other way to get to it. Something you could have at least theoretically gotten to. For example, if you know that a company did X, you can often find references to X as the nine hundredth entry on a Google search. Nobody looks for it there—it would take forever. But if you know it’s there and you’ve got specific search terms . . .”

“Got it,” Lucas said. “So what was nine hundredth on the list?”

“The guys who run Heracles and Flamma invented Inter-Core Ballistics after the Army began looking for bidders on the armor panels. When they won the bid, they paid another company down in Florida, Bishop Composites, to make the armor. Inter-Core was the middleman on the deal. When I looked up Bishop, it turns out that their stuff had failed earlier tests for shrapnel resistance. They recycled their product through Inter-Core, and, this time, they passed the tests.”

“Was it different armor or the same?”

“As far as I can tell, it appears to be identical. Let me make that a little stronger: it was identical. After they failed the earlier tests, they were stuck with a lot of the plate, so they gave Inter-Core a cut-rate price. Bishop looks to have sold around thirty-five million in plate, and, from looking at their financial statements, it appears that Inter-Core took about twenty percent of that.”