Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(76)

The desk was in a private niche. They sent the bank people away, gathered around as Forte popped the top, looked in, and Bob said, “Oh boy.”

The box was filled nearly to the top. The first layer, six or eight inches thick, was a mass of documents in English, French, and Arabic. “Contracts for delivery,” Rae said, thumbing through them. “Guns. Oh my God, antiaircraft missiles.”

“Ritter was keeping the docs for self-protection, his cover-your-ass files. Just in case,” Lucas said.

“Looks like it’s gonna work, too, if we’re right about who killed him,” Rae said. “Maybe not for self-protection, but revenge.”

Under the first layer was a thin, flat plastic box, identical to those that Lucas had for his fishing tackle. Inside were two dozen thumb drives.

The third layer consisted of cash—hundred-dollar bills and five-hundred-euro notes—and gold coins, and three more passports. They did a quick count of the cash, and an estimate of the gold, and Forte, looking at his cell phone calculator, said, “He was looking for a rough equivalent of a million dollars in cash. The five-hundred-euro notes make it more compact.”

The eighty gold coins added a bit more than a hundred thousand dollars to the total.



* * *



—

RAE WENT BACK to the lobby and got a cardboard bank box from the manager. Forte filled out a return on the search warrant, signed it, the manager took it away to xerox, and then they put everything inside the box and carried it out to Forte’s car.

“Got thirty minutes to get to Hoover,” he said. “We could be a bit late, especially if I drive slow. And I will. Holy cats, a million dollars in the footwell. Maybe I’ll be really late, drive out to Reagan and get on a plane to Panama.”

“Think about the wife and kids,” Bob said.

Forte said, “That’s what I was doing.”





20


Forte’s boss, Gabe O’Conner, was waiting for them outside the Hoover Building. He saw the box that Forte was carrying, and joked, “Money?”

Forte said, with a straight face, “Over a million, we think, though we didn’t have time to work out the exchange rate on the euros. Or the current price of gold.”

O’Conner looked from Forte to Lucas, to Rae, to Bob, and back to Forte. “Are you shittin’ me?”

“Might not be the most important thing,” Lucas said. “We took it out of Ritter’s safe-deposit box; there are a lot of CYA docs in there, apparently about illegal weapons sales.”

“You guys find . . . interesting cases,” O’Conner said. He looked at his watch. “Let’s go. Russell, talk to me about this while we walk up. I don’t want to be late, but I don’t want to be the complete dumbass in there, either.”

Forte started talking, and didn’t stop, even when their escort showed up. He talked fast—and in paragraphs, Lucas thought. If you’d typed out what Forte said, you could have published it as an essay. He continued all the way to the conference room, with O’Conner nodding steadily like a bobblehead doll. The conference room was still empty, like the first time they were there, until Jane Chase and her retinue of suits showed up, Chase carrying a thin aluminum attaché case.

As they were arranging themselves in their chairs, Forte stood up, plunked the mass of documents on the table. He followed that with the thumb drives and passports, added the stacks of cash, and finally the pile of gold coins, and sat back down.

“Where did you get it?” Chase asked.

Lucas smiled, rubbing his nose as cover. They weren’t asking “How much?” or even saying “Oh my God” but instead “Where did you get it?” The gold and cash weren’t enough to impress this particular bunch of bureaucrats.

Forte looked at Lucas, and said, “You talk for a while.”



* * *



—

LUCAS STARTED with Ritter’s laptop and the encrypted documents, explaining how the code had been concealed—though openly—on the back of Ritter’s gun belt. Then he explained Bob’s sudden comprehension of the “S” design on the same belt and finding the safe-deposit box key.

One of the suits with Chase, a woman, said to Bob, “You thought it was a drain? Why would you think that?”

Bob said, “Well, it looked like one. The design.”

The woman said, “I don’t think I’ve ever looked at a drainpipe.”

“Probably not a do-it-yourselfer,” Bob said. “I’ve looked at quite a few of them. They’re kind of interesting, if you really get your head around them.”

The woman said, “Huh.”



* * *



—

LUCAS EXPLAINED that they hadn’t had time to go over the documents from the bank, “But it looks like Ritter was accumulating material that would give him some protection if Heracles, for whatever reason, ever decided to sell him out,” Lucas said. “There’s a lot of stuff about arms sales, including antiaircraft missiles, and the implication seems to be that the sales were illegal. Or at least irregular.”

“What are you planning to do with it?” Chase asked.

“I was planning to give it to you,” Lucas said, “all of it,” and Chase showed a tiny smile of satisfaction. “We have a particular focus: the assassination attempt on Senator Smalls. If you could have your legal people process this stuff—quickly—and give us an idea of the ramifications, we’ll use it to confront a couple of the guys who were involved in the deliveries. We need to turn them. It’ll have to be swift: they know we’re coming, right now, and they’ve already lined up attorneys for the main suspects. We’ve talked to two of them, and they told us to go . . . You know.”