Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(81)

“I don’t know, but she knew what she was doing,” Lucas said. “If she’d come to the right door, I’d be dead right now.”

Bob nodded, and said to Rae, “You know what that would mean? No more Business Class, no more suites. We’d be back at Motel 6.”

“Let’s not even think about that,” Rae said, shivering, wrapping her arms around herself. “Tourist Class—the Walk of Shame.”

“We’re not there yet,” Lucas said. “But I’m worried.”



* * *



—

JANE CHASE didn’t call in the morning—she’d warned them she might not. Lucas, Bob, and Rae were rousted out of bed at nine o’clock to be interviewed by three Homeland Security guys, accompanied by a D.C. cop and two FBI agents. They were gone by noon, having extracted everything that Lucas, Bob, and Rae knew by ten o’clock but insisting on going over and over the same territory for the next two hours.

“Excuse me, but those guys wanted it to be a terror attack,” Rae said.

“If you don’t have the occasional terror attack, what are those guys going to do for jobs?” Bob asked.

“There you go,” Lucas said.

At one o’clock, Lucas called Chase’s office number, but nobody picked up, and he left a long message about the firefight at the Watergate. They got sandwiches at a Subway, and the three ate lunch in Lucas’s room.

“You see the reporters out there last night?” Rae asked. “We’re national news everywhere. We’re probably all over CNN and Fox right now.”

Lucas turned on the television, surfed the news channels, and on the third click found a reporter, standing outside the Watergate, talking to a woman who’d either seen or heard something. “They were shouting in Arabic, clear as day, Allahu Akbar . . .”

“Aw, man,” Rae said, and Lucas turned it off.

“Homeland Security is handling it,” Lucas said. “Or their PR department is.”



* * *



—

THEY TALKED about the documents from Ritter’s safe-deposit box and concluded that while there may have been illegal activity at Heracles, it wouldn’t directly help them with the Smalls investigation.

“I’d need a lot more background to even understand the documents. I mean, I know all the words, but I don’t know what they’re saying. If you know they shipped twenty cases of used/surplus full-auto SAWs, what does that mean? Is it illegal? I don’t know,” Rae said. SAWs, Squad Automatic Weapons, were belt-fed light machine guns. “The fact that Ritter saved the paper suggests there’s something wrong, else why would he save it? If it’s all legal, there wouldn’t be any difference between shipping a SAW and a grilled cheese sandwich.”

“There’s something wrong with it,” Bob said, “I promise. That’s why Jane Chase said they’d have some specialists look at it.” After a moment, he said to Rae, “I’d like to get one of those SAWs for our equipment bag. Remember that dipshit Willard pecking away at us with that .25? Think about stepping out there with a SAW and powdering his whole fuckin’ trailer.”

They both laughed, thinking about it, and Lucas shook his head, and said, “Jesus Christ, guys, try to hold it together, huh?”



* * *



—

LUCAS’S PHONE RANG. He took it out of his pocket, looked at the screen, and said, “Speak of the devil and she calls you.”

Lucas put the phone on speaker, and they all bent over it as Chase came up. “We’ve been working through the documents. We can make a strong case against Heracles for illegally exporting these weapons,” she said. “They show end-user certificates issued to approved users—national governments, mostly, along with a few militias in North Africa—but Heracles personnel delivered the weapons to different buyers altogether, including some groups on our FTO lists.”

“What’s an FTO list?” Bob asked.

“FTO is an acronym for Foreign Terrorist Organizations,” Chase said. She said lists were maintained by the State Department.

“What are you going to do?” Lucas asked.

“The documents implicate Heracles, Flamma, and Inter-Core Ballistics, which are all interlocking. The men who actually delivered the weapons are the low-hanging fruit. We can pick them up right now and try to turn them. We plan to do that. Today. We invite you to come along; two of the men implicated are McCoy and Moore, who you want to squeeze for your Smalls investigation.”

“This is dang quick for the FBI—no offense,” Rae said.

“None taken, but you’re right. For us, this is quick,” Chase said. “We have a problem. Two of the most critical documents, the clearest cases, will fall under the statute of limitations in a matter of a few weeks. That’s unfortunate, but it is what it is. So, we’re going to pick up McCoy and Moore and three other men today, interview them separately, and use their statements, if any, to launch a raid on Heracles, Flamma, and Inter-Core tomorrow morning. Frankly, we’re planning to use the possibility of a murder charge, those that you’re pursuing, to motivate the men we grab today to make a statement on the gun diversion case. We’re waiting now for warrants for both the arrests and for searches of their apartments.”