“Go ahead and say it,” Lucas said.
“That little bitch, I’ll wring her neck.”
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Chase’s assistant, a young man named Donald, met Lucas in the Hoover Building at two o’clock and took him to a conference room that had a seventy-plus-inch television screen hung from one wall. The screen was connected to a chunky black laptop computer.
“Ms. Chase is trying to get on top of the Audrey Coil situation,” Donald said. He was a pale man with reddish hair, dressed in a blue suit, white shirt, and burgundy necktie, the suit precisely the wrong shade of blue; altogether, his outfit had the grace you’d expect from a one-man band in a vaudeville show. Lucas decided he would have a personal conversation with Donald before he left. “I don’t know what’s happening there. Based on what you gave us, I doubt we’ll find your man from the ANM, because there are so many possibilities, but we can try. A runner, possibly a competitive runner at some point, white, thin, tall, perhaps a current or former government worker, possibly ex-military who may have expressed political sentiments andhas contacts in the intelligence community. We included your height and weight estimates with hair and eye color.”
“That’s about all I got,” Lucas said.
Donald plugged a thumb drive into the computer, handed Lucas a remote control, and said, “What will happen now is that you can click between pages. There are forty headshots per page, and almost two hundred pages. That’s eight thousand headshots. You will get through them surprisingly quickly... a few seconds per page, most of the time. Probably less than an hour to get through all of them, if you don’t spot him. If you see a possible, note down the number on the headshot and the page.”
He handed Lucas a legal pad and a pen.
One of the chairs was a worn leather recliner and Lucas took it. Donald brought the computer up, opened the thumb drive, and Lucas clicked the first page. The photos came in ranks of eight, five ranks per page. He could scan a page and reject it with barely a blink. Donald said, after a moment, “If you find something, you have my number. Call when you’re finished.”
—
LUCAS FOUND HIS MAN, David Thomas Aline, on the twelfth page. He scrambled to the door, which had barely closed, and caught Donald before he turned a corner in the hall: “Hey! I got him.”
“You’re joking,” Donald called back.
“No. I got him.”
Donald came back, took down Aline’s name and an index number, and said, “I can’t believe it worked.”
“Neither can I. I spent a good part of my life looking at mug shots and hardly ever found anyone. Let’s look the guy up.” Lucas paused, and then said, “Donald. About your suit...”
—
DAVID THOMAS ALINE WAS EX-ARMY, a former captain who’d served for six years after graduation from West Point. He’d been a middle-distance runner at West Point and had spent four of his six years in the Army as a logistics officer at an air base in Kuwait. When he left the Army, he’d joined Bechtel Corp. as a logistics manager.
“Odd job for somebody who doesn’t like the government,” Donald said. “Bechtel’s a major government contractor.”
They were sitting in Chase’s office, paging through a computer printout of everything the FBI had on Aline.
Lucas said “Mmm,” because he hadn’t thought about it.
Chase showed up as they were reviewing Aline’s file. She was slightly disheveled—wrinkles in her usually perfect suit, a hank of hair out of place. “That little... person... really screwed us. What are you doing here?”
“Lucas found the ANM guy. We have a file on him,” Donald said.
“You’re joking.”
“That’s what Donald said, but I wasn’t.” Lucas took her through the sequence of events and filled her in on Aline. “What we need to do now is find out who he’s been talking to... who he’s been getting phone calls from.”
“That could be tough if he’s got a burner phone,” Chase said. “Which he probably does, if he’s security-conscious.”
“If there’s any way you could call him a national security threat, we could black-bag him,” Lucas suggested.
“Nope, that won’t work,” Chase said, shaking her head. “He’s basically a political operator working for a conservative political group. If we went for a warrant, the judge would laugh us out of the courthouse.”
Donald said, “Stingray.”
They both looked at him and he added, “Or a tower dump, if we know where he’s at in the evenings. When the PR lady talked to Lucas, she probably connected with Old John right away, or at least somebody high up in the ANM. They had to do some organization to make the approach to Lucas so quickly. They had to talk to Aline, and he had to get in touch with whoever photographed Gibson, the people looking for surveillance.”
