“You were right. I got into Audrey’s computer and that 1919 site is in there, the pieces of it. Audrey put the site together.”
“Where are you?”
“At home,” Winston said. “I put all the pieces I found on a thumb drive for you. I have it here.”
“Don’t talk to anyone. I mean,anyone. We’re coming,” Lucas said. “I’m way up north, it’ll take an hour.”
“I’ll go hit some tennis balls with my mom. I did tell her about it and she’s royally pissed.”
“Try to calm her down, Blake. I’m on my way.”
—
LUCAS CLICKED OFF AND CHASE, eyes wide with horror, said, “No, no, no, no-no-no.”
Lucas: “Oh, yeah. I had a funky feeling right from the first meeting with Audrey and her mother. I recruited Blake to spy on her.”
“That’s awful.”
“What’s awful is that she did it,” Lucas said. “Anyway, I don’t think you want to have heard what you just heard.”
“Lucas...”
“This can’t get out,” Lucas said. “The Senate will go batshit, or at least half of it will. If something happens and you have to claim later that you didn’t know about this, I’ll back you up. I’ll lie. I’ll say nobody knew but me. ’Cause this is about to get desperately political. If it gets out, then everybody who knew about it, about a cover-up, which is what we’re talking about, is going to carry a little stink.”
“What about you?”
“I’ve got forty million dollars in my investment accounts,” Lucas said. “If it turns into a huge deal, I could maybe lose my job, but so what? I’ll take the chance, and if I lose, I’ve got a pillow to fall on. What do you have?”
She bit her lower lip and then said, “Probably be a county prosecutor, but it’d be a small county in a cold place.”
“Exactly. So, youknow, but you don’t know. You might be able to direct some traffic that you wouldn’t if you didn’t know. Take the emphasis off uncovering 1919 and put it on finding any lone wolves who are rattling around. But that’s only because you’re really, really smart—not because youknowwho put the site up.”
Chase stepped back: “You’re right. About all of it. Iknow, but I don’t know.”
She walked away, glancing back only once.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
Lucas pried Bob and Rae away from the SWATs, said, “I need the truck, but you guys can’t come. What you need to do is, get a ride from Jane. She’ll give you a warrant to search Cop’s car down at the UPS center. Call me when you get it done.”
Rae: “We can do that, but why?”
“Because this is about to get political and you don’t want to know about it. You want to be able to look a Senate investigating committee in the eye and say, ‘Davenport never told me about it.’”
Bob and Rae looked at each other, and Rae shrugged: “You usually know what you’re talking about,” she said. “But it sounds bad.”
“It is bad.”
Lucas called Chase, who was standing fifty feet away, and fixed a ride for Bob, Rae, and their guns, first to the UPS center, then back to the Watergate. Then he headed south, the late-afternoon traffic beginning to congeal, but most of it wascoming toward him, rather than with him. On the way, he called Senator Elmer Henderson on his private line.
Henderson picked up on the fifth ring and said, “I’m in a meeting—on a scale of one to ten...”
“Ten.”
“Give me a second to get out in the hall,” Henderson said. There were some shuffling sounds and a door closed, then Henderson said, “I assume you cracked it. Did you kill anyone?”
