Storm Front

God. Now, we need to make sure that the landlord is okay, that he doesn’t somehow tip off Kaar that people were looking at him.”
    “I put the landlord in a cop’s car and he’s being transported back to the BCA right now. I’ve been told by an assistant attorney general that I can bust him on suspicion of sheltering a foreign terrorist and hold him incommunicado for a few days under the Patriot Act, but then he’d sue us, and every taxpayer in the State of Minnesota would have to send him money. What I’m hoping to do is to send him back home, with some coaching about how to handle Max the next time he sees him.”
    There was a rustle of voices in the background, and a name popped out: Morganthaler. Then there was more rustling, and finally Lincoln said, “A man named Joe Morganthaler will be at the BCA this afternoon. He will coach the landlord. All you need do is hold him until then.”
    “Good,” Virgil said.
    “I asked you to stay out of this, and now I’m ordering you: stay out of it. Stay out of it!”
    “You didn’t know that the Hatchet was the driver, did you? You would have trailed some chump to North Dakota or something while the real Hatchet was on his way back.”
    She clicked off. Virgil smiled at the phone, and put it back under the seat.
    —
    A T THE BCA, Virgil walked Swanson up the stairs and half-explained the situation to him. “We don’t want to arrest you, because you haven’t done anything wrong. On the other hand, we
can
arrest you, if we needed to, though you’d probably beat the charges. What we really want to do is put you back in your house, after you get some coaching on behavior.”
    “That’s good, I’ll do whatever you want,” Swanson said. “But my behavior—”
    “It’s not bad or good behavior, it’s how you react to Kaar the next time you see him, knowing that he might be cooperating with some really bad people. A guy is flying in just to talk to you, to give you a few moves.”
    “So what do I do now?”
    “Well, you just kind of sit around, I’ll get somebody to take you out to lunch, get you a tour of the crime lab upstairs . . .” Virgil outlined a few other entertainment possibilities as he walked Swanson to Davenport’s office. Davenport was banging on a computer when Virgil arrived and knocked on his office doorjamb.
    “Lucas, I’d like you to meet Larry Swanson.”
    —
    A FTER S WANSON was settled under the watchful eye of Davenport’s secretary, Virgil, Jenkins, Shrake, and Davenport gathered in Davenport’s office to decide what to do about the evening’s festivities.
    “Sure would be a lot easier if we could just pick up Jones before he got to the delivery site,” Davenport said.
    “It would be, but we don’t know what he’s driving, or where he’s hiding out, or how he plans to do this. I can guarantee it’ll be something tricky. I don’t think we have the time to figure all that out—but we will have the inside information on where it’s going to happen,” Virgil said.
    “How much notice will you get?”
    “As much as the people delivering the money, so we’ll all probably get there at once, wherever it is.”
    “But if they want to do it on a country road somewhere, in the dark, and they see six cars coming instead of two—”
    “Jones is a smart guy,” Virgil said. “He won’t want to be alone in the dark with Hezbollah.”
    “Take lots of guns,” Davenport said.
    “Gives me little goose bumps when you say things like that,” Jenkins said.
    —
    V IRGIL , J ENKINS , AND S HRAKE went back to Mankato in a caravan of three cars. At Mankato, Jenkins and Shrake dumped their cars in the parking lot of a Happy Chef Restaurant, consolidated in Virgil’s car, and they all drove out in the countryside to visit Ma Nobles.
    Virgil had explained how Bauer and Ma had pledged to help him, and how Bauer had apparently already sold him out. “All we want to do with Ma is make sure that Jones isn’t at her place. And he might be. I don’t know what’s going on with those two, but something is.”
    “Does she go to church?” Jenkins asked.
    “Not so you’d notice. Besides, Jones doesn’t have a church. I don’t know if he ever did. He’s been a professor forever.”
    “I bet I know where he is,” Jenkins said.
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. College professors always go somewhere in the summer. You know, they’ve got to do research in Paris, London, and Rome, and they write it off their taxes. So, he did just