The Hanged Man's Song

danger.”
    “I do think that. Three people are dead, murdered. Two of those people were apparently trying to jump Carp without any . . . regular authority. They were intelligence people, for Christ’s sakes. Somebody has freaked out and we don’t know who.”
    “I can make some arrangements.”
    “If you want, I could call with a threat. Make it sound Middle Eastern.”
    “No, no, no. Let me handle it,” he said. “Now, your idea.”
    >>> “WE —our group—have two limited objectives,” I said. “We want to kill Bobby’s computer and we want Carp punished for murdering Bobby. That’s all. If Bobby’s laptop is destroyed, that solves our problem and solves part of yours. That’s one less wildcard running around out there. Of course, you still have to deal with your working group.”
    “What about the stuff you have? That’s still a problem.”
    “If you talk some more with Rosalind Welsh, she’ll tell you that we are discreet as long as we’re not fucked with. I don’t want the FBI coming after me—they might find me. Once we’ve got Carp in hand, and the laptop, you’ll never hear from me again. Besides, we don’t have much. Carp, on the other hand, has about fifty huge files. He has used a small fraction of only one, and that’s the one I’ve got.”
    “Fifty?”
    “That’s right. He hasn’t used one percent of what he’s got.”
    “Oh my God.”
    >>> “WE THINK we can get to Carp, without him knowing it,” I said. “Sort of, mmm, through a third person. We could tell him that you want to make a deal. That you’ll cover for him in exchange for neutralizing the Bobby laptop. We know he’s broke and desperate and probably homeless, and we think he’s crazy—so he might go for it. We think you might be able to set up a meeting.”
    “And then what?”
    “You’re the politician, Senator. Negotiate with him. Try to bring him in. I wouldn’t try to grab him, though. He’s crazy, but he’s smart. If he agrees to a meeting, he’ll set up some way to get out. And there’s too much of a chance that he’ll have set up a time bomb on the laptop.”
    “What?”
    “You know, an information bomb. You grab him, he doesnothing but keep his mouth shut, and twelve hours later, the computer dumps everything to CNN. That’s simple enough to do. All you need is a motel room with a telephone, and a few lines of computer code.”
    “Goddamnit.”
    “You’ve got to do something, ” I said. “Right now, he’s completely out of control. If you go after him with the FBI, the laptop is going to become public property, and you’re toast. If you can talk to him, face-to-face, you should be able to deal with him. Somehow.”
    “I’ve got to think about this. How would you convince him to get in touch with me?”
    “We’re not exactly sure we can. I don’t want to explain it to you, because it would give something away. But we think we can get him to call . . . to get in touch.”
    “Okay. You do that, and I’ll think about it.”
    >>> WE DID nothing overnight, except make a stop at a Home Depot to pick up a couple of bronze plumb bobs; and talk about it.
    If we called at night, we thought, Carp might do something like set up a middle-of-the-night meeting somewhere, and that would make him much harder to track. Better to do it in daylight.
    As we lay awake in bed, LuEllen said, “Every move you make, you act like you think Krause is gonna pull something smart. That he’s gonna double-cross us.”
    “I’d bet on it,” I said. “That’s why we don’t get involved with any exchange. Let them work it out. If we can get the laptop, that’s all we want.”
    “There are a lot of assumptions buried in that—that Carptakes the Corolla, that he takes the laptop and leaves it in the Corolla, that he tries to figure out something clever.”
    “It’s more than just hope,” I said. “He has to believe that nobody’s figured out the Corolla—nobody official, anyway—or they would have grabbed him already. He can’t leave the laptop with anybody, because if he is busted, and it makes television, then his friend, whoever he’s staying with, would have no choice but to turn it in. If he didn’t, then he’d go down with Carp. So Carp can’t trust anybody, but he can sort of trust the car.”
    >>> WE GOT up the next morning at seven o’clock, had a quick breakfast, drove out to our wi-fi building, and went online to Lemon.
We have been monitoring Sen. Krause. He is