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“They could tell us to fuck off,” Baxter said.
Letty: “We have those chips. Able knows somebody who’ll buy them. We could pay them. Pay them quite a bit, and they’d be doing a good thing that fits with their politics and gets back for Loren Barron and Wolfe and Delph.”
Cartwright had crossed her arms, usually a sign of resistance, and was wandering around the room, stopping to look out the windows. They had a clear view of jets taking off and landing at LAX, and they’d all spent time watching.
Letty and Baxter waited for her to say something, and she turned and said, “Another possibility: we’re working for a Ukrainian lobby group in DC. We tell them that we got picked up by the feds after the shooting on the dock. They know it was self-defense, but they’ve got a rope around our necks if they need to yank on it. On the other hand, the feds have agreed to look the other way on the shooting if Ordinary People help us pull down the Russian trains.”
Letty: “Andwe pay them. The hackers. We offer to do both things.”
Cartwright: “You know what? It’s your call, Letty. I’m the consultant, not the boss of us.”
Cartwright and Baxter stared at her, waiting, and finally Letty said, “I’ll call Sovern. See if he can get here. We’ll lay it out for him,like you said, Barb. We got picked up by the cops after the shooting on the dock. We tell them that we don’t know what government agency is involved, but it’s got a lot of clout. Maybe the Defense Department, maybe the CIA or DHS. Anyway, that agency got us cut loose. The FBI would prefer to put all of us in jail, including him and all the other train hackers, and let the Ukrainians deal with their own problems.”
“That’s a plan,” Cartwright said. “Don’t know if it’ll work.”
“Have to refine it a little... but it’ll still sound like bullshit,” Baxter said.
Sovern had donewhat Letty had half-suspected he might do: he’d left the marina that he was in, and had immediately motored to another, owned by a friend, where he’d gone bow-first into a slip so the name of the boat couldn’t be read from the dock. He’d also taken down the wind turbine on the stern, which was distinctive. Of course, the boat itself was distinctive, but only to the knowledgeable; a survey of docks by street cops shouldn’t pinpoint it.
Then he settled in to wait for news, monitoring incoming emails from other members of Ordinary People, but not replying to any of them. The other members had all been linked to reports of the death of Loren Barron and Brianna Wolfe, as well as the suspected death of Daniel Delph. They were frightened. There was some talk of fighting back, but against what? And who?
He was cleaning the vanes on the wind turbine, in preparation for storing it out of sight, when Letty called.
“We need to meet with you,” she said. “Seriously. About something we haven’t talked about. Are you on the water? Can we pick you up somewhere?”
Sovern considered the question, then said, “You can’t pick me up, but I could come to you.”
To get to the SkyPort, he said, would take two hours. “I have an Uber driver I can call and pay in cash, so there’s no credit card record. How bad is it?”
“Talk about it when you get here,” Letty said. “We’ve got the FBI flying around and they’re pissed off. With this kind of stuff, I hate to talk on cell phones.”
“That’s wise. Two hours,” Sovern said.
Baxter went to his laptop.Letty and Cartwright walked around the hotel. The place was built for travelers, not vacationers; some would have their own cars, but most would be laying over between flights at LAX. Many of them were airplane crew. The place smelled of swift passages and fast food. The walls were covered with beige vinyl wallpaper, the kind easily cleaned; the carpet was deep red, also an easily cleaned synthetic.
Letty and Cartwright looked at the stairways, calculated the time it took for an elevator to arrive, and then, outside, walked the surrounding blocks, checking for cover, concealment, escape and approach routes. The hotel itself was an undistinguished chunk of concrete and glass, but it was big, and by its very bigness provided some cover. Cars were parked in a three-floor garage at the base of the hotel.
Letty hadn’t done that kind of reconnaissance before, not with Cartwright’s thoroughness.
On the street, Cartwright said, “Always make sure you check up high, even higher than you think is necessary. Everybody has hands-free cell phones, and a spotter up high can kill you if he’stalking to somebody on the ground. Nowadays, you’re not fighting in two dimensions; in the cities, you’re fighting in three.”
World War I pilots, in open planes, she said, wore silk scarves as a kind of anti-chafing lubrication because they were trained to constantly turn their heads, looking for enemy aircraft in all directions, back, forward, above, and below. “In a serious threat situation, you sorta have to do that, without being too obvious about it.”
“Got it,” Letty said. She later realized that she kept forgetting to do it; the difference between understanding the theory and putting it into practice.
Sovern showed upat the hotel three hours after the phone call, an hour later than he’d predicted, because his Uber contact had been busy. Letty, Cartwright, and Baxter were all impatient for the talk and the wait had them snapping at each other. Sovern called Letty from the lobby, asking for the room number, and when he stepped off the elevator, Letty waved him down the hall.
He was dressed in a green tee-shirt under a nylon rain jacket, with neat olive-drab nylon cargo pants and boat shoes with non-marking white soles. Inside the suite, he looked around, then said, “You don’t look like the types who’d pay for suites.”
“We’re not,” Letty said. “A government’s paying.”
“You’re feds?”
Letty shook her head and began unloading the story they’d been working on. “Barbara and I work for a security company in Washington. The company does work for a lobbying firm. And the lobbying firm has Ukraine as one of its clients... They’ve been in the news a little, you could look them up.”
“Uh-oh,” Sovern said.
“Yeah. Ukraine is paying,” Letty said hastily. “We rounded up Paul here; he works as a freelance programmer in the DC area, and we were sent out to find you guys. Ordinary People. Ukraine would like you to mess with the Russian trains again, if you can.”
