“That’s what Mandy was working on?” That didn’t sound right, he thought. He’d been sure Mandy had been looking at property protection, not smuggled bustard eggs.
“Possibly.” Ginger’s cool expression remained, but something like a spasm of discomfort crossed her features.
“Uhm, Ginger—”
“Leave it,” she said, her voice taking on an almost ugly timbre. “Was this the only reason you wanted me to bother Tamara Charter?”
“No,” Carl lied, letting his voice rise in good-humored denial. “No. That was just sort of a curiosity thing. The real thing has to do with a lek of sage grouse near an airfield. It’s a real lek—the birds mate and lay there—and the covey is doing fairly well. There are fences blocking them off from the strip, and a good stretch of the legs between the landing strip and the lek, but I wanted to double-check. Moving the airstrip would be a PITA for the insurance company, and offending the DOI would also not be a picnic.”
Carl’s heart was pumping in his chest as though he’d had a near miss, and he was thinking that he seriously had to thank Michael for the spot-on excuse for talking to Tamara Charter, who was apparently Ginger’s contact at the DOI.
Ginger’s expression had smoothed out as he’d spoken, and now she gave a charming smile, as though trying to be the same friend he’d always known. He did his best to pretend he hadn’t seen some real fear there.
Something about Mandy Jessup’s disappearance and smuggled bustard eggs had touched a real sore spot for Ginger Carson, and Carl made another note to have Stirling hack those files.
But first he had to talk to Tamara Charter.
“Of course I can set you up with her,” Ginger said now, practically gushing. “Would this afternoon do? I know she plays squash at that gym outside of Georgetown. Isn’t that by your apartment?”
Carl nodded. He’d given his tenants—three interns at Serpentus who split the outrageous rent among themselves, on the contingent that Carl got his bed back on the rare occasions he came to town—notice that he’d be returning that night after his brief dodge in to drop off his carry-on and would be freeing up some closet space before he left. A quick nip in to change into his workout clothes would hardly be a problem; most of them worked late hours on the best of nights anyway.
“What time?” he asked pleasantly. “I have some things to do at the office after lunch, but after that, I’m free.”
“I’ll text you,” Ginger said happily, and then their food arrived and the rest of the lunch passed in pleasant conversation, almost as if those frightening moments when Ginger had become a dangerous, ugly person had never existed.
Carl laughed and chatted and told a highly edited version of his first “flying lesson” that was as much fiction as anything else, and then gave her a brief kiss on the cheek before they left.
But very quietly, in the back of his mind, he moved Ginger from the “friends to trust” column to the “business contacts to use” column he kept running in his head.
He knew what it was like to trust someone with his life now, and he wasn’t going to make that mistake with Ginger, no matter how much water they had under the bridge.
HE HADN’T been planning to return to the office—once had been bad enough. But he knew that as good as Stirling was with computers, hacking into one the size and complexity of Serpentus’s involved more than having a genius kid hunker over his laptop for a few minutes and announce “Done!” Most of the magic Stirling and Josh accomplished had hours of forethought and preparation put in beforehand.
In this case, they had maybe an hour before Foster Aldrich got back from his usually extended lunch.
“Stirling?” he said over Bluetooth as he strode toward the Serpentus building from the restaurant. “You busy?”
“It can wait,” Stirling replied, his tones clipped per usual. Carl and Stirling had worked together quite a bit while figuring out who was trying to break into Lucius’s women’s shelter. They both understood that pleasantries and soft voices weren’t necessary to do a job well.
“I need you to break into my company’s website for information on Mandy Jessup. She disappeared around five years ago, about the time Matteo di Rossi was crashing into a cliff. She was a fledgling investigator then, had worked her way up from the reception desk, and I was out of the country. I didn’t know the details of her disappearance, so I couldn’t put it together, but….” He was striding down the street, looking determined and focused like most of the people in DC, but he was suddenly loath to go into the particulars of his lunch with Ginger.
It had been shocking and a little sad to realize that someone he’d considered a friend for so long could turn on him that suddenly.
“Complicated,” Stirling said, breaking into his thoughts. “Elaborate later. Your company’s damned near airtight. Can you get me in?”
“I was going to email you from someone’s computer,” Carl said, taking a right into an alleyway that would get him into Serpentus from the delivery entrance at the back of the building. “And I think I know where to find his passcodes. Will that do?”
Stirling let out a happy little hum. “You understand,” he said, because Carl got that he was good but wasn’t a magician. “Private address.”
Meaning the email Stirling only answered on his triple-encrypted black-box computer, the one he surfed the dark web on, routed through thirty gajillion different servers with a plethora of spoofed ISP addresses.
“Roger. Gimme a few.”
Carl saw that the service dock was open as the company took a delivery of office supplies and toilet paper, and he slid in silently, eyes scanning the large open area for the employee’s entrance.
And there it was. Down a dark, hot hallway, on the left past restrooms he never wanted to visit, the hallway opened up into two rooms separated by a cinderblock barrier—women’s on the right, men’s on the left.
Inside were lockers and uniforms for custodians, plumbers, even the computer engineers who dealt with the actual towers of the server in the basement. Everybody who worked a blue-collar job in the white-collar building was stationed in this suite of offices with concrete floors and double-paned, wire-lined glass windows.
Carl hit the men’s locker room without breaking stride, walking as though he had a mission to speak to one of the maintenance workers about a blocked toilet. Nobody looked twice at him, not even as he blew past the head maintenance worker’s office and marched straight to the laundry where the clean jumpsuits were pressed and stacked in four cloth bins.
Carl snagged one of two gray suits from the XXL bin and stripped off his suit jacket and slacks, silently saying goodbye to his brown off-the-rack suit. It was old, he thought, and American cut, and after seeing Felix and Lucius dressed so nattily, he’d refused to buy another suit like it.
Besides, if Michael was going to look at him with those dark eyes because he was the “man in the suit,” Carl wanted to be the man in the well-cut suit so he at least had that going for him.
Carl cleared out his wallet and phone and shoved them into the side pockets of the jumpsuit before he stuffed the old suit into the hamper. Then he hopped into the onesie, glad it was oversized so it covered his shiny leather shoes, and grabbed a company logoed baseball hat from the rack that ran above the lockers. This one looked new and clean and didn’t have anyone’s initials on the inside, and he used it to cover his noticeable blond hair.