thumb drive, and Lucas clicked the first page. The photos came in ranks of eight, five ranks per page. He could scan a page and reject it with barely a blink. Donald said, after a moment, “If you find something, you have my number. Call when you’re finished.”
* * *
—
LUCAS FOUND HIS MAN, David Thomas Aline, on the twelfth page. He scrambled to the door, which had barely closed, and caught Donald before he turned a corner in the hall: “Hey! I got him.”
“You’re joking,” Donald called back.
“No. I got him.”
Donald came back, took down Aline’s name and an index number, and said, “I can’t believe it worked.”
“Neither can I. I spent a good part of my life looking at mug shots and hardly ever found anyone. Let’s look the guy up.” Lucas paused, and then said, “Donald. About your suit . . .”
* * *
—
DAVID THOMAS ALINE WAS EX-ARMY, a former captain who’d served for six years after graduation from West Point. He’d been a middle-distance runner at West Point and had spent four of his six years in the Army as a logistics officer at an air base in Kuwait. When he left the Army, he’d joined Bechtel Corp. as a logistics manager.
“Odd job for somebody who doesn’t like the government,” Donald said. “Bechtel’s a major government contractor.”
They were sitting in Chase’s office, paging through a computer printout of everything the FBI had on Aline.
Lucas said “Mmm,” because he hadn’t thought about it.
Chase showed up as they were reviewing Aline’s file. She was slightly disheveled—wrinkles in her usually perfect suit, a hank of hair out of place. “That little . . . person . . . really screwed us. What are you doing here?”
“Lucas found the ANM guy. We have a file on him,” Donald said.
“You’re joking.”
“That’s what Donald said, but I wasn’t.” Lucas took her through the sequence of events and filled her in on Aline. “What we need to do now is find out who he’s been talking to . . . who he’s been getting phone calls from.”
“That could be tough if he’s got a burner phone,” Chase said. “Which he probably does, if he’s security-conscious.”
“If there’s any way you could call him a national security threat, we could black-bag him,” Lucas suggested.
“Nope, that won’t work,” Chase said, shaking her head. “He’s basically a political operator working for a conservative political group. If we went for a warrant, the judge would laugh us out of the courthouse.”
Donald said, “Stingray.”
They both looked at him and he added, “Or a tower dump, if we know where he’s at in the evenings. When the PR lady talked to Lucas, she probably connected with Old John right away, or at least somebody high up in the ANM. They had to do some organization to make the approach to Lucas so quickly. They had to talk to Aline, and he had to get in touch with whoever photographed Gibson, the people looking for surveillance.”
Chase said to Lucas, “If he’s at home in the evenings, we can dump the nearest cell phone tower. There’ll be thousands of calls, but most of them will go to homeowners and we can get the associated addresses, which will leave a certain number of burners, but not a huge number. We’d look for a cluster of calls from a burner. It’s all computer-sorting . . .”
“You don’t need a warrant?”
“No. We can issue a subpoena on our own to the cell companies, get a dump,” Chase said.
“Or we could track him with a Stingray unit,” Donald said. “The Stingray’ll force all the nearby calls through the unit, so we can see who he’s calling. We can’t actually intercept the call, though.”
“Let me talk to some people,” Chase said. “We’ll explore the possibilities.”
“What happened with Audrey Coil?” Lucas asked.
“What you saw,” Chase said. “Her mother’s a little angry with her, but not too, because she’ll undoubtedly get a few invitations herself, from Fox or CNN or MSNBC, to talk about this. Audrey was insufferably cute, by the way. Insufferably sincere.”
“She won’t be cute if somebody shoots her in the face,” Lucas said.
They all thought about that, then Chase asked, “What’s next up? You got anything else going?”
“Not a thing,” Lucas said. “I’ve got nothing to work with. None of the alt-right people have given me anything useful. I could go interview the other kids who were photographed, and their parents, but you guys have already done that and I’ve read the transcripts. If nothing comes out