Coil said to Lucas, “Ah, God. She’s lying. I’ve been able to tell when she’s lying, ever since she was a small child. She’s lying now.”
“I am not,” Audrey wailed. “I don’t know where—”
“You don’t protect your laptop from outside intrusion,” Lucas said. “You leave it plugged in, turned on and running. Overnight sometimes. The photos you took with your RX100 camera are still on your hard drive.”
Audrey stared at him for a minute, with something that looked like pure, unadulterated hate, sniffed, then started to cry: “All this wasn’t supposed to happen. I thought it might get me on TV, but I never thought . . .”
“Ah, God,” Coil said again. To Lucas: “All right. We know she did it. What’s next?”
“Like Senator Henderson said . . . she’s got to go away.” Lucas turned to Audrey, who was sobbing, but trying to suppress it by pressing her knuckles to her teeth. “Audrey . . . who else have you told about this? Is there anyone else we have to shut up?”
“No . . .”
“How about Blake Winston?” Lucas asked, throwing a head fake. “He must’ve known.”
“No, I didn’t tell anyone . . .”
“How did you do this?” Roberta Coil asked. “I know why, but how?”
Audrey explained that she’d gotten the idea from a story on Ars Technica, a website that covered technology and computers, about how websites were used to create whole fictitious stories for political and monetary reasons. The techniques, she said, were simple enough.
“How did you avoid the cameras around that Starbucks, where you set up the website?” Lucas asked.
“Easy. I never went there,” she said. “I walked in from the back and uploaded my stuff from the alley.” Then she asked, “Are you saying there’s somebody in my laptop?”
“Not anymore. When I found out about it, I shut it down,” Lucas lied. “I also shut down the people who were doing it. The computer penetration—and they were going after a lot of people besides you—is illegal. If this blows up, they’re going to prison. I made that very clear to them.”
“Jeez, are they in my computer?” Roberta Coil asked.
Lucas shook his head. “They say not. But what do I know? I’d have it checked, if I were you.”
* * *
—
ROBERTA COIL SNAPPED a couple of more questions at her daughter, her voice climbing in volume, until she was just shy of shouting: “I could lose my Senate seat. I wasn’t planning to stop at the Senate, and now you’ve put everything at risk . . .”
Lucas said, “Senator Coil . . . I’m going to leave you two alone. You figure out the rest of this. Maybe talk to Senator Henderson some more. Let’s all hope that there aren’t any more crazies out there who took the website seriously.”
* * *
—
BACK AT THE WATERGATE, Lucas called Weather, swore her to secrecy, and told her what had happened. She was properly appalled. They spent ten minutes speculating on possibilities, then a few more talking about the kids, and Weather told him about an intricate surgery she’d be doing in the morning.
When they’d rung off, Lucas mulled over the situation, thinking about how much trouble he might be in if the whole thing came out, realized there wasn’t much he could do about it, and turned on the TV. He found an old movie, The Little Drummer Girl, and was halfway through it when Henderson called.
“Senator Coil told me about your little séance. She said that her husband, George, has been having a series of heart problems and that Audrey has asked that she be allowed to go home for a semester to be with her father. Coil has already spoken with the school head, and he’s agreed to the semester in Tifton, without loss of place toward graduation. Audrey’ll be down there for several months, at least.”
“Are the heart problems real?” Lucas asked.
“Lucas, I mean, for Christ’s sakes . . .”
“Okay.”
Audrey would be on a plane to Atlanta in the morning, Henderson said, and any press