The more she thought about it, the more she suspected he’d been lying to her about the president being in the videos. Because what was he going to do, tell her the truth? Help me out here, Lisa. I fucked a bunch of teenaged girls at a drug-fueled orgy and now it’s all going to be released as a movie of the week. He would have been afraid she would want those videos for her own leverage. And rightly so.
But who was pressuring Devereaux? He had been vague about that when he first brought Rispel into this. Schrader himself? How could he have, from jail? Through his lawyer, maybe, but who would the woman contact? Well, given that the underlying problem was an out-of-control assistant US Attorney, it stood to reason that Schrader’s lawyer would have gone to the attorney general himself. But why would Hobbs have cared enough to bring in Devereaux, unless Hobbs was implicated in the videos, too?
It didn’t matter. Either way, she needed to secure the videos quickly. Every leaked report about Russian fake news would bleed off the eventual impact. Enough time, and Devereaux and Hobbs and anyone else who appeared in the videos might even be able to ride out a release. They’d cry “fake news” in unison and accuse anyone in the media who wanted to publish the material or even to ask questions about it of doing the Kremlin’s kompromat work. It wouldn’t be easy—the public, like the press, was far more interested in sex scandals than in routine corruption—but if Devereaux and the rest kept strict message discipline, eventually they’d exhaust the media, and it would move on to the next glittering object. In the end, it always did.
She went back to news from Seattle. And this time, there it was. Explosions and a shooting in a house on Lake Tapps. She felt a cold weight settle inside her chest.
She found a television station. Reporters were standing outside the house, which was surrounded by police tape. A stunned-looking uniformed cop the chyron identified as being with the Bonney Lake Police Department was briefing the press. Five bodies inside, all shot to death. A reporter asked if this had anything to do with the shootings the day before in Freeway Park and the Four Seasons, or with Andrew Schrader’s escape from prison. The cop stammered that she didn’t know. Rispel almost sympathized. Before this morning, probably the cop’s toughest case had been a couple of teenagers breaking into an empty off-season lakefront vacation home.
She watched for another minute. A television crew had managed to get behind the house and was showing footage of one of the walls. There was a large hole blown in a second-story wall. Windows broken on the first floor. Evidence of a coordinated, professional entry by a trained team.
She stared at the screen for another moment, then exited the site. She tried to think.
Somehow, someone had gotten intel on where they had been holding Schrader.
Devereaux?
Maybe. But her gut told her otherwise. Her gut told her Kanezaki.
It made sense. He had sabotaged the initial operation. He’d lied to her afterward. And he was missing now, incommunicado. Rispel had people watching his house, and he hadn’t gone home. His cellphone was off. He was a prick, but obviously he wasn’t stupid.
And it wasn’t just him. His little spy, Maya, was also in the wind. Rispel had sent a contractor to her house, and the idiot had shot the wrong person—another officer, as it turned out. Maya had given a statement to local police and then disappeared, probably with Kanezaki. Rispel sensed it wouldn’t be long before Devereaux found a way to incorporate the shooting of a young intelligence officer into the tale of Russian disinformation he was spinning.
All right. Assume they have Schrader now. What’s their next move?
Kanezaki was after the videos, of course. How could he not be? Anyone who controlled that information would have almost undreamt-of power.
She had to assume they’d learn from Schrader everything Sloat had been able to extract. So it stood to reason that their next move would be what hers was going to be. A team had come for Schrader that very morning. They were going to bring him to his Bainbridge Island house, drug him, and have him reset the system. Then more interrogations until they had enough information to take control of the videos themselves.