Johnson took in the cane and asked, “Letty . . . Oh, God, you didn’t hurt yourself?”

  “I’m a temporary gimp for undercover purposes,” Letty said, and the thin man smiled. Johnson nodded and waved a finger at the two men. “Richard Taylor in the suit, and Rod Baxter, who you’ll be working with.”

  From her corner, Greet said, “If we decide to go ahead with it.”

  Johnson said, “That’s already been decided, Ms. Greet. We have no time to argue about it. No time.”

  “Letty’s never had undercover training,” Greet said. “Yet you expect her to spend several days and maybe weeks in close contact with . . .”

  “Yes, we do,” Johnson snapped. “She has a number of desirable characteristics that are nearly impossible to find in a government employee. For one thing, she looks far too young to be a threat to Ordinary People. And we know she’s smart and actually did spend some time undercover at Pershing.”

  “Yeah, about fifteen minutes,” Greet said.

  Baxter spoke up. “I’d hoped I’d have a little more cover than a girl with a limp. Like somebody said, Ordinary People could be dangerous.”

  From the back of the room, Billy Greet muttered, “Makes my face hurt.”

  Baxter turned his head to look back at Greet. “I’m not being sexist, if that’s what you think. She’s pretty, but not particularly . . .” He paused, looked at Letty, and continued, “prepossessing. If somebody gave us serious trouble . . .”

  Letty slipped her hand in her pocket and brought out her Sig, a chunk of black metal that hit the tabletop with a clunk. “Prepossess this,” she said.

  “Ah, man,” Baxter said. “I don’t like—”

  “For your protection,” Greet said. “The woman can shoot the balls off a gnat, you fuckin’ turnip.”

  Baxter got pissed: “These people we’re going against are nuts! You got that! Capiche? They’re wacko!”

  Greet: “That’s why you need Letty.”

  * * *

  After a period of awkward silence, Greet asked, “What if somebody runs a facial recognition app against her, and Letty Davenport, heroine of the Pershing Bridge, turns up?”

  “They won’t find Letty Davenport, heroine of the Pershing Bridge, no matter how deep they go,” Taylor, the older man, said. “They’ll find a young woman named Charlotte Snow, nicknamed Charlie.”

  Johnson laid it out:

  Letty, as Charlie Snow, had dropped out of the University of Florida after two years, where she and Baxter had met.

  The two of them would fly to Orlando that night, then drive to Gainesville in his pickup, which would be delivered to the Orlando airport that afternoon. Baxter would spend a morning showing Letty around the campus, and his old haunts, before they left for Los Angeles. Ordinary People were believed to have gone to college in the LA basin—UCLA, USC, and Caltech, so they should not be intimately familiar with Gainesville, if any had been there at all.

  Letty: “If any of them were at Stanford . . . I was there for six years.”

  “We don’t see that,” Johnson said.

  “Better not,” Greet said. “What kind of cover have you built for her?”

  Taylor spoke up. “Ordinary People are undoubtedly adept at all kinds of computer searches, of course. But not as good as we are. We have made changes in several Florida databases to include ID photos for Ms. Davenport, a couple more photos of her participating in the University of Florida Ayn Rand Club—”

  “Give me a break,” Letty said.

  Taylor chuckled and said, “Small tolerance for charlatans, eh? Good for you. In any case, we inserted a number of documents in a variety of databases, including grades for freshman and sophomore classes—you did quite well, Letty, though you faltered in Introduction to Computer Science. We also have a brief story about your arrest for vandalism in the student newspaper, the Alligator. It seems that you got caught spray-painting the personal parts of Albert and Alberta, bronze alligator mascots to make them more . . . interesting. The story says you’d probably done it more than once.”

  Letty: “Okay. My name’s Charlie . . .”

  “Charlotte Snow,” Taylor said. “Charlie. By the way . . . do you play a musical instrument of any kind? I couldn’t find it in your résumé.”

  “I took six years of drum lessons,” Letty said. “Sub Focus, 10 Years, bands like that. I played in a jam band in college. I can hold my own. Both play it and talk it.”

  “Excellent,” Taylor said. “We were looking for another possible article for the Alligator database. We can slip in a picture of you and your drums.”

  “I don’t have a picture like that,” Letty said.

  “Don’t worry about it, we’ll make one,” Johnson said. “We’ll locate a used electronic drum set, put it in Rod’s truck.”

  “Great stuff,” Letty said. “Now, how are we going to find Ordinary People?”

  Johnson sighed: “That, we don’t know. We believe they hang around Caltech and UCLA. We believe they are politically involved, although they may have curtailed that activity when they started looking at the Russian trains and then the natural gas systems. We know the OP are, or were, basically anti-Trump lefties, so you’ll have to do some reading. We’ll give you a flash drive with a collection of political articles for you to digest; they’ll make you a believable advocate of the left, should anyone question your politics.”

  “Rod got involved in the research after he volunteered for this project,” Taylor said. “He may have more to say about finding the OP.”

  Everybody turned to Baxter, who heaved himself more upright in his chair.

  “When I was poking around after the Ordinary People attack on the Russian rail system, I got a guy at the agency to look at phone and email records from the time Pastek was commissioning the train hack. We found a burner phone that we believe belongs to Vernon Pastek, although we think it’s now at the bottom of a Sunnyvale sewer. There were calls from the phone that link with calls received by a Caltech professor named Eugene Harp. He’s a computer science professor there and also a political lefty.”

  “You think he’s a member of the group?” Letty asked.

  “Don’t know,” Baxter said. “He’s older, mid-forties, so I kinda don’t think so. But, he’s very likely Pastek’s initial connection to Ordinary People. He got divorced two years ago, no children. One of our researchers took a look at the divorce settlement. He and his wife were married in California for eleven years, so under California laws, they split everything fifty-fifty. He bought out her share of the house, paid her one-point-three million for her half, got a mortgage from Wells Fargo to cover it. He might need money. If Ordinary People pull off an attack on, say, the Minneapolis natural gas system, there’ll be a very large payday.”

  “What does he teach?” Letty asked.

  “Specializes in machine-control software,” Baxter said.

  “So . . . you really got him. He’s got to be the connection,” Letty said.

  “I’d be willing to bet on it,” Johnson said.

  “Willing to bet on it. So now we’re rolling the dice,” Greet said from the back of the room.

  * * *

  When Johnson pulled Greet out of the room for a private come-to-Jesus chat, Baxter grumbled to Taylor, “Volunteered for the job, my fat white ass. If I hadn’t, I’d be working in the back of the NSA furnace room for the next thirty years.”

  Taylor smiled at him and said, “Yes. I believe that is correct. On the other hand, since you did volunteer, promotion is a distinct possibility. We never do this kind of thing. You’re sort of the canary in the coal mine.”

  Baxter to Letty: “These guys could kill us.”

  “You, maybe,” Letty said. “Not me.”

  Baxter: “I’m putting in for a lot of overtime.”

  Letty: “You go, girl.”

  Baxter: “Fuck you.”

  “No chance of that.”

  Taylor smiled again in his dry, pencil-thin, rimless-glasses way.

  * * *

  The briefing continued when Johnson and Greet came back to the room. Most of it involved possible places they might look for politically involved hackers: bars and diners and hipster hangouts in Pasadena, where Caltech was located. They were given thumb drives containing lists of computer academics who might know members of Ordinary People, even if they didn’t know what the OPs were up to.

  Letty took notes, Greet mostly kept her mouth shut.

  Johnson said, “When you find them, we need names and emails and physical locations, phone numbers if you can get them, the kinds of equipment being used, where they hook into the Net. We need to isolate the leadership, if there is a leadership. From what we’ve been able to gather, the group’s organization may be communal rather than hierarchical. There may be no single leader . . .”

  The NSA also had what Johnson called a “valuable resource” should it be necessary to follow someone in the LA area and a few other cities. Johnson explained that the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department had an Automatic License Plate Reading (ALPR) system and could track license plates through the city, in real time, from cameras on patrol cars, traffic signals, and light poles throughout the LA basin.

  “The original idea was to pick up on stolen vehicles and to track fleeing vehicles. That was years ago and things have come a long way since,” Johnson said. “We, mmm, mmm, have access to the system.”

  “How long does it take to get hooked up to it, if we need it?” Letty asked.

  “It’s real time,” Johnson said. “We’ll give you a number to call and an identification code and you can track anyone you want, any time you want, night or day.”

  Halfway through the briefing, a busy-looking man showed up, carrying a battered leather briefcase stuffed with manuals. He had too-long hair for the government and glasses with steel frames.

  When Johnson called on him, he said, “Okay . . . Rod. I’ve got some stuff for you. The software used by most gas companies. Most of it is standard PLC stuff, from Schneider and OMRON and LySergicAD Labs, if you know those guys. We’ve got some malware code that goes after Codesys that underlies the software . . . We dug this out of an APT actor, and tell you what, it’s now a level above Stuxnet or Industroyer . . .”

  Baxter understood it all, but Letty didn’t. One minute into the tech talk, she was lost. As Baxter and the new man went back and forth, Johnson waved Letty toward the door.

  * * *

  Greet joined them in the hallway and Johnson said, “As you can see, Rod’s a little reluctant, Letty, so you’ll have to push him. We need him out there. He’ll understand what Ordinary People are up to, if we can get him in place. I can’t emphasize enough how fast you’ve got to make your connections.”

  “Nobody’s said anything about backup,” Greet said.

  “We’re talking with the Los Angeles office of the FBI. They’ve been read into the problem and we have a contact for Letty,” Johnson said. “If she gets in trouble, she can call up anything from a single undercover agent to a SWAT team with automatic weapons.”

  She put her briefcase on an upraised knee, fished around, and produced a foot-square Ziploc bag that appeared to be full of trash and a cell phone.

  “A cheap-looking burner phone, which wasn’t cheap, believe me. It has a secret cache with phone numbers and IDs and other information you might need. Instructions are in the bag. There are two credit cards for you, a Visa from a Wells Fargo Bank in Gainesville, and a Target, also from Gainesville, as well as a perfectly good Florida driver’s license and some other wallet trash. All well-used. And some grade reports from the university . . . photos of your ‘mother.’ You were a single-parent family. You’re Charlotte Snow. Charlie.”

  “She needs to take her federal carry permit and senate ID,” Greet said. “If she’s carrying a gun and gets tangled up with a California cop . . .”

  “Yes. Talk to Baxter. I understand he has some hiding places in the truck. He says they’re secure against anything but a complete disassembly.”

  “When are we leaving?” Letty asked.

  Johnson glanced at her watch. “A little before seven o’clock tonight. You fly into Orlando. Rod’s truck will be in a parking garage there. We’ll text you the parking-lot space. On your new-old phone . . .”

  “Why are we driving, anyway? We could fly all the way . . .”

  “We need you to be on the road, we need you to have legitimate gasoline and motel receipts scattered around the truck, we need you to go through Gainesville, to look at it, we need you to see the highway, I-10, we need you to drive into Pasadena. We want you to push it: it’ll be something like thirty-six hours on the road, you should be able to make it in three days. You’ll be pretty far south, so you shouldn’t run into any snow in the mountains . . . if there are mountains. Every time you stop at a McDonald’s or wherever, grab the receipts and throw them in the back of the truck.”

  “Will Rod try to wrestle me into bed?”

  “No. But here’s a warning for you: don’t keep yourself too separate,” Johnson said. “Rent one motel room, get two beds. Get to know what his underwear looks like. You need to have some degree of intimacy. Not sex, but you need to know him. You need to create a persona that might be sleeping with him.”

  Letty nodded: “Got it.”

  “By the way, I love that cane,” Johnson said. “You really look helpless.”

  “That’s not the entire point,” Greet said.

  “What’s the entire point?” Johnson asked.

  “She’s been stick-fighting with a former Delta operator,” Greet said. “She could kill you with it.”

  “As the Delta guy told me, I might not be able to pack a gun,” Letty said to Johnson, “but who’s gonna take a cane away from a gimp?”

  Johnson smiled: “I like that.”

  * * *

  When Johnson had run out of things to talk about, Letty took Greet aside and asked, quietly, “What do you think of Baxter?”

  “He’s gonna be a load,” Greet said. “I feel for you. But he’s nothing you can’t handle. I can’t promise the same about these hackers. They’ll be smart and wary. And probably horny, so keep your knees together. Going deep doesn’t mean you have to screw anybody.”

  Letty nodded: “I’d already figured that out. Screwing: optional.”

  “Something else,” Greet said. “I don’t trust the fuckers from the NSA and I don’t trust the fuckers from the FBI. You feel like you’re getting in a jam, if you even get a hint of that, I’ll put Kaiser on a plane and you can have him in six hours, armed to the teeth and off the books. Don’t mention it to Johnson.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Got both guns?”

  “Is a frog’s ass watertight?” Letty asked, adding: “Sorry. I hang around cops. I might need help getting the guns on the plane. I don’t want to check them.”

  “Got you covered on that,” Greet said. She looked at her watch. “I’ll walk you through the back door.”

  Letty spent the tag end of the afternoon cleaning out her refrigerator and purse, packing, talking to the apartment manager, paying rent in advance.

  * * *

  Greet picked her up after dark, drove her to the airport, then literally walked Letty through a back door at Reagan National, a door reserved for security personnel, obviating any problems with the two pistols, the ammo, or the five-inch switchblade in Letty’s duffel bag.

  Nobody asked about the black camera bag slung over her shoulder. The bag contained a diminutive Panasonic GX8, equipped with a single zoom lens equivalent to a 24mm–120mm lens on a full-frame camera, and a pair of Leica Ultravid 8x20 binoculars. Letty had learned that decent optics came in handy when sneaking around.

  She carried the cane, but wasn’t yet hobbling.

  “I gotta get Kaiser to train me on the stick-fighting stuff,” Greet said.

  “Oooh, sexy. Discipline me with the stick and then take me to bed,” Letty said, pitching her voice into a plea.

  “The shit that comes out of your mouth sometimes . . .” Greet shook her head.

  Greet watched them from the gate as Letty and Baxter boarded an American Airlines flight to Orlando, called “Be careful,” and raised a hand as Letty disappeared down the jetway. Letty and Baxter sat in separate rows, ignoring each other until they touched down in Orlando two hours later.

  They found Baxter’s truck in a parking structure, exactly where the NSA spooks said it would be. As they walked out to the truck, Letty made an effort and said, “Warm and damp.”

  Baxter nodded and said, “That’s the main thing about Florida. The heat and humidity. I was born and raised in Belle Glade, and in the summer, it gets so hot and humid you can’t breathe. We didn’t have air-conditioning until I was twelve, and Mom started getting sick from the heat and the air when they burned the sugarcane fields. My dad didn’t believe in it. Air-conditioning. Said it made you weak.”

  It was the single longest thing he’d ever said to her.

  The Toyota Tundra looked rough—gray, ten years old, door dings—and when Letty asked about it, Baxter grunted, “I like old Tundras. I’m a fanboy.”

  “Will you like old Tundras if we break down in the middle of the Sonoran Desert?”

  “Not gonna happen,” he said. “The truck is perfect. I maintain it myself. Get in.”

  The truck had a crew cab with a short bed, and they threw their bags in the backseat. The interior, Letty admitted to herself, was flawless and comfortable, with aftermarket leather bucket seats. A green deodorizer tree hung from the rearview mirror, and a black carbon-fiber clamp-like mechanism extended from the dashboard between the driver’s and the passenger’s positions.