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Letty slipped her hand in her pocket and brought out her Sig, a chunk of black metal that hit the tabletop with aclunk. “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 periodof 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 showingLetty 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, theAlligator. 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, 10Years, 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 theAlligatordatabase. 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 withcalls 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.
