Hidden Agendas

Thing was, tricky and pretty sharp beat real sharp every time. And the Net Force pukes were fooling themselves, so that helped a bunch.

Back after he'd first left home and gone on the road for a while, Platt had met an old grifter name of James Treemore Vaughn. Jimmy Tee, they called him. He was probably pushing seventy, had white hair, and looked just like your kindly old gramps. Kinda guy you'd trust with your wife, your kid, your money. Only Jimmy Tee was a con man, working the small cons by the time Platt had met him, though in his prime he had done a lot of second- and third-man parts in big stings. Earned big, spent big, didn't have a pot to piss in. But he knew more about people than a trainload full of psychiatrists, hookers, and bartenders put together. He could rope a mark, sting him, and send him on his way thinking Jimmy Tee had done him a big favor.

They'd sat in a bar in Kansas City once, Big Bill Barlow's place, Jimmy Tee having a weakness for good blended whisky, and the old man had taught Platt a major lesson.

'Thing is, boyo, if you work it right, a mark will do most of the work for you. Yeah, you can set him up, hammer him good with the pitch, pull a fast close, and take off with the score, but if the mark knows he's been had, sooner or later he'll scream. A good con gets you the money. A great con gets you the money — and the mark doesn't know he's been had.'

Platt was fascinated. 'Yeah?' He waved at the bartender, who came over to fill up Jimmy Tee's glass.

'Oh, yeah. See, there's a lot of people out there who are faster, smarter, stronger, and meaner than you. You face off with them, you get the crap kicked out you. A big guy comes at you, you don't try to block him balls against balls, you just redirect him a hair. Nudge him in a direction, and get out of his way. The trick is to make him think that's the way he wanted to go in the first place. You can do that, you can write your own ticket.'

In the warm sunshine, Platt smiled again. Old Jimmy Tee had been dead and gone what? Five, six years? But his lesson had stuck.

The Net Force guys were looking for terrorists because that was what they were most afraid of. So, zap, Platt and Hughes gave them some terrorists. And the trick was to hide little clues here and there, hide ‘em well enough so when the Net Force dogs went sniffin', they had trouble finding those little rabbits in their hidey-holes. If you were lookin' for somethin' you just knew was there and you couldn't find it, well, that made you look just that much harder.

This whole bullshit Danish thing was Hughes's idea, but it was pretty smart. Platt had started planting stuff about the Fried Socks thing five or six months ago, so some of the clues were absolute boilerplate when it came to real time. Net Force could poke and prod at the information and no matter how they scanned it, it would come up real — well, at least real in that the thing had been sitting in somebody's memory archives since months before the manifesto showed up.

Some of the clues were yet to be put into place, but when they got there, they'd be backdated to seem as if they had been there for months or years. By the time the Net Force pukes got to those, they'd have checked the earlier stuff and found it to be more or less legit. So they would convince themselves that the later stuff was okay by the time they found it. They wouldn't bother to check, or if they did they'd do a half-assed job, since that was what they wanted to believe.

If it looks like a rabbit, smells like a rabbit, and hops like a rabbit, well, hell, it's a rabbit, ain't it?

You give a guy a sack of coins and he dips into it and pulls out eight or ten at random and they all assay out as pure 24-carat gold, he is gonna believe that all of the suckers in the bag are real. He'll figure no way anybody could tell which ones he'd pick, it's pure chance, so he's covered.

Guy like that would completely forget all the sleight of hand he'd ever seen, forget that there were magicians who could fan a deck and let him pick a card — any card — and the trickster would know what it was before the mark ever touched it.

The hand doesn't have to be quicker than the eye — if the eye doesn't know where to look.

The trick, Jimmy Tee had said, was not to embellish it too much. Just give the guy a direction and get out of his way. The smarter the guy was, the quicker he would fool himself. If you did it right.

Net Force was hot on the trail of a Danish terrorist group. Platt knew this because some very expensive and practically undetectable squeal programs had told him that the feds hunting for the terrorists had finally started to find his planted clues. Clues that were hidden enough so they had to work at finding them, and clues that were mysterious enough to keep ‘em guessin'.

They didn't trust anything too easy. Most people figured if it didn't cost anything, it wasn't worth anything. But if they had to slog through a swamp, swatting at mosquitoes, then what they found hiding in the hollow of the third dead cypress on the left, well, hell, that was why they'd come, right?

Wrong. But that was the trick.

When the hounds caught the quarry's scent, when they knew for sure they were on the right track, then he could let them see the rabbit. When it took off running, they'd follow it. They'd never catch it, because it wasn't real. It was a phantom, a spook, a ghost.

And boy, it was gonna be fun to watch them chase that sucker.

But of course, the thing he had to do was make sure the hounds still wanted to chase the critter. So this afternoon, he was going to give ‘em a new reason. A real good reason, this time…

Chapter Twenty-Five

Wednesday, January 12th, 6:15 p.m. Washington, D.C.

Tyrone Howard pretty much wanted to die.

He lay on his bed, staring through the ceiling, unable to move for the weight of what Bella had dropped on him. He had replayed the conversation a hundred times in his head, and every time, it came out the same. There wasn't any wiggle room, no way to put a good face on it. She'd dropped him, blap, just like that.

He'd seen her at school, she'd acted just fine, and although he'd told himself he wasn't, he was not going to say anything, in the end it had spewed from him in a hot blast, as if he'd been punched in the belly and the punch had knocked his words out with his wind.

'So, meet anybody interesting at the mall lately?'

Give her credit, she wasn't stupid and she didn't try to pretend she didn't know what he was talking about. Right there in the hall, outside his last-period class, she let him have it, full spray, nozzle tight:

'Maybe I did. What business is it of yours?'

Wham! Another punch to the gut. 'What business is it of mine. Jesus, Bella, I thought we were — you and I–I mean, we were—'

'What? Married? Well, attenzione Ty-ree-o-nee, we are not. I like you, you're sharp, but I have other friends, you copy? I see them when and where I want. You praw that?'

He was too stunned to think about his response. Maybe if he'd thought about it, if he'd had time to consider it, what she said, he'd have said something else, but he didn't have the time. He said, 'Yeah, I do have a problem with it.'

She'd glared at him as if he'd slapped her. 'Oh? Really? My game, my rules, that's how it is. You want to play, you play my way.'

Then he really put his butt into it. He said, 'No. I don't think so.'

That really burned her. He thought she was going to spit on him for a second. Then she said, 'Well, then, tell you what, slip, you just lose my com number, okay? I don't have time to be holding your hand and showing you what's what, little boy.'

And then she turned and left. His world went gray. He couldn't hear the students around him, couldn't see anything, couldn't feel anything — except a twist in his stomach. His gut was knotted as if he'd just jumped off the top of a very tall building and was in free fall. With the ground coming up fast…

On his bed, he replayed it again, searching for a small crack, a word that could have a double meaning that he had somehow missed, a magic word that, once he grasped it, would turn the whole conversation on its head and make it mean something altogether different. But he couldn't find it, that magic word. It just wasn't there.