"The Fool's Run" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sandford John)

CHAPTER 8

What?

Need fix on MURs.

Give me numbers.

Can't be simple patch.

Will do cutout.

OK. How much?

1K

OK

The phone company keeps computer records of local phone calls. Hackers call them "muthers," for Message Unit Records. If a hacker uses his home phone for illegal computer entries, and the law gets interested, the phone company can check his muthers to see when and to where he made calls.

Once Whitemark realized that their computer was under attack, they would call in federal investigators. The feds, with their Grays, could sweep the Washington muthers looking for a pattern of calls to Whitemark.

"If Bobby did a simple software patch, one that tells the muther computer to ignore calls from this number, the feds might find the patch and read the number right off it," I told LuEllen.

"So what's he going to do?"

"He'll rig a cutout. Every time we dial out, the call will be assigned to a random number. That's what muther will record."

"He can do that from wherever he is?"

"I don't know. He might hire a tech out here, but for the price, I doubt it. I think he does it from wherever he is."

MURs out w/ random bypass.

Thanx.

We ready for backup.

I'll get back.

We would attack Whitemark in two ways. We would enter the company's computer system and alter it. Some of the changes would be subtle, some crude. The damage would be extensive. As the computer breakdown got Whitemark into deeper and deeper trouble, we'd open the second front: Dace would leak word of the company's problems through the Pentagon rumor mills and the defense press. If it was done right, Whitemark's credibility would crumble, and with it, Hellwolf's. But first we had to get into the Whitemark computers.

Defense industries like Whitemark have physical security ranging from adequate to pretty tight. Fortunately for the craft of industrial espionage, they do have weak points. One of them is greed. They like the idea of their engineers and key managers working at home. Those people inevitably have home terminals with phone links to the main computer center.

The existence of those outside terminals creates a paradoxical problem for the computer centers. On the one hand, if nonexperts, like engineers or accountants, are going to use the computers, the computers have to be friendly-easy to enter and easy to use. On the other hand, if they're too friendly, a bunch of hackers-or spies, if paranoia's your style-could get in and trash the system.

The usual answer is a tough, but thin, security screen. There are a number of different techniques for building the screens, but most are based on coded access. The home users of the system would have entry codes. To get into the Whitemark computers, we had to have the codes. We had to steal them.

The only way to do that was to get into the users' homes. We could copy the code-carrying software and leave behind a concealed bug that would relay computer traffic. If the whole business looked like an ordinary burglary, no one would suspect that computer security had been penetrated.

Once we had the codes, though, we had to start using them, because the damn things expire. And once we attacked the Whitemark computer, we had to keep the attack rolling. When Whitemark figured out what was happening, they would isolate the computer system and shut us out.

It was a matter of doing everything at once. It wasn't good, but there was no choice.

Bobby's research turned up a long list of potential burglary targets. Dace knew Washington like only a local newsman can, and LuEllen cross-examined him on street layouts, crime rates, and landscaping styles. As we narrowed the list of prospects to a dozen, Bobby went into the credit companies and pulled out full reports on the primary targets.

Late in the afternoon, with the list down to a handful of solid possibilities and their files in hand, we broke for dinner.

I drove, LuEllen in the front seat beside me, Dace in the back. As we stopped at the curb cut before entering the street, LuEllen reached over and touched my hand on the steering wheel, while turning to look at Dace.

"Okay, guys," she said, smiling, "I don't want anybody to look. But when we came out the door, there was a guy sitting in the driver's seat of that green van up the street. I think he was looking for us in his outside mirror, and when we came out he looked back at us. Now he's not in the driver's seat anymore. He's not around. I think he's in the back of the van."

"Watching us?" asked Dace, not looking at the van. It was thirty feet up the street, on the opposite side.

"I'm paranoid," said LuEllen. "I got a funny vibe when he looked at us. It was like our eyes met."

"We can't just sit here," I said. I looked both ways and turned down the street toward the van.

"Dace, you look," LuEllen said. "Like you're talking to me, but look past my head and see if there's anybody in the front seat."

We passed the van and Dace grunted, "Nobody."

"Shit," said LuEllen.

"Maybe the guy was just getting out when you saw him and he left while we were walking to the car," Dace suggested.

"Nope," I said, looking in the rearview mirror. "The van just pulled out. He's coming after us." The van driver waited until there was another car between us, then fell in behind. LuEllen casually turned her head and watched for a few seconds and then turned back to me.

"What the fuck is this, Kidd?" she demanded.

"I don't know. We haven't made a move yet."

"You've been doing the computer stuff. Could the cops be monitoring already?"

"No. That's too paranoid," I said. "There are probably a half million data transmissions every day in this town."

She watched the van for another minute. "Well, then what?" she asked impatiently.

"I don't know, but he's breaking off, whoever he is," I said. The van had followed a few blocks, but as we approached a traffic light at a major intersection, it slowed, waited for two additional cars to get between us, then did a U-turn, and headed back toward the apartment.

I took a left, drove a block, took another left, and headed back after it.

"Go past the apartments and come back from the other side. They won't be looking in that direction," LuEllen said.

When we got back, the van was parked on the street directly in front of the building. A tall man in green maintenance coveralls was just getting out of the back and when he slammed the door, the van pulled another half block up the street and stopped.

"So there are two of them," LuEllen said. "The outside guy is a lookout. The inside man has a radio or maybe a beeper."

"So now what?" asked Dace.

LuEllen looked at me. "Our security must be fucked," she said.

"It's not right," I repeated. "For somebody to be onto us, it'd have to be the biggest coincidence in the world."

"So what are we doing?" Dace asked.

"A million bucks," I said. I thought about it. "We don't even know if we're the targets. If we are, and we can take the guy inside, we might find out what's going on. We haven't broken any serious laws yet. If we catch a guy in the place, and talk to him, we might find out exactly where we stand. And he might not be in there at all."

"We better move if we're gonna do it," LuEllen said. "I'd be surprised if he's in there for more than five minutes."

I shook my head. "That's if he's burglarizing the place. If he's tossing it, looking for something specific about us, or if he's putting in bugs, he'll be a little longer. Any ideas about that lookout?"

"Sure. I need a phone," LuEllen said.

There was a phone box on the side of a recreation center two blocks away. LuEllen called the cops and then came running back.

"I told them that the guy in the green van picked up a little girl outside the rec center and took her down the street," she said when she climbed back in the car. "They'll have a car here in a minute. That'd be a top priority call."

The squad car actually arrived less than a minute later. We waited on a side street. When the squad went by, I pulled around the block and went up an alley into the back entrance of the apartment parking lot. The cops had the van driver in the street.

"Dace, you wait here," I said over my shoulder. "If LuEllen doesn't come down in five minutes exactly, you get the cops up there."

"Why don't I come up?" he asked anxiously.

"I don't have time to argue," I said. LuEllen followed me into the building, and we took the steps to the second floor. At the door to the apartment, LuEllen put her finger to her lips, listened for a few seconds, then checked the door lock.

"Scratches," she said, pressing her lips close to my ear. "They weren't there before. They could come from an old-style automated lockpick."

"Can we get inside?" I whispered back.

"He'll hear us coming. If he's armed, we're in trouble."

"Will he take the elevator or the stairway?"

"Stairs."

"Let's go back there."

We walked back to the stairs and shut the steel fire door.

"You better go down and tell Dace we're okay," I said. "I'll wait here and try to take him when he comes through the door."

There was a small, mechanical sound from beyond the fire door. "Too late," LuEllen said. "He's coming."

"Shit. Get down the stairs, out of sight."

LuEllen scrambled down the concrete steps and stopped below the next landing. I stood behind the fire door and waited. If the person coming down the hall was one of the alleged hookers who frequented the place, or a Pentagon general, this would be embarrassing.

But it wasn't. The guy who came through the door was slender, anemic, with thin blond hair and pale, watery eyes. He was wearing coveralls and carrying the toolbox. He pushed the door open with his right hand and his body was into the doorway before he saw me. His eyes widened and his mouth dropped open, and I pivoted and kicked the door as hard as I could, a good solid karate-style thrust kick that smashed the steel door into his body and the side of his head.

His tool case fell. Its contents spilled over the landing as the door rebounded off him, and he half stumbled. I kicked a leg out from under him and rode him down to the concrete. He put out his hands to break his fall and I got a knee in his back and an arm around his throat.

"Fight and I'll break your fuckin' neck," I said. LuEllen had come back up the stairs, and I said, "Tell Dace." She turned to go, and froze: a rat-faced guy was on the landing. He had eyes like ball bearings and was pointing a small, black pistol at my forehead.

"Let him go, motherfucker," Ratface said. He had a high-pitched, ragged-edged voice like a chalk squeak, but there was nothing ragged or shaky about the black hole at the end of the pistol's barrel. It was cold and round and absolutely steady. I stood up and the guy beneath me got to his hands and knees, sobbing, saying, "Jesus Christ," scooping his gear back into his toolbox. Except for a few pairs of pliers, screwdrivers, and some black plastic tape, the equipment was all electrical, and mostly illegal.

"Who the fuck are you?" I asked Ratface. LuEllen looked like she was ready to make a move, but I put out a hand, and she relaxed.

"Shut up." The hole at the end of the barrel never wavered.

When the tech's box was packed, he stood up, shot me a fearful look, and scurried down the stairs past Ratface. The gunman backed down after him, the gun steady on my face.

"We're walking out," he said. "Don't come after us."

We heard the door slam below, then the fire door opened above us. Dace.

"What happened to you?" I asked him. "The second guy came in right on top of us with a gun."

"Christ, the cops talked to him for a couple seconds, and then they left. I mean, they just got in their car and drove away. About one second later this guy was running over here. I never had a chance to get in front of him; I was too far away. I took the elevator up; I was hoping that if you were inside, he'd stop in the stairwell and wait or something."

"How'd he get in the door?"

"Key," Dace said.

"Probably had keys to the outer door, but not to the apartment. That's how they got into the stairwell, too," LuEllen said. She looked at me. "We all fucked up, it's not Dace's fault."

I said, "Something's really fouled up. This guy wasn't a burglar, he was a wire man. And I can't believe that somebody's already on us. It must come out of Chicago."

In the apartment we packed, and I took the phones apart. They were bugged. The bugs were crude and so was the installation.

"He wasn't in here long enough to do much more," I said. "We could probably sweep the place and we'd be okay."

"Let's check Chicago," LuEllen said. She had packed everything she brought with her. She wasn't planning to come back.

We moved into a Holiday Inn for the night. When I called Chicago, Maggie was vehement about her security.

"There's no possibility of a leak here," she said flatly. "Three people know about your team-me, Rudy, and Dillon. Period. And none of us would talk. It's more likely this guy Dace is the problem."

"I don't think so. We go back too far," I said.

"You don't know, though."

"No, I don't, but he's a friend. My instinct tells me he's okay. He was scared today. And surprised."

"I tell you, the problem isn't here," she insisted.

"I still can't believe they just stumbled over us," I said. "If we can't figure this out, we'll have to call it off."

"Christ, just hold on for a couple of days. I'll get Dillon checking. " There was a longish pause, and then she said, thoughtfully, "Say, do you suppose this might be some kind of leakage from the previous tenants? Didn't you say it was some kind of whorehouse?"

"Something like that," I said. I thought about it. It made some sense, at least, better sense than the other possibilities.

"What's the landlord's name?"

I gave it to her, and she told me she would get back to us.

That night I worked the tarot. LuEllen and Dace came to argue, huddle together, and watch me turn cards.

"That tarot shit is spooky," Dace said after a while.

"It's okay," LuEllen said. She looked at me. "Tell him about it."

"I use it to game," I said shortly.

"What the hell does that mean?"

I looked at a spread of cards dominated by minor swords. Distress, tension. They got that right. I turned to Dace.

"Back in seventy-nine I was hired by an astrologer to put together an astrology program. Preparing an astrology chart is all mechanical. Figuring moon rises and stuff."

"I thought it took years to learn how to do it," Dace said.

"That's the interpretation of the chart. The chart itself is fixed. Anyway, a computer can do the mechanical part as well as a human-better, really, because it doesn't make computational errors-and save a lot of time.

"So I had to build a scanner to scan the ephemeris-that's the book with the actual astronomical information in it, when the planets rise and set and all that. Then I had to work out another program to scan it in again with a second method, so we could compare the two bunches of data to cross-check for errors. It was a hell of a job. It took weeks. Anyway, this astrologer fooled around with the tarot, and I got interested."

"You tell the future?"

"No. Almost everything you read about the tarot is bullshit. But if you take the cards as archetypes for different kinds of human motives and behaviors, it becomes a kind of war-gaming system," I said.

"So what does that do?" Dace asked.

"When a person looks at a problem, it's always in a particular context. Most of the time, he's blinded to possible answers by his own prejudices and by the environment around him. By gaming a problem, you're forced outside your prejudices. So our question is, why do we have a security problem? I'd never think that LuEllen was the problem. I trust her. But maybe LuEllen got caught in that apartment back in Cleveland, and maybe she has a federal indictment that I don't know about, and when I got in touch with her and explained what I wanted to do, maybe she went to the U.S. Attorney and cut a deal.

"Or could be Bobby's got a legal problem and he cut a deal. The cards throw out random possibilities, and then you lay back and think about them."

"I didn't cut a deal," LuEllen said.

"I know."

"How do you know?" Dace asked. "I mean, just as an example."

"I've seen LuEllen do her act. She wasn't acting today. She was about to take on that gun."

We all thought about that for a minute.

"That's weird," Dace said finally. "Do you ever do just an old-fashioned magic reading?"

"I can. I don't do it often."

"Doesn't work?" he asked curiously.

"No. Just the opposite. It does seem to work. And that worries me."

"Why?"

"Because I don't believe in that shit," I said.

Maggie called just before midnight. "You said the man with the gun was short and rat-faced, with a brush cut?"

"Yeah."

"What about the other man? Was he kind of tall and wimpy, kind of thin and nervous?"

"Yeah. Where'd you get that from?"

"They're private detectives from Washington, at least the rat-faced one is. The blond guy works for him. They do divorce work."

"What do they want with us?"

"Nothing. The landlord says he had another run-in with these guys a couple of months ago. They're chasing after some general who used to meet a woman in the apartment you're using."

"That's a pretty pat answer," I said after a minute.

"That's what the guy said, the landlord. You can go on over and meet him tomorrow. He's pissed; he'll talk to Ratface tomorrow. He says he'll get them off your back. He's going to tell them the apartment is leased to a private computer-security group working out of the Pentagon, and that you want to go after them with the FBI. He says that'll take them out. This detective supposedly has a bad reputation with the feds, and he won't mess with anything that smells like government security."

"I don't know," I said. But it sounded reasonable. It would account for the archaic bugging equipment and what LuEllen said was an old-fashioned lockpick. "I'll have to talk to the other two. They're pretty spooked."

"Look. Find another place if you want, but get on the job. This was just a bizarre coincidence. Talk to the landlord."

That night, with Dace's suggestive questioning in the back of my head, I did a "magic" layout with the tarot. I got the Seven of Swords overlaying the Emperor in a crucial position. Later, I knew what it meant. But then it was too late.

Dace agreed to talk to the landlord the next morning while I went out and bought a commercial bug detector. You can buy them across the counter-just another necessary appliance in Washington, like VCRs and compact-disc players.

"I'm pretty shaky about this," LuEllen said as we went back in the building.

"No reason," I said. "We haven't done anything detectably criminal yet. If we see any problem at all up here, we walk away."

We didn't find anything. I took the bugs out of the phones, checked the lines, then went over the rest of the place inch by inch with the scanner. Nothing.

"We're clean," I said finally. "He wasn't up here long enough to do more than the phone. Certainly nothing so sophisticated that it would be completely invisible and wouldn't show up on this." I waved the scanner at her.

LuEllen was skeptical, but when Dace came back from meeting the landlord, he seemed convinced.

"I'm pretty sure he was telling the truth. Ratface's name is Frank Morelli. The other guy is a phone technician he brings in on some of his cases. They tried to get in once before, nine weeks ago, chasing this Pentagon guy. The Pentagon guy drops his mistress like a hot rock, but he was back here last week for a party. Morelli must have been watching him and figured it started up again."

"So he talked to them?"

"Yeah. He says Morelli used to be a cop. That's how he got around those cops we sicced on him. He pulled out his private eye card and mentioned a few names, and told them he was on a job. They said okay and took off."

"So what do you want to do?" I asked, looking at LuEllen. "You're the skeptical one. If you don't want to do it, we'll call it off."

She chewed on a thumbnail.

"A half million bucks," she said.

"Yeah."

"All right," she said. She pointed a finger at me. "But one more problem and I'm outa here."

"We haven't done enough research on these guys," LuEllen said. It was the next day, and she was draped over an easy chair, looking at the final list of Whitemark burglary targets. All of them, Bobby thought, had access to Whitemark computers from their homes. "We're going in semi-blind. It bothers me."

"We don't have time for more," I said.

"If you get caught, the whole job goes up in smoke," said Dace from his perch on the arm of a couch. He had a tin can of Prince Albert in one hand and a pinch of tobacco between the thumb and forefinger of the other.

"That's why LuEllen's here. To keep risks to a minimum."

"But you're not taking her advice," Dace argued. "She said we need more research. You're pushing to go in now."

He was right, but there was no help for it. Every day that passed brought Whitemark's version of String closer to completion. If we didn't move quickly, there wouldn't be any point in doing it at all.

"Look, couldn't we spend a week scouting all of them, and then pick the best two or three?" Dace asked.

"We don't have a week," I said. "We have to take our best shot and go into the computers and see where we are. Maybe we'll only need one or two, and all the other scouting would be a waste of time."

"But.

"Wait a minute, wait a minute," LuEllen said, waving us down. "It makes me nervous, but I didn't say we couldn't do it. We have to be careful, that's all."

"I don't like it," Dace said. "I hate sitting around here. I wish I could come along and drive. Or something. Anything."

"We already talked about that. Having you along wouldn't help, it'd only make things worse," LuEllen snapped. "Let's just work on this list, okay?"

We wanted to do three specific things inside the Whitemark computers. We wanted to interfere with the programs used to design the Hellwolf. We wanted to destroy Whitemark administrative systems. And we wanted to attack the computer itself, to fundamentally bollix up the way it operated.

The best way to do that was to get the entry codes of the top systems programmer. With those codes we would be able to move through the whole system. But going after a systems man was dangerous. Computer experts are paranoically sensitive about security: if we broke into the top man's house he might change his codes as a matter of routine. It would take only a few minutes, and he could do it himself, so why not?

Instead of going after the systems programmer first, I decided to go after an engineer and a manager and hope we could get into the programming levels through their terminals.

"We want a suburban neighborhood of single-family houses, not an apartment complex, because there are fewer people around. We don't want kids, because kids get sick and stay home from school, or come home at odd times. And if there aren't any kids, both the husband and wife are probably out during the day, at work," LuEllen said, ticking off the points on her fingers. "If the neighborhood and the house are right, the Ebberly woman ought to be our top target. Bobby's credit report says her husband is an executive with the Postal Service, which is a nine-to-five job. The other ones, where the husband works for Whitemark and the wife works somewhere else, it's hard to tell how important they are. They could be working late shifts or early shifts."

"So we go for the woman, the personnel evaluator. Samantha Ebberly. Samantha and Frank," I said.

LuEllen nodded. "We'll give them first look, anyway."

That night I did a few spreads with the tarot, but couldn't find anything significant. The Fool was in hiding.

We left the apartment at nine o'clock the next morning. The day was already thick and sultry, with thin, morose clouds sliding off to the south. We were dressed in tennis whites and court shoes. We carried tennis bags with racket handles sticking out of the side pockets.

"White folks think burglars are these big black dudes with panty hose on their heads, who come in the middle of the night. They won't look twice at a white couple walking around at ten o'clock in the morning with tennis rackets," LuEllen said while we were buying the equipment. "We put the crowbar and the bolt cutters, the gloves and your tools and the electronic stuff in the bottom of the bags. If there's a problem, we ditch the bags and jog back to the car. Jogging is one way you can run in the 'burbs without a single soul paying attention to you."

The Ebberlys lived in Falls Church, Virginia, in a neighborhood of upper-middle-class ranch homes and bungalows. The streets had names like Willow Lane and Crabapple Court, and twisted endlessly back on each other like a ball of twine. There were sailboats in the side yards, basketball hoops on garages, heavy, black barbecue grills on brick and stone patios. The houses were separated by tall hedges and lines of weeping willows.

We drove by the Ebberlys' home and LuEllen looked it over.

"It feels empty," she said. The house was a two-story, split-entry design with evergreen bushes on either side of the front door. She was pleased by the layout.

"I like those shrubs. They cut off the view from the side. These streets are good, too, with the curves. There's nobody right across the street looking at the target's front door. Gives you some extra privacy to work."

We went by a second time. She took out a pair of compact Leitz binoculars and scanned the place.

"You look for lumps of dark green grass in the backyard, especially along the fences," LuEllen said idly. "If they have a dog, and he does his business in the yard, there'll be dark clumps of grass, like pimples. It's not a sure thing, but it can warn you off."

There was nothing. Satisfied by the house, we drove six blocks out to a convenience store, where we had seen a drive-up phone. Checking the list from Bobby, she called the Ebberlys at their separate offices. Samantha came on, and LuEllen rattled the receiver a few times and hung up. Frank wasn't in his office, but had been just a minute ago. He was probably down the hall for coffee, according to the woman who answered the phone, but he had an appointment coming up so he should be right back. LuEllen promised to call in fifteen minutes.

"Get my bag," she said. I reached into the backseat for her bag, as she dropped another coin into the phone. "Who now?" I asked.

"The house." She listened while the Ebberlys' house phone rang thirty times, then glanced around the parking lot. Sure that nobody was watching, she took a pair of compact bolt cutters from the tennis bag and nipped off the phone receiver.

"Let's go," she said, tossing the receiver in the backseat. "Let's do it."

"You're sure?"

"Goddamnit, let's do it," she snarled. LuEllen carries no excess fat, and now her face muscles stood out in bundles. She slipped a packet of white powder out of her purse, carefully tipped some on a matchbook, and snorted it up.

"You want some?"

"No."

"Good stuff," she said. "It'll give you an edge."

"I've got an edge," I said.

"Then drive."

As I pulled out of the parking lot, she retrieved the amputated receiver from the backseat and stuffed it out of sight in the glove compartment.

"If you cut the receiver off, nobody will try to use the pay phone," she explained. "That means nobody will hang it up, so the phone should still be ringing at the Ebberlys' when we get there."

"If there's nobody home."

"Right."

We stopped at a neighborhood park two blocks from the target. Both tennis courts were occupied. We did some stretches, got the bags, and walked down the street toward the Ebberlys'.

"When we get there, we turn right in. I knock. If somebody comes to the door, we ask where the park is. If we hear the phone, and nobody answers the knock, you back up so I can get at the door. I pop it, and we go in. Keep everything slow," she said quietly. As she talked, her head turned from the street up to me, and back to the street. Her smile switched on and off, the perfect rhythm for a friendly husband-wife talk on the Way home from a tennis game. The streets were eerily quiet for a nice summer day. No kids, no cars.

"It's an older suburb, one of my favorite situations," LuEllen said. "Young families can't afford it. The people who moved here when the houses were cheap are in their forties and fifties. Their kids are growing up. There's nothing to do here during the day, so the teenagers take off for work, or go into the city or out to the beaches. It's empty, nobody home."

She glanced up at me and grinned. "You're twitching."

"I'll be okay," I said, irritably. The words were strangled in my own ears.

"It's a trip," she said. She put her hand up to her face as though she were coughing and took another hit on the cocaine.

Nothing moved along the street as we came up to the house. LuEllen looked casually around. "Let's do it," she said hoarsely. Halfway up the drive, we could hear the phone ringing. On the front step. LuEllen pushed the doorbell with a knuckle, and then knocked. Nothing. She took a silent dog whistle from her pocket and blew on it, hard. There was no answering bark.

"Probably okay," she said, looking around again. We'd been at the door for fifteen seconds. She took a short, curved bar from the tennis bag, and I stepped back to cover her with my body. She shoved one end of the bar in the crack between the door and the jamb, and threw her full weight against it. There was a loud crack, and the door popped open.

"Goddamn. That was loud," I muttered.

"Nobody ever looks," she said. She pushed the door open with the back of her hand, and we stepped inside. We were in a short hall off the living room. The kitchen was to the left, with coffee cups and cereal bowls still on the table. The living room was furnished with a couch and easy chair, a piano, a couple of tables. There was a cheap Art Barn-type oil painting over the couch.

"Let's move. Get the gloves on," LuEllen said. She handed me a pair of latex surgeon's gloves from the tennis bag.

"The computer's probably upstairs in this kind of house," she said. "You go up there. Check all the bedrooms before you do anything. I'll check the basement." As I headed up the stairs, she picked up the phone in the kitchen to kill the ringing.

The computer was in a converted bedroom. I checked the rest of the rooms, found nobody, and went back to the computer. It was a standard IBM-AT with a Hayes modem. An inexpensive plastic disk box sat next to it. I brought the computer up and started flipping through the disks. All but three were neatly labeled-Word Perfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Files, and so on. The three unlabeled disks were from different manufacturers, so Ebberly probably kept track of the contents simply by remembering the brand names. I took a box of blank disks and a special disk-cracking program of my own out of the tennis bag. When the computer came up, I loaded my cracker disk, and stripped the directory out of the first unnamed disk. Games.

I loaded one to make sure, and a popular baseball game flashed on the screen. Pirated, of course. I killed it and shoved in a second disk. It was a custom communications program. After a little manipulation it coughed up a short list of seven-letter words. Code words.

"That's the baby," I muttered to the machine. It took two minutes to duplicate the disk on one of my blanks.

As I made the copy, LuEllen was working in the other parts of the house. From the sound of it, she was trashing the place, but there was no time to look.

When the code disk was copied, I dropped it in my bag and pushed in the third disk. More games. I put in another disk, labeled as Files. I opened one and found personal letters. I opened another, and an accounting program showed a list of personal accounts. The Ebberlys were doing well, according to the accounts-and I was pretty sure that they weren't being clever with mislabeled disks. As I put the original disks back in the storage box, LuEllen came to the door. She was panting.

"How's it going?"

"Halfway there," I said. She nodded and disappeared, and I looked at the phone outlet where the modem was plugged in. It was a standard AT amp;T connection. I got a screwdriver from the tennis bag, removed the wall plate, and pulled out the tangle of wires behind it. It took a minute to find the right wires, isolate them, and strip a half-inch length off each. The bug, a piece of exotic hardware about the size of a beer bottle cap, clipped onto the bare wires. The work was not difficult, but it was delicate. Every move took an eternity.

When it was done, I put the wall plate back in place and screwed it in tight. If a knowledgeable phone tech took the plate off, the bug was hanging there like a great, fat leech. With any luck, it wouldn't happen for years.

"We've been in ten minutes. That's my personal record," LuEllen said from the door. Her face was screwed tighter than I'd ever seen it.

"Right. I'm done." I threw all the tools back in the tennis bag and wiped my forehead on a shirtsleeve. "Christ. I'm falling out."

"Let me in there," LuEllen said. She pulled open the drawers in the file cabinets and dumped the papers on the floor.

"Like we were looking for money," she said. "Let's go."

We walked back to the front door, where she picked up her tennis bag. "Carry mine," she said. "It's heavy." I stripped off my gloves and took her bag. It felt like an anchor was stuffed inside.

"What's in here? "I asked.

"Guns."

"What?"

"Pistols. Heaters. Rods. Gats. You know. Guns. One of the Ebberlys is a collector."

"Why take them? If we get stopped.

"Because this is supposed to be a horseshit smash-and-grab burglary, looking for money, dope, jewelry. One inch up from a stereo thief," she said as we stepped out on the porch. She carefully pulled the door shut behind us. From ten feet away, it would look intact. "Nobody but a real specialist will leave guns behind. On the street, pistols are as good as cash. If we left them, the cops would know something was wrong. We had to take them."

"So what do we do with them?" I asked as we walked out of the Ebberlys' driveway.

"Throw them in the river," she said. "Drop them in a sewer. I don't care. We couldn't leave them."

Our walk back to the car seemed to take twice as long as the walk to the house. A mailman came down the street in his red, white, and blue jeep, and nodded at us as we went by. LuEllen told me twice to slow down and talk. "You look like one of those long-distance race-walkers," she said with a practiced smile. "Slow the fuck down." At the car, I dropped the tennis bag in the back and buckled up before we pulled away.

"Jesus Christ," I said after a couple of blocks, as my stomach uncoiled.

"It does get intense," LuEllen giggled. She went into her purse for the cocaine again and took two hard hits.

I'd never been caught inside a factory during one of my midnight research excursions. With a couple of exceptions, I walked inside with a regular employee, a paid guide. If somebody had stopped us to question my presence, the employee was supposed to claim I was a friend waiting for him to get off, that we didn't think it would hurt if I hung around for a while, sorry about that, etc.

On the few occasions I went into a hostile plant, cold, the pre-entry research had been so thorough and the objectives so limited, that I had been more interested than excited, and not particularly worried.

This entry had been different. More free-form. Like jazz, say, compared to Bach. If you're an anonymous guy in a huge defense plant and a security guard comes by, that's one thing; there's a ninety-nine percent chance you can talk your way out of any problems. If you're in somebody's house and they walk in the door, that's something else altogether.

I was still buzzing from the entry and LuEllen started backseat driving. She kept me three miles an hour under the speed limit, and called out every street and stop sign. When we got back, Dace met us at the door with an anxious look.

"What happened?" he demanded.

"What does it look like?" asked LuEllen.

"We went in," I said, grinning. "It was perfect."

"Get the computer stuff?"

"Yeah. We're wired in."

LuEllen walked across the room and grabbed him by the ears. "C'mere, you," she said, and tugged him into the bedroom and slammed the door. I was left by myself in the front room. A few minutes later, when I realized the apartment wasn't quite as soundproof as I had thought, I got the watercolor kit and drove down to the Potomac. It was hot and humid; the buildings across the river shimmered like white silk scarves, and I tried to get them down just like that.

I got back to the apartment late in the afternoon, arriving just behind a metallic-blue Corvette. The 'Vette took the first available slot and I pulled in three spaces down. The 'Vette's driver was already striding down the lot when I got out of the car. It was an entrancing sight. She was small, dark-haired, and perfectly built. She moved like a dancer.

She used her key at the entry door and let it close behind her. I used my own key and caught her waiting for the elevator. She looked me over with a careful eye.

"You must be one of the people in two-A," she said, with a touch of a French accent.

"Yes. And you're.

"Two-D," she said. "Are you. a business?"

"Consultants," I said.

"Ah, consultants," she said brightly, as though it explained everything. In Washington, of course, it probably did. "To tell you the truth, I was happy to see Louis and his little friends move out."

"Louis?"

"The landlord."

"Oh, sure. I've never met him. One of my associates actually rented the place."

"Ah." The elevator came and she got in and pushed the button for the second floor.

"What, uh. " I gave her my best, most open smile. "I can't resist gossip, I'm afraid. That's why I'm a consultant. What about Louis's friends?"

She shrugged, and her eyes evaded mine. "If one is heterosexual. " She shrugged.

"There's an uneasy feeling. I know what you mean."

"You are heterosexual?"

"Yes."

"I saw the woman, your associate. She is very attractive."

"Yes. She looks not unlike you. Very attractive."

She dimpled and was about to say something when the elevator arrived at the second floor. "I do not mind homosexuals," she said, pronouncing the word with care. "But there were. so many of them. Five or six living there at once. In the evenings, sometimes, it sounded like they were all in one pile. And then one hears about AIDS."

"Now you've got me worried. Were they living there for long?"

"Two years?" she said.

"God, I'll have to spray the place."

"Oh, that's not. you are joking me."

"I'd never joke you," I said. We were at my door; she continued down the short hallway and turned when she got to her door.

"Could I buy you a drink sometime?" I asked.

She considered for a moment, then shook her head in what looked like genuine regret. "I have a friend," she said. "If I did not, I would like it." She pushed her door open, gave me a final smile, and was gone.

LuEllen was standing just inside the door when I opened it, with Dace a few steps behind her. A half-finished microwave pizza sat on the kitchen table.

"We heard you talking," she said, a question in her voice.

"Another tenant. She told me something. odd."

"What?"

"She said the landlord's gay and that he used to keep a bunch of male friends in here. Several of them. For maybe two years."

"Aw, shit," said LuEllen, nibbling her lip.

Dace looked puzzled. "What difference does it make?"

LuEllen turned to him and asked the question that was bothering both of us. "If there were a bunch of gays living here, how come Ratface was bugging the place to catch a general and his mistress?"

"Jeez.

"Somebody's lying to us," LuEllen said.

We hashed it over without reaching any conclusion.

"I'll sweep the place again and make sure Bobby is sterilizing the phone lines," I said. "And I'll see if Bobby can get a line on Ratface-Morelli- whatever his name is. Maybe Bobby can do something with his phones."

"Should we be talking about this?" Dace asked, looking at the walls.

I went over the apartment inch by inch and again found nothing. Bobby said our lines were clean. Guaranteed.

"Maybe we're worrying about bullshit," I said. "There's no way anybody could know about us, not unless Anshiser has sprung a major leak. And if anybody did know-the law-they would have moved."

Dace shook his head. "Paranoia," he said. "Shadows."

LuEllen was looking doubtful. "I don't know," she said. She took a couple of slow turns around the front room, then plopped on the couch. "I can't figure it."

"Let it go for now," said Dace.

"Maybe Bobby will come up with something," I said.

"It's worth a try," LuEllen agreed. "Okay. We let it go. For now."

"Good." Dace turned to me. "Wanna look at the loot?"

We dumped LuEllen's tennis bag on the front-room floor. There were a half-dozen pistols, two hundred dollars in cash, three credit cards, and several good pieces of gold jewelry, including a gold and diamond stickpin. Total value, she said, would be about two thousand on the street.

"It'd be a good haul for a junkie," she said. "They usually get a transistor radio and a bottle of picante sauce."

Late that night, she and Dace dropped everything but the cash and guns in the alley in one of the harder districts of Washington. They'd be picked up and get about the use that the cops would expect. The guns they dropped in the Potomac; the cash we kept.

While they were out, I dialed the Ebberlys' number. Before the phone rang, I blew into the receiver with a pitch pipe. The whistle activated the intercept, which linked their line to ours. I flipped the open line over to one of our computers and left it.

When the bug detected a computer's electronic sound packets, it would relay them to our computer. It would also pass them through to the Ebberlys' machine. Ebberly would get her work done as usual. We would have a complete record of it.

Nothing happened the first night, or early the next morning. We left the apartment a little after nine o'clock to scout more targets. When we got back, the computer showed a transmission from the Ebberlys' home to Whitemark.

"That's what we wanted?" Dace asked.

"That's what we wanted," I said. "She must have been working at home this afternoon. Good thing she wasn't there yesterday."

"She's probably home because of the burglary," LuEllen said. "Talking to cops."

A computer work session, printed out, soaks up an enormous amount of paper. Every time Samantha Ebberly even glanced at a personnel form, the computer printed the whole form. I ran the session back across the screen, did some quick editing, and printed it. It was seventy pages long, and I handed it to Dace.

"We need to extract procedures," I said. "We want to do things just the way she did, get in and out without being noticed. Map these things for us. Every time she gets on, map them again. By the time we're ready to go in, we should know how to operate as well as she does."

"All right. But it'll bore my brains out."

"Think about the money."

"I've been doing that."

"Didn't work?" asked LuEllen.

"No, no, it worked. I'll sit here and watch the computer. But don't tell John Wayne."