John Sandford - The Devil's Code

She giggled. "Their car is a puddle of plastic."

"We hope."

Then she sighed and rolled over and said, "This was fun; both the running and the fucking. But we've got to be smarter."

"I don't see anything more for us here," I said. "Welsh told me that they'd gone into the computer in Laurel, so maybe they'll take care of everything."

"Back home?"

"You want to go back home?"

"Where're you going?"

I thought for a moment, then said, "Texas. Just to look around."

"I've been to Texas," she said. "I sort of like it there. I like the way they dress."

"You're welcome to come along."

Late in the afternoon, we checked out of the motel, took a cab to BWI, and flew to New York. We stayed overnight in Manhattan, sharing a room this time. Monday morning, before we left for La Guardia, I called Welsh at her office from a pay phone. Her secretary answered and when I asked for Welsh, said Mrs. Welsh was in a meeting.

"This is Bill Clinton. If she wants to talk to me again, right now, you have ten seconds to get her on the phone. After that, I'm gone."

Five seconds later, Welsh picked up. "This better not be a joke."

"This is no joke. This is a threat. If you come after us again, or threaten us, we'll tear major new assholes in all those bright and shiny computers you keep buying out there."

"Your threats don't worry us too much, Bill. We're only about one step behind you now."

"Oh, yeah? Get a lot of prints off that car? Listen, lady, I'm telling you. If we feel threatened, we'll take you down. If you want a demonstration of what we can do, we'll put your internal phone book on the Internet, with all the names and home addresses listed, so people who don't like your brand of bullshit can call you up at any time of day or night. Would that convince you?"

Her resolve seemed to waver: "I don't think you could."

"What phone do you think I'm talking to you on?" I asked. "Jesus Christ, woman, take a minute to think about it."

"So don't do that."

"Look at those computers, find out what happened with Lighter and Jack Morrison and AmMath and Clipper, and stay the fuck away from us."

I hung up. We were headed toward the airport, five minutes later, when one of LuEllen's cell phones rang. The taxi driver was chanting to himself in Arabic, and apparently paying no attention. LuEllen dug the phone out of her purse, punched the Talk button, said, "Hello?" listened for a moment, then handed the phone to me. "Green," she said.

Green was calling from a phone at a gas station in San Francisco. "I couldn't figure out how they were tracking us, when they were always so far away, always two or three blocks," he said. "So I drove over to my brother's placehe's got a garageput the car up on a lift and guess what?"

"You had a bug."

"Still got it," he said. "But I moved it inside the car, and duct-taped a big alnico magnet to it. When we get to the airport, I'll stick it on a car that's leaving. That ought to confuse them for a while. then we'll fly the Seattle-to-Houston route, and drive up to Dallas."

"Good. We're on our way now. We'll be in Dallas tonight."

"We'll probably stay over in Houston, see you tomorrow."

We talked for another minute, and then he was gone.

And we were gone. Seven hours later, we were in Dallas.

ST. JOHN CORBEIL

Corbeil was sweating. In the cold air-conditioning of his office, he could feel the dampness under his shirt collar and despised himself for it. Not good clean sweat, the kind you got lifting weights. This was nervous sweat, the kind you got when a hard-nosed NSA security officer cornered you with unexpected questions, while some FBI faggot sat in the back smiling and playing with his tennis bracelet.

Strunkthe security officer's name was Karl Strunkhad questions about the Bloch Tech ISP, about the emergence of Firewall, about the deaths of Lighter and Morrison. Corbeil managed to finesse the questions, to play dumb. He hated having to project even the appearance of ignorance, but it had been necessary. And it had been a close-run thing.

How had they gotten onto Bloch Tech and the connection between Bloch Tech and the Firewall rumors? That was the last thing he would have expected.

Hart knocked once and pushed into the office. "What happened?" he asked. "Trouble?"

"I'm not sure. Something's going on. They know about Bloch Tech, and they suspect that Lighter and Morrison are connected. But they don't seem to have any idea what the connection might be. And I don't understand that. how they could suspect a connection without having any idea what it might be." He stopped, pulled himself in. He'd almost been sputtering, like some striped-tie civil service asshole who'd lost a box of paper clips.

"We took care of that with the Morrison plane tickets," Hart said. "Did they find the tickets?"

"I wasn't asking any questionsbut I assume they did. I came down hard on the idea that we were monitoring everything, that we were afraid that we'd been penetrated by Firewall. I suggested that Firewall had penetrated Bloch Tech, recognizing that it was the biggest ISP in Glen Burnie, and figuring that there must've been a lot of NSA people in it. Probably in there looking for anything they could get."

"What'd he say?"

"The idea didn't surprise him. I kept talking about his IRS attack. That has them confused, too."

"That has me confused."

Corbeil smiled: "I think it's absolutely wonderful. They're going to find some people who profess to be Firewall, and they'll have nothing to do with us. If you've ever dealt with those little cocksuckers who infest the Internet these days, you know that they'll probably take credit for every bit of damage that gets done. They think it's glamorous."

"It'd still be nice to have an. overview."

Corbeil nodded. "I'll go up to Meade and tap the old-boy line. See if I can find out what's happening."

"I can make a couple of calls," Hart said. "Ask a couple of guys to keep an eye outtell them that if there's trouble, I want to get out while the getting is good. That might produce something."

"Do it," Corbeil said. "And tell Woods to keep an eye on the computers, just in case the people at Meade have a backdoor into it."

When Hart was gone, Corbeil made a half-dozen calls and managed to wangle an invitation to visit NSA headquarters to talk about Firewall and AmMath. Once inside, it'd be usual enough to visit old pals, an ordinary thing to pick up on the gossip. He'd made a lot of money on the outside, and had jobs prospects to dangle.

Somewhere, somebody was working a vein of information, and if he couldn't find out who, he might get hurt.

He spent another half-hour online, using an encrypted spreadsheet to move money between offshore accounts: from the "in" account to, eventually, the "invest" account. Corbeil had a number that he had taken out of The Wall Street Journal. The head of a big arbitrage fund had set aside twenty-five million for his own use, the Journal said, and with the rest of his fortune, he simply played. Twenty-five million, the man said, was enough to take care of any realistic need.

Corbeil made that his number: twenty-five million. When he reached that number, he would shut down the Old Man of the Sea, find a way to seal himself away from Woods and Hart and Benson. Then find something else to do, in a softer climate. Ibiza would be a candidate.

He thought about Ibiza for a while, and then again about Woods and Hart and Benson. If something were to happen to Hart and Benson, and if Woods were to disappear with a large amount of cash, then conclusions might be drawn. Then, if Clipper died, as it appeared that it would, he could liquidate and find that something else.

That would be a couple of years, yet. He was not yet halfway to his number.