John Sandford - The Devil's Code

Hart came back. "Talked to some guys, they'll keep their ears open, but right now, nothing. The only talk about us, is, most of them have heard that Clipper is going down."

"Common knowledge," Corbeil said. "I've been thinking about this whole problem. There is either a source of information about us, or the Ward woman knows something that we don't. Maybe she had more files than we know about. Maybe Morrison made more than one entry. Maybe they were working together."

"Possible. But if all that was true, and if she's giving her stuff to the NSA, why are they so confused? Why are they just sniffing around? They don't really seem to know much. Maybe she's just jacking us up, and is gonna come in with an offer."

"Doesn't feel like it. If you two hadn't lost her."

"Listen, when they made that switch, that was professional," Hart said. "Where does a college professor get off spotting a beacon the size of an ice cube? I'm telling you."

Corbeil waved him off. "We've been through all that and she's out of sight for the time being. The police say she's coming here to look at the house and to pick up some of Morrison's equipment and personal effects. You found MasterCard and American Express receipts in her house-maybe you can pick her up through her cards."

Hart nodded. "I'll check."

Corbeil leaned back in his chair. "Somebody is working on us, William. Possibly the NSA, but it doesn't feel like them. Strunk knew a few things, but there were holes in everything he knew. Questions didn't follow any reasonable logic. He had bits and pieces, only bits and pieces."

"Gotta find Ward," Hart said.

"Find her, and look at her."

Dallas was hot.

Hot enough that the newspapers were whining about it. Unnaturally hot, for the time of year. When we got to the DFW car-rental building, which was a couple miles from the airport, a chunky red-headed woman dragged a bulky black suitcase up to the Hertz desk with a complaint about her bill. I didn't hear the details of the complaint, but noticed that her blouse was soaked with sweat from the fifty-yard walk across the parking lot.

We rented a thoroughly air-conditioned car, using one of LuEllen's IDs, and got two rooms at the Ramada Inn. When we were settled, we drove to something called the West End Historic District, which turned out to be a fern-bar shopping district injected into a bunch of aging warehouses.

The TrendDirect building, once a big, old red-brick warehouse, had been dressed up with modern black windows and new tuck-pointing. It stood alone on its own block. Part of the ground floor had been given over to an imposing lobby, with a glass wall separating the street from an interior done in old brick and new marble, with huge wooden beams crisscrossing overhead. A guard and reception desk sat to one side, a half circle of marble. We could see two heads behind it, but no details of the security.

Except for the lobby, the front part of the building's first floor was all retaila couple of boutiques, a men's formal-wear store, a sports-collectibles shop, a coffee shop and a beer-and-steaks restaurant on the corner.

TrendDirect, a direct mail advertising company, occupied floors two through five, plus the back part of the first floor. Six and seven were a single law firm, eight was occupied by an ad agency. Nine and ten were AmMath.

LuEllen had her game face on. "Ten stories," she said, as we cruised the neighborhood.

"Ten stories."

"Exactly."

The front of the building was on a wide street, but faced a grassy square, and most of the traffic was local. Both side streets were narrow, showing walls of black windows. There were three window wells on each side.

The rear of the building was on a wider, busier, dirtier street, smelling of truck coolant and exhaust. A half-dozen truck-parking bays backed up to a loading dock, with steel overhead doors opposite each truck bay. A windowless standard door, of steel, was at the center of the dock, between two of the big overhead doors. A smaller, street-level garage door, also steel, and just big enough for a small truck, was located at the end of the building. A video camera monitored the dock.

"What do you think?" I asked her. She was looking straight up through the windshield.

"I'd like to see the roof," she said.

"LuEllen." I'm just the tiniest bit afraid of heights.

"It's gonna be a tough building," she said. "That guard desk is a twenty-four-hour operation, and we know there are guards wandering around at night. Jack supposedly shot one who was making a routine round of the building. We could probably crack one of the doors in back, but then, the question is, could we get up? We can't tell without going inside."

"Gotta be a way."

"Probably. The fact that there's some kind of government top-secret connection makes me extra nervous. If we came down from the top. look, the building across the street from the south side is an office building. Turn here, I'll show you."

The building across the street was just as she said: another old warehouse, renovated, with glitzy neon-signed shops on the bottom floor, and what must've been offices on the floors above.

"The thing is, the security'll probably suck. There's no lobby, it's a little shabby, so it's probably a lot of individual offices. We could get access during the day, hide out inside, and get onto the roof at night. It's twelve floorstwo higher than TrendDirect," LuEllen said. She looked back and forth between the two buildings. "Narrow streets here. I bet it's not more than forty feet between the two cornices. We heave a climbing line across, slide down, and the TrendDirect roofs probably got no security at all. It'd be really unusual if it did."

"Why don't we get fake IDs and fool the guards," I said. "Or keys for the back doors?"

"Those are options."

"Or we could do a sneak." Sneak is private language. It amounts to doing an easy reconnaissance, like a phony delivery, to look over a target. LuEllen has done them twenty times. I usually go on public toursmost big companies have them, and they are very informative, if you know what to look for.

"That's another option," she admitted. But she liked the roof idea. She'd like the rush it'd bring, swinging out over the street at three o'clock in the morning. We spent another fifteen minutes looking at the building, and LuEllen shot a couple of rolls of color-slide film. She also got out of the car and looked into one of the window wells.

She came back, shaking her head. "Why would you put glass brick all the way up and down?" she complained. "People working in there have to breathe, for Christ's sakes. It's inhuman."

"LuEllen, the voice of the working man," I said.

"But you know what? It all looks very secure," she said. "Somebody went out of their way to be secure. and something else I just thought of."

"What?"

"How often are building guards armed? Like the old guy who got shot?"

I thought about that and shook my head "Not often."

"The place is tough," she said. "I'd turn it down, if I were working on my own, unless I had a very tight inside connection "

"Huh." We both thought about that as we rolled away, leaving the building behind. Neither of us had ever spent serious time in Dallas, and it turned out that the West End Historic District was historic not only because it was old, but because that was where John Kennedy was assassinated. We went past the memorial, not knowing exactly what it was until LuEllen spotted a Dealy Plaza sign.

"Do you remember Kennedy?" she asked, her face turned to the memorial as we passed by.

"Sometimes I think I do," I said. "But I think I mostly remember my folks telling me about him."

"I've only seen him in old TV shows," LuEllen said. "He seemed like an okay guy for a president."