John Sandford - The Devil's Code

"So do I," LuEllen said. "But you know what? I don't think they did a very good job with Frank. They needed to make him more attractive in the beginning and worse in the end, and show why Emma was attracted to Yum."

"I didn't think he was very attractive at all," Lane said. "I don't see how he could possibly compete with."

"Could we talk about what we're doing?" I asked.

"I think that would be good," Green said, "Since we're in these guys' hometown."

We brought them up to date on what we'd done, without providing any details that might be used against us in a court. We would have to trust them at some point, though, and I said, "We're seriously considering going into Corbeil's apartment. He has a T-1 phone line, and we think he probably uses it for rapid access into the company computers. There's a good chance that I can tap into his computer line, and that'll give us a door into their mainframe."

Lane said, "We've been looking at the photo you sent us, and I can't see anything in it. If we knew who the people were."

"It's a blank wall," I said. "Jack must have gotten something out of the computers that went with the photographs. That's what we need to find."

"I really, mmm, I had some problems back home and if I got caught going into a place, I could be looking at a long time," Green said. He sounded apologetic.

"You couldn't go in anyway," I said. "It's not an area where a black guy can wander around. We could use a couple of eyes, though."

"We could do that," Green said. "Do we know anything about the place?"

"We came up with these," I said, touching the drawings. "I've seen a couple of things in them; everybody ought to take a look, and see if we can spot anything else."

We did that, spreading the drawings around on the beds like pages from The New York Times on a Sunday afternoon. LuEllen said, eventually, "Look at this." She was pointing at a blank box.

"It's a blank box," Green said.

"It's a safe."

"Yeah?"

"Bet your ass it is," she said. "Let me look at the drawings for that wall. and for the opposite wall. Where are the materials specs, anyway?"

After a while, Lane and LuEllen went out for Cokes, and Green and I continued to look at the blueprints.

"You're pretty good at this," Green said after a while. It sounded like a statement, but there was a question inside of it.

"I've done it for a whilenot exactly this, but related stuff."

"I know a little bit about Longstreet," he said. I looked up at him: Longstreet was supposed to fade away into the pasta political seizure of a small town in the Mississippi delta, engineered with several tastefully chosen burglaries and a few bad moments at the dog pound, to say nothing of the weeks of hospitalization and physical rehab that followed.

"I wish people would forget about all of that," I said, finally.

"Most of them are forgetting, but not everybody," Green said. "What I'm saying is, my friends tell me that I should go all the way with you. That it's important."

"I'm not sure how important it is outside our little group," I said. "I wouldn't want you to be misled."

"Not too worried about that," he said. He stood up, stretched, looked out the sliding glass doors toward the golf course. "What I'm worried about is, I'm getting bored. Hard to stay sharp when you're bored, stuck in hotel rooms."

"Do you play golf?"

"Does a chicken have lips?"

"Why don't you take LuEllen out for a round? She's getting antsy herself. I'll read though these drawings for a while longer, keep an eye on Lane."

"Okay." He chewed on a lip for a minute, then said, "Think Lane has a little thing for you."

"Yeah?"

"A little thing," he said.

"I thought, maybe, you guys have been hanging around for a week or so."

He shook his head: "I'm not from the right social-educational strata."

"She's a bigot?"

"No, no. Never that. She's got a Ph.D. and I never quite went back for my GED, if you know what I mean. She's got this thing about. diplomas. Degrees."

"Huh. Don't know what to tell you," I said. And I didn't.

We spent some more time looking at the architect's drawings and when LuEllen got back, I said, "We go in through the garage. I can get us up to Corbeil's floor, but after that, I've got no guarantees. If we want to make it a quiet entry, I don't know. You'd need some lock picks or something. I don't think we could use an auto-pick. There are three other apartments up there."

"How are you going to get us up? If we don't know how long we're gonna be up, I don't think it'd be a good idea to take the elevator apart."

I explained it, and she said, "That means we need more scouting trips. And some more gear."

"I was thinking we'd go in Saturday night," I said. "That article that Bobby found said he was a big social guy. Saturday night in Dallas?"

"About ten o'clock?"

"If it's possible at all," I said.

"I wish I could get a look at his door," she said.

For each of the next three days, Green and LuEllen played thirty-six holes of golf on the Radisson course, while Lane and I hung out, sometimes together, sometimes separately. I got a lot of drawing done, and she was online with her business in Palo Alto.

LuEllen, it turned out, was a near-scratch golfer. "I'm damn good," Green said one night, "But she's better. I think if she was a little younger, and worked on it, she could probably go on the women's tour."

"Can't putt," LuEllen said.

"You could if you had a little patience," he said. "You never look." And they'd go off on a long, twisted argument about puttingor chipping or pitching or whateverthat would leave Lane and me nodding off.

The nights were more interesting. LuEllen and I scouted Corbeil's apartment from the golf course, with Green and Lane circling the course, listening to a police scanner, looking for cops. We'd bought Motorola walkie-talkies, apparently used by huntersthey were in camouflage colorsso they could call us instantly if anything came up. We'd found a better place to enter the golf course, where two uneven pieces of fence came together at a corner, next to a sidewalk. From one direction, you couldn't see us at all; from another, it looked like we'd turned the corner. From the third and fourth, you could see us plainly, but traffic was light enough that we could wait for holes.

On Wednesday night, we took a look at the garage. The garage entry was on the end of the building, and nicely landscaped, which was a break for us. Coming in from the golf course, we could get close without being seen. The garage was enclosed with a steel door, and a key card was used for entry. If I could get fifteen seconds with a key card, I could duplicate the signal easily enoughyou can buy the parts at Radio Shackbut getting fifteen seconds with a key card might be a problem. Not an insuperable one, but there appeared to be an easier way.

When the doors opened, they stayed open for as long the car was in the garage entranceway, and then for a few seconds longer. The doors operated on a simple infrared cell; the key card opened the door, and then, if a car was blocking either of two cells, the doors stayed up. All we had to do was block the cell when a car came out. The door would stay up until we unblocked the cell. Once inside, we would head for the freight elevator.

On Thursday, we got a bunch of photos of Corbeil from Bobby, memorized the face, and wiped them out of the computer. That same night, LuEllen found a tree she could climb, where she could look through the floor-to-ceiling windows of an apartment on the second floor.

"If his door is the same, it's a standard solid-wood door set in a steel frame," she told me when she came down. "I couldn't see the locks, but they're probably pretty good."

On Friday night, we were lying out in the grass outside his apartment, listening to a couple make love on a blanket twenty yards away. They continued for longer than seemed probable, then had an intense conversation about two people named Rhonda and Dave, who seemed to have been their respective spouses; then they started again.