John Sandford - The Devil's Code

"Up in Minnesota," she said. I'd never known she was a smalltown girl, though if I'd thought about it, I might've guessed. And I waited. No small-town kid has ever been through another small town without some kind of comment about the other town's inferiority. She said, "But the place I grew up, at least we had a Dairy Queen."

Yup.

Corbeil's place was set on a ridge above Texas Highway 185; the place was a sprawling yellow log-cabin-style house. Not new, but not antique, either: the kind of log place that city people buy. We couldn't see it all from the road, but a half-dozen outbuildings of one kind or another were scattered about the place: a steel pole barn stuffed with hay, what was probably a machine shed, a six-car garage, what might possibly have been a bunkhouse or an office buildingtwo doors, and a row of windows with decorative shutters next to each windowa long, low stable with a training ring off one side, and what might have been a pump shed.

One pasture, surrounded with barbed wire and with a circular growth pattern in the grass that suggested a center-pivot watering system, contained a half-dozen Brahman cattle. The rest of the place was that kind of shaggy gray-green, ready for winter. A couple of hundred white-faced cows were clumped around what we could see of the rest of his pasture land, which continued to rise, in a series of steps, behind the ranch house.

According to the plat book, Corbeil owned 1,280 acres two square miles, a mile wide and two miles deep. There were roads on two sides: Highway 185, which ran east-west along the front of the house, and Beulah Drive, which ran north-south, along the west side of the ranch.

A mile north of Highway 185, as we drove up Beulah on the west side of Corbeil's property, an old ramshackle farmhouse squatted well back from the road in a clump of trees, with weeds growing up in the two-tire-track driveway. The place looked dead, but there was a newer pizza-dish-sized satellite TV antenna on the roof, and another, old-style dish on the lawn out back, so we figured somebody probably lived there.

We continued on the county road to what we figured was the end of Corbeil's property, and then went two miles on, where we found the remnants of what must have been another old farm: a grove of trees set back from the road with traces of a track going back into the trees. I turned around on the track, and in the silence and emptiness of the place, got out and trotted back to the trees, and found an old crumbling chimney, and a parking spot littered with corroding beer cans. Maybe the local lover's lane.

On the way back out, as we approached the north end of Corbeil's land again, I pointed to the fence line that marked the edge of Corbeil's property.

"Up aheadsee those trees? I want to hop out with the glasses. You take the truck back up the road about five or six miles, then come get me. Give me fifteen minutes," I said.

"Where're you going?"

"I'm going to walk along that fence row, see what I can see on the other side of that hill."

"Probably a rancher who doesn't like trespassers."

"I'll tell him I'm an artist," I said. "I'll take my bag with me."

At the trees, I hopped out with the bag and the binoculars, and as LuEllen rolled away, I cut through a copse of junky roadside trees, crossed a fence where it joined another fence line, and headed up the hill. As I said, the countryside was empty: roads and fences and fields and not a lot of people. I was walking through some kind of ground cover, springy underfootit looked grassy, and it looked as though it were regularly mowed, but it wasn't anything like the alfalfa or clover I was familiar with.

I followed the fence line four hundred yards up the hill, and finally reached a broad crest where I could look down on Corbeil's ranch. Lots more cows and a big stock tank with a watering station. What interested me more, though, was the satellite dish that sat next to the pump station. It was one of the big ones, the old-fashioned dishes, but it looked well-kept; and there was nobody there to look at a TV. Still, it was moving as I watched. I couldn't actually see the movement, but when I looked away, and then looked back, it seemed that the dish had moved. I squatted next to the fence, lined up a barb on the barbed-wire with one edge of the dish: and yes, it was moving. It moved for the best part of five or six minutes, and then stopped.

As best I could judge, from the direction of the road down the hill, the dish was pointing northeast when it stopped. I could see the backside of the old abandoned-looking farmhouse a mile south, and with the binoculars, could make out the satellite dish behind it: that dish was also pointing northeast.

Huh.

Were the dishes coordinated? Were they talking to satellites? And if they were, so what? There are uplinks all over the place: even sports bars had them. But bars didn't have coordinated dishes scattered over a couple of square miles. If the dishes were linked, they would have, in effect, a huge baseline, which would be the same as having a much bigger and more sensitive dish. And with those photos.

We were onto something. A secret operation of some kind? But who were they hiding it from? If they were working with the feds, they'd just go ahead and stick the dishes up anywhere; they wouldn't be hidden away on a ranch in Waco.

I was waiting in the trees when LuEllen came back.

"Anything?"

"Yeah. I think we're getting a handle on something. Did you see a satellite dish at Corbeil's? One of those big babies?"

"I didn't notice. I don't think so."

We cruised the place again, running down Highway 185, but no dish was visible from the highway. "Could be down out of sight," she said.

"Or maybe there are only two. or maybe there are more, tucked away like that stock tank."

"What are you thinking?" she asked.

"A little fantasy," I said. "They were willing to kill for those pictures, and we have what might be code. We got that list of names for all those Middle Eastern countries. I wonder if somehow they aren't hijacking photos from the recon satellites and selling them."

"For what?"

"Sell surveillance of Pakistan to India, and surveillance of India to Pakistan. Sell surveillance of Iraq to Iran, and Iran and Syria to Iraq; of Israel to Syria. Of Taiwan to China, and China to Taiwan."

"They'd get caught."

"I could tell you ten ways to do it, that they'd never get caught. That the buyers would never see the sellers. That's what the Internet is for. Any buyer who's getting this stuff. it'd be the biggest secret they had."

"Okay. So what next?"

"Let's go back to Austin. I need to do some shopping," I said.

"Always shopping."

"We'll come back tonight."

"A scout?"

"A scout."

In Austin, we went to an outdoor-sports store and bought a good compass; a GPS receiver with a map function; topographic maps of the East Waco area, including Corbeil's ranch; and a cheap black daypack. At a building-supply place, picked up a builders' protractor, a bubble level, and some duct tape. And in a sewing store, a card with five yards of elastic banding. I spent an hour in the parking lot with the GPS receiver, figuring out how to work it; especially interesting were the time and distance functions, and the backtrack function.

Then there was the matter of the gun.

"We need a better one," LuEllen said. "Look what they did to Lane, and what they did to Jack. Those were executions, so they just don't give a fuck. If we go on a scout, and they catch us, and they've got gunsthis is Texas, Kiddthey're going to shoot us down like dogs."

"Anytime you buy a gun."

"Ought to be easy in Texas," she said. "Let me call Weenie."

It was easy in Texas. All we had to do was drive to Houston, which was a little better than two hours away, meet a guy in a parking lot near George Bush Intercontinental Airport, and give him $600 for a cheap Chinese-made AK with two magazines, fifty rounds of 7.65 X 39, and a nylon sling.