John Sandford - The Fool's Run

"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."