“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.”
He was right, but there was no help for it. Every day that passed brought Whitemark’s version of String closer to completion. If we didn’t move quickly, there wouldn’t be any point in doing it at all.
“Look, couldn’t we spend a week scouting all of them, and then pick the best two or three?” Dace asked.
“We don’t have a week,” I said. “We have to take our best shot and go into the computers and see where we are. Maybe we’ll only need one or two, and all the other scouting would be a waste of time.”
“But . . .”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” LuEllen said, waving us down. “It makes me nervous, but I didn’t say we couldn’t do it. We have to be careful, that’s all.”
“I don’t like it,” Dace said. “I hate sitting around here. I wish I could come along and drive. Or something. Anything.”
“We already talked about that. Having you along wouldn’t help, it’d only make things worse,” LuEllen snapped. “Let’s just work on this list, okay?”
We wanted to do three specific things inside the Whitemark computers. We wanted to interfere with the programs used to design the Hellwolf. We wanted to destroy Whitemark administrative systems. And we wanted to attack the computer itself, to fundamentally bollix up the way it operated.
The best way to do that was to get the entry codes of the top systems programmer. With those codes we would be able to move through the whole system. But going after a systems man was dangerous. Computer experts are paranoically sensitive about security: if we broke into the top man’s house he might change his codes as a matter of routine. It would take only a few minutes, and he could do it himself, so why not?
Instead of going after the systems programmer first, I decided to go after an engineer and a manager and hope we could get into the programming levels through their terminals.
“We want a suburban neighborhood of single-family houses, not an apartment complex, because there are fewer people around. We don’t want kids, because kids get sick and stay home from school, or come home at odd times. And if there aren’t any kids, both the husband and wife are probably out during the day, at work,” LuEllen said, ticking off the points on her fingers. “If the neighborhood and the house are right, the Ebberly woman ought to be our top target. Bobby’s credit report says her husband is an executive with the Postal Service, which is a nine-to-five job. The other ones, where the husband works for Whitemark and the wife works somewhere else, it’s hard to tell how important they are. They could be working late shifts or early shifts.”
“So we go for the woman, the personnel evaluator. Samantha Ebberly. Samantha and Frank,” I said.
LuEllen nodded. “We’ll give them first look, anyway.”
That night I did a few spreads with the tarot, but couldn’t find anything significant. The Fool was in hiding.
WE LEFT THE apartment at nine o’clock the next morning. The day was already thick and sultry, with thin, morose clouds sliding off to the south. We were dressed in tennis whites and court shoes. We carried tennis bags with racket handles sticking out of the side pockets.
“White folks think burglars are these big black dudes with panty hose on their heads, who come in the middle of the night. They won’t look twice at a white couple walking around at ten o’clock in the morning with tennis rackets,” LuEllen said while we were buying the equipment. “We put the crowbar and the bolt cutters, the gloves and your tools and the electronic stuff in the bottom of the bags. If there’s a problem, we ditch the bags and jog back to the car. Jogging is one way you can run in the ’burbs without a single soul paying attention to you.”
The Ebberlys lived in Falls Church, Virginia, in a neighborhood of upper-middle-class ranch homes and bungalows. The streets had names like Willow Lane and Crabapple Court, and twisted endlessly back on each other like a ball of twine. There were sailboats in the side yards, basketball hoops on garages, heavy, black barbecue grills on brick and stone patios. The houses were separated by tall hedges and lines of weeping willows.
We drove by the Ebberlys’ home and LuEllen looked it over.
“It feels empty,” she said. The house was a two-story, split-entry design with evergreen bushes on either side of the front door. She was pleased by the layout.
“I like those shrubs. They cut off the view from the side. These streets are good, too, with the curves. There’s nobody right across the street looking at the target’s front door. Gives you some extra privacy to work.”
We went by a second time. She took out a pair of compact Leitz binoculars and scanned the place.
“You look for lumps of dark green grass in the backyard, especially along the fences,” LuEllen said idly. “If they have a dog, and he does his business in the yard, there’ll be dark clumps of grass, like pimples. It’s not a sure thing, but it can warn you off.”
There was nothing. Satisfied by the house, we drove six blocks out to a convenience store, where we had seen a drive-up phone. Checking the list from Bobby, she called the Ebberlys at their separate offices. Samantha came on, and LuEllen rattled the receiver a few times and hung up. Frank wasn’t in his office, but had been just a minute ago. He was probably down the hall for coffee, according to the woman who answered the phone, but he had an appointment coming up so he should be right back. LuEllen promised to call in fifteen minutes.
“Get my bag,” she said. I reached into the backseat for her bag, as she dropped another coin into the phone. “Who now?” I asked.
“The house.” She listened while the Ebberlys’ house phone rang thirty times, then glanced around the parking lot. Sure that nobody was watching, she took a pair of compact bolt cutters from the tennis bag and nipped off the phone receiver.
“Let’s go,” she said, tossing the receiver in the backseat. “Let’s do it.”
“You’re sure?”
“Goddamnit, let’s do it,” she snarled. LuEllen carries no excess fat, and now her face muscles stood out in bundles. She slipped a packet of white powder out of her purse, carefully tipped some on a matchbook, and snorted it up.
“You want some?”
“No.”
“Good stuff,” she said. “It’ll give you an edge.”
“I’ve got an edge,” I said.
“Then drive.”
As I pulled out of the parking lot, she retrieved the amputated receiver from the backseat and stuffed it out of sight in the glove compartment.
“If you cut the receiver off, nobody will try to use the pay phone,” she explained. “That means nobody will hang it up, so the phone should still be ringing at the Ebberlys’ when we get there.”
“If there’s nobody home.”
“Right.”
We stopped at a neighborhood park two blocks from the target. Both tennis courts were occupied. We did some stretches, got the bags, and walked down the street toward the Ebberlys’.
“When we get there, we turn right in. I knock. If somebody comes to the door, we ask where the park is. If we hear the phone, and nobody answers the knock, you back up so I can get at the door. I pop it, and we go in. Keep everything slow,” she said quietly. As she talked, her head turned from the street up to me, and back to the street. Her smile switched on and off, the perfect rhythm for a friendly husband-wife talk on the way home from a tennis game. The streets were eerily quiet for a nice summer day. No kids, no cars.
“It’s an older suburb, one of my favorite situations,” LuEllen said. “Young families can’t afford it. The people who moved here when the
houses were cheap are in their forties and fifties. Their kids are growing up. There’s nothing to do here during the day, so the teenagers take off for work, or go into the city or out to the beaches. It’s empty, nobody home.”
She glanced up at me and grinned. “You’re twitching.”
“I’ll be okay,” I said, irritably. The words were strangled in my own ears.
“It’s a trip,” she said. She put her hand up to her face as though she were coughing and took another hit on the cocaine.
Nothing moved along the street as we came up to the house. LuEllen looked casually around. “Let’s do it,” she said hoarsely. Halfway up the drive, we could hear the phone ringing. On the front step. LuEllen pushed the doorbell with a knuckle, and then knocked. Nothing. She took a silent dog whistle from her pocket and blew on it, hard. There was no answering bark.
“Probably okay,” she said, looking around again. We’d been at the door for fifteen seconds. She took a short, curved bar from the tennis bag, and I stepped back to cover her with my body. She shoved one end of the bar in the crack between the door and the jamb, and threw her full weight against it. There was a loud crack, and the door popped open.
“Goddamn. That was loud,” I muttered.
“Nobody ever looks,” she said. She pushed the door open with the back of her hand, and we stepped inside. We were in a short hall off the living room. The kitchen was to the left, with coffee cups and cereal bowls still on the table. The living room was furnished with a couch and easy chair, a piano, a couple of tables. There was a cheap Art Barn—type oil painting over the couch.
“Let’s move. Get the gloves on,” LuEllen said. She handed me a pair of latex surgeon’s gloves from the tennis bag.
“The computer’s probably upstairs in this kind of house,” she said. “You go up there. Check all the bedrooms before you do anything. I’ll check the basement.” As I headed up the stairs, she picked up the phone in the kitchen to kill the ringing.
The computer was in a converted bedroom. I checked the rest of the rooms, found nobody, and went back to the computer. It was a standard IBM-AT with a Hayes modem. An inexpensive plastic disk box sat next to it. I brought the computer up and started flipping through the disks. All but three were neatly labeled—Word Perfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Files, and so on. The three unlabeled disks were from different manufacturers, so Ebberly probably kept track of the contents simply by remembering the brand names. I took a box of blank disks and a special disk-cracking program of my own out of the tennis bag. When the computer came up, I loaded my cracker disk, and stripped the directory out of the first unnamed disk. Games.
I loaded one to make sure, and a popular baseball game flashed on the screen. Pirated, of course. I killed it and shoved in a second disk. It was a custom communications program. After a little manipulation it coughed up a short list of seven-letter words. Code words.
“That’s the baby,” I muttered to the machine. It took two minutes to duplicate the disk on one of my blanks.
As I made the copy, LuEllen was working in the other parts of the house. From the sound of it, she was trashing the place, but there was no time to look.
When the code disk was copied, I dropped it in my bag and pushed in the third disk. More games. I put in another disk, labeled as Files. I opened one and found personal letters. I opened another, and an accounting program showed a list of personal accounts. The Ebberlys were doing well, according to the accounts—and I was pretty sure that they weren’t being clever with mislabeled disks. As I put the original disks back in the storage box, LuEllen came to the door. She was panting.
“How’s it going?”
“Halfway there,” I said. She nodded and disappeared, and I looked at the phone outlet where the modem was plugged in. It was a standard AT&T connection. I got a screwdriver from the tennis bag, removed the wall plate, and pulled out the tangle of wires behind it. It took a minute to find the right wires, isolate them, and strip a half-inch length off each. The bug, a piece of exotic hardware about the size of a beer bottle cap, clipped onto the bare wires. The work was not difficult, but it was delicate. Every move took an eternity.
When it was done, I put the wall plate back in place and screwed it in tight. If a knowledgeable phone tech took the plate off, the bug was hanging there like a great, fat leech. With any luck, it wouldn’t happen for years.
“We’ve been in ten minutes. That’s my personal record,” LuEllen said from the door. Her face was screwed tighter than I’d ever seen it.
“Right. I’m done.” I threw all the tools back in the tennis bag and wiped my forehead on a shirtsleeve. “Christ. I’m falling out.”
“Let me in there,” LuEllen said. She pulled open the drawers in the file cabinets and dumped the papers on the floor.
“Like we were looking for money,” she said. “Let’s go.”
We walked back to the front door, where she picked up her tennis bag. “Carry mine,” she said. “It’s heavy.” I stripped off my gloves and took her bag. It felt like an anchor was stuffed inside.
“What’s in here?” I asked.
“Guns.”
“What?”
“Pistols. Heaters. Rods. Gats. You know. Guns. One of the Ebberlys is a collector.”
“Why take them? If we get stopped . . .”
“Because this is supposed to be a horseshit smash-and-grab burglary, looking for money, dope, jewelry. One inch up from a stereo thief,” she said as we stepped out on the porch. She carefully pulled the door shut behind us. From ten feet away, it would look intact. “Nobody but a real specialist will leave guns behind. On the street, pistols are as good as cash. If we left them, the cops would know something was wrong. We had to take them.”
“So what do we do with them?” I asked as we walked out of the Ebberlys’ driveway.
“Throw them in the river,” she said. “Drop them in a sewer. I don’t care. We couldn’t leave them.”
Our walk back to the car seemed to take twice as long as the walk to the house. A mailman came down the street in his red, white, and blue jeep, and nodded at us as we went by. LuEllen told me twice to slow down and talk. “You look like one of those long-distance race-walkers,” she said with a practiced smile. “Slow the fuck down.” At the car, I dropped the tennis bag in the back and buckled up before we pulled away.
“Jesus Christ,” I said after a couple of blocks, as my stomach uncoiled.
“It does get intense,” LuEllen giggled. She went into her purse for the cocaine again and took two hard hits.
I’d never been caught inside a factory during one of my midnight research excursions. With a couple of exceptions, I walked inside with a regular employee, a paid guide. If somebody had stopped us to question my presence, the employee was supposed to claim I was a friend waiting for him to get off, that we didn’t think it would hurt if I hung around for a while, sorry about that, etc.
On the few occasions I went into a hostile plant, cold, the pre-entry research had been so thorough and the objectives so limited, that I had been more interested than excited, and not particularly worried.
This entry had been different. More free-form. Like jazz, say, compared to Bach. If you’re an anonymous guy in a huge defense plant and a security guard comes by, that’s one thing; there’s a ninety-nine percent chance you can talk your way out of any problems. If you’re in somebody’s house and they walk in the door, that’s something else altogether.
I was still buzzing from the entry and LuEllen started backseat driving. She kept me three miles an hour under the speed limit, and called out every street and stop sign. When we got back, Dace met us at the door with an anxious look.
“What happened?” he demanded.
“What does it look like?” asked LuEllen.
“We went in,” I said, grinning. “It was perfect.”
“Get the computer stuff?”
“Yeah. We’re wired in.”
LuEllen walked across the room and grabbed him by the ears.
“C’mere, you,” she said, and tugged him into the bedroom and slammed the door. I was left by myself in the front room. A few minutes later, when I realized the apartment wasn’t quite as soundproof as I had thought, I got the watercolor kit and drove down to the Potomac. It was hot and humid; the buildings across the river shimmered like white silk scarves, and I tried to get them down just like that.
I GOT BACK to the apartment late in the afternoon, arriving just behind a metallic-blue Corvette. The ‘Vette took the first available slot and I pulled in three spaces down. The ’Vette’s driver was already striding down the lot when I got out of the car. It was an entrancing sight. She was small, dark-haired, and perfectly built. She moved like a dancer.
She used her key at the entry door and let it close behind her. I used my own key and caught her waiting for the elevator. She looked me over with a careful eye.
“You must be one of the people in two-A,” she said, with a touch of a French accent.
“Yes. And you’re . . .”
“Two-D,” she said. “Are you . . . a business?”
“Consultants,” I said.
“Ah, consultants,” she said brightly, as though it explained everything. In Washington, of course, it probably did. “To tell you the truth, I was happy to see Louis and his little friends move out.”
“Louis?”
“The landlord.”
“Oh, sure. I’ve never met him. One of my associates actually rented the place.”
“Ah.” The elevator came and she got in and pushed the button for the second floor.
“What, uh . . .” I gave her my best, most open smile. “I can’t resist gossip, I’m afraid. That’s why I’m a consultant. What about Louis’s friends?”
She shrugged, and her eyes evaded mine. “If one is heterosexual . . .” She shrugged.
“There’s an uneasy feeling. I know what you mean.”