The Fool's Run

  “Holy shit,” I muttered.

  “What?” LuEllen said anxiously.

  “Bobby shut us down. I hope.”

  “You hope?”

  “Yeah. I hope it was Bobby.”

  A second later the phone rang, and we all looked at it like it was a cobra. After a couple of rings, I picked it up and heard the familiar carrier tone. I turned on the modem again.

  Those suckers fast. They on line, followed me at least to Rome. Maybe all the way to banana stand.

  You okay? We okay?

  Yes. But you must shut down now. No more entries or they get us.

  Yes. Will call later, still special line.

  ’Bye.

  “What’s the special number?” Maggie asked.

  “It’s a cutout. I don’t know the details, but it signals him that I’m trying to reach him. He’s changed the main number, the one I used to have, and I don’t have it anymore. We don’t know exactly what NSA might do if they caught us, but just in case . . . I mean, if they use chemicals, it’s better if I don’t know how to get him. If they get the special number out of me, and try to use it, he’ll see the trace and get out.”

  “Good luck on that,” LuEllen said.

  We all sat and looked at the monitor for a moment. There was nothing on it.

  “That’s it,” I said, feeling suddenly tired. “We’re all done.”

  “Jesus,” said Dace.

  I looked over at Maggie. “Satisfied?”

  “I’m going in to Chicago,” she said. “Dillon will be doing a final analysis.”

  “We’ll shut down here. Are you coming back, or should we come there?”

  “You wait here. There might be something else Dillon thinks we should do—I don’t know what. But maybe something. I’ll bring the rest of the money.”

  She looked pinched, taut. If the job wasn’t done now, it would never be done.

  Dillon would know.

  Chapter 14

  THE FIGURE OF Maggie was the best painting I’d ever done. She looked at it when it was finished and said, “It’s mine.” The day after the end of the attack, I rolled it and slid it into a shipping tube as she packed her clothes.

  “This has been a strange experience,” she said on the way to National. She had the window down and her hair blew out behind her. “A team like yours opens up all kinds of possibilities. When I get back to Chicago, I’m going to ask Dillon for a crash study of corporate aggression. To work out the limits and the consequences.”

  “Tell him to call me,” I said. “I have some thoughts about it.”

  “Yes.” She turned and stared out the window, lost in thought. “This attack on Whitemark . . . there’s a temptation to write it out, document it, then stash it somewhere. It could be a classic someday. Like Clausewitz’s On War.”

  “Don’t use my name,” I said. “Call me Ann Smith. Or something equally innovative.”

  At the airport, I waited until her plane was called and kissed her goodbye. She walked out through the gate with the painting tube under her arm. She looked back once and smiled.

  Dace and LuEllen finished packing his apartment. The few things he wanted to keep were put in storage, and the rest of it was sent to a Goodwill store. I spent the afternoon working at the apartment, disassembling the office and cleaning up. A little portable computer with a built-in modem watched the phone, in case Bobby called.

  The attack programs we used against Whitemark had been written in a deliberately structured, functional, but inelegant programming style. If NSA or the FBI had a textual analysis capability for computer code, the structured programs wouldn’t match any examples of my usual programming style. It was a small piece of security, probably unnecessary, but who knows?

  The computers and printer had to go for the same security reasons. If there were tapes of incoming data from our terminals, a sophisticated analysis of transmission peculiarities might identify them. Same with the printer type, should they compare samples with the printout sent to the cops with the pornography package. I hated the thought of dropping the equipment in the river, so I packed it with newspapers in three big cardboard boxes, hauled the boxes to a delivery service, and had them sent to an elementary school in a slum area. The note said the equipment was from a friend.

  Dace and LuEllen showed up just before dark and we all went out to eat. Later that evening, I put the phones back where they were when we rented the place. We would leave the working table. The landlord could get rid of it.

  The next morning, Dace and LuEllen took care of financial matters and shopped. I called Bobby at the special number, told him we’d be out of touch for a few days, and took the portable and the rest of our personal stuff down to the car. When the apartment was empty, I started wiping the place down. It was another piece of security that would probably be unnecessary, but Maggie, before she left for Chicago, had insisted on it.

  “We know the place is used by prostitutes. If there should be any trouble here in the next few weeks, and they find fingerprints from a computer expert and an executive from Anshiser Aviation and a Washington publicity expert and a burglar . . .”

  “I’m not on record as a burglar anywhere,” LuEllen said.

  “You see my point, though?” Maggie had said. “Somebody smart could reach the right conclusion.”

  “The chances of a problem are almost nonexistent,” I said.

  “Exactly. Almost. But not quite. It’ll take two hours, and it’ll eliminate the possibility.” She stuck out her lower lip. “For me?”

  I WAS NEARLY finished wiping the apartment when the phone rang. It was Maggie, calling from Chicago.

  “It’s done,” she said crisply. “I’ll be back tonight with the cash.”

  Dillon’s analysis indicated that Whitemark was reeling. Its stock had dropped into the forties, then started drifting back up, but only because of takeover rumors. The Hellwolf project was dead in the water, due to massive problems with their design system computers. Work on their copy of the String system had stopped. Manufacturing had problems with supply coordination, and couldn’t straighten them out. Routine administrative work was completely tangled. The company would again fail to meet the payroll at the end of the week. The unions threatened to walk out unless the paychecks were validated.

  The press was still pushing the corruption stories, and procurement people at the Pentagon were afraid to talk to anybody at Whitemark. The Whitemark systems director had been fired after his arraignment on child pornography charges. To make everything worse, the FBI was crawling all over the place, questioning employees about a possible source of the attack, which they suspected was internal. The interrogations further disrupted the process of straightening out the company.

  “Rudy is very pleased—also a little frightened. He hired the biggest computer security people in the country to revamp our system,” she said. Her voice sounded oddly tight.

  “Who have they got?” I asked.

  She mentioned three names, and I recognized all of them. One was a charlatan, but the other two were good. They were all expensive, and not likely to miss much.

  “How soon will they finish?” I asked.

  She hesitated for a moment and then said, “Yesterday.”

  “Yesterday?”

  “Rudy hired them right after we started the attack on Whitemark. My reports scared everybody out here, so he hired these people and gave them three weeks and a big bunch of money. Most of what they did was rearranging phone lines and moving furniture, and they changed some procedures. There wasn’t much new equipment involved. Anyway, they finished yesterday. Rudy was talking about hiring you, in a year or so, to see if you could crack it.”

  “You know where to find me,” I said.

  “Right. On a sandbar,” she said. “Have you got the apartment cleaned up?”

  “You mean wiped? Just about. I’m just finishing the kitchen now. We could meet downtown somewhere to split the cash, but we thought this was convenient to the airpor
t.”

  “No, no, I’ll see you there. I should be in about seven o’clock.”

  DACE AND LUELLEN got back in the early afternoon, and Dace had shed another five years. He was wearing an expensive tweed coat, a dark blue shirt with silk knit tie, whipcord pants, and leather boat shoes. He was pleased with his appearance.

  “For Christ’s sake, don’t touch anything,” I said, as they came in.

  “What do you think?” he said, spreading his arms. LuEllen stood behind him, grinning.

  “Straight out of Esquire,” I said.

  “And look at this,” he said. He pulled out a bundle of traveler’s checks, twenty-five thousand in tens and twenties.

  “I made him go to ten different banks,” LuEllen laughed.

  “This ought to take care of us for six months or a year,” Dace said, thumbing through the stack of checks. “If it doesn’t, we can always come back for more.”

  With the new clothes and the money burning in his pocket, Dace wanted to run around to newspaper and public relations offices and buy drinks for a few friends and contacts.

  “It wouldn’t be a good idea if I just disappeared,” he said. “Besides, I like some of these guys. I’ll be back in time to eat.”

  I got my painting gear, and LuEllen and I went down to the banks of the Potomac, where I did a watercolor as good as anything I’d ever done. The Whitemark attack sat on the surface of my mind, but the painting took care of itself. It was all eye and hand, and the pigment seemed to flow without effort. By the time I finished, I was beginning to hyperventilate. LuEllen had gone off across the park, and as I was looking at it, wondering about one more touch, one last touch—it’s always the last ones that ruin paintings—she walked up and looked.

  “Jesus Christ, Kidd, that’s good,” she said.

  I swirled the brush through the ice-cream bucket I used as my main water container. When it was clean, I dropped it back in its box, and tossed the bucket of water out on the grass. It was good, by God.

  September is beautiful in Washington, one of the best months of the year. The sky was a perfect china blue, and there was just a hint of leaf smoke in the air. LuEllen was chatting along as we walked back to the car, and I kept sneaking looks at the painting. The nude of Maggie was the best figure I’d ever done. This was the best landscape, and it had come out in two hours. Was it luck? Or was it a breakthrough?

  I put the painting in the trunk, carefully braced between two suitcases, on top of the portable, so it wouldn’t rattle around.

  On the way back to the apartment, I stopped at a grocery and bought a pack of kitchen gloves. Having wiped the entire place, I didn’t intend to leave any isolated prints during the final clean-up.

  At the apartment, there was an odd moment before we went inside. A car was parked across the street, a red Buick with tinted windows. Dark glass wasn’t uncommon in Washington, and I paid no attention. But as we walked up to the apartment door, I happened to glance back at it and caught the white crescent of face close to the glass in the car’s back window. Maggie?

  If you work in figurative art, you quickly become aware of the strange qualities of human perception. A mother can walk up to a playground and immediately spot her kid among dozens of others, all of whom are about the same size and color and wearing similar clothing. You can see a friend from a block away, too far to pick out details of face or color or dress, and recognize him instantly.

  I saw the flash of white, and thought, Maggie. But nobody got out of the car, and she wasn’t due for two hours. I let it go and followed LuEllen into the apartment and up the stairs.

  Dace was sitting in the kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the Post. He looked up when we came in and said, “Haven’t touched a thing except this coffee cup!”

  “You ready?” LuEllen asked, kissing him on the forehead.

  “Anytime,” he said.

  “I want to go through this place literally on our hands and knees, to make sure we’re not leaving anything behind,” I said.

  “Let me finish the sports,” Dace said. “I don’t think they write about the ’Skins down in Mexico.”

  LuEllen and I pulled on the plastic gloves, and she followed me to the first bedroom. I got down on my knees and looked under the bed. She pulled open the drawers in the bureau.

  “There’s not going to be anything,” she said.

  “Look under the shelf paper, too,” I said. She rolled her eyes and started pulling the shelf paper out of the drawers. We were about finished with the first room when the doorbell rang. LuEllen looked at me, and I stood up.

  “Maggie,” I said. “I thought I saw her . . .”

  “Could be the landlord,” Dace said, coming out of the kitchen with the paper in one hand and the coffee cup in the other. “I told him we’d be pulling out.” He crossed to the door and opened it.

  Two men stood in the hallway. The one in back was mostly out of sight, but he was big. The one in front was wearing a neat red-and-white striped golf shirt, tan slacks, and tennis shoes. Ratface. He pulled a long, skinny gun from under his shirt and raised it toward Dace. Dace said “Wait” and held up the newspaper, and Ratface shot him three times in the head.

  The shots went phut-phut-phut. LuEllen, who had gone into the hallway before I did, spun and started toward me and we both surged back into the bedroom, and I slammed the door and flipped the lock. Since it was a whorehouse, the door was heavy wood and the locks were solid, but I picked up the rosewood dressing table and literally threw it against the door. LuEllen didn’t stop to look. She dashed across the bedroom to the old-fashioned, double-hung windows, frantically turned the crescent lock on the top of one and slid it up, and slapped at the hooks holding the screen outside.

  “Go—go—go,” she screamed; she had her feet out the window, and I ran across the room toward her. The guy in the hallway outside kicked the bedroom door at the lock, but it held, and he kicked it again, but by then I was at the window, watching LuEllen drop into the alley behind the apartment. She landed like a cat and turned to run toward the back of the building. I slid through, hung for a second, heard the door splinter, and dropped.

  LuEllen was thirty feet in front of me when I landed; I yelled, “Car, car,” and she cut behind the apartment. When I turned the corner she was squatting, gasping for breath, next to the passenger door. I unlocked the driver’s side, slid in, pulled the lock, and cranked the engine. We left the back end of the lot in a hurry, and LuEllen, looking back, said, “There he is!” Looking in the rearview mirror as we turned the corner, I saw Ratface limp around the building, stop, and then hobble back out of sight.

  “They killed Dace,” LuEllen moaned.

  “Yeah.” There was nothing else to say.

  I took a left at the next corner, drove a block, took another left, and headed west toward a big commercial street. There was no sign of a chase.

  “What the fuck happened?” LuEllen demanded. “Who were those guys?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But they’ve got Maggie, too.”

  “What?” LuEllen was stricken, her face white and drawn, but she was functioning. “What makes you think that?”

  “When we were going into the building, I thought I saw her face in a car across the street. I didn’t think it could be her, because she’s not due for a couple hours. But I got a bad feeling. . . .”

  “They’re not coming after us,” LuEllen said. “Let’s get on another street somewhere, find a phone, and call Chicago. They’ll know if she left early. If she didn’t, they should know her flight number, and we can catch her at the airport.”

  I drove another two miles and spotted a phone booth outside a convenience store. I pulled around to the side of the store where the car couldn’t be seen from the street, and called Chicago, collect.

  Maggie had not left early. She’d taken a three o’clock flight out of O’Hare, just as she had planned, and was still in the air. Dillon was stunned by the shooting. “I don’t know what to t
ell you,” he said. “This is far out of bounds from anything I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Who would they be? Whitemark? They can’t just be some fuckin’ private eyes like you guys said,” I said.

  “That’s what we got from people in Washington—good people. That they’re just private detectives. I don’t know, it doesn’t add up.” There was another long silence and finally he said, “I can’t imagine it would be Whitemark. Big corporations can be ruthless, but we don’t have gunmen hanging around. I’m afraid it might be the federal people. When we checked on these private detectives, we heard they’d had some trouble with the government in the past. Remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember something like that.”

  “So maybe somebody’s got them on a string. It would be a way of . . . killing somebody without official involvement.”

  “But why would they come after us?”

  There was another moment of silence, and he said, in a cooler voice, “It’s very hard to think. Very hard. But suppose they figured out what happened at Whitemark and talked to each other, and said, ‘If we arrest these people, the publicity could set off a whole rash of these things. Like a rash of jet hijackings.’ If there is some kind of murder squad in the CIA or the NSA, they might have decided that this was the most expedient way to solve the problem.”

  “Jesus,” I said. I thought about the people I’d known in the Strategic Operations Group. A few were killers, plain and simple. They were career military men, Special Forces, and some held rank, but at heart, they were gunmen. If an intelligence agency needed a couple of shooters, they’d know where to find them. And private investigation was just the kind of job that attracted former company cowboys.

  “Where are you?” Dillon asked. I looked around, but there were no street signs. “I don’t know. Standing at a 7-Eleven on a street corner. We have to stay out of sight for a while and then head out to the airport in time to find Maggie.”