It was a matter of doing everything at once. It wasn’t good, but there was no choice.
BOBBY’S RESEARCH TURNED up a long list of potential burglary targets. Dace knew Washington like only a local newsman can, and LuEllen cross-examined him on street layouts, crime rates, and landscaping styles. As we narrowed the list of prospects to a dozen, Bobby went into the credit companies and pulled out full reports on the primary targets.
Late in the afternoon, with the list down to a handful of solid possibilities and their files in hand, we broke for dinner.
I drove, LuEllen in the front seat beside me, Dace in the back. As we stopped at the curb cut before entering the street, LuEllen reached over and touched my hand on the steering wheel, while turning to look at Dace.
“Okay, guys,” she said, smiling, “I don’t want anybody to look. But when we came out the door, there was a guy sitting in the driver’s seat of that green van up the street. I think he was looking for us in his outside mirror, and when we came out he looked back at us. Now he’s not in the driver’s seat anymore. He’s not around. I think he’s in the back of the van.”
“Watching us?” asked Dace, not looking at the van. It was thirty feet up the street, on the opposite side.
“I’m paranoid,” said LuEllen. “I got a funny vibe when he looked at us. It was like our eyes met.”
“We can’t just sit here,” I said. I looked both ways and turned down the street toward the van.
“Dace, you look,” LuEllen said. “Like you’re talking to me, but look past my head and see if there’s anybody in the front seat.”
We passed the van and Dace grunted, “Nobody.”
“Shit,” said LuEllen.
“Maybe the guy was just getting out when you saw him and he left while we were walking to the car,” Dace suggested.
“Nope,” I said, looking in the rearview mirror. “The van just pulled out. He’s coming after us.” The van driver waited until there was another car between us, then fell in behind. LuEllen casually turned her head and watched for a few seconds and then turned back to me.
“What the fuck is this, Kidd?” she demanded.
“I don’t know. We haven’t made a move yet.”
“You’ve been doing the computer stuff. Could the cops be monitoring already?”
“No. That’s too paranoid,” I said. “There are probably a half million data transmissions every day in this town.”
She watched the van for another minute. “Well, then what?” she asked impatiently.
“I don’t know, but he’s breaking off, whoever he is,” I said. The van had followed a few blocks, but as we approached a traffic light at a major intersection, it slowed, waited for two additional cars to get between us, then did a U-turn, and headed back toward the apartment.
I took a left, drove a block, took another left, and headed back after it.
“Go past the apartments and come back from the other side. They won’t be looking in that direction,” LuEllen said.
When we got back, the van was parked on the street directly in front of the building. A tall man in green maintenance coveralls was just getting out of the back and when he slammed the door, the van pulled another half block up the street and stopped.
“So there are two of them,” LuEllen said. “The outside guy is a lookout. The inside man has a radio or maybe a beeper.”
“So now what?” asked Dace.
LuEllen looked at me. “Our security must be fucked,” she said.
“It’s not right,” I repeated. “For somebody to be onto us, it’d have to be the biggest coincidence in the world.”
“So what are we doing?” Dace asked.
“A million bucks,” I said. I thought about it. “We don’t even know if we’re the targets. If we are, and we can take the guy inside, we might find out what’s going on. We haven’t broken any serious laws yet. If we catch a guy in the place, and talk to him, we might find out exactly where we stand. And he might not be in there at all.”
“We better move if we’re gonna do it,” LuEllen said. “I’d be surprised if he’s in there for more than five minutes.”
I shook my head. “That’s if he’s burglarizing the place. If he’s tossing it, looking for something specific about us, or if he’s putting in bugs, he’ll be a little longer . . . Any ideas about that lookout?”
“Sure. I need a phone,” LuEllen said.
There was a phone box on the side of a recreation center two blocks away. LuEllen called the cops and then came running back.
“I told them that the guy in the green van picked up a little girl outside the rec center and took her down the street,” she said when she climbed back in the car. “They’ll have a car here in a minute. That’d be a top priority call.”
The squad car actually arrived less than a minute later. We waited on a side street. When the squad went by, I pulled around the block and went up an alley into the back entrance of the apartment parking lot. The cops had the van driver in the street.
“Dace, you wait here,” I said over my shoulder. “If LuEllen doesn’t come down in five minutes exactly, you get the cops up there.”
“Why don’t I come up?” he asked anxiously.
“I don’t have time to argue,” I said. LuEllen followed me into the building, and we took the steps to the second floor. At the door to the apartment, LuEllen put her finger to her lips, listened for a few seconds, then checked the door lock.
“Scratches,” she said, pressing her lips close to my ear. “They weren’t there before. They could come from an old-style automated lockpick.”
“Can we get inside?” I whispered back.
“He’ll hear us coming. If he’s armed, we’re in trouble.”
“Will he take the elevator or the stairway?”
“Stairs.”
“Let’s go back there.”
We walked back to the stairs and shut the steel fire door.
“You better go down and tell Dace we’re okay,” I said. “I’ll wait here and try to take him when he comes through the door.”
There was a small, mechanical sound from beyond the fire door. “Too late,” LuEllen said.
“He’s coming.”
“Shit. Get down the stairs, out of sight.”
LuEllen scrambled down the concrete steps and stopped below the next landing. I stood behind the fire door and waited. If the person coming down the hall was one of the alleged hookers who frequented the place, or a Pentagon general, this would be embarrassing.
But it wasn’t. The guy who came through the door was slender, anemic, with thin blond hair and pale, watery eyes. He was wearing coveralls and carrying the toolbox. He pushed the door open with his right hand and his body was into the doorway before he saw me. His eyes widened and his mouth dropped open, and I pivoted and kicked the door as hard as I could, a good solid karate-style thrust kick that smashed the steel door into his body and the side of his head.
His tool case fell. Its contents spilled over the landing as the door rebounded off him, and he half stumbled. I kicked a leg out from under him and rode him down to the concrete. He put out his hands to break his fall and I got a knee in his back and an arm around his throat.
“Fight and I’ll break your fuckin’ neck,” I said. LuEllen had come back up the stairs, and I said, “Tell Dace.” She turned to go, and froze: a rat-faced guy was on the landing. He had eyes like ball bearings and was pointing a small, black pistol at my forehead.
“Let him go, motherfucker,” Ratface said. He had a high-pitched, ragged-edged voice like a chalk squeak, but there was nothing ragged or shaky about the black hole at the end of the pistol’s barrel. It was cold and round and absolutely steady. I stood up and the guy beneath me got to his hands and knees, sobbing, saying, “Jesus Christ,” scooping his gear back into his toolbox. Except for a few pairs of pliers, screwdrivers, and some black plastic tape, the equipment was all electrical, and mostly illegal.
“Who the fuck are you???
? I asked Ratface. LuEllen looked like she was ready to make a move, but I put out a hand, and she relaxed.
“Shut up.” The hole at the end of the barrel never wavered.
When the tech’s box was packed, he stood up, shot me a fearful look, and scurried down the stairs past Ratface. The gunman backed down after him, the gun steady on my face.
“We’re walking out,” he said. “Don’t come after us.”
We heard the door slam below, then the fire door opened above us. Dace.
“What happened to you?” I asked him. “The second guy came in right on top of us with a gun.”
“Christ, the cops talked to him for a couple seconds, and then they left. I mean, they just got in their car and drove away. About one second later this guy was running over here. I never had a chance to get in front of him; I was too far away. I took the elevator up; I was hoping that if you were inside, he’d stop in the stairwell and wait or something.”
“How’d he get in the door?”
“Key,” Dace said.
“Probably had keys to the outer door, but not to the apartment. That’s how they got into the stairwell, too,” LuEllen said. She looked at me. “We all fucked up, it’s not Dace’s fault.”
I said, “Something’s really fouled up. This guy wasn’t a burglar, he was a wire man. And I can’t believe that somebody’s already on us. It must come out of Chicago.”
In the apartment we packed, and I took the phones apart. They were bugged. The bugs were crude and so was the installation.
“He wasn’t in here long enough to do much more,” I said. “We could probably sweep the place and we’d be okay.”
“Let’s check Chicago,” LuEllen said. She had packed everything she brought with her. She wasn’t planning to come back.
We moved into a Holiday Inn for the night. When I called Chicago, Maggie was vehement about her security.
“There’s no possibility of a leak here,” she said flatly. “Three people know about your team—me, Rudy, and Dillon. Period. And none of us would talk. It’s more likely this guy Dace is the problem.”
“I don’t think so. We go back too far,” I said.
“You don’t know, though.”
“No, I don’t, but he’s a friend. My instinct tells me he’s okay. He was scared today. And surprised.”
“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 dete
ctor. 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.”