“Jesus Christ, what are you talking about? That’s forty-five cents apiece if . . .” LuEllen squealed. The locksmith cut her off.
“Tell it to somebody else, lady. Somebody asks me for a bunch of key blanks for Elwin four-oh-twos, the kind of locks you find on rich guys’ apartments, and I sell the four-oh-twos, blank, no questions asked, for ten bucks. That’s the price.”
LuEllen looked at him for a minute, then cracked a tiny, tight smile. “I’ll remember you,” she said. It was a promise of future business. She turned to me and said, “Pay him.”
I gave him a twenty and a ten.
“Thanks,” he said. “For another hundred I’ll cut them off impressions.”
“No thanks,” LuEllen said. “We don’t consort with crooks.”
The locksmith laughed, showing crooked, yellow teeth. “Come back anytime,” he said.
Outside, the guy in the sleeveless jeans jacket was waiting. As we stepped outside the door, he came up close behind and said, “Give me your wallet.” He had one hand in his jacket pocket.
LuEllen looked him over. “You gotta be kidding.”
“Hey, lady . . .”
“Hey yourself, asshole. If you had a gun in your hand it’d make a bigger lump. There’s nothing in there but your fist. Why don’t you take it home and fuck it?”
The guy looked at her, mouth half open. Then he did something with his hand in his pocket. There was a pop, and LuEllen said, “Oh, shit, he shot me.”
When the gun went pop, I kicked the guy on the inside ball of his knee. His leg went out from under him and he lurched forward, and I hit him with a right hand on the bridge of the nose. His nose crunched, and he went down like a sack of sand.
LuEllen was looking at her arm. “Maybe I’m not shot. No, I think I am.”
The guy was face down on the blacktop with both hands covering his face, trying to figure out what happened. Broken noses do that to you. For the first few minutes, it’s impossible to think about anything else.
LuEllen pulled up the sleeve of her blouse. An inch above the elbow was a red streak where a small-caliber bullet had grazed her, pushing holes through the shirtsleeve both coming and going.
“He could have hurt me,” LuEllen said.
The locksmith had seen the commotion. He came out and looked at the guy lying on the blacktop.
“Tried to rob you, huh?”
“Yeah. Thanks for the warning.”
The locksmith shrugged. “I ain’t the Sisters of Mercy.”
“He shot me,” LuEllen said. The guy tried to get up on his knees, one hand still cradling his face. LuEllen moved behind him and kicked him in the crotch, a full-footed punt. The guy gurgled and knotted up, his hands in his crotch now. Blood streamed down his chin into his little black beard. LuEllen dipped into his jacket pocket and came up with a single-shot .22 built into a stainless steel Zippo cigarette lighter.
The locksmith reached out for it. “A .22 short. Effective range, about the length of his dick. What a dipshit.”
“Let’s go,” said LuEllen.
“Ain’t you going to take his money?” asked the locksmith.
“You can have it,” LuEllen said. As we drove away, the locksmith was going through the guy’s pockets.
LuEllen didn’t say much for a while, just kept looking at her arm, and finally giggled. “Wish I had some coke.”
“Probably good that you don’t.”
“You should have felt his nuts squish.”
“Yeah, right, a real treat, and I missed it.”
“How come you didn’t go for his nuts in the first place?”
“Too chancy a target. If you miss and kick a thigh instead of the balls, he’ll be inside your shirt. There’s no reflex to protect the knee, and that’s crippling if you get it. And nothing hurts as bad as the first two minutes of a broken nose.”
“It really sounded ugly when his nose broke,” LuEllen said. “It gives me the shivers thinking about it.”
“Yeah, well.” I touched my own nose, which has been broken twice. I can remember each time with painful clarity. “You ought to hear it from the inside.”
THAT WAS ON a Friday. We couldn’t risk going into the Durenbargers’ place over the weekend, so Dace and LuEllen drove out to a cabin he owned in the hills of West Virginia. “The shack,” he called it. “My wife hated the place. She called it Chigger City.”
On Sunday afternoon, while they were gone, Bobby called. I’d given him Ratface’s real name—Frank Morelli—and with the help of a Washington phone phreak, he’d been watching Morelli’s phones. No activity.
I look up gas stations near Morelli apartment and check data banks for most likely credit cards. Morelli makes five charges in past week Atlantic City area.
He’s out of town?
Yes/week. Also check consumer credit reports, shows personal loan secured by Chevrolet, year unknown, but bluebook value at $4,500 so must be old. Also estimated pretax earnings last year $52,000.
Thanx. Keep tabs.
Yes/Bye
LuEllen and Dace got back at midnight, and I told them about Bobby’s call.
“So it’s unlikely that he’s watching us,” LuEllen concluded.
“And he’s a small-timer. Fifty-two thousand in billings wouldn’t keep a church mouse alive in D.C., not if he pays for an answering service and an office in addition to an apartment,” Dace said.
“I feel better about it,” LuEllen said. “That’s still weird about the gays, though. I wish I knew about that.”
WE WENT INTO the Durenbargers’ first thing Monday morning. I made my copies, set the bug, and we were out of there like a cool breeze. LuEllen didn’t touch a thing.
Chapter 10
MONDAY NIGHT, WHILE Dace and LuEllen went to play in the District, I broke down the disks we’d taken from Ebberly and Durenbarger. The Whitemark code system was simple. When the central computer was called from the outside, it asked for a name and account number. After receiving those, it sent a code word back, directly to the home computer, and asked for a matching word from the code disk. The home computer scanned the list of words on the disk, found the match, and returned it. If the code was correct, you were in.
When I understood the code operation, I reviewed Dace’s outline of Samantha Ebberly’s sessions on the Whitemark computer. She had gone directly to a number of administrative files, and also called up a letter form. The format was standard. When I was sure that I knew what I was doing, I dialed one of our computers into the Ebberlys’ to make sure she wasn’t talking to the Whitemark system. She wasn’t. I left the line open, in case she came on, then I dialed our second terminal into Whitemark.
Entry was routine. Inside, I found a typical mainframe administrative system, stuffed with files and forms. Using common techniques worked out by hackers over the past couple of decades, I spent four hours wandering through the system, opening files, reading, and moving on. There were no surprises, and there were some disappointments.
Security was a notch tighter than I hoped it would be. Key files were protected with personal passwords, and I had no way around them except laborious trial and error. I let that go for the time being. Whitemark programmers had also constructed programming barriers between the various sectors of the computer. Using Ebberly’s codes I could wander at will through the open administrative sector, but I couldn’t get down to the underlying programs. I couldn’t get into the system itself.
I next checked the Durenbarger codes. Once again, entry was easy. On the engineering side, the computer was jammed with numbers and designs and ongoing work, with key files protected by personal passwords, just like the administrative side. And, as on the administrative side, access to the programming level was thoroughly blocked.
LuEllen and Dace came in late, saw me working, and tiptoed away. Much later, I went to bed and lay staring at the ceiling. By four in the morning, I’d decided there were no options. We had to get into the programming level of the computer. We had to c
rack another house.
AT BREAKFAST, LUELLEN rambled on, sore, about the play they’d seen the night before. It concerned a street gang. The single scene was set in a basement, where the gang was waiting for a shipment of pistols.
“It was like one of those World War Two movies, where there’s a Jew and a black guy and an Italian and the coward and this cool, white guy who’s the hero. You know, one of everything,” LuEllen said. “That’s what this gang was like. But I know gang punks. I went to school with them. You don’t find any Jews and blacks and whites together. You hang out with a white gang and it’s nigger-this and nigger-that. If a Jew comes along it’s fuckin’ kike. In real life, these guys are assholes.”
“It was supposed to be allegorical,” Dace said dryly.
“Right. What really happened was, the guy who wrote it had his head up his ass.” LuEllen trailed off and peered at me. “Why so glum? Something we should know about?”
“We have to hit the systems programmer’s place,” I said. “The head man’s. There’s no way around it.”
“You knew we might.” She was leaning on the refrigerator, munching a bowl of dry Honey-Nut Cheerios. The play was forgotten. “When do you want to do it?”
“We can cruise by this afternoon, see how it looks.”
“Is this the last one?” Dace asked.
“Yeah. If he’s got the codes. And he should.”
“We’re pushing our luck.”
“I know. I sweat blood every time,” I said.
While LuEllen and I had been scouting the homes of Whitemark employees, and hit the first two, Dace had worked out the tactics of the propaganda attack. After breakfast he produced a yellow legal pad with a list of notes, and outlined the plan.
“When you get the computer operation going, we’ll start leaking stories about their production and design troubles. We’ll get that out to the technical press. It’ll scare the brass over at the Pentagon. They’ve been burned too often—they’re gun-shy about design problems.
“But most newspaper and TV reporters don’t care about that stuff. Whitemark might be able to sweep the whole thing under the rug. If we really want to nail them, we need raw meat. Corruption. If you tell a Post reporter that there’s a ten-million-dollar cost overrun on a control circuit for a fighter plane, and anyway, the circuit doesn’t even work, he’ll say, ‘So what’s new?’ But if you tell him the company president spent ten thousand on broads and booze for a couple of generals and you’ve got the pictures to prove it, he’ll camp out on your doorstep.”
“So where do we get the pictures?” LuEllen asked.
“We could make them up,” Dace said mildly.
“Frame them?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Frame them.” He looked sanguine about the prospect, sipping tea and watching us.
“Sounds risky,” I said.
“There are advantages, too. If we frame them we can make the corruption as spectacular as we want, and we don’t have to waste time looking for it. We can go in and out fast. Plant the documents, create the backup and supporting material, and call the papers. The biggest problem we’ll have is getting somebody to listen to us.”
Washington is overrun with crazies. The city desk receptionists at the major newspapers and television stations dealt with a dozen screwballs a day, by telephone and in person. There were letters from a dozen more. Some threatened to wipe out the Zionists, some the Arabs. Some reported the deleterious effects of fluoride on the nation’s testicles. Others could prove that AIDS was a deliberate plot by the Russians, the Chinese, the gays, the blacks, the CIA, or the League of Women Voters, take your pick. Several hundred people knew of the island where a brain-damaged JFK was still living, sometimes with Elvis.
“If we can find or create something good enough, I can handle it. I can get us in, but it has to be good,” he said. “Once we get in, the media will stay with it, especially if they get the credit. A big defense contractor paying off the generals, and caught in the act by a vigilant press? That’s good stuff.”
“What about the poor assholes who supposedly took the bribes? I mean, we could be killing these people,” LuEllen said. “Look what happened to you.”
Dace nodded. “That’s not the only thing. If you frame someone, everything must be precisely right. If we say General Jones was getting laid on Bimini on March 4, and he can produce fifty witnesses who say he was in Boise speaking to the Mothers for Righteousness, the whole effort goes down the drain. If we frame them we’ll have to make it a loose frame—slush funds, women, cash payoffs, but no names.”
“Will that take?” I asked.
“We could rig something,” Dace said. “But see where I’m headed? It would be better to find the real thing, if it’s spectacular enough. The real thing always has a special flavor. You know it’s real. And I’m sure it’s in there, somewhere. All of these big companies do favors for the brass. Maybe it’s not money or sex, but it’s something. If you could get me into their general files, I could find something. But it might take time.”
“I’ve already been in, so entry is no problem,” I said. “And it seems like the payoff potential would be bigger.”
“Yeah, it would be. I’ll outline a frame, just in case. But we should take a run at their files and see what we can find,” Dace said.
LuEllen and I looked at each other, and LuEllen said, “I don’t like the frame.”
I nodded. “Okay. We can’t take more than two or three days to look, but let’s try it. And first we hit the systems programmer’s place, so I can get into the system.”
“When are you going to Chicago?” LuEllen asked. I wanted one last talk with Anshiser, to get the final go-ahead.
“If I can get into the system soon—like tonight—I’ll go tomorrow or the next day.”
“Are you still planning to bring this Maggie back?”
“If she wants to come.”
“It makes me nervous, another outsider knowing our faces. My face,” LuEllen said. “I hope she’s all right.”
I shrugged. “No guarantees. There’s not much choice, either, if we want to get paid.”
Chapter 11
MAGGIE SOUNDED GOOD on the phone, her voice low and husky. She laughed once, and it brought back the memory of her scent, the iris and vanilla, and the feel of the day we met on the sandbar.
“We have to make one more entry,” I said. “We’ll try it this afternoon. How’s Anshiser?”
“He’s worse. We’re going ahead, but he’s not so good.”
“Can I talk to him when I come in?”
“Sure. He’s functional, if that’s what you’re asking. When are you coming?”
“Day after tomorrow, if everything works out. If we get in this afternoon.”
“Be careful.”
“Always.”
THE LAST TARGET was in an exclusive suburb in the Virginia countryside. The sprawling lawns were shaded by full-sized trees. Swimming pools were standard equipment and a few yards had tennis courts, screened by lilacs and honeysuckle. Most of the houses had small signs posted by the driveways: THIS HOUSE PROTECTED BY ACME ALARMS. LuEllen scanned the target, looking especially at the phone line coming out.
She was spooked. “What is it?” I asked. “The security?”
“No. We can get past that, if they have it. But something’s not right,” she said. “These people aren’t important enough for this house. You say this guy makes seventy-five or eighty thousand? These places must start at three hundred and fifty and go up from there.”
“Maybe Papa had money.”
“Maybe,” she said, but she wasn’t happy about it. The neighborhood was quiet. We rolled through it three times, from different directions, without seeing anything obviously threatening.
“Let’s go make the calls,” LuEllen said finally. “But if we can’t get them at work, I want to wait.”
We got them, though, virtually on the first rings. LuEllen dug some coke out of her purse, and took a hit while I calle
d the house, cut the line, tossed the phone receiver in the backseat, and drove back to a neighborhood park.
We ambled down to the house in three or four minutes, taking our time, LuEllen miming a cough to cover a couple of additional hits on the cocaine. We could hear the faint ringing of the phone as we walked up the driveway. There was no security sign outside, but that meant nothing.
“When I pop it, you step right inside the door behind me, and stand there. Don’t do anything until I tell you,” she said as we walked up to the front door. She took a pair of wire cutters out of her tennis bag and slipped them into the pocket of her shorts. “I’m going to be running around like a rat for a couple of minutes.”
At the door, she rang the bell and blew hard on the dog whistle. There was no response. She dipped into the bag for the bar, and I covered her with my body while she cracked the door. We stepped into a dark-paneled entry hall; the kitchen was to the left, the living room straight ahead. Hanging on the entry wall was an eye-popping Egon Schiele drawing of two women, nude except for calf-length silk stockings, making love. It was worth a good fraction of the house’s value. I began to understand LuEllen’s misgivings. That drawing belonged in a museum, or a millionaire’s bedroom, not in a suburban house in Virginia.
LuEllen launched herself into the house, literally running, ripping open the front hall closet, pivoting, going into the kitchen, pulling open the cabinets one after another.
The Doberman pinscher caught her on her knees halfway down the kitchen. He came around the corner from the dining room—black and brown and rippling with muscle, running like a leopard.
I was looking at the Schiele drawing when I heard the dog’s toenails on the kitchen floor, and LuEllen screamed “No” and I turned, and the dog was coming. He must not have seen me behind LuEllen, because he leaped toward her snarling, and she half stood, her hands in front of her. I took two steps toward them, and as he hit her upper arms and she started to go down, I kicked him in the throat. LuEllen’s arm pulled out of his mouth as he tumbled over and down, then he scrabbled his legs under him, recovering, and I took another step and he was almost on his way again, and I kicked him in the head and he went down again.
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