The Devil's Code

by John Sandford

  They arrived five or six minutes after I had. As the car pulled up, I slipped the rifle out of the box, braced myself against a corner of the garage, and looked at the car through the scope. Still enough light. Benson got out of the car, wobbled on his bad leg, then leaned back into the car to say something. For a moment, he was unmoving.

  I took the moment, and shot him.

  LuEllen always claims that you can get away with one or two loud noises: one or two shots, one large mechanical clunk, whatever. The first loud noise will cause people to wonder what it is; if it’s not repeated, they’ll stop wondering. That’s the theory.

  I didn’t look down toward Benson after I fired. I simply eased back down, slipped the gun in the bookcase box, and backed away from the shooting scene, keeping the garage between myself and whatever was happening in front of Benson’s apartment.

  At the dry cleaner’s, I put the box in the trunk, backed out of the parking lot, and drove away. As I passed the end of Benson’s street, I looked down toward his house and saw two people on his lawn, looking down at what was apparently Benson’s body, and a third person, a woman, running across the street with a big yellow dog in front of her, on a leash, I thought.

  I kept going. Out to the Interstate, back to the motel. I carried the box inside, got the gun out, wiped it down, put it back in the box, carried it back out to the car. As long as I had the gun, I could be in trouble. I drove slowly, carefully, out of Dallas, north, until I was well into the countryside, stopping only once, to buy a cheap shovel. A half-hour north of the city, I turned off on a country road, drove until I found a nice patch of trees, got out of the car, and buried the AK a couple of feet down, kicking some dead leaves over the raw soil. Back on the highway, two or three miles from the gun’s grave, I wiped the shovel and tossed it out the window into the roadside ditch.

  Shooting somebody from ambush is not exactly the all-American way of doing things, but I was more intent on survival than etiquette. When I got back toward Dallas, I called the Denton Police Department non-emergency line. A woman answered—“Denton Police, can I help you?”—and I said, “Hi, this is Jack Hersh from the Morning News. Can you tell me who’s handling that shooting a couple of days ago at the Eighty-Eight Motel?”

  “I, uh, think that’s Sergeant Frederick. He’s out right now . . .”

  “I’ll check back,” I said. “What’s Sergeant Frederick’s first name?”

  “Hal.”

  “Thank you.”

  Got back to Bobby.

  STILL TROUBLE ?

  YES. BUSTED CURTIS MEANY. SAY HE WILL CHAIN TO MANY MORE HACKERS. NEVER HEARD OF HIM. YOU?

  NO . HAVE THEY BUSTED ANYBODY WE KNOW ?

  NOT SINCE LADYFINGERS.

  NEED HOME PHONE NUMBER FOR SERGEANT HAL FREDERICK OF DENTON POLICE DEPARTMENT .

  WAIT ONE.

  A moment later, he was back with the unlisted number. Bobby is very deep in the telephone system.

  WHAT HAPPENS?

  WORKING . ANY MORE ON SATELLITES ?

  YES. BUT MAY MISS NECESSARY INFO. POSSIBLY CAN RECONSTRUCT. DO YOU HAVE ACCESS TO AMMATH DOCS?

  NO .

  WILL TRY TO CRACK COMPUTERS FROM HERE.

  TAKE CARE . THEY ’RE WATCHING .

  AND YOU TAKE CARE.

  I stopped once more before heading back to the motel. From an outside phone, I called Hal Frederick’s number. He answered on the fourth ring, sounding cranky. “Yeah?”

  “Sergeant Frederick? I have a tip for you.”

  “Who is this?” Even crankier.

  “A benefactor. You’re investigating the shooting at the Eighty-Eight Motel. About two hours ago, there was a shooting in Dallas, a man named Lester Benson. He’s been taken to the hospital with a wound in the thigh. If you check, you will find that he has another recent bullet wound in one leg. He was the man who was shot running out of the Eighty-Eight after the murder. If you check his blood DNA against the blood you found in the parking lot, you will find a match.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Remember the name. Lester Benson. He was admitted to the hospital a couple of hours ago. The Dallas police should have the details,” I said, and dropped the phone back on the hook.

  If that didn’t create some serious heat, I’d just pack up and head home.

  I had no more ideas.

  25

  ST. JOHN CORBEIL

  Corbeil smeared his face and his hands, pulled the black hat on his head, and shuffled across the parking lot to the Emergency Room at Health North. Inside, a nurse behind the reception station glanced at him, an old man, maybe black—certainly black, with the X baseball hat on his head—as he looked uncertainly around and then shuffled down toward the patient rooms.

  “Excuse me?” she asked. “Are you looking for somebody?”

  “Bafroom,” Corbeil said. “Men’s room.”

  “Do you have a family member here?”

  “My wife. Upstairs. Kicked m’ ass out ’fore I could pee.” Corbeil had to keep it short: he didn’t sound that much like an old black man.

  The nurse bought it. “All right, then. Just straight down the hall. On your right.” She went back to her paperwork, and Corbeil shuffled down the hall.

  Took the elevator, up four floors, turned out in the hallway, and walked down to the right. Room 411. The door was shut, but not locked. He stepped inside. Hart had said there was only one bed . . .

  One bed with a man sleeping. In the ambient light from the window, he could see Benson lying on his back, one leg suspended in a trapeze, a saline drip hooked into his arm. Corbeil reached into his pocket, took out the cigar tube, slipped out the needle inside, jabbed it into the saline bag, and emptied it. Enough sedative to kill an elephant.

  Well, he thought, looking down at Benson, he was supposed to be sleeping . . .

  He couldn’t hang around. He had a long way to go this night.

  Down the elevator, out through the Emergency Room entrance, driving back home. Scrubbing his face with clean-up packs from a barbecue joint, in case he met somebody in his apartment stairwell. But he met no one.

  He glanced at his watch: A long way to go. In the bathroom, he washed his face and hands, scrubbed away the last of the Cover Mark. After drying his hands, he got the pistol from the dresser—detoured around the living room on the way out, unwilling to look at the wrecked wall—and headed for Hart’s place. Hart was expecting him. Had to talk about the next move . . .

  Hart was worried. “I don’t know if it’ll hold,” he said. “I don’t know if Benson will hold.”

  “Take it easy,” Corbeil said. They were in Hart’s study, a converted family room. In some ways, it aped Corbeil’s study: a leather chair, but not quite as sleek. Books, but not as many, and with a narrow range: karate, guns, camping, travel.

  Corbeil found it irritating. “If he’s caught, he knows that we’re his only chance. Giving us away won’t help him: he’ll wind up with a public defender instead of the best defense money can buy.”

  “I’m not sure he’s that smart,” Hart said. He dropped into the leather chair, brooding. Corbeil paced in a lazy circle. As he passed Hart, he took the pistol out of his pocket, paused, and, moving unhurriedly so the motion wouldn’t catch Hart’s eye, put the muzzle next to the other man’s temple and pulled the trigger.

  Crack!

  Hart slumped. Corbeil waited a moment, listening—realized that if there were anything to hear, he probably wouldn’t, being deafened by the shot—then reached for Hart’s throat, pressed his fingers just under his jawbone. No pulse. He hadn’t expected any. William Hart was thoroughly dead.

  All right. Now: one more shot, with Hart’s finger in the trigger . . . the Webster’s should do as a backstop. He fired again, into the heavy hardback dictionary. The little .380 slug penetrated to page 480, and stopped. Corbeil picked up one of the two ejected shells, carefully added one loaded shell to the top of the gun’s magazine, pressed the shell against Hart’s thumb, replaced
the magazine, and dropped the gun on the floor next to the chair.

  He looked at his watch. Still a long way to go.

  He picked up the dictionary and left.

  He drove through the night to Waco, his mind crowded with possibilities. Stay and fight. Run and hide.

  The simple fact was this: if nobody knew about the satellite intercepts, none of the killing made sense. Even if somebody knew, it could be blamed on Tom Woods, and then he would kick free. The conspiracy never required his involvement, he thought. Woods could have set it up with the other two. He had the technical background—background that Corbeil didn’t have.

  As of now, the danger to himself had narrowed to a single point . . .

  A car was parked in the driveway at the ranch, and there were lights in the main house. Corbeil parked, got out, felt the second gun nestled next to his leg. Took a moment to stand in the driveway, to look up at the stars.

  Woods came out on the porch: “Hey, John. What’s going on?”

  “Hey, Tom. Need to talk about next week. I’ve got an order from Azerbaijan.”

  “Jeez, those guys . . .”

  Corbeil was looking up. “Look at the stars. You can really see the stars out here.”

  Woods walked down the three steps of the porch and stood beside his friend to look at the sky.

  “Glorious,” he said. Then he said something that prolonged his life for a few seconds. “By the way, I’m not sure about this, but there might be something going on out here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Somebody may be messing with the dish controls. I don’t know where it happened—inside the house or out—but we got an odd signal the other night. I just noticed it.”

  “Odd?”

  “Attenuated, as if the signal were being blocked somehow. Not interfered with, but physically blocked.”

  “What would do that, Tom?”

  “Somebody standing in front of the dish. Something placed near the amplifier loops . . . that would do it. Could be nothing. Could have been a bird building a nest. Or, if it was inside, it could have been somebody messing with the gain controls, although they’re all right now.”

  “Did you look at the dishes?” Corbeil asked.

  “Yeah. Everything looks all right. Might have been nothing at all.”

  “Probably. We’re all a little jumpy with this Firewall thing, that shooting.”

  “That fuckin’ Hart. The guy’s a killer, John. He probably enjoyed it.”

  “Look at the stars,” Corbeil said.

  “Glorious,” Woods said again. The muzzle of Corbeil’s gun was an inch from the back of his head.

  26

  I spent the next day intermittently monitoring the Net, watching news programs, and checking the newspapers’ online editions, looking for something—anything—that would tell me what was going on with AmMath, Firewall, or with Benson or Hart.

  When I wasn’t doing that, I was playing with the tarot, or drawing. The landscape north of Dallas is interesting, in its own Southern Plains way, though not as interesting as the area around Tulsa, some parts of Kansas, or the Dakota grasslands.

  Still: interesting. The relative flatness of the landscape, only sparsely inflected by humans and weather phenomena, gives the land and atmosphere a natural abstraction that you don’t see in landscape paintings, but that you often see in nonobjective art. By working with the land and sky, without adding human inflection, you wind up with something that looks like abstraction, but has a kind of organic quality that pulls the eye in. Under the best conditions, the viewer falls into the picture, rather than colliding with the painted surface of the abstraction . . .

  Either that, or I’m completely full of shit. In any case, the first real break came that evening, and left me astonished. I’d been clicking around the cable channels with the remote, and heard Corbeil’s name mentioned. Channel 3: the newsreader had more hair than the average werewolf, and teeth just as shiny; he liked this stuff, and this story.

  Benson had been found dead in his hospital bed, a victim of what police said was a deliberate barbituate overdose. He’d been murdered.

  Benson had been with a man named William Hart when he was shot, and had given Hart’s name as an alibi for the time that Lane Ward had been shot. After Benson had been found dead, police went to talk with Hart. They found him dead in an easy chair, a pistol on the floor beside him, an apparent suicide. The newsreader added that police had interviewed Corbeil in the case, but that he had not been charged with anything, nor was he being held.

  “Corbeil says that his company, AmMath, a high-tech concern that creates top-secret coding software for the federal government, has been under attack for several days by the hacker group that calls itself Firewall, apparently because AmMath is one of the lead contractors on the Clipper II chip. The Clipper II, if you recall, is the chip that the government would like to see incorporated as a standard in communications hardware, including that used on the Internet. Firewall is the group that has taken credit for the continuing denial-of-service attack on the IRS.

  “Corbeil said that he did not understand Benson’s involvement with Lane Ward or her brother, Jack Morrison, who was slain last month after an alleged break-in at AmMath’s secure computer facility. He said that he had asked Hart to monitor Benson’s activities after the Morrison shooting, but hadn’t known of Ward’s presence in Dallas or his security officers’ shoot-out with them,” the newsreader intoned, his eyebrows signaling a moderate level of skepticism.

  Benson and Hart were dead. Who’d done that? Corbeil himself? Or were there more security goons in the background somewhere? Corbeil’s story was actually pretty good, from a legal standpoint: he took no position; he was confused. If it all got mixed in with national security and codes and spies and Firewall, and if the guy held out, he might walk . . .

  I spent fifteen minutes pacing around the motel, then went out, found a phone, and dropped a message with Bobby. He batted it away: he was no longer interested in AmMath or revenge for Jack or Lane. He thought he might have found a way out for those of us still alive.

  NEED MORE RECORDINGS OF RANCH TRANSMISSIONS. SENDING MAN TO YOU WITH PACKAGE, ARRIVES TONIGHT. NEED TRANSMISSIONS MOST QUICKLY.

  OK. PROBLEM ?

  WE NEED SATELLITE PROTOCOLS, CAN’T GET INTO AMMATH. COMPUTERS SEALED OFF. CAN YOU COME MEMPHIS WEDNESDAY?

  YES .

  GOOD. WILL SEND ADDRESS LATER.

  The idea of going back to Corbeil’s ranch was not appealing, especially since I’d dumped the rifle. I still had the pistol that LuEllen had picked up in Lane’s room, but I had little faith in pistols. With the very best of them, like a .45 Colt ACP, I could probably ding a guy up at twenty-five yards, if neither of us were moving. Otherwise, I might as well be throwing apples.

  Still: Bobby had a plan. Crack the satellites, he said, then talk to the government. Demonstrate that we were not a danger. Build a case for ourselves . . .

  Maybe.

  At eight-thirty that night, a guy with one of those uneven Southern faces, the kind that looked like they got a little crunched in a vise or a wine press or something, knocked on my door, and when I opened it, handed me a box. “From Bobby,” he said.

  He did not look like the kind of guy who’d be hanging with Bobby: if you were going to cast a movie and needed a guy with hair like straw and pink lips and big freckles, to stand with his foot on a pickup truck’s running board and talk about the Imperial Wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, this guy would be a candidate.

  “How is he? Bobby?” I asked.

  “Same as ever.” He raised a hand in what used to be a black-power salute. “Off the pigs,” he said. Then he laughed and I laughed with him, feeling ridiculous, and he headed down the hall in his beat-up cowboy boots, ragged stepped-on back cuffs, and jean jacket.

  Gone.

  So was I, five minutes later, headed south in the night.

  Third time’s the charm.

  That’s what I kept th
inking all the way back to the dish in the gully. I took it slow, like still hunting for deer. I started down the road at eleven o’clock, deep in the darkness, watching, listening. I didn’t make it to the fence-crossing until midnight. Twelve cars passed along the road as I moved parallel to it, hunkered down in the weeds as they passed.

  At midnight, I crossed the fence into the eastern pasture, and began moving parallel to Corbeil’s fence line. At twelve-thirty, having taken a half-hour to move four hundred yards, I crossed Corbeil’s fence and began working my way toward the nearest dish. As I got close, I spent some time watching the ranch house.

  The yard lights illuminated the area around the house and showed a single pickup truck parked in front of the garage. The house itself was absolutely dark. The bunkhouse, if that’s what it was, had one lit window. A shadow fell on the window once, and then went away. Whoever it was, was up late.

  Nervous, but satisfied that nothing much was happening at the house, I crossed carefully into the gully, using the needle-beam flashlight now, and hooked the detection package into the dish. Then I climbed the far side of the gully and lay down, looking down at the farmhouse while I waited for the dish to start moving.

  At one o’clock, or a few minutes later, the light in the bunkhouse went out, and a man stepped into the lighted driveway, walked over to the house, unlocked the door, went inside. A light flashed on, then, twenty seconds later, went out. The man stepped outside, closed the door behind himself, rattled it—locked—and walked over to the pickup truck. He got in and bumped slowly down the driveway to the highway, paused, turned left, and drove away.

  Huh.

  For the next three hours, I perched on top of the ridge waiting for the dish to move. Eventually, I realized that it wasn’t going to. Lying in the dark, with nothing much to do, I began to work out my own version of Corbeil’s caper.