“Ah, no.” I glanced at the clock. 3:56. “That, I’m afraid, could be managed. People could be bought, the charges denied, especially if LuEllen and I weren’t around to back them up. Somebody might say the whole thing was a fantasy . . . and even the people who would believe it wouldn’t have any way to prove it for sure. Besides, the instigator of the whole thing is a vegetable. You can’t put a vegetable on trial.”
“So what did you do?” Maggie asked.
I shrugged. “Same old shit you saw in the Washington apartment. A computer blitz. The fact is, if you mess with me or LuEllen, our friends on the computer net will take Anshiser right down the toilet. Right down.”
Maggie glanced at the dark man again. He frowned and tipped his head back and stared at me, figuring, and finally said to Maggie, “I don’t know.”
She thought she did, though. She had decided it was a game, and looked at me with what may have been genuine regret.
“I’m disappointed, Kidd. We thought you’d be better than this. Let me tell you what we’ve done. We have the best people—the very best, better than you—watching every move that’s made on those computers. It has been a major inconvenience, and it cost us a lot of money, but we’ll get it back with the Sunfire contract. In any event, we know you’re not in there. Just in case, we have backups of all our software, and all the daily work. We can shut down and sterilize our system in half an hour, and be back up with completely clean software. Everybody who does anything on the system is logged in and out, and the input is studied by the security crew. There isn’t any way you can reach us. You just don’t have the leverage for a deal.” She shook her head and stood up. “I think it’s time to leave,” she said to the dark man.
The clock said 3:59.
“By the way, don’t try to use your telephone. It won’t work,” she said, showing a few teeth. “I couldn’t figure why you stayed in an Anshiser Hotel. You must know we could control the place.”
“Don’t go,” I said. “We have more things to talk about.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. A note of triumph had crept into her voice. The clock ticked over to four, and she started toward the door, the dark man standing to follow. The blond opened the door, and she walked away, giving it a little extra effort as she walked. At the door she paused, and seemed about to say something.
Then the lights went out.
Everything else went with them—the clock, the TV, the air conditioning. There was a stuttering, and emergency lights came on in the hallway. Somewhere, a smoke detector screeched, and doors started popping open down the hallway.
I had pulled the blackout drapes over the windows to intensify the effect. I waited for a few seconds, and reached back and pulled the drawstring. Daylight flooded the room, and the blond was standing just inside the door, pointing a small-caliber automatic pistol at my chest. A long, fat silencer was attached to the snout.
“Why don’t you come back in and sit down?” I suggested.
Maggie looked shocked, but came back in. “What have you done?”
“I’ve shut down Anshiser,” I said. “Or at least, my friends have.”
“What are you talking about, we have the best security, there was no way . . .”
“It’s awful good,” I agreed. “Too good to penetrate in the time that we had. So we had to do something different.”
“What did you do, Kidd?”
“We went into the power company computers. We couldn’t get every little dinky Anshiser operation, but we got all the good ones. All the hotels, all the factories, your headquarters back in Chicago. Not a single one of the big operations has power. If you call up your airframe fabrication plant you’ll find they don’t have a computer problem, they’ve got a problem with everything. They can’t run a fuckin’ power drill.”
The Tower of Destruction. The lightning bolt. Power plants, of course. And it had been shown in conjunction with the Magician, the computer-freak card. It was all coincidence, but a timely one—I really don’t believe in that magic shit.
“This can’t last. . . .” Maggie blurted.
“Yes, it can. Believe me: Anshiser is shut down. Unless I tell my people to bring you back up, you’ll be down for three or four days before the electric people find the fault. And then the next bomb goes off. If you’re really efficient, you might get fifteen or twenty days of work out of your companies in the next year.”
She sank down in the chair opposite me, and the dark man said, “Sonofabitch.” He looked at the blond and said, “Put it away.” People were shuffling through the hall in the dim light, moving toward the stairwell. The smoke alarm, apparently triggered by the power shutdown, was still screeching into the gloom. The blond stepped inside and shut the door.
“How long will it take to get us back up?” Maggie asked.
“Probably two or three hours. We have a lot of them to deal with,” I said. “But we don’t want to bring them back up too soon. We want to give you a chance to call around. Find out how bad things can get. See if you can fix it yourself.”
Maggie looked at the dark man. “What do you think?”
He shook his head. “What I thought in the first place. We cut the deal and walk away. And keep his phone number in case we need his help sometime.”
“No chance,” I said.
“Don’t shut any doors,” he said. It didn’t sound like a threat. It sounded like advice.
Maggie was still looking for a way out. “We could go after your computer friends.”
“No. The National Security Agency has gone looking for Bobby, and came up empty. A bunch of hoods aren’t going to find him. And if you come after me or LuEllen, if there’s even a hint of it, Bobby’ll take Anshiser apart.”
“What happens if you’re hit by a car?” the dark man asked.
“You better pray I’m not, because you’ll be out of luck,” I said. He nodded. That was the kind of deal he understood. One that had no options.
“Look,” I said to Maggie, “in a couple of years, anything I say about this whole Whitemark deal, or about Dace, will be ancient history. Nobody will pay any attention. It’ll be like if you called up the FBI and said you knew who killed Judge Crater. Nobody would give a shit. So if we can make it through a couple of years together, you’ll be safe. And there’ll be no percentage at all in coming after us. You’ll have that whole big company to work with.”
“He’s right,” said the dark man.
“Okay,” said Maggie, deciding. She stood up again. “It’s a deal. Turn the power on.”
Chapter 21
I WAS WORKING on the sandbar below St. Paul. I’d dragged the anchor halfway up the bar and buried it, and the boat swung placidly on its line as the towboats streamed by. It was hot, the first real heat of the coming summer. She crossed the levee, pushed through the willows, and walked out on the bar. She was wearing gym shoes, jeans, and a peek-a-boo blouse. She had a nice tan.
“Neat picture,” she said when she came up. She said “pitcher.”
“Thanks. How was Mexico?”
“All right. A lot of foreigners.” She laughed and I smiled and she said, “Old joke.”
“No kidding.” I laid in a long vermilion horizon.
LuEllen did a critical pout, cocked her head, and nodded. “Not bad,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“Seen Maggie lately?”
“Not since I called you—not since Vegas. There’s a mutual lack of interest.”
“Still think we’re safe?”
“I think so. We put ourselves outside the percentages. Have you been back to Duluth?”
“Snuck in and out a week after you called. Moved some money around, and went back.” She wandered around, looked in the boat. “I saw that old man Anshiser croaked.”
“Yeah. Maggie’s running the place. A new guy took her job, Dillon’s still number three.” I dropped in some very liquid ultramarine and feathered it into the vermilion.
“I could never do that,�
� she said. “Paint, I mean. Like you put in that hill, with purple. Who would think that a hill with green trees is purple? But it kind of is, isn’t it?” She looked across the river at the hill.
“Yeah, it is.”
“Have you thought about Dace at all?”
“You mean, do I feel guilty?”
“Yeah.”
I stopped painting and looked at her. “Yes. I do. I thought I knew what we were getting into, and I didn’t. And Dace paid. But there’s nothing I can do about it. I could go after Maggie, I suppose. But I can’t do that, either. And I like it here. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life running from somebody, the cops, or the mob, or whoever.”
She nodded. “That’s where I got to, sitting on the beach. I kept thinking, Dace would want us to do this, or Dace would want us to do that. Then one day I figured, Dace doesn’t want us to do anything. He’s dead. It’s like they turned out a TV. It’s like thinking a TV show wants you to do something, after you’ve turned it off.”
I went back to painting and she watched for another minute or two, then ran off down the sandbar, stopping to look at the flotsam. She was back in five minutes with a wasp-waisted seven-ounce Coke bottle.
“Must be twenty years old,” she said.
“I don’t want to break your heart, but you can still buy them like that.”
“Oh yeah?” She looked at me suspiciously, but when I nodded, heaved it into the river. She had a good arm. The bottle hit and bobbed up, its neck sticking out of the water.
“Been stealing anything?” I asked.
“Nope. I’m too rich,” she said. “But I’m thinking about it anyway.”
“Playing the ponies?”
“A little.”
“How about the nose candy?”
“Yeah, a little.”
“Were you faithful to me down in Mexico?”
She snorted and threw a driftwood stick after the Coke bottle and watched them both float away. A tow jockey ran his harbor boat by, heading toward the coal dump downriver.
“Are you, you know, involved with anybody?” she asked.
“Nah.”
“What are my chances of getting laid?”
“Pretty good, if you play your cards right,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “All right.”
She looked happy. She found a flat rock and tried to skip it side-armed out in the river. It skipped once and crashed.
The river itself was dark and black and snaky, the currents and crosscurrents bucking up along the bar. We spent most of the afternoon there, painting and talking and watching the clouds roll in, up from the south, over the Mississippi.
FROM THE #1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR
OF THE PREY SERIES…
A CRIME NOVEL OF “CLASSIC STINGS” (Booklist)
THE EMPRESS FILE
With the same sharp human insight he brings to the murderers and manhunters of his bestselling Prey novels, Sanford takes us into the minds of two irresistible con artists. Kidd and LuEllen are a winning pair of lovers and liars plotting the ultimate sting. Their target is the wealthy (and corrupt) mayor of a small Mississippi river town. Their setup includes buying a houseboat, assuming false identities, and exposing local scandals. Their scam is perfect. Until everything goes wrong…
“THE IMAGINATIVE CON SCHEME IS CLEVER… BUT THE BIGGEST THRILLS OCCUR WHEN EVENTS DON’T GO AS PLANNED.”
—Library Journal
“WITTY AND CINEMATIC… ENGROSSING.”
—Publishers Weekly
“ALFRED HITCHCOCK WOULD HAVE BEEN DELIGHTED.”
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Praise for John Sandford’s Prey novels
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“One of the most horrible villains this side of Hannibal.”
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—Kirkus Reviews
TITLES BY JOHN SANDFORD
Rules of Prey
Shadow Prey
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Silent Prey
Winter Prey
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THE EMPRESS
FILE
JOHN
SANFORD
Previously published under
the name John Camp
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Henry Holt edition published 1991
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For Roswell S. and Anne B.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Prologue
THE HEAT WAS ferocious.
The odor of melting blacktop was thick in the air, like the stink of an oil slick, and the rare night walkers glistened with sweat. A time-and-temperature sign outside the state bank poked scarlet digits down the dark streets: 91, it said, and 11:04. Three doors north of the bank, a janitor at the Paramount Theater vacuumed the lobby in slow motion. The theater was air-conditioned. His home was not.
Across the street from the Paramount, a window dresser at Trent’s fussed with an abattoir of dismembered mannequins. He worked only nights, after curfew for children twelve and under. He was setting up the annual bathing suit display, and modern mannequins, the city council observed, had nipples.
In the window lights even the dummies looked hot.
WITH NIGHTFALL an army of insects marched out of the Mississippi river bottoms. Coffee brown beetles, some as long as a man’s thumb, scuttled through the gutters. Hard-shelled June bugs ricocheted like stones off the storefront windows. Fuzzy-winged moths fluttered in the headlights of passing cars. They made yellow smears when they hit the windshields; the biggest ones had guts like baby birds, and blood.
Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4 Page 23