“And Bell went out and voted against your ticket, but you had the votes,” I said.
“That’s right.”
I looked at John and remembered that he’d said something about Commies and hobby politics. “Doesn’t sound like hobby politics to me,” I said.
“Woman learns quick,” he said.
“What about Darrell Clark and his family? Did you reopen the case?”
“No, no, we didn’t,” Marvel said, her eyes shifting away from mine. “We were having control problems. We didn’t want there to be any more uproar than there already was. Not until we got the election districts redrawn.”
“How about now?”
“Well, it’s just kind of… awkward,” she said.
“Not good politics,” I said, “to reopen the case.”
“That’s right. And Darrell’s gone… can’t get him back. And there’s no money left for the family. That all went.…” She gestured in the general direction of the state capital.
As I was leaving, I asked, “Was it worth it?”
“Yes,” she said, looking straight into my eyes. “Harold would have died for this. He would have told you so himself. And he did. But we got what he wanted.”
“If you’re satisfied…”
“I am, but that doesn’t mean I’m not sad. Harold’s murder damn near killed me. And there are loose ends all over the place. Archie Ballem is oozing around like a slug. He’s got trouble with the IRS, but he’s still kicking, and he hates me. And we can’t pry Mary Wells out of the city clerk’s office. Not yet, anyway, because of civil service. Carl Rebeck got immunity to testify against the machine and now thinks he can run on a clean house ticket—and he’s already going around calling me a Commie nigger.… But for now I’m satisfied. Satisfied and sad.”
“All right,” I said. “Maybe that’s the best you can hope for.”
ON THE WAY out of town I stopped at Chickamauga Park, scuffed around the trash can until I found the computer key, and pocketed it. Then I drove on to the E-Z Way and bought a couple of Diet Cokes. I’d need the caffeine for the run into Memphis.
It was still hot when I got to the store, and a billion bugs were diving around the pole lights. The fat guy sat behind the counter, mopping his face with a rag that once was a T-shirt; you could still see the yellow deodorant stains in the armpits.
“Hot,” the counterman said, in a sort of neutral way. He was ready to agree with a different opinion if I had one. It was that kind of town.
“Yeah.” I put a dollar and a quarter on the counter. He slid it into the palm of his hand and poked at the cash register. He was wearing a plastic pin that said ELVIS, and under that, in smaller letters, NIGHT ASSISTANT MANAGER.
He gave me a nickel back. As I was going out the door, I thought he said something to me and half turned. He was looking out the open window at the pole lights, with a dreamy look in his little pig eyes.
“Pretty fliers,” he crooned. His mouth was half open, his heavy pink lips glistening in the overhead lights. “Pretty, pretty fliers.”
LUELLEN.
She hung around for a month or so in New Orleans, while I was recovering. One morning at breakfast she said, “Do you love me?”
I said, “Yes.”
“I don’t know if I can handle that,” she said.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said.
“I’m going away for a while.”
“Like Charade, or whatever her name was,” I said.
“Chaminade,” she said absently. “But not like her. ’Cause I’ll be back.”
“For sure?”
“Yeah.” She has dark eyes like great northern lakes. “For sure.”
Click here for more titles by this author
John Sandford is the pseudonym of the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist John Camp. He is the author of the Prey novels, the Kidd novels, the Virgil Flowers novels, The Night Crew, and Dead Watch. He lives in Minnesota. Visit his website at www.johnsandford.org.
TITLES BY JOHN SANDFORD
Rules of Prey
Shadow Prey
Eyes of Prey
Silent Prey
Winter Prey
Night Prey
Mind Prey
Sudden Prey
Secret Prey
Certain Prey
Easy Prey
Chosen Prey
Mortal Prey
Naked Prey
Hidden Prey
Broken Prey
Invisible Prey
Phantom Prey
Wicked Prey
Storm Prey
The Night Crew
Dead Watch
KIDD NOVELS
The Fool’s Run
The Empress File
The Devil’s Code
The Hanged Man’s Song
VIRGIL FLOWERS NOVELS
Dark of the Moon
Heat Lightning
Rough Country
Bad Blood
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Devil’s Code
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2000 by John Sandford
This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
For information address:
The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is
http://www.penguinputnam.com
ISBN: 1-101-14663-X
A BERKLEY BOOK®
Berkley Books first published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
BERKLEY and the “B” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
Electronic edition: April, 2004
Titles by John Sandford
RULES OF PREY
SHADOW PREY
EYES OF PREY
SILENT PREY
WINTER PREY
NIGHT PREY
MIND PREY
SUDDEN PREY
SECRET PREY
CERTAIN PREY
EASY PREY
THE NIGHT CREW
The Kidd Novels
THE EMPRESS FILE
THE FOOL’S RUN
THE DEVIL’S CODE
For Pat and Ray Johns
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
author’s note
1
ST. JOHN CORBEIL
A beautiful fall night in Glen Burnie, a Thursday, autumn leaves kicking along the streets. A bicycle with a flickering headlamp, a dog running alongside, a sense of quiet. A good night for a cashmere sportcoat or small black pearls at an intimate restaurant down in the District; maybe white Notre Dame–style tapers and a rich controversial senator eating trout with a pretty woman not his wife. Like that.
Terrence Lighter would have none of it.
Not tonight, anyway. Tonight, he was on his own, walking back from a bookstore with a
copy of SmartMoney in his hand and a pornographic videotape in his jacket pocket. He whistled as he walked. His wife, April, was back in Michigan visiting her mother, and he had a twelve-pack of beer in the refrigerator and a bag of blue-corn nachos on the kitchen counter. And the tape.
The way he saw it was this: he’d get back to the house, pop a beer, stick the tape in the VCR, spend a little time with himself, and then switch over to Thursday Night Football. At halftime, he’d call April about the garden fertilizer. He could never remember the numbers, 12-6-4 or 6-2-3 or whatever. Then he’d catch the second half of the game, and after the final gun, he’d be ready for the tape again.
An unhappy thought crossed his mind. Dallas: What the hell were they doing out in Dallas, with those recon photos? Where’d they dig those up? How’d that geek get his hands on them? Something to be settled next week. He hadn’t heard back from Dallas, and if he hadn’t heard by Monday afternoon, he’d memo the deputy director just to cover his ass.
That was for next week. Tonight he had the tape, the beer, and the nachos. Not a bad night for a fifty-three-year-old, high-ranking bureaucrat with a sexually distant wife. Not bad at all . . .
Lighter was a block and a half from his home when a man stepped out of a lilac bush beside a darkened house. He was dressed all in black, and Lighter didn’t see him until the last minute. The man said nothing at all, but his arm was swinging up.
Lighter’s last living thought was a question. “Gun?”
A silenced 9mm. The man fired once into Lighter’s head and the impact twisted the bureaucrat to his right. He took one dead step onto the grass swale and was down. The man fired another shot into the back of the dead man’s skull, then felt beneath his coat for a wallet. Found it. Felt the videotape and took that, too.
He left the body where it had fallen and ran, athletically, lightly, across the lawn, past the lilac, to the back lot line, and along the edge of a flower garden to the street. He ran a hundred fifty yards, quiet in his running shoes, invisible in his black jogging suit. He’d worked out the route during the afternoon, spotting fences and dogs and stone walls. A second man was waiting in the car on a quiet corner. The shooter ran up to the corner, slowed, then walked around it. If anyone had been coming up the street, they wouldn’t have seen him running . . .
As they rolled away, the second man asked, “Everything all right?”
“Went perfect.” The shooter dug through the dead man’s wallet. “We even got four hundred bucks and a fuck flick.”
They were out again the next night.
This time, the target was an aging ’70s rambler in the working-class duplex lands southwest of Dallas. A two-year-old Porsche Boxster was parked in the circular driveway in front of the house. Lights shone from a back window, and a lamp with a yellow shade was visible through a crack in the drapes of the big front window. The thin odor of bratwurst was in the air—a backyard barbecue, maybe, at a house farther down the block. Kids were playing in the streets, a block or two over, their screams and shouts small and contained by the distance, like static on an old vinyl disk.
The two men cut across a lawn as dry as shredded wheat and stepped up on the concrete slab that served as a porch. The taller of the two touched the pistol that hung from his shoulder holster. He tried the front door: locked.
He looked at the shorter man, who shrugged, leaned forward, and pushed the doorbell.
John James Morrison was the same age as the men outside his door, but thinner, taller, without the easy coordination; a gawky, bespectacled Ichabod Crane with a fine white smile and a strange ability to draw affection from women. He lived on cinnamon-flavored candies called Hot Tamales and diet Coke, with pepperoni pizza for protein. He sometimes shook with the rush of sugar and caffeine, and he liked it.
The men outside his door stressed exercise and drug therapy, mixed Creatine with androstenedione and Vitamins E, C, B, and A. The closest Morrison got to exercise was a habitual one-footed twirl in his thousand-dollar Herman Miller Aeron office chair, which he took with him on his cross-country consulting trips.
Morrison and the chair rolled through a shambles of perforated wide-carriage printer paper and diet Coke cans in the smaller of the rambler’s two bedrooms. A rancid, three-day-old Domino’s box, stinking of pepperoni and soured cheese, was jammed into an overflowing trash can next to the desk. He’d do something about the trash later. Right now, he didn’t have the time.
Morrison peered into the flat blue-white glow of the computer screen, struggling with the numbers, checking and rechecking code. An Optimus transportable stereo sat on the floor in the corner, with a stack of CDs on top of the right speaker. Morrison pushed himself out of his chair and bent over the CDs, looked for something he wouldn’t have to think about. He came up with a Harry Connick Jr. disk, and dropped it in the changer. Love Is Here to Stay burbled from the speakers and Morrison took a turn around in the chair. Did a little dance step. Maybe another hit of caffeine . . .
The doorbell rang.
Eleven o’clock at night, and Morrison had no good friends in Dallas, nobody to come calling late. He took another two steps, to the office door, and looked sideways across the front room, through a crack in the front drapes. He could see the front porch. One or two men, their bulk visible in the lamplight. He couldn’t see their faces, but he recognized the bulk.
“Oh, shit.” He stepped back into the office, clicked on a computer file, and dragged it to a box labeled Shredder. He clicked Shred, waited until the confirmation box came up, clicked Yes, I’m sure. The shredder was set to the highest level: if the file was completely shredded, it couldn’t be recovered. But that would take time . . .
He had to make some. He killed the monitors, but let the computer run. He picked up his laptop, turned off the lights in the office, and pulled the door most of the way closed, leaving a crack of an inch or two so they could see the room was dark. Maybe they wouldn’t go in right away, and the shredder would have more time to grind. The laptop he carried into the kitchen, turning it on as he walked. He propped it open on the kitchen counter, and pulled a stool in front of it.
The doorbell rang again and he hurried out the door and called, “Just a minute.” He looked back in the computer room, just a glance, and could see the light blinking on the hard drive. He was shredding only one gigabyte of the twenty that he had. Still, it would take time . . .
He was out of it. The man outside was pounding on the door.
He headed back through the house, snapped on the living room overhead lights to let them know he was coming, looked out through the drapes—another ten seconds gone—and unlocked the front door. “Had to get my pants on,” he said to the two men on the stoop. “What’s up?”
They brought Morrison into the building through the back, up a freight elevator, through a heavily alarmed lock-out room at the top, and into the main security area. Corbeil was waiting.
St. John Corbeil was a hard man; in his early forties, his square-cut face seamed with stress and sun and wind. His blue eyes were small, intelligent, and deeply set beneath his brow ridge; his nose and lips narrow, hawklike. He wore a tight, military haircut, with just a hint of a fifties flattop.
“Mr. Morrison,” he said. “I have a tape I want you to listen to.”
Morrison was nervous, but not yet frightened. There’d been a couple of threats back at the house, but not of violence. If he didn’t come with them, they’d said, he would be dismissed on the spot, and AmMath would sue him for violating company security policies, industrial espionage, and theft of trade secrets. He wouldn’t work for a serious company again, they told him.
The threats resonated. If they fired him, and sued him, nobody would hire him again. Trust was all-important, when a company gave a man root in its computer system. When you were that deep in the computers, everything was laid bare. Everything. On the other hand, if he could talk with them, maybe he could deal. He might lose this job, but they wouldn’t be suing him. They wouldn’t go public.
So he went with them. He and the escort drove in his car—“So we don’t have to drag your ass all the way back here,” the security guy said—while the second security agent said he’d be following. He hadn’t yet shown up.
So Morrison stood, nervously, shoulders slumped, like a peasant dragged before the king, as Corbeil pushed an audiotape into a tape recorder. He recognized the voice: Terrence Lighter. “John, what the hell are you guys doing out there? This geek shows up on my doorstep . . .”
Shit: they had him.
He decided to tough it out. “I came across what I thought was anomalous work—nothing to do with Clipper, but it was obviously top secret and the way it was being handled . . . it shouldn’t have been handled that way,” Morrison told Corbeil. He was standing like a petitioner, while Corbeil sat in a terminal chair. “When I was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I was told that if I ever found an anomaly like that, I should report it at least two levels up, so that it couldn’t be hidden and so that security problems could be fixed.”
“So you went to Lighter?”
“I didn’t think I had a choice. And you should remember that I did talk to Lighter,” Morrison said. “Now, I think, we should give the FBI a ring. See what they say.”
“You silly cunt.” Corbeil slipped a cell phone from a suit pocket, punched a button, waited a few seconds, then asked, “Anything?” Apparently not. He said, “Okay. Drop the disks. We’re gonna go ahead on this end.”
Corbeil’s security agent, who’d been waiting patiently near the door, looked at his watch and said, “If we’re gonna do it, we better get it done. Goodie’s gonna be starting up here in the next fifteen minutes and I gotta run around the building and get in place.”
Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4 Page 46