The Devil's Code

by John Sandford

  I plugged “Old Man of the Sea” into the Alta Vista search engine and got back 756 Web pages; most of it was junk, but it became pretty clear that the original Old Man of the Sea was a character from the Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor.

  According to the story, Sinbad was stranded on an island—he never learned—where he came across an old man who he believed to be crippled. The old man asked to be carried to a pool of water, but when Sinbad got him there, the old man wouldn’t get off Sinbad’s back.

  In fact, he grew something like spurs, and claws, and dug into Sinbad’s neck. For days, Sinbad was forced to carry him around the island and feed him. Sinbad himself, in an excess of pain, hollowed out a gourd that he found, and filled it with grapes. In a few days, the grape juice had become strong wine, which he drank to kill the pain.

  The old man noticed him doing this, and demanded some of the wine. Sinbad gave it to him. The old man became drunk, and Sinbad was able to throw him off his shoulders. Not being a major moralist, Sinbad then beat the old man to death. When he managed to get a ship off the island, he was told that the old man was a famous devil, who would beg to be carried, but then would ride his victim to death, eventually eating the body . . .

  “Nice story,” LuEllen said.

  “I should have remembered it,” I said. “I read all the Sinbad stories, but a long time ago.”

  “So . . . what does it mean?”

  “There are some very heavy social and psychological implications to it.”

  “You have no fuckin’ idea what it means,” she said.

  “Why do you think we’ve been cutting the devil card out of my tarot deck?”

  She opened her mouth to crack wise, and then shut it. And kept it shut.

  Actually going out on the Net suggested something else to me. I did a quick search, found a site, and plugged in www.dallasnews.com. The Dallas Morning News had one of the better newspaper sites, and on page one, it carried a teaser: “One Killed, One Wounded in Denton Shooting.”

  I punched it up and after a minute, a brief story trickled down the laptop’s screen.

  A CALIFORNIA WOMAN WAS KILLED AND A MAN WHO TOLD POLICE THAT HE WAS HER “BODYGUARD” WAS WOUNDED IN A SHOOTING AT THE EIGHTY-EIGHT MOTEL IN DENTON LATE SATURDAY NIGHT. DENTON POLICE SAY THE SHOOTING MAY BE DRUG RELATED.

  LANE WARD, AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA, WAS PRONOUNCED DEAD AT THE SCENE, WHILE HER “BODYGUARD,” IDENTIFIED BY POLICE AS LETHRIDGE GREEN, OF OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, WAS IN FAIR CONDITION AT MOUNT OF OLIVES HOSPITAL.

  POLICE SAID THAT BOTH WARD AND GREEN HAD PRIOR DRUG-RELATED ARRESTS, WARD IN 1986 IN SAN FRANCISCO FOR POSSESSION OF MARIJUANA, GREEN IN 1977 IN OAKLAND FOR POSSESSION OF COCAINE.

  WITNESSES SAID THE GUNMEN WERE TWO WHITE MALES, ONE OF WHOM WAS WOUNDED IN THE SHOOTING. NEITHER GUNMAN HAS BEEN FOUND.

  POLICE SAID GREEN WAS BEING HELD FOR QUESTIONING AT THE HOSPITAL.

  “Ooo. Little Lane was smoking dope,” LuEllen said.

  “In 1986,” I said. “She was a college kid.”

  “But it sounds bad, doesn’t it?”

  “Not unless the cops dropped some dope in the room, and the paper doesn’t mention any dope being found,” I said. “Of course, there’s the other possibility.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That it’s all bullshit from start to finish; that the FBI or somebody is mixing in with the cops, and don’t want reporters asking any more questions. I mean, right now, it’s another dope-related shooting. Nobody’ll give it another look.”

  “Good for Green . . .”

  “Probably,” I said.

  So we didn’t go to the library. We didn’t go to Waco, either; not that day, or the next. If there was anything going on at the ranch, they might be looking out for conspicuously nonrancher cars, for at least a couple of days.

  So we spent Sunday and Monday wandering around Austin; bought a basketball at a Wal-Mart and played a little one-on-one at a local playground, hit some more golf balls, did some drawing. Checked the Dallas Morning News Web site a couple more times, but the story was dead.

  Talked to Bobby. The FBI had interviewed Green, pretty much cutting out the local cops. He’d convinced them that he was hired muscle: he had all the background, plus the attitude. They left with a few threats, but both Green and his lawyer thought it was all over.

  I also spent some time calling around Austin, and found a place I could rent a pickup—“I need to help my daughter move some furniture from one house to another,” I told the guy at Access Car Rental, who didn’t care one way or the other—and picked up the truck. On Monday night, we watched movies on pay TV. The next morning, at eight o’clock, we left for Waco.

  Or Whacko, as LuEllen pronounced it.

  22

  When we were killing time in Austin, we hardly talked about Lane Ward. We were working at pushing her away, the image of her dead on the motel bed. Instead of talking about that, we were technical: How did they find us so quickly? When did they detect the intrusion, etc.?

  On the way up to Waco, LuEllen, who had hardly spoken at all that morning, asked, “Who’s going to take care of her?”

  “What?”

  “Who’s going to take care of Lane? Who’s going to take care of the funeral and her stuff at her house? What’s going to happen with all that? Does somebody just haul it to the dump?”

  “Don’t start,” I said.

  “I can’t help it. I woke up thinking about it. I mean, she was about my age, and she doesn’t have any kids, and her parents are dead, just like me. Then, all of a sudden, she’s killed—and who takes care of her? The state? I mean, do they just cremate her and throw her ashes in a dump somewhere? Do they take all of her books out and throw them away, or have a garage sale, or what?”

  “If she’s got a will . . . I mean, that should take care of it.”

  “That’s just legal,” LuEllen said. “I wonder if there’s anybody who really cares?”

  She worried about it all the way to Waco; and didn’t really stop then, I don’t think. She just stopped talking about it.

  Waco has a county courthouse that looks like a state capitol. I went in looking for a map, and they sent me across the street. I got one, chatted with the map guy for a few minutes, and he showed me a plat book. It took a while, but I eventually spotted Corbeil’s ranch just outside a little town called Crawford, which was northwest of Waco proper. We stopped at a Barnes & Noble bookstore, LuEllen ran in and bought a couple of crumpets and some kind of health juice, and we headed for Corbeil’s.

  There’s a big lake at Waco, and a couple of rivers, which didn’t fit with my mental picture of the place: but there they were. The November countryside was low and rolling, and as we got closer to Crawford, cut by gullies and a few creeks. There was some corn farming, and lots of hay around, but in general, the country was more ranch than farm. We crawled through Crawford, inadvertently ran a four-way stop that I thought was two-way, and almost got T-boned by a Chevy pickup. LuEllen was peering out the window and said, eventually, “Took me sixteen years to get out of a place like this.”

  “Really? A place like this?”

  “Up in Minnesota,” she said. I’d never known she was a small-town girl, though if I’d thought about it, I might’ve guessed. And I waited. No small-town kid has ever been through another small town without some kind of comment about the other town’s inferiority. She said, “But the place I grew up, at least we had a Dairy Queen.”

  Yup.

  Corbeil’s place was set on a ridge above Texas Highway 185; the place was a sprawling yellow log-cabin–style house. Not new, but not antique, either: the kind of log place that city people buy. We couldn’t see it all from the road, but a half-dozen outbuildings of one kind or another were scattered about the place: a steel pole barn stuffed with hay, what was probably a machine shed, a six-car garage, what might possibly have been a bunkhouse or an office building—two doors, and a row of windows
with decorative shutters next to each window—a long, low stable with a training ring off one side, and what might have been a pump shed.

  One pasture, surrounded with barbed wire and with a circular growth pattern in the grass that suggested a center-pivot watering system, contained a half-dozen Brahman cattle. The rest of the place was that kind of shaggy gray-green, ready for winter. A couple of hundred white-faced cows were clumped around what we could see of the rest of his pasture land, which continued to rise, in a series of steps, behind the ranch house.

  According to the plat book, Corbeil owned 1,280 acres—two square miles, a mile wide and two miles deep. There were roads on two sides: Highway 185, which ran east-west along the front of the house, and Beulah Drive, which ran north-south, along the west side of the ranch.

  A mile north of Highway 185, as we drove up Beulah on the west side of Corbeil’s property, an old ramshackle farmhouse squatted well back from the road in a clump of trees, with weeds growing up in the two-tire-track driveway. The place looked dead, but there was a newer pizza-dish-sized satellite TV antenna on the roof, and another, old-style dish on the lawn out back, so we figured somebody probably lived there.

  We continued on the county road to what we figured was the end of Corbeil’s property, and then went two miles on, where we found the remnants of what must have been another old farm: a grove of trees set back from the road with traces of a track going back into the trees. I turned around on the track, and in the silence and emptiness of the place, got out and trotted back to the trees, and found an old crumbling chimney, and a parking spot littered with corroding beer cans. Maybe the local lover’s lane.

  On the way back out, as we approached the north end of Corbeil’s land again, I pointed to the fence line that marked the edge of Corbeil’s property.

  “Up ahead—see those trees? I want to hop out with the glasses. You take the truck back up the road about five or six miles, then come get me. Give me fifteen minutes,” I said.

  “Where’re you going?”

  “I’m going to walk along that fence row, see what I can see on the other side of that hill.”

  “Probably a rancher who doesn’t like trespassers.”

  “I’ll tell him I’m an artist,” I said. “I’ll take my bag with me.”

  At the trees, I hopped out with the bag and the binoculars, and as LuEllen rolled away, I cut through a copse of junky roadside trees, crossed a fence where it joined another fence line, and headed up the hill. As I said, the countryside was empty: roads and fences and fields and not a lot of people. I was walking through some kind of ground cover, springy underfoot—it looked grassy, and it looked as though it were regularly mowed, but it wasn’t anything like the alfalfa or clover I was familiar with.

  I followed the fence line four hundred yards up the hill, and finally reached a broad crest where I could look down on Corbeil’s ranch. Lots more cows and a big stock tank with a watering station. What interested me more, though, was the satellite dish that sat next to the pump station. It was one of the big ones, the old-fashioned dishes, but it looked well-kept; and there was nobody there to look at a TV. Still, it was moving as I watched. I couldn’t actually see the movement, but when I looked away, and then looked back, it seemed that the dish had moved. I squatted next to the fence, lined up a barb on the barbed-wire with one edge of the dish: and yes, it was moving. It moved for the best part of five or six minutes, and then stopped.

  As best I could judge, from the direction of the road down the hill, the dish was pointing northeast when it stopped. I could see the backside of the old abandoned-looking farmhouse a mile south, and with the binoculars, could make out the satellite dish behind it: that dish was also pointing northeast.

  Huh.

  Were the dishes coordinated? Were they talking to satellites? And if they were, so what? There are uplinks all over the place: even sports bars had them. But bars didn’t have coordinated dishes scattered over a couple of square miles. If the dishes were linked, they would have, in effect, a huge baseline, which would be the same as having a much bigger and more sensitive dish. And with those photos . . .

  We were onto something. A secret operation of some kind? But who were they hiding it from? If they were working with the feds, they’d just go ahead and stick the dishes up anywhere; they wouldn’t be hidden away on a ranch in Waco.

  I was waiting in the trees when LuEllen came back. “Anything?”

  “Yeah. I think we’re getting a handle on something. Did you see a satellite dish at Corbeil’s? One of those big babies?”

  “I didn’t notice . . . I don’t think so.”

  We cruised the place again, running down Highway 185, but no dish was visible from the highway. “Could be down out of sight,” she said.

  “Or maybe there are only two . . . or maybe there are more, tucked away like that stock tank.”

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “A little fantasy,” I said. “They were willing to kill for those pictures, and we have what might be code. We got that list of names for all those Middle Eastern countries . . . I wonder if somehow they aren’t hijacking photos from the recon satellites and selling them.”

  “For what?”

  “Sell surveillance of Pakistan to India, and surveillance of India to Pakistan. Sell surveillance of Iraq to Iran, and Iran and Syria to Iraq; of Israel to Syria. Of Taiwan to China, and China to Taiwan.”

  “They’d get caught.”

  “I could tell you ten ways to do it, that they’d never get caught. That the buyers would never see the sellers. That’s what the Internet is for. Any buyer who’s getting this stuff . . . it’d be the biggest secret they had.”

  “Okay. So what next?”

  “Let’s go back to Austin. I need to do some shopping,” I said.

  “Always shopping.”

  “We’ll come back tonight.”

  “A scout?”

  “A scout.”

  In Austin, we went to an outdoor-sports store and bought a good compass; a GPS receiver with a map function; topographic maps of the East Waco area, including Corbeil’s ranch; and a cheap black daypack. At a building-supply place, picked up a builders’ protractor, a bubble level, and some duct tape. And in a sewing store, a card with five yards of elastic banding. I spent an hour in the parking lot with the GPS receiver, figuring out how to work it; especially interesting were the time and distance functions, and the backtrack function.

  Then there was the matter of the gun.

  “We need a better one,” LuEllen said. “Look what they did to Lane, and what they did to Jack. Those were executions, so they just don’t give a fuck. If we go on a scout, and they catch us, and they’ve got guns—this is Texas, Kidd—they’re going to shoot us down like dogs.”

  “Anytime you buy a gun . . .”

  “Ought to be easy in Texas,” she said. “Let me call Weenie.”

  It was easy in Texas. All we had to do was drive to Houston, which was a little better than two hours away, meet a guy in a parking lot near George Bush Intercontinental Airport, and give him $600 for a cheap Chinese-made AK with two magazines, fifty rounds of 7.65 × 39, and a nylon sling.

  “That’s about a two-hundred-dollar gun in a store,” I told LuEllen, as we left the parking lot.

  “That wasn’t a store,” she said.

  “Hope it works,” I said. “Looks like it was made by a high school kid in a shop class.”

  At five o’clock we were back in Austin. In the motel room, I pumped some shells through the AK, bruised the tip of my middle finger with the firing pin, and eventually decided that the thing might work. We ate, and by seven o’clock, we were on the road again.

  The land around Waco is fairly lush. Waco is just about south of Dallas, and the really dry, sere land—serious prickly-pear country—starts an hour or two to the west.

  But the land just west of Waco, like lots of back-country in this day of Interstate highways, was lonely. All the land was used,
in one way or another, but when we’d gone out in the morning, we’d seen only one person along the road, a woman walking out to her mailbox. In that kind of country, without the light pollution of the city, it gets dark.

  We’d picked a good night for it, windless, starlit, quiet. The moon was already slanting down in the sky when we drove past Corbeil’s. There were lights in the house, in the building that might have been an office or bunkhouse, and in the yard. A couple of cars were parked outside the garage, but we didn’t see anyone moving around. We made the turn on Beulah Avenue, west of the ranch, and headed north, until we found the track that headed back to the abandoned homesite that we’d discovered in the morning. Once there, we shut down the truck, spent a couple of minutes looking around, and mostly, listening.

  We heard nothing but insects, and the gravel underfoot. Ten minutes after we arrived, LuEllen broke out the taped flashlights, and we started back down the road toward Corbeil’s place.

  The walk took forty minutes, moving slowly, and stopping to listen and scan ahead with the night glasses. During that time, we neither heard nor saw another vehicle. At the corner of Corbeil’s property, where I’d followed the fence line in that morning, we stepped into the trees and with the flashlights, established our position on the GPS.

  “Ready?”

  “Go,” she said.

  We were both dressed from head to foot in black. In the city, we’d worn dark red jackets. They were nearly as invisible as black, when you were out of the light, and looked a lot more innocent to cops. Out here, if we were caught in the middle of Corbeil’s pasture with the AK, there’d be no point in arguing that we were there by mistake.

  We crossed the fence, with me in the lead, LuEllen following behind; the stars and fragmentary moon were just bright enough that we could see each other as shadows, and hear our feet swishing through the grass. When we’d walked a good distance up the hill, I moved over to the fence line, illuminating it with a spiderweb of light from one of the flashlights.