Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  “This is Bill Clinton. If she wants to talk to me again, right now, you have ten seconds to get her on the phone. After that, I’m gone.”

  Five seconds later, Welsh picked up. “This better not be a joke.”

  “This is no joke. This is a threat. If you come after us again, or threaten us, we’ll tear major new assholes in all those bright and shiny computers you keep buying out there.”

  “Your threats don’t worry us too much, Bill. We’re only about one step behind you now.”

  “Oh, yeah? Get a lot of prints off that car? Listen, lady, I’m telling you. If we feel threatened, we’ll take you down. If you want a demonstration of what we can do, we’ll put your internal phone book on the Internet, with all the names and home addresses listed, so people who don’t like your brand of bullshit can call you up at any time of day or night. Would that convince you?”

  Her resolve seemed to waver: “I don’t think you could . . .”

  “What phone do you think I’m talking to you on?” I asked. “Jesus Christ, woman, take a minute to think about it.”

  “So don’t do that . . .”

  “Look at those computers, find out what happened with Lighter and Jack Morrison and AmMath and Clipper, and stay the fuck away from us.”

  I hung up. We were headed toward the airport, five minutes later, when one of LuEllen’s cell phones rang. The taxi driver was chanting to himself in Arabic, and apparently paying no attention. LuEllen dug the phone out of her purse, punched the Talk button, said, “Hello?” listened for a moment, then handed the phone to me. “Green,” she said.

  Green was calling from a phone at a gas station in San Francisco. “I couldn’t figure out how they were tracking us, when they were always so far away, always two or three blocks,” he said. “So I drove over to my brother’s place—he’s got a garage—put the car up on a lift and guess what?”

  “You had a bug.”

  “Still got it,” he said. “But I moved it inside the car, and duct-taped a big alnico magnet to it. When we get to the airport, I’ll stick it on a car that’s leaving. That ought to confuse them for a while . . . then we’ll fly the Seattle-to-Houston route, and drive up to Dallas.”

  “Good. We’re on our way now. We’ll be in Dallas tonight.”

  “We’ll probably stay over in Houston, see you tomorrow.”

  We talked for another minute, and then he was gone.

  And we were gone. Seven hours later, we were in Dallas.

  14

  ST. JOHN CORBEIL

  Corbeil was sweating. In the cold air-conditioning of his office, he could feel the dampness under his shirt collar and despised himself for it. Not good clean sweat, the kind you got lifting weights. This was nervous sweat, the kind you got when a hard-nosed NSA security officer cornered you with unexpected questions, while some FBI faggot sat in the back smiling and playing with his tennis bracelet.

  Strunk—the security officer’s name was Karl Strunk—had questions about the Bloch Tech ISP, about the emergence of Firewall, about the deaths of Lighter and Morrison. Corbeil managed to finesse the questions, to play dumb. He hated having to project even the appearance of ignorance, but it had been necessary. And it had been a close-run thing.

  How had they gotten onto Bloch Tech and the connection between Bloch Tech and the Firewall rumors? That was the last thing he would have expected . . .

  Hart knocked once and pushed into the office. “What happened?” he asked. “Trouble?”

  “I’m not sure. Something’s going on. They know about Bloch Tech, and they suspect that Lighter and Morrison are connected. But they don’t seem to have any idea what the connection might be. And I don’t understand that . . . how they could suspect a connection without having any idea what it might be . . .” He stopped, pulled himself in. He’d almost been sputtering, like some striped-tie civil service asshole who’d lost a box of paper clips.

  “We took care of that with the Morrison plane tickets,” Hart said. “Did they find the tickets?”

  “I wasn’t asking any questions—but I assume they did. I came down hard on the idea that we were monitoring everything, that we were afraid that we’d been penetrated by Firewall. I suggested that Firewall had penetrated Bloch Tech, recognizing that it was the biggest ISP in Glen Burnie, and figuring that there must’ve been a lot of NSA people in it . . . Probably in there looking for anything they could get.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “The idea didn’t surprise him. I kept talking about his IRS attack. That has them confused, too.”

  “That has me confused.”

  Corbeil smiled: “I think it’s absolutely wonderful. They’re going to find some people who profess to be Firewall, and they’ll have nothing to do with us. If you’ve ever dealt with those little cocksuckers who infest the Internet these days, you know that they’ll probably take credit for every bit of damage that gets done. They think it’s glamorous.”

  “It’d still be nice to have an . . . overview.”

  Corbeil nodded. “I’ll go up to Meade and tap the old-boy line. See if I can find out what’s happening . . .”

  “I can make a couple of calls,” Hart said. “Ask a couple of guys to keep an eye out—tell them that if there’s trouble, I want to get out while the getting is good. That might produce something.”

  “Do it,” Corbeil said. “And tell Woods to keep an eye on the computers, just in case the people at Meade have a backdoor into it.”

  When Hart was gone, Corbeil made a half-dozen calls and managed to wangle an invitation to visit NSA headquarters to talk about Firewall and AmMath. Once inside, it’d be usual enough to visit old pals, an ordinary thing to pick up on the gossip. He’d made a lot of money on the outside, and had jobs prospects to dangle . . .

  Somewhere, somebody was working a vein of information, and if he couldn’t find out who, he might get hurt.

  He spent another half-hour online, using an encrypted spreadsheet to move money between offshore accounts: from the “in” account to, eventually, the “invest” account. Corbeil had a number that he had taken out of The Wall Street Journal. The head of a big arbitrage fund had set aside twenty-five million for his own use, the Journal said, and with the rest of his fortune, he simply played. Twenty-five million, the man said, was enough to take care of any realistic need.

  Corbeil made that his number: twenty-five million. When he reached that number, he would shut down the Old Man of the Sea, find a way to seal himself away from Woods and Hart and Benson. Then find something else to do, in a softer climate. Ibiza would be a candidate . . .

  He thought about Ibiza for a while, and then again about Woods and Hart and Benson. If something were to happen to Hart and Benson, and if Woods were to disappear with a large amount of cash, then conclusions might be drawn. Then, if Clipper died, as it appeared that it would, he could liquidate and find that something else.

  That would be a couple of years, yet. He was not yet halfway to his number . . .

  Hart came back. “Talked to some guys, they’ll keep their ears open, but right now, nothing. The only talk about us, is, most of them have heard that Clipper is going down.”

  “Common knowledge,” Corbeil said. “I’ve been thinking about this whole problem. There is either a source of information about us, or the Ward woman knows something that we don’t. Maybe she had more files than we know about. Maybe Morrison made more than one entry. Maybe they were working together . . .”

  “Possible. But if all that was true, and if she’s giving her stuff to the NSA, why are they so confused? Why are they just sniffing around? They don’t really seem to know much. Maybe she’s just jacking us up, and is gonna come in with an offer . . .”

  “Doesn’t feel like it. If you two hadn’t lost her.”

  “Listen, when they made that switch, that was professional,” Hart said. “Where does a college professor get off spotting a beacon the size of an ice cube? I’m telling you . . .”

  Corb
eil waved him off. “We’ve been through all that and she’s out of sight for the time being. The police say she’s coming here to look at the house and to pick up some of Morrison’s equipment and personal effects. You found MasterCard and American Express receipts in her house—maybe you can pick her up through her cards.”

  Hart nodded. “I’ll check.”

  Corbeil leaned back in his chair. “Somebody is working on us, William. Possibly the NSA, but it doesn’t feel like them. Strunk knew a few things, but there were holes in everything he knew. Questions didn’t follow any reasonable logic. He had bits and pieces, only bits and pieces.”

  “Gotta find Ward,” Hart said.

  “Find her, and look at her.”

  15

  Dallas was hot.

  Hot enough that the newspapers were whining about it. Unnaturally hot, for the time of year. When we got to the DFW car-rental building, which was a couple miles from the airport, a chunky redheaded woman dragged a bulky black suitcase up to the Hertz desk with a complaint about her bill. I didn’t hear the details of the complaint, but noticed that her blouse was soaked with sweat from the fifty-yard walk across the parking lot.

  We rented a thoroughly air-conditioned car, using one of LuEllen’s IDs, and got two rooms at the Ramada Inn. When we were settled, we drove to something called the West End Historic District, which turned out to be a fern-bar shopping district injected into a bunch of aging warehouses.

  The TrendDirect building, once a big, old red-brick warehouse, had been dressed up with modern black windows and new tuck-pointing. It stood alone on its own block. Part of the ground floor had been given over to an imposing lobby, with a glass wall separating the street from an interior done in old brick and new marble, with huge wooden beams crisscrossing overhead. A guard and reception desk sat to one side, a half circle of marble. We could see two heads behind it, but no details of the security.

  Except for the lobby, the front part of the building’s first floor was all retail—a couple of boutiques, a men’s formal-wear store, a sports-collectibles shop, a coffee shop and a beer-and-steaks restaurant on the corner.

  TrendDirect, a direct mail advertising company, occupied floors two through five, plus the back part of the first floor. Six and seven were a single law firm, eight was occupied by an ad agency. Nine and ten were AmMath.

  LuEllen had her game face on. “Ten stories,” she said, as we cruised the neighborhood.

  “Ten stories.”

  “Exactly.”

  The front of the building was on a wide street, but faced a grassy square, and most of the traffic was local. Both side streets were narrow, showing walls of black windows. There were three window wells on each side.

  The rear of the building was on a wider, busier, dirtier street, smelling of truck coolant and exhaust. A half-dozen truck-parking bays backed up to a loading dock, with steel overhead doors opposite each truck bay. A windowless standard door, of steel, was at the center of the dock, between two of the big overhead doors. A smaller, street-level garage door, also steel, and just big enough for a small truck, was located at the end of the building. A video camera monitored the dock.

  “What do you think?” I asked her. She was looking straight up through the windshield.

  “I’d like to see the roof,” she said.

  “LuEllen . . .” I’m just the tiniest bit afraid of heights.

  “It’s gonna be a tough building,” she said. “That guard desk is a twenty-four-hour operation, and we know there are guards wandering around at night. Jack supposedly shot one who was making a routine round of the building. We could probably crack one of the doors in back, but then, the question is, could we get up? We can’t tell without going inside.”

  “Gotta be a way.”

  “Probably. The fact that there’s some kind of government top-secret connection makes me extra nervous. If we came down from the top . . . look, the building across the street from the south side is an office building. Turn here, I’ll show you.”

  The building across the street was just as she said: another old warehouse, renovated, with glitzy neon-signed shops on the bottom floor, and what must’ve been offices on the floors above.

  “The thing is, the security’ll probably suck. There’s no lobby, it’s a little shabby, so it’s probably a lot of individual offices. We could get access during the day, hide out inside, and get onto the roof at night. It’s twelve floors—two higher than TrendDirect,” LuEllen said. She looked back and forth between the two buildings. “Narrow streets here . . . I bet it’s not more than forty feet between the two cornices. We heave a climbing line across, slide down, and the TrendDirect roof’s probably got no security at all. It’d be really unusual if it did.”

  “Why don’t we get fake IDs and fool the guards,” I said. “Or keys for the back doors?”

  “Those are options.”

  “Or we could do a sneak.” Sneak is private language. It amounts to doing an easy reconnaissance, like a phony delivery, to look over a target. LuEllen has done them twenty times. I usually go on public tours—most big companies have them, and they are very informative, if you know what to look for.

  “That’s another option,” she admitted. But she liked the roof idea. She’d like the rush it’d bring, swinging out over the street at three o’clock in the morning. We spent another fifteen minutes looking at the building, and LuEllen shot a couple of rolls of color-slide film. She also got out of the car and looked into one of the window wells.

  She came back, shaking her head. “Why would you put glass brick all the way up and down?” she complained. “People working in there have to breathe, for Christ’s sakes. It’s inhuman.”

  “LuEllen, the voice of the working man,” I said.

  “But you know what? It all looks very secure,” she said. “Somebody went out of their way to be secure . . . and something else I just thought of.”

  “What?”

  “How often are building guards armed? Like the old guy who got shot?”

  I thought about that and shook my head. “Not often.”

  “The place is tough,” she said. “I’d turn it down, if I were working on my own, unless I had a very tight inside connection.”

  “Huh.” We both thought about that as we rolled away, leaving the building behind. Neither of us had ever spent serious time in Dallas, and it turned out that the West End Historic District was historic not only because it was old, but because that was where John Kennedy was assassinated. We went past the memorial, not knowing exactly what it was until LuEllen spotted a Dealy Plaza sign.

  “Do you remember Kennedy?” she asked, her face turned to the memorial as we passed by.

  “Sometimes I think I do,” I said. “But I think I mostly remember my folks telling me about him.”

  “I’ve only seen him in old TV shows,” LuEllen said. “He seemed like an okay guy for a president.”

  On the way back to the motel, we found a phone and got online with Bobby. He’d been doing research on AmMath, knowing that we might try to go in. I said:

  TREND DIRECT LOOKS TOUGH . ANY ONLINE OPTIONS ?

  CANNOT FIND ONLINE OPTION BUT DID LOOK AT CORBEIL HOME. HE HAS T-1 LINE.

  EXCELLENT . GIVE ADDRESS . . .

  Corbeil lived in a snazzy glass-and-brick low-rise apartment building on a North Dallas golf course; a gated community called Lago Verde. The T-1 line meant he was probably working from home on his downtown computer system.

  “This is the place to do a sneak,” she said, as we rolled past the gate. “I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that all the security is out here, on the fence, with maybe some drive-by guys in golf carts at night.”

  “So let’s go in,” I said.

  “Let’s call Bobby again,” she said. “We need to nail down Corbeil’s exact address, and we need the name of a single woman who lives in there, anywhere. Maybe he could check elevators—don’t elevators have to be inspected or something?”

  “I think so.�
��

  Bobby came back and said that Corbeil, according to the local phone and electric companies, lived on the eighth and ninth floors of a nine-story building called Poinsettia. All of the apartments in the building were two stories—on two and three, four and five, six and seven, eight and nine. He couldn’t find out what was on one, nor could he find anything about elevators. There was a state elevator data bank, but you had to know the serial number to find the right one; the bank was not searchable by address.

  He did get the name of a single woman, an Annebelle Enager who lived in the Poinsettia building.

  “That’s a start,” LuEllen said.

  “We’re gonna do a sneak?”

  “An easy one,” she said.

  One thing the movies never tell you is that burglars spend about half their life shopping. We bought a small paint brush and jars of red and black water-soluble poster paint at a kids’ store. At an office supply place, LuEllen picked up a bottle of rubber cement, a roll of duct tape, an X-Acto knife, and one of those roller-receipt boxes with a roll of receipt paper to go with it. The receipt paper went on a spindle-bar inside the top of the box—like a toilet paper holder—fed to the outside, across a plate where a customer would sign, and then back inside the box to a take-up spindle.

  We rented a white van from Hertz, took the van to a mostly vacant parking lot outside a thirty-six screen theater, and I used the poster paint to create a business on the side of the van: Rose’s Roses.

  “That looks great,” LuEllen said, when I’d finished. “You missed your calling. You should have been a sign painter.”

  “Yet, I think I would be unfulfilled,” I said. I’d painted two intertwined red roses, with black stems, above the name, in red. You had to hope nobody looked at both sides of the truck, because the roses were not exactly the same.