"That tarot shit is spooky," Dace said after a while.
"It's okay," LuEllen said. She looked at me. "Tell him about it."
"I use it to game," I said shortly.
"What the hell does that mean?"
I looked at a spread of cards dominated by minor swords. Distress, tension. They got that right. I turned to Dace.
"Back in seventy-nine I was hired by an astrologer to put together an astrology program. Preparing an astrology chart is all mechanical. Figuring moon rises and stuff."
"I thought it took years to learn how to do it," Dace said.
"That's the interpretation of the chart. The chart itself is fixed. Anyway, a computer can do the mechanical part as well as a human-better, really, because it doesn't make computational errors-and save a lot of time.
"So I had to build a scanner to scan the ephemeris-that's the book with the actual astronomical information in it, when the planets rise and set and all that. Then I had to work out another program to scan it in again with a second method, so we could compare the two bunches of data to cross-check for errors. It was a hell of a job. It took weeks. Anyway, this astrologer fooled around with the tarot, and I got interested."
"You tell the future?"
"No. Almost everything you read about the tarot is bullshit. But if you take the cards as archetypes for different kinds of human motives and behaviors, it becomes a kind of war-gaming system," I said.
"So what does that do?" Dace asked.
"When a person looks at a problem, it's always in a particular context. Most of the time, he's blinded to possible answers by his own prejudices and by the environment around him. By gaming a problem, you're forced outside your prejudices. So our question is, why do we have a security problem? I'd never think that LuEllen was the problem. I trust her. But maybe LuEllen got caught in that apartment back in Cleveland, and maybe she has a federal indictment that I don't know about, and when I got in touch with her and explained what I wanted to do, maybe she went to the U.S. Attorney and cut a deal.
"Or could be Bobby's got a legal problem and he cut a deal. The cards throw out random possibilities, and then you lay back and think about them."
"I didn't cut a deal," LuEllen said.
"I know."
"How do you know?" Dace asked. "I mean, just as an example."
"I've seen LuEllen do her act. She wasn't acting today. She was about to take on that gun."
We all thought about that for a minute.
"That's weird," Dace said finally. "Do you ever do just an old-fashioned magic reading?"
"I can. I don't do it often."
"Doesn't work?" he asked curiously.
"No. Just the opposite. It does seem to work. And that worries me."
"Why?"
"Because I don't believe in that shit," I said.
Maggie called just before midnight. "You said the man with the gun was short and rat-faced, with a brush cut?"
"Yeah."
"What about the other man? Was he kind of tall and wimpy, kind of thin and nervous?"
"Yeah. Where'd you get that from?"
"They're private detectives from Washington, at least the rat-faced one is. The blond guy works for him. They do divorce work."
"What do they want with us?"
"Nothing. The landlord says he had another run-in with these guys a couple of months ago. They're chasing after some general who used to meet a woman in the apartment you're using."
"That's a pretty pat answer," I said after a minute.
"That's what the guy said, the landlord. You can go on over and meet him tomorrow. He's pissed; he'll talk to Ratface tomorrow. He says he'll get them off your back. He's going to tell them the apartment is leased to a private computer-security group working out of the Pentagon, and that you want to go after them with the FBI. He says that'll take them out. This detective supposedly has a bad reputation with the feds, and he won't mess with anything that smells like government security."
"I don't know," I said. But it sounded reasonable. It would account for the archaic bugging equipment and what LuEllen said was an old-fashioned lockpick. "I'll have to talk to the other two. They're pretty spooked."
"Look. Find another place if you want, but get on the job. This was just a bizarre coincidence. Talk to the landlord."
That night, with Dace's suggestive questioning in the back of my head, I did a "magic" layout with the tarot. I got the Seven of Swords overlaying the Emperor in a crucial position. Later, I knew what it meant. But then it was too late.
Dace agreed to talk to the landlord the next morning while I went out and bought a commercial bug detector. You can buy them across the counter-just another necessary appliance in Washington, like VCRs and compact-disc players.
"I'm pretty shaky about this," LuEllen said as we went back in the building.
"No reason," I said. "We haven't done anything detectably criminal yet. If we see any problem at all up here, we walk away."
We didn't find anything. I took the bugs out of the phones, checked the lines, then went over the rest of the place inch by inch with the scanner. Nothing.
"We're clean," I said finally. "He wasn't up here long enough to do more than the phone. Certainly nothing so sophisticated that it would be completely invisible and wouldn't show up on this." I waved the scanner at her.
LuEllen was skeptical, but when Dace came back from meeting the landlord, he seemed convinced.
"I'm pretty sure he was telling the truth. Ratface's name is Frank Morelli. The other guy is a phone technician he brings in on some of his cases. They tried to get in once before, nine weeks ago, chasing this Pentagon guy. The Pentagon guy drops his mistress like a hot rock, but he was back here last week for a party. Morelli must have been watching him and figured it started up again."
"So he talked to them?"
"Yeah. He says Morelli used to be a cop. That's how he got around those cops we sicced on him. He pulled out his private eye card and mentioned a few names, and told them he was on a job. They said okay and took off."
"So what do you want to do?" I asked, looking at LuEllen. "You're the skeptical one. If you don't want to do it, we'll call it off."
She chewed on a thumbnail.
"A half million bucks," she said.
"Yeah."
"All right," she said. She pointed a finger at me. "But one more problem and I'm outa here."
"We haven't done enough research on these guys," LuEllen said. It was the next day, and she was draped over an easy chair, looking at the final list of Whitemark burglary targets. All of them, Bobby thought, had access to Whitemark computers from their homes. "We're going in semi-blind. It bothers me."
"We don't have time for more," I said.
"If you get caught, the whole job goes up in smoke," said Dace from his perch on the arm of a couch. He had a tin can of Prince Albert in one hand and a pinch of tobacco between the thumb and forefinger of the other.
"That's why LuEllen's here. To keep risks to a minimum."
"But you're not taking her advice," Dace argued. "She said we need more research. You're pushing to go in now."
He was right, but there was no help for it. Every day that passed brought Whitemark's version of String closer to completion. If we didn't move quickly, there wouldn't be any point in doing it at all.
"Look, couldn't we spend a week scouting all of them, and then pick the best two or three?" Dace asked.
"We don't have a week," I said. "We have to take our best shot and go into the computers and see where we are. Maybe we'll only need one or two, and all the other scouting would be a waste of time."
"But.
"Wait a minute, wait a minute," LuEllen said, waving us down. "It makes me nervous, but I didn't say we couldn't do it. We have to be careful, that's all."
"I don't like it," Dace said. "I hate sitting around here. I wish I could come along and drive. Or something. Anything."
"We already talked about that. Having you along wouldn't help, it'd only make things worse," LuEllen snapped. "Let's just work on this list, okay?"
We wanted to do three specific things inside the Whitemark computers. We wanted to interfere with the programs used to design the Hellwolf. We wanted to destroy Whitemark administrative systems. And we wanted to attack the computer itself, to fundamentally bollix up the way it operated.
The best way to do that was to get the entry codes of the top systems programmer. With those codes we would be able to move through the whole system. But going after a systems man was dangerous. Computer experts are paranoically sensitive about security: if we broke into the top man's house he might change his codes as a matter of routine. It would take only a few minutes, and he could do it himself, so why not?
Instead of going after the systems programmer first, I decided to go after an engineer and a manager and hope we could get into the programming levels through their terminals.
"We want a suburban neighborhood of single-family houses, not an apartment complex, because there are fewer people around. We don't want kids, because kids get sick and stay home from school, or come home at odd times. And if there aren't any kids, both the husband and wife are probably out during the day, at work," LuEllen said, ticking off the points on her fingers. "If the neighborhood and the house are right, the Ebberly woman ought to be our top target. Bobby's credit report says her husband is an executive with the Postal Service, which is a nine-to-five job. The other ones, where the husband works for Whitemark and the wife works somewhere else, it's hard to tell how important they are. They could be working late shifts or early shifts."
"So we go for the woman, the personnel evaluator. Samantha Ebberly. Samantha and Frank," I said.
LuEllen nodded. "We'll give them first look, anyway."
That night I did a few spreads with the tarot, but couldn't find anything significant. The Fool was in hiding.
We left the apartment at nine o'clock the next morning. The day was already thick and sultry, with thin, morose clouds sliding off to the south. We were dressed in tennis whites and court shoes. We carried tennis bags with racket handles sticking out of the side pockets.
"White folks think burglars are these big black dudes with panty hose on their heads, who come in the middle of the night. They won't look twice at a white couple walking around at ten o'clock in the morning with tennis rackets," LuEllen said while we were buying the equipment. "We put the crowbar and the bolt cutters, the gloves and your tools and the electronic stuff in the bottom of the bags. If there's a problem, we ditch the bags and jog back to the car. Jogging is one way you can run in the 'burbs without a single soul paying attention to you."
The Ebberlys lived in Falls Church, Virginia, in a neighborhood of upper-middle-class ranch homes and bungalows. The streets had names like Willow Lane and Crabapple Court, and twisted endlessly back on each other like a ball of twine. There were sailboats in the side yards, basketball hoops on garages, heavy, black barbecue grills on brick and stone patios. The houses were separated by tall hedges and lines of weeping willows.
We drove by the Ebberlys' home and LuEllen looked it over.
"It feels empty," she said. The house was a two-story, split-entry design with evergreen bushes on either side of the front door. She was pleased by the layout.
"I like those shrubs. They cut off the view from the side. These streets are good, too, with the curves. There's nobody right across the street looking at the target's front door. Gives you some extra privacy to work."
We went by a second time. She took out a pair of compact Leitz binoculars and scanned the place.
"You look for lumps of dark green grass in the backyard, especially along the fences," LuEllen said idly. "If they have a dog, and he does his business in the yard, there'll be dark clumps of grass, like pimples. It's not a sure thing, but it can warn you off."
There was nothing. Satisfied by the house, we drove six blocks out to a convenience store, where we had seen a drive-up phone. Checking the list from Bobby, she called the Ebberlys at their separate offices. Samantha came on, and LuEllen rattled the receiver a few times and hung up. Frank wasn't in his office, but had been just a minute ago. He was probably down the hall for coffee, according to the woman who answered the phone, but he had an appointment coming up so he should be right back. LuEllen promised to call in fifteen minutes.
"Get my bag," she said. I reached into the backseat for her bag, as she dropped another coin into the phone. "Who now?" I asked.
"The house." She listened while the Ebberlys' house phone rang thirty times, then glanced around the parking lot. Sure that nobody was watching, she took a pair of compact bolt cutters from the tennis bag and nipped off the phone receiver.
"Let's go," she said, tossing the receiver in the backseat. "Let's do it."
"You're sure?"
"Goddamnit, let's do it," she snarled. LuEllen carries no excess fat, and now her face muscles stood out in bundles. She slipped a packet of white powder out of her purse, carefully tipped some on a matchbook, and snorted it up.
"You want some?"
"No."
"Good stuff," she said. "It'll give you an edge."
"I've got an edge," I said.
"Then drive."
As I pulled out of the parking lot, she retrieved the amputated receiver from the backseat and stuffed it out of sight in the glove compartment.
"If you cut the receiver off, nobody will try to use the pay phone," she explained. "That means nobody will hang it up, so the phone should still be ringing at the Ebberlys' when we get there."
"If there's nobody home."
"Right."
We stopped at a neighborhood park two blocks from the target. Both tennis courts were occupied. We did some stretches, got the bags, and walked down the street toward the Ebberlys'.
"When we get there, we turn right in. I knock. If somebody comes to the door, we ask where the park is. If we hear the phone, and nobody answers the knock, you back up so I can get at the door. I pop it, and we go in. Keep everything slow," she said quietly. As she talked, her head turned from the street up to me, and back to the street. Her smile switched on and off, the perfect rhythm for a friendly husband-wife talk on the Way home from a tennis game. The streets were eerily quiet for a nice summer day. No kids, no cars.