The Devil's Code

for a long time, Hart waiting through the pause. As he thought, with the CNBC mimes doing their silent chat opposite his desk, it occurred to Corbeil that he’d like to fuck every single one of the reporting women, but as for stock information, he wouldn’t trust any of them as far as he could spit a rat. That was not a coincidence, he thought. That was marketing. He wrenched himself back to the problem: “So keep an eye on her. Monitor her.”
    Hart was disappointed; Corbeil could hear it in hisvoice. He didn’t say “That’s it?” but he wanted to. Instead, he said, “We can’t really hang around her neighborhood, but if you want to cough up a couple of grand, in cash, I can put a bug on her car. At least we’ll know where she goes.”
    “Do it. I’ll send the cash through American Express. I’ll find out where the local office is out there, and you’ll have the money in a couple of hours. How long will it take you to get the bug?”
    “Probably tomorrow. I’ll have to call around.”
    “Good,” Corbeil said. “One other thing. I want you to start e-mailing reports to me. I’ve set up a new account called, um, Arclight. A-R-C-L-I-G-H-T. Regular number. Tell me that you’re monitoring them, that you’re watching them, and ask for advice. I’ll send one back that tells you to watch them for another week, to see if they make any contacts that seem to reflect an association with Firewall. We can discuss the feasibility of going to the FBI. Don’t be overly dramatic, but mention something about national security. We want to sound ethically challenged in the defense of the good old USA.”
    “Building a paper trail?”
    “Exactly. Give me a note or two every day, reporting on the surveillance. Maybe even suggest that we might want to get an ex-FBI guy to do a black-bag job, but I’ll turn you down on that.”
    “All right. I’ll get Benson to chip in a report.”
    “Read it first. He’s not the brightest bulb in the chandelier.”
    W hen Hart was off the line, Corbeil leaned back in his chair, made a steeple with his fingers, and thought about it. Hart’s memos would be useful in a couple of different ways. If everything went smoothly, and they either recovered the disks or discovered there was no second copy, then the memos could stay in the files just as Hart sent them.
    If, on the other hand, the situation got out of control, the memos could be altered to show an illegal operation running inside AmMath. The memos could be altered without changing the time stamp on them, and a check of the phone records would show the matching calls coming and going . . .
    Since the Arclight file had been opened from the computer in Tom Woods’s office, it would be at least credible that Corbeil didn’t know about it; especially if Woods wasn’t around to testify.
    That’s all Corbeil would need: a level of credibility, and the silence of contrary witnesses.
    And a good lawyer, of course.

 10 
    S ince I couldn’t sleep anyway, I kicked LuEllen out of bed at six-thirty and we went to look for Clarence Mason. We stopped at a diner for cholesterol and caffeine, got clogged in traffic heading into San Francisco, crossed the Golden Gate at eight o’clock, and after a bit of wandering, LuEllen ran into a gas station and got a guess on the location of LaCoste Road. Mason’s place was a small dark-green bungalow with an old-style two-track drive. Nobody home.
    “Why didn’t I think of that?” I said, back in the car. “Most people work during the day.” We went out to a phone, and I hooked up the laptop and got online with Bobby. Mason, he said, had his own photography business in Santa Rosa. We found him on the second floor ofa downtown building, above a flower store: Mason Restorations.
    The office door looked like it might open on a detective office from a noir movie—textured glass with a gold-leaf name. Inside, it was all windows, blond hardwood floors, and high-tech machinery. The place had two rooms—a big working space behind the counter at the entrance, and a small glassed-in office at the far end, along the window wall. The working space was occupied by a half-dozen top-end Macs, a number of film and flatbed scanners and several large color printers. Three women were looking at a computer screen when we pushed through the door; one of them straightened and walked over to the counter.
    “Can I help you?” she asked.
    “We’re here to see Mr. Mason.”
    “Do you have an