The Devil's Code

phone?”
    “Yeah.”
    CNN was doing an advertisement for itself. When they got back to news, they were doing the weather. I hopped out of bed, got my notebook, and used the cold phone to punch up John Smith’s phone number in Longstreet. John answered on the first ring; he was wide-awake.
    “This is the guy from upriver,” I said. “Is it true?”
    “We don’t know. I don’t think so, but this guy, whoever it is, is gonna be in court in two hours, so we’ll know for sure, then. Our guy’s off-line, though. All his numbers are down.”
    “They wouldn’t be down unless he took them down,” I said. “If the feds grabbed him, they would have left the lines up, to see who called.”
    “There’s something else: if they busted him at his place, they’d most likely be taking him to court in Jackson, not in New Orleans.”
    “I don’t know where his place is at, but I’m glad to hear you say it,” I said.
    We talked about it for another minute, poking through clues from a TV broadcast neither of us had seen yet. “I’ll get back,” I said.
    H ow much trouble are we in?” LuEllen asked.
    “Depends on whether they really got him, and if they did, what they got. And if he’s willing to deal. I’ve never met him face-to-face, but if he wanted to deal . . . he could hurt a lot of us. He knows all about Anshiser . . . He knows about Longstreet. He knows about Modoc and Redmond.” All jobs involving what we lightly call industrial espionage.
    “Maybe you ought to back away from this thing,” LuEllen said. “Get back home and maybe pack a suitcase.”
    “Something to think about,” I said, “though I wouldn’t be good at running.”
    “How does ten years in the federal penitentiary sound?” she asked.
    “There’ve got to be other options. Gotta be.”
    We looked at each other and I realized how hooked up I really was. I’d always thought of myself as something of a loner, going my own way, doing what I wanted when I wanted to do it. But Bobby knew about me—knew where to find me—and so did LuEllen, and John Smith, and now Lane Ward knew a couple of things, and so did twenty or thirty other people. If the feds somehow managed to get them all in the same room, they could hang me.
    “ You can get stubborn,” she said. “But I still reserve the right to split, you know that.”
    “Anytime,” I said. That’d always been the deal, and she’d always been protective of her identity, background, and home. Nobody knew much about LuEllen; not even me.
    We watched television for a half hour, and I got cleaned up. We saw one item on Bobby, which said just that he’d been caught, and was believed to be a leading member of Firewall, and was coordinating the attack on the IRS. The attack was still going on, and the government was considering an extension of filing dates for quarterly business returns. Congress was squealing like a herd of stuck pigs.
    “You were right about what gets them excited,” LuEllen said.
    We went out to breakfast, but neither of us said much. I spent the time trying to figure out what to do next, and one thing kept coming up: call the cops. The problem would be to get the cops to listen, especially since (a) they thought they knew what was going on, and (b) we were the bad guys.
    “Not having Bobby to do research is like . . . I don’t know. Like going blind,” I told LuEllen as we walked back to the hotel.
    “What more research do we need?”
    “Anything that would get the bureaucracy running in a different direction. They’re tearing up the world looking for fifteen or twenty of us, and we haven’t done anything—I mean, nothing that they think we did. Somebody has to talk to them.”
    “Not me.”
    “Of course not; you’re not in jeopardy. But I might try to find somebody I could talk to. I could find somebody, if I had Bobby.”
    B ack at the hotel, I changed to shorts and a T-shirt, and went for a run, the cell phone clipped uncomfortably into the shorts. LuEllen went shopping. I did three miles, fairly hard, and the exercise felt good after all the time cooped up in cars and planes and small rooms. When I got back, I jumped in the shower again, for a quick rinse, and was just toweling off when John called.
    “It’s not him,” he said. He sounded bubbly, which was not usually the case. “The guy they busted is white. They just had a picture of the cops walking him into federal court.”
    “Ah, Jesus. I hope our guy’s okay.”
    “So do I.