The Devil's Code

between the gentleman here and the gentleman from Dallas.”
    “There was last night . . .”
    “We think that the file in question may have been altered. Did you place an administrative account named B. D. Short on the Laurel installation? For your own uses?”
    “No, we didn’t.”
    “Then someone unknown has been burning files.”
    “I told you who it was . . .”
    “We are looking into that,” she said. “We want you to stay in touch, though, and we also want to send you a file and have you look at two photographs. Can you take a quick transmission if I switch over?”
    “Just a minute.” I wasn’t ready for that; it seemed uncommonly cooperative. I turned in the car seat, reached over the back, got out the laptop, and turned it up. “I’m just bringing it up,” I said.
    “I’ll have to say, to be honest, that I didn’t appreciate your approach last night. You scared me.”
    “I regret that,” I said. I had the line that would go from the modem to the phone wrapped in a bundle, and fumbled it as I tried to pull off the rubber band while still talking on the phone. The bundle dropped between my legs and I had to lean forward to get it. As I did, with my head at a low angle, I noticed a helicopter a mile or so ahead, hovering above a line of buildings. I picked up the bundle of wire, undid the rubber band, and clipped it into the laptop and the phone, and called up my communications program. A moment later, I was ready.
    “Switch over anytime,” I said.
    “It’s about a hundred K, so it’ll take a minute or two,” she said. “If you’re ready, here it comes . . .”
    I got a tone and hit the enter button on the laptop; a moment later, the download began.
    “What’s going on?” LuEllen asked.
    “They’re shipping a couple of pictures they want us to look at,” I said.
    “An unusual show of cooperation,” she said wryly, echoing my own thoughts.
    “Yeah, I . . .” And as I started to say it, I looked right out the passenger window. There, a half mile away and running parallel to us, was another helicopter. “Shit!”
    “What?” She’d picked up the tone in my voice as I plucked the wire out of the computer and shut down the phone.
    “We were set up. They’re tracking the call and they’ve maybe got us isolated. See that chopper straight ahead? We’ve got another off to the right . . .”
    “Aw, man, Kidd, what do we do?”
    “Don’t do anything, yet; keep the speed steady,” I said. “In case they haven’t spotted us.”
    “The front chopper is sliding this way.”
    “So’s the side guy,” I said. An exit was coming up, with signs for a shopping center. I could see it to the north, a big one, with what looked like an enclosed parking garage. “Take the exit, take the exit.”
    She cut right and took the ramp, “What next?”
    “Take a left. There’s a shopping center over there with a covered ramp. If they’ve isolated us, we won’t be able to run from them as long as they can see us.”
    It was a cool day, and I was wearing a light sweatshirt over a golf shirt, and had a jacket in back. I peeled off the sweatshirt and began wiping down every surface I thought we might’ve touched, and at the same time tried to look for the choppers. The one that had been to the right was closing fast.
    “I think they’ve spotted us,” I said. “Get in the parking ramp.”
    LuEllen ran a stoplight, took a hard right into the shopping center, went the wrong way up a one-way drive and into the parking ramp, under cover. “We were in the backseat,” she said. “We were in the back, we’ve got prints. We used the radio . . .”
    I’d spotted a parking space: the inside end of it, against the wall, was slightly lower than the outer end. “Right there. But don’t go in head first. Back into it.”
    “Why?”
    “Do it, goddamnit.”
    I crawled over the seat into the back, wiped down everything, stuffed the laptop back into my briefcase, and got out my old Leatherman tool as LuEllen maneuvered the car. When she killed the engine, I said, “Pop the trunk. Get out. Don’t touch anything.”
    She did, pulling her hands inside her jacket sleeves, wiping frantically along the way. I hopped out, wiped the handles, then ran around behind the car, dropped to the ground between the barrier wall and the back of the car. I got the Leatherman out of my pocket and unfolded a long pointed blade with a serrated edge. After a couple of timid attempts to do it by