The Devil's Code

say no.
    T he first round of sex all done with, I was tracing some of her more interesting contours with my fingertips, and she said, “Tell me what they did.”
    “They must want us fairly badly,” I said. “But then, we’re right where they’ve got all their equipment. I think they probably put up several pairs of helicopters around Baltimore and probably Washington, with radio direction-finding equipment—cell phones are radios . . .”
    “I know that . . .”
    “Then, with the access the NSA has to phone call-tracing equipment, they probably picked up the cell our phone was using, spotted it, vectored in the nearest helicopters and fed them our signal at the same time. They’d get us pretty close just with the one cell, and our speed would probably tell them that we were on the Interstate. Then, if we switched to another cell, they’d have our direction, and from the time of change, a pretty good location. From that point, with their direction-finding equipment, it was only a matter of time. That’s why they were downloading those pictures. They were keeping our signal going back and forth, and getting us to focus on what was happening.”
    “Smart,” she said.
    “Yeah. We fucked up. Sorry, I fucked up. I forgot who we were dealing with. If I’d been using my brain, we could’ve taken the train to New York, which theywould never in a million years have been covering, and we could have called from midtown at lunch. Instead . . .” I spread my hands. “We have a major screwup. Hertz is gonna be pissed at Nancy M. Hoff.”
    She giggled: “Their car is a puddle of plastic.”
    “We hope.”
    Then she sighed and rolled over and said, “This was fun; both the running and the fucking. But we’ve got to be smarter.”
    “I don’t see anything more for us here,” I said. “Welsh told me that they’d gone into the computer in Laurel, so maybe they’ll take care of everything.”
    “Back home?”
    “You want to go back home?”
    “Where’re you going?”
    I thought for a moment, then said, “Texas. Just to look around.”
    “I’ve been to Texas,” she said. “I sort of like it there. I like the way they dress.”
    “You’re welcome to come along.”
    L ate in the afternoon, we checked out of the motel, took a cab to BWI, and flew to New York. We stayed overnight in Manhattan, sharing a room this time. Monday morning, before we left for La Guardia, I called Welsh at her office from a pay phone. Her secretary answered and when I asked for Welsh, said Mrs. Welsh was in a meeting.
    “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 phoneout 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