The Devil's Code

showing walls of black windows. There were three window wells on each side.
    The rear of the building was on a wider, busier,dirtier street, smelling of truck coolant and exhaust. A half-dozen truck-parking bays backed up to a loading dock, with steel overhead doors opposite each truck bay. A windowless standard door, of steel, was at the center of the dock, between two of the big overhead doors. A smaller, street-level garage door, also steel, and just big enough for a small truck, was located at the end of the building. A video camera monitored the dock.
    “What do you think?” I asked her. She was looking straight up through the windshield.
    “I’d like to see the roof,” she said.
    “LuEllen . . .” I’m just the tiniest bit afraid of heights.
    “It’s gonna be a tough building,” she said. “That guard desk is a twenty-four-hour operation, and we know there are guards wandering around at night. Jack supposedly shot one who was making a routine round of the building. We could probably crack one of the doors in back, but then, the question is, could we get up? We can’t tell without going inside.”
    “Gotta be a way.”
    “Probably. The fact that there’s some kind of government top-secret connection makes me extra nervous. If we came down from the top . . . look, the building across the street from the south side is an office building. Turn here, I’ll show you.”
    The building across the street was just as she said: another old warehouse, renovated, with glitzy neon-signed shops on the bottom floor, and what must’ve been offices on the floors above.
    “The thing is, the security’ll probably suck. There’s no lobby, it’s a little shabby, so it’s probably a lot ofindividual offices. We could get access during the day, hide out inside, and get onto the roof at night. It’s twelve floors—two higher than TrendDirect,” LuEllen said. She looked back and forth between the two buildings. “Narrow streets here . . . I bet it’s not more than forty feet between the two cornices. We heave a climbing line across, slide down, and the TrendDirect roof’s probably got no security at all. It’d be really unusual if it did.”
    “Why don’t we get fake IDs and fool the guards,” I said. “Or keys for the back doors?”
    “Those are options.”
    “Or we could do a sneak.” Sneak is private language. It amounts to doing an easy reconnaissance, like a phony delivery, to look over a target. LuEllen has done them twenty times. I usually go on public tours—most big companies have them, and they are very informative, if you know what to look for.
    “That’s another option,” she admitted. But she liked the roof idea. She’d like the rush it’d bring, swinging out over the street at three o’clock in the morning. We spent another fifteen minutes looking at the building, and LuEllen shot a couple of rolls of color-slide film. She also got out of the car and looked into one of the window wells.
    She came back, shaking her head. “Why would you put glass brick all the way up and down?” she complained. “People working in there have to breathe, for Christ’s sakes. It’s inhuman.”
    “LuEllen, the voice of the working man,” I said.
    “But you know what? It all looks very secure,” she said. “Somebody went out of their way to be secure . . .and something else I just thought of.”
    “What?”
    “How often are building guards armed? Like the old guy who got shot?”
    I thought about that and shook my head. “Not often.”
    “The place is tough,” she said. “I’d turn it down, if I were working on my own, unless I had a very tight inside connection.”
    “Huh.” We both thought about that as we rolled away, leaving the building behind. Neither of us had ever spent serious time in Dallas, and it turned out that the West End Historic District was historic not only because it was old, but because that was where John Kennedy was assassinated. We went past the memorial, not knowing exactly what it was until LuEllen spotted a Dealy Plaza sign.
    “Do you remember Kennedy?” she asked, her face turned to the memorial as we passed by.
    “Sometimes I think I do,” I said. “But I think I mostly remember my folks telling me about him.”
    “I’ve only seen him in old TV shows,” LuEllen said. “He seemed like an okay guy for a president.”
    On the way back to the motel, we found a phone and got online with Bobby. He’d been doing research on AmMath, knowing