The Devil's Code

circling the course, listening to a police scanner, looking for cops. We’d bought Motorola walkie-talkies, apparently used by hunters—they were in camouflage colors—so they could call us instantly if anything came up. We’d found a better place to enter the golf course, where two uneven pieces of fence came together at a corner, next to a sidewalk. From one direction, you couldn’t see us at all; from another, it looked like we’d turned the corner. From the third and fourth, you could see us plainly, but traffic was light enough that we could wait for holes.
    On Wednesday night, we took a look at the garage. The garage entry was on the end of the building, and nicely landscaped, which was a break for us. Coming in from the golf course, we could get close without being seen. The garage was enclosed with a steel door, and a key card was used for entry. If I could get fifteenseconds with a key card, I could duplicate the signal easily enough—you can buy the parts at Radio Shack—but getting fifteen seconds with a key card might be a problem. Not an insuperable one, but there appeared to be an easier way.
    When the doors opened, they stayed open for as long as the car was in the garage entranceway, and then for a few seconds longer. The doors operated on a simple infrared cell; the key card opened the door, and then, if a car was blocking either of two cells, the doors stayed up. All we had to do was block the cell when a car came out. The door would stay up until we unblocked the cell . . .
    Once inside, we would head for the freight elevator.
    O n Thursday, we got a bunch of photos of Corbeil from Bobby; memorized the face, and wiped them out of the computer. That same night, LuEllen found a tree she could climb, where she could look through the floor-to-ceiling windows of an apartment on the second floor.
    “If his door is the same, it’s a standard solid-wood door set in a steel frame,” she told me when she came down. “I couldn’t see the locks, but they’re probably pretty good.”
    On Friday night, we were lying out in the grass outside his apartment, listening to a couple make love on a blanket twenty yards away. They continued for longer than seemed probable, then had an intense conversation about two people named Rhonda and Dave, whoseemed to have been their respective spouses; then they started again.
    “Must be younger than us,” I whispered to LuEllen.
    “Younger than you,” she whispered back. “Unless, maybe, you’re entertaining Lane during the day, when I’m playing golf.”
    “How could you possibly be that full of shit?” I asked. “What the fuck do you mean . . .”
    Like that.
    At nine o’clock, a white limo pulled up outside the apartment house, and a young woman got out. A very nice-looking young blond woman, with a long neck like the woman in Emma. She didn’t dress like Emma, though; she dressed like a supermodel. Her short black frock probably cost as much as the average condo and if there’d been any less of it, she couldn’t have crossed a state line without committing a felony.
    Eight minutes later, a few lights went off in Corbeil’s apartment, and two minutes after that, as the improbable couple to our left grunted and squeaked toward orgasm, she reappeared, two steps in front of St. John Corbeil. Corbeil moved in that stiff, upright military-academy way, as though he were holding a golf ball in his crotch as he walked. Not an especially tall guy, but one of those small-headed, wide-shouldered types who probably wrestled in high school.
    LuEllen, who had the binoculars, focused on them with that kind of silent intensity that an attractive women gets when she feels she might have become asatellite, rather than the planet. That’s what I thought at the time, anyway.
    When Corbeil and his date had gone, we lapsed back into the waiting mode, until the adulterers decided they’d had enough. They split up after a last hasty kiss and grope, and as soon as they were gone, we headed across the golf course ourselves. Halfway across, in the dark, LuEllen said, “I’m gonna have to go away for a while.”
    We signed off with Green and Lane, and back at the hotel, LuEllen started making phone calls to numbers she’d memorized. She was looking for some specific gear, and she needed a nearby supplier. She got the right guy just before midnight, talked to him for five minutes, and dropped the phone back on the hook.
    “Find it?” I asked.
    “Yeah. We have a