The Devil's Code

a number. The guard straightened, took a couple of steps to his right, picked up the phone.
    LuEllen said into the phone, “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?” And clicked off.
    The guy behind the glass shook his head, put the phone down, and went back to where he’d been standing before. He might’ve been reading something.
    “So . . .”
    “So when he’s answering the phone, he can’t see the monitor,” she said. “If the monitor is rotating between sites, there’s a good chance that we wouldn’t be on it, anyway.”
    “Take us ten seconds to walk inside and get to the freight elevator,” I said.
    “Mmm.”
    “But we won’t know whether they’ve seen us or not.”
    “That’s the fun part,” she said. “The waiting.”
    W hen we left Corbeil’s, we drove up to the Radisson, and LuEllen and Green spent time hitting golf balls on the driving range, while I went over the drawings again. Lane, looking over my shoulder, chewing on a raw carrot, suggested that one particular group of rooms in the Corbeil apartment could be for a live-in maid. Itwas labeled “guest suite,” but it could have been either. We debated it for a while, and I finally pulled up the wiring diagrams. We decided that the questionable area had no wiring for a stove or for an electric clothes dryer, so it was probably a guest room.
    “We’ll have to call,” I said. “Every fifteen minutes.”
    W e started calling right after dark. The phone would ring four times and we’d get Corbeil’s answering service. I was getting cranked on adrenaline, and LuEllen took a walk around the closed-down driving range and did a little cocaine. At ten o’clock, we left, LuEllen and me in one car, Green and Lane in the other.
    I dropped LuEllen on the corner where we crossed the fence, and she was gone in an instant. I took the car around the block, parked, and crossed the fence myself five minutes later. LuEllen was waiting. We’d wrapped all of her tools in towels, and we were decently quiet as we moved slowly through the trees toward Corbeil’s apartment. Halfway there, we stopped for a radio check with Green:
    “Got us?”
    “Gotcha.”
    W e started moving again. There’s a technique to the movement—hunters call it “still hunting,” and it takes some discipline. LuEllen and I learned it, separately, as a method of staying out of jail. You take three slow steps and stop, and listen. Then five more, andstop. You cover ground more quickly than you’d think, and quietly, and almost always hear other people before they hear you.
    We took fifteen minutes crossing to Corbeil’s, and it was all worth it, for our own self-confidence. If we were caught with LuEllen’s black bag, there’d be no point in explanations.
    A t the edge of the golf course, we stopped under cover of a low twisted pine, and listened. In twenty minutes, we heard nothing, nor did we see anything move. Corbeil’s apartment was dark, except for the IR glow through the night glasses.
    “Gonna do it,” I said.
    “Got the reel.”
    She had an old Penn level-wind reel filled with fishing line. We’d attached a piece of a black 3.5-inch computer floppy disk to the end of the line, as though we were going to cast it.
    What I was going to do was easy enough, but I would be out in the open: a risk. After checking around one last time, I stepped out of the landscape planting and walked up to the garage door, towing the line behind me.
    Six inches from the garage door, a small electric eye looked across at its illuminator on the other side of the driveway. I taped the floppy to the edge of the metal case around the illuminator, so it was hinged, and could fall up or down. Then I walked along the side of the building into the back, as though I were heading for thegolf course. A minute later, I sprawled out next to LuEllen.
    Normally, a driver would pull up to the door inside the garage, and tap his radio-operated garage-door opener to send the door up. Electric eyes both inside and outside the door would make sure that the door would not come down on top of the car, should it stop for some reason. As long as the electric eye’s illuminator was blocked, the door would stay up. The normal up-and-down cycle would not give us enough time to get inside, without taking the risk of being seen by the driver of the departing car. With the electric eye blocked, however, the door would simply stay up until we cleared it.
    We couldn’t just cover the eye, though, because