The Devil's Code

good,” she said, in an almost normal voice.
    “I’ll rig the line,” I said. I was drenched with sweat: I did industrial espionage, and went places where I wasn’t wanted, but the big-time apartment break-in wasn’t my style.
    “Look at the rug,” she said.
    I looked down, in the light of her flash: we were leaving greasy tracks behind us. “Uh-oh.” I stepped to the door and looked out in the hall. The tracks came all the way down the hall from the elevator, though they were harder to see in the subdued hall lighting. “Let’s get the line rigged. We’ll just have to take a chance that nobody’ll see them.”
    Another unforeseen risk.
    We did a quick run through the apartment to make sure it was empty. On the way, I stopped for a few seconds to admire LuEllen’s work with the alarm. She’d used the knife to cut a hole through the drywall to expose the alarm console—couldn’t just pull the wires out, because if you cut a wire, the security servicewould be automatically alerted. She’d then stripped the wire, clipped in bypasses, and then cut the wire between the two bypasses. The top bypass silenced the keypad; the bottom one would keep the circuit alive, so the cut-wire call-out would never be made. She’d done it in about twenty-five seconds.
    The suite that had worried us, the possible maid’s suite, was just a guest room. The computer was in a small purpose-built office. “Don’t stop,” I said. “Just walk on by.”
    The balcony ran the width of the apartment. We took a moment, surveying an adjoining balcony with the night-vision glasses, then carefully opened the door and listened. I could hear what sounded like a radio or CD, but it was inside, contained. Above us, I thought. We looped the climbing rope around one of the support posts on the balcony, and coiled the rope so that a quick kick would launch it down the side of the building. If somebody came through the door, we could be on the ground in less than a minute, pulling the rope after us.
    That done, we headed for the safe, which was nicely concealed behind a piece of wooden paneling. LuEllen said, “I’ll do this, you get going.”
    I walked back and forth and around the room, leaving traces of the black grease, while LuEllen started pulling out her equipment. After leaving the tracks, I went back to the door, took off my pants, jacket, shoes, and the dirty kitchen gloves, and walked back to Corbeil’s office in my shorts and socks.
    LuEllen made a lot less noise than I’d feared. She was good at this, and what she was doing was more acover than any serious attempt at the safe. As long as Corbeil concentrated on the safe, and not the computer, we’d be cool.
    In his office, I shut the door and turned on the light. What I was doing was simple: I was loading a program that would spool anything he typed on the computer to a file on his hard drive. Another program—one of my own design—would send the file to one of my online mailboxes, and then erase its tracks. The only question was, had Corbeil booby-trapped his computer with hardware of some kind, or software, to detect intrusion?
    I spent twenty minutes trying to figure that out, and in the end, didn’t. I didn’t think so, but you can’t be sure, not in twenty minutes.
    As soon as my software was in, I checked the rest of the desk, found a couple of Zip disks, and copied them to my own Zip disks.
    I was just finishing when LuEllen scratched on the door. I turned out the light and opened it: “Almost done,” I said.
    “I need your help. Hurry, and get dressed.”
    In the study, LuEllen had done two things: she had taken her heavy bar, which had an edge like a razor, and had cut through the wall around the cylindrical safe. The safe was set in concrete, inside a steel frame that was probably bolted to the building beams. Around the cylinder flange, she’d fitted a five-sided, one-size-fits-all steel collar, with adjustable bolts.
    With that in place, she’d gone to the far wall and cut another hole, exposing one of the I-beams that held upthe building. The beams had been covered with drywall, so exposing them was no problem. She’d slipped a steel strap around the beam, then hooked the strap to the collar on the safe, using what amounted to a large come-along.
    The come-along was essentially a high-ratio pulley, with a four-foot-long handle and a three-foot pipe as an extension; the connection was a steel cable. She’d pumped the cable tight; so tight that I