The Devil's Code

a find a large administrative file called CLPR, which turned out to be internal memos about the Clipper II program. I dumped it to our Jaz disk, which took a while. Too long, actually. When we had it, I closed down the connection.
    We’d taken care not to touch any hard surfaces inside the room that we didn’t have to, and when we were done, we wiped those we’d had to touch, told the motel clerk that something had come up at home and that we’d have to check out—you could see the Yeah, right, in his eyes as he looked at LuEllen—and headed back to our hotel.
    “We should have spent a little time fooling around,” I said. “For verisimilitude—you don’t really have that nice pink postorgasmic look that you get afterwards.”
    “We could still go for it,” she offered.
    “Too late to impress the clerk,” I said.
    T he OMS2 file was mostly interesting for the names—military people from around the world, but mostly from the band of Islamic states that stretched from Syria to Indonesia. Only Egypt in Africa; and Turkey was missing.
    “Why is that odd?” LuEllen asked, when I commented on it.
    “Just the selection of names. If you’re doing the Clipper, these people might all be customers, but the main customers would be the bigger states—England, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, China, India, like that. Instead, we have Syria, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Pakistan, Indonesia, Kazakhstan—missing Afghanistan, missing Saudi Arabia, missing Turkey.”
    “It’s only one file. If it’s OMS2, that implies other numbers, even if we couldn’t get them. Maybe they’re someplace else, or they erased them.”
    “Yeah, that’s true . . .”
    The CLPR file included a couple of thousand memos on routine technical, personnel, and financial matters. We spent four hours reading through them—scanning them, really—without finding a single useful fact.
    “You know what?” LuEllen said. “If I had to be an administrative guy, I’d cut my wrists. I can’t imagine even writing this shit, much less worrying about it.”
    “Not a single goddamn thing,” I said, discouraged.
    “Maybe there is one thing,” she said. “Not a fact . . .and I’m not sure, but let’s look at the dates on these things.”
    We looked at the dates, and LuEllen pointed out that two years earlier, there were ten or twenty Clipper memos being filed every week. A year ago, there were ten at the most. For the past six or eight months, there were four or five being filed weekly.
    “Like the project is running down,” she said.
    “Maybe it’s running out of time, or money. Maybe they’ve been stealing from it, and that’s what they’re trying to cover,” I suggested.
    “So why would they kill for a picture of three guys in a parking lot? If they did?”
    “We’d know, if we could figure out who the guys were,” I said.
    “How do we do that? Figure it out?”
    “I don’t think we do. We’re not the fuckin’ FBI. We’re just some guys.”

 19 
    ST. JOHN CORBEIL
    C orbeil was in a rage: the necklace was gone, and the palm of his hand itched for it. His space had been violated. He had been so angry about the necklace that he hadn’t seen that it was a diversion. And they’d done it so beautifully.
    They’d absolutely suckered him. Those greasy footprints all over the living room, with only one track leading past the computer. He could still see the footprints in his mind’s eye, could still feel the way he’d relaxed when he realized that the computer hadn’t been touched.
    He’d been angry about the necklace, but that had only been thieves. Lord knows he’d paraded the stones around enough, hanging them off the necks of half themodels in Dallas. But they’d used him, they’d known how he’d think.
    Then, that same night, they’d looted the computer. They would not have been found out if Woods hadn’t been watching, hadn’t seen, the next morning, the odd groping-about in the files. He’d come in to ask about it, and Corbeil knew instantly what had happened.
    Suckered.
    “Lane Ward,” he said.
    “She wouldn’t have the resources,” Hart protested. “Whoever went into your apartment was a pro. That safe wasn’t ripped out of the wall by hackers. That took special gear. They goddamned near destroyed your apartment and nobody in the building heard a thing.”
    “Then who is it? The FBI doing a black-bag job? Not anymore, it’s not. The CIA? They’re the most gun-shy intelligence agency in the