The Devil's Code

West. The NSA? They have fewer resources in the dark than we do. So who? Somehow, it’s Ward. Or if it’s not Ward, she can tell us who it is. Look at what they did with the bug in San Francisco. She’s got help.” He turned and looked at Hart. “Find her. Take her. We’ll talk to her out at the ranch.”
    “Mr. Corbeil, if she disappears, the shit’s going to hit the fan. I’m already tied to the Morrison killing.”
    “Look: we can make her out to be a member of Firewall. We’ve already started the groundwork on that. I’ll have Woods do an entry from the outside, using the stuff from my apartment, just like they did it—but they’ll go into Clipper files, and we’ll call the NSA and the FBI in. We’ll lead them back to her, somehow.”
    “What? She drops her driver’s license on the motel floor?” Hart asked skeptically. “And she’s got somebody with her.”
    “Yeah, and that’s another guy we want to talk to. I’ll bet it’s some little Stanford computer genius who happens to know how to hack into anything. One of those goddamned pencil-necked hundred-and-sixty-IQ smart-asses who might even be able to pull a safe out of a wall.”
    Hart shook his head, and then Corbeil said, “Fingerprints, maybe.”
    “What?”
    “A computer attack’s launched from a motel room. When the FBI investigates, it finds her fingerprints all over the place.”
    “How’re we going to get her to do that?”
    “We’ll talk to her first in a motel room. Rent a room, talk to her there, make sure there are plenty of prints around, then take her out to the ranch. As soon as she’s gone, we have Woods make an intrusion call from the motel room . . . The Agency can still trace that kind of crap.”
    “Sounds too complicated. If she broke away, if she started screaming . . .”
    “So if it’s too complicated, take her right out to the ranch,” Corbeil snarled.
    “Then we can’t . . .”
    “We’ll have her hands,” Corbeil said. “She won’t need them. Not when we’re done talking to her.”
    “Jesus,” Hart said.
    “No, he’s not here,” Corbeil answered.
    “I just think, I’m starting to feel . . .”
    “What?”
    “This is out of control.”
    “William, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. We’ve got to get it back under control, or we’re dead meat. You did a year in the softest prison in Texas. How’d you like a real hard place, the kind of place they reserve for traitors? That’s what they’d call us: traitors. William, we would spend the rest of our lives up to our necks in shit.”
    “But if we just . . .”
    “Do nothing? We’ve been trying that, William. It’s not working. We need to know what’s happening. If worse comes to worst, we at least need the time to run.”
    “Run.” Hart clasped his head in his hands. “Ah, Jesus. Running.”
    “So you get Lane Ward. And the geek who’s driving her around, whoever it is. In the meantime, I’ll sit here, behind this desk—” he pointed to the cherrywood desk in the corner—“and try to think of a way to pin the whole thing on Firewall. Pin it hard enough that we won’t go down for it, anyway.”
    “We should shut down the Old Man of the Sea.”
    Corbeil shrugged. “If you insist, but there’s really no point. They’re not close to it; they have no hint of it.”
    “I would just feel easier about it,” Hart said.
    “I’ll talk to Woods,” Corbeil said.

 20 
    W e slept late the next morning, LuEllen later than I. At ten o’clock, I rolled out, stretched, cleaned up. When I came back into the main room, LuEllen was still half asleep. She’d thrown the blanket off, and from one angle, near the bathroom door, her face was nicely framed by one outflung arm, and was just rising—from that perspective—over a thigh, with her foot in the foreground. Feet are always nice to draw, especially when you get to see them from the bottom. I tiptoed around to my briefcase, got out my drawing book, eased a chair over to the bathroom door, sat down, and drew for an hour.
    Finally, growing aware of the total silence, she pushed herself halfway up and looked around. “Kidd?”
    “Right here.”
    “Drawing my butt again?” She pushed herself all the way up, stretched and yawned.
    “It’s in the picture, but it’s not the focus; it’s sorta half cut off.”
    She came to look as I worked some shading in around her toes. “My feet aren’t that big,” she said.
    “From this