The Devil's Code

be the same as having a much bigger and more sensitive dish. And with those photos . . .
    We were onto something. A secret operation of some kind? But who were they hiding it from? If they were working with the feds, they’d just go ahead and stick the dishes up anywhere; they wouldn’t be hidden away on a ranch in Waco.
    I was waiting in the trees when LuEllen came back. “Anything?”
    “Yeah. I think we’re getting a handle on something. Did you see a satellite dish at Corbeil’s? One of those big babies?”
    “I didn’t notice . . . I don’t think so.”
    We cruised the place again, running down Highway 185, but no dish was visible from the highway. “Could be down out of sight,” she said.
    “Or maybe there are only two . . . or maybe there are more, tucked away like that stock tank.”
    “What are you thinking?” she asked.
    “A little fantasy,” I said. “They were willing to kill for those pictures, and we have what might be code. We got that list of names for all those Middle Eastern countries . . . I wonder if somehow they aren’t hijacking photos from the recon satellites and selling them.”
    “For what?”
    “Sell surveillance of Pakistan to India, and surveillance of India to Pakistan. Sell surveillance of Iraq to Iran, and Iran and Syria to Iraq; of Israel to Syria. Of Taiwan to China, and China to Taiwan.”
    “They’d get caught.”
    “I could tell you ten ways to do it, that they’d never get caught. That the buyers would never see the sellers. That’s what the Internet is for. Any buyer who’s getting this stuff . . . it’d be the biggest secret they had.”
    “Okay. So what next?”
    “Let’s go back to Austin. I need to do some shopping,” I said.
    “Always shopping.”
    “We’ll come back tonight.”
    “A scout?”
    “A scout.”
    I n Austin, we went to an outdoor-sports store and bought a good compass; a GPS receiver with a map function; topographic maps of the East Waco area, including Corbeil’s ranch; and a cheap black daypack. At a building-supply place, picked up a builders’ protractor, a bubble level, and some duct tape. And in a sewing store, a card with five yards of elastic banding. I spent an hour in the parking lot with the GPS receiver, figuring out how to work it; especially interesting were the time and distance functions, and the backtrack function.
    Then there was the matter of the gun.
    “We need a better one,” LuEllen said. “Look what they did to Lane, and what they did to Jack. Those were executions, so they just don’t give a fuck. If we go on a scout, and they catch us, and they’ve got guns—this is Texas, Kidd—they’re going to shoot us down like dogs.”
    “Anytime you buy a gun . . .”
    “Ought to be easy in Texas,” she said. “Let me call Weenie.”
    It was easy in Texas. All we had to do was drive to Houston, which was a little better than two hours away, meet a guy in a parking lot near George BushIntercontinental Airport, and give him $600 for a cheap Chinese-made AK with two magazines, fifty rounds of 7.65 × 39, and a nylon sling.
    “That’s about a two-hundred-dollar gun in a store,” I told LuEllen, as we left the parking lot.
    “That wasn’t a store,” she said.
    “Hope it works,” I said. “Looks like it was made by a high school kid in a shop class.”
    At five o’clock we were back in Austin. In the motel room, I pumped some shells through the AK, bruised the tip of my middle finger with the firing pin, and eventually decided that the thing might work. We ate, and by seven o’clock, we were on the road again.
    The land around Waco is fairly lush. Waco is just about south of Dallas, and the really dry, sere land—serious prickly-pear country—starts an hour or two to the west.
    But the land just west of Waco, like lots of back-country in this day of Interstate highways, was lonely. All the land was used, in one way or another, but when we’d gone out in the morning, we’d seen only one person along the road, a woman walking out to her mailbox. In that kind of country, without the light pollution of the city, it gets dark.
    We’d picked a good night for it, windless, starlit, quiet. The moon was already slanting down in the sky when we drove past Corbeil’s. There were lights in the house, in the building that might have been an office or bunkhouse, and in the yard. A couple of cars were parked outside the garage, but we didn’t see anyone moving around. We made the