The Devil's Code

Smith?”
    “What?”
    “Are you Mr. . . .”
    “Smith. Yes.”
    “You’ve, uh, got a phone call. Normally we don’t allow customers, but the gentleman said it was an emergency . . .”
    John was out of the booth, trailing her; she took him into the back. Two minutes later, he was back out. “Gotta go.”
    “Bobby?”
    “Yeah. He knew we were gonna be here.” He tossed five dollars at the tabletop and headed for the cashier. Outside, in the open, he said, “He says to tell you that Ladyfingers was busted and she gave them the 800 number and that the feds, the NSA, traced him all the way to the banana stand. He said there were only three more links between him and the feds before he was toast. He’s shut down everything. He says you shouldrecover the number just like you did before—he didn’t tell me what it was, he’s crazy paranoid—and said you will cut directly into him. It’s the only link he’s going to take coming in, until he reworks all his numbers.”
    “Bad time for this,” I said. “Bad time.”
    At the car, John handed me a gym bag with the receiver in it. “As soon as you’ve recorded a full movement, mail it back to me, express mail, at the house in Memphis.”
    “All right.”
    “Good luck,” he said. “Keep your ass down.”
    A t Texarkana, I found a gas station phone booth and hooked up with the laptop. I went out to my two mailboxes, and found, just as Bobby had promised, two pieces of a phone number. I called, keyed a “k,” and Bobby came up.
V ERY CLOSE . N EVER CLOSER . S CARED THE S OUT OF ME . I’ M CLOSED FOR BUSINESS , EXCEPT FOR YOU . D ID YOU GET PACKAGE ?
    Y ES .
    C AN YOU MOUNT TONIGHT ?
    Y ES .
    W HAT ELSE CAN WE DO ?
    I told him, and got back a long silence. Then,
T AKE CARE . T AKE CARE . T AKE CARE .
    The Interstate crosses some sparsely inhabited landscape between Texarkana and Dallas. After checking the map, I got off at one of the larger white spots, and picked out a long piece of quiet road. I parked on one side, got out my sketchbook, checked around, then paced off 200 yards down the road, and stood a plastic Coke bottle on the shoulder. I was willing to bet I wasn’t more than a yard or two off—one of the things you learn in the burglary business is how to estimate distances. My normal stride was thirty-four inches long, and I’d learned how to swing a leg just a split-second longer than I usually did, to come down right on thirty-six inches.
    Back at the car, I looked around again, then got the AK out of the trunk, loaded it, rolled down the passenger-side window. When I was sure nothing was coming from either direction, I ripped up a couple of pieces of newspaper, made them into spitwads, put them in my ears, and aimed the gun out the window at the Coke bottle.
    The scope was decent; I leaned back against the driver’s-side door, my left hand cradling the fore-end, and braced against the inside of my knee, held on the bottle, squeezed . . .
    The rifle jumped, and I lost sight of the bottle; and when I got back on it—where it would have been—it was gone. I got the car straightened out, repacked the rifle, found the ejected shell and threw it into the roadside weeds.
    Rolled slowly down the road until I spotted the bottle. There was a neat .30-caliber hole an inch off centerto the right, maybe two inches below the shoulders of the bottle. Good enough; more than good enough.
    A t Dallas, I stopped at the motel to clean up, change clothes, look at the package—a plastic box with a toggle switch and a couple of pieces of tape antenna sticking out of the top, the whole thing the size of a VHS videotape cassette, but heavier—and get the rest of the gear.
    Moving right along, it was still well past nine o’clock before I made it through Waco, and headed out to Corbeil’s. The ranch house showed only one light, and I saw no cars in the yard; I continued up to the ruins of the old home place, took the car back into the trees, then got out, and sat down on the incoming track.
    And listened.
    Listening will always tell you more than your eyes, if you’re in the dark and somebody might be hunting you. People get tense, try to see, don’t know how to move, breathe too hard, and they stumble. If you’re relaxed, breathing as quietly as you can, eyes closed . . . you can hear. Everything but owls. You hear birds moving at night, but never the owls; they’re like ghosts.
    After a half-hour, I was satisfied that I was alone. I stood