The Devil's Code

impact at my back. Across the lighted lawn, running, running, thirty more steps, twenty, five, and down on the ground. Laying still. Then up and moving again, fast, running hard for fifty yards, dropping to the ground again. Listening.
    I could hear Corbeil, still in the house, screaming: and I could see firelight in all the windows now.
    A minute later, Corbeil ran out into the yard, running as I had, but at an opposite angle. He dropped to the ground, and I realized that from his angle, he could see most of the lighted yard around the house—that the only part that he couldn’t see was the driveway. He must have thought that I was still inside, but if the fire wasbuilding, he knew I’d have to run for it. And I probably wouldn’t run down the driveway. He waited, patiently, as the fire spread through his log palace, and began eating it alive.
    Moving as slowly as I could, I shrugged off the pack and got out the night glasses. The yard lights were still burning, and the fire glowed from the windows of the house: I turned down the gain on the glasses, and looked toward the last place I’d seen Corbeil. He was still there, looking toward the house, then away, then back toward the house.
    I studied him for another minute, then flattened into the ground cover. He had night glasses, just like mine, and was scanning the fields around him. I didn’t dare move, except snakelike, pushing backward on my belly, watching him. Every time his face turned toward me, I flattened, frozen in place. I would wait fifteen seconds, then look: each time I expected a quick slap on the forehead and the final darkness.
    I made progress. At the beginning, we were fifty yards apart. Ten minutes later, I had another fifty. I was there, a hundred yards out, studying Corbeil’s position with the glasses, when a car swerved off the highway, drove up the driveway, and a man got out and ran up to the front door of the house and began pounding on it, shouting. Then he ran back to his car, took what must have been a cell phone from the front seat, and staring up at the house, made a call.
    Two or three minutes later, I heard the sirens, and far down the road, the flashing lights of the first fire trucks.The man who called them was running around the house, looking in the windows. I could see Corbeil watching him with the glasses, and I backed farther away.
    When I was two hundred yards out, I stopped to watch the fire: the house was now fully involved, flames leaping from the rooftop. One of the fire trucks sprayed foam on the bunkhouse and garage. They didn’t bother with the house: they had no good water source, and the house was burning so hard it probably wouldn’t have helped if they did have water. The best they could hope for was to keep the flames from spreading to the outbuildings.
    I switched back to Corbeil. He was standing now, just outside the circle of light cast by the flames. He was turning, his hands to his face, scanning the fields.
    And I thought: how odd.
    He’d been questioned about a murder. He must’ve worried that the cops—or the FBI, if we’d made any impression with the NSA—were going to break down his door at any moment. Anything in his apartment would be up for grabs.
    It stood to reason that he’d move anything incriminating out of his apartment, out of his office, out of any place that the police or the feds could get at by looking at records, like safe deposit boxes. He couldn’t actually destroy it: the docs and software used for controlling a satellite system would not be something you commit to memory.
    My eyes drifted back to the burning house. I’d gone in because the last guy who left took the only vehicle. There were no other cars visible. It seemed unlikely thatCorbeil would take the chance of being stranded on foot, so he probably had a car somewhere.
    Like in the garage.
    I looked back at him, still scanning. I was due east of the garage, if I moved out, and around to the south, I could come up behind it. As long as I could see him . . .
    I started moving . . .

 27 
    F ifteen minutes later, I’d crawled and pulled myself through the ground cover to a spot fifty feet behind the garage, in the deep shadow cast by the fire. For the moment, I was safe. But you win a little, and you lose a little. Halfway through the crawl, I lost Corbeil. He’d been looking up the hill, toward the satellite dish in the gully, when I’d last checked.
    I checked again from the shadow, and he was gone.