The Empress File

she stopped, leaned her face close to my ear, and said, “Wait three minutes.” I thought she was going up the hill, but instead, we simply stood in the dark.
    When your eyes adjust from light to dark, the night vision seems to fade in, like a black-and-whiteslide coming into focus. What was pitch-dark when you first come out of bright lights is suddenly nothing more than twilight. It works the same for your hearing, although most people aren’t aware of it. When you stand stock-still in a dark place, the noises that once resided in the background suddenly come to the fore. You notice the roar of far-off trucks climbing a grade, the motors and air conditioners, the insects in the trees, the sound of the wind. Human voices are an absolutely distinct sound; even from a long distance, when you can’t make out the individual vowels and consonants, the rhythm or the rise and fall of the pitch tell you that you’re hearing another human.
    We heard all the background sounds, picked them up one at a time. No voices.
    We waited the full three minutes, and then LuEllen was moving again. I trailed behind. The track along the levee broke out of the brush thirty or forty yards from the animal control buildings. The main building, the white one, was thirty yards away, across an open stretch of weedy lawn. A gravel driveway came in from the other side but stopped short of the building.
    We waited for another five minutes in the weeds just out of the cleared area. There was one exterior light, up on a pole outside the main building. No lights were showing in the building.
    “Glad the kennel’s on the far side,” LuEllensaid. She took her picks and a power rake out of her pack. “Let’s try not to wake up the mutts.”
    We were absolutely exposed as we crossed the yard. If anyone was up the hill or anybody came up in a car, we were in the open. There was no point in being furtive but we were furtive anyway. LuEllen went straight to the door, tried the knob, found it locked. There was a window around the side, and she tried it. It was locked. She came back to the door and looked at the lock.
    “I’ll try the picks,” she whispered. “Maybe we can avoid the power rake. Hold the light.”
    She opened it, but it took twenty sweaty minutes. The power rake would have done it in two, but it sounds like a spoon dropped in a garbage disposal. When the door was open, we took a quick look around the side of the building, then crossed the yard and waited in the weeds again, listening and waiting. If there were any kind of unseen alarm, somebody should be coming up the road.
    The sense of hearing isn’t the only thing that sharpens in the dark. As far as we were from the building, there was a light but persistent stench of animal urine and fear. And something else…
    “Raw meat,” LuEllen muttered. “From the shooting pen…”
    Nothing moved on the road. We went back and inside. The lock on Hill’s office door was nothing. LuEllen slipped it, and we were in. The computerwas another old IBM. I brought the machine up and began dumping the hard disk to my portable. LuEllen went through the desk and found a box of floppies. When the disk-to-disk transfer was complete, I loaded the floppies one at a time, found two sets of files, and saved them to my machine.
    That done, I slipped in a utility program I’d written myself. A hard disk is like an electronic filing cabinet, with lots of storage space for files. Unless the operator is running complicated accounting programs with enormous amounts of data or huge applications programs, there’s usually plenty of empty space.
    I checked and found the Longstreet gang had used less than a tenth of the available disk space. Good. My program—a gem, if I do say so myself—simply made a second copy of everything on the disk and then hid it in the free space. The copy would never show up on directories or in any other routine transaction unless the right code phrase was entered at the prompt. I made the code phrase
redneck
. And fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.
    If these were the books, and the Longstreet gang got nervous and tried to erase them, there was an excellent chance that there’d still be a set left on the machine, hidden under the code. A set available to the state cops…
    After LuEllen had unlocked the desk, shechecked a filing cabinet, found nothing interesting, and then went through the rest of the building. As I finished, she came in and said, “Come look at