The Fool's Run

said. “Don’t come after us.”
    We heard the door slam below, then the fire door opened above us. Dace.
    “What happened to you?” I asked him. “The second guy came in right on top of us with a gun.”
    “Christ, the cops talked to him for a couple seconds, and then they left. I mean, they just got in their car and drove away. About one second later this guy was running over here. I never had a chance to get in front of him; I was too far away. I took the elevator up; I was hoping that if you were inside, he’d stop in the stairwell and wait or something.”
    “How’d he get in the door?”
    “Key,” Dace said.
    “Probably had keys to the outer door, but not to the apartment. That’s how they got into the stairwell, too,” LuEllen said. She looked at me. “We all fucked up, it’s not Dace’s fault.”
    I said, “Something’s really fouled up. This guy wasn’t a burglar, he was a wire man. And I can’t believe that somebody’s already on us. It must come out of Chicago.”
    In the apartment we packed, and I took the phones apart. They were bugged. The bugs were crude and so was the installation.
    “He wasn’t in here long enough to do much more,” I said. “We could probably sweep the place and we’d be okay.”
    “Let’s check Chicago,” LuEllen said. She had packed everything she brought with her. She wasn’t planning to come back.
    We moved into a Holiday Inn for the night. When I called Chicago, Maggie was vehement about her security.
    “There’s no possibility of a leak here,” she said flatly. “Three people know about your team—me, Rudy, and Dillon. Period. And none of us would talk. It’s more likely this guy Dace is the problem.”
    “I don’t think so. We go back too far,” I said.
    “You don’t know, though.”
    “No, I don’t, but he’s a friend. My instinct tells me he’s okay. He was scared today. And surprised.”
    “I tell you, the problem isn’t here,” she insisted.
    “I still can’t believe they just stumbled over us,” I said. “If we can’t figure this out, we’ll have to call it off.”
    “Christ, just hold on for a couple of days. I’ll get Dillon checking. . . .” There was a longish pause, and then she said, thoughtfully, “Say, do you suppose this might be some kind of leakage from the previous tenants? Didn’t you say it was some kind of whorehouse?”
    “Something like that,” I said. I thought about it. It made some sense, at least, better sense than the other possibilities.
    “What’s the landlord’s name?”
    I gave it to her, and she told me she would get back to us.
     
    THAT NIGHT I worked the tarot. LuEllen and Dace came to argue, huddle together, and watch me turn cards.
    “That tarot shit is spooky,” Dace said after a while.
    “It’s okay,” LuEllen said. She looked at me. “Tell him about it.”
    “I use it to game,” I said shortly.
    “What the hell does that mean?”
    I looked at a spread of cards dominated by minor swords. Distress, tension. They got that right. I turned to Dace.
    “Back in seventy-nine I was hired by an astrologer to put together an astrology program. Preparing an astrology chart is all mechanical. Figuring moon rises and stuff.”
    “I thought it took years to learn how to do it,” Dace said.
    “That’s the interpretation of the chart. The chart itself is fixed. Anyway, a computer can do the mechanical part as well as a human—better, really, because it doesn’t make computational errors—and save a lot of time.
    “So I had to build a scanner to scan the ephemeris—that’s the book with the actual astronomical information in it, when the planets rise and set and all that. Then I had to work out another program to scan it in again with a second method, so we could compare the two bunches of data to cross-check for errors. It was a hell of a job. It took weeks. Anyway, this astrologer fooled around with the tarot, and I got interested.”
    “You tell the future?”
    “No. Almost everything you read about the tarot is bullshit. But if you take the cards as archetypes for different kinds of human motives and behaviors, it becomes a kind of war-gaming system,” I said.
    “So what does that do?” Dace asked.
    “When a person looks at a problem, it’s always in a particular context. Most of the time, he’s blinded to possible answers by his own prejudices and by the environment around him. By gaming a problem, you’re forced outside your prejudices. So our question is,