The Fool's Run

guns in the alley in one of the harder districts of Washington. They’d be picked up and get about the use that the cops would expect. The guns they dropped in the Potomac; the cash we kept.
    While they were out, I dialed the Ebberlys’ number. Before the phone rang, I blew into the receiver with a pitch pipe. The whistle activated the intercept, which linked their line to ours. I flipped the open line over to one of our computers and left it.
    When the bug detected a computer’s electronic sound packets, it would relay them to our computer. It would also pass them through to the Ebberlys’ machine. Ebberly would get her work done as usual. We would have a complete record of it.
    Nothing happened the first night, or early the next morning. We left the apartment a little after nine o’clock to scout more targets. When we got back, the computer showed a transmission from the Ebberlys’ home to Whitemark.
    “That’s what we wanted?” Dace asked.
    “That’s what we wanted,” I said. “She must have been working at home this afternoon. Good thing she wasn’t there yesterday.”
    “She’s probably home because of the burglary,” LuEllen said. “Talking to cops.”
    A computer work session, printed out, soaks up an enormous amount of paper. Every time Samantha Ebberly even glanced at a personnel form, the computer printed the whole form. I ran the session back across the screen, did some quick editing, and printed it. It was seventy pages long, and I handed it to Dace.
    “We need to extract procedures,” I said. “We want to do things just the way she did, get in and out without being noticed. Map these things for us. Every time she gets on, map them again. By the time we’re ready to go in, we should know how to operate as well as she does.”
    “All right. But it’ll bore my brains out.”
    “Think about the money.”
    “I’ve been doing that.”
    “Didn’t work?” asked LuEllen.
    “No, no, it worked. I’ll sit here and watch the computer. But don’t tell John Wayne.”

Chapter 9
    S AMANTHA EBBERLY WAS a manager, so her codes would get us into the administrative side of the Whitemark computers, but we also had to get into the engineering side. We scouted four of the five engineering targets, and all were marginal prospects. The morning after the Ebberly entry we went to check out the fifth engineer.
    From the moment we turned the corner the target looked bad. Aside from the dying brown grass, the front yard was devoid of plant life. A battered ten-speed bike was lying at one side of the driveway, next to a green-and-cream ’57 Chevy set up on concrete blocks. The driveway was stained black by a tear-shaped oil slick that was creeping out from under the car.
    The backyard was surrounded by a shoulder-high, chain-link fence. There were no clumps of extra-dark-green grass, because there wasn’t much grass, but subtle signs were unnecessary. Two old-fashioned doghouses squatted against the house, and an evil-looking, white-eyed hound crouched beside one of them. The chain around his neck looked as if it might once have been used to haul logs. As we drove by, a blonde in a tight, black T-shirt banged out the front door, followed by a teenage boy who swatted her on the butt as they cut across the moribund grass toward his Harley, which was curled up to the curb.
    “Just keep on rolling,” LuEllen said. “Don’t bother to look back.”
    “Christ, it’s the Jukes.”
    “Nice Harley, though.”
    “Wonderful.”
    “Softtail,” she said.
    “I’d rather eat worms than ride a Harley-Davidson,” I said, remembering a bumper sticker I once saw on a Honda.
    “Riding a Honda’s like fuckin’ a faggot; it feels sorta good, but you wouldn’t want your friends to see you doin’ it,” LuEllen said. “I thought this Bobby guy was finding us people without kids.”
    “He’s doing it from databases. There aren’t any guarantees.”
    “So now what?”
    “The Durenbargers are probably the best bet,” I said. “You’ve seen the other choices.”
    “Durenbarger, Jason and Ellen,” she said, reading from the list. “They make a lot of money between them. Goddamn, I hate apartments.”
    The Durenbargers lived in an apartment called the Summit Rock, not far from our own.
    “There are too many people around,” LuEllen said as we sat on a bench across the street from the Summit Rock. “If you crack the door with a crowbar, somebody will hear you. It’s only a short walk down the hall