The Fool's Run

suspected was internal. The interrogations further disrupted the process of straightening out the company.
    “Rudy is very pleased—also a little frightened. He hired the biggest computer security people in the country to revamp our system,” she said. Her voice sounded oddly tight.
    “Who have they got?” I asked.
    She mentioned three names, and I recognized all of them. One was a charlatan, but the other two were good. They were all expensive, and not likely to miss much.
    “How soon will they finish?” I asked.
    She hesitated for a moment and then said, “Yesterday.”
    “Yesterday?”
    “Rudy hired them right after we started the attack on Whitemark. My reports scared everybody out here, so he hired these people and gave them three weeks and a big bunch of money. Most of what they did was rearranging phone lines and moving furniture, and they changed some procedures. There wasn’t much new equipment involved. Anyway, they finished yesterday. Rudy was talking about hiring you, in a year or so, to see if you could crack it.”
    “You know where to find me,” I said.
    “Right. On a sandbar,” she said. “Have you got the apartment cleaned up?”
    “You mean wiped? Just about. I’m just finishing the kitchen now. We could meet downtown somewhere to split the cash, but we thought this was convenient to the airport.”
    “No, no, I’ll see you there. I should be in about seven o’clock.”
     
    DACE AND LUELLEN got back in the early afternoon, and Dace had shed another five years. He was wearing an expensive tweed coat, a dark blue shirt with silk knit tie, whipcord pants, and leather boat shoes. He was pleased with his appearance.
    “For Christ’s sake, don’t touch anything,” I said, as they came in.
    “What do you think?” he said, spreading his arms. LuEllen stood behind him, grinning.
    “Straight out of Esquire,” I said.
    “And look at this,” he said. He pulled out a bundle of traveler’s checks, twenty-five thousand in tens and twenties.
    “I made him go to ten different banks,” LuEllen laughed.
    “This ought to take care of us for six months or a year,” Dace said, thumbing through the stack of checks. “If it doesn’t, we can always come back for more.”
    With the new clothes and the money burning in his pocket, Dace wanted to run around to newspaper and public relations offices and buy drinks for a few friends and contacts.
    “It wouldn’t be a good idea if I just disappeared,” he said. “Besides, I like some of these guys. I’ll be back in time to eat.”
    I got my painting gear, and LuEllen and I went down to the banks of the Potomac, where I did a watercolor as good as anything I’d ever done. The Whitemark attack sat on the surface of my mind, but the painting took care of itself. It was all eye and hand, and the pigment seemed to flow without effort. By the time I finished, I was beginning to hyperventilate. LuEllen had gone off across the park, and as I was looking at it, wondering about one more touch, one last touch—it’s always the last ones that ruin paintings—she walked up and looked.
    “Jesus Christ, Kidd, that’s good,” she said.
    I swirled the brush through the ice-cream bucket I used as my main water container. When it was clean, I dropped it back in its box, and tossed the bucket of water out on the grass. It was good, by God.
    September is beautiful in Washington, one of the best months of the year. The sky was a perfect china blue, and there was just a hint of leaf smoke in the air. LuEllen was chatting along as we walked back to the car, and I kept sneaking looks at the painting. The nude of Maggie was the best figure I’d ever done. This was the best landscape, and it had come out in two hours. Was it luck? Or was it a breakthrough?
    I put the painting in the trunk, carefully braced between two suitcases, on top of the portable, so it wouldn’t rattle around.
    On the way back to the apartment, I stopped at a grocery and bought a pack of kitchen gloves. Having wiped the entire place, I didn’t intend to leave any isolated prints during the final clean-up.
    At the apartment, there was an odd moment before we went inside. A car was parked across the street, a red Buick with tinted windows. Dark glass wasn’t uncommon in Washington, and I paid no attention. But as we walked up to the apartment door, I happened to glance back at it and caught the white crescent of face close to the glass in the car’s back window. Maggie?
    If you