The Devil's Code (21 page)

The walk took forty minutes, moving slowly, and stopping to listen and scan ahead with the night glasses. During that time, we neither heard nor saw another vehicle. At the corner of Corbeil’s property, where I’d followed the fence line in that morning, we stepped into the trees and with the flashlights, established our position on the GPS.

“Ready?”

“Go,” she said.

We were both dressed from head to foot in black. In the city, we’d worn dark red jackets. They were nearly as invisible as black, when you were out of the light, and looked a lot more innocent to cops. Out here, if we were caught in the middle of Corbeil’s pasture with the AK, there’d be no point in arguing that we were there by mistake.

We crossed the fence, with me in the lead, LuEllen following behind; the stars and fragmentary moon were just bright enough that we could see each other as shadows, and hear our feet swishing through the grass. When we’d walked a good distance up the hill, I moved
over to the fence line, illuminating it with a spiderweb of light from one of the flashlights.

With the night glasses, I could clearly make out the dish next to the water tank. Nobody around, though down the hill, I could see cattle, lying down, grouped together like pea pods on a table.

“Anything?” The word was a breath next to my ear.

“No. Let’s cross. Use the light and watch the barbs.”

We crossed the fence and headed down the hill. The dish was two hundred yards away, and we took it easy, stopping often to listen. When we got close, we could hear trickling water, and then, even closer, a tiny electronic hum; the equipment wasn’t moving, but was turned on.

I handed the AK and the night glasses to LuEllen; by agreement, she moved on down the hill about thirty yards, as a listening post. I took off the backpack and got the equipment out, marked our spot with the GPS, switched the GPS receiver to the time function, then started making measurements.

The dish was in what appeared to be its “rest” position. With the compass, I measured, to within a degree or to, the direction it was aimed in—about 290 degrees, or a little north of west, and not at all the direction it had been aimed earlier in the day. When I was sure I had it right, I got out the duct tape, taped one end of the elastic band to the top rim of the dish, stretched it across the face of the dish, so I had a tight, straight line with no sag, and taped it to the bottom. Using the level to establish my earth-line, I measured the angle of the elastic,
which essentially gave me the current azimuth of the dish. I wrote it down, and then sat down to wait.

We’d agreed, earlier, that we’d wait for up to three hours for the dish to move. If it hadn’t moved by then, we’d bail. We’d be getting tired, and our edge would be gone. With the elastic stretched out, I laid back on the ground and got comfortable. Watched the moon going down, the stars popping out. The lights from Waco, to the east, were bright enough that you didn’t get the full clout of the Milky Way as you do up in the North Woods, but then, that might be northern jingoism; the stars were pretty good . . .

I’d been there for twenty-five minutes when the dish motor burped—an electronic burp, a change in the hum, and I sat up, listening, to be sure, then quickly checked the GPS and jotted down the time. With the level and protractor in hand, I moved around to the front of the dish and quickly checked the azimuth. It hadn’t changed. But something was happening: the deeper note from the motor was unmistakable.

I was worrying about that when I felt a vibration in the disk, and slowly, surely, it began to move, tilting back. I looked at where it was pointing, at the horizon line, but could see nothing but stars. Sometimes, on dark nights, you could see them, the satellites, like tiny sparks scratching themselves on heaven . . .

I checked the azimuth, wrote down the GPS time signal. Checked the azimuth, wrote down the time. Checked it again, and again. Then hurried around behind it, got the compass, checked to make sure the direction hadn’t changed: it hadn’t. I went back to the dish and
checked the azimuth as many times as I could until the dish was pointing at the local horizon, up the hill, and suddenly stopped. After taking the last azimuth, I ran around and checked direction again. Still the same. When I give the numbers to Bobby, I should have a straight line running through the sky from just north of west to just south of east, and even with the crude measurements of the protractor, should be able to give him a reasonably close approximation of times and azimuths.

At the top of its arc, the dish stopped moving for thirty seconds, then slowly began turning, more to the north this time, as the dish began to come down in its arc. At the end of the movement sequence, it was pointing at the horizon at about 320 degrees, or about 30 degrees further north than before. I noted that, packed up my stuff, took the elastic off the dish, and walked south about fifteen feet, and whispered, “LuEllen?”

A moment later, she was next to me: “Get it?”

“Yeah.”

“I heard you clunking around.”

“Not too much, I hope.”

“Not too bad . . . are we good?”

“Unless you’d like to take a little walk.”

“You’re the boss.”

M
oving slowly, stopping often to use the night glasses, and staying as far away from the groups of cows as we could, we walked toward Corbeil’s farmhouse. We sat on one hillside for fifteen minutes, taking the whole country in, then crossed a wash and climbed
the other side; and from there, we could see Corbeil’s clearly.

“No dish,” I muttered to LuEllen.

“So let’s go. We’ve been here too long.”

“Let’s head over that way for a couple of hundred yards first, and then head back,” I said.

“That way” was east, toward the eastern edge of Corbeil’s land. We first crossed back to the hill behind us, to get a little more distance between us and the house, and followed the backside of the ridge for four or five hundred yards. When the GPS put us three-fourths of the way across, we turned back up the hill. When we got to the crest, we looked down, and there, in a little hollow, was another dish.

“That’s three,” I whispered.

We crossed down to it, and I marked it on the GPS, and did a quick measurement: 320, just like the last one. Waiting. I considered waiting until it started to move, but we were running down. “Let’s go.”

We took better than an hour to get back to the truck. We approached it slowly, listening, loaded up as quietly as we could, backed out, and headed south toward the highway. Once on the road, LuEllen said, “Nice night for a picnic.”

“I’m a little kicked,” I said. She was driving, and I added, “When we get down to that old farmhouse, off on the side, if there aren’t any lights, stop at the end of the driveway; just for a second.”

There were no lights, and she stopped. I stuck the GPS out the window, got a quick read, noted it, and said, “Let’s go home.”

W
e took the county road south, then Highway 185 east, past Corbeil’s ranch. As we passed the ranch, we saw two men walking out to a car in the driveway. One of them glanced at us as we went by.

“That guy . . .” LuEllen said. “The one on the right.”

“Yeah. He’s limping.” We continued down the highway, and looking back, I saw the car pull out of the driveway, following. A few miles on, we stopped at an intersection before turning south toward Waco. The car followed, again.

“Still behind us?”

“Yeah, but they would be. There’s no place else to go.” They didn’t seem to be coming after us with any urgency. “Slow down a little; bring it down to about fifty-seven or fifty-eight,” I told her.

She lightened up on the gas, and the car, a Buick, slowly crept up on us. When they were off our back bumper, they hung there for a while, then, at a flat spot, kicked out around us and accelerated away. I had the glasses ready, and picked out the tag number on the Buick.

“Guy didn’t look at me,” LuEllen said.

“Why should he? We’re just another truck on the open highway. Even paranoia has its limits.”

“For amateurs,” LuEllen said. “Not for me. We wipe this truck, and take it back first thing tomorrow morning. Before the DMV opens, in case he can check the plate.”

“Of course,” I said.

 23 

W
e went back to Bobby that night, and I summarized everything we’d figured out. From the GPS receiver, I’d worked out precise locations of the three satellite dishes we’d seen, and the distances between them, and also gave him the directions, azimuths, and times I’d taken from the dish.

U
NAUTHORIZED SATELLITE CONTACTS
?

P
OSSIBLE
. C
USTOMERS COULD GET HIGHRES
PHOTOS VIA THE
N
ET WITH PAYMENTS SENT TO FRONT ACCOUNTS
. N
AMES IN
J
ACK
’
S FILE WERE ALL WEST AND SOUTH
A
SIA
, I
SLAMIC
,
AND
I
NDIAN
.

M
UST BE SOME KIND OF ACCOUNTING ON TASKS
. H
OW COULD THEY TASK THE SATELLITE WITHOUT
NRO
KNOWING
?

D
ON
’
T KNOW
.

I
WILL SHOW DISH DATA TO TWO FRIENDS IF OK WI TH YOU
.

M
UST BE
*
GOOD
*
FRIENDS
.

B
OTH
*
EXCELLENT
*
FRIENDS
. B
OTH KNOW SOME THINGS ABOUT SATELLITES
.

G
OOD
. A
NY NEWS ON
G
REEN
?

Y
ES
. A
TTORNEY SEZ COPS PROBABLY DONE WITH
G
REEN
.

I
S ROOM MONITORED
?

W
ILL CHECK
.

A
LSO CHECK LICENSE PLATE
 . . .

I gave him the plate number and he said he’d get back. The next morning, we returned the truck, carefully wiped of fingerprints. The gun and other equipment we stowed in the back of the rental car.

“I’d hate to have a cop look at that collection: night glasses, compasses, GPS, the rifle . . . he’d figure we were assassins,” LuEllen said as I put it all in the trunk.

“Maybe we are,” I said. As the words came out of my mouth, I tried at the last minute to make them into a joke, but LuEllen looked at me with curious eyes. I had to be careful, now, around her.

M
ore waiting. We spent the day stooging around, checking with Bobby every couple of hours. LuEllen was tired of hitting golf balls with bad equipment.

“Why don’t you learn how to play golf? We’re always waiting on these things, we’re always trying to
figure out what to do, and you always want to draw or some shit. Why don’t you learn something social?”

“Golf is for morons,” I said.

“How would you know? You’ve never played.”

“If you don’t shut up, I’m going to have to turn you over my knee.”

“Ooo. That could soak up a couple of hours,” she said.

T
he only thing we got from Bobby in the morning was the ID on the car driven by the two men from Corbeil’s ranch. A William Hart, with an address.

“Back at the beginning of all this, I got a letter from Jack that mentioned this guy. He said to be careful around him, because he’s an evil fuck, or something to that effect.”

“So let’s be careful around him,” LuEllen said.

L
ate in the day, Bobby had something:

C
AN YOU GO TO
L
ITTLE
R
OCK
?

Y
ES
? W
HEN
,
WHY
?

T
OMORROW
. P
ICK UP EQUIPMENT
. N
EED TO BUG DISH
.

OK.

E
XCELLENT
. T
ALKED TO ATTORNEY
. G
REEN ROOM
[348]
PROBABLY NOT FORMALLY MONITORED
. M
AN IN NEXT ROOM
[350]
NAMED
M
ORRIS
K
ENDALL
,
HEAVY DRUGS
FROM CANCER
,
PROBABLY DIE IN A DAY OR TWO
,
IF YOU NEED TO ASK FOR PATIENT
.

T
HANKS
.

We checked out of the Austin motel and headed back to Dallas, found another room in another anonymous motel, called the hospital for visiting hours, and were told we could visit until nine o’clock.

“Tell me again what we can get from Green,” LuEllen said.

“We can point out the benefits of stonewalling,” I said.

“I’m sure he’s figured those out,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. “You’ve got something else working through your dirty little mind.”

I nodded, reluctantly. “Yeah, I do; but I’m not going to tell you about it yet, because it’d probably piss you off, and then you’d piss me off, and I don’t have the energy for all that. Anyway, tonight, I’m going into the hospital alone. I’ll want you on the street, ready to roll, in case there’s trouble.”

“Kidd, if you think there’s gonna be trouble . . .”

“I don’t think there will be, but I’m more paranoid than our two friends at Corbeil’s . . . Okay? Now, shut up for a while: I’m trying to think.”

S
omething else
was
working through my dirty little mind, and I didn’t want LuEllen to know about it. Not yet, anyway. I’d figured out how to drag AmMath and Corbeil and his goons right into the shit, but I didn’t
want LuEllen around when I did it. Texas was a bad state for all this . . .

I
went into Mount of Olives Hospital at eight-thirty that night, with LuEllen waiting in a parking spot on a street behind the doctors’ parking lot. If I had to run for it, I probably wouldn’t get out of the building; but if I did, and I could make it across the doctors’ parking lot, we could be lost in traffic in fifteen seconds.

A gift shop was open just inside the hospital’s front doors, and I bought a bouquet of bright yellow flowers that looked something like daisies, but with a plastic sheen and a harsh odor. They came in a green glass vase; the whole thing looked cheap, but somehow right. I asked at the information desk for Morris Kendall’s room, got the number, and went up.

The door to Green’s room was open, and a grim, heavyset woman was sitting in a chair looking into a bed at the far end of the room. There were two beds in the room. I could see only the end of the bed closest to the door, where I presumed Green must be. Nobody told me that his room was only semiprivate. Goddamnit. I went on to 350 and found Morris Kendall in what appeared to be a coma, dying all by himself, a drip running into an arm that was pockmarked with needle sticks. I put the flowers on a sidetable and tried not to look at him.

After a couple of minutes, I went back out to the hallway and paced for a while. The woman was still sitting there, unspeaking, clutching a purse on her lap. She
looked like she disapproved of this whole hospital thing. I went and sat with Morris for a couple more minutes, and in those two minutes, decided that when I got old, I’d lay in a lethal supply of sleeping pills, just in case. I didn’t want to end like this . . .

P
eople were coming and going in the hall, and I kept looking for the heavyset woman; fifteen minutes after I got there, I was rewarded: she went by the door, walking with purpose, clutching her purse with both hands. I checked the hallway—a little cluster of a man and two kids, all, from their looks, from the same family, were gathered by a doorway fifty feet down—and stepped around the corner into Green’s room.

Green was in the first bed, separated from the other by a pull curtain. A television was bolted into the far corner of the room, tuned to the romance channel. Green rolled his head toward me when I walked in. I turned my hands palm-up in a question, and raised my eyebrows; he shrugged, but put a finger to his lips. I stepped over next to his bed and put my head close to his. He whispered, “What are you doing here?”

“Needed to talk. Are you okay?”

“I will be. Gonna be in physical therapy for a few weeks.”

“Sorry.”

“Not as sorry as I am. I was supposed to cover Lane. She’s dead.” He looked ineffably sad when he said it.

“I need to know about the two guys. Were they both shooting?”

“Yeah, big time. Didn’t bother with silencers or any of that shit. I think it might have been a pickup, but when they saw me, it was just
boom-boom-boom
. You got the computer?”

“Yes. I need to know what the guys looked like. You hit one of them.”

“Not bad, I don’t think. Maybe even ricocheted him. The short guy knocked me down first thing through the door, right on my ass into the bathtub . . . Not a goddamned thing I could do but keep pulling the trigger.”

“Good thing for you that the tub was there.”

“You got that right. I don’t think—” but he thought anyway, for a second, for probably the ten-thousandth time—“I don’t think I could have saved her.”

“Not a chance,” I said. “These guys: What’d they look like?”

“They were two mean white boys; nylons over their heads so you couldn’t see them very well. But in good shape, thin and hard. I think, real short hair; I couldn’t tell for sure, but that was the impression I got. One was maybe six-two or -three, the other was maybe three inches shorter than that, but a little thicker. You’d notice if you saw them together. I shot the short one.”

“All right. Are you headed back to Oakland?”

“I guess. I’d be happy to stay, but I don’t know what good I’d do you.”

“No, no. What we need the most is for you to go back to Oakland and do absolutely what you’d do if everything was just like you said it was. You’re a bodyguard who doesn’t know anything about anything. Go
back, do therapy, go for walks, get laid. If the feds are still interested, you gotta bore them.”

He nodded: “That’s what I’ll do.”

From the other side of the curtain, a man’s voice croaked, “Hey, Leth, you mind if I switch this over to Cinemax? I think they got one of them car-wash movies on.”

“Go ahead,” said Green. “I could use a car-wash movie.”

I
stuck a hand out, shook Green’s, and went out the door. Down the elevators, across the doctors’ parking lot, and into the car.

“How’d it go?” LuEllen asked.

“Fine. Green’s cool, and we’re good.”

“Why do you look so bummed out?” She swung the car in a U-turn and we headed back toward the Interstate.

I told her about Morris Kendall, next door to Green. “There wasn’t a single personal belonging in the room, that I could see. He’s up there dying with nothing to keep him company but a cheap bouquet of yellow flowers from a stranger.”

“Country song,” she said.

T
hat was the easy part of the day. We checked with Bobby, to see if he had anything new. He had a time and a place in Little Rock: three-thirty the next day, at a restaurant by Little Rock National Airport.

With that all fixed, I jumped LuEllen. Nothing slow
and playful, the way her taste runs in sex, but straight ahead, pinning her on the bed, taking her down. When we were done, she said, “All right, Kidd. What was that all about?”

“I’m shipping your ass out,” I said. “I figured you’d be pissed for a while, and I wanted some sex to remember you by.”

She sat up: “You fucker.”

“LuEllen . . . you’re always reserving the right to take off when life gets too cranky, right? Well, it’s going to get crankier, and there’s no reason for you to be around. I’d just have to think about taking care of you, and I don’t want to do that. I’m gonna have enough to do taking care of myself.”

“You’ve never had to take care of me,” she said. She said it in her dangerous voice.