The Devil's Code (6 page)

I continued back to the bathroom, almost tripped over the tool towel, picked it up, and hissed up at the hatch: “Lane.”

“What?” A white patch, her face, hovered over the hatch.

“Somebody coming,” I said. “I’m gonna hand you the towel.”

As I said it, I heard a scratching at the front door. Somebody was peeling the police tape off the front, and taking care to be quiet about it. I stood on the toilet, handed her the tool towel. “Take the disks,” I said.

“You found them!”

“Move back; I’m coming up.”

I had to stand on my tiptoes to get my hands around the joists at the edge of the hatch. I heard the key in the lock, got a grip, and did a pull-up and then a push-up
through the hatch. The door opened outside, and Lane whispered, “Now what?” and I whispered, “Shut up. Shine your light on the hatch.”

She turned her light on the hatch board. I picked it up, and carefully settled it back into its slot. As long as nobody was doing a thorough search . . .

W
hoever was down below us was as quiet as we’d been. After a few minutes, Lane said, “Are you sure they’re down there?”

I nodded: “I heard a key in the lock.”

A minute later: “I don’t hear anybody,” she said.

“Quiet.”

I was standing on a joist. A long plank ran down to the end of the house, to a head-sized vent that looked out over the front yard. Half hunched against the low overhead, I eased down the board and peered through the vent. A sports utility vehicle—maybe a 4Runner or a Pathfinder, I could only see the front end of it—was parked in front of the green house, a spot that had been empty when we came in. There was no other movement on the street, although I could see a television through a window across the street. Then I heard the door open below me, softly, and a man stepped out onto the curved driveway. He looked back and said, “Hurry, goddamnit.”

As he turned to talk, I caught an image of his face, eye-blink quick. A second man pushed the door shut, and they hurried toward the SUV. The second guy was carrying what looked like . . .

“A gas can,” I said aloud. “Ah, shit.” I turned back toward Lane.

“Get out, get out,” I said, “Get the hatch up, get the hatch up, get . . .”

“What, what . . . ?”

She was looking toward me, still whispering, as I scrambled frantically down the plank, and she was not lifting the hatch.

“Get the goddamn hatch . . .” I was almost on top of her before she lifted it up, still uncertain.

“Drop through,” I said, urgently. “Hurry—they’re going to burn the place.”

She got it: no question. She put her feet over the edge, held on with her hands for a second, dangled, and then dropped into the bathroom.

“Disks,” I said. I handed the bundle down, then dropped into the bathroom myself. I stepped into the hallway, and the air was thick with gasoline fumes and something else. “Out the back.”

“What?” She’d taken a step toward the front room, to see what was happening. I took a step after her, caught her arm. Just beyond her, a burning rag hung from a string that must have been taped or thumb-tacked to the ceiling. The “something else” odor was burning cotton. As I caught her arm, the string, already burning, parted, and the rag dropped to the floor.

The gas went with a
whump,
like a giant pilot light—or napalm, for that matter—and I jerked her back, and her sweatshirt was burning and I beat at it with my hands as I dragged her through the firelight to the back door.

She was screaming and beat at her shirt with her free hand. I twisted her and got the bottom of the back of the shirt and ripped it up over her head and off, and she groaned and said, “I’m burned,” and I led her out the door and around the house and said, “Run, run, run,” and we ran through the backyards of the green house and the next house over, and then around onto the sidewalk and down the street.

In one minute, we were at the car. In three minutes, we were a mile away.

“How bad?” I asked.

“My arms, my hands, my face,” she said. “I don’t think it’s too bad.”

“Gotta find a good light,” I said.

We found a good light at a hot-bed motel a couple of miles from the airport. I checked in with the Harry Olson ID. The clerk was locked behind a thick bulletproof glass window, and I said, “We’ll want to check out early; we got a real early flight.” He grunted, said, “Drop the key in the box,” pointed at a locked box hung on the side of the motel, and went back to a gun magazine whose lead story was, “Exposed! Handgun Control Inc.’s 5-Year Plan to Disarm America: Read It and Weep.”

Inside, we got the good light. Lane had been burned on the backs of her hands, her forearms, and under her chin. Her eyebrows were singed, and the dark hair over her forehead had taken on some new curls. The burns were pink, rather than white or black. The worst were on her arms; the biggest burn, under her chin, was the size of her palm.

“What do you think?” she asked, holding her hands away from her body, palms up. She was hurting.

“You probably ought to have a doctor look at it,” I said.

“Then the police will know.”

“ . . . but if you can stand it, we could catch our flight, and you could go to the doctor—or to an emergency room—out on the West Coast. We could tell them that you burned yourself with charcoal lighter at a barbecue, but didn’t think it was bad until it started hurting overnight.”

“It hurts now,” she said.

“Which is good,” I said. “Really bad burns don’t hurt right away: the nerve endings are destroyed.”

She actually smiled, which suddenly made me like her a lot, and said, “If the burns aren’t too bad . . .”

“I really don’t think they are, but they’ll hurt,” I said.

“Then I can stand it. Better than going to jail,” she said.

“ . . . and I’m not a doctor.”

“Do you think the airline people will notice?” she asked.

I shook my head: “No. You don’t look bad at all. Keep your jacket over your arms, let me handle the tickets.”

“Then let’s go.”

I checked my watch: “We’ve got some time yet. I’m gonna find a pharmacy, see if I can get some sunburn painkiller, or whatever I can get. That could help.”

“Good . . . I held on to the disks.” She turned her
head up to smile at me again, and winced. “I guess I don’t want to move my head too fast,” she said.

“I’ll go get the stuff.”

“Don’t tarry,” she said, the woman with the big dark eyes.

 5 

ST. JOHN CORBEIL

S
t. John Corbeil was sitting in a leather armchair, reading, light from the floor lamp glinting from the steel rims of his military spectacles. As he read—Orwell’s
Homage to Catalonia
—he threaded and rethreaded a diamond necklace between his stubby fingers, as though it were a string of worry beads.

He liked the cool sensuality of the necklace, and the money it represented. He’d had it made to his specifications by Harry Winston of New York. One hundred diamonds, excellent cut, clarity, and color in each, and each a single carat in size. The Winston people had thought that curious—he’d seen the curiosity, unspoken, in their eyes—because a hundred-diamond necklace doesn’t carry the flash of say, a big central stone or two, surrounded by a constellation of smaller diamonds.

Corbeil had good reasons: one-carat diamonds were easy to move, easy to sell, and anonymous. The necklace was a bank account. If you popped the diamonds out of their settings, you could put $300,000 in the toes of your shoes . . .

Another good reason was the sensuality of the stones. Corbeil’s face might have been chopped from a block of oak, but he was a sensual man. He liked the feel of a woman, the sound of a zipper coming down on the back of a woman’s dress, the smell of Chanel. He liked fast cars driven fast, French cooking and California wine, Italian suits and English shoes and diamonds. He hadn’t been able to afford the very best in women, wine, and song until AmMath. Now he had them, and he would be damned if he would give them up . . .

T
he doorbell rang; he’d been expecting it. He put the book down, slipped the necklace into a shirt pocket, crossed to the intercom, and pushed the button. “Yes?”

“Hart and Benson.” William Hart’s voice. Four men were involved in various parts of the operation. Corbeil himself, as coordinator; Hart and Benson, as security and technicians; and Tom Woods, a computer-encryption expert who loved only money more than codes. Woods was not aware of the Morrison, Lighter, or Ward difficulties, other than that Morrison had been killed in a break-in. He was a nervous man.

“Come in.” Corbeil pressed the door-release button, buzzing them in.

D
one,” Hart said.

Corbeil nodded. “So. There’s no reason to think that anything remains here in Texas.”

“Not as far as we know.”

Corbeil turned away, fished the diamond necklace out of his pocket, and began unconsciously pouring it from hand to hand, as though it were a slinky. “There remains the possibility that he sent his sister something.”

“He could have sent something to anybody; but we can’t find any really close friends. No girlfriends, right now. The sister’s the obvious candidate. I mean, we’re still backgrounding him, but if there’s somebody else, it’s not obvious,” Hart said.

“I wish we’d had time to interrogate him,” Corbeil said. “But the pressure to get him out of the way . . . well, we couldn’t both interrogate him and have a credible disappearance, could we?”

Hart shrugged. The other man, Benson, stood silently, listening. A follower. Hart asked, “So now what? Shut down the ranch for a while?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Corbeil said. “We can do it by pushing a button. No point in pushing it before we have to. There’s a lot of money out there right now.”

“I’ll tell you, Mr. Corbeil, this whole incident scared the shit out of me. I’m still scared and Les is just as nervous as I am.” Hart glanced at the silent man, looking for support, and got a nod.

“That’s why we’ve been so careful setting it up,”
Corbeil said. “They’d need evidence to put us in jail, and there’s no physical evidence of anything. If I tell Tom Woods to push the destruct button, everything is gone. Not even
we
could get it back.”

“That’s well and good, but there’s still Lane Ward,” Hart said. “If she does have something, or if Morrison set up some kind of dead-man’s drop . . .”

“So we need to go out and look at her house.”

“That’s dangerous,” Hart objected.

“You didn’t have any trouble getting into Morrison’s place out there. Or here, either.”

“That was different. He was supposed to be out of town, and
we
knew he was dead, so nobody would be coming around to visit. With Ward, we don’t know the neighborhood, we don’t even know what we’d be looking for. It might be on a disk, on a hard drive, it might be stashed online somewhere. It might not exist.”

“But if it does, and if it were sent on to the FBI, we’d be in desperate trouble,” Corbeil said. “It’s worth the risk. If the worst happened, and you were caught, we might explain it as a security matter. Something that we were terribly worried about: something that you did on your own to keep the nation’s secrets from falling into unfriendly hands. If you did go to jail for a while—what would you get for an unsuccessful burglary, six months?—if that did happen, there would be a magnificent bonus at the end of the time.”

“How much?” Hart asked bluntly.

“Say, two million a year, prorated for lesser amounts of time,” Corbeil said.

Hart looked at Benson, then turned back to Corbeil.
“So we look at her house. Actually, there’s an opportunity coming up.”

Corbeil’s eyebrows went up, and when Hart explained, Corbeil smiled with pleasure. “I so like working with you, William,” he said.

B
enson spoke up for the first time. “You know what I don’t like, Mr. Corbeil? I think we’re really okay with this Morrison character, and his sister. I don’t think he sent anything. We caught on too quick, and he was relying on Lighter to take care of the problem. But what I see . . .”

Corbeil was made impatient by the preface: “Yes?”

“I’m worried about Woods. Ever since Morrison was killed, he’s been walking around with this doggy face. I think he knows something happened. They used to hang out a little.”

Corbeil nodded, and said, “All right, Les. That’s a legitimate concern. You know Tom Woods is a friend of mine, an old confidant who came over with me from the factory. And a mathematical genius, to boot.”

“I know that, sir, but . . .”

Corbeil raised one hand: “If he becomes a problem, I will take care of it. I promise. But we already have two deaths that are too closely connected. A third one, if it becomes necessary to remove Lane Ward, would almost certainly draw attention. If Tom Woods had died in the interim . . . Well.”

Hart said, “Unless Tom was the architect of it all.”

Corbeil said, “You took the thought right out of my
head, William. We can perhaps begin to prepare some documents. . . . So: you travel to San Francisco.”

Hart nodded. “Tomorrow. We’ll call back. After we see what we’ve got, we can make a call on the Ward chick. Take her out or leave her.”

Corbeil said, “Mmm,” and smiled.