Grace smiled at her. 'Very Gatsby. I like it.'
'You know me, Fat Annie was just born for croquet and champagne, although you're not about to get me out on a lawn in this heat. Come on, let's get ourselves inside before I start to render.'
Annie had always thought Gothic to be a particularly uncivilized and slightly distasteful architecture, which therefore suited Harley perfectly. The baroque furnishings he favored were as massive as his frame and his personality, but as far as she was concerned, they were just plain Frankenstein.
They found Harley at the eight-burner stove in the kitchen, dumping canned chili in a pot with one hand, holding a beer with the other. Charlie was already next to him, nose up to a skillet of warming breakfast sausage. 'Just for you, buddy.' He tossed a link into the air and Charlie rose on his hind legs to catch it.
Grace leaned an elbow on a counter, chin in her hand, and watched the pair of them. The really amazing thing about this vagabond dog was what he taught you about the people he interacted with. Harley, for instance, oblivious to his own great value, bought affection shamelessly. Charlie was the easiest mark. One sausage, and he was yours for life. Where's Roadrunner?' she asked.
'In the shower. He made a new land speed record biking over here this morning, and I had to wring him out before I'd let him in the house.'
Annie peered into the mess in the pot and punched her hands into her pillowy hips. 'Nobody's going to eat that crap. And why are you drinking at eight o'clock in the morning?'
'Technically, since I didn't sleep last night, it isn't really morning. It's just a continuation of the dark time, only with light.' '
Grace smiled at him. You're really shook up about this, aren't you?'
You're goddamned right I'm shook up about it. We're going to have a Fed in this house for God knows how long, watching over our shoulders, looking at every move we make.'
'So?'
'So? So? Are you kidding me? We break about a hundred Federal laws every day when we work. We bust into secured sites - hell, we hack into the FBI like it was our own e-mail. They're going to wait until they get the software program they want from us, then they're going to throw us in the pen for about four hundred years. Christ. We beat these guys black and blue for ten years. They hate our guts, so what do they do? They ask permission to send this Trojan horse asshole right into our office and we open the door.'
'Are you talking about John Smith?' Roadrunner ducked through one of the kitchen doorways in his perpetual uniform of bicyclist Lycra. Even though the entire house was built on a grand scale, at six-foot-seven his head nearly brushed the lintel. 'Hi, Grace, Annie. Sounds like you're getting the four-hundred-years-in-prison lecture.'
Harley scowled at him. 'Very funny, dipshit. And that damn well better not be the same suit you were wearing when you got here, because I just got the chairs reupholstered to match the koi.'
'I'm not an animal. I put the sweaty one under your bed. And all your koi are dead, anyhow.'
Annie's bow lips turned down in a troubled pout as she focused on the disturbing possibility of wearing a prison- orange jumpsuit for any length of time. 'They wouldn't do that, would they, Grace?'
'Do what?'
'Throw us in jail for a teeny-weeny bit of computer mischief.'
'No, of course not. Harley's just being paranoid. The Feds know all about us working under the table every now and then…'
'Right,' Harley grumbled. 'They just haven't been able to prove it.'
Grace rolled her eyes. 'They asked for our help, and they're going to cut us some slack. Besides, Smith is the new FBI, not the Hoover archetypes we were dealing with back in Atlanta.'
'Are you kidding me? Did we meet the same guy? He had the suit, he looked like a Feeb, he talked that stupid Feeb talk, shit. The only thing that wasn't Hoover archetype about Smith was that he wasn't wearing a dress.'
Grace shook her head. 'They're desperate, Harley. They tried tracing this network and they can't do it. Not legally, anyway. So they bring in us and a bunch of hackers so we can do what the law keeps the Feds from doing themselves. You can't stick religiously to every letter of the law when lives are at stake, and maybe they're starting to get that. Sometimes you have to bend some rules. Hack into private phone records and save a life, or respect privacy laws and let somebody die. There's no choice if you're a human being.'
Harley nodded. 'Exactly my point. Who ever said the Feds were human beings?'
Grace shrugged. 'We had a choice. An office of our own in D.C., or D.C. came to us.'
Yeah, well, I agreed to that before they told us they were sending a full-time spy.'
'Liaison,' Grace corrected him. 'He's here to help us.'
Harley snorted. 'That's what they say to the mental patients when the guy comes in to give them electric-shock therapy. Christ, Grace, you're talking about the same agency that set you up to bait a serial killer, and now all of a sudden you think they've got scruples?'
'Harley.' Grace took in a breath and exhaled noisily; one of those secret signals that told people who knew her they should pay attention. 'There are creeps out there filming fake murders to get their fifteen minutes on the Web; but there are other creeps filming real murders for the same kind of celebrity. The FBI wants them all shut down, and the first warrant step is a software program that can tell the difference between something staged and something real. They're doing the right thing, Harley, trying to nail the real killers fast, and scaring the creep idiots straight. And it's simple for us. Software 101.'
Harley snorted. 'I'm glad you're so optimistic. Even if we use one of our existing software platforms, we're talking a week, minimum, just to get an idea if this is doable. It's going to be a ton of extra work, and my point is, we've got a lot on our plate right now. We're staring down deadlines on security software for three of the biggest corporations in the world, which, incidentally, is going to make us filthy, stinking rich…'
Annie cocked a brow at him. 'We're already filthy, stinking rich. Half the computers in the world run at least one of our software apps or games.'
'Besides, the security software is already in beta version,' Grace reminded him. 'We'll be finished by the end of the month, easy.'
'Okay, but we still have to finish the updates for all the educational software…'
Roadrunner lifted his hand and waved. 'I finished those this morning.'
Harley folded his big arms across his chest and grunted. 'All right, all right, so maybe we can squeeze this in. Big whoop. The bottom line is, I do not trust the guy, I do not want to work with him looking over my shoulder, I do not want him in my house.'
Roadrunner shrugged. 'I kind of liked him.'
Yeah, but you're a dipshit.'
'Besides, we've got more bad-guy radar in this room than all of MPD, and if he is one, we'll know it after the first hour.'
Harley blew a raspberry. 'Oh yeah? It took us ten years to figure out who was trying to kill us. Our record for reading people isn't exactly sterling.'
Grace didn't exactly make a face. The one she already had just went very still and stayed that way. For a woman who had spent her entire life anticipating and preparing for danger, she didn't like reminders that she had locked out the world and locked in the most dangerous people of all. It had almost cost all of them their lives, and it was her fault, no one else's. 'When's he coming?'