"What do you think?"
"We need to get out of here. If we can lose them, I'd feel a lot easier. Here, we're pinned like butterflies."
"Okay. We've got a couple more things to do here, but we'll be in Dallas the day after tomorrow. Or the day after that, not later than. You could surprise them somehow, get out to the airport, ditch the car, get on a plane."
"What if they've got people in Dallas?"
"Fly to Seattle first," I suggested.
"All right; I'll talk to Lane about it,"
"How is she?"
"Antsy. But here, you talk to her."
Lane came on and I told her about Jack and Lighter, that Jack may have found something at AmMath that needed Lighter's attention. She didn't immediately pick up on the problem of the second trip.
"I knew something was going on," she said. "If Jack was talking to this guy, and this guy was killed, then we've got to tell somebody. This proves it. That something was going on with AmMath."
"It doesn't prove anything in particular," I said. "And the second tripthat's a problem."
"I don't see a problem. The guy-"
"They'll say Jack shot him," I said.
That stopped her only for a few seconds: "But we know he didn't," she argued. "He wouldn't do that."
"They've got a gun in Texas that was stolen in San Jose years ago. They've got witnesses who say he was the shooter, and one of those witnesses took a bullet in the chest. Now, if they ever get around to looking, they can show that he flew into Baltimore late in the afternoon-after working hoursand flew back the next morning. His NSA contact was murdered right in the middle of that time period, and he never said a word about it to anyone."
That stopped her for a little longer: "Okay. That sounds bad. When you put it that way. But maybe he didn't even know about it."
"There's another problem. If we pass information to the FBI. where did we get it'"
"We could finesse that. An anonymous call from Dallas."
"All right, we could figure something out. Maybe we'll do it. But later When the information doesn't look so incriminating. Or when there's something else to go with it."
"How are the burns?" I asked.
"The bad ones are peeling, like a heavy tan. The lighter ones are almost gone. Not much pain anymore. Everything itches like crazy."
"Have you talked to the Dallas cops again?"
"Yup. The lead detective of the case called today and wanted me to fly out. I told him it'd be a couple of days yet and got on his case about AmMath again."
"How're you fixed for cash?" I asked.
"I'm okay. You need some?"
"No. But get Green to use his credit cards when you go to Dallas, and give him cash to pay him back. They don't know who he is, so they won't be able to track him using his credit cards. Take your cell phone."
"Of course. Where're you guys going?"
"We've got some more research to do here and then we'll hook up with you in Dallas. Stay with the phone."
I have never been a particularly good sleeper. My sleep/wake cycle is about twenty-five hours long, so I tend to push the clock around, until I'm sleeping all day and working all night. Then I just keep pushing. In any case, seven hours is about right: anything shorter than that and I tend to get grumpy.
I got fairly grumpy when LuEllen ran her cold fingers up my spine at eight o'clock in the morning; I nearly bounced off the ceiling, which she thought was moderately hilarious.
"You're gonna give me a fuckin' heart attack some day," I snarled at her, and there were some teeth behind the snarl. I didn't like her sneaking up on me. "How'd you get in?"
"The lock is shit," she said.
"Wonderful, that's just fuckin' great. You give me an aneurysm because you want somebody to talk to at breakfast."
"No, no. I had some seriously bad news to share with you, but you're being such a mean asshole that I'm not going to do it," she said. She crossed her arms.
"What news?"
"Say please."
"Give me the fuckin' news or I'll breathe on you."
"The feds busted Bobby," she said.
"What?" The news left me completely disoriented. "Where'd you get this? Who called?"
"It's on TV. They busted him last night and he'll be arraigned today in federal court in New Orleans. They say he's involved in the attacks on the IRS and that the attacks are continuing."
"Sonofabitch." I fumbled the TV remote off the nightstand and punched up CNN. At the same time, I asked LuEllen, "Did you bring the cold phone?"
"Yeah."
CNN was doing an advertisement for itself. When they got back to news, they were doing the weather. I hopped out of bed, got my notebook, and used the cold phone to punch up John Smith's phone number in Longstreet. John answered on the first ring; he was wideawake.
"This is the guy from upriver," I said. "Is it true?"
"We don't know. I don't think so, but this guy, whoever it is, is gonna be in court in two hours, so we'll know for sure, then. Our guy's off-line, though. All his numbers are down."
"They wouldn't be down unless he took them down," I said. "If the feds grabbed him, they would have left the lines up, to see who called."
"There's something else: if they busted him at his place, they'd most likely be taking him to court in Jackson, not in New Orleans."
"I don't know where his place is at, but I'm glad to hear you say it," I said.
We talked about it for another minute, poking through clues from a TV broadcast neither of us had seen yet. "I'll get back," I said.
"How much trouble are we in?" LuEllen asked.
"Depends on whether they really got him, and if they did, what they got. And if he's willing to deal. I've never met him face-to-face, but if he wanted to deal. he could hurt a lot of us. He knows all about Anshiser. He knows about Longstreet. He knows about Modoc and Redmond." All jobs involving what we lightly call industrial espionage.
"Maybe you ought to back away from this thing," LuEllen said. "Get back home and maybe pack a suitcase."
"Something to think about," I said, "Though I wouldn't be good at running."
"How does ten years in the federal penitentiary sound?" she asked.
"There've got to be other options. Gotta be."
We looked at each other and I realized how hooked up I really was. I'd always thought of myself as something of a loner, going my own way, doing what I wanted when I wanted to do it. But Bobby knew about meknew where to find meand so did LuEllen, and John Smith, and now Lane Ward knew a couple of things, and so did twenty or thirty other people. If the feds somehow managed to get them all in the same room, they could hang me.
"You can get stubborn," she said. "But I still reserve the right to split, you know that."
"Anytime," I said. That'd always been the deal, and she'd always been protective of her identity, background, and home. Nobody knew much about LuEllen; not even me.
We watched television for a half hour, and I got cleaned up. We saw one item on Bobby, which said just that he'd been caught, and was believed to be a leading member of Firewall, and was coordinating the attack on the IRS. The attack was still going on, and the government was considering an extension of filing dates for quarterly business returns. Congress was squealing like a herd of stuck pigs.
"You were right about what gets them excited," LuEllen said.
We went out to breakfast, but neither of us said much. I spent the time trying to figure out what to do next, and one thing kept coming up: call the cops. The problem would be to get the cops to listen, especially since (a) they thought they knew what was going on, and (b) we were the bad guys.
"Not having Bobby to do research is like. I don't know. Like going blind," I told LuEllen as we walked back to the hotel.
"What more research do we need?"
"Anything that would get the bureaucracy running in a different direction. They're tearing up the world looking for fifteen or twenty of us, and we haven't done anythingI mean, nothing that they think we did. Somebody has to talk to them."