"That's her," LuEllen said. "That's her. Now do what I tell you. You gotta do it exactly right."
What I did was, I hurried halfway down the mall, until I was standing in front of a Victoria's Secret store. The woman in the teal jacket came through the inner door a second later. I started toward her, carrying my briefcase open and across my chest, digging in it with one hand. LuEllen was behind her, four or five feet back, pacing her. As we closed, I suddenly crossed in front of her and stopped abruptly, bowing over the briefcase, and she almost ran into me. She put her hands up to fend me off, and I said, "Oh, jeez, I'm sorry," but she was already past.
When she'd swerved to avoid me, then ricocheted off my arm, LuEllen had dipped her pocket for the keys. As the woman went on down the hall, LuEllen nodded at me, turned, and headed out. I was a step behind.
"We might not have long," LuEllen said, as we crossed the parking lot. She was tight. We could still hear a chopper, but it must've been on the other side of the building. Then there were sirens and for a moment I thought the cops would be blockading the place, but the sirens were fire trucks, coming in from off the mall.
We got in the van, LuEllen driving, and headed out; from the corner stoplight, we could see the parking ramp, and a fireball in the near end. Two big choppers were down in a vacant area of the lot, and a couple of hundred people were standing around, looking at the fire.
"If they get any prints out of that, they'll have earned them," I said.
"You think there were any left?"
"I don't think so. But why take a chance? And the fire got people looking that way."
"You think that woman saw your face?"
"Yeah, probably," I said. "A slice of it. Not all of it."
We took the van to the airport, trying not to touch anything. At the airport, we wiped it and left it in a reserved slot. I put a sheet of notebook paper on the dashboard with a note: "This car was stolen." A cab took us back to the motel.
At the motel, LuEllen took advantage of me. She tends to do that when there's trouble, when things have gotten tight. She went to her room, did a couple lines of cocaine, then, her eyes all blue and pinpointed, came down to mine.
"You need some exercise," she said, pulling her shirt off. LuEllen's a good-looking woman and an old friend. It would have hardly been polite to say no.
The first round of sex all done with, I was tracing some of her more interesting contours with my fingertips, and she said, "Tell me what they did."
"They must want us fairly badly," I said. "But then, we're right where they've got all their equipment. I think they probably put up several pairs of helicopters around Baltimore and probably Washington, with radio direction-finding equipmentcell phones are radios."
"I know that…
"Then, with the access the NSA has to phone call-tracing equipment, they probably picked up the cell our phone was using, spotted it, vectored in the nearest helicopters and fed them our signal at the same time. They'd get us pretty close just with the one cell, and our speed would probably tell them that we were on the Interstate. Then, if we switched to another cell, they'd have our direction, and from the time of change, a pretty good location. From that point, with their direction-finding equipment, it was only a matter of time. That's why they were downloading those pictures. They were keeping our signal going back and forth, and getting us to focus on what was happening."
"Smart," she said.
"Yeah. We fucked up. Sorry, Ifucked up I forgot who we were dealing with. If I'd been using my brain, we could've taken the tram to New York, which they would never in a million years have been covering, and we could have called from midtown at lunch. Instead." I spread my hands. "We have a major screwup. Hertz is gonna be pissed at Nancy M. Hoff."
She giggled. "Their car is a puddle of plastic."
"We hope."
Then she sighed and rolled over and said, "This was fun; both the running and the fucking. But we've got to be smarter."
"I don't see anything more for us here," I said. "Welsh told me that they'd gone into the computer in Laurel, so maybe they'll take care of everything."
"Back home?"
"You want to go back home?"
"Where're you going?"
I thought for a moment, then said, "Texas. Just to look around."
"I've been to Texas," she said. "I sort of like it there. I like the way they dress."
"You're welcome to come along."
Late in the afternoon, we checked out of the motel, took a cab to BWI, and flew to New York. We stayed overnight in Manhattan, sharing a room this time. Monday morning, before we left for La Guardia, I called Welsh at her office from a pay phone. Her secretary answered and when I asked for Welsh, said Mrs. Welsh was in a meeting.
"This is Bill Clinton. If she wants to talk to me again, right now, you have ten seconds to get her on the phone. After that, I'm gone."
Five seconds later, Welsh picked up. "This better not be a joke."
"This is no joke. This is a threat. If you come after us again, or threaten us, we'll tear major new assholes in all those bright and shiny computers you keep buying out there."
"Your threats don't worry us too much, Bill. We're only about one step behind you now."
"Oh, yeah? Get a lot of prints off that car? Listen, lady, I'm telling you. If we feel threatened, we'll take you down. If you want a demonstration of what we can do, we'll put your internal phone book on the Internet, with all the names and home addresses listed, so people who don't like your brand of bullshit can call you up at any time of day or night. Would that convince you?"
Her resolve seemed to waver: "I don't think you could."
"What phone do you think I'm talking to you on?" I asked. "Jesus Christ, woman, take a minute to think about it."
"So don't do that."
"Look at those computers, find out what happened with Lighter and Jack Morrison and AmMath and Clipper, and stay the fuck away from us."
I hung up. We were headed toward the airport, five minutes later, when one of LuEllen's cell phones rang. The taxi driver was chanting to himself in Arabic, and apparently paying no attention. LuEllen dug the phone out of her purse, punched the Talk button, said, "Hello?" listened for a moment, then handed the phone to me. "Green," she said.
Green was calling from a phone at a gas station in San Francisco. "I couldn't figure out how they were tracking us, when they were always so far away, always two or three blocks," he said. "So I drove over to my brother's placehe's got a garageput the car up on a lift and guess what?"
"You had a bug."
"Still got it," he said. "But I moved it inside the car, and duct-taped a big alnico magnet to it. When we get to the airport, I'll stick it on a car that's leaving. That ought to confuse them for a while. then we'll fly the Seattle-to-Houston route, and drive up to Dallas."
"Good. We're on our way now. We'll be in Dallas tonight."
"We'll probably stay over in Houston, see you tomorrow."
We talked for another minute, and then he was gone.
And we were gone. Seven hours later, we were in Dallas.
CHAPTER 14
ST. JOHN CORBEIL
Corbeil was sweating. In the cold air-conditioning of his office, he could feel the dampness under his shirt collar and despised himself for it. Not good clean sweat, the kind you got lifting weights. This was nervous sweat, the kind you got when a hard-nosed NSA security officer cornered you with unexpected questions, while some FBI faggot sat in the back smiling and playing with his tennis bracelet.
Strunkthe security officer's name was Karl Strunkhad questions about the Bloch Tech ISP, about the emergence of Firewall, about the deaths of Lighter and Morrison. Corbeil managed to finesse the questions, to play dumb. He hated having to project even the appearance of ignorance, but it had been necessary. And it had been a close-run thing.