"Lots. I called my guy in Georgia, and he said he could probably get me a hundred and a half. They're all small, one-carat, but they're top quality, like the necklace was made to sell. A bank account."
"That was it? The necklace?"
"Nope." She grinned. "He had forty thousand in cash, all in hundreds."
"Computer disks, printouts."
She shook her head. "Nothing like that. Some personal papersa mortgage, birth certificate, his passport. I brought it all back, but I don't think there's anything for you. There was enough to make it worthwhile for somebody like me to hit him."
"So maybe he'll be less likely to look at the computer."
"Maybe. I'll tell you, Kidd, you've gotten me in some shit over the years, but we've always made money, huh? Every time."
"Just lucky, I guess."
She tagged along for breakfast and then said she needed a nap. Having her sleepy made me sleepy, and we went back to her room, put out the "Do Not Disturb" sign, and slept into the afternoon. Green called at three o'clock and asked what the hell we were doing.
We ate dinner together. Green took a look at Corbeil's passport as we were waiting for the meal, and said, "Travels a lot. Extra pages." He folded the extra pages out like an accordion. "Travels in the Middle East. And India."
"One of those been-every where, done-everything guys," LuEllen said.
The food arrived and Green started looking at the mortgage, which he said wasn't a mortgage at all, but a contract-for-deed, which I said was the same thing, and LuEllen said, "Not quite."
Finally, during the dessert, Green folded up the mortgage paper, tossed it on the table, and said, "He's got something strange going with a ranch."
"A ranch?"
"Yeah. A private sale, looks like. A contract-for-deed. He paid seven hundred and fifty thousand up front, and then a thousand a year for ten years, and he can pay the last ten thousand anytime."
"That sounds weird," I said. "He paid three-quarters of a million up front, but couldn't come up with the last ten grand?"
"Makes no sense," Green said.
"Sure it does," said LuEllen. She had a glob of ice cream on a spoon and was licking it, like an advertisement for fellatio.
"Well, tell us, Miss Sucking on a Spoon," Lane said.
"If you get a contract-for-deed, the final ownership doesn't pass to you until you make the last payment."
"So?"
"So that means the ranch is still in the seller's name. What's his name?"
Green picked up the contract-for-deed and looked at it: "Fred Lord."
"See, Fred Lord sells it to Corbeil, and Corbeil still has to pay a few bucks to totally own the land, but he gets the full use of it, but only Lord's name appears on tax records, land records, and so on. It's a dodge."
"He doesn't want people to know he's got a ranch?" I asked. "We ought to look at it. Where is it?"
"McLennan County, wherever that is," Green said. "Twelve hundred and eighty acres. Two square miles. Corbeil-land."
Lane wanted to go take a look right away. "What else are we going to do?"
"Monitor my drop box," I said. "We need that computer more than we need a ranch."
"How do we know that?" Lane demanded. "I feel like we're getting bogged down. It's been three weeks since Jack was killed. I don't think anybody cares anymore. Except us."
"And the people chasing after Firewall," I said.
"Ah, Firewall," she said. She batted the thought away, like a gnat. "They'll find these kids, and that'll be it."
"I wish it was true," I said, "But I don't think it is."
We talked about Firewall for a couple of minutes, about the technique of the attack on the IRS and the use of the zombie computers. We also talked for a few minutes about her talks with the cops, which were set for Monday morning, sixteen hours away.
She'd try to pressure them on AmMath. The more pressure that we could apply, the more curious the cops and the FBI and the NSA got about AmMath, the better chance there was that something would break loose. If we could get it into the media, make it a political problem, we had a chance of generating a legitimate investigation.
"I don't see the logic of it," Lane said.
"There is no logic. We just keep bringing AmMath up, hooking them to Firewall, to Jack's killing, to the house burning down, to the burglary at your place. we don't have to explain it, we just have to keep hooking them up."
We agreed to meet the next afternoon, after Lane's talk with the cops. When we left, I was still getting a bad vibration from Lanefor her, Jack was the main question, and it obviously wasn't the same for LuEllen and me.
"She's starting to worry me a little," LuEllen said. "What happens if she decides that the only thing to do is to talk about us, about Firewall, about the NSA, about everything, to get the cops to look at Jack?"
"She doesn't know that much," I said.
"She knows we're the ones who hit Corbeil. That's a lot right there."
"Yeah." We drove along in silence for a moment; then I sighed and said, "It's not out of control yet. I think we could talk to her about the damage she'd do, if she dumped on all of us. She'd listen."
"I hope," LuEllen said. "But we've got to keep our options open." She thought a moment, then added, "Too bad she knows where you live."
Corbeil went online that night. There was no way to tell when they found that the apartment had been cracked, but I checked the clump box all day, every hour, and at ten o'clock, it was spooling stuff from an online session between Corbeil's apartment and the AmMath computer. The software I was using was simple enoughyou can buy copies of the heart of it for $99, over the counter. Essentially, it records keystrokes. Everything that Corbeil typed on his keyboard was recorded, picked up, and sent to my dump box. Sometimes, it can be a little hard to follow, if the guy you're recording is a bad typist, but I've had enough practice that I can read it like a letter.
"What do you got?" LuEllen asked, looking over my shoulder.
"To begin with, we've got the phone number, the sign-on protocols, and Corbeil's password to get into the AmMath computer," I said. "After that, not much."
Corbeil sent company mail to one of his security people, telling him about the break-in.
Where are you? Can't find you. My apartment was hit by burglars. They pulled the safe out of the wall, must have used industrial equipment because they wrecked the place. They got money and jewelry. We need a full alert downtown, and somebody's got to keep an eye on the ranch.
We need some over-night temps at the office. I tried to call Nasmith security but can't get hooked up. We need people downtown tonight!! (I'll go down myself when we're finished here.) I had to call cops about the burglary because the apartment management discovered it. No way around it. Cops on way now. Maybe it was the money amp; jewelry, Marian wore it Friday amp; everybody saw it. There's no way to be sure, we have to assume otherwise. We better get low for another week or two. I'll call the paks this afternoon and put them off. wipe this when you get it amp; call me.
He also pulled a file. We couldn't see what it was, because the program only recorded keystrokes, but we got the name, OMS2. All he did was read, and then the connection shut down, and he was off-line.
"Let's go," I said. "He's off, and he's going to be occupied for a while."
We went out to a Red Roof Innchecked in with the fake ID I got in San Francisco, but paid cashand got online. The dump box was still off-line, which meant that Corbeil's computer was shut down. I went out to the AmMath number, punched in his password, and we were in.
The OMS2 file was short and sweet: a few corporate memos, and a list of names and phone numbers. I then checked for an OMS3, got nothing, went to OMS1, got nothing, and then simply OMS, and again, got nothingwhich was odd, because the files we'd inherited from Jack were labeled OMS. They could have been in another sector of the computer, or a different computer entirely, someplace where I didn't have access.
I did find a find a large administrative file called CLPR, which turned out to be internal memos about the Clipper II program. I dumped it to our Jaz disk, which took a while. Too long, actually. When we had it, I closed down the connection.