He looked at his watch. Still a long way to go.
He picked up the dictionary and left.
He drove through the night to Waco, his mind crowded with possibilities. Stay and fight. Run and hide.
The simple fact was this: if nobody knew about the satellite intercepts, none of the killing made sense. Even if somebody knew, it could be blamed on Tom Woods, and then he would kick free. The conspiracy never required his involvement, he thought. Woods could have set it up with the other two. He had the technical backgroundbackground that Corbeil didn't have.
As of now, the danger to himself had narrowed to a single point.
A car was parked in the driveway at the ranch, and there were lights in the main house. Corbeil parked, got out, felt the second gun nestled next to his leg. Took a moment to stand in the driveway, to look up at the stars.
Woods came out on the porch: "Hey, John. What's going on?"
"Hey, Tom. Need to talk about next week. I've got an order from Azerbaijan."
"Jeez, those guys."
Corbeil was looking up. "Look at the stars. You can really see the stars out here."
Woods walked down the three steps of the porch and stood beside his friend to look at the sky.
"Glorious," he said. Then he said something that prolonged his life for a few seconds. "By the way, I'm not sure about this, but there might be something going on out here."
"What do you mean?"
"Somebody may be messing with the dish controls. I don't know where it happenedinside the house or outbut we got an odd signal the other night. I just noticed it."
"Odd?"
"Attenuated, as if the signal were being blocked somehow. Not interfered with, but physically blocked."
"What would do that, Tom?"
"Somebody standing in front of the dish. Something placed near the amplifier loops. that would do it. Could be nothing. Could have been a bird building a nest. Or, if it was inside, it could have been somebody messing with the gain controls, although they're all right now."
"Did you look at the dishes?" Corbeil asked.
"Yeah. Everything looks all right. Might have been nothing at all."
"Probably. We're all a little jumpy with this Firewall thing, that shooting."
"That fuckin' Hart. The guy's a killer, John. He probably enjoyed it."
"Look at the stars," Corbeil said.
"Glorious," Woods said again. The muzzle of Corbeil's gun was an inch from the back of his head.
CHAPTER 26
I spent the next day intermittently monitoring the Net, watching news programs, and checking the newspapers' online editions, looking for somethinganythingthat would tell me what was going on with AmMath, Firewall, or with Benson or Hart.
When I wasn't doing that, I was playing with the tarot, or drawing. The landscape north of Dallas is interesting, in its own Southern Plains way, though not as interesting as the area around Tulsa, some parts of Kansas, or the Dakota grasslands.
Stilclass="underline" interesting. The relative flatness of the landscape, only sparsely inflected by humans and weather phenomena, gives the land and atmosphere a natural abstraction that you don't see in landscape paintings, but that you often see in nonobjective art. By working with the land and sky, without adding human inflection, you wind up with something that looks like abstraction, but has a kind of organic quality that pulls the eye in. Under the best conditions, the viewer falls into the picture, rather than colliding with the painted surface of the abstraction.
Either that, or I'm completely full of shit. In any case, the first real break came that evening, and left me astonished. I'd been clicking around the cable channels with the remote, and heard Corbeil's name mentioned. Channel 3: the newsreader had more hair than the average werewolf, and teeth just as shiny, he liked this stuff, and this story.
Benson had been found dead in his hospital bed, a victim of what police said was a deliberate barbituate overdose. He'd been murdered.
Benson had been with a man named William Hart when he was shot, and had given Hart's name as an alibi for the time that Lane Ward had been shot. After Benson had been found dead, police went to talk with Hart. They found him dead in an easy chair, a pistol on the floor beside him, an apparent suicide. The newsreader added that police had interviewed Corbeil in the case, but that he had not been charged with anything, nor was he being held.
"Corbeil says that his company, AmMath, a high-tech concern that creates top-secret coding software for the federal government, has been under attack for several days by the hacker group that calls itself Firewall, apparently because AmMath is one of the lead contractors on the Clipper II chip. The Clipper II, if you recall, is the chip that the government would like to see incorporated as a standard in communications hardware, including that used on the Internet. Firewall is the group that has taken credit for the continuing denial-of-service attack on the IRS.
"Corbeil said that he did not understand Benson's involvement with Lane Ward or her brother, Jack Morrison, who was slain last month after an alleged break-in at AmMath's secure computer facility. He said that he had asked Hart to monitor Benson's activities after the Morrison shooting, but hadn't known of Ward's presence m Dallas or his security officers' shootout with them," the newsreader intoned, his eyebrows signaling a moderate level of skepticism.
Benson and Hart were dead. Who'd done that? Corbeil himself? Or were there more security goons in the background somewhere? Corbeil's story was actually pretty good, from a legal standpointhe took no position, he was confused. If it all got mixed in with national security and codes and spies and Firewall, and if the guy held out, he might walk.
I spent fifteen minutes pacing around the motel, then went out, found a phone, and dropped a message with Bobby He batted it away: he was no longer interested in AmMath or revenge for Jack or Lane He thought he might have found a way out for those of us still alive.
need more recordings of ranch transmissions. sending man to you with package, arrives tonight. need transmissions most quickly
ok. problem?
we need satellite protocols, can't get into ammath. computers sealed off. can you come memphis wednesday?
yes.
good will send address later.
The idea of going back to Corbeil's ranch was not appealing, especially since I'd dumped the rifle. I still had the pistol that LuEllen had picked up in Lane's room, but I had little faith in pistols. With the very best of them, like a 45 Colt ACP, I could probably ding a guy up at twenty-five yards, if neither of us were moving Otherwise, I might as well be throwing apples.
Still. Bobby had a plan. Crack the satellites, he said, then talk to the government. Demonstrate that we were not a danger. Build a case for ourselves.
Maybe.
At eight-thirty that night, a guy with one of those uneven Southern faces, the kind that looked like they got a little crunched in a vise or a wine press or something, knocked on my door, and when I opened it, handed me a box. "From Bobby," he said.
He did not look like the kind of guy who'd be hanging with Bobby: if you were going to cast a movie and needed a guy with hair like straw and pink lips and big freckles, to stand with his foot on a pickup truck's running board and talk about the Imperial Wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, this guy would be a candidate.
"How is he? Bobby?" I asked.
"Same as ever." He raised a hand in what used to be a black-power salute. "Off the pigs," he said. Then he laughed and I laughed with him, feeling ridiculous, and he headed down the hall in his beat-up cowboy boots, ragged stepped-on back cuffs, and jean jacket.