"Nice," LuEllen said as we stepped inside. "This is the kind of place I might do a job." A heavy, wine-red carpet covered the lobby floor, setting off the green-figured wallpaper. Four oak doors led off the hall. Between the two on the right was an elevator. Our apartment was on the second floor, on the right as we came out of the elevator. From the outside, it would be the second apartment in, on the back side of the building, away from the driveway. I rapped on the door and Dace answered.
"Hey, Kidd," he said. He was barefoot, in khaki shorts and a golf shirt. He stepped back and looked curiously at LuEllen as we shook hands. I'd told him other people were involved, but hadn't mentioned who.
"Dace, this is LuEllen, LuEllen, Dace." They said pleased-to-meet-yous and I said, "LuEllen is, uh, a spacial intrusion engineer."
"What?"
"A burglar," said LuEllen.
"Oh." Dace wiggled his eyebrows and looked interested. "Well, come on in and look around."
From where I was standing I could see a kitchen with a dining area, and a comfortable living room with overstuffed couches facing a console television. The fabric wallpaper was done in a discreet gold figure over beige, and nineteenth-century British sporting prints hung on the walls. A hallway led back to the bathrooms and bedrooms.
"Pretty nice," I said. "A little classier than I expected."
Dace shrugged. "He's got an upscale business. Can't have the place looking like a cathouse."
"You order the furniture?"
"Already here. In the big bedroom."
He led the way to the rear of the apartment. There were four bedrooms with a bath off each. The master bedroom had been converted to a neat and efficient office, with a big library table in the middle and four office chairs facing it. A telephone perched on one end.
"What happened to the bed?" I asked.
"He took it down the hall. He owns the whole building."
"Is there another phone?"
"Yeah. Four more. One in each bedroom, and one in the living room. There's a separate line for each."
"Jesus, you could run a book out of here," LuEllen said.
"I thought about getting somebody to move the phones, but then I figured maybe you would want to do it."
"Good. The fewer people who see this place, the better," I said.
In an hour, the whole thing was set up. I moved a second phone into the office, hooked both lines through the portables, and set up the printer. I tested it by calling Bobby.
What?
I gave him the new number.
Got a dump. Want now?
Sure.
Set to receive.
Two minutes later I had the files in the memory of one of the computers, and dumped them to the printer. The printer took another five minutes to print out two copies.
"I've never seen a computer working," LuEllen said, looking over my shoulder as I stripped paper off the printer. Dace was in the kitchen making coffee. "What is all that stuff?"
"Names, addresses, phone numbers, and background information on Whitemark executives, plus a few people who have home computer terminals we might want to get at. That's where you come in."
"We steal their computers?"
"No, no. We just steal the information they keep on their computer disks."
"I don't know what that means."
"A computer disk is like magnetic recording tape, except that it's flat, like a phonograph record. The information is stored on the disk in the form of magnetic markers. When we play the disk into the computer, the computer translates the markers into letters and puts them on the screen."
"So we're going to steal the disks."
"I hope not. We can use the computers to copy them. It takes a minute or two to make each copy. I'd rather copy the disks and leave the originals in place so nobody will know that we took anything."
Dace came back with the coffee. "So. What's next?" he asked.
"I want to look at this stuff and do some thinking," I said. "Why don't we call it a day? I'll brief both of you tomorrow morning. What we do first, where, all of that."
Dace nodded. "Nine?"
"Good."
"Think it would be all right if I went downtown and looked at the Washington Monument and the Capitol and everything?" LuEllen asked. "I've never seen them."
I shrugged. "Sure. Go ahead."
"I'll show you around," Dace offered.
When they were gone, I started working through the printout. It was neatly done, dozens of names with some personal background-appearance, credit ratings, marital status, type of automobile.
LuEllen got back about ten o'clock, yawned, and said she was going to bed. I went back a half hour later to get a copy of the Whitemark report I'd left on the chest of drawers, and found that we were no longer sleeping together. LuEllen had moved to another bedroom.
Curious, I poked my head into her room. The lump on the bed was too quiet to be asleep.
"Uh, do we have a problem?"
She half rolled toward me, so I could see a crescent of her face in the hallway light. "No, I just thought this would be better. As long as we're, like, going into combat."
"Does Dace have anything to do with this?"
There was a moment of silence.
"He's an awful nice guy," she said in a small voice. "He wants to go to Mexico and write."
"You're going with him?"
"I don't know. Nothing happened tonight, if that's what you're asking." She sounded a bit frosty, like she was about to claim she wasn't that kind of girl, but couldn't, since we both knew she was. "He's a nice guy. I like him."
"Okay, just asking," I said, turning away from the door.
"Kidd," she called.
I stepped back.
"I like you an awful lot, too," she said. Now she sounded sad. "But you're not a nice guy. I always wanted, you know, a nice guy."
"Gee, thanks."
"No, really. Do you think you're a nice guy?"
I had to think about that for a minute. Was I a nice guy? The question had never occurred to me.
"See?" LuEllen said in the lengthening silence.
Sometimes I'm sure I don't relate well to women. There always seem to be a couple around, but they always leave. LuEllen, I thought, would be different. She was as self-contained as I was; we fit well together, we each thought the other was interesting. We didn't talk too much, didn't rub anything.
I went back to my bedroom, accepting the change of condition, but when my undershirt came off I found myself wadding it up and pitching it at the wall like a fastball.
The next morning Dace showed up at nine o'clock with a package under his arm and a look of mild embarrassment on his face. He walked casually through to the office bedroom and couldn't quite contain a look of satisfaction when he saw the rumpled blankets in LuEllen's bedroom.
"Ah, I see. " he said, when he noticed me noticing him.
"Yeah, don't worry about it. You must have hit it off last night."
"A fascinating woman," he said. "We're talking about Mexico. Afterward."
"So I hear."
LuEllen came out of the kitchen with a cup of coffee. "Are my ears burning?"
"Just straightening out administrative details," I said.
"Details," repeated Dace. "Say, we got a box." He handed it to me.
The box had no return address, but the postmark indicated that it came from a California friend of mine who operates an electronics specialty business. He usually works from a rented garage, and his appliances are very, very expensive.
"Tools," I said. "Let's start sorting things out."
CHAPTER 8
What?
Need fix on MURs.
Give me numbers.
Can't be simple patch.
Will do cutout.
OK. How much?
1K
OK
The phone company keeps computer records of local phone calls. Hackers call them "muthers," for Message Unit Records. If a hacker uses his home phone for illegal computer entries, and the law gets interested, the phone company can check his muthers to see when and to where he made calls.
Once Whitemark realized that their computer was under attack, they would call in federal investigators. The feds, with their Grays, could sweep the Washington muthers looking for a pattern of calls to Whitemark.