"Scratches," she said, pressing her lips close to my ear. "They weren't there before. They could come from an old-style automated lockpick."
"Can we get inside?" I whispered back.
"He'll hear us coming. If he's armed, we're in trouble."
"Will he take the elevator or the stairway?"
"Stairs."
"Let's go back there."
We walked back to the stairs and shut the steel fire door.
"You better go down and tell Dace we're okay," I said. "I'll wait here and try to take him when he comes through the door."
There was a small, mechanical sound from beyond the fire door. "Too late," LuEllen said. "He's coming."
"Shit. Get down the stairs, out of sight."
LuEllen scrambled down the concrete steps and stopped below the next landing. I stood behind the fire door and waited. If the person coming down the hall was one of the alleged hookers who frequented the place, or a Pentagon general, this would be embarrassing.
But it wasn't. The guy who came through the door was slender, anemic, with thin blond hair and pale, watery eyes. He was wearing coveralls and carrying the toolbox. He pushed the door open with his right hand and his body was into the doorway before he saw me. His eyes widened and his mouth dropped open, and I pivoted and kicked the door as hard as I could, a good solid karate-style thrust kick that smashed the steel door into his body and the side of his head.
His tool case fell. Its contents spilled over the landing as the door rebounded off him, and he half stumbled. I kicked a leg out from under him and rode him down to the concrete. He put out his hands to break his fall and I got a knee in his back and an arm around his throat.
"Fight and I'll break your fuckin' neck," I said. LuEllen had come back up the stairs, and I said, "Tell Dace." She turned to go, and froze: a rat-faced guy was on the landing. He had eyes like ball bearings and was pointing a small, black pistol at my forehead.
"Let him go, motherfucker," Ratface said. He had a high-pitched, ragged-edged voice like a chalk squeak, but there was nothing ragged or shaky about the black hole at the end of the pistol's barrel. It was cold and round and absolutely steady. I stood up and the guy beneath me got to his hands and knees, sobbing, saying, "Jesus Christ," scooping his gear back into his toolbox. Except for a few pairs of pliers, screwdrivers, and some black plastic tape, the equipment was all electrical, and mostly illegal.
"Who the fuck are you?" I asked Ratface. LuEllen looked like she was ready to make a move, but I put out a hand, and she relaxed.
"Shut up." The hole at the end of the barrel never wavered.
When the tech's box was packed, he stood up, shot me a fearful look, and scurried down the stairs past Ratface. The gunman backed down after him, the gun steady on my face.
"We're walking out," he said. "Don't come after us."
We heard the door slam below, then the fire door opened above us. Dace.
"What happened to you?" I asked him. "The second guy came in right on top of us with a gun."
"Christ, the cops talked to him for a couple seconds, and then they left. I mean, they just got in their car and drove away. About one second later this guy was running over here. I never had a chance to get in front of him; I was too far away. I took the elevator up; I was hoping that if you were inside, he'd stop in the stairwell and wait or something."
"How'd he get in the door?"
"Key," Dace said.
"Probably had keys to the outer door, but not to the apartment. That's how they got into the stairwell, too," LuEllen said. She looked at me. "We all fucked up, it's not Dace's fault."
I said, "Something's really fouled up. This guy wasn't a burglar, he was a wire man. And I can't believe that somebody's already on us. It must come out of Chicago."
In the apartment we packed, and I took the phones apart. They were bugged. The bugs were crude and so was the installation.
"He wasn't in here long enough to do much more," I said. "We could probably sweep the place and we'd be okay."
"Let's check Chicago," LuEllen said. She had packed everything she brought with her. She wasn't planning to come back.
We moved into a Holiday Inn for the night. When I called Chicago, Maggie was vehement about her security.
"There's no possibility of a leak here," she said flatly. "Three people know about your team-me, Rudy, and Dillon. Period. And none of us would talk. It's more likely this guy Dace is the problem."
"I don't think so. We go back too far," I said.
"You don't know, though."
"No, I don't, but he's a friend. My instinct tells me he's okay. He was scared today. And surprised."
"I tell you, the problem isn't here," she insisted.
"I still can't believe they just stumbled over us," I said. "If we can't figure this out, we'll have to call it off."
"Christ, just hold on for a couple of days. I'll get Dillon checking. " There was a longish pause, and then she said, thoughtfully, "Say, do you suppose this might be some kind of leakage from the previous tenants? Didn't you say it was some kind of whorehouse?"
"Something like that," I said. I thought about it. It made some sense, at least, better sense than the other possibilities.
"What's the landlord's name?"
I gave it to her, and she told me she would get back to us.
That night I worked the tarot. LuEllen and Dace came to argue, huddle together, and watch me turn cards.
"That tarot shit is spooky," Dace said after a while.
"It's okay," LuEllen said. She looked at me. "Tell him about it."
"I use it to game," I said shortly.
"What the hell does that mean?"
I looked at a spread of cards dominated by minor swords. Distress, tension. They got that right. I turned to Dace.
"Back in seventy-nine I was hired by an astrologer to put together an astrology program. Preparing an astrology chart is all mechanical. Figuring moon rises and stuff."
"I thought it took years to learn how to do it," Dace said.
"That's the interpretation of the chart. The chart itself is fixed. Anyway, a computer can do the mechanical part as well as a human-better, really, because it doesn't make computational errors-and save a lot of time.
"So I had to build a scanner to scan the ephemeris-that's the book with the actual astronomical information in it, when the planets rise and set and all that. Then I had to work out another program to scan it in again with a second method, so we could compare the two bunches of data to cross-check for errors. It was a hell of a job. It took weeks. Anyway, this astrologer fooled around with the tarot, and I got interested."
"You tell the future?"
"No. Almost everything you read about the tarot is bullshit. But if you take the cards as archetypes for different kinds of human motives and behaviors, it becomes a kind of war-gaming system," I said.
"So what does that do?" Dace asked.
"When a person looks at a problem, it's always in a particular context. Most of the time, he's blinded to possible answers by his own prejudices and by the environment around him. By gaming a problem, you're forced outside your prejudices. So our question is, why do we have a security problem? I'd never think that LuEllen was the problem. I trust her. But maybe LuEllen got caught in that apartment back in Cleveland, and maybe she has a federal indictment that I don't know about, and when I got in touch with her and explained what I wanted to do, maybe she went to the U.S. Attorney and cut a deal.
"Or could be Bobby's got a legal problem and he cut a deal. The cards throw out random possibilities, and then you lay back and think about them."
"I didn't cut a deal," LuEllen said.
"I know."
"How do you know?" Dace asked. "I mean, just as an example."
"I've seen LuEllen do her act. She wasn't acting today. She was about to take on that gun."
We all thought about that for a minute.
"That's weird," Dace said finally. "Do you ever do just an old-fashioned magic reading?"