Dace shook his head. "Paranoia," he said. "Shadows."
LuEllen was looking doubtful. "I don't know," she said. She took a couple of slow turns around the front room, then plopped on the couch. "I can't figure it."
"Let it go for now," said Dace.
"Maybe Bobby will come up with something," I said.
"It's worth a try," LuEllen agreed. "Okay. We let it go. For now."
"Good." Dace turned to me. "Wanna look at the loot?"
We dumped LuEllen's tennis bag on the front-room floor. There were a half-dozen pistols, two hundred dollars in cash, three credit cards, and several good pieces of gold jewelry, including a gold and diamond stickpin. Total value, she said, would be about two thousand on the street.
"It'd be a good haul for a junkie," she said. "They usually get a transistor radio and a bottle of picante sauce."
Late that night, she and Dace dropped everything but the cash and guns in the alley in one of the harder districts of Washington. They'd be picked up and get about the use that the cops would expect. The guns they dropped in the Potomac; the cash we kept.
While they were out, I dialed the Ebberlys' number. Before the phone rang, I blew into the receiver with a pitch pipe. The whistle activated the intercept, which linked their line to ours. I flipped the open line over to one of our computers and left it.
When the bug detected a computer's electronic sound packets, it would relay them to our computer. It would also pass them through to the Ebberlys' machine. Ebberly would get her work done as usual. We would have a complete record of it.
Nothing happened the first night, or early the next morning. We left the apartment a little after nine o'clock to scout more targets. When we got back, the computer showed a transmission from the Ebberlys' home to Whitemark.
"That's what we wanted?" Dace asked.
"That's what we wanted," I said. "She must have been working at home this afternoon. Good thing she wasn't there yesterday."
"She's probably home because of the burglary," LuEllen said. "Talking to cops."
A computer work session, printed out, soaks up an enormous amount of paper. Every time Samantha Ebberly even glanced at a personnel form, the computer printed the whole form. I ran the session back across the screen, did some quick editing, and printed it. It was seventy pages long, and I handed it to Dace.
"We need to extract procedures," I said. "We want to do things just the way she did, get in and out without being noticed. Map these things for us. Every time she gets on, map them again. By the time we're ready to go in, we should know how to operate as well as she does."
"All right. But it'll bore my brains out."
"Think about the money."
"I've been doing that."
"Didn't work?" asked LuEllen.
"No, no, it worked. I'll sit here and watch the computer. But don't tell John Wayne."
CHAPTER 9
Samantha Ebberly was a manager, so her codes would get us into the administrative side of the Whitemark computers, but we also had to get into the engineering side. We scouted four of the five engineering targets, and all were marginal prospects. The morning after the Ebberly entry we went to check out the fifth engineer.
From the moment we turned the corner the target looked bad. Aside from the dying brown grass, the front yard was devoid of plant life. A battered ten-speed bike was lying at one side of the driveway, next to a green-and-cream '57 Chevy set up on concrete blocks. The driveway was stained black by a tear-shaped oil slick that was creeping out from under the car.
The backyard was surrounded by a shoulder-high, chain-link fence. There were no clumps of extra-dark-green grass, because there wasn't much grass, but subtle signs were unnecessary.
Two old-fashioned doghouses squatted against the house, and an evil-looking, white-eyed hound crouched beside one of them. The chain around his neck looked as if it might once have been used to haul logs. As we drove by, a blonde in a tight, black T-shirt banged out the front door, followed by a teenage boy who swatted her on the butt as they cut across the moribund grass toward his Harley, which was curled up to the curb.
"Just keep on rolling," LuEllen said. "Don't bother to look back."
"Christ, it's the Jukes."
"Nice Harley, though."
"Wonderful."
"Softtail," she said.
"I'd rather eat worms than ride a Harley-Davidson," I said, remembering a bumper sticker I once saw on a Honda.
"Riding a Honda's like fuckin' a faggot; it feels sorta good, but you wouldn't want your friends to see you doin' it," LuEllen said. "I thought this Bobby guy was finding us people without kids."
"He's doing it from databases. There aren't any guarantees."
"So now what?"
"The Durenbargers are probably the best bet," I said. "You've seen the other choices."
"Durenbarger, Jason and Ellen," she said, reading from the list. "They make a lot of money between them. Goddamn, I hate apartments."
The Durenbargers lived in an apartment called the Summit Rock, not far from our own.
"There are too many people around," LuEllen said as we sat on a bench across the street from the Summit Rock. "If you crack the door with a crowbar, somebody will hear you. It's only a short walk down the hall to check. Then they see the door and call the cops.
"And there are too many eyes around, even where there shouldn't be. Look how you caught me, outside your place. You were on the fuckin' roof. In the middle of the night. Asshole."
"Always be alert; America needs more lerts."
"Right. Then, with apartments, there's a hassle getting through the outer door. In some towns, like Des Moines or Lincoln, you can walk up to the front door as one of the tenants goes through and catch the door as it closes. You say 'Thanks' and go on in. Most of the time, you get away with it. Here, there's too much crime. Everybody's suspicious. You try that trick in a big city, and they'll ask to see your key."
"What do we do?"
"We get a key," she said. "Do we know what they look like? What their cars look like?"
"Yeah, we know the cars. His is a dark-brown Thunderbird. She's driving a red Toyota Celica." I thumbed through the report Bobby had sent us and found the license numbers.
"Okay. We wait. We see if there's any chance to get a key."
"That could take forever."
"No. You said time is getting tight. We'll give it a couple of days, and then we'll try cracking the place."
The street in front of the apartment was one-way. The paired street was on the other side of a narrow public boulevard six blocks long, dotted with oak trees and green, metal benches. We found a place to park across the boulevard and waited.
LuEllen waited well. I didn't. I was looking at the story of my life, as represented by the folded and bent bits of paper in my billfold, when LuEllen cleared her throat.
"Ah," she said.
"What, ah?"
"You think it's Dace? The leak?"
"I don't know if we've got a leak. We had a problem, and it seemed to go away. We get some information that doesn't fit with other information, but nothing happens. I don't know."
"If we have a leak.
"I still don't think it's Dace," I said. "He doesn't lie well enough."
"Look at it this way," LuEllen said. "You talk to him. He's nodding his head, but inside, he's saying, 'What a story. Giant companies raiding each other.' It could be the story of his life."
"I thought about it," I admitted. "But it doesn't feel right. He's just too. innocent."
She looked out the window and sighed. It sounded like relief. "I think the same thing. But I had to ask. You've got one of the great poker faces in the Western world. But I kind of trust your instincts."
"You in love?"
She pushed out her lower lip and squinted at me, thinking.
"Maybe," she said.
Jason Durenbarger showed up at six o'clock, his wife a half hour later. They parked in back of the Summit Rock, their cars side by side in a fenced compound.