The Fool's Run (6 page)

I spent the early morning at the Art Institute. Rembrandt didn't paint Young Girl at an Open Half-Door, like the museum says he did, but I like it anyway. And even if you dislike pointillism, Georges Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Ile de la Grande Jatte is a masterwork. When I see it, I tend to hyperventilate. It's like looking down that marvelous wall of Degas's paintings at the Met.

As usual, I overstayed my time and had to race across town to meet LuEllen at O'Hare. She was wearing a tan summer suit with slacks, a touch of lipstick, and a white panama hat that snapped down over her eyes. We picked up her bags and went downtown and rented safety deposit boxes at the Second Illinois. Afterward, I dropped her at my hotel while I went to Anshiser's. Maggie met me at the door and took me up. The money was in a small fake-leather suitcase on Anshiser's desk.

"The contract?" he asked. His voice trembled, and he cleared his throat. Dillon was back in his chair against the wall, still dressed in gray, still showing the small smile.

"Right here." I handed him a letter of employment. It clearly spelled out what I was to do. He read it and passed it to Maggie, who looked at it, nodded, and handed it back.

"That should do it," he said. He took a pen from his coat pocket and signed and dated our agreement.

"Now the fingerprints," I said. I took a stamp pad from my pocket and handed it to him.

"This will be messy," he said.

"A small price."

"Hmph." He rolled his fingers across the pad and onto the paper, leaving a row of neat, fat fingerprints below his signature.

"Both hands?"

"One is fine."

Maggie handed him a purse pack of Kleenex to clean his fingers.

"The money," he said. He pushed the case toward me. "It's all there. One million, one hundred thousand dollars. Twenties and fifties, nonsequential. It came right out of the cash box at one of our casinos. You can count it, if you wish."

I popped open the locks, peered in, and shut it again.

"I'll count it later," I said. "You want some kind of progress report?"

"Go ahead." He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his stomach, now the executive listening to a subordinate. I told him I'd hired two associates and had begun processing names from Dillon's report. I outlined a couple of methods of attack, told him we'd be working out of the Washington area, and that I would call him every few days with reports. When I finished, he looked at Dillon, at Maggie, and back to me.

"We have a request," he said.

"What?"

"We want Maggie to work with you. To see what you're doing, how it's done. She won't interfere unless it looks like you're getting carried away. What I'm saying is-we'd like to keep some oversight."

I looked over at Maggie and thought about Bobby's report on her. She looked back, a level gaze, no smile.

"I run the show," I said to Anshiser. "It's my ass on the line. I don't care if she observes, but I'll give her only one option: she can pull the plug. If she says kill the program, we kill it. But she doesn't tell us how to run it."

"That's all we ask," Anshiser said. He pointed a finger at her. "If there's any sign of trouble, you get out."

"Right."

"Speaking of trouble," Anshiser said to me, a cold note in his voice, "let me say a few words to the wise. Do not try to steal this money from us, Mr. Kidd. We want performance. If you can't perform, say so. But you must try. I won't be stolen from. I'm not threatening to break your legs should you abscond, but a billion dollars can purchase a world of legal and financial trouble for anyone I'd choose to pick on. Understood?"

"Fine," I said. I picked up the money bag. A million dollars. It was lighter than I'd expected. "A friend and I are leaving for Washington tomorrow. I'll get back to you when we've got a place. Maggie can fly out then."

"Good luck," Anshiser said, standing and extending a hand. His hand felt cool and damp and mealy, like tightly wound wet tissue paper. I shook it, dropped it hastily, and left.

"Partners in crime," Maggie said in the hallway.

"I hope you're well paid," I said. "This will be a major event."

"I'm well taken care of," she said.

I opened my mouth, and quickly shut it.

"What were you going to say?"

"A wisecrack," I said.

"You're not deferential," she said, looking up at me with mild amusement. "Why'd you hold back?"

I shrugged. "My mouth sometimes gets me into trouble with women I like. I'm trying to be friendly and it comes out wrong."

"You like me?"

I looked into her cool green eyes. "I could. You're bright and mean as a snake. Those are decent recommendations."

She laughed out loud, the first time I'd ever heard her do it. It sounded nice, unrehearsed.

"A million bucks," LuEllen said in a reverent tone. "We could be in Brazil in eight hours."

The money was spread on the hotel bed, so we could look at it, count it, check serial numbers, and run our fingers through it. When we were satisfied that it was all there, we packed it into three bags. There was $600,000 for me, $250,000 for LuEllen, and $150,000 for Dace. We put the hundred thousand of expense money in with Dace's cash.

"A hundred thousand for expense money," LuEllen said. She looked at it, looked at me, and started giggling.

When she finally stopped, we checked out of the hotel, dropped our personal shares at the bank, and mailed the safety deposit keys back home-mine to Emily and hers to somebody in Duluth. I didn't ask who, and didn't tell her where mine went. The rest of the money, less a few thousand for pocket and purse, went into a small, hidden box just forward of the spare tire well in the trunk of the car.

Late in the afternoon, armed with the Chicago Tribune's want ads, we drove around the suburbs and paid cash for two used Kaypro IBM-compatible computers and a Toshiba printer. Then we drove south, made the big turn at Gary, and headed for Washington.

"You sure about this friend of yours in Washington-Dace?" LuEllen asked.

"I'm sure."

"He's got a place for us?"

"Yes. Furnished, telephones, dishes, the whole works. We can move in the same day."

"How much?"

"Two thousand a week."

She whistled. "That's steep."

"It's a special deal. The landlord runs a call girl operation for the Pentagon brass, in Alexandria. The apartments are for the girls, but he let Dace have one. He's a crook himself, so he won't talk to anyone. There won't be any records, there won't be any receipts. He won't be around, won't see our faces; he stays out of sight himself."

Personal cars are invisible in America as long as you don't buy gas on credit cards or get traffic tickets. And if you drive off the main interstate highways, down into the midsized towns when you're looking for a motel, you can find one where all transactions are done in cash. They don't want to see a Visa card, they don't check your license plate to see if you wrote down the right number. Hand over forty dollars in advance, and they're satisfied.

There was a reason for our caution. Despite what Anshiser said about the powers of political protection, it was still possible that he didn't understand the magnitude of what we were doing. A computer attack on a major corporation is a technological-age nightmare. If word of a corporate war got out to the computer community, the reaction could be violent. Some very unpleasant people could come looking for us. Given that possibility, the whole job was best done with as few personal traces as possible.

We took out time getting to Washington, and talked about the attack.

"So if things started to get hairy," LuEllen said, "you might not even need me around at all? Especially toward the end?"

"Right. You could take off. You could probably take off anyway. Your job will be right up front, before the attack starts. I'd like you to hang around for a while, but you won't have to stay until the end."

"I'd like to know how it comes out."

"You'll know, one way or the other," I said. "Either I'll call you and tell you or you'll read all about it in the newspapers."

"You fill me with confidence," she said.

LuEllen was pleasant company; she didn't feel pressure to talk all the time. In the evenings, after dinner, we would catch a movie on Home Box Office and afterward make love, a reasonably athletic event that made a nice transition into sleep. We were feeling almost domestic by the time we got to Washington.

We arrived in the late afternoon on a hot, damp Thursday. Our new headquarters was in a pretty neighborhood of narrow, green lawns, neatly trimmed hedges, and tastefully shabby private homes interspersed with well-kept apartments. The apartment buildings were mostly of dark brown or wheat-colored brick. Tenant parking was tucked discreetly behind screens of bridal wreath or in reproduction carriage-house garages with weathered wood siding. At the address Dace had given us we parked the car in a guest slot. The building was a long, two-story rectangle, with the narrow end toward the street. There were four separate entrances, each with eight apartment numbers above the outer door. We went to the door nearest the front of the building. A call phone hung on the wall of the entry. I dialed the apartment and Dace buzzed us in.

"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.