The Devil's Code (25 page)

I sat thinking about it.

I looked through the window with the needle-beam again. Took a deep breath, used the butt of the flashlight to crush the glass near the door handle, flipped the lock, and went in.

There was no time. I turned on the needle flash and followed it through the top floor: bedroom, bathroom, bedroom, bathroom, bedroom, moving as quickly and quietly as I could. I suspected an intrusion alarm was already dialing out.

With three bedrooms and two bathrooms already down, I almost didn’t push the fourth door. But I did, and behind the fourth door I found the control room,
such as it was: a computer, what looked like a ham radio setup—is there still such a thing as ham radio?—and a couple of notebooks, all stuffed into a windowless cubicle that was more like a closet than a room.

I turned the computer on, looked at my watch. Almost a minute gone since I entered. I
would
be out in five. The computer was a standard IBM-compatible running the last generation Windows, but it was probably running nothing more complicated than a time-of-day and switch program, which would orient the receivers and turn them on and off. So Windows was a logical program; what drove me crazy was the time it took to load. As I shifted from foot to foot, waiting, I pulled the notebooks off the shelf and flipped them open.

They were empty. Well, not empty—they were filled with blank paper.

Oh, shit.

I’d been suckered. Pulled into a small room with exactly one exit. Forget the computer.
Move.

I stuck the flashlight in my jacket pocket and pulled the revolver. The hallway was still dark, and I went into it hard and low, on my knees and elbows, the pistol in one hand, already pointed down the hall.

I saw movement and then the overwhelming, bone-shaking blast and brilliant muzzle flash of a fully automatic weapon. A long burst burned past two feet overhead. I was in an ocean of noise and light, without being much aware of it: aware only that I wasn’t yet dead. I fired once, lurched forward to the bedroom door, and rolled through it.

A half-second later, another burst chewed up the
carpet where I’d just been. I did a quick peek, then stuck my head around the corner and fired again.

Bedroom. I looked around, panicked. I didn’t have a chance against the automatic weapon, if it came to a straight shootout. The bedroom had a glass door and a short balcony, but if I went over the side, I’d have to run across fifty yards of lighted, bald-as-a-pool-table lawn before there was any cover. I’d be cut in half before I made ten of them.

What to do? Who was that out there? Had to be Corbeil.

“Corbeil! Why are you killing us?”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“We’re just some guys, trying to stay away from the feds,” I shouted back. “Why are you killing us?”

He said nothing for a moment, then: “Because I like it. I’m gonna cut you to pieces, dickhead.”

No way for a CEO to talk, but he was right about one thing: if I moved, he’d cut me to pieces. I did an inventory. I had the flashlight, the revolver, the night glasses, LuEllen’s usual break-in kit . . .

Ten seconds later, I had the quilt off the bed behind me. A fat one, a nice traditional quilt filled with cotton batting. I balled it up, watching the door, snapped LuEllen’s lighter under the blanket, and got it burning. When the fire was going hard, I threw it over across the hallway and over the railing onto the main floor.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Corbeil screamed, “What are you doing?”

“You burned Jack’s house down,” I shouted back. I
pulled the pack back on. “You burned it down: so suck on this.”

Another row of gunfire and the edge of the door splintered. I risked a quick peek the instant it stopped, and saw—felt—another movement, on the stairs, going down. Had to risk it: crossed to the railing in the near dark, saw the blanket burning on a couch below. And in the glow of the small fire, movement.

I took a quick, unsteady shot, and missed. Corbeil turned and fired a burst along the railing, but by that time, I was farther up the hall, crawling toward the bedroom where I came in. At the stairs, I paused.

Corbeil was screaming something unintelligible, and then a cloud exploded across the room below. He’d gotten a fire extinguisher from somewhere, CO
₂
, and I fired another shot at what seemed to be the source of the cloud. He screamed again and the cloud suddenly went sideways. Had I hit him? I moved, fast and low as I could, scrambling, and nearly lost the gun.

He opened fire again, this time shooting at the railing farther along the balcony, but not as far as I had gotten. The light was growing: the couch was now fully on fire.

Run, or wait? I could run fifty yards in maybe six or seven seconds, dressed as I was and carrying the pack. But now, caught in the break-in without a chance to clean up behind myself, I really wouldn’t mind seeing more of a fire. So I waited.

Corbeil, whether he was hit or not, was soon back with another extinguisher, this one firing some kind of spray. But the couch was burning too hard, the fire now
running along what looked like a big Oriental carpet under a grand piano. He began shouting again, but I was concentrating on the gun. I had no wish to lose any shells, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember how many times I’d pulled the trigger. Four? Five? Was it empty?

I flipped the cylinder out, pulled the flashlight out of my jacket, looked at the primers. Four of them had firing-pin dents. Two shots left. I clicked the cylinder back into place, so a shell would come under the hammer with the next trigger pull.

Move or wait? The fire was growing and Corbeil had shouted something unintelligible again.

I shouted back: “Satellites.”

One loud word. One word to get him thinking about what I was saying, get him looking up at the balcony. I was out the window, over the edge, and running. Waiting for the impact at my back. Across the lighted lawn, running, running, thirty more steps, twenty, five, and down on the ground. Laying still. Then up and moving again, fast, running hard for fifty yards, dropping to the ground again. Listening.

I could hear Corbeil, still in the house, screaming: and I could see firelight in all the windows now.

A minute later, Corbeil ran out into the yard, running as I had, but at an opposite angle. He dropped to the ground, and I realized that from his angle, he could see most of the lighted yard around the house—that the only part that he couldn’t see was the driveway. He must have thought that I was still inside, but if the fire was
building, he knew I’d have to run for it. And I probably wouldn’t run down the driveway. He waited, patiently, as the fire spread through his log palace, and began eating it alive.

Moving as slowly as I could, I shrugged off the pack and got out the night glasses. The yard lights were still burning, and the fire glowed from the windows of the house: I turned down the gain on the glasses, and looked toward the last place I’d seen Corbeil. He was still there, looking toward the house, then away, then back toward the house.

I studied him for another minute, then flattened into the ground cover. He had night glasses, just like mine, and was scanning the fields around him. I didn’t dare move, except snakelike, pushing backward on my belly, watching him. Every time his face turned toward me, I flattened, frozen in place. I would wait fifteen seconds, then look: each time I expected a quick slap on the forehead and the final darkness.

I made progress. At the beginning, we were fifty yards apart. Ten minutes later, I had another fifty. I was there, a hundred yards out, studying Corbeil’s position with the glasses, when a car swerved off the highway, drove up the driveway, and a man got out and ran up to the front door of the house and began pounding on it, shouting. Then he ran back to his car, took what must have been a cell phone from the front seat, and staring up at the house, made a call.

Two or three minutes later, I heard the sirens, and far down the road, the flashing lights of the first fire trucks.
The man who called them was running around the house, looking in the windows. I could see Corbeil watching him with the glasses, and I backed farther away.

When I was two hundred yards out, I stopped to watch the fire: the house was now fully involved, flames leaping from the rooftop. One of the fire trucks sprayed foam on the bunkhouse and garage. They didn’t bother with the house: they had no good water source, and the house was burning so hard it probably wouldn’t have helped if they did have water. The best they could hope for was to keep the flames from spreading to the outbuildings.

I switched back to Corbeil. He was standing now, just outside the circle of light cast by the flames. He was turning, his hands to his face, scanning the fields.

And I thought: how odd.

He’d been questioned about a murder. He must’ve worried that the cops—or the FBI, if we’d made any impression with the NSA—were going to break down his door at any moment. Anything in his apartment would be up for grabs.

It stood to reason that he’d move anything incriminating out of his apartment, out of his office, out of any place that the police or the feds could get at by looking at records, like safe deposit boxes. He couldn’t actually destroy it: the docs and software used for controlling a satellite system would not be something you commit to memory.

My eyes drifted back to the burning house. I’d gone in because the last guy who left took the only vehicle. There were no other cars visible. It seemed unlikely that
Corbeil would take the chance of being stranded on foot, so he probably had a car somewhere.

Like in the garage.

I looked back at him, still scanning. I was due east of the garage, if I moved out, and around to the south, I could come up behind it. As long as I could see him . . .

I started moving . . .

 27 

F
ifteen minutes later, I’d crawled and pulled myself through the ground cover to a spot fifty feet behind the garage, in the deep shadow cast by the fire. For the moment, I was safe. But you win a little, and you lose a little. Halfway through the crawl, I lost Corbeil. He’d been looking up the hill, toward the satellite dish in the gully, when I’d last checked.

I checked again from the shadow, and he was gone. Had he seen me? But if he’d seen me crawling, why couldn’t I see him stalking me? He couldn’t have seen me using the night glasses, so he wouldn’t have known that he needed concealment. If he were walking anywhere, up to four or five hundred yards or so, I should have been able to see him.

Unless he’d moved opposite of the fire. When I turned so that my line of sight crossed too close to the fire, the glasses whited out. But if he were on the opposite side of the house, I was good for a few minutes, anyway.

Staying in the shadow cast by the fire, I edged closer to the garage. Fifteen feet out, I had to commit. I took one last look around, stood up, and trotted to a back window and looked in. A car squatted inside. I punched the glass out with the butt of the pistol, unlocked the window, lifted it, and crawled through into the utter darkness inside.

Waited, listened. Corbeil couldn’t be inside, I thought: I’d have seen him coming. If I moved quickly, I’d be okay. Went to the car: Mercedes-Benz S430. Looked in the front seat with the needle-beam flash, saw nothing. And in the backseat, behind the passenger seat, a briefcase. The car doors were locked. I looked around the garage, which also served to hold yard gear, and found an ax.

I was going to make some noise, here. A car this expensive had an alarm, for sure. I put the flashlight back in the pack, put the gun in my pants pocket, where I could feel it if it began to slip out—I’d seen one too many of those TV shows where the good guy loses his gun at a critical moment—took a breath, and swung the ax. It went through the window like a spoon through whipped cream. The alarm went and I used the ax handle to smash the rest of the glass out, grabbed the briefcase, and went out the window.

Nothing subtle about this: I ran as hard as I could, fifty yards, a hundred. Out of the deepest shadow, out into the dark, and then flat on the ground.

Listening. The garage was suddenly full of firelight: somebody on the fire side had gone into the garage and pushed the door up. I took the moment to run another fifty yards; and dropped.

A human head appeared in the garage window, silhouetted by the firelight. Another head appeared in a moment, then a third. Looking out the window, toward me. Dressed as I was, I was almost certainly invisible. But the car alarm was going, and Corbeil, wherever he was, would be hunting me in the dark.

I scanned the hillside, saw nothing. Thought about it for a moment. Corbeil was between me and my car. I might be able to slip around him—that would certainly be the most direct route—but if I headed south instead, crossed the highway, and stayed to the roadside ditch, or on the other side of the fence on the far side of the highway, I could make a circle away from him and get back to the car.

If I could only see him . . .

But sooner or later, it would occur to the cops who were with the firemen that anyone who broke into the garage would have to be somewhere in these surrounding fields. If they started crawling through the fields in their squads, with searchlights, I’d be cooked.

I started crawling toward the highway, moving slowly, stopping to scan, then moving on. At the fence line along the highway I paused, scanning. And saw
him coming. He was jogging straight down toward me, carrying a gun across his chest. He stopped and scanned for me. He was too far away for a quick shot, so I crawled to a fence post, tossed the briefcase over, stood up, put my hand on the post, and vaulted over into the ditch.

In the ditch, I recovered the briefcase after a moment of panic—it wasn’t exactly where I thought I’d thrown it—pivoted, turned, looked up the hill. He was coming, running as hard as he could.

I went left, running hard for five seconds, paused, scanned, saw him still coming, put a hand on another fence post and vaulted back over and got the glasses out again, scanning. He ran to the fence, stopped, scanned. Waited. He
knew
I was on the other side. When he hadn’t seen me in fifteen seconds, he stood up and clambered over the fence, knelt, and scanned up and down the ditch. Then he went left, as I had: passed me not fifteen feet away.

He was moving slowly, but not as slowly as he should have, and a hundred feet down the highway, suddenly crossed the two-lane strip of blacktop into the opposite ditch. I started moving away, crawling again, dragging the briefcase, trying to keep track of him. When he got far enough down the highway, and I got far enough up the hill, I was covered by a line of brush. I turned and started jogging up the hill, breathing hard. Running through the tall, clinging pasturage, whatever it was, was tough.

I reached the ridge without knowing it, really, and
dropped. I must’ve been silhouetted against the sky, for anyone using glasses. But now I was so far ahead of him . . .

I stopped and looked back: the house fire had passed its peak, but the house was still burning fiercely. There were now forty or fifty people gathered around the place, firemen, cops, and probably neighbors. I sat catching my breath for a moment or two, then started back toward the car. Taking it slow, now, stopping to listen and scan.

I crossed his eastern fence line, into his neighbor’s pasture, then moved slowly down the fence to the north road. Once on the gravel, I could jog back to the car in a hurry.

At the fence, I threw the briefcase over, then stepped to the left and knelt, scanning back up the hill. Caught a spark of light straight up the hill, maybe a hundred yards away; and then the fence post shattered, and a split second later, the sound of a shot banged down the hill.

I rolled left and kept rolling, into a little depression, and froze. He was out there, and he’d seen me, but he didn’t have an exact fix. He probably couldn’t fire accurately and scan at the same time.

He couldn’t afford a whole burst of gunfire, I thought. One or two shots probably wouldn’t be a problem, but a burst of full-auto would be a definite cop magnet.

If they knew where the gunfire was coming from. There were a couple of hills between us and the house. With all the racket of the fire and the fire equipment, the
sound of gunfire might not be all that easy to pick out: not a single shot, anyway.

When the first shot was not repeated, I slowly, a quarter-inch at a time, lifted my head with the glasses to my eyes. Corbeil was fifty yards away, standing in the dark, looking through his glasses. Then he took them away from his face and groped forward, and I eased farther left. When he stopped again, to scan, I ducked, but still watched him.

He scanned for a moment, then moved forward again, in what to him must have seemed like absolute silence. When he was twenty yards out, he stopped, looked through his glasses. I reached back, got a good grip on the fence, and when he was looking to my right, about where the fence post should have been, I gave it a hard tug.

He dropped the glasses and the gun came up. And then he said, speaking softly, “If you give yourself up, I’ll just take you in. There’s no point in dying.”

Like Br’er Rabbit, I said nothing, but just laid low.

“I can see in the dark,” he said. “I’ve got starlights, and there’s plenty of light. I’m looking right at you.”

Like Br’er Rabbit . . .

He moved forward, still scanning; I was pressed against the fence, with no way to make a major move. He had the glasses in one hand, and the rifle in the other. The rifle had a pistol grip, like an AK. The barrel tracked along the fence, then back, then my way.

Had he seen me? The muzzle tracked past me, then swung back. I flinched.

“I can see you,” he said, confidently. “Lift up your hands. If you don’t, I’m gonna have to shoot you; I can’t get any closer without giving you a chance with that pistol of yours. C’mon, man, I don’t want to hurt you . . .”

Then he did see me. I don’t know what it was—maybe I rolled my foot, or he caught a starlight reflection off the glasses, whatever, he dropped his glasses and the muzzle snapped round and was aimed right at my head.

I hadn’t wanted to shoot him. He was twenty feet away and I was rolling, the muzzle of my pistol aimed more or less at the extra-dark piece of sky that was Corbeil, and his rifle popped and in the muzzle flash I saw him, pointed the pistol and . . .

Click.

The
click
was inaudible, but I knew nothing had happened; I could now see Corbeil only as a blinding afterimage that moved when my eyes moved. I pointed the gun at where I thought he might be and pulled the trigger again. This time it bucked in my hand; I heard a grunt, saw him in the muzzle flash, the barrel of his rifle pointed more or less at my head, fired again, and rolled.

And that was it; I had no more shells.

I didn’t need any. The next sound from Corbeil was a rapid thrashing, followed by a low, everlasting moan, as the breath flowed out of his now dead body.