Firebreak

12

"Good," Elkins said, sounding hurried. "I was hoping you'd call pretty quick."

I had things to do," Parker said. This pay phone at LaGuardia airport was surrounded by other callers with problems of their own, and the number he'd dialed was a pay phone at a gas station in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, he having ten minutes earlier called Elkins' motel room in the same town to let the phone ring once. Now, hearing the trouble in Elkins' voice, he said, "What went wrong?"

"Larry apparently had a security lapse," Elkins said.

"What, the law got him?"

"No, not that kind. It affects us, you and me and Ralph. Come on up here, we'll dope this out."

The car he chose from long-term parking was a gray Volvo with the parking lot's ticket stuck behind the visor, a date on the ticket of the day before yesterday, and a nearly full gas tank. Three and a half hours later he left it in the municipal parking lot in Great Barrington and walked to the motel, about a mile out north of the main town among the big stores and fast-food restaurants. Elkins was in room 11, and when he opened to Parker's knock Wiss and Lloyd were in there, too. Elkins and Wiss both looked worried, Lloyd mostly embarrassed.

They'd opened the connecting doors between this room and number 12, and brought the chairs from that one in here, so everybody could sit at the round wood-look table under the hanging swag lamp, with Elkins' green Honda and the traffic of state route 7 outside the window. Parker said, "What security? Who found out what?"

"I don't have that part yet," Lloyd told him. "What happened, Mr. Parker, it was just my old habits coming out. I should know better, I'm in a different world now, but I still keep backing everything up."

"Backing what up?" Parker asked him. He would be patient, and he would keep asking questions, and eventually what Lloyd was saying would start to make sense.

"Data," Lloyd said, as though that were an explanation. "I spend most of my time at the computer, you know, though I'm not supposed to, the terms of the parole are I'm supposed to keep away."

'They found you at it?"

"No, no, it's nothing like that." Lloyd shook his head, irritated at himself, then gathered himself for the effort to explain things in a rational way. "It's a hacker," he said. "It's some hacker out there, he came into my file, I'm not sure why, unless one of your names triggered it."

Parker said, "Names? You have a file with our names in it?"

'Yes, that's what I'm saying. I should know better than to keep records, my God, it was my own records brought me down last time, as much as my running around acting out."

Parker said, "What is in this file, besides our names?"

"Well, nothing any more," Lloyd assured him. "As soon as I realized what had happened, I eliminated those files completely, they don't exist, they never existed."

"Except they did."

"Yes."

"And somebody read them. What did they find?"

"Names, addresses, phone numbers, places of meetings. Not, thank God," Lloyd said, with a shaky smile, "the subject of the meetings. Nothing about Marino, not his name or the hunting lodge or how I plan to cut into his systems or any of that, that's all on a secure disk completely separate from the computer. But us, everything about us."

Parker looked at Elkins. "How long has this genius been flashing my name and address and phone number around?"

Elkins shrugged. "Maybe three days before we first called you. We had things to set up, our old partners to talk to."

So Charov had not been a coincidence. In the old days, Brock had owned a music shop, was a technician, an expert with recording technology. Had he expanded into computers? It seemed a lot of music people had. And all of a sudden he'd found Parker, after all these years, and it had taken three days to get Charov on the case.

Parker looked at Lloyd, who could see he'd somehow made even more trouble than he'd thought. Parker waited, and Lloyd said, "If there's anything I can do ..."

"This . .. data of yours, it's definitely gone?"

"Yes, oh, yes, definitely."

"The guy who came in and got it," Parker said. "Can you follow him home?"

"No, I don't think so," Lloyd said. "Apparently, he got everything he wanted the first time through."

'Yeah, he did," Parker said, and said to the others, "I told you I had this other thing to take care of, and it wasn't connected to you people, but now I think maybe it is connected."

"Because of Larry?" Wiss asked. He seemed very disappointed in his protégé.

"And his files, yeah."

"I'm really sorry," Lloyd said. "Old habits just die hard."

"Some things die easier," Parker told him, and said to the others, "Around the time you called me, a hit man came to visit. A pro out of Russia, with a cover at a liquor importer in New Jersey. I took care of that, but because of being with you people I haven't been able to deal with the people who hired him. I just found out this morning who they are, and I know they got somebody else watching my house right now, waiting for me to come back."

"Stupid, stupid, stupid," Lloyd said to himself.

Wiss said, "We should take a hand. If we brought this guy on you—"

"It's the timing," Elkins said to Wiss. "Sure we brought this guy on him."

"That's what I'm saying," Wiss agreed. "What we got to do is take a hand, make Parker whole again. We want him thinking about our little deal, not some guy with a hard-on watching the house."

Again Lloyd said, "If there's anything I—"

"I'm pretty sure there is," Parker told him. "What's at the house right now is a tiny camera, like the size of a wine cork, over the front door frame, with a wire hanging down, so when the door opens it broadcasts the view of the room. That way, they know it's me, or they know it's the cleaning woman, or they know whoever it is and what to do. This is a house on a lake with most of the houses closed for the winter, so the base could be anywhere around there. I thought I didn't have time to deal with it until I was done with you people, but now I think we got to deal with this problem first."

Elkins said, 'To get that distraction out of your mind, I agree."

"Not just that," Parker said. "One of the two guys behind this is a fella named Matt Rosenstein that's a heavy heister himself, or used to be. Him and the other guy, Brock, they've got to have some money on them right now, to be throwing it around the way they are, but I know Rosenstein, and he likes to go where money is and take it for himself. That was what our trouble was in the old days. Your boy Lloyd here says he put everything except my blood type in his computer, but didn't put anything about Marino's gold toilets or his stashed art gallery, and maybe he didn't. But just to be on the safe side," Parker said, "I'd like to make sure in my own mind, when I go back to that hunting lodge, Matt Rosenstein and Paul Brock aren't gonna be there to say hello."