Firebreak

6

The Big Sky Airlines commuter plane took Parker the last leg from Great Falls, Montana, up to Havre, twenty-five miles from Canada. Elkins met him in a rental Jeep Cherokee. "Get your other stuff taken care of?"

"It's waiting for me," Parker said.

They had to go through Havre, small and neat and flat, still a railroad town, surrounded by the mountains. Three peaks of the Bear Paw Mountains, Baldy and Bates and Otis, six to seven thousand feet high, were all within twenty minutes of the center of town.

Route 2, the east-west road, ran along beside the Milk River from here almost a hundred miles to Malta, but their motel, a non-chain operation called Thibadeau View, was just a couple miles east of town, toward Chinook. The motel, a long white one-story wood clapboard building dwarfed by its Indian-motif sign, stood on the left, the north side of the road, with the quick-tumbling Milk River behind it.

It was seven in the evening, local time. The motel didn't have a restaurant, so after Parker put his bag in his room the four of them drove to a place that called itself a family restaurant. They weren't the family the owners had in mind.

Over the meal, Elkins said, "We figure to go up there tonight, take a look at the place. Also, Larry's gotta head back to Massachusetts tomorrow."

Parker looked at Lloyd. "You're gonna commute? Massachusetts to Montana?"

"No, I won't come back after this," Lloyd told him. "I have to get physically close just this once, to find my access, since it isn't a normal site with normal ways in. But after that, I can deal with it from home."

Wiss continued to take an almost paternal pride in Lloyd, saying, "Do you like that, Parker? He's gonna pick the lock over the Web."

"If he misses," Parker said, "we're the ones on the scene. And he's the one with the electronic alibi."

Wiss shook his head. "Larry won't miss," he said.

"I'll be in touch with Ralph through the whole thing," Lloyd explained. "He'll have a portable with him. Whatever's happening there, I'll know about it as soon as you do."

"I'm told there's nothing secure on the Web," Parker said. "Everybody hears everything."

"We're talkin about a chess game," Wiss explained.

"We got it all worked out, openings, gambits, sacrifices. Larry and me both play chess anyway, so it'll be easy."

Parker could imagine circumstances that could make it less than easy. If they had a listener, and if the listener knew chess, and if the listener heard moves that didn't make sense. But it didn't seem to be enough of a problem that he'd want them to look for some other way to talk, back and forth, some different way that might be even less easy and, more risky. Having a member of the string that meant to phone in his part was strange, but everybody seemed to think they could make it work, so Parker shrugged and said, "Fine."

"You folks want dessert?" the waitress asked.

They didn't.

In the woods, close to or maybe over the Canadian border, they traveled without lights. Wiss and Elkins both wore infrared goggles, Wiss behind the wheel, Elkins walking out front. Elkins carried a geological survey map and a compass, and kept looking for vehicle-friendly terrain in the direction they wanted to go. Wiss watched Elkins and drove where he walked.

In the backseat, Parker and Lloyd couldn't see a thing, only feel the slow sway and jounce of the Cherokee as it eased forward. There were high clouds, a thin sliver of moon, not enough starshine to make much difference. Here under the trees, without the goggles, everything was black.

After they'd driven awhile in the darkness, Parker said, "Tell me why you were in."

Lloyd's voice, to his left, sounded pained but tired: "I'm trying to forget all that."

"I need you to remember it," Parker told him, "or you can forget me."

"Why? You know Frank and Ralph, don't you?"

"But I don't know you. And I don't go by other people's judgment."

There was a little silence over there, while Lloyd got used to the idea, and then he sighed and said, "I'm not proud of it."

"Most people aren't."

"I mean, I was stupid, I was emotional, I was hasty, I was careless, I was everything I've always prided myself on not being."

"When was this?"

Lloyd let out a long breath. "All right," he said. "In engineering school, I partnered with a guy named Brad Grenholz, a brilliant guy, a real innovator. I was always more of the grind, the detail man, the one who tidied up."

"So you made a good team."

"The best. If only—"

Parker waited, and finally Lloyd did another long sigh and said, "When you spend all your imaginative time inside molecules, it makes you nervous. You're very fast, and very jumpy, but you don't think you're fast enough, you need to be mare jumpy, so pretty soon Brad and I were doing a lot of drugs. A lot of drugs.

Liquor, too, but that was to come down. That was our only downer. Everything else we took was uppers. I swear, static electricity ran over our bodies like an electrode."

"Can't last," Parker said.

"It wasn't supposed to last. The thing is, we came up with— The two of us came up with, but that was a dispute later, but the two of us came up with a server application that was just awesome. Everybody wanted to invest, we had Brazilians wanted to invest!"

"Drug money?"

"No! Legit legit! Bank money! Venture capital money! All of a sudden, barely out of school, we're millionaires! On paper, but still. Millionaires."

"He screwed you," Parker suggested.

"It's that obvious, isn't it," Lloyd agreed, disgusted with himself. "I trusted him, I thought we were a team forever. There had to be contracts, legal papers, deals, all of that, but that wasn't the real stuff, the stuff inside the molecules was the real stuff, and the stuff in our veins. So Brad's sister's husband's brother was our lawyer, but so what, he was our lawyer, we all loved each other."

"Until," Parker said.

"Until there was a distribution," Lloyd told him, "and I wasn't part of it. Everything had been going into the business until then, just a little draw for us to live on, but now there was the first distribution, and Brad is on the list, and his sister and her husband are on the list, and the lawyer's wife is on the list, but I'm not on the list."

Lloyd was silent. The Cherokee kept creeping around tree trunks and boulders, skirting ravines and too-steep slopes, looking for the road down to Marino's place. Parker waited for Lloyd to calm himself down, silent and invisible over there.

"All right," Lloyd finally said. 'Thank you for not pressing me."

"We've got time," Parker said.

"Yes. All right. What I did— I couldn't bring myself to go to Brad, as though I was accusing him, because it had to be a simple fuckup, an explanation somewhere, so I brought it to our office manager, the one in charge of disbursements, and she said the list was straight from George. The lawyer, George. I said this can't be right, this is some sort of fuckup, I called George, George told me to look at the papers I'd signed, I was an employee, he offered to fax me over copies of everything I'd signed in case I didn't have it all myself, I hung up on him. I thought, Brad can't know about this, this is something George the sleazy lawyer did because he's George the sleazy lawyer, it's a sleazy lawyer thing is all. So I went to see Brad, he had a nice weekend place north of the city—New York, I mean—up in the Shawangunks, good climbing mountains, he'd become a mountaineer by then, and I confronted him, I mean, to the extent I ever confronted anybody, and he was very bland and smooth and of course we were both stoned, we were always stoned but functioning, you know, that creative high, and he said I'd never been anything but his assistant from the beginning, he was the genius with the ideas, I was his girl Friday, that's all I was. So I hit him with a laptop, right on the back of the head with a laptop, and threw him off his goddam terrace with the great view of the Gunks, and threw his laptop after him, and I seriously positively wanted to kill him, and thought I had. And I set fire to the house, and I stole his Porsche, and I forged his name to a few checks, and I tried to access the business accounts so I could steal everything, and somewhere in there they caught me."

"You cut a pretty good swath," Parker said.

"I sure did," Lloyd agreed.

"How long were you in?"

"Six years, four months, nine days."

"Not that long, with everything."

"No, well, that's where it turned out I maybe wasn't that stupid, after all," Lloyd said. "I had a couple things come out right for me later on. Like Brad didn't die, for one, which at first I thought was too fucking bad, but then I realized it was a blessing."

"Because it wasn't murder."

"No, because I could rat him out." Lloyd laughed, a harsh sound, and said, "Due to the fact I'd gone in and screwed everything up, made such a mess of the firm, the feds had to come in and take a look around, and it seemed I wasn't the only one Brad was screwing. He wasn't really doing it for the money, he had money, he was doing it to prove he was smarter than everybody else, and that meant everybody else, including the government. Embezzling from his own company to avoid taxes on profits, filing false income tax returns, all kinds of shit like that. So, it turned out, maybe Brad was the genius, and I was just the— He was the grasshopper and I was the ant, but when it came to game theory I thought of it first."

There was another little silence. Again Parker waited him out, and this time Lloyd, sounding defiant and embarrassed, said, "He who flips first wins."

"You went state's evidence."

"I traded my best friend Brad for a reduction of sentence." Lloyd giggled, a strange sound. "He won't be out for a few more years."

"Okay," Parker said.

Now the silence returned in the slowly moving Cherokee. Parker was satisfied, felt there was nothing more to say, but a minute later Lloyd asked, "Does that worry you?"

"Does what worry me?"

'That I ratted out Brad."

"You did what you had to do."

"I just don't want you to think, uh ..."

Parker said, "Don't worry about it."

"All right."

"You won't be in that situation, with me," Parker said.

* * *

Parker gradually became aware of light, off to his right. It was pinkish gray, dim, diffuse, like a false dawn, but narrower. Lloyd said, "Isn't that—?"

"Maybe it's where we're going," Parker said, and up front Wiss cried, "God damn! At last!" He spurted the Cherokee forward a few feet, then stopped, his red brake lights shining from behind Parker, brighter than the faint illumination downslope to the right.

They'd earlier switched off the Cherokee's interior lights, so it stayed dark when Elkins climbed in, saying, "Well, we found it. Too far south, though."

"Doesn't matter," Wiss said.

Parker said, "What doesn't matter?"

Elkins told him, "I wanted to come in above the shed, just to look it over, but we can do that on the way back. Marino's got a shed, like a little cabin, up at the top of the road, in case anybody wants to take a leak, have a shower, drink a beer."

"Small, for him," commented Wiss.

"I figured," Elkins said, "if we went there first, we'd get some idea what's changed around here."

Wiss said, "Should we go up there now?"

"No," Parker said. "We're here. I want to see what those lights are."

"So do I," Elkins said.

"Done," Wiss said, and put the Cherokee in gear.

Elkins had taken his goggles off now, but at first Wiss kept them on as he drove, so he could find the road. Soon, though, the light out ahead got stronger, more amber now than either pink or gray, and he took the goggles off.

It was strange, almost an underwater feeling, to drive into the aura of the light, the pine forest becoming more solid, the sky now like a roof, black where the soft light didn't reach.

Just as Parker saw the first floodlight out ahead of them, Lloyd sharply said, "Stop! Stop here."

They stopped, and all four got out onto the road, a narrow ribbon of gray concrete barely two lanes wide, curving up the slope through the forest, angling around the larger trees. Ahead of them were two floodlights, mounted atop twenty-foot-high metal posts. One was about ten feet from the road to the right, the other an equal distance to the left. Both lights were aimed away from them, downslope, through clear plastic mountings that dimmed and diffused them. There was no glare at any point in among the trees, just a steady low illumination, as though Marino had given the entire forest a night-light.

Lloyd said, 'This is the new perimeter. These fixtures will circle the house."

"Hell of a big perimeter," Wiss said.

"But this is the way to do it," Lloyd told him. "Mounted up there with those lights will be motion sensors and cameras. If a deer walks through here—"

"Or an elk," Wiss said.

"Anything," Lloyd agreed. "If anything bigger than a chipmunk goes into the part that's lit up, it'll sound an alarm down in their security station, in the staff house. They look at it, they see it's a bear or a fox, they don't worry about it. They see it's a man, they send somebody."

Elkins said, 'This is gonna go all around the place? From way out here?"

"Of course," Lloyd told him. "Comes on automatically at dusk, goes off at daybreak. Just the lights go off. The cameras and sensors stay on."

Parker said, "Let's take a look at this staff house."

Elkins said, "Why?"

"Because you've got to take that out first," Parker said, "or you don't have a score."

They walked around the perimeter, another light on a tall pole always ahead of them like a marker, the lights at equal spacings, all aimed inward toward the center, where the main house would be, too far away to see from out here. Which also meant the lights wouldn't bother anybody in the house. But they'd bother anybody trying to get in the house.

It was easy walking, mostly downslope, because clearing had been done when this security system had been put in, just a month or two ago. The cables were all buried, and the result was a narrow path through the forest, curving gently from light to light.

Lloyd led the way, Wiss behind him, then Parker, then Elkins, so it was Lloyd who said, quietly, "Here's a road."

The others came up with him. This was the reverse of the road on the other side, where they'd left the car,

where the road had come downslope from darkness to continue on into the light, disappearing among the trees. Here the road came down out of the lit forest, went past them, and continued on down into black.

Elkins said, 'This is it. Main house up that way, staff house down there."

"I don't see it," Lloyd said.

"It's probably a quarter mile from here," Elkins told him.

The fun part," Wiss said, "is when we walk all this way back up the mountain."

They walked down the road, leaving the amber light behind them, and as it faded they picked out another light ahead, a yellowish rectangle. That'll be security, with the light on," Wiss said.

It was, the one lit window in a dark house. Parker said, "Lloyd, why don't I see any protection here?"

"Well, there's nothing valuable here," Lloyd told him. They're just supposed to keep guard on the main house."

Closer to the yellow rectangle of window, Parker could dimly make out a two-story boxy house with a wide front porch, the kind of building you'd find on a well-to-do side street anywhere in the midwest. Here in a forest on a mountain it had a lost look, as though the people who'd put it up hadn't stopped first to look around at the setting.

Almost four in the morning. It would be day before they got back to the car, mid-morning before they got back to Havre, and then Lloyd had to start taking planes. Parker said, "We need to know how many people they got in there, and what kind of guns."

Wiss said, "Parker, I like to be a sneak thief when I can. You don't think there's any way to bypass this?"

"None," Parker told him.

Lloyd said, "I have to agree with that."

Elkins said, "After all this, do we have a score or not? Parker, what do you think?"

"Maybe," Parker said.

Lloyd had brought with him Wiss's goggles. Now he put them on, saying, "I've got to see where the cables come in."

They walked down past the house, slowly, Lloyd with the goggles leading the way, looking back and forth, bending to study the ground, finally dropping to all fours to crawl over to the house across a recently mowed lawn. He'd found the service box there, where the underground cables came up to be split to bring power and communication to the house. The others stayed back by the road, trying to see what he was doing, keeping watch that he didn't attract attention from anybody inside the house.

He spent ten minutes there, then crawled back, standing when he reached the road. "I can get in," he said.

'The question is," Elkins said, "can we?"