The Devil's Code

CHAPTER 15

Dallas was hot.

Hot enough that the newspapers were whining about it. Unnaturally hot, for the time of year. When we got to the DFW car-rental building, which was a couple miles from the airport, a chunky red-headed woman dragged a bulky black suitcase up to the Hertz desk with a complaint about her bill. I didn't hear the details of the complaint, but noticed that her blouse was soaked with sweat from the fifty-yard walk across the parking lot.

We rented a thoroughly air-conditioned car, using one of LuEllen's IDs, and got two rooms at the Ramada Inn. When we were settled, we drove to something called the West End Historic District, which turned out to be a fern-bar shopping district injected into a bunch of aging warehouses.

The TrendDirect building, once a big, old red-brick warehouse, had been dressed up with modern black windows and new tuck-pointing. It stood alone on its own block. Part of the ground floor had been given over to an imposing lobby, with a glass wall separating the street from an interior done in old brick and new marble, with huge wooden beams crisscrossing overhead. A guard and reception desk sat to one side, a half circle of marble. We could see two heads behind it, but no details of the security.

Except for the lobby, the front part of the building's first floor was all retaila couple of boutiques, a men's formal-wear store, a sports-collectibles shop, a coffee shop and a beer-and-steaks restaurant on the corner.

TrendDirect, a direct mail advertising company, occupied floors two through five, plus the back part of the first floor. Six and seven were a single law firm, eight was occupied by an ad agency. Nine and ten were AmMath.

LuEllen had her game face on. "Ten stories," she said, as we cruised the neighborhood.

"Ten stories."

"Exactly."

The front of the building was on a wide street, but faced a grassy square, and most of the traffic was local. Both side streets were narrow, showing walls of black windows. There were three window wells on each side.

The rear of the building was on a wider, busier, dirtier street, smelling of truck coolant and exhaust. A half-dozen truck-parking bays backed up to a loading dock, with steel overhead doors opposite each truck bay. A windowless standard door, of steel, was at the center of the dock, between two of the big overhead doors. A smaller, street-level garage door, also steel, and just big enough for a small truck, was located at the end of the building. A video camera monitored the dock.

"What do you think?" I asked her. She was looking straight up through the windshield.

"I'd like to see the roof," she said.

"LuEllen." I'm just the tiniest bit afraid of heights.

"It's gonna be a tough building," she said. "That guard desk is a twenty-four-hour operation, and we know there are guards wandering around at night. Jack supposedly shot one who was making a routine round of the building. We could probably crack one of the doors in back, but then, the question is, could we get up? We can't tell without going inside."

"Gotta be a way."

"Probably. The fact that there's some kind of government top-secret connection makes me extra nervous. If we came down from the top. look, the building across the street from the south side is an office building. Turn here, I'll show you."

The building across the street was just as she said: another old warehouse, renovated, with glitzy neon-signed shops on the bottom floor, and what must've been offices on the floors above.

"The thing is, the security'll probably suck. There's no lobby, it's a little shabby, so it's probably a lot of individual offices. We could get access during the day, hide out inside, and get onto the roof at night. It's twelve floorstwo higher than TrendDirect," LuEllen said. She looked back and forth between the two buildings. "Narrow streets here. I bet it's not more than forty feet between the two cornices. We heave a climbing line across, slide down, and the TrendDirect roofs probably got no security at all. It'd be really unusual if it did."

"Why don't we get fake IDs and fool the guards," I said. "Or keys for the back doors?"

"Those are options."

"Or we could do a sneak." Sneak is private language. It amounts to doing an easy reconnaissance, like a phony delivery, to look over a target. LuEllen has done them twenty times. I usually go on public toursmost big companies have them, and they are very informative, if you know what to look for.

"That's another option," she admitted. But she liked the roof idea. She'd like the rush it'd bring, swinging out over the street at three o'clock in the morning. We spent another fifteen minutes looking at the building, and LuEllen shot a couple of rolls of color-slide film. She also got out of the car and looked into one of the window wells.

She came back, shaking her head. "Why would you put glass brick all the way up and down?" she complained. "People working in there have to breathe, for Christ's sakes. It's inhuman."

"LuEllen, the voice of the working man," I said.

"But you know what? It all looks very secure," she said. "Somebody went out of their way to be secure. and something else I just thought of."

"What?"

"How often are building guards armed? Like the old guy who got shot?"

I thought about that and shook my head "Not often."

"The place is tough," she said. "I'd turn it down, if I were working on my own, unless I had a very tight inside connection "

"Huh." We both thought about that as we rolled away, leaving the building behind. Neither of us had ever spent serious time in Dallas, and it turned out that the West End Historic District was historic not only because it was old, but because that was where John Kennedy was assassinated. We went past the memorial, not knowing exactly what it was until LuEllen spotted a Dealy Plaza sign.

"Do you remember Kennedy?" she asked, her face turned to the memorial as we passed by.

"Sometimes I think I do," I said. "But I think I mostly remember my folks telling me about him."

"I've only seen him in old TV shows," LuEllen said. "He seemed like an okay guy for a president."

On the way back to the motel, we found a phone and got online with Bobby. He'd been doing research on AmMath, knowing that we might try to go in. I said:

trenddirect looks tough. any online options?

cannot find online option but did look at corbeil home. he has t-1 line

excellent. give address.

Corbeil lived in a snazzy glass-and-brick low-rise apartment budding on a North Dallas golf course; a gated community called Lago Verde. The T-1 line meant he was probably working from home on his downtown computer system.

"This is the place to do a sneak," she said, as we rolled past the gate "I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that all the security is out here, on the fence, with maybe some drive-by guys in golf carts at night."

"So let's go in," I said

"Let's call Bobby again," she said "We need to nail down Corbeil's exact address, and we need the name of a single woman who lives in there, anywhere. Maybe he could check elevatorsdon't elevators have to be inspected or something?"

"I think so."

Bobby came back and said that Corbeil, according to the local phone and electric companies, lived on the eighth and ninth floors of a nine-story building called Poinsettia. All of the apartments in the building were two storieson two and three, four and five, six and seven, eight and nine. He couldn't find out what was on one, nor could he find anything about elevators. There was a state elevator data bank, but you had to know the serial number to find the right one; the bank was not searchable by address.

He did get the name of a single woman, an Annebelle Enager who lived in the Primrose building.

"That's a start," LuEllen said.

"We're gonna do a sneak?"

"An easy one," she said.

One thing the movies never tell you is that burglars spend about half their life shopping. We bought a small paint brush and jars of red and black water-soluble poster paint at a kids' store. At an office supply place, LuEllen picked up a bottle of rubber cement, a roll of duct tape, an X-Acto knife, and one of those roller-receipt boxes with a roll of receipt paper to go with it. The receipt paper went on a spindle-bar inside the top of the box-like a toilet paper holder- fed to the outside, across a plate where a customer would sign, and then back inside the box to a take-up spindle.

We rented a white van from Hertz, took the van to a mostly vacant parking lot outside a thirty-six screen theater, and I used the poster paint to create a business on the side of the van: Rose's Roses.

"That looks great," LuEllen said, when I'd finished. "You missed your calling. You should have been a sign painter."

"Yet, I think I would be unfulfilled," I said. I'd painted two intertwined red roses, with black stems, above the name, in red. You had to hope nobody looked at both sides of the truck, because the roses were not exactly the same.

While I was painting, LuEllen sat on the back bumper and used a screwdriver to rip the guts out of the roller-receipt box, and the X-Acto knife to cut a quarter-sized hole through the plastic side. Her JVC miniature camcorder fit snugly inside, held in place with the duct tape; she used the rubber cement to glue a receipt across the face of the box.

"We ready?" she asked, as I finished up the roses.

"If you are."

"Let's go."

I didn't have to do anything, truth be told. LuEllen drove the truck up to the gate, said something to the gatehouse guard, who pointed, and let her m. I waited a block away, in the car.

She was inside for exactly twenty-two minutes, about ten more than I thought reasonable. She waved at the guard as she left, took a left, and five minutes later, we met in a weedy, litter-strewn strip under a freeway. When I got there, she'd already gotten out a gallon jug of spring water and a roll of paper towels, and was wiping Rose's Roses out of existence.

"No problem," she said cheerfully, as I walked up. "I even got a date, if we need it."

"Who with?"

"Guy named Ralph Carnelli, he's an office guy there; some kind of low-level manager, I think."

Inside the compound, she'd driven around until she spotted the Poinsettia building. The first and basement floors were parking, she said. That was as much as she could see. Then she found the clubhouse, which sat on the edge of the golf course. The clubhouse included a receiving area, the upstairs management offices, and a lounge and exercise room for the residents.

"I got lost," she said. "I wandered all over the place."

"An easy mistake to make, in such a big building," I said.

"Yeah. I went up these stairs and eventually I found Ralph and he took me back downstairs and showed me the reception desk. I left the flowers for Annebelle and we got to talking. He came on to me a little and I gave him a little shine. I wouldn't give him the phone number, but I took his."

"Nice guy?"

"Good-looking, forty-two, divorced. Big shoulders."

"With that skirt and your ass, the poor guy never had a chance."

"Exactly. And." She paused for dramatic effect.

"What?"

"The clubhouse is open all night. Twenty-four hours. The door that connects the clubhouse to the office suite can be slipped. At the back of Ralph's office is a big wooden flat file that has the names of different buildings on different drawers, four names to a drawer."

"Architect's drawings?"

"That's what I think. Couldn't see for sure. But the office has something to do with maintenance."

"Tonight. We cross the fence onto the golf course, watch the building; when it's open, we go in."

"Absolutely," she said.

We got a call from Green at eight; they were in Houston, and he and Lane would be heading for Dallas as soon as it got light. LuEllen and I replayed the movies she'd made at Lago Verde, until I knew my way around the place as well as she did.

We went into Lago Verde at ten o'clock, carrying nothing but a thick woolen Army blanket we got at a salvage store, a dinner knife I stole from a Denny's, and a penlight. We parked on a residential street a block off the golf course, after spotting a convenient tree along the edge of the course; the course was bordered by an eight-foot chain-link fence, but without any guard wire at the top. We both wore jeans, black gym shoes, and crimson jackets. Dark red is as good as black for concealment, as long as nobody throws a light on you. If a light is thrown on you, you look a lot more innocent in red than in black.

The tree at the edge of the golf course was halfway between two streetlights, along a commercial strip. Across the street from the tree, a paint-and-wallpaper place closed at eight o'clock, and the adjoining high-end stereo place at nine. At ten, with a good space between cars, we jogged across the street. LuEllen tossed the blanket over the top of the fence, and I lifted her up to it, and she was over. I did a quick climb, pivoted on my belly on the blanket, and dropped to the other side. We both squatted behind the tree, to look at the passing cars. Nobody slowed. We waited, out of sight, for ten minutes, and then headed across the golf course.

Once we were away from the strip, the golf course was dark as a coal sack. I'd never had a mental image of Dallas as a place with trees, but it has about a billion of them: from the air, the city looks like a forest. Golf courses are even denser with them, and most of them seem to have thorns. We crossed a fairway, moving slowly, I stepped into a thorn bush, backed out, fell in behind LuEllen, and we groped our way toward the apartment light three hundred yards away.

Fifty yards out of the clubhouse, we found a soft patch of grass between two trees, spread the blanket, and hunkered down. We could see lights both at the front of the clubhouse and at the back. The upstairs windows were dark.

The back of the clubhouse was framed by a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. We could see a line of soda and snack machines along one wall, and a bunch of soft leather chairs, like the first-class lounge in an airport. There were a half-dozen people in the lounge. Two had apparently just come out of the exercise room; they were putting on tennis shoes. The other four were sitting in a group of chairs, talking.

"Could be a while," LuEllen said.

About three hours, in fact. The group in the lounge stayed for an hour and a half, an animated conversation that seemed to go on forever. When they finally left, a couple of other people had settled in. More came and went from the exercise room. Traffic slowed down after midnight, but every time we thought to move, somebody else would show up. At one-fifteen, we hadn't seen anybody for fifteen minutes.

"Let's try," LuEllen said.

We left the blanket and started through the dark to the clubhouse door. Twenty yards out, at the edge of the golf course, we came to a line of head-high shrubs. After we passed them, we'd be out in the open and committed. We stopped, looked around, then LuEllen touched my arm and we moved.

Slowly, LuEllen on my arm. We got to the clubhouse, stepped inside. No sound, except a refrigerator gurgle from one of the soda machines. We waited another second; then LuEllen slipped the dinner knife out of her pocket, walked to the door connecting with the executive suite, slipped the lock with the knife blade, and we were in. And up.

Ralph's office door had the same crappy lock. We slipped it and LuEllen led the way inside. I shut the door behind us and she turned on the penlight. The flat files were not locked; didn't have locks. The architect's drawings for Poinsettia were right where they were supposed to be, in the Poinsettia drawer, with drawings for Wild Rose, Black-Eyed Susan, and Hollyhock. The drawings for Poinsettia made up a pad a half-inch thick, and probably three feet long by two and a half wide.

"Take the whole thing?" she asked.

"Might as well. Hope nobody goes looking for them."

"They're dusty; we should be okay," she said.

We put the room back together, and walked out. As we crossed the paved area toward the parking lot, another couple was coming off the parking lot, carrying a blanket, but not ours. We never got closer than fifty yards, but they waved, and LuEllen waved back, and then said, "Jesus Christ, Kidd, the golf course is the local lover's lane. We're lucky we didn't trip over somebody."

"Better cover for us," I said.

We saw nobody on the course. We crossed the fence, strolled back to the car, and were out of there.