The Devil's Code

CHAPTER 5

ST. JOHN CORBEIL

St. John Corbeil was sitting in a leather armchair, reading, light from the floor lamp glinting from the steel rims of his military spectacles. As he readOrwell's Homage to Catalonia he threaded and rethreaded a diamond necklace between his stubby fingers, as though it were a string of worry beads.

He liked the cool sensuality of the necklace, and the money it represented. He'd had it made to his specifications by Harry Winston of New York. One hundred diamonds, excellent cut, clarity, and color in each, and each a single carat in size. The Winston people had thought that curioushe'd seen the curiosity, unspoken, in their eyesbecause a hundred-diamond necklace doesn't carry the flash of say, a big central stone or two, surrounded by a constellation of smaller diamonds.

Corbeil had good reasons, one-carat diamonds were easy to move, easy to sell, and anonymous. The necklace was a bank account. If you popped the diamonds out of their settings, you could put $300,000 in the toes of your shoes.

Another good reason was the sensuality of the stones. Corbeil's face might have been chopped from a block of oak, but he was a sensual man. He liked the feel of a woman, the sound of a zipper coming down on the back of a woman's dress, the smell of Chanel. He liked fast cars driven fast, French cooking and California wine, Italian suits and English shoes and diamonds. He hadn't been able to afford the very best in women, wine, and song until AmMath. Now he had them, and he would be damned if he would give them up.

The doorbell rang, he'd been expecting it He put the book down, slipped the necklace into a shirt pocket, crossed to the intercom, and pushed the button. "Yes?"

"Hart and Benson." William Hart's voice. Four men were involved in various parts of the operation. Corbeil himself, as coordinator, Hart and Benson, as security and technicians, and Tom Woods, a computer-encryption expert who loved only money more than codes. Woods was not aware of the Morrison, Lighter, or Ward difficulties, other than that Morrison had been killed in a break-in. He was a nervous man.

"Come in." Corbeil pressed the door-release button, buzzing them in.

"Done," Hart said.

Corbeil nodded. "So. There's no reason to think that anything remains here in Texas."

"Not as far as we know "

Corbeil turned away, fished the diamond necklace out of his pocket, and began unconsciously pouring it from hand to hand, as though it were a slinky. "There remains the possibility that he sent his sister something."

"He could have sent something to anybody, but we can't find any really close friends. No girlfriends, right now. The sister's the obvious candidate I mean, we're still backgrounding him, but if there's somebody else, it's not obvious," Hart said.

"I wish we'd had time to interrogate him," Corbeil said. "But the pressure to get him out of the way. well, we couldn't both interrogate him and have a credible disappearance, could we?"

Hart shrugged. The other man, Benson, stood silently, listening. A follower Hart asked, "So now what? Shut down the ranch for a while?"

"That won't be necessary," Corbeil said. "We can do it by pushing a button. No point in pushing it before we have to. There's a lot of money out there right now "

"I'll tell you, Mr. Corbeil, this whole incident scared the shit out of me. I'm still scared and Les is just as nervous as I am." Hart glanced at the silent man, looking for support, and got a nod

"That's why we've been so careful setting it up," Corbeil said. "They'd need evidence to put us in jail, and there's no physical evidence of anything. If I tell Tom Woods to push the destruct button, everything is gone. Not even we could get it back."

"That's well and good, but there's still Lane Ward," Hart said. "If she does have something, or if Morrison set up some kind of dead-man's drop."

"So we need to go out and look at her house."

"That's dangerous," Hart objected.

"You didn't have any trouble getting into Morrison's place out there. Or here, either."

"That was different. He was supposed to be out of town, and we knew he was dead, so nobody would be coming around to visit. With Ward, we don't know the neighborhood, we don't even know what we'd be looking for. It might be on a disk, on a hard drive, it might be stashed online somewhere. It might not exist."

"But if it does, and if it were sent on to the FBI, we'd be in desperate trouble," Corbeil said. "It's worth the risk. If the worst happened, and you were caught, we might explain it as a security matter. Something that we were terribly worried about: something that you did on your own to keep the nation's secrets from falling into unfriendly hands. If you did go to jail for a whilewhat would you get for an unsuccessful burglary, six months?if that did happen, there would be a magnificent bonus at the end of the time."

"How much?" Hart asked bluntly.

"Say, two million a year, prorated for lesser amounts of time," Corbeil said.

Hart looked at Benson, then turned back to Corbeil. "So we look at her house. Actually, there's an opportunity coming up."

Corbeil's eyebrows went up, and when Hart explained, Corbeil smiled with pleasure. "I so like working with you, William," he said.

Benson spoke up for the first time. "You know what I don't like, Mr. Corbeil? I think we're really okay with this Morrison character, and his sister. I don't think he sent anything. We caught on too quick, and he was relying on Lighter to take care of the problem. But what I see."

Corbeil was made impatient by the preface: "Yes?"

"I'm worried about Woods. Ever since Morrison was killed, he's been walking around with this doggy face. I think he knows something happened. They used to hang out a little."

Corbeil nodded, and said, "All right, Les. That's a legitimate concern. You know Tom Woods is a friend of mine, an old confidant who came over with me from the factory. And a mathematical genius, to boot."

"I know that, sir, but."

Corbeil raised one hand: "If he becomes a problem, I will take care of it. I promise. But we already have two deaths that are too closely connected. A third one, if it becomes necessary to remove Lane Ward, would almost certainly draw attention. If Tom Woods had died in the interim. Well."

Hart said, "Unless Tom was the architect of it all."

Corbeil said, "You took the thought right out of my head, William. We can perhaps begin to prepare some documents. So: you travel to San Francisco."

Hart nodded. "Tomorrow. We'll call back. After we see what we've got, we can make a call on the Ward chick. Take her out or leave her."

Corbeil said, "Mmm," and smiled.