"You take good care of Maggie," he said. "She's the daughter I should have had. Or the wife." He grinned, and for another instant, the vitality was back.
Maggie led the way to the door, and just outside, put a hand on my arm. "I wasn't expecting this," I said, holding up the money bag.
"That's Rudy's way of telling you he's happy," she said. "Do you have reservations in town?"
"No. I thought it would be better to show up somewhere and pay in cash. I sure as hell have enough of it."
"Why don't you stay at my place? I have an extra room, and you're welcome to it. It would be untraceable."
"That's nice of you. Thanks."
"I have to talk to Rudy privately for a moment. I'll be right back." I waited in the hallway, heard the sound of their voices, then Anshiser laughed again, and a moment later she came out.
"His sense of humor seems to be intact," I said as we headed down the stairs.
"You seem. not exactly to amuse him, but to make him laugh," she said. "It's good for him."
"What'd I say?"
She glanced back at me, the smile extending to her eyes this time.
"I told him I'd offered to let you stay at my place, in the spare bedroom. And how you said, 'That's nice of you.' And he said, 'God Almighty, Maggie, why don't you take that boy home and let him screw your brains loose?'"
"That's when he laughed?"
"No, he laughed on my line. He never laughs on his own." She was ahead of me going down the stairs, so all I could see was that tantalizing neck, and not her face.
"What was your line?"
She'd reached the bottom of the stairs and crossed the short hall to the outside door. She turned at just the right moment, with one hand on the knob. "I said I planned to do exactly that."
I said "Oh" to an empty doorway.
As a top-level manager, and a large, athletic woman, she was surprisingly soft and yielding in the bedroom. While LuEllen went after sex with the enthusiasm of a beer-drinking cowgirl, Maggie was slower and looser and almost submissive. When we broke apart after making love the first time, she rolled onto her back. The skin of her stomach and breasts was shiny-damp in the dim bedside light, and she said, sounding satisfied with herself, "There."
"There, what?"
She propped herself on one elbow and looked down at me. "There are some men. getting them in bed is a challenge, you know? You were such an arrogant asshole the first time we met, out on the sandbar, with your brushes and your paintings and your torn shirt and your tan. I was sweating like a pig, my nylons were full of holes, my hair was a mess, and when I try to make conversation about the hole you cut in your painting, you cut me off at the knees. What a jerk."
"Jesus," I muttered.
"What?"
"Nothing. I'd just. heard something similar."
"Well, you're the type who would."
"Not about me. About someone else," I said. Time to change the subject. "Are you worried about the raid? We could call it off right now, and nobody would ever know."
She dropped flat on her back again. "Sure I'm worried. I'm paid to worry. I'm worried about Rudy, too. The way he talks about dying."
"Don't ignore that," I said. "Sometimes people know what the doctors don't."
"That's what worries me. That he might somehow talk himself right into the grave." She looked sideways at me. "Tell me why this attack is going to work."
I thought for a moment. "Because it's set up right," I said. "We took some time, and we know what we're doing. There's a possibility that we'll be nailed right away, that there's some kind of invisible monitoring system in Whitemark's software, but I've been careful and I haven't seen it; and I've been deep enough into their system to know that they depend on it. When we corrupt that system, they'll be effectively frozen."
"People will be hurt."
"Not physically. Like Anshiser said the first time I saw him, it's either his company or Whitemark. Somebody's got to lose. Whitemark cheated. That makes it a little more okay."
"But not completely okay."
"Nothing is completely okay."
"What about this problem with what's-his-name, Ratface?" she asked. She knew about the incident with the woman from down the hall, and that we thought the landlord had been lying about Ratface.
"I still don't know what that was about," I said. "Bobby's watching him, but nothing's happened. I have it in the back of my head that maybe it wasn't a divorce thing, that maybe Ratface and the landlord were involved in some kind of blackmail business. You know, we're not even sure that the technician was putting those bugs on the phones. Maybe he was taking them off. Maybe the landlord called them and said, 'Hey, these guys are some kind of computer freaks, maybe you better get those bugs out of there.' I don't know. That doesn't feel right either."
Maggie laughed softly. "It all sounds nuts. You know, whacky. Like something one of those right-wing fascist weirdo groups would fantasize about."
"Yeah, but they'd do it in tree-bark camo," I said. "The main thing is, nothing has happened. Ratface is still off in Jersey."
Maggie snuggled up on my shoulder and I looked at the ceiling, feeling her there, and neither one of us said anything for a few minutes. Then her hand crept down my stomach and she said, "Hmm."
"It's going to work," she said a half hour later. I was a little confused and wondered for a second if that was a personal comment. I thought it did work. "Dillon did a risk evaluation on this job. We had a hard time evaluating the first phase, the burglaries, because we didn't know what kind of personnel you'd have. That's why Rudy kept me out of it until now."
I'd caught up with her. "How about the second phase, going into the company?"
"That was easier to evaluate. We know you and your work, and there have been studies of this kind of attack by the National Security Agency and the FBI. Dillon thinks this will be the least risky phase. But after we hit, and the news reports start coming out, the risks escalate. The key is picking the time to get out. If you wait too long. zut." She drew a finger across my throat.
"And if we get caught? What happens then?"
"That depends. It's absolutely critical to keep your name and face, everybody's name and face, out of the media. The biggest danger is that you would be arrested, and processed, before we could interfere. Once something is on paper, it gets much harder," she said. "If you can keep things private and give Rudy time to operate, we should be okay."
"So we keep things informal."
"Absolutely."
"Jesus, I wish I still smoked."
"Why?"
"I could use a cigarette."
The next day, while Maggie took care of last-minute business at Anshiser's, I went into Chicago and stashed my share of the extra money in a second safety-deposit box. I mailed the key to Emily in St. Paul, along with a note telling her that everything was fine.
We flew out of Chicago in the early afternoon and got to Washington in time to catch the evening crush on I-395. When we arrived at the apartment, I unlocked the door and pushed through, carrying my own overnight case and Maggie's three-suiter. Dace and LuEllen were working in the office. LuEllen was wearing jeans and her white, tassled cowboy boots; Maggie was in one of her blue power suits.
"Dace and LuEllen, this is Maggie Kahn, and Maggie. " I gestured at the other two.
"Pleased to meet you," LuEllen said cheerfully, sticking out a hand. Maggie shook it, smiling, and said, "My pleasure. I've heard something about your work from Kidd. I'd like to hear more."