She stood up and stepped toward the bed, wearing a brassiere and panties and slip. She pulled the slip over her head and tossed it negligently on a side chair. "You were on the computer, and he didn't want to bother you," she said. "He said you were in a fugue state. Undo me?"
She sat on the edge of the bed; I propped myself up and unsnapped the brassiere, and kissed her between the shoulder blades. She arched her shoulders and pivoted on her butt and lay back on her pillow, her hair spreading out.
"Haven't heard anything about the kiddie porn yet," I said.
"Ah. Dace said something was happening. He attached his video recorder to the TV and set the timer for the news programs. It's running now," she said.
"Jesus, I didn't even see it. I've been out of it."
She rolled on her side facing me and slid her hand down inside my shorts. "Aw, has you been aw wonesome and sulking since mama's been gone?"
I groaned. "God save me from women who talk baby talk to my dick."
"Oh yeah? "she said.
Later that night we were lying in spoons, my arm over her hip, her butt against my stomach. When she had been breathing deep and steady for ten minutes, I got up and padded out of the room and quietly closed the door behind me. I had the computer up a minute later, and I was out on the phone lines, looking around. Sometimes, nothing will stop the code in your head.
The next day was the peak of the programming. I sat on the computer for nine straight hours, working out one piece after another, checking, debugging, rechecking. When I got out of the chair I could barely walk.
"You need a Fuji," Dace said as I hobbled out of the office.
"What's that?"
Fuji 's Water-Gate was a thoroughly westernized Japanese bathhouse not far from the Pentagon-westernized because the patrons wore tank suits and bathed in private groups. The bathing pools were not much bigger than good-sized hot tubs, but the water was infinitely hotter. Dace and Maggie dropped into it, moaned for a few seconds, then relaxed, and watched LuEllen and me test the water.
"C'mon, you'll live," Maggie said. "No guts?" With that, LuEllen dropped in like a stone, went completely under, gasped, and tried to crawl back out. Dace, laughing, grabbed her around the waist and held her squealing until she settled down. "Get your ass in here, Kidd," she said.
The water was hot enough to boil lobsters. I slipped in, an inch at a time, to my hips, supporting my weight with my hands.
"That's the worst way," Dace said snidely. "You get ten minutes of pain instead of ten seconds."
"I'll do it my way," I said.
"You'll boil your balls, is what you'll do," Maggie snorted. LuEllen and Dace looked at her strangely, and she blushed, then all three burst out laughing.
"All right, all right." I took a breath and dropped the rest of the way in, up to my chin. LuEllen, who is as strong as an ox, reached over and pushed my head under. For a moment, I thought my heart had stopped. When it started again, I huddled up next to Maggie until all the nerve endings died and I could straighten out.
"Jesus. How long do we have to stay in here?"
"An hour or so," Maggie said, grinning.
"We'll be dead in an hour."
"Nonsense. In two minutes, you'll feel fine."
She was right. Two minutes later I felt fine. We floated around the pool, talking, not touching, never mentioning Whitemark or the attack. LuEllen had been to the Smithsonian and-Dace laughed-had been looking at the display of locks. Dace, LuEllen said, had been closing down his apartment, and she had been helping. When she cleaned out the front room, she found a sack lunch behind the couch. Dace admitted that it was probably two years old, from a tough time when he was making his own lunch. There was a little plastic container of green grapes, LuEllen said, that had gone past raisinhood and had reached petrification.
Maggie told the other two that when I thought she was asleep, I snuck out of the bedroom and went back to the computer. "I can't compete, I guess."
"Of course you can," Dace said, ogling her thinly concealed breasts.
"Down, boy," said LuEllen.
Maggie threw back her head and laughed and lay back in the water, and she looked like a medieval swan queen come to life. Sometime during the forty-five minutes we spent in the pool, the code stopped running through my head.
The head of the Whitemark systems department, his wife, and twenty-three-year-old son were arrested at seven o'clock the next morning on a variety of pornography charges, all of them felonies. It was midmorning, and I was already on the machine, working, when the phone rang and Maggie answered. She listened for a moment, said, "Great" and "What channel?" and "Goodbye."
"That was Dace," she reported, leaning in the doorway. "He said to look at the 'Morning Break' news on Channel Three. He said the cops picked up our pornographer friends. There was a 'Live Eye' report right from the house."
We went into the living room and backed up the video recorder until we found the "Morning Break" segment, and watched the three people coming out of the house in handcuffs.
"I feel kind of sorry for them," Maggie said. The wife, a weighty, gray-haired matron, was weeping. She tried to cover her face with her hands, but the cameras tracked her right to the car.
"Think about what they were doing," I said. But it wasn't pretty.
After the unhappy family was bundled off in a squad car, the camera cut to a half dozen uniformed cops filing in and out of the garage door, carrying boxes full of magazines. We watched until the end of the segment, and then Maggie called Channel Three.
"Listen," she said when she got the news department, "if you hadn't heard, this man they arrested on the child pornography is a very important executive at Whitemark Aerospace. I work there, and I know. He runs all their computers. I think some of the other guys in that department may be working with him on this porn thing. They're pretty close."
She listened for a minute. "No, I can't. If I told you my name I could get fired. But he's really a bigshot."
She dropped the phone on the hook, and it rang again almost before she had taken her hand away. She listened for a moment, said "Thanks," and hung up. "Dace again," she said. "Turret is out. The generals are on the front. They reprinted the critical letters word for word."
"Ah. We're rolling."
"Yes." She got the phone book and methodically called the rest of the television stations about the tie between the pornographer and Whitemark. Then she started calling the newspapers and wire services, urging them to look at the Turret article.
On day 16, The Wall Street Journal ran an expanded version of the Turret story. The New York Times, the Post, and the Associated Press followed the next day, although the AP story was so hedged against libel that it was hard to tell what was happening.
The Post is not nearly as good a paper as the Times, but it can bleed a story like an eighteenth-century barber-surgeon squeezing every exquisite moment of agony out of a public death. After reporting the generals' relationship with Whitemark, it followed the next day with a complicated explanation by Whitemark. The day after that, there was an even more complicated explanation from the generals, paired with a Post editorial deploring military corruption. The day after that, there was an analysis, and the day after that, more of the letters-Dace had saved a few to use as fresheners after the story started to age. Dace also called the Post metro desk and reminded them of the pornographers' arrest. He hinted that the release of letters was revenge taken by somebody in the computer department on the company that was currently blackguarding their former systems director. That produced a masterpiece of analysis that ran on day 23.