"Are you following that lady?"
The voice was only a couple of feet away, and my heart almost stopped. I looked down, toward the fence, and found a pair of small, blue eyes peering between the woven boards. A little girl, not more than four.
"Yeah, we're playing a game," I said.
"What kind of game?"
"Like hide-and-seek," I said. "But it's a secret."
"Are you sure?" she asked suspiciously.
"Of course I'm sure. Haven't you ever seen television?"
I left her with that to chew on, figuring Denton had had more than enough time to get his sandwich and head downstairs again. I walked straight out the driveway, looking neither right nor left, into the street.
LuEllen was fifty yards in front of me. When we were out of sight of the house, I jogged until I caught her.
"Don't talk to me," she said.
"Thanks for pulling me out of there."
"Don't talk to me; I'm too high to talk."
We were back at the car in two more minutes. LuEllen hit the coke as we pulled out from the curb. "Goddamn, that feels good."
"The coke?"
"The whole thing. Going in, getting out. God, I'm so high I could fly."
We moved into a downtown Washington hotel with a handy automated switchboard. That night we called into the bug at the Dentons', but nothing went out. I lay on the bed reading an Artnews and listening for the tone that signaled a data transmission.
LuEllen was washing her hair. She left the bathroom door open, tossed her clothes on the toilet seat, and went back and forth past the open door, pleasantly pink as always. We slept in the same bed again that night. The next morning we were in spoons, and I woke up with her moving against my stomach. She was still asleep, I thought, until she muttered, "Geez, feels like somebody dropped a pencil in the bed."
"Pencil your ass," I said.
"Oh, God, not that," she said, and rolled away, smiling. The smile slowly faded when she saw my face and she said, "Not yet. It's hard not to tease you, but I'm afraid if we made love, Dace's face would come up. That might ruin it forever.
We spent the day around the hotel, in the pool, in a shopping arcade, buying books, and watching movies on television. That night, just after eight o'clock, Denton went into the NCIC. We watched the entry transaction come up on our screen, and I was flabbergasted. There were virtually no screening protections at all. He signed on with his own name, a backup code-"weaver"- and an account number. Then he was in.
What?
Got NCIC entry codes. Would prefer you do search, all known execs Anshiser and associated companies.
Send codes.
We slept in the same bed again that night, and it was easier, but shorter. The computer started beeping for attention shortly after seven in the morning. Bobby said there would be multiple dumps. I plugged in the printer and routed the incoming data to paper as it arrived.
It was all there, in the NCIC files, if you knew where to look. Anshiser was involved with the mob all the way back to his teenage years. His father had been an accountant-a banker and money-mover for half of the organized crime syndicates in the country. He was trusted, with impeccable books.
Anshiser took his father's methods a step further. He laundered the mob's dirty cash with a variety of money-making and money-losing ventures: vending machine companies; trash-hauling concerns; hotel casinos in Atlantic City, Reno, Las Vegas, and the Caribbean; hotels in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia, Freeport, and a half dozen other tourist destinations. Federal cops suspected him of recirculating big-time drug money through his casinos. The process was simple enough. A drug dealer has, say, a suitcase full of ten-dollar bills-an awkward way to carry your money. Take it to Anshiser, pump it through the company, and out comes a handy pocket-size packet of thousands, ready for a trip to the third world. Less, of course, a ten percent handling fee.
More sophisticated opportunities were available for investors in the trash-hauling firms. One deal had Anshiser executives locating a failing trash-hauling company with old, screwed-up equipment but reasonably good potential. An unnamed dealer supposedly had two million in cash that he wanted to use in the U.S. but couldn't explain to the Internal Revenue Service. He gave the two million to Anshiser and got back in return fifty thousand dollars in stock in the failing trash hauler. Anshiser sent one of his hard-nosed executives in to run the company. New equipment from other Anshiser trash haulers was transferred in, at no charge to the new company. In a very short time, the dealer had stock worth a million and a half, and Anshiser bought him out. The dealer paid his taxes and, instead of two million in impossible-to-explain cash, had a perfectly legitimate, IRS-sanctioned, million-dollar bankroll. Anshiser's people took out a half million and owned a thriving garbage hauler.
We read through all the printouts before ten o'clock, then went down to the shopping arcade for croissants and coffee. I sat in the booth and found it hard to think.
"I really got took," I said finally. LuEllen was watching me across the table. "There was so much money, I didn't want anything to be wrong. We should have gotten out after we bumped into Ratface the first time. That was never right, we knew it wasn't right. And I had Bobby on the other end of the line, and I didn't use him. I should have given him an open account to keep running stuff on Anshiser and everybody else involved. If we'd known about Whitemark's Snagger program, we would have known something was wrong. If we'd known Anshiser's old man was in the mob, we would've been warned."
"Pigs and wings," LuEllen said. She was looking at the light fixtures.
"Thanks. I needed that."
"Stop whining, for Christ's sake," LuEllen snarled. "Tell me why they sent Ratface the first time. I still don't understand that. They had Maggie right there watching us."
"They were paranoid," I said. "Remember how she'd call Chicago to tell them what we were doing? Talking to computer people? When I laid out the attack for them, and they began to see what could be done, in detail, they really started to get worried. I think they wanted a better line on us. Maggie told them what she could, but she's not a computer tech. If they'd gotten a bug on our line, they could've looked at the attack programs in detail. And that's why it was such an old-fashioned bug-we were dealing with the mob, not the NSA or the CIA or the FBI or any other fuckin' alphabet."
"The fuckin' mob," LuEllen said. She thought it was funny.
"It doesn't seem to be a mob. It seems to be a whole bunch of people who float around in rackets."
"What do you think a mob is? Italians in zoot suits with violin cases under their arms?"
"I don't know. This doesn't seem so organized. It seems like they just. know each other."
"That's what a mob is. People who know each other. Our mob got started because you knew me and Dace," she said.
"We're not exactly a mob," I said dryly.
"Oh yeah? Then what are we?"
I thought about it for a minute. "A gang," I said firmly. "We're a gang."
"Okay, so we're a gang," she said. "What I don't understand is why Anshiser does all this stuff. He's already got more money than God."
I shrugged. "Maybe he likes it. Maybe they don't give him a choice. And it must be profitable. They've probably got a hundred of these scams going all the time," I said. "Who knows how much they take down? Thirty or forty or fifty million a year, all of it hidden? I bet there aren't five people in Anshiser's company who know all of it. Anshiser, Dillon, Maggie, maybe a couple more in that working group at his house."