I spent fifteen minutes pacing around the motel, then went out, found a phone, and dropped a message with Bobby He batted it away: he was no longer interested in AmMath or revenge for Jack or Lane He thought he might have found a way out for those of us still alive.

need more recordings of ranch transmissions. sending man to you with package, arrives tonight. need transmissions most quickly

ok. problem?

we need satellite protocols, can't get into ammath. computers sealed off. can you come memphis wednesday?

yes.

good will send address later.

The idea of going back to Corbeil's ranch was not appealing, especially since I'd dumped the rifle. I still had the pistol that LuEllen had picked up in Lane's room, but I had little faith in pistols. With the very best of them, like a 45 Colt ACP, I could probably ding a guy up at twenty-five yards, if neither of us were moving Otherwise, I might as well be throwing apples.

Still. Bobby had a plan. Crack the satellites, he said, then talk to the government. Demonstrate that we were not a danger. Build a case for ourselves.

Maybe.

At eight-thirty that night, a guy with one of those uneven Southern faces, the kind that looked like they got a little crunched in a vise or a wine press or something, knocked on my door, and when I opened it, handed me a box. "From Bobby," he said.

He did not look like the kind of guy who'd be hanging with Bobby: if you were going to cast a movie and needed a guy with hair like straw and pink lips and big freckles, to stand with his foot on a pickup truck's running board and talk about the Imperial Wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, this guy would be a candidate.

"How is he? Bobby?" I asked.

"Same as ever." He raised a hand in what used to be a black-power salute. "Off the pigs," he said. Then he laughed and I laughed with him, feeling ridiculous, and he headed down the hall in his beat-up cowboy boots, ragged stepped-on back cuffs, and jean jacket.

Gone.

So was I, five minutes later, headed south in the night.

Third time's the charm. That's what I kept thinking all the way back to the dish in the gully. I took it slow, like still hunting for deer. I started down the road at eleven o'clock, deep in the darkness, watching, listening I didn't make it to the fence-crossing until midnight. Twelve cars passed along the road as I moved parallel to it, hunkered down in the weeds as they passed.

At midnight, I crossed the fence into the eastern pasture, and began moving parallel to Corbeil's fence line. At twelve-thirty, having taken a half-hour to move four hundred yards, I crossed Corbeil's fence and began working my way toward the nearest dish. As I got close, I spent some time watching the ranch house.

The yard lights illuminated the area around the house and showed a single pickup truck parked in front of the garage The house itself was absolutely dark The bunkhouse, if that's what it was, had one lit window. A shadow fell on the window once, and then went away. Whoever it was, was up late.

Nervous, but satisfied that nothing much was happening at the house, I crossed carefully into the gully, using the needle-beam flashlight now, and hooked the detection package into the dish. Then I climbed the far side of the gully and lay down, looking down at the farmhouse while I waited for the dish to start moving.

At one o'clock, or a few minutes later, the light in the bunkhouse went out, and a man stepped into the lighted driveway, walked over to the house, unlocked the door, went inside A light flashed on, then, twenty seconds later, went out. The man stepped outside, closed the door behind himself, rattled itlockedand walked over to the pickup truck. He got in and bumped slowly down the driveway to the highway, paused, turned left, and drove away.

Huh.

For the next three hours, I perched on top of the ridge waiting for the dish to move. Eventually, I realized that it wasn't going to. Lying in the dark, with nothing much to do, I began to work out my own version of Corbeil's caper

He'd built a company that once must have been on the cutting edge of cyberintelligence, creating code products that could be used by anyone who needed absolutely secure communication. Other companies could do the same thing, but the AmMath people had an advantage: their product would be the software component of the Clipper II, and they would essentially have a government-sponsored monopoly on encoded transmissions.

Then, just as Corbeil stepped on the road to billionairedom, the catch jumped up and bit him on the ass.

Outside the intelligence community, nobody wanted the Clipper. The Clipper was an obsolete idea when it was floated the first time. By the time Clipper II came along, even the Congress recognized its stupidity. So they said the hell with it, and instead of the road to billions, Corbeil found himself in the alley to Chapter Eleven.

Corbeil had to find something else to sellthis was all part of my fantasyand found it, circling the earth every few hours. Perhaps AmMath had developed the code that the National Reconnaissance Office used for its satellite transmissions. However they did it, AmMath was pulling down the recon stuff and retailing it. Jack Morrison had been killed for knowing about it, and his sister was murdered because they thought she might know about it; and Firewall had been invented to cover it up, or at least to confuse any trail that might lead to it.

Could it be some sort of official dark operation? I doubted it. There are plenty of people working around the U.S. intelligence community who would be willing to kill if ordered toI'd known some of thembut the fact is, nobody will give the order. American intelligence, in my experience, doesn't kill people.

So Corbeil was almost certainly out in the dark by himself, and if he was, then it was impossible that many people knew about it. Not more than three or four, I'd bet. The danger of what they were doing, and the penalties, were just too great to let too many people in on the secret.

At four o'clock in the morning, the dish hadn't moved. Bobby wouldn't have sent me back unless he really needed the information from the transmissions, and down below, the house that probably acted as the control center for the dish array was sitting dark and apparently empty.

LuEllen would have given me a ton of shit for even thinking about it, but a few minutes after four o'clock in the morning, I began scouting the house. First, I stripped the recording package off the dish and stuffed it in the backpack; then, using the needle-beam, I changed batteries in the night-vision glasses and checked to make sure they were still working.

I followed the gully as far to the north as I could, duckwalking the last fifty yards, staying below the horizon so I wouldn't be seen from the house. I listened and, for a while, worried. And then, working from the northeast corner of the house, I began closing in. Watched the windows for movement, for light, for anything. Stopped often, and long, to listen, but heard nothing but my heart and the occasional passing car.

At five o'clock, I was fifty yards from the house and facing the decision. Go in, or stay put. We needed any docs that might be inside: we needed anything we could find. Nothing moved. Nothing even breathed.

I crossed the last fifty yards quickly now I was so close, with enough ambient light from the yard lights, that if anyone were looking right at me, they'd see me, even without night-vision glasses. The base of the house was landscaped with a variety of broad-leafed cactusSpanish bayonet, I thought, so named for good reasonand I pushed through them with care. Overhead, a balcony. Too far overhead. But the house was a log cabin, and I could put one foot on a window frame, then step up two feet or more on a log, and then, doing a quick step-up, catch the edge of the balcony.